I've been wanting to get stuck into a Starforged game for a long time, my wife is traveling, and I'm lonely and bored. So let's start a solo text-based actual play on cohost!
Like the title says, I plan to do this thing one Move a night. Starforged is a very Move-dense PBTA(ish) game, so I think it will be a good fit. I was gonna call it One Roll a Night, but then I realized that would likely mean many instances of making a Move then having to wait 24 hours to interpret the results with an Oracle roll, and I am simply not that patient.
Now let's start at the start, Choosing Your Truths. Starforged presents 14 of these categories, which means we'll have ourselves a Galaxy of Adventure all crisped up and ready to go in two weeks. Neat!
Cataclysm Roll: 64
"Interdimensional entities invaded our reality"
It's time to find out how we got to this distant galaxy called The Forge! It's a very serious sounding name, compared to The Milky Way!! Let's roll on a table already!!!
Exodus Roll: 82
"Mysterious alien gates provided instantaneous one-way passage to the Forge."
We know why we came to The Forge and how we got here. Now how have we clung together since then, and what have we built?
Communities Roll: 80
"We have made our mark in this galaxy, but the energy storms we call balefires threaten to undo that progress, leaving our communities isolated and vulnerable."
My ISP is having an outage in this area so I'm hotspotting from my phone to my desktop write this! Because I want to use my nice keyboard instead of the phone screen!! Oh gosh we'd better find out what the deal is with all this Iron people swear oaths on PDQ
Iron Roll: 37
"Iron vows are sworn upon totems crafted from the enigmatic metal we call black iron."
My internet's back, and I'm ready to figure out what the Laws situation is in The Forge... so my character can be cool and break 'em, that is.
BTW, right now I'm planning to start a fresh one of these threaded posts every week. Then I'll link back to all of the completed weeks in the first post of each new week. Will that still be too obnoxiously long for your timeline? Let me know!
Laws Roll: 81
"Our communities are bound under the terms of the Covenant, a charter established after the Exodus. The organization called the Keepers is sworn to uphold those laws."
It's kinda neat that my Truths roll for Religion is taking place on the morning of Easter Sunday. As a long-since-lapsed Catholic who has been pretty happy to leave it at that for the rest of his life, I guess that's all I've got to say on the subject.
Religion Roll: 08
"Our gods failed us. We left them behind."
I threw out a few ideas of how black iron could do some magical (or at least prophetic) stuff last night, and how that may relate to a human civilization that has largely abandoned our current ideas of religion. Let's see if that kind of thing is the exception or the rule.
Magic Roll: 42
"Supernatural powers are wielded by those rare people we call paragons."
Hmmmm...! Not super excited about this. I'm going to withhold further comment until I roll for more specifics on where these paragons come from.
Subtable Roll: 59
"These powers are born of: Evolutionary mutations."
OK. Good save, subtable. This makes me think Paragons come from exposure to balefires, which leads us to our first solid example of how chaos-stuff interacts with/threatens people.
The balefires' chaotic energy rewrites something about how entities relate to the world around them. It blurs their edges in a way that's often fatal. (Even if you emerge unharmed, you don't want to be in deep space when a balefire convinces parts of your ship to revert to sand and unrefined ore, for instance).
What if you made some kind of black iron Faraday cage? Would it protect you from the influence of balefires? I bet retrieving a shielded escape pod full of Covenant executives from the middle of a balefire would open some doors...
did I just talk myself into taking the "Grappler" ship upgrade before I'm even done picking truths