I'm curious on how much if any conversion is needed to make them work. Is it just shock damage I need to account for or is there more.

Also WWN and SWN what's the exclusive content in the paid versions?

Hello! Before I start - I know the obvious answer to this is "If your table finds it tedious, or otherwise doesn't want to do it, there is no shame in ignoring these rules!" - but I want to get a gauge on how strictly everyone follows them, how they balance them, and how pacing might affect how they're implemented...

Specifically, I want to discuss the various "taxes" your players pay throughout their sessions. The rough estimates for what I want to discuss are...

~100 credits per day per NPC hired crewman

~20 credits per day per crewman/PC for food

~500 credits per system jump for fuel

~10k credits every 6 months for basic ship maintenance

Plus of course all the things the players want to actually buy.

My concern and confusion primarily comes from my table coming from a DnD like system where coin weight and rations are very rarely tracked unless you're running a very specific type of survival campaign. I found that implementing these rules means the players are often paying 1,000 credits per jump - and the jumps themselves take ~2 minutes if IRL table time unless the players have downtime activities and I'm not throwing any unexpected encounters at them. It feels like there's a gash in their coinpurses and they're bleeding money by simply existing.

Now this might be because I've made my sector too big and my players like to jump around a lot - or maybe I'm not offering them enough payment for jobs to balance out the costs of surviving - or maybe it's just a perception thing and the problem is not as bad as it seems on my end? Either way, my fear is food and crew costs (and they only have 2 crewman) are bleeding them dry and having them constantly adjusting their credit count instead of focusing on missions and roleplay.

How do you guys run these rules? How strict are you with keeping track?

A couple questions about ship modifications. I see that Integrated Mods "require no further maintenance" it seems to me that means both maintaining with effort of an engineer, and cost of 6 months maintenance? Am I crazy or does that make sense? It seems like that's the point of the huge up front cost?.

TLDR: I am in the planning stage for a campaign which will probably be online. What would I need to have for SWN (with additional material) to run it? Looking for advice/encouragement.

I am considering a SWN scenario using the XWN rules (mutants (x-men) without number, but more like “what if (more aesthetic) Other Dust mutants ran into weird scenarios and investigated them”) which I’m cobbling together. The basic premise for the first session is something of a funnel where the player characters have woken up in a lab and have to escape. Think escaping from a Vault in fallout. The first session intention is I try out the SWN rules and my homebrew rules, and maybe even set up some ideas for the actual game. BUT afterwards I want to run a more role play focused game with a mystery, some character development, investigation, and things I’ve never gotten to run before. The longer term campaign would ideally be more of the focus than the initial one (or two) shot but it would be cool if the players were in both. My UNREALISTIC dream would be players (not me) updating a wiki with their version of events, and maybe a cork board with red string connecting the pins; AND the characters have personal relationships they want to maintain, like the rules from Strixhaven, but it’s for a rural area; and of course boss fights and action sequences juxtaposed with the mundane.

My realistic expectation is I get to run a one shot funnel with some people, but we have fun. Then I finish my notes, post them for the community to enjoy, and some people somewhere enjoy it, and I never know - but it’s out there in the universe.

Anyway!

I have had some success using roll20 for maps and Discord for chatting. This was during lockdown. Since then I went back to in person for a 5e game, wet erase marker maps and minis.

Do players need more than this for a game using SWN? Like for character sheets, and maybe a wiki for campaign information? Do players need more than just the basics (dice, paper, pencil, rules, handouts like images, and imagination)?

Has the SWN received its system reference document yet, and if so where ?

I tried looking at cardinals post not finding it there, but I might have missed something.

We've been playing almost every week since September and I only just finally got around to starting the write-up, so I have a long way to go before I'm caught up, but I figured I'd share what I've done so far and see whether people like it. Too short? Too long? Not enough narrative? Not enough behind-the-screen thoughts about how I approached things and how the mechanics work? Let me know what you think!

Prologue
Cast & Crew
Chapter 1
Factions & Faction Turn 1
Chapter 2

I know there have been some questions recently about how the faction mechanics work, so hopefully that part's useful to somebody. (Although even after playing for half a year, we're only just about to hit the third faction turn in tonight's session! We're a bunch of slowpokes…and the pilot took both ranks of Starfarer.)

I'm gearing up to run another campaign of SWN. I ran one before a few years ago so I'm not completely unfamiliar with the game. But I'm wondering what house rules the community has come up with to improve it.

