Orbital Graveyard of More Soon-To-Be Derelict SF projects

Unlike most years where I flipflop between fantasy and SF every couple months, I've largely continued riding this SF obsession all year. Here is its newest progeny clogging up my game idea backlog. Non-all-caps names are working titles.

EON

Simple solitaire hexmap game. Follow the course of humanity's expansion and contraction among the stars as they discover new physics and space travel technologies, bifurcate and war against each other, Rogue AIs decimating vast swaths of their empire and rebuild it with nanotech, and other civilization-changing events, all from a breakneck galactic timelapse perspective.

Status: Current iteration is just not that fun in practice. The majority of playtime is taken up by updating those aforementioned vast swaths of hexes in pencil.

MEGASTELLAR VAGABONDS 

or

SUPERNOVA REVENANTS

Overpowered Picaresque in A Posthuman Cosmos

Galaxy-spanning TRPG with shades of BLAME (abandoned megastructures) and into the odd (everyone gets a high-tech arcanum) and Traveller.

Everyone's an alien, everyone's an edgelord, no one knows how anything works, or what anyone is capable of. Roam, marvel, wreak havoc, survive, repeat.

Status: I got too crunchy than intended with this, so it needs a heft realignment before it goes anywhere.

Titanic Bastionships

Spaceship Wargame with detailed component tracking and abstracted but realistic maneuvering.

Loosely inspired by Chris' Titanic Bastionmechs project (because I can't seem to keep my hackin' hands off every new project of his), yet another attempt at a realish-tic space warfare game that is any fun to play. Build ships out of modules and components, use an elegant mechanic to roll to hit those modules. 

Status: Quickly and unsurprisingly ballooned into an unwieldy mess due to The Iron Triangle of Analog Realistic Space Warfare Games - choose two:

- Dimensionality and resolution of positions and velocities in the battlespace

- More than two combatant ships, and/or independently tracked missiles, kinetic volleys, etc.

- Any amount of depth for literally anything else

THE ORBITAL MECHANIC

A System-Agnostic Space Travel Toolkit Inspired By Realism. 

Simple rules for handling the counterintuitive vagaries of movement through vacuum near massive bodies

Handling space travel, orbital dynamics, and spacecraft design in a realistic but playable manner without falling prey to the Iron Triangle above by only being detailed enough for practical use in a TRPG instead of a simulationist wargame.

Status: Not much solidified yet, in a parking orbit until I feel like playtesting any of it.

Spacewalk Skirmish

Zero-G miniature skirmish combat between salvage gangs among a three dimensional battlespace with floating derelicts and debris, using armature wires that represent tethers and umbilical cables to place characters in arbitrary positions in open space. 

Status: Really sticky idea in my brain, but I'm not sure how well it would work in practice. Currently takes the form of only a shipbreaking spacesuit customization and equipment build list, which I might just turn into a system-agnostic supplement or integrate into another project.

The Zachtron Probe Mission

Envisioned as a digital game in the style of Zachtronics (Shenzen IO, TIS-80), following the dramatic arc of a small, decreasingly funded team fighting and adapting to new tech to keep in contact with the one and only Voyager-like space probe in an alternate solar system and a world where no one cares about space anymore. Involving various types of programming challenges and robotic control minigames. Inspired by dying mars rovers and the crowdfunded attempt to regain contact with a comet probe.

Status: Will likely remain a dream game.

Shipbreaker Cardgame

Simple Solitaire (maybe MP) card-and-dice game

Set up up the layers of a derelict spaceship's hull by laying out overlapping layers of cards, each of which represents a different material or component, some of which are hidden on the card backs. Then use actions to gradually cut into and move them apart to extract the juicy reactor and other high-value modules without cutting a high power line or explosive tank.

Status: Not much to speak of beyond the concept yet, but it seems cute enough that I might return to it.

Long Arc SFRPG Framework

System-agnostic toolkit for framing campaigns that cover vast timespans with the PC crew either in cryostasis or spending absurdly long periods awake and isolated from civilization and how that affects them.

Status: Not much to speak of beyond the concept yet.

Crunchy Hard Space Opera Heartbreaker

Hard-SF General-Purpose TRPG

Dump a bunch of bits from all of my nascent SF games (and others') into a box and shake it up, then let myself go Full Crunch Mode (as I tend toward naturally) and see where it ends up, just for a lark.

Status: Almost certainly fated to break up on re-entry, but some interesting ideas that might re-applicable elsewhere or reshaped into something tractable. I'll post some details about this next.

