/r/SWN
A subreddit dedicated to all things Stars Without Number, a sci-fi tabletop role-playing game designed by Kevin Crawford.
Welcome to /r/SWN, a subreddit dedicated to all things Stars Without Number!
Got a question about rules or lore in your campaign? Feel free to ask it here! ;)
Stars Without Number publications:
Core Rulebooks:
Campaign Supplements:
Worldbooks:
Setting Supplements:
Adventures:
Mandate Achives:
(Only available as part of the
Mandate Archive Collection 2011)
Other Dust
The following additions are set within the same SWN universe and follow the same lore, but the included books are intended for Other Dust campaigns which are set on earth about 350 years before the events of SWN (but around 185 years after the scream hit).
Core Rulebook
Adventures:
Codex of the New Earth:
Sine Nomine Publishing Journals
Every once in a while, a free journal is published with additional content supplements such as roll tables, items, or new classes. However, these releases aren't SWN specific, and contain supplements to various Sine Nomine publications.
/r/SWN
For those of you who DO NOT use Spike Drive FTL, what do you use instead? And how does it work in game mechanics and how does it work in universe etc.
So I'm new to VTT, and began to work on putting together a campaign. It was only after I put a decent amount of work into the world that I found that certain functions like Ship Sheets were not working, I think due to compatibility issues? I'm pretty sure I'll have to start over on an older version of the software, which really stomps up and down on my nutsack, if you see what I mean.
tl;dr: Any word on when or if this will be getting an update? https://foundryvtt.com/packages/swnr
wintersleep if you're reading this please for the love of god update it I'm begging you
I'm curious about the connections between each of the *WN books, especially since it seems like CWN is the earliest version of earth, AWN seems like it will be freshly post apocalyptic earth, SWN is space grand adventure where earth is forgotten about, and WWN is earth so ludicrously far in the future very little of even physics resembles present day.
I'm absolutely fascinated by what seems to be an overarching lore. And would love to know any other connections that people have noticed besides the most obvious ones.
Hi all! Prefacing by saying this is not sponsored, nor am I affiliated with the company. There is a new site that seems fantastic for managing campaigns and offering a lot of great tools for generating ideas called Alkemion Studio. Anyway, I created a planet generator using SWN's Sector Generation rules. It's lacking the Other Worlds and Points of Interest tables but I'm working on it. Hope it's useful to people! :)
How do you find routes to new planets that have never been discovered before or aren’t well known? I’ve seen the answer “have the players find a computer with the travel data on it” provided before but that doesn’t answer how those people found it. It says in the book to do a blind jump is basically suicide, but then how did the old Terran mandate find new planets using spike drives?
Mindless Swarm: a new trait to give enemies whith no self preservation instinct such as zombies. When this enemy is killed by a direct attack, the action cost used for the attack is given back to the attacker. This means as long as a shooter has ammo inside their gun and every shot is a deadly one, they can keep shooting, potentially taking out many zombies in one turn.
This is intended to be used for zombie or terminide swarm scenarios, with epic actions and great numbers. I expect this to slow things down and diminish the importance of AOE weapons and melee combat in those scenarios, although they would still have a role to play. This would also mean munitions are more precious (since you shoot more targets) and a few unlucky dices could get you easily swarmed.
Stolen from XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, where this trait is given to the Lost.
Hi all. I'm using Wintersleep-AI's SWN module for Foundry (https://github.com/wintersleepAI/foundry-swnr). I'm having some trouble wrapping my head around the character creation. There doesn't seem to be any place to put in your class. Is the issue that the classes are copyrighted? I heard that you may need to make the classes as Items and drag and drop them onto the sheets, but when I created a test class it didn't seem to drag and drop correctly. What do people think?
Hi Everyone,
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Thank you for being fans of games!
Hey Chooms!
I'm new to cyberpunk RPGs and in prepping a CWN campaign I have this sense that the CWN cyberware selection in thin compared to other systems. Have people found that to be true or is CWN genrally on par with what you can find in the core books for Shadowrun and CP Red? I realize that the lean style of CWN (which I prefer) may make it seem thinner than games that have more text or images in their gearnsections. I also don't want to overwhelm myself or my players with too many choices that they frustrated. Thanks!
