Good RPGs for New Players

I'd like to suggest some good "starter" roleplaying games for new players who don't have a group of more experienced players to learn from. There's been huge growth in the number of people interested in playing RPGs thanks to streaming video of sessions and from mentions in popular media like Stranger Things and Community. Not all of those people will be able to find existing groups to join, and many will have to put together a group of people who've never played before to learn together. 27 years ago, when I first started playing RPGs, I was in the same boat, so I'm sympathetic to people facing the challenge of picking it all up on your own.

One, probably controversial assumption, that I'll be working from is that I think newer players tend to appreciate systems that provide lots of clear guidelines for how to do things, rather than rules-light systems that don't provide much guidance for what to do, especially when you have an inexperienced referee who isn't used to making judgement calls and house-ruling smoothly.

I'm also going to stick with systems that are currently in print, because I don't think sending people who have a casual interest in trying roleplaying thanks to a Youtube video on a bug-hunt through secondhand bookshops is a good introduction to the hobby. I'm also sticking to games I've actually played in some form. Also, with the exception of D&D, I'm going to try to stick to the cheaper end of the hobby, since asking someone to drop more than a hundred bucks for something they don't even know if they'll like doing is unfair.

So here's my list:

For science fiction games:

Stars Without Number Revised - Quick character creation and simple rules, while the adventure creation system is easy to use for new referees, and teaches them how to construct stories with minimal fuss. New referees are most likely to have trouble figuring out the experience and wealth subsystems, which are at least clearer than they were in the previous version of the game.

Cepheus - Character creation is a fun minigame, and the premise (you're petty-bourgeois speculators trying to stay ahead of debt in the far future) is easy to get. The text doesn't always explain itself super well, so expect a few delays on your first attempts at creating characters or vehicles, but the rest of the system is fairly easy to figure out. Go with Cepheus over Stars Without Number if you've got a lot of players with STEM backgrounds who want harder SF.

Diaspora - A great system for teaching people how to collaboratively build worlds and stories, with lots of minigames and mechanics that repeat in various ways across them. A great choice if you've got some players with really strong ideas either about the world or their characters going into the game. Some people can't wrap their head around FATE or the mapping components of this game, so if you're going to run into trouble, it'll be there.

For fantasy games:

Beyond the Wall - Get the Further Afield supplement and all the free playbooks as well. The game setup is a fantastic example of collaborative world- and party-building. The fronts and scenario packs are really good for new referees trying to figure out how to link together a bunch of sessions into a story. The simple premise is easy for new PCs to understand. I wrote a review praising it, and I stand by my conclusions there.

Labyrinth Lord + Yoon-Suin - I narrowly favoured this over Labyrinth Lord + Red Tide, but either would be good options. Yoon-Suin gives you a lot of different settings with generators and rules for running each one that differ slightly. While the weirdness might take some getting used to, the system for generating adventures based off of the PCs' social circles is really good, and I'm surprised more game writers don't adapt it. It also gives a new referee a fairly clear idea of how to generate and run the various campaign options it contains.

Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition - This one's fairly obvious. The part most likely to trip up a new referee is getting a handle on how the encounter-building process works, and learning what the magic and powers let PCs do. Mostly important, Dungeons and Dragons' core books tend to be written with the default assumption that the person picking them up doesn't know anything about RPGs, and while it won't give anyone masterful insights into how to play, the game covers the essentials well.

Assorted other genres:

Other Dust - if space opera isn't your thing, Other Dust is basically the original edition of Stars Without Number (mentioned above), but with mechanics to run it as a postapocalytpic game instead of as a space opera. Same strengths, same weaknesses.

Rifts - Rifts is simultaneously a western game, a fantasy game, a science fiction game, and a horror game all rolled up into one gonzo mess. It's fiddly and complicated. It's also great, and an incredibly popular introductory RPG. I started playing RPGs myself nearly thirty years ago using a derivative of it called "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness" back during the Ninja Turtles craze of the early 1990s.

Further suggestions are welcome in the comments / on G+ as always.

Technical Plot Example

I'm going to lay out a simple technical plot as an example. This one will be science fiction.

Preventing a Supernova

For our first one, let's presume that our system is Stars Without Number, and the party is composed of four characters (a scientist, an engineer, a psion who's also the face and a soldier who's also the pilot) who are part of the scout service of a TL4 starfaring society. They're zipping around when they get a transmission from Scout Central telling them to head to System X and deal with the situation there.

The briefing they receive is where you, the referee, present the problem they're going to be dealing with. In this case, the problem is that a red giant star with some alien ruins on one of its orbiting planets is unexpectedly going to turn into a supernova much faster than expected. This was detected because some strange signals from above the plane of the ecliptic drew the attention of a stellar observatory at Scout Central. Scout Central wants the supernova stopped because the explosion endangers a neighbouring star system.

The elements of the problem are:

1) The red giant star
2) The alien ruins
3) The strange signals

The PCs drill over to System X, and are given the choice of which one of these they want to examine first. At this point in time, the effects of the red giant's incipient explosion are minimal, but they don't have much time before it blows. Maybe you provide a diegetic timeline (72 hours!), maybe you don't (it's looming but unpredictable), whichever suits your preferred style.

The PCs decide to investigate the star first. Investigating the star involves a few challenges. They need to get close enough that the heat of the star will affect them, and they'll expend some of their limited time jetting around the star.

The PCs successfully zip around the star scanning it while dodging solar flares. From this, they learn that the star is giving off more energy than it should for its mass, and is much more unstable than it should be. At the end of their examination, two things happen. First, the star's energy flares, making sensors and communications much more difficult (the first effect kicks in). Second, the PCs hold a meeting onboard their ship where they decide what to do based on what they know. The scientist and engineer roll their skills, and they discover that based on what they know and have available, their only option is to drill through the star using their FTL drive, and bleed the energy off into other dimensions as they do so.

This apparatus has some pretty obvious flaws:

1) The death of everyone aboard the spaceship even if it works properly
2) Need to get into the corona of the star in the first place to work
3) One chance to succeed

So the PCs decide not to do this, and instead examine some other element of the problem to see if they can get further insight and come up with a better solution. They decide they don't want to land the starship just yet, so they go to check out the strange signals. So they fly over to check it out.

The strange signals turn out to be coming from a giant space whale-type thing. It's hanging around above the star. The PCs have to get close without attracting the space whale's attention, because it's firing a giant beam periodically out of its eyes into the sun and slurping up helium. Because this is a technical plot, not a bug hunt, the PCs can get some readings that tell them that the space whale is basically a giant fusion reactor in space whale form and blowing it up would make a mininova.