An Orbital Survey of Nascent SF Projects

I tend to vacillate between deep interest in Fantasy projects, and SF projects. It's difficult to get into the mindset of one or the other, so rarely mix them or easily shift between them. 

I've been deep into an SF phase since my last post. I also find it more difficult to share my SF projects, for no apparent reason. So I thought I might force myself to try.

One after another, I've been tentatively excited about a handful of projects, thinking I might be able to see one to a good state and share it with the world in a playable form. And for each one, in turn, I got distracted by a different one. So it goes.

But since I want to show something to the world, here's a brief survey of those projects, as well as my bigger older unreleased SF projects.

You'll note that most of these are Solitaire-first and not PRGs. During the pandemic I realized I'm much more likely to polish and release a game I can playtest by myself.

I'd love to hear any opinions on which of these sound the most interesting, or the most worthwhile to continue developing.

Recent Projects

 (since last post here, in chronological order)

Aces and Admirals

• Simple(ish), thematic rules for cinematic space opera battles
• Type: 2P or Solitaire Tactics Miniature (or token) Wargame
• Hook: Some unique-to-me mechanics that enforce thematic tactical decisions
  
• Inspirations:  Chris McDowell's Project 10, Star Wars Armada (which I haven't played)
  
• State: 23 page GDoc, v0.3, a couple of playtests
• Feel: Lukewarm, slow to playtest, maybe not unique enough to pursue
  

 Deckhand

• Organize dice that represent different types of cargo in your ship's hold according to restrictions, and strategically choose your trade route
  
• Type: Inspiral-like Solitaire Dice-and-One-Page game
  
• Inspirations: Inspiral... my own desire for a cargo management game with some physicality 
• State: one-page GDoc layout, v0.3, multiple playtests
• Feel: Lukewarm, but it's small, and I think there's something there
  

SS Hot Mess

• Follow the relationships between a scrappy crew of a cramped starship as they shift and flare and evolve
• Type: Solitaire or multiplayer... Inspiral-like Solitaire Dice-and-Board game, probably
  
• Inspirations: The Sims, Firefly etc, games where this is an element but not the focus
• State: No rules, just a Perchance generator for a crew and their interrelationships
• Feel: Uninterested right now but, cute notion but not sure where to go from here
  

 Unnamed Starfighter Sim

• Track enemy fighters with dice, moving them between sectors of a radar display as you maneuver to get a good shot and shake tails and manage power between systems
• Type: Inspiral-like Solitaire Dice-and-One-Page game
• Inspirations: Tie Fighter and other space dogfighting sims
  
• State: Initial designs
• Feel: Uninterested right now but might return to flesh it out

TransMars Rail

• Scan, plan, and build up a planet-wide industrial infrastructure on a printed and folded 3-D icosahedral hex-dot-grid globe
• Type: Strategic Solitaire Boardgame
• Inspirations: Real plans for Mars settlement, Slipways, Factorio/Satisfactory, "grease pencil" rail boardgames
  
• State: Some notional resource tree and unit stats, generators for icosahedral hex map resources
• Feel: Long way to go here, not super hopeful, but sated some strong design urges 

 Ever Outward

• Strategically pilot an Interstellar Diaspora ship across the stars, scanning planets and searching for a place that a contingent of the 4000 settlers you carry in cryostasis can work their entire lives to make a home out of.
  
• Type: Inspiral-like Solitaire Dice-and-Board game
• Inspirations: Real Geoplanetary Science, Seedship
  
• State: 8 Page GDoc, some elements playtested 
• Feel: Hopeful, but there is a lot of balancing work needed, and I'm not sure if mechanics and choices are compelling enough to keep you engaged when the majority of systems are uninhabitable 

 Tungsten Trilemma

• A light framework for SF RPGs
• Type: Semi-modular RPG rules/tools
  
• Inspirations: Iron Triangles, Various SF RPGs, The Expanse, the worlds of my other SF games
  
• State: recent, growing GDoc
• Feel: IDK, right now just an outlet for some ideas that have built up over very tentative prior attempts at SF RPGs. Might turn into a smallish finished project that I'll probably never run.
  

Prior Projects

(at least the bigger ones, roughly in chronological order)

 Inflection:Prelude

• "VAST APOCALYPSE-POWERED SPACE OPERA OF META-ETHICS AND EXISTENTIAL RISK AT THE CUSP OF THE SINGULARITY"
• Type: PbtA RPG
  
• Inspirations: Various Hard SF novels
• State: 50+ page GDoc, incomplete
• Feel: IDK. Self-aware-ly naive back when I was thrilled by the seeming ease of hacking together PbtA games and also into absorbing existential risk studies and when I actually read novels. Probably too pretentious to attempt to distill metaethics into a game system that people would play.

