Let me start with this: I love Uncharted Worlds.

Let me start with this: I love Uncharted Worlds.

Let me start with this: I love Uncharted Worlds. I find it a departure from some of the typical stuff found in a PbtA game that both simplifies it and makes it more freeing to play.

But I have three problems I can’t seem to solve on my own:

1. Debt. I get it, conceptually. I see how it works. It just doesn’t seem to engage in play. I think this actually needs some mechanics wrapped around it, or just more direction in the book on how the GM is supposed to use debt.

2. Career flags are a bit difficult for me to keep reminding myself of. By this I mean – if a player has an explorer career, the skills and advancement triggers fall within some umbrella of things they probably expect to see – these are flags for the GM to bring into play. But there’s just so many careers that it’s hard to figure out all the time. Some sort of cheat-sheet or list would go a long way here. This could even be included in the Threats chapter to make that section more concrete too – go through each career, list some types of threats that the career should be going up against.

3. Advancement seems to peter out after a bit. You end up with enough skills to make your character playable the way you want, and then you have to choose another skill. But they don’t always make sense. I think some alternate non-skill advancements (maybe even Gain a Favor, Pay off a Debt, Gain a Class 3 asset, etc) could go a long way toward helping here. I have also added a “Retire to safety if you have 0 debt” in my current game, which I think is pretty solid.

41 thoughts on “Let me start with this: I love Uncharted Worlds.”

  1. 1 – Debt is, in my mind, like heat in video games. It reflects who the PCs have the most investment in relations with. Ding it and call upon it to drive the plot. Call in those favors and offer a bail-out from time to time for a Debt. Once Debt gets above 3 or so, the Faction might feel the PCs owes them fealty, so have them make demands. You can press as hard or light as you like on this.

    2 – Only worry about the flags they actually pick, as those are the things they are not just looking for, but will try and make happen. My players chase their advancement events, so I don’t have to chase them on that.

    3 – I have not played long enough to see this, since my PCs get 1-2XPs per session. I think having more things to buy can always be a good thing, so I like what you’ve come up with.

  3. I tend to agree that Debt hasn’t really worked in my games either. It’s there, but it’s hard to make it feel like a pressing thing, and the meaning of each numerical level of debt isn’t at all well defined. Most of the “interesting” faction interactions work just as well without tracking a number (you need something, you make a quid pro quo deal, you’re on the hook if you back out of it). And it’s often difficult to work a faction calling in their debt into the game in a makes-sense-in-fiction way.

    Debt also tends to get muddled between individual characters and the crew as a whole.

    I also agree that progression gets muddled after a while. My game has run quite long, and my players have no interest in quitting / changing characters. They’ve all got an increasingly homogeneous & broad set of skills that often have no particular bearing on who the character is or has been up to.

  4. Judd Goswick​ Like I said, I get debt fundamentally. The problem seems to happen in the fictional position of calling in debts. If the PCs are making smuggling runs, what good is the debt with the big mining conglomerate? How do you call in favors out in the black? How do you make sure the debts chosen at character creation remain relevant in a game with no rails?

    Perhaps the flaw here is actually in creation of the factions themselves. Perhaps it should have less, more focused factions. But you can’t always know this from the outset.

    I could imagine ways of actually revealing debt in play during interaction. So you start with three, but they don’t have concrete reasons until you interact with one of the factions… I’m spitballing now.

    Re: flags. I don’t just mean advancements but also opportunity use various moves. A Commercial character should be given opportunities to exchange cargo, sure, but also opportunities to use Bribery or Acumen. These things don’t always all work together.

  5. We could probably make a “General” career with some generic advancements that people can always pick from. Something like:

    General Advancements

    These can be purchased multiple times but count as a skill for the purposes of advancement.

    – Gain a Class 3 asset (not safe from the GM like the career skill)

    – Gain a Favor

    – Pay off a Debt

    – Change Careers

    – Add +1 to any stat (can be purchased once per stat, max of +2 unless you have an origin skill to raise the max to +3)

  7. Aaron Griffin , I hope you don’t feel I was challenging your assertions, just riffing my two centicreds.  My group decided on a City based game, so it Is easier to run debt as immediate right now, because the factions are pervasive.

  8. Judd Goswick yeah, definitely. Debt in Urban Shadows is way easier because it’s isolated to a single city. People can just walk over to your house and knock on your door 🙂

    I wonder if that’s the issue – one of space.

  13. Debt is worries about the big things. Like, you are in debt to the mob but you still buy your Egg McMuffin in the morning. I welcome the break from credit-counting like in Traveller.