So the PCs do some submariner-in-space silent-running maneuver, and get to observe the whale as it feeds. Since the apparatus they came up with last time sucked, they decide to use this opportunity to conceive a new one. Everyone gets together and rolls some skills. The outcome is that they think if they can get the space whale to reverse what it's doing, they'll be able to prevent the supernova. The apparatus they conceive of is to configure the spike drive so it lenses the psion's mind control powers, allowing them to get control of the space whale's brain.

The initial flaws are:

1) Neither their spike drive on its own, nor their psion, has enough power to give this a good chance of working.
2) What does "reverse what it's doing" even mean once they do get control?
3) This will draw the space whale's attention, and could provoke an attack.

In this case, because they've already examined the star, you're generous and you let them cross out flaw #2. The scientist and engineer can figure out what the whale's doing based on what it's done to the star, and can cobble together a crude approximation of what unzapping the sun means.

As the PCs are figuring this out, the space whale zaps the star once more, and suddenly the stellar surface starts roiling and shooting out waves of cosmic rays at levels so intense the PCs' starship has to retreat or else everyone will get radiation fried. This is the second effect, triggered by the PCs examining the space whale. In this case, not only does this mean that the PCs risk incineration by cosmic rays periodically, they also might not be able to get close enough to the whale to use the apparatus as it stands. Rather than treat this as a new flaw (though I guess you could), it seems simpler to just wrap this into flaw #1 - not enough juice - with the increased distance they need to do this from simply making that worse.

So, to put some distance between them and maybe figure out how to get rid of another flaw, they decide to check out the alien ruins on X Prime. They get down there, and a ton of weird stuff happens as they dungeoncrawl through a ruined alien city. Eventually, they discover the source of most of the weird stuff is that there's one ancient alien hermit who's the last survivor of his people and who's super psionic. He's holed up in the ancient space telescope that still works, and he's super lonely. He probably called the creature in the first place accidentally as he projected his mind out into the cosmos via the space telescope, but he can't stop the whale from destroying the star, and thus killing him.

The PCs talk it over with him, and make some skill rolls as they examine the ancient space telescope and talk to the gelatinous worm-swarm who's so lonely. They get some successes, and he agrees to help, teaming up with their psion, showing her how the space telescope works. The scientist and engineer rig it up to the starship for extra boost, and the end result of all of this is that flaw #1 goes away. Unfortunately, during the time they spend doing this, they also register the space whale continuing to fire. Now the very surface of the star is roiling, and sending deadly waves of cosmic radiation pulsing down onto the surface of the planet. The PCs are going to start taking damage every 1d4 rounds. They rush into their space suits and get the worm-swarm into a mylar blanket or whatever, to buy them a few extra rounds each time (you shift the damage interval to every 1d8 rounds).

So now, the PCs' main risk is that doing this is going to draw the space whale's attention, and it'll take a bit of time between turning the device on, aiming, using the power, and then getting the whale to fire. This is the activation phase of their apparatus. You run this as an action sequence, lots of tension. They can make multiple attempts, but maybe the whale starts firing after the first failure, and someone nearly gets burnt to death by cosmic rays but is saved when someone else does something risky, and like, the ancient space telescope building is crumbling and all that jazz. Eventually the PCs win, and get the whale to zap off enough helium (or whatever) that the star stabilises.

Mission accomplished. Number of bad dudes shot to solve this problem: 0. The PCs now have the last survivor of a gelatinous worm-swarm civilisation as their bud, and they take him off to land on the space whale, who he infests the intestines of, and they fly off into the black together, firing goodbye laser blasts of friendship.

I plotted this out over my lunch break today simply by taking the model and making sure I'd filled out each section of it. The amount of scientific research I had to do involved checking Wikipedia twice to make sure a supernova is what I thought it is (yes) and to make sure red giant stars still had helium (yes, mostly on their surface, vs. younger stars where it's more buried). Almost all other "science" in this adventure is pure technobabble, but it's meant to fit together to motivate decisions and actions by the PCs, rather than to provide a cohesive and accurate summary of stellar lifecycles. I came up with effects each time by knowing that I wanted the star stuff to get worse, and just picking which possible option based on what these (fake) PCs had done.

Anyhow, I hope this example provides a useful illustration of how to apply the model to actual games.

Layers of the Sandbox

This post ties in with yesterday's Traveller post, but also with something I'm working on for Necrocarcerus 1.3.

Sandbox settings typically have two different scopes of play during a session, and moving between them well is critical to pulling a sandbox. I'm going to call these two scopes the "strategic" and the "tactical" scopes for clarity.

The strategic scope is the scope where the player characters consider the list of options for missions, tasks and goals. In play, this scope often involves consulting maps and lists, but it doesn't exclude roleplaying. PCs may consult their patrons, discuss their options in character, check in with sources and contacts, etc. This often even includes the actual travelling portion of game-play. The important thing is that they are not necessarily committed to any particular course of action. Deciding whether to smuggle xenopornography to the dolphinoid revanchist militias of an interdicted waterworld (a real example from a Traveller game I ran) is the kind of decision you make at this scope.

I occasionally see this section written off as "prep" with the suggestion that it should be elided or compressed, but I think this does a disservice to the possibilities of play it generates. A common referee mistake here is to undersupply the PCs with information they need to evaluate or predict possible consequences of their actions. While one doesn't need to simply hand them everything they want to know without effort or cost, it's useful to explicitly ask them the critical factors they need to decide between courses of action, and then detail how they can obtain this information.

The strategic scope helps fix the details that feed into the tactical scope. It determines time pressures, goals, resources, allies and enemies - basically it generates the framework of the individual adventures.

The tactical scope really begins when the PCs make a decision that can't be undone without abandoning the goal. So, when they dock at the space station to investigate the SOS signal, or when they make the first move to steal the nuke snuffer from their rival, or whatever. Here we enter the traditional scope of play - usually involving a specific location or small set of locations, where the PCs describe their actions individually and shoot their lasers at enemies, etc. The tactical scope is where adventures happen.

In Traveller, much of the procedural generation material exists to support the strategic scope of play, rather than the tactical scope. I believe this is true of most sandbox games I'm familiar with. This doesn't mean the tactical scope is unimportant, but strong support for the strategic scope is a feature that we use to declare a game is a "sandbox" instead of some other type of play structure.

The part I want to back up to for a moment is that transition between the two, since I think this is the part that trips people up the most. It involves shifting gears between two different styles of play. Some examples of games that have both of these scopes in them and clearly demarcate them are Burning Empires, and Stars Without Number (especially the Darkness Visible supplement). I recommend checking either game out for more information, but I'm going to just mention them here rather than go into great detail about either one.

The demarcation point between strategic and tactical scopes of play is the choice that cannot be undone. This line of demarcation is taken from dramatic writing (a choice that cannot be undone is the transition point between acts of the story in film and plays, specifically). "Undone" doesn't mean the PCs can't leave the dungeon, fly away from the asteroid, whatever, but that they can't do so without some cost or risk that would not occur had they not engaged with it in the first place.