Fission System Privateers

• A Tactical Game of Tense Deception and Interplanetary Maneuvers
  
• Type: Tactical 2P+ Board-and-Card game 
• Hook: baking realistic restrictions into rules (orbital mechanics Delta-V, simplified rocket equation, no stealth in space, known/hidden info)
  
• Inpirations: Realistic space warfare concepts, Human Reach novels, The Expanse
• Feel: This is one of multiple attempts at distilling realistic space warfare into a playable analog tactical game, probably my best one, and yet it still feels only somewhat tractable. Still might be something there worth polishing.
  

AIRLOCK

•  LO-FI  SCI-FI  ISOLATION  HORROR  RPG
• Type: Rules Light RPG
  
• Hook: "Solve, Survive, Save" framework codified into rules, panic rules tweaked to my taste
  
• Inspirations: Alien, Cthulhu Dark, Mothership
• State: 20 page GDoc, v0.7, no playtesting
  
• Feel: I mean, there's a million of these now, so........

Unnamed Slipways-like 

• Build self-reinforcing interstellar trade routes on a randomly pre-generated and printed starmap
• Type: Solitaire Dice-and-Draw game
• Inspirations: Slipways
  
• State: Starmap generator, v0.4, a few playtests
  
• Feel: IDK, went through a few versions of the central mechanic and haven't found a satisfying balance of comprehensibility and legibility of map-marking
  

Orbital Decay (such an overused name, but I don't think there's been a more suitable game for it)

• Make tense decisions to survive and escape Jupiter's orbit after a Kepler-Syndrome-like event, by salvaging derelict spacecraft to refuel and maintain your own against accelerating decay
• Type: Inspiral-like Solitaire Dice-and-Board game
  
• Hook: Simplified but realistic orbital maneuvering mechanics, ship systems damage simulation, an undercurrent of cosmic horror
  
• Inspirations: Hard SF
  
• State: 10 page GDoc, v0.6, multiple playtests
  
• Feel: Hopeful - focused scope, but needs more tweaking
  

Further Inspiration-Warping: Cyberpunk, Space Horror

Welcome to my game design therapy journal.

 Since my last post, my attention has fluctuated through/between:

• A: Some rules for a cyberpunk version of the skirmish game rules, focused on hacking
• A.5: some work on a few Perchance generators for a cyberpunk setting
• B: Creating a spin-off solo hacking card game all the way to a prototype in TTS 
• C: A notional cyberpunk RPG ruleset which is itself the system the PCs are literally hacking and breaking, made by a fictional game company representing the in-game corporation. Not really sure how to actually make it though, probably won't be more than a fun concept write-up. Maybe I'll share that at least.
  
• D: Youtube watching shifted from fantasy terrain crafting to Sci-fi, and a growing visceral desire to get my hands into it
  
• E: Skeletal ideas for combining some of the above with my nascent Alien Dark space horror RPG rules into a kind of narrative co-op Alien+"Space Hulk with civilians" miniature/board game.
  
• F: Left Field - slight hints of dipping into playtesting and/or hacking Chris McDowell's OTHER mini ruleset Project 10...
  

B is vaguely promising. And, in creating it I learned Nandeck, which will help me further test Primal Wild, a solo card game from a while ago that I was really keen on but stalled on playtesting. But I'm not in the headspace for that yet.

 

 I'm still really torn on getting into physical terrain crafting, but the pull has been strong. Something makes me feel like doing it means i need minis themselves, and that's yet another whole world that takes investment. And I'm sure my interest horizon just won't support it.

E is taking most of my mind share right now. Another way to put it would be along the lines of Betrayal at House on the Hill plus Mothership. A board-game like set of procedures, and lots of random tables (or maybe card decks to pull from) for how things go wrong, in formed by my Alien Dark project. Various scenarios for strange space horrors to get chased by, either controlled by another character, or maybe some solo AI. 

But my brain is tying it so closely to a desire for physical spaceship terrain that my resistance to going in on that is blocking further progress. I have delusions of terrain that would have labelled wall and floor panels the players would have to travel to and literally pop off, exposing wires and pipework and mechanisms that need repair or rerouting or something, to open or lock doors and stuff. It feels tangible and "sticky", but I'm sure is not really tractable in practice.

F just seems kind of fun, ability combos that are fast to play and easy to hack. I've usually been even less interested in that scale of wargame than I was with mini skirmish games though, so who knows how long that would last.