Greetings hive mind ! I’m working on light homebrew rules for space combat, and I would appreciate external feedbacks. I’m using the « no command point » optional rule, and I thought about reusing some of the Traveller ship combat range rules. The idea is to create more varied situations and more things to do for the Bridge officer. Here is what I have so far:
Every ship weapon has a range between Far, Medium, and Close. A weapon suffers a -2 penalty for every out-of-range threshold (so a close range weapon shooting at far range suffers a -4 to hit penalty). The Bridge actions Escape Combat and Pursue Target allows to move one range further/closer to the enemy ship. Weapon tags such as Clumsy and Flak function as normal. Escape Combat while at far range allows to flee the fight. Pursue Target while at close range allows to board the enemy ship (no idea how that would work for now) Starting distance depends on the situation, but as a rule of thumb : far range for deep space encounter, medium range for orbital encounter, close range for dense area (like an asteroid field).
Short range : Reaper Battery Fractal Impact Charge Sandthrower Flak Emitter Battery Mag Spike Array Lightning Charge Mantle
Medium range : Multifocal Laser Polyspectral MES Beam Plasma Beam Smart Cloud Gravcannon Spike Inversion Projector
Far range : Torpedo Launcher Charged Particle Caster Spinal Beam Cannon Vortex Tunnel Inductor Mass Cannon Singularity Gun
I chose ranges based on weapon descriptions and abilities.
Thank you for your feedbacks !
Hi! Just discovered https://sectorswithoutnumber.com/ and I love it :)
When trying to export my sector I can not find any option to get a per planet breakdown though. The breakdown per entity is far too detailed and got too many pages. Is there any option I am missing?
Obviously QECM and Minovsky Particles are pretty close, but Minovsky Particles take things a step further and can completely jam ranged comms even within ships in large engagements.
I haven't finished the book, but I did skim through the second half and the index. I haven't seen this, but might have missed it.
If one wanted to use SWN rules and tools to run a campaign in a home brew setting or an established canon/setting that isn't the SWN setting, is there a work sheet with the kinds of questions the GM would have to resolve?
There's obvious questions
But there's a whole bunch of less obvious questions. If someone had a more formalized list of things that need to be addressed ahead of time, possibly with balance questions, that would be a nice resource.
I think one would be hard pressed to use SWN for a setting as broad as star wars or star trek. But most commercial and home brew settings are not as broad as those.
I know one of the recommended ways of creating adventures for SWN is re-skinning other OSR adventures. Has anyone here tried that out, and if so how did that work out for you? I'm looking to seed my sandbox with a few different adventures and would appreciate recommendations!
For example, the Faction Turn minigame in SWN and WWN, the lightweight scheme and other Merc group system in CWN, or others.
My personal favorite is Godbound's faction/village system. What's yours?
Anyone have advice for how to translate Shadowrun’s d6 dice pools and success levels into the 2d6+mod and 1d20=mod system of SWN and CWN?
I've looked through the rules, and I probably missed it, but I'm looking for what skill(s) would govern a PC's ability to spacewalk with the benefit of thrusters - whether that's gas jets on a spacesuit or the thrusters on a suit of power armor/powered exoskeleton (whether it's a combat or construction/mining model).
Hello all, I am planning to use SWN Factions to spice up my Traveller game. However some things I am struggling with.
How far away can a pacter summon a shadow via the "Call X" spells?
Can a sunblade master craft their own weapon, and if so, how much does it cost given that sacred weapons are typically free?
Can a mage use the modifiers from the designing shadows table on page 105 on the statblocks of existing shadows? I.E. create a formula for a myrmidon but with base AC 18 and immunity to shock damage by increasing the summon/bind DC by +2?
Can ship weapons be made into pattern weapons?
And lastly, is there a guideline for pacters creating new spells to summon custom shadows, and how to balance that?