You can move as freely as one likes between the two scopes in actual play, so long as this line of distinction is maintained. If it isn't, you'll find people start getting confused about their options. It helps to call this out a bit in play, often by citing the obstacles to disengagement before the PCs fully commit. "Once you dock with the space station, it'll take a half-hour to disengage and break contact if there are any problems" or "If you go and talk to Murderous Marco and he offers you a job, you'll either have to take it or there will be trouble, regardless of how bad the terms he offers are."

This also helps in defining the scope of adventures. Knowing that the adventure proper must begin with a choice that cannot be undone, you can design your adventures to clearly begin with them, instead of just kind of drifting into suddenly having an adventure, which is a common mistake referees make as they try to manage the two scopes.

Old Files Now on Google Drive

The Tellian Sector, complete with map, planetary profiles, and a listing of active espionage organisations in the Tellian system itself.

Backgrounds for Moragne, my Runequest 6 / Legend / Mongoose Runequest 2 setting loosely modeled after Angevin England. Suitable for any JAFE (Just Another Fantasy Europe) setting.

My overland travel reference sheet for the Moragne campaign.

The primer for my Moragne campaign.

My potion tables for use with my alchemy rules. These are built off of procedural metapharmacology.

Iron Heartbreakers v. 1.52, my Microlite20 swords and sorcery game inspired by Iron Heroes. It's ideal if you want low or no-magic PCs.

The Necrocarcerus v. 1.1 rules document as well as a map of Necrocarcerus showing rail connections. Also, a copy of the wandering monster table for SAFE AREA DUVANOVIC, a mini-campaign setting within Necrocarcerus that I'm writing.

Reviews: Relics of the Lost / Engines of Babylon

I'll admit I can't figure out the numbering system for Stars Without Number supplements. Polychrome is W1, Relics of the Lost is W2, Engines of Babylon is W3, but Darkness Visible, Suns of Gold, Skyward Steel, and Dead Names are all unnumbered, as are the Mandate Archives. I've already reviewed the Mandate Archives, Darkness Visible and Polychrome, and I'll be writing reviews of Skyward Steel, Suns of Gold, and Dead Names shortly.

Relics of the Lost and Engines of Babylon are sort of a natural pairing beyond their numbering because they are both gear books for Stars Without Number. Relics of the Lost is focused on pretech (SWN's equivalent of magical items), while the core of Enginess of Babylon is the vehicle and slowboat rules, though both books have thematically overlapping sections. For the record, I think they should have been merged into a single large gear book similar to MongTraveller's Central Supply Catalogue because of the extensive thematic overlap, but I'm not too chuffed about it.

Relics of the Lost is a 32 page book with sections on weapons and armour; medical devices (mainly stims, the healing potion-equivalent in SWN); pretech consumer goods (miscellaneous magical items); robots; maltech, and some random loot generation tables to insert them into adventures. A few of the tables in it look like they were recycled, adapted or updated from The Dust, one of the Mandate Archive supplements that had the original pretech generation rules in it. Some of the information around maltech is adapted from Darkness Visible. I think the reuse of the Dust tables is fine, but the treatment of maltech is somewhat weak in Relics compared to Darkness Visible, and the treatment in Relics' maltech section veers away from the concreteness of the rest of the book's material. The maltech isn't intended for PC use, but it might be nice to provide a set of sample procedures for ghoul immortality, or a list of time-bomb devices / situations for NPC villains to have as goals.

If one wanted to avoid getting too bogged down with the mechanics, a set of tags related to each one that could be slotted into the SWN adventure-creation system would be ideal. "Roll on this table for your Allies, Enemies, Complications, Places and Things if you want to run an adventure where a ghoul immortality cult is the main villain" would be ideal, as well as being new material that wasn't in Darkness Visible. Dead Names and Engines of Babylon split the difference here (adventure material for weirdo transhumanists and concrete maltech devices, respectively), so it's unfortunate Relics doesn't. I think this might be an artifact of it originally being a stretch goal of the Stars Without Number Bundle of Holding.

Despite that complaint, the book is generally strong. Like all good gear books, it's mostly very concrete, with items statted up and variations noted. One particularly strong element of the descriptions is that they mostly list what the original use of the item was in the pretech era (the ancient galaxy-spanning technologically advanced era that precedes the default setting for SWN and justifies the existence of ruins and mysterious wonders). This helps the referee decide what kinds of gear from the book might be appropriate for different ruin locations.

 Of its sections, I liked the one on stims the most, since it took a boring but necessary component of the game (sci-fi healing potions) and provided a number of options for making them interesting. I think some of this material is recycled or adapted from Other Dust, but a lot of it is new and interesting. In particular, the stim manufacturer brands at the end of the section, complete with mechanical differentiation between them, is a nice touch.

The sections on robots and consumer items are also strong. There are eight kinds of robots listed that would be appropriate for pretech sites, and a couple are very cool and interesting, particularly the culler and the kami. The culler robots are basically murderbots that harvest your organs to make anagathic drugs, while the kami are nanite clouds that form drone to attack you.. Stats are given so that if you have an AI PC, you could have them use any of the robots as armatures. The consumer items section fills out the "miscellaneous magical items" list for SWN, and is mostly colourful, interesting and useful while being plausibly weird.

Engines of Babylon is a 41 page supplement dealing with gear. I like it a lot as a supplement, but I'm going to list one format complaint here. Both it and Dead Names have some new sans-serif font for their body text, instead of the typical font used by the rest of the line. It looks like Verdana or another screen-based font and makes them harder to read in print (at least for me). I don't know why the decision was made, but insofar as my vote counts for anything, I'd encourage the return to the old SWN body font (which looked like Aldus?). It's a minor complaint though.

The book is split into sections dealing with vehicles (including vehicle creation, vehicle operation rules, and sample vehicles; sublight or slowboat ships (including creation and operation rules); some more magical items (in general ones that are more powerful than in Relics of the Lost) and maltech devices. Despite thematic similarities in the last two sections with Relics of the Lost, the material is entirely new.

Vehicle and slowboat creation are basically variations of the starship creation and operation rules in the SWN corebook, though they have entirely new module options in both cases, including some cool pretech fittings for vehicles. The example vehicles and slowboats are pretty solid, and cover most of the common options you'd want. The slowboat section has two pages of material on using slowboats in games, including how combat between them differs combat involving spike drive-capable ships with "Quantum ECM" (SWN's handwavium for why intelligent drone-missiles don't dominate space combat, previously established in Skyward Steel and the corebook).

