I’m rebooting my actual play posts. It’s been several years but it seems fitting since my first post in 2007 (Kubla is King) was about KublaCon that I start back up with Kubla 2024.
GM: Aaron Morneau
Players: Nathaniel Bowers, Mark OrganicByte, Perry D Clark, Katelyn Sweigart, Sean Nittner, Richard Nicholson
System: Stars Without Numbers (Revised)
I had been hankering to play a game of SNW since our Agents of F.f.E.a.R. game in 2020, So much so that when the game description said you could supply your own characters, I essentially recreated Hope so I could have more fun with a teleporting test subject genetically engineered for a purpose. And, to that end, I did have fun!
The game was six hours but was unfortunately cut short WAY before we got to anything like a conclusion. There seemed to be lots of potential leads at the start of the game but once we got into the action, it was a dungeon crawl in space and suffered accordingly. Room to room exploration filled with inexplicable encounters and combat, only to have the next 4-6 hours of play summarized in the last 10 minutes.
My big take aways were:
- Creating characters during a session for a game like SNW eats up too much time (this was exacerbated by the fact that we had the Revised book but the original character sheets which had an entirely different skill set).
- There is a great character creation tool online: https://www.swnfreebooter.net Use it!
- I really feel like this adventure (which was created by Sine Nomine) has potential. Brightside station is just the kind of seedy place where cool NPCs and adventure hooks could crop up. Mysterious temples (Sky Tombs) inside asteroids that were dangerous to go to because of the solar radiation was all exciting stuff, or seemed like it could be.
- You gotta, gotta, gotta have connections between player characters at the start. By the end of the game we barely had any meaningful conversations with each other nor with the goals of the adventure (which started as “get rich doing a job” and could have evolved to caring about what happened in the system, but those details only came at the very end).
I’d play Stars Without Number again for sure, but not sure I’d do it at a con. The game just needs more time to breathe than you can fit in a four hour (or in this case six-hour) slot.
