Scampir

Be the Choster you wanna read

  • He/Him + They/Them

One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.

Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
Priv: @Scampriv


So as per this post I'd like some help figuring out if I am missing anything from my outline. So far I have notes on:

  1. The Premise
  2. The Factions involved on the planet
  3. Important rules in EotE that should be used
  4. Player Characters, what they'll be doing, and how to work with their Obligations
  5. Starting Resources for Player Characters (A Ship and a friendly contact)
  6. Where players go for different things
  7. What the players have to discover for themselves
  8. The Megadungeon
  9. An Appendix of jobs (Side-quests for pocket change)

Ok some short notes:

I know the classic rpg set up is Town, Forest, Dungeon, but for this project I'm splitting up the important zones to Space Station, Spaceport City, Outskirts, and the Dungeon. Mostly as places with different kinds of resources and different parts of a treasure economy that the player characters will be involved in. So like, you can not find items to buy above a certain rarity in the outskirts where the farmers are. You could find them in the Spaceport City, but if they are Restricted you will have to find someone at the Space Station and coordinate a seller and either hire a smuggler or go retrieve it yourself.

The same goes for selling whatever you find in the dungeon. All of these different locations will also have different risks prepared that can be brought out when a roll generates Threat. You might hear the clicking of imperial bootheels approach if Threat if enough threat is generated on a roll you make trying to find a buyer for some dungeon loot for example.

I'm also really interested in setting up faction presence in the Dungeon. The Empire would of course have a Checkpoint at the main entrance, only allowing Imperial Contractors to enter and leave, with rights to inspect and confiscate any treasure for safety concerns. But this is an important dilemma for players, because obviously there are other factions operating in the dungeon that are working around the Checkpoint. Have they found another entrance? Have they made another entrance? Have they cut some kind of deal or have they found some way to slip past the checkpoint? That kind of first challenge imo sets of faction play because it invites the players to go ask their provided friendly contact (remember 5 on the list!) who else is getting into the dungeon and where the players can get a hold of them.


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in reply to @Scampir's post:

The only thing which occurs to me right now would be adding a low-on-the-list section on ā€œcamps, installations, and making upgradesā€ since the starwars aesthetic lends itself nicely to something classic fantasy mega dungeons don’t really lean into: setting up your own medium to long term field facilities and more-than-temporary forward camps, with prefab shelters and the like. The classics are all ā€œoh, local traders may move in andā€¦ā€ but what about if the players want to set up their own mechanics shop for repairs, etc

This is something i definitely have planned! Colonists are a Career in EotE that I don't want to pass over here. I just need to figure out if, if players set up in the Outskirts for their own enterprise, what i'm doing with a game that has a Colonist Class.

AoR Fully Operational and Lead by Example have stuff for encampments, including modular structures.

I was working on a full index a while back. I haven't touched it in about a year, so it's a lil messy atm. I'd gotten through all the AoR and EotE books, was working through the FaD books. There is stuff from FaD and the Universal books in there, but it was from the original doc creator and I was checking/correcting their work.

You'll need to make a copy to use the sorting options.

reading the expansion book for the colonist career. IMO they should have just called these people Citizens lol. I agree that setting up a base and seeing it turn into a settlement is a good thing to add.

Not really a thing in a list, but one I wish I'd paid better attention to when designing the dungeon I run online, is session length. A lot of dungeon advice comes outta the OSR space and lessons accumulated from the 70s and 80s and lends itself to building dungeons designed to be picked apart over the course of a whole day or long weekend. That's often a poor fit for the shorter and more infrequent play most folks engage with now. You need things like more shortcuts, frequent camping spots, or a mechanic to quickly leave it when you hit the last 10 minutes of a session. I didn't bake enough of those into my dungeon and it sabotaged several other mechanics and gimmicks.

Gus L. has a long post about this change in play from the 70s and 80s to the 10s and 20s and how to design around it. It shows up a lot in his published adventures as well.

This is a great point! I had something like this in mind after reading about a group that did dungeons but would have a rule where the party retreats after 3 hours of play. I even instated this as a rule of Ghost-Type Stories where you only have as long as the session to explore the haunted area; when the session time is up the sun comes up, the danger disappears, and you have to come again the next night!

This is part of Songbirds 3e as well, with the Silver Rule that handles sessions ending before the dungeon delve is over. I expect to play around with that in September when I start running Goblin Archive's The Bureau with @ahcoffeebeans 's hack Robins.

For this project though, I definitely want to have the full exploration of a floor+concept tied to one session that's about two and a half hours plus ten minute break, ten minute pre-game and ten minute post-game. As part of that, I want to design each floor as having a main obstacle, some exploration leading to some opportunities for changing the terms of engagement with that obstacle, and an opportunity for players to leave the dungeon, go on a little side-quest to procure a solution out in the world, and come back and use their purchased equipment to overcome the obstacle. Hopefully it works out!