The section dealing with the pretech items differs a bit from Relics of the Lost in a few subtle ways. The items in Engines tend to be more powerful, but also more easily exhausted or expended than in Relics (where most items either work fine, or just need batteries). It reads like the items in Engines were designed to be either the goal or spark for an adventure, whereas most of the items in Relics feel more like "loot" you'd get during an adventure. There's also some nice work making a lot of the items here feel more like the extravagant decadences of long lost Mandate directors rather than another cool space TV.

The maltech section in Engines is nicely concrete and appropriately horrific. I particularly like the telekinetic mining equipment that floods prisoners with psychic energy at the cost of their lives and sanity while allowing an evil telekinetic to literally tear apart a world with their powers. I think it's got some interesting allegorical heft, as well as being a really interesting device to structure a set of adventures around - both while it's in the bad guy's hands as well as once it falls into the PCs. The rest of the devices are similarly interesting, including stuff to make people god-kings, destroy stars, and genetically tamper with enemies.

Broadly speaking, the difference I elaborated above between Relics and Engines is the key decision point if you're only planning to pick up one, or trying to decide which your game needs. Relics is at its core a "loot" book, with lots of stuff designed to be used by PCs without breaking the game or trivialising all their problems. Engines is (mostly) a set of game-changing items that you could build entire stories around, with a few modular add-ons to provide richness to specific activities.

Review: The Mandate Archives for Stars Without Number

There's a huge sale going on at Drivethrurpg right now, so I rebought a copy of Stars Without Number after giving my previous copy to someone going to Nunavik. I also bought Skyward Steel, a bunch of Red Tide stuff, Other Dust, An Echo Resounding and I downloaded the Mandate Archives and Pacts of the Wise. I think now own almost everything Sine Nomine has put out, other than Spears Without Dawn and a couple of short adventures. Let me talk about the Mandate Archives first since they're the easiest for others to access.

The Mandate Archives are a series of free supplement Kevin Crawford, the owner / writer / lead guitarist for Stars Without Number has available for download. They cover a variety of marginal topics related to Stars Without Number. I'm just going to run through them all in the order that I like them:

Martial Arts is six pages long. It has ten martial arts styles, rules for creating your own martial arts, information on learning martial arts, and a table of martial arts weapons stats suitable for use in Stars Without Number or Other Dust. It's a model of concision, and the styles of martial arts are suitably varied, with several examples of psychic martial arts that allow you to replicate Jedi-type powers. I plan to offer it in the next Stars Without Number game in the Tellian Sector as an option for characters.

Transhuman Tech is worth checking out if you're interested in playing Eclipse Phase-style games but find the rules off-putting (as I do). It manages to provide mechanics for swapping bodies ("Hulls"), building new bodies, running post-scarcity economies, new equipment, some advice on running a transhumanist game and designing transhuman factions, and a micro-setting within the greater Stars Without Number universe in 16 pages. The body-swapping rules could be applied to a variety of different situations, like an AI downloading itself into various robot bodies. I plan to use it to represent Valentine Illst, arch-heretic, in my next game.

The Dust is seven pages on gray-goo type nanodust, with rules for it as an environmental hazard, stats for "dust drones", two pages of new gear including weapons, and a bunch of tables for determining what TL5 gear looks like. TL5 is the highest level of technological development in Stars Without Number, and so basically this serves as a set of tables for determining what ancient weirdo artifacts made by AIs look like. I plan to use it to make archaeotech look distinctive and interesting, plus the gear is a really cool.

Scavenger Fleets is 12 pages, about half of that spent describing scavenger fleets in the Stars Without Number setting (the "post-Terran Mandate", I guess we should call it?). The other half is rules for designing scavenger fleets, including three new types of ship, some new fittings, and a page of tables for rolling up fleet concepts. The stuff in here would allow you to recreate Battlestar Galactica using Stars Without Number if you wanted to. I plan to use it to flesh out ship designs and ideas.

Bannerjee Construction Solutions is about orbitals. It's eight pages, with three kinds of station hulls plus three versions of stations statted up, a bunch of new starship fittings, and a bunch of new starship weapons. Some of the material here is recycled from Skyward Steel, though not all of it. The last two pages tables dealing with station flaws and station adventure seeds to make orbitals come to life as locations. If you want to run a Deep Space Nine-type game, this is your book.

Imago Dei is the other half of running a Battlestar Galactica game, basically laying out Cylon-type foes. It's nine pages. It's about ship-bound AIs who've become religious fanatics and who fly around scourging human kind for their sins and converting them to righteous worship, while also protecting them from the horrors of space. It has five new hulls, a couple of pages on the organisation of the fleet, and two pages of statted out versions of the hulls. I would have liked to have seen a few AIs statted out using the rules in the "Core Edition".

Red Sangha Mercenary Corps is seven pages, and is all about a mercenary group of Buddhist soldiers modified to be emotionally calm and collected. Two pages of history, two pages on their organisation and using them in a campaign, a page with stats for using them as antagonists and NPCs, and a page with a new background, training package and martial art. They could be reskinned as any sort of elite paramilitary organisation in your own game.

The Bruxelles-class Battlecruiser is seven pages of information on a ship built as a weapon of mass destruction. There's a nice glossary of ship terms, some information on why such a ship is valuable to various common types of antagonists, how adventures could be built around it with some plot seeds, and a table of three new ship weapons of mass destruction, plus information on the hull itself.

There are two more Mandate Archives beyond this: The Qotah,  and Cabals of the Hydra Sector. All of the Mandate Archives I've listed above are ones I generally have a positive impression of. These last two are, in my opinion, the weakest two. I think they share the same problem.

One of the things that makes me consider Stars Without Number one of the best science fiction games on the market is how rather than expend tons of words describing its setting, it instead gives you the tools to build your own setting. While there is a section at the start of the corebook laying out a history, most of this can be easily ignored or reflavoured. This practice has mostly been kept up in Stars Without Number supplements and expansions (Skyward Steel and Other Dust are both good examples of it). I think Crawford's real talent is as a system designer, rather than a world builder (I don't mean this as an insult, I consider him one of the best designers working today) and I tend to prefer works of his that showcase this talent.

These last two supplements are much heavier on flavour text and explanations than new rules or systems or tables. Because I don't run the Stars Without Numbers setting, they're of much less use to me than the others, because I have to chuck out more. On the other hand, they are free, so check them out and you may find them useful. I'll keep on listing them in order from ones I liked the most to least.

The Qotah is seven pages on warrior bird aliens. They're sort of Klingons with feathers. There's a player cheatsheet on playing them, a table of names, information on stat mods for using them as PCs, a sample Qotah warrior statted up, a table of plot seeds, and a table of random NPCs. Unfortunately, the table of plot seeds is not integrated with the rest of the Stars Without Number tagging system (most plot seeds in SWN product run something like "An Enemy is plotting to use a Thing to undermine a Friend's new invention, with "Friend", "Enemy" and "Thing" able to be pulled from a list of samples under each tag that a location receives). There's also a standard alien notation used in Stars Without Number for describing alien species that this supplement doesn't follow.