Hi folks,
How come there doesn't seem to be any kind of autocannon that ships can mount? I'm far from an expert in such things, but that seems a little odd to me. I thought there might be something like that in Engines of Babylon - the game I'm currently running takes place in a single solar system, so we're using those rules - but nope, nothing like that in there either.
Now, granted, I've reflavored the Sandthrowers from the main rule book to essentially be the autocannon turrets from the Expanse, but that's not what they're intended to be. I could do the same with Pebble Clouds and Spall Guns from EoB, but, again, it's clearly not what it's supposed to be.
It just seems like an odd omission. Is there a reason why it's omitted, other than that they're unguided projectiles?
Just looking for some clarification or opinions on a few things.
I know a good chunk of this game system can be hand wavey about minutiae, which I generally enjoy and agree is a good thing, but sometimes I get stuck on turns of phrase, so I appreciate you bearing with me.
Starting with Split Focus, do each of me get its own ‘turn’ during combat or scenes where turns matter?
So we know Split Focus and Drone Control can be used to control a small but rapidly increasing flight of drones. My question is about utilizing those routines though. First things first, I Split Focus. Prime me activates Drone Control and starts giving orders. Does first and second iteration me also have to activate a separate Drone Control to take control of its own flight, or does processing Drone Control once mean every instance of me also has Drone Control.
Speaking of Split Focus, are all of us restricted to the same processing pool? If I have 3 processing, does each of me dip in to the pool to run processes separately? Expanding on that, if I have a processing cluster 1 and 2 available, I know that I can only access the bonus processing from one or the other cluster as it specifically stats clusters don’t stack, but would prime me be able to access the +1 cluster, while secondary me could access the +2 cluster and run its own processes?
Were there ever specific rules about whether a bot/expert system had to be modified or specially built to accept direct AI control, or can they be puppeted purchased stock?
ECM interference. I’ve seen different things that confuse me. I recall somewhere here Crawford mentioning that ‘laser line of sight’ can bypass ECM interference, but what’s the practical limitations on that? If I have a ship armature in orbit on a clear day, can I control the entire army ‘personally’ with Split Focus? If I’m on the ground and turn around, do I lose direct control of the bots standing behind me, or does line of sight control mean uninterrupted straight line? This is further complicated in my mind by the military campaign supplement that casually mentions AI encryption is too strong to be countered, but then gives no rules or mention of what that means, even though AI players did exist when that was written.
Processing clusters specifically mentions a planet bound AI can access a ship mounted cluster of not under the effects of ECM. Going back to the ‘line of sight’ control idea, is ‘control a bot’ and ‘access a cluster’ too disparate to be considered alike for the purposes of defeating EMC?
Finally, are there listed methods I’ve just missed to defeating ECM, beyond the destructive inherents blow it up, cut power, bribe someone to shut it off, etc.
Last night the PCs frigate entered into a dog fight with a strike fighter, which also happened to be the first one-on-one space combat we've encountered.
The PCs had the bright idea of targeting the strike fighter's weapons, which succeeded. The strike fighter's only recourse was to either flee or attempt to fix their weapons. They fixed their weapons, and on the PCs' next turn they simply disabled them again.
Are we doing something wrong? It seems like in a one-on-one, whoever disables the other ship's weapons first can simply win by attrition by continually disabling their weapons as their HP slowly drops.
Other than that, we generally like space combat in SWN and can't wait to play more!
Hey folks,
Has anyone here ever tried to "harden" the space combat in this game? I'm considering revamping it and adding in some things from the Expanse ttrpg, like range bands and some more grounded weapons, maybe adding in heat management, that sort of thing. I'm just starting, here, looking at the combat system and deciding how I want to approach it.
Has anyone else here tried this? If so, how did it work out?
Hii!! My best friend has made our campaign into a fanfic on ao3! She’s our GM and such an amazing writer <33 I’d love for people to give it a read and check her out! Chapter one is out now!
https://archiveofourown.org/works/59145271/chapters/150808069