  14. Space and extent of factions needs to be structured based on how much you want Debt as a driver.

    I definitely think to make debt work as a pressure and release measure for the PCs, the factions do have to have ways of reaching in to what is going on. This can be done by leading questions (“What is Helios Mining’s stake in this?”) or by building them into the Jump Point (“Helios Mining has you running a cargo off-book to Rigel 4 to burn off a Debt.”)

    If Debt is a carrot\stick in your game, make sure that the Factions keep getting underfoot (“That Helios ship that has been shadowing you all mission offers to aid with the Pirates, but it’s gonna cost you down the line.”)

  15. Remember: everything in the black is backed by a Faction. Every space station, colony, ship, etc is tied — somehow — to these monolithic power blocs. You can never escape your debts, because someone — somewhere — is always a broadwave or personal favor or threat away from making demands on you on the Faction’s behalf.

  16. Debt seems to me to be a key component of a campaign (even a shorter one) more so than to one-off sessions. Because fixer-types are my favorite archetype I’m thinking the Debt system would work really, really well.

  18. In my current game, Judd Goswick, the carrot/stick stuff is all fictional. The current cliffhanger situation: cargo bay is sealed with a shuttle full of genetically engineered superbugs inside – they can dump it into space but they’re orbiting the most populated planet of the sector and aren’t sure if ship cannons will destroy everything. They’re aware that returning it to the faction that engineered it would repay a debt, but don’t want to do that because it’s a genetically engineered superbug.

    I did get them to accept a solid favor from a faction, but they’re looking at it as future reward, not a way to pay off debt. So the carrot actually seems to work fine as written.

  19. So, Debt.

    Those who followed UW’s development might remember all the previous incarnations of Debt, which all tested poorly or didn’t quite capture what I wanted out of the system, which is to say “strings attaching characters to Big Important Groups”. I still feel that with a few more months of iteration I could have come up with a more robust system, but Perfect is the opposite of Done and I had a deadline, a full-time career and a newborn to take care of. Such is life.

    Ultimately, Debt is designed to be as intrusive as the GM wants. It’s an extra lever that the GM can pull when they want to spice things up. Debt is a tool to tie characters back to a past, and twist the knife a bit when they’re faced with decisions. There will be times where Debt isn’t needed as a motivator, and that’s fine. If it’s not needed it can sit in the background, until the opportunity is right.

    For the application/fictional positioning when calling in Debts, Alfred Rudzki has it quite right that anything the characters do to interact with all but the most remote societies is also interacting with a Faction, its agents and subsidiaries. A Faction built the starport, runs the customs agency, crews the maintenance bay, runs the shopping mall and collects rent from the residents. Characters cannot buy, sell, repair or refuel without encountering at least one Faction. And as soon as they do, their Debt can become a complication. That’s why Reach is arguably the most important Faction stat (Reach, Power, Ideology and Structure).

    Another way to slip in Debt and its repayment is to allude to the hold the Faction has. Hint at the ramifications of ignoring their Debts. The Faction doesn’t need to be right there on the vid-screen, because the Faction and its reputation exists in the character’s mind as well.

    “[Character], you’re heavily in Debt with the Genetic Cabal, right? Just how badly will they take it when they find out you had the opportunity to recover their property but blew it? Are we just talking even more Debt? Or will this be the straw that breaks the camel-scorpion’s back? You’ve heard stories of what the Genetic Cabal does to people who piss them off.”

    It doesn’t even need to be everyone, just pick one character to put in social danger, and let that tension ping outwards to the inter-character relationships.

    In a group where the characters have mixed loyalties, asking different characters to perform contradictory tasks for different Factions will start a snowballing process unless the characters are clever. Remember that refusing to honor a request from a Faction is the same as failing them, which is the same as working against them = more Debt, the possibility of reprisal. Factions are used to getting what they want and stepping on anyone who gets in their way. They’re not reasonable. They are fickle and petulant and hard-headed and ideologically fixated.

  21. Sean Gomes I think my specific problem might actually be related to Reach, but it’s part of world building we did together.

    I guess this would be easily solved if I created the sector myself – I’d have overlapped and intertwined the major factions on purpose for drama.

  22. No Reach is a tough one, because so much of a Faction’s usefulness and threat comes from their ability to be where the characters are, to be within arm’s reach at all time to provide assistance or cause trouble.

    If the Factions were created too small or isolated during world-building, you may need to increase their scope to make them effective as Factions (if that’s what you want, it sounds like you’ve got plenty of motivations going on without them, so take-em or leave-em as needed)

    That said, shifting a Faction to make them more present may be a bit tricky, depending on their Ideology/Structure/Power.