Cabals of the Hydra Sector is seven pages covering two espionage organisations built using the system for doing so outlined in Darkness Visible (link is to my review of Darkness Visible). One is a bunch of shady communists, the other group is neo-Aztecs run by an AI. They're OK and reasonably interesting, but the actual stats for both organisations would fit on a single page. The rest is descriptions of how they work, which are well-written and sensible, but not particularly exciting. The final page is a list of twelve other organisations with two or three sentence descriptions. I would have preferred less information on the two featured organisations and a big table of stats for all 14 organisations instead.

Overall though, the Mandate Archives are excellent mini-supplements, and I hope Kevin Crawford will continue to produce more of them for Stars Without Number.

The Tellian Sector Returns!

The Tellian Sector returns!
The link has:

A big map of the Tellian Sector I created using Hexographer
An Excel 2007 spreadsheet with planetary profiles for 44 systems with 136 described locations
An Excel 2007 spreadsheet with stats for 15 espionage organisations active in the Tellian System (several are sector-wide)

This was created with the Stars Without Number planetary generator. This is the setting I created for my 40K games. I've used it in three campaigns using the actual 40K games (Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader and Deathwatch), and I'll be using it in future when I run 40K games using Stars Without Number.

The Tellian Sector is adjacent to the Calixis Sector, the basic setting for Dark Heresy. Specifically, it is almost directly below it, with its "top" side touching the galactic plane and extending downards. Proximity to the Calixis Sector and the Koronus Expanse allows referees to repurpose material from their Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader books with a minimum of fuss.

Some of the tags in the above planetary profiles are different than in stock Stars Without Number. They are all direct conversions of existing tags - "Unbraked AI" becomes "Silica Animus", the term in the setting for AIs. "Regional hegemon" becomes either "subsector hegemon" or "sector hegemon", "preceptor archive" is "ancient archive", "aliens" become "xenos", "psionics" become "psykers", "pretech cultists" are "tech priest cult", "perimeter agency" becomes "inquisition outpost".

There's also a new tech level, "specialist 4", which is a world with Tech 4 in most respects, but Tech 5 in one or two.

The Tellian Sector tends to focus on the elements of 40K I like the most, and downplay or ignore those elements I least wanted to tell stories involving. There is a lot of malign technology, rogue psykers, Chaos cults, and inscrutable xenos. Orks, Tyranids and Necrons are not present in any great numbers, but there are plenty of Xeno-controlled worlds that could be repurposed to those ends, particularly Washout, Crux Ultima and the Devil's Egg.

The stories I've told using the Tellian Sector primarily focus on the machinations of an arch-heretic named Valentine Illst and his various cronies, particularly a Dark Mechanicus sect known as the Statisticians of Certainty, and a Nurgle cult known as the Black Dawn. Both Illst's core organisation, the Statisticians of Certainty and the Black Dawn are statted up in the espionage organisation section (based on the system in Darkness Visible). If there's demand for it, I can also stat them up as factions using the core rules.

Originally, this was all part of a mega-campaign ("The Navigator of Possibilities") where I would run one campaign / adventure in each FFG 40K system focusing on an interwoven narrative.

The first adventure was a Dark Heresy adventure focusing on a Black Ship that had dropped out of a convoy while transporting a former Interrogator turned heretic, a Mechanicus Magos working for the Inquisition, a dozen or so alpha psykers, and a mysterious artifact known as the Navigator of Possibilities, a communication from the residents of a possible future trying to invade their own past and cannibalise it. The cell managed to stop these foul psyker-vampire mutants from invading our timeline en masse and consuming all life in the galaxy.

The second was a Rogue Trader adventure in which a Rogue Trader crew was asked to find and pinpoint the location of the Statisticians of Certainty, who had captured the Navigator of Possibilities with the help of arch-heretic Valentine Illst. The Statisticians of Certainty had fled into the Lost Worlds, beyond the edge of the Imperium intending to activate the Navigator of Possibilities, travel to the far future, and become techno-gods. This adventure ended with the Navigator of Possibility recaptured, and the Statisticians of Certainty's main fleet crushed, though many of their members escaped. The mysterious pre-Imperial demigod Azar, a supergenius alpha-psyker from the Dark Age of Technology released from his imprisonment on a lost world by the Rogue Trader, was seen vanishing into the future with several of the Dark Mechanicus and the psyker-vampires.

The third was a Deathwatch campaign in which this sudden burst of activity by Valentine Illst was registered by his old foe, an Inquisitor-Lord on Ammis unable to travel between the star due to a daemon's vendetta. A kill team of Deathwatch marines was assigned to hunt down Illst (who is possibly any one of a Xeno pretending to be human, a Silica Animus remotely operating a doppleganger, or a colonist from the Dark Age of Technology resurrected over and over again by infernal science). The kill team captured Titus Hyle, Nurglish sorcerer and master of the Black Dawn, slew several others among Illst's cronies, and eventually captured Illst himself after leading an Imperial naval fleet into the Black Atlantis dyson sphere.

The Black Crusade game, if I ever run it, will be about breaking Illst free of the Inquisition's headquarters on Ammis, and recovering the Navigator of Possibilities from the same.

The Only War adventure is a secret until I run Black Crusade, but will involve Illst and his cronies once again. Azar will show up here again, and the nature of his mysterious connection the Illst matter resolved.

40K Stars Without Number Warrior Training Packages

Arbiter
The character is either a member of the Adeptus Arbites or a similar planetary institution. He investigates crimes and violently confronts the guilty.

Skills: Combat/Projectile Weapons, Combat/Primitive, Culture/World, Perception, Persuade, Security

Assassin
The character is a member of an assassin temple or death cult, or they are a professional killer for pay.

Skills: Athletics, Combat/Primitive, Combat/Projectile Weapons, Security, Stealth, Vehicle/Any

Crusader
A holy warrior motivated by faith. Crusaders are found throughout the Imperium, and are often attached to the Ecclesiarchy or the Inquisition.

Skills: Combat/Energy Weapons, Combat/Projectile Weapons, Culture/World, Leadership, Religion/Imperial Creed, Tactics

Feral Warrior
The character comes from a backwater world, often a Death World, and prefers to use the techniques they acquired there.

Skills: Athletics, Combat/Primitive, Combat/Unarmed, Culture/World, Stealth, Survival

Ganger
The character acquired their skills as part of an organised criminal group where they supplied muscle.

Skills: Combat/Unarmed, Combat/Any, Culture/Criminal, Persuade, Security, Vehicle/Any

Guardsman
The character was a member of the Imperial Guard or PDF or a professional mercenary organisation with similar training.