Ok well this is kind of a pointless post. Here, have some of the videos that have been lodged deep in my subconcious of late:

And here's where the horror part comes in.
Gert is some kind of unspeakable elder god of crafting.

Inspiration Shift: Miniature Skirmish Wargames

Been a while so I'm forcing myself to write up what I've been thinking about, regardless of the state it ends up in.

Getting a bit slogged in detailing out the many factions in the Offbeat Megadungeon, I was easy prey for alternative inspiration, which came on swift and silent wing in the form of Chris McDowell's GRIMLITE/The Doomed miniature wargame ruleset. Which I learned of from some podcast interview (Mud & Blood I think), disconnected from the digital RPG socmed sprawl as I've been.

I've only ever been vaguely interested in miniature games; the material investment has always outweighed the draw. Usually I'm drawn more to crafting terrain, and I've been comfort-watching a lot of youtube vids of such.

But a very stripped-down, fast-playing, small-team ruleset seems really appealing, at least for just playing around with the game design. As Chris puts it, GRIMLITE is no-measuring, no stacking, no tracking. 

Searching around the space for similar games, the ones most interesting to me have been Five Leagues to the Borderlands, Chromehammer, and Emmy's The Dolorous Stroke (though it's pretty heavy on tracking).

There are a few concepts I want to explore that this kind of ruleset lends itself to.

• Verticality of the physical game space, even more than what I've seen of Necromunda. Makes the most sense in a Cyberpunk mileau. Difficult to set up and visualize for digital playtesting though.
• Crunchy position-manipulating tactics, ala Into the Breach and Fights in Tight Spaces. I saw this happening a little bit with 5 Leagues, but also seems to be good for Cyberpunk (think John Wick)
• Just making a bunch of fun abilities that alter a core ruleset.
• Some ideas around self-balancing point-buy systems.

Also the "narrative" (which seems to me more like "procedure- and roll table-heavy")  campaign structure of this style of game seems to fit with and lend itself really to the kind of solo play i've been getting into during the pandemic (5 leagues is specifically solo, and there's a solo campaign version of Chromehammer).

I've spun up a promising mashup of GRIMLITE and 5 Leagues that I've had fun with designing if nothing else. Keeping it in my pocket for now but might share in a later form. But here's an excerpt of the core melee exchange rules, primarily inspired by 5 Leagues. 

Note: Units have between 3 (basic) and 5 (Leaders) Combat Dice, but various traits and weapon tags alter this amount, often depending on certain conditions and whether you're attacking or defending in that exchange.

Melee Exchanges

• A Melee Attack initiates a series of up to three Exchanges

• The Initiator is Attacker in the first Exchange (Certain weapon tags may alter this)

• In each Exchange...

• Attacker and Defender secretly decide how many of their Combat Dice to commit for that Exchange, removed from their Total CD available for the rest of the Melee.

• • If you have a Readied Ally Unit in base contact with you AND/OR your Attacker, gain +1 CD when Defending

  • You may (or may need to) commit no CD, or have negative CD. In this case, your roll is treated as a 1

• Attacker and Defender roll their committed CD, select their highest die, and compare them. 

• If the Attacker has the higher die, they cause 1 Wound to the Defender

• On a 6, you may trigger certain effects from Traits/Tags

• If it is a tie, the Attacker chooses to either Backstep, Press, or Shove (ending the melee). 

• If the Defender has the higher die, they become the Attacker in the next Exchange. They may also choose to Dodge, or Disengage (ending the melee).

• On a 6, you may trigger certain effects from Traits/Tags

• After the final Exchange (the third, or if the Melee is ended early)

• The Defender Disengages

Maneuvers

• Shove: The Defender moves away from the Attacker by the Attacker's base width

• Press: As Shove, but the Attacker also moves up into Contact

• Dodge: Move up to 90 degrees around a base you're in contact with

• Disengage: Move your base width away from a base you're in contact with

• Backstep: As Disengage, but Unit that was in contact may choose to step back into contact with you.

Definitely crunchier than GRIMLITE, and even 5 Leagues, but these exchanges are kind of the core concept of a game like this, and from playtesting, they're tense and engaging enough to justify a bit of complexity for what I'm aiming for.

But then the miniature elephant in the room - I'm not going to get a bunch of physical minis. particularly since this is probably yet another passing fancy that I'll be dropping for the next thing in 2D6 weeks.

Tabletop Simulator would be good but it is sooo clunky  in some specific ways (and non-aesthetic, counter to one of the primary appeals of mini games in the first place). I wonder if there are other more suitable digital tools for this kind of thing.

