About a month ago, Six Feats Under came back from a hiatus and launched a new series, RENEGADE SCUM. We've released three episodes (four for patrons) so far, and I'm having so much fun with every part of it.
We're playing in Galactic 2E, with The Scum and Villains Expansion, and one playbook snuck in from Going Rogue 2E; so it's a party of 6 and no GM. I don't have to do homework! This is a huge difference from my last ongoing game, 6FU's Mouse Guard campaign. Running that game was a puzzle. How to the actions of each patrol affect the other, how does the fallout from previous seasons catch up, and most of all: how does all this feed into the comics set two years later? It was bus stop GM-ing; knowing where the start and end would be and empowering the group to make the space between their own.
Now, I have no idea. I don't know! I don't have to. Every session I hold hands with five other people as we jump out of a plane together, and it's always worked so far! Part of that is of course game design. That's the point of how it's built. But it's also how we play it. One of the early responses was a listener surprised at how fast we went, they'd only heard Belonging Outside Belonging games played deliberately, with more contention and interpretation of the moves. Our game is about throwing ideas out and the most common response is "I have a suggestion to make that even bigger" Session 0 was really useful for getting a sense of what we wanted our Star Wars to be and to draw from, so we went in knowing how to get each other on board and excited.
Izer Munn is a fucking awesome guy. I went with one of my favorite kinds of guy, especially for a story about criminal lowlifes, the guy who's a better man than he believes. He says he wants to be left alone, he tries to sell ancient artifacts to the highest bidder, he's very unpleasant. But he keeps helping people behind his self-serving justifications, and he [spoilers for episode 4, subscribe to the Patreon to hear it right now]. What if Kanan Jarrus was more like Han Solo, and also scary? That's a guy right there. Make him big and blue and that's a hell of a guy.
My favorite little extra I've given each episode is the cold opens. The idea is to show something related to the action that's well offscreen, something our PCs can't possibly see. Some have made their way into the action later, some haven't. The cold opens for Mouse Guard were, in year 1 at least, meant to introduce the established setting to the unfamiliar. But in RENEGADE SCUM the setting is either the most recognized fictional world around or a twist on it we make up on the spot. So it's actually more like the end-of-season Letters From Friends I did for Mouse Guard; a widening of scope and an excuse to write in character voice. They're fun!
The one for episode 2, Corbo the Hutt speaking to his entourage after exploding a Star Destroyer, helps illustrate what I love about the process of the show. The listener hears this prideful Hutt, classic stuff, and then an adventure in the fallout of that attack. In a later episode they hear us brainstorm everything about them, give them descriptors and moves that informed that brief scene, and the reveal that yes this mobster slug monster really was speaking French all along. We have a Quebecois Hutt and a 10 foot tall bird woman. Nobody else is bringing it like Feats.