Skills: Combat/Energy Weapons, Combat/Any, Leadership, Tactics, Tech/Imperial, Vehicle/Any

Pirate/Armsman
The character has worked as a pirate or armsman aboard a voidship, defending it from attack.

Skills: Combat/Any, Culture/Spacer, Exosuit, Navigation, Tech/Imperial, Vehicle/Space

Naval Officer
The character has served as a naval officer aboard a voidship, either as part of the Imperial Navy or a private vessel.

Skills: Combat/Gunnery, Culture/Spacer, Leadership, Navigation, Tactics, Tech/Imperial

40K Stars Without Number Psychic Training Packages

Astropath
The character is an astropath, a psychic communications specialist.

Skills: Culture/Any, Language, Navigation, Tech/Warp

Diviner
The character is an Imperial diviner, a precognitive specialist. Diviners make a good living predicting the future for their employers, both private and Imperial.

Skills: Combat/Warp, Gambling, Perception, Tech/Warp

Medicae Psyker
The character is a psyker-healer. Many of these individuals are sent to the battlefields of the Imperial Guard to serve as field medics.

Skills: Combat/Any, Religion/Imperial Creed, Tech/Warp, Tech/Medical

Psychic Investigator
The character uses their psychic powers to investigate crimes. This may be for the Inquisition, the Adeptus Arbites, or for private interests.

Skills: Perception, Persuade, Security, Tech/Warp

Psychic Scholar
The character is a researcher into the mysteries of psy-power. Many of these individuals dabble in forbidden lore, and are greatly prized by the Inquisition.

Skills: Culture/Any, Religion/Any, Science, Tech/Warp

Shaman
The character comes from a feral world or other primitive background and uses its rites and rituals to activate their psychic powers. Shamans often serve as the keepers of lore for their societies.

Skills: Combat/Warp, History, Survival, Stealth

Sorcerer/Witch
The character is an unsanctioned psyker, who will either fall prey to Chaos sooner or later, or who has already sold their soul to the laughing gods.

Skills: Combat/Warp, Culture/Ruinous Powers, Religion/Ruinous Powers, Tech/Warp

Templar
Combat psykers are in high demand amongst the Imperial Guard.

Skills: Combat/Any, Combat/Warp, Leadership, Tactics

Darkness Visible / Polychrome Review

Darkness Visible and Polychrome are supplements for Stars Without Number by Sine Nomine Publishing (which is a one-man shop run by Kevin Crawford). Stars Without Number is one of the most exciting and interesting science fiction games to come out this decade, and I think both of these supplements expand the possible kinds of games you can use the system for.

Polychrome covers the eponymous world, which is a cyberpunk dystopia. You've no doubt seen and read about cyberpunk dystopias before, and can create your own, but if you're pressed for time, there's one premade for you here. There's a description of the world, NPCs profiles, pre-established conflicts for you to exploit,  hooks for why off-world visitors would want to come to Polychrome, all good stuff. Unfortunately, this section doesn't include faction write-ups to use the SWN faction / politics system.

The really exciting parts of the book are the rules additions and game structures in the back half, starting from about page 14 onwards until page 30. You've got rules for "shadowrun" operations, investigations, hacking, new cyberware and other gear, stats for various NPC antagonists and allies, and generators for adventures and NPC resources (one table is called "A Memorable NPC Quirk Is Their..." and another is "What's that Underhab Building?"). At the very back of the book is a PC-suitable handout with the player hacking reference sheet.

This kind of stuff is not unusual, though as always for Stars Without Number the material is both high-quality and extremely gameable. What elevates it above the ordinary bunch of tables, and this is true of most material like this in Stars Without Number books, is the detailed information on structuring play and using the tables as part of that. The information on running investigations is literally one page of text with two columns, and yet it packs more useful advice about how to handle investigations and legwork in cyberpunk games than dozens of similar pages in Dark Heresy. Similarly, the two pages titled "Inside Jobs" dealing with undercover corporate espionage / sabotage almost reads like it was written to cover all the information about these things that Shadowrun 4e left out (for example, how much PCs should be paid) and has a bunch of generic adventure seeds that can be repurposed endlessly, as well as a couple of quick tables to flesh out these seeds. SWN's great strength compared to many other adventure games is its concision and concreteness where other games are prolix and vague, and Polychrome demonstrates that well.

There's also an introductory adventure in Polychrome. I haven't played or run the adventure, so I can't speak to it, but I like that it only takes up six pages instead of say, the thirty-one that the intro adventure in Dark Heresy does.

As fond as I am of Polychrome, I actually consider Darkness Visible the better supplement of the two. If I only had to buy one, it's the one I would buy (fortunately, I didn't have to choose). Darkness Visible is a 97 page supplement about running an espionage campaign. The first chunk of the book deals with the Perimeter agency, which is part of the core Stars Without Number setting. They're an interstellar covert-ops group left over from the previous interstellar human civilisation devoted to preventing technological experimentation from creating existential threats to humanity. I don't use the actual Stars Without Number setting much, so it's of limited gaming value to me, but I did find the section well-written, interesting, and full of gameable ideas. It passed the "Chupp Test", where after reading it, I wanted to play a Perimeter agent.

The bulk of the book is taken up with rules material for running espionage campaigns, and it's a feast of good stuff. There's a subsystem or replacement system for the faction / politics system in stock Stars Without Number that focuses on the resources and actions most relevant to espionage agencies. These rules are meant to by used by PCs to direct the course of the agency they work for, and used properly (as the rules explain), they allow the players to create missions for their characters to go on instead of requiring the referee to come up with them. It's a really well done system, and I encourage other writers to study it as an example of how you can take what initially appears to be a very limited, strictly defined frame for a campaign that appears to provide limited agency (the PCs are operatives given missions by a patron agency) and turn it into a "sandbox" game.

The maltech antagonists are given extensive treatments, including stats, cool new gear, a genetic modifications subsystem and good discussions of how each type of organisation (eugenics cults, doomsday cults, and "godmind" cults focused on unbraked AI) works. There's a lot of work done exploring why and how people might want to tamper with this stuff despite the risks. At the end of this section, there's a version of the Stars Without Number "tags" system for the cults with a random generator.

If you're unfamiliar with the "tags" system, it's a set of randomly generated keywords that are attached to things (mainly planets and factions in the core rules) that have associated entries that suggest friends, enemies, complications, things, and places. These are tied into the adventure generation system in a consistent way so that with a couple of quick rolls you can create entire adventures. The terminology is consistent across books whenever adventure seeds or structures are presented, so you could actually take the tags from the cults in this book, plug the associated subcategories into the adventure seeds in Polychrome or the stock rules, and instantly generate adventures. It's a really subtle, well-done part of the Stars Without Number system that I don't see a lot of people comment on, and it's always surprised me that it hasn't been more influential or studied.