Google Slides actually worked really well for quick playtesting, at least for simple setups. Just copy the current slide and go from there for the next action/turn. Here's a half-baked playtest of my nascent rules. Which went pretty well so far - I like the tough-decision-making of the dice-commiting mechanic, and the dynamism of the forced movement baked into the melee procedure.

miniature cave terrain and simple-but-deep tactical combat thoughts

 I've been caught by a tangent (no - a good and natural evolution of my locus of interest) into thinking about better (than i've seen) miniature terrain to represent strange cave formations, ala Veins of the Earth (or, y'know, real caves).

although i've never used minis for any games, i've always had a side interest in terrain crafting; it seems like a lot of fun to produce some really usable stuff without a huge amount of effort, primarly with XPS foam, hot wire knife, and simple painting techniques. I don't have much experience with any of it in the last 15 years or so. 

I got sucked down a youtube hole of watching game crafting videos. But nothing really hit the notes i was looking for. 

I think we avoid realistic, strange cave shapes in RPGs because they are difficult to visualize. But physical terrain solves that problem. Except everyone still seems to be locked into a very strict concept of modularity, with standardized sizes and shapes.

This is the closest I've seen to what I'm picturing in terms of modularity, but its still way to "rigid" or rectilinear

 I thought it would be quite easy to make a versatile set of shapes that could help represent strange cave forms that I was picturing in my head.

then i realized that using sketchup actually mirrors a lot of the same simple techniques; rough lines cutting through shapes. so instead of going out to home depot to grab some XPS, i'm doing my usual thing and over-thinking/planning stuff that should be simple to just do, and started playing around in sketchup.  creating shapes that are easy to make, but  work really together to create more interesting, vertical, strange real-life cave shaped spaces.

still images are difficult to convey how well it works in 3d.

This one is obviously really "prefabbed" and not modular, but its interesting thinking what you can do with just a few layers stacked to represent a cramped corridor full of vertical challenges. and even though it's only piece, it could still work in any orientation, even sideways. 

ok but why

But if i were to actually create and use this stuff, it would involve a change in my headspace around gameplay style, and probably ruleset.

In my mind, using minis and physical terrain would need to be justified by soemthing engaging. Your not going to build out a complex 3d space just to move through it on the way to another point of interest.

Maybe rules that make the physical act of exploring strange cave spaces interesting enough to justify being the focus,  spending time on ((and holding the attention of players to) just getting yourself up a slippery flowstone outcropping. maybe even physical representation of rope. There's some spelunking challenge rule stuff in VOTE but it's kinda weird. I hold out hope for there being something worthwhile here, but moving on...

If combat is the justification for building out a space, in any good players in an OSR style game are going to make sure as heck that they don't get ambushed while in a weird position (and just throwing ambushes in for the sake of play is really outside of OSR style). Which again obviates the impetus for building out a space.

The obvious alternative is fun tactical combat as the focus - in other words, combat-as-sport, or a cinematic challenge style. I've dipped into this some with Knave Souls, (and a bunch of unshared thinking and designing of more complex combat rules hacks for various systems), but it got me thinking about simple, combat-focused RPG that still support OSR play. 

I don't follow or know much about skirmish games, and i expect this is probably pretty well accomplished by soemthing liek age of sigmar or whatever.  (of course 5E is right out, too much baggage.)

So I'm thinking: "What if halfway between BX (or Knave, etc) and 4E... or Into The Breach?"

crunchier, more dynamic, small-numbers combat at a relatively small and cramped scale.  Lots of shoving, attacks pushing and advancing, relevant facing and flanking, impact from verticality, monsters crawling around walls, etc.

But... no complex character builds.  the kind fo crazy abilities built into the rules of 4E would instead be things that arise situationally and are arbitrated on the spot, or maybe granted by magic items. niches arise from item loadouts and ability score differences. (I should look into ICRPG - I know it emphasizes power growth through items).

so combat may be a forgone conclusion, but the spirit of creative problem-solving is still there, just involving the physical, literally visualized spacial situation. pleyrs need to coordinate their tactics and come up with plans to beat a combat situation using the particulars of strange environments and their items creatively. 

That's the idea at least.

this implies a kind of brutal dark soulsy VOTE style setting; Long-lost cavers now adapted with  trogolodytic mutations trying to kill or be killed by weird forgotten entities in dark holes. I think Kingdom Death: Monster or whatever its called might be a bit like this, but has its own tightly integrated stuff that wouldn't be relevant to a more general rpg system.

Bonus:  here is one such a survivor before and after his adaptations and evolving loadout after spending months in the dark places where the pressure of the earth above you molds your very form