Star World

Heya AWers!

Rob Wieland and I have been kicking around some ideas for an AW-hack centered around spaceships and their crews since GenCon. We're drawing a lot from BSG, Star Trek, Firefly, and Mass Effect without leaning too heavily on any one intellectual property. The *W games do an awesome job of exploring a setting, and Rob and I both thought exploring space would be a lot of fun.

In essence, you pick character playbooks like normal and then pick a ship playbook that helps to define the universe and your ship. Part of our goal is to make the ship into a character as well, albeit one that everyone plays together.

We've got five playbooks (Captain, XO, Doctor, Cadet, and Engineer) done, as well as three ships (Flagship, Warship, Freighter). You can download all of them, including the basic moves, ship moves, and MC guide here:

Star World v1.0

At this point, we'd love to get some feedback on this thing. I've gone out and roadtested it four or five times and had a great time, but we are eager to hear what others think. :)

Hey there!

I like to see that someone's using my harm hack. How's that worked out for you in play?

I also really love the two different violence moves (with honor, or to win), that's a really cool touch.

The new harm move has worked out really well.

First, it means the MC only has to determine what kind of damage is headed toward the PCs. That makes for a lot less bookkeeping for a game that has plenty of tech and fiddly bits.

Each playbook has slots where players can put the conditions they get. If you can't fill a minor spot, you have to upgrade to a major spot, etc. That worked well to fictionally describe the danger, and the player-facing part of it worked beautifully.

The biggest problem we've had so far is that the original moves were still a bit lethal for the fiction. We've toned them down since then. :)