"Tradecraft" is the chapter explaining how to create espionage adventures in detail, and is worth the price of the book on its own. Even if you're not that interested in the Stars Without Number system itself, this section is worth reading through as a very concrete, well done example of how to structure and run espionage / intelligence missions. Once again, it's incredibly concise at 13 pages, with about half of that devoted to specific mission types. After that are rules specific to an espionage game, more background and training packages and some new gear.

What these two books have done IMHO, is turn Stars Without Number into a better system for running Dark Heresy-type games than Dark Heresy itself is. As long-time readers of this blog know, I have a 40K - Stars Without Number conversion, so the idea for me is not a new one (checking my back posts, I just realised I never posted the training packages for warriors and psychics - expect those to go up in the next few days). I think that between Darkness Visible and Polychrome, you now have more rules support for playing a bunch of Throne Agents going around investigating heresy than you do in Dark Heresy itself. If you're currently playing Dark Heresy and finding yourself butting up against what is a very clunky, overly complicated rules system that is mostly available in extremely expensive full-colour hardcover books, it might be worth your time to dole out a much smaller amount of money on Stars Without Number and the two supplements mentioned in this review and switch over. Not only will this be easier on your pocketbook, I suspect you'll actually have a superior play experience.

Christmas Haul

A brief list of games I either purchased or found free, legal copies of in the past couple of days:

Free:
Heroes Against Darkness
Make a Fantasy Sandbox
Delving Deeper
Adventures on Gothic Earth
Pars Fortuna
Ambitions and Avarice (Beta)
Backswords and Bucklers
Blood, Guts and Glory
The No-Art Grindhouse Edition of Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Bought:
A physical copy of Heroes Against Darkness
Polychrome for Stars Without Number
Darkness Visible for Stars Without Number
Red Tide
Fiasco and the Fiasco Companion
Vornheim
The Dungeon Alphabet
De Profundis

So expect reviews of a lot of this stuff as soon as I get the time. I'm basically putting Kevin Crawford's kids through college, so far as I can figure. My choices for purchase differ pretty significantly from my choices to freely download, as I'm sure anyone will notice. In general, for buying stuff, I look for innovative game structures that I can learn from (Fiasco, De Profundis), or procedural generators that I think I can use and reuse (anything by Crawford), and works that will teach me how to design better game artifacts for play (Vornheim, Fiasco). All my purchases were from Drivethrurpg due to Lulu logging me out at the last minute, but I find that those are the only two platforms I'm willing to go through. I want to turn my credit card info over to as few vendors as possible, so I tend to avoid company websites unless absolutely necessary. In general, anything that I intended to study but not necessarily play, I was content to pick up a PDF of, but anything that I expected to play with at the table, I wanted a print copy of.

In general, I would say that the least attractive products for me, other than those tokens, counters, pictures and other bric-a-brac type pieces, are OSR rules systems. I have somewhere around 30 very slightly different takes on old school D&D. I'm well saturated. And to be honest, very few have much to recommend them over the already existing Swords and Wizardry Complete, Microlite74, OSRIC, Labyrinth Lord, Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Dark Dungeons (and even that's really more than I personally want or need). Really, what we need are more products like Adventures on Gothic Earth / Tales of the Dungeonesque and Grotesque, the Arcane Abecediary, and Kellri's Encounters Reference - things that genuinely extend the already existing systems in new and interesting ways or that systematise and catalogue information in a useful way. It's crazy that we have such a large number of core systems, and not a single catalogue of all the possible ways to make a drop die table.

#7RPGs

From Tim Brannan's Other Side by way of Black Vulmea's Really Bad Eggs, comes the idea of posting about the 7 adventure games you have run or played the most. Here's my list, in rough order of amount of time spent playing or running them:

1) Dungeons and Dragons

Especially if you count d20 variants. I've been playing some version of D&D off and on since 1993. Started with the Rules Cyclopedia, moved to 2e, and then abandoned it in the mid-90's only to pick it back up around 2003 and play it more or less continuously until early 2010, when the guys in my group decided they hated 4e and we collectively decided to try other systems. And even then, in 2011 I started playing Swords and Wizardry, and in 2012, Microlite Iron Heartbreakers. Of the 21 or so years since I started playing, I have been playing some version of D&D for about 14 of them.

It's odd because though d20 is inarguably the roleplaying game system I am best at manipulating the mechanics of for personal and team advantage, the D&D family of systems has never been a favourite of mine. Swords and Wizardry and the other rules light variants / retroclones suit my purposes well enough to use for paedogogical purposes. I use them to train people in the basics of playing adventure games with the hope of eventually moving onto crunchier systems.

2) World of Darkness / Storyteller

I used to be much more fond of this family of games than I am now, though I do consider the games to have mostly gotten mechanically better over time. I played a lot of Mage: the Ascension online between 1998 to 2003, which was a gaming drought for me in the physical world, and a lot of Exalted online between 2000 and 2006 as a supplement to it. I also a ran really strange, very short-lived Hunter game when I was 17 that was based on the players playing "adult" versions of themselves (the characters were them imagined at age 25 or so). All told, I've playing Storyteller games for about nine years of my gaming life. Between 2010 and 2011, as what used to be my main gaming group moved away from playing D&D, we took up the new World of Darkness system, though most games were short run horror-themed mortals games. This is part of a general move on my part away from horror-themed games, and away from rules-light games towards crunchier systems.

3) WFRP / 40K

I calculated a year or so ago that if all my current WFRP 2e campaign obligations as both PC and referee are to be fulfilled, I will be playing campaigns of it until sometime in 2015. I started playing it online years ago, in 2005 IIRC, then moved to playing it in real life in 2007, and have been playing it with some group or another ever since. Since then, the only major interruptions in playing some session of WFRP 2e have been to play short runs of Rogue Trader and Deathwatch. I figure it to be about seven years of playing it in some form, typically in biweekly sessions or play-by-posts.

Of all the systems I play consistently, WFRP 2e is the one I like the most, though of course I have a few complaints about it. I like the power curve, I like the setting, I like mechanics for the most part. I wish the gear list was better, though it's pretty good. At the very least it should have the prices for more of the career trappings. I also find the specialties of some skills excessively narrow, though this isn't nearly as bad as in Dark Heresy. When I run WFRP 2e I tend to run it very differently than the people who are my main referees for it, but that's mainly a stylistic issue.

I can't really stand Dark Heresy in many ways, but I have played a ton of it, and I've run games of it, as well as Rogue Trader and Deathwatch. There are many, many elements of DH I would rewrite / have rewritten for my own games, to the extent that I'm almost playing a different game. Still, I love the setting, and the actual campaigns were great.

