A New Can of Worms

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This game will be played on Roll20, recorded, and provided as an actual play podcast (see the Game Logistics section below for more details about the game sessions).

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. Game background information, house rules, and a list of the player and non-player characters are given in the sections below.

Contents

Background Information

History

Pale is a new old planet. Pale had a medium population before the Great Sathar War that led to the founding of the UPF. During the war every major population center besides Point True was destroyed by orbital bombardment. There is basically just a big crater at the location of every original city. In Point True, the old military base was nuked leaving a large crater and damage to remaining structures but the rest of the city was left relatively intact. The sathar were in the process of exporting the inhabitants when they were driven off. There are still signs of the Sathar occupation.

After the war, the planet rebounded, partially due to the influx of people coming to help rebuild and partially due to aggressive development by Streel Corporation (known as Streele Mining Corp before the war). By the time of this game, the population has rebounded to it's pre-war levels and is pushing into the heavy population category.

As part of their invasion, the sathar seeded the biosphere around the planet with a number of their bio-constructs and attack monsters. Despite efforts to clean up after the war, some of these creatures are still loose on the planet. While quickdeaths and slithers are the most common, there are also a few other creatures that can be encountered when ranging away from the population centers. There are even still some cybodragons (and their decendents) running around although the cyber features are no longer functional due to lack of power. There are bounties for the elimination of these creatures.

In addition to sathar bio-constructs, there are rumored to be some small pockets of sathar still living on the planet. These are remnants from the sathar army that was driven off and mostly destroyed when the planet was liberated. They survive by foraging and by hypnotizing and controlling members of the population to provide food and materials as needed. It is unknown how many of these sathar still survive but the numbers range from a few dozen to several hundreds.

Streel is by far the dominant force on the planet. After the war, Hilo Headrow took over Steele Mining and expanded its operations - first on Pale and then across the Frontier. While Streel doesn't officially control the government, it is fairly favorable towards the company and it is rumored that a majority of the government's officials are "owned" by Streel in one way or another. Despite the potential negative aspects of this situation, Streel's touch on the government is surprisingly light-handed given the tactics the company employs elsewhere around the Frontier. Much of the work of the government is environmentally sound and intelligent. Thoughtful practices are put into place that benefit all companies on the planet not just Streel. In fact, the planet is strong on fostering new ideas and companies.

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:

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

Character generation will occur during our "session 0". 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 items in the following list. Completing them all provides enough XP for one or two new skills or boosting your PSA skill to level 2 at the beginning of play. NPC's provided as part of the background become part of the setting and will be woven into the game as appropriate.
    • 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 - Connection to one or more of the other characters in the group.
    • 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.
  7. The PCs are part of a team and should be built as such. Streel would not have hired loner characters that don't work well with others. Design your character's personality appropriately.

Player Characters

Here are links to all the characters in the game:

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:

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:

Equipment

Initially only equipment from the Alpha Dawn rules will be available in the game. If you are interested in a different piece of equipment discuss it with the Referee.

Tech Specs

This section will be filled in as new mateiral is created for the game.

Equipment

Vehicles

Robots

Game Logistics

Game Sessions

Game sessions will occur on the 2nd and 4th Friday of each month starting at 8pm Mountain Time. They will typically run 3-4 hours.

Technology

We are using Roll20 for maps, dice rolls and (often spotty) video and are using Discord for audio (we had too many problems with the Roll20 audio).

Handling Missing Players

To be discussed at session 0.