A New Can of Worms

From Star Frontiers Network

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Revision as of 17:25, 7 September 2017

This game will be played on Roll20, recorded, and provided as an actual play podcast (Details as they are available)

The game is set on Pale in the Truane's Star system at the beginning of the Second Sathar War. Players begin as agents of the Streel Corporation assigned to investigate a murder at a mining facility. We'll see where things go from there.

Contents 1 Background Information 1.1 History 1.2 Pale Physical Information 2 Characters 2.1 Character Generation 2.2 Player Characters 2.3 Non-Player Characters 3 House Rules 3.1 Skills 3.2 Equipment 4 Tech Specs 4.1 Vehicles 4.2 Robots

Background Information

History

Pale Physical Information

Pale orbits it's primary, Truane's Star, in the outer portions of the star's habitable zone. This causes the average temperature on Pale to be fairly low resulting in fairly cold and severe winters and cool summers. Pale is also a slightly smaller world with a surface gravity of only 0.9 g.

In addition to the cool weather, Pale rotates very slowly on it's axis, completing one revolution every 55 standard hours. As such the local population has divided the day into four working time periods:

• Day-day: Corresponds to the 13 hours starting roughly 1 hour after sunrise. This is the typical working time when the sun is up.
• Day-night: This corresponds to the next 14 hour period and is typically a rest period although the sun is still shining. Because this rest period occurs during daylight hours, all houses on Pale have windows or curtains allowing rooms to be completely "blacked out" to simulate darkness and night time even though the sun is still up.
• Night-day: This is the 13 hour work period occuring during the local night. Since this is a time of major work and transportation, all the streets and buildings of Pale are well lit to provide a semblance of daylight during this work period. When seen from orbit, the cities and towns of Pale in the Night-day part of the cycle blaze with light.
• Night-night: This is the final 14 hour rest period that occurs during the local night time.

The extra hour is added in to either the Day-day or Night-day period depending on the season, the hour being added to the Day-day in the summer when the days are longer and the Night-day in the winter when the nights are longer.

Typical work periods are 10 hours long during the Day-day and Night-day periods although there are many graveyard and swing shift positions that run during other hours.

Characters

Character Generation

Please use the following rules for generating your character:

1. Follow standard Alpha Dawn character generation to determine their starting characteristics
2. Characters may be from any of the four races from the Alpha Dawn rules or the Ifshnit, Humma, or Osakar from the Zebulon's Guide to Frontier Space suppliment. Characters from the Zeb's Guide races need to detail in their background how and why they are on Pale as there is still only very limited contact between the Rim and the Frontier at the time of the start of this campaign.
3. Instead of the standard skill AD/KH skill system we will be using the skill system from the A Skilled Frontier article in the Star Frontiersman. This system will be modified slightly as described in the Skills section of the House Rules below.
4. Note that initial parts of this game will be almost completely ground based so skills related to spacecraft will not see much use. You may want to have that as part of your character concept but they may lie dormant for a while during play.
5. All characters will start with a toolkit or weapon relevant to their primary skill in their PSA, a standard equipment pack, plus d100+50 cr to spend on other equipment as they would like subject to limitations in the Equipment House Rules below. They also start with a Streel uniform that is the equivalent of a civilian skiensuit.
6. All character should provide a background write-up of their history before joining Streel. Remember when writing these backgrounds up that your character is fairly young with limited experience. Bonus starting XP will be given for the following:
   • 2XP - Basic background write-up
   • 1XP - Providing a drawing or picture to represent the character
   • 1XP - NPC contact on Pale. This could be family member, significant other, professional contact, etc.
   • 1XP - Description of the character's goals, dream, and/or aspirations - What does the character want to do with his/her/ids life? What do they hope to achieve.

Player Characters

Here are links to all the characters in the game:

• Character - player
• Character - player
• Character Name Template <- This is link to a template you can use to fill out your character.

To add yours, just edit this page and put your charcters name inside the brackets on the edit page, save the page and click on the link created. You can follow the template provided to create your page. The easiest way to do that is to go to the character template page, hit the edit button on top and copy the markup text out of the edit window and paste it into yours and modify for your character.

Non-Player Characters

Information on various NPC's can be found below:

• NPC Name
• NPC Name
• NPC Name

House Rules

Here are various house rules that will apply to the game.

Skills

While we will be using the A Skilled Frontier skill system, the following modifications apply:

• Space Sciences (from the Scientist PSA) covers astronomy, physics, and other space sciences but does not include spacecraft engineering. In truth, astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, etc. should all be separate skills but for simplicity and playability, we'll leave them grouped as they are otherwise.
• Spacecraft Engineering is a new separate skill in the Tech PSA
• I'm adding a new Xenotechnology (Race) skill that is available either through the Scholar, Scientist, or Tech PSA. This skill represents studying the alien culture and understanding how it works in relation to how the culture creates and operates it machinery and is designed to help overcome the -20% alien technology penalty. This skill only goes up to level 2, and is harder to earn than would be normal, costing one extra XP to earn level 1 and two extra XP to earn level 2. The skill must be learned for each race individually but each level overcomes 10% of the penalty applied to using alien technology. Thus if a human had a Level 1 Xenotechnology (Vrusk), when using technology specifically designed for vrusk, that would normally carry a -20% modifier, he only suffers a -10%. If he raised his skill to level 2, the penalty would be removed. This skill would not apply to any technology designed for any of the other races.
• I'm adding an "Architecture" skill, available through the Scholar or Tech PSAs that cover things like civil engieering, architecture, building/bridge construction, etc.

Equipment

Tech Specs

Vehicles

Robots