  23. I feel like reach is THE pinnacle issue with debt. If the faction can’t get to you then that debt doesn’t mean much. But what I would do in that case is every week/month/year that they PCs stay away the harder it will be to deal with it. At the same time you start increasing the pressure in the local sector they are in and start to have the NPC’s there learn about the debt. Maybe there is a huge bounty and the PCs find that nowhere is safe.

  24. Chalice In Chains yeah, that’s sort of where I’m at – the players are spending a lot of time on shitty border planets and using smuggling lanes to avoid the primary factions.

  25. Yeah, debts don’t just sit static. Eventually, the debtholders are going to be asking “why haven’t we heard from Joe in 3 months? Time to send someone to collect.”

    Like the space opera version of those atrocious robo-callers.

  26. Yeah. Smuggling lanes are usually populated by smugglers and pirates. Those kind of people have no problem accepting funds from a faction to bring in a bounty. Use it to build tension and then bring it to a head. “why are those shady dudes looking at us and whispering like that?” “Why is our picture on a sector net bulletin way out here on the border planets?”

    “Why does this crappy moon’s administrator suddenly know who we are and want to invite us to her residence for a private meeting?”. Then let the shit hit the fan

  33. Rob Barrett A while ago I read a wonderful sci fi short story about a company who owned proprietary rights to a programmable shape-changing metal. They used it to make jewelry and watches and stuff, which would change shape and texture depending on your mood or what you were wearing.

    When one of their scientists betrayed them, they turned her necklace into an inward-facing buzzsaw torus and sliced off her head.

    Don’t mess with Factions. They are not subtle.

    Aaron Griffin Absolutely! Hopefully Carta’s pregen Factions will also provide a good reference point.

  34. #1   In the Fate Core games, they talk a lot about chunky, non-bean-counting money-systems.  Some games talk about a Wealth stat, some game express it as Debt.

    In BULLDOGS (Fate Core version), you have ten Debt squares — but nine start out filled meaning you owe the Trans-Galaxy corporation a 5-year work-contract, so it’s a kind of zany blue-collar version of Firefly or (the non-traumatic part of) ALIEN. The reason that you signed on to Trans-Galaxy becomes your “Trouble” Aspect, a central motivation and die-roll influencer.

    Your ship is a rust-bucket, but heavily insured by Trans-Galaxy, and you get the Class D cargo:  the cargo nobody wants, to ship to places nobody wants to go.  Trans-Galaxy picks up the tab for fuel and your basic pay and basic ship maintenance (but not weapon-turret installation or combat damage repair).  You will slowly reduce in debt but then there will be big expenses to fund your big side-projects (scams, let’s be honest) and extra-curricular activity.

    If you manage to work your debt down to zero early, “It is time for you to leave.”  Leave your spot on the crew to some other working stiff.

    #3  Character Advancement:  Powered by the Apocalypse games are meant to be quick-starting, but by making it easy and defining few stats, it may be hard to give players something new in character advancement for a really long, sustained campaign.  Assuming you can weather the stresses and make it a long-term campaign; that’s a universal problem for all RPGs.

    Maybe special gear or new Skills giving super-success rolls of 13+ for advanced characters could be worked out.  Are they hitting 13+ regularly?  What about 16+-class?

  36. Michael Atlin I’ve played around with the idea. Urban Shadows Debts and Monsterhearts Strings don’t work out of the box because they’re predicated on owing individuals, not groups.

  38. Aaron Griffin You could try and fall back on a three-tiered debt format. 1-Debt is minor debt, and so long as it exists the GM can make occasional soft moves about the debt. 2-Debt is standard debt, debt that lots of people have, and the GM can make regularly scheduled soft moves and the occasional hard move. 3-Debt is really serious and opens the character up to a world of misery, and the GM is considered to have fictional permission to bring down the hard move hammer all the time as it applies to your debt.

    For three tiers of Debt, you’ll want to maybe reduce how often you hand out debt, since there’s now a cap in place. You’ll also want to be clear about how serious each tier is, so no one is thinking ‘pssh, what’s 2 debt?’

  39. Alfred Rudzki oh that’s a neat idea. The 3rd tier would also need to accommodate “allegiance”  – perhaps unaligned people cap out at 2 debt for a faction for “normal”, but if you are aligned with a specific faction, up to 4 is considered “normal”. It gives you more ability to hold debt for them as long as you play nice in their sandbox

  41. Sure, but factions are built of individuals, and debts are transferable. If you end up incurring a debt to a freighter captain working for Long Star Shipping, who’s to say space-traffic control in a different system won’t call in the marker on their behalf. Space is big, but social circles are small.

Comments are closed.