Just a recent idea that came into my head: What if Jurassic Park, but in Space? And so, I have made this custom Planet Tag to meet my purposes! And if you don't want specifically dinosaurs or any other prehistoric earth-lifeform, a more generic Megafauna tag to go with it.

Primeval Reserve

The result of a slightly eccentric terraforming project, the planet heavily resembles a time period of Prehistoric Terra. This isn't necessarily accurate to any one epoch, and the ecosystem may be extremely anachronistic in places; Late Cretaceous Opisthocoelicaudia sauropods grazing on Carboniferous Sigillaria trees among flocks of Mid-Jurassic Anurognathid pterosaurs in the forests, a pack of feathered raptors ignoring a passing Smilodon as they feast on a killed Triceratops in the steppe, perhaps even a tribe of Neanderthals politely making trade with a clan of once-entirely-hypothetical saurosapiens right next to a camp of tourists.

E: Poachers, Hostile fauna/flora, the planet's curator, a Gengineering Company making easy to train dino-warbeasts, Mad scientist obsessed with primeval genetics

A: The planet's curator, curious local sapient (Human or otherwise), friendly tourist

C: the ecosystem is collapsing, the planet is a staging ground for genetic maltech experimentation, There's something or someone installing cybernetic implants on the dinosaurs, This actually seemed to evolve on its own

T: Exotic flora samples, primeval hunting trophy

P: Terraforming Apparatus, the Wilderness, Dino-Colisseum for the entertainment of tourists, local tribal settlement

...Unfortunately, there's not exactly a whole lot more I can think of to add for complications, things, or places.

TL;DR: What's the sidearm for officers and noncombatants in your ships? Melee, void pistol, or none?

So, there's void carbines for in-ship engagements. But there's no void pistols. So, are the default sidearms for officers swords, should we make a void pistol, or should there be no sidearms?

No sidearms makes sense. Only combat you are gonna see is boarding action, and you can more often than not get to a weapons' locker before that happens.

Void pistols make sense too. You don't want your officers having to dive into the fray. They are the most valuable of your troops, so them being able to take cover is good, and also allows them to shoot if engaged in melee, which isn't bad at all.

Hell, if void pistols DON'T exist, it makes a lot of sense to have melee troops to entangle the carbiners, and carbine troops behind them to shoot at the entangled carbiners. Which of course means that in reality both groups will be doing that, and there will be a sandwich of carbiner bread with melee in the middle. Whoever's melee falls first is gonna have their carbiners entangled and mostly useless while the other carbiners and melee make minced meat of them. Or, they all have melee weapons AND carbines, but there would still likely be some specialization in roles, with stronger troopers carrying two handers for melee and being worse at shooting. Hell, all of this meta still could be interesting if there was a void pistol.

Finally, I kinda like the image of officers using swords, but it evokes a sense of aristocracy you may not want for every faction. Of course, the old captain pulling out her ceremonial vibro sword and then showing some incredible fencing skills while tangling up your ranged warriors is an excellent surprise to drop on your players. Or the captain being a feral beast in combat also could work, and doesn't evoke a sense of aristocracy. Then again, having a sword AND a void pistol makes them look like swashbuckling heroes, which may be the best of both worlds.

(Proposed stats for void pistol: 2d4, 30/100, $300 Cr, 7 magazine, TL4. Void Carbine is pretty similar to a combat rifle without burst and sligthly better damage die, but less ammo. Did the same with the SMG to make the void pistol.)

Just wondering how people have incorporated the Scream into their worlds and how your sector/factions have developed (if any) protections against another Scream event.

Heya, I was planning on trying to run this as a 2nd campaign for my online group, but can't seem to find an online character sheet or companion? Is there any available? Everyone is more keen on using digital vs paper as we are all pretty fresh to other TRPGs outside of DnD, if anyone has any good options, please let me know!

Worlds without number is a great book! Used the free version for two of my campaigns and now I had the money to buy the hardcover.

I'm also considering buying SWN but haven't read it yet. what offers SWN that's different enough to spend another 80 bucks on the second book?

After a year break, the crew is getting back together!

I'm really excited to restart our campaign. The last cliffhanger was the Hero ship attempting to intercept some missiles to save a limping ship.

I've decided to revamp space combat and am asking for your advise. I've posted some of these before but have made a major change; I am moving from a CP based economy to an action based economy.

Additionally, every department will be allowed a single "Maneuver" per round, with an additional Maneuver being awarded by the captain.

Some of these Maneuvers cost a single or double action, and every department has at least one ability that will assist another department.

NOTE: The PCs are halfway through the campaign and are expecting to fight in multi-ship combat and potentially in Battlegroup vs Battlegroup Battles, so I'm hoping this makes combat both deadlier and more fun.

​

All C&C is welcomed!

​

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19rsr97gKUJuFCCUWY7AC38MFXAyXHnpZxcJ9h-lJSWQ/edit?usp=drive_link

How would you describe what they were, and what they might be currently some six centuries after the Scream?

I have the beginning of an interesting setup, but now I am trying to figure out where to go next session.

On the planet the PCs just landed, a large corporation runs about 30% of the economy, like Samsung in real-world Korea. It is a huge company, but for now it hasn't engaged on anything underhanded.

Another corporation is a different story. It is the de-facto government of my game's cyberpunk world. The board has decided that it will acquire company 1, or destroy it trying.

It has made a first move by hiring union toughs and starting a strike on the starport, controlled by company 1 and a major component of this planet's economy. But a Captain of the Port Authority suspects that there is something fishy. The union's list of demands seems made to be rejected and cause a stalemate. He was prohibited from investigating the matter, but he has some leverage on the players and intends to use it.

So once he recruits them to investigate (assuming they agree,) how could I structure this investigation? Do I offer them some initial leads and let them follow the ones they find promising, then wing it from there? How could those union toughs respond once they find the PCs poking their nose around? I think the ringleader should have some chrome installed by his secret employer, but that wouldn't be enough evidence.

Thought I'd ask the great SWN brain trust for some ideas for a planet's Great Work tag. Because I'm stumped and can't think of anything that seems appropriate and interesting.

Here's the situation...

New campaign just getting rolling, in the party's current system there are two planets. The main one is TL4+, has hundreds of millions of people, and the tags Sole Supplier / Doomed World. Awesome! Very flavorful. Through play we've established that the planet is the sole source of "psi-crystals" used in metapsionic device manufacturer and their rampant mining has resulted in telekinetic metaquakes that are tearing the planet apart. With the high population, tons of people are trying to get off world while they can, others are making a cash grab to get rich from the crystals first, and the government has been trying to cover up or down play the environmental disaster. Some of the people are panicking, some don't believe it's happening, etc. A real powder keg ready to explode with adventure opportunities for the players.

The second planet is TL2, has a few million people, and has the tags Psionics Fear / Great Work. We've established that it's an agrarian world that makes food for the other planet, and is at TL2 due to a lack of infrastructure, religious preferences, etc. They are probably under huge immigration pressure from the other world, and the Psychics Fear fits right in as the populace outlaws the psicrystals from the other planet and are afraid their planet will be damaged too by the menace of a psychic psychosis! Buuuut Great Work? I dunno what a TL2 populace would be up to that would be interesting or that would add a different springboard for adventure ideas.

Do you have any ideas to suggest? Thanks!

Hi all! I'm new here, and I've been enjoying reading along with the disscusions so far. I'm about to wrap a DnD campaign, and I'm looking to get my group into some new systems this year.

So, I just finished reading SWN and I'm really excited about the idea of running it for my group, but before I do that I want to put together some quick-reference materials (both for me and for them!) to help me avoid scrolling through the PDF at the table any more than necessary.

Are there already some good resources for that out there, so I don't have to reinvent any wheels? If not, is there a good place to share whatever I make in case anyone else could benefit from it?

I'm curious as to what people use as actual Xeno-Bestiaries or alien ideas to spring off of. I'm looking more for xenobiology or speculative zoology as inspiration. I want to fill my worlds with interesting eco-systems that make it feel alive. Game wise I would like to see more OSR stat-like creatures that can be turned into aliens or other such entities. Or OSR sci-fi books

What can a heal expect do that a biopsychic can't, and vis versa?

I’m working on a first SWN game using a homebrew set of mutations (see my other post on the subreddit), and I’m trying to design a good one shot for it.

The opening premise is “you are mutants who were abducted from your home, and you all wake up in a hibernation pod in a vault tech style lab; there’s some kind of disaster going on, and your containment pods open; you have to escape!”.

My plan is to keep it simple, with some skill challenges, some combat, and then the survivors get to an escape hatch.

There’s going to be a map with the layout, a power generator the PCs need to get working, and I was thinking about a monorail tunnel to reach the escape hatch. Add in some mooks, some monsters from experiments who escaped; finding combat gear, and some memos from the scientists describing what they were doing?

But: I am not sure if it’s too much. I don’t always consider how this will affect the player experience.

I’m also not sure if it’s too lethal for SWN, even with the mutation powers I have been working on.

Would you nice people consider sharing your thoughts and experiences with creating scenarios - and what makes the most sense and the most fun for this kind of game?

SWN Gundam style campaign PbP via discord: Adam (Mecha built from Adamantium) Automata (name of mechs generally). PCs are part of the crew of the ACS Ulisses a state-of-art fast attack carrier designed to carry the latest model of automaton, the Adam. PCs can be crew, fighter pilots, Mecha pilots or whatever or anything helpful aboard a starship with Mecha. Psions encouraged, I need at least one player to be one, though everyone can if they want, yes we are breaking out the psi-mechs from SWN. The Plot is somewhere between the Gundam series and FTL (PC game). Seeking 1-3 players. Once a day posting schedule, though i can be flexible. Message or Chat if interested.

As much as The Scream, The Mandate, and other parts of the original lore explain the setting, I like to throw them out and use my own. What is your sector's backstory? Is is post apocalypse like the original? Is it a bustling hub of alien life? A Dark Forest? A Space Utopia?

With the release and runaway popularity of Helldivers 2, I remembered the War Mage exists and thought it could be fun to try emulating that genre. I went back and gave it another look, and honestly, I wonder if it's not underwhelming. A small, limited number of spells known is pretty rough when most of those spells are super situational in the first place, and the fact that it takes at least a week, up to a month to swap spells means that you can't just prepare for tomorrow, ensuring that most War Mages will gravitate towards the most general-use spells. Too, several of these feel like they should be Arts rather than using spell slots; if a Duelist or a Ghost Archer is summoning their weapon for free (and in Ghost Archer's case, alongside unlimited ammunition), why does it cost a Warmage one of their precious spell slots (and another if they also want endless ammo)? Etcetera.

I think the War Mage could benefit hugely from a rework in the paradigm of Worlds mages, with both Spells and Arts for the things that shouldn't need to take an entire spell slot, and probably from being able to swap spells more freely to allow them to make use of up-to-date recon. I'm gonna hack something together in this vein for my own game, but I wonder if anyone else has ever done anything with it (or even played it and has pro tips), and maybe has any ideas?

Hey y'all! I've been toying with the idea of running a sci-fi campaign for a while and I'm finally trying to get it going once my girlfriend's D&D campaign ends. I've been doing a lot of research into SWN, and it looks like exactly the kind of system I've been looking for. I'm currently reading through the book but haven't finished yet, so forgive me if I'm asking an ignorant question.

The current rough idea I have for the inciting incident/main thrust of the campaign is that the PCs would receive or steal a MacGuffin that would change the nature of psionics and MES throughout the galaxy. In my campaign, I want a majority of the sector to function through an exploited psionic labor force (sort of like the mentats in Dune) who are currently on the verge of an uprising spurred by a mysterious leader. After receiving this MacGuffin, the PCs would then be shunted through a wormhole into a sector on the far side of the galaxy where the majority of the campaign would take place.

My question is whether or not there's any way for me to mechanically grow the presence of the various factions I have in mind (a mercantile empire, a polity of unified planets in a sort of feudal system, a religious cult of metadimensional space worshippers, and the aforementioned psionic resistance) in this far sector. Sort of like a way to mechanically represent that, as these PCs make waves in the Sector, they reveal their presence and attract the attentions of the more powerful factions from their old Sector. I'd imagine the influence of these factions would be scattered in this far region, but the influence would consolidate and grow as they arrived one-by-one to retrieve the MacGuffin.

Again, if this is answered in the book, sorry for the pointlessly long post, but my cursory understanding of the faction mechanic as it currently stands is that it's used to determine the bodies of influence that are currently active in the Sector, not necessarily ones that already exist somewhere else and are making their way into this new area. Hope that makes sense! Any tips or critiques on the structure are also totally welcome.

TL;DR: Is there any way for me to mechanically determine the arrival/growing influence of an existing faction in a different Sector to the campaign's Sector during the Faction Turn?

We just had our first session, and four out of five players loved it. The fifth, who bounced off Mothership because he didn't like horror or the power level, doesn't like the default gritty feeling. He wants to be more Malcolm Reynolds.

Now if you playing with this guy for nearly 30 years, so I know he's not a power gamer.

I don't mind scaling up the game as long as I get to do sci-fi sandbox craziness. I'm looking through the heroic rules in the Revised edition, and I was wondering if anyone had experience with them. I've already added some default hit points, but can anyone tell me if there are things that works great or things to avoid in those five pages?