4) Heavy Gear

From 1994 to 1999 Heavy Gear was one of my go-to science fiction games, along with Alternity. One of the great things about the game was the incredible buy-in to the setting from the group I played with for most of my adolescence, at least partially due to the war game elements and the tie-in computer games. PCs went out and bought, and then read, setting books and supplementary material, and I could drop casual references to other elements of the setting in and rely on the PCs catching them. It was a golden era of young gaming.

The game where I got into the knife-fight at the table with one of the PCs was a Heavy Gear game in summer 1998. Superficially this probably seems like it coincides with the end of my RL gaming for about five years, but in actual practice we played for another six months or so (mostly Alternity at that point), and it was only at the tail end of 1998 that we ceased meeting regularly. When I reflect on Heavy Gear now, it's always with a bit of melancholy and nostalgia, and I feel like I can't really go back to this system and play it in a clear, adult way. Playing Heavy Gear basically ruined me for any other mecha game, and I've never gotten back into the genre in the way I did when I played it as my preferred game in my teenage years.

5) The BRP family (Call of Cthulhu, Openquest, Mongoose Runequest 2)

It's odd that the family of systems I like so much crops up so low on this list I suppose, but that's because I discovered it so late. I first played Call of Cthulhu at Giant Space Telescope Con in 2009, playing the sonar operator in Grace Under Pressure. It was also the first time I played a prewritten module. Upon discovering the then-newly-released Mongoose Runequest 2, and Openquest, these systems won my heart. I've played a bit of each, though nowhere near as much as D&D, obviously. I hope that over the course of the rest of my gaming life, this ratio will even out, or even shift in favour of BRP.

6) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles And Other Strangeness / Rifts / Heroes Unlimited / Recon

The first roleplaying game I ever played, from 1991 to 1994, off and on. I am a self-taught gamer who came to roleplaying through an adventure game that was not D&D, both of which are somewhat unusual as I understand it from hearing others discuss their backgrounds. TMNT was great, though the kids I mostly played it with were my toxic and horrible neighbours, who taught me at a very young age how terrible people can be in groups. I'm not saying my interest in group dynamics in adventure games from a set of experiences I had when I was eight, but that interest is definitely informed by them.

Heroes Unlimited and Rifts were grafts onto the same group, and while I am still nostalgically fond of the systems, I experience even less desire to play them. Of all these games, only Recon, which I played later, with the same adolescent group that I played Heavy Gear with, is one that I'd like to revisit. It wasn't the first military game I played, but it was the first one that was based on a real conflict and that emphasised the complexities of military activity, and that wasn't really heroic.

7) Everything Else

At this point, the list starts to break apart into a basically arbitrary selection. Any of Diaspora, Traveller, Burning Empires, Burning Wheel, Unknown Armies, FUDGE, Star Wars D6, Shadowrun, Nobilis, Stars Without Number or Alternity would qualify. I've probably spent a bit more time running Alternity or Unknown Armies than the others, but Traveller and Stars Without Number are systems that I use as supplements to other games I'm running (the world generation systems, in particular). Most of these are games that I've run or played in one-shots, or short series of games, or campaigns that failed to launch, or that I draw on as supplements or reference books. There are a couple that I would love to play more often than I do (Diaspora, Stars Without Number and Traveller) but can't fit into my available gaming time.

I Don't Own Stars Without Number Anymore

A friend of mine is going up north to teach English to ESL students in Kangirsuk [1], in Nunavik in northern Quebec. She sent out a call for people to donate small items like art supplies etc. that the students could use to learn English (most speak the Nunamvimmiutitut dialect of Inuktitut and/or French) and I decided to donate a roleplaying game (plus dice), since Malcolm Sheppard has been using them to teach literacy to young people and adults. The students are at about the age that many gamers enter the hobby (Grades 3 and 4 - I started playing when in Grade 3 when I was 8).

Finding a roleplaying game that I hope would appeal to young people from a non-Western background is harder than it sounds. The vast majority of fantasy games have Europe-like settings, feature art that is entirely white people, and don't provide a lot support for anything other than killing things and the accumulation of wealth and power. These games are more or less fine for an audience with a cultural background that prepares them for these things, but I suspect they're of much less interest to a non-Western audience (just as most of us are not watching Nollywood films). I wanted a game where there was at least the possibility of nonviolent objectives and goals, since the kids are young enough that their parents probably won't approve of imaginary murder. As well, I wanted a game that would teach kids how to roleplay, rather than assume they knew how to, and that would provide them with a ton of tools to do so.

I decided Stars Without Number would be the ideal game in my collection for a lot of reasons. The rediscovery of lost worlds and cultures in the default setting offers an overarching non-violent goal for PCs to pursue. The tools for building worlds, aliens, etc. were fantastic and simple, and should be easy for new gamers to learn. The actual rules are simple and sensible. But what really sold me was the inclusion of tables of non-Western names and the art featuring non-whites fairly frequently. Though the names don't include Inuit ones, they do include specific tables of Arabic, Japanese and Nigerian ones, which I hope will indicate to the Inuit kids that you don't have to be a white guy to be adventuring space heroes. The fact that it's one book was helpful too, since transportation space will be limited.

On the chance that the kids wouldn't like that particular game or she couldn't take the physical book, I loaded up an 8GB thumb drive with pdfs of other games (all freely and legally available), including the Swords and Wizardry core rules and the Quickstart, all the free mini-adventures available for Swords and Wizardry, the art-free version of Mutant Future, Dark Dungeons, the free pdf version of Stars Without Number, and Infinite Stars. I had the Eclipse Phase pdf on there at one point, but took it off because I figured it'd be too mechanically complex for young kids, but that left me with very few good, free, science fiction games. Openquest has a free pdf available, but the harpy monster in the back of the bestiary has exposed breasts. I also loaded up tons of OSR-related material, like free NPC generators, hex templates, etc. These will require the kids to have access to a printer to make full use of, but I figured I'd err on the side of more rather than less.

And that's why I don't own Stars Without Number anymore.

40K Stars Without Number: Minor Xenos

Dark Eldar

Lenses: Gluttony, Treachery
Government: Tribal (Clan leaders)
Technology Level: Specialised 4 (Advanced Xenotech)
Motivation: Indulgence

In the Tellian Sector:

Dark Eldar pirates and raiders can be found across the Tellian sector. The Tellian sector has many colonies and frontier worlds that are ideal hunting grounds for them. Pech, Chinvat and Granville have all suffered depredations at one time or another. Many of the mercenaries and bandits buying Eldar weapons from Milvanen do so thinking they're buying the horrific, brutal weapons of the Dark Eldar for use in terror campaigns.

Eldar roll 2d6+6 for Wisdom and Dexterity, and 3d6 for all other stats.
Jaded: Dark Eldar XP requirements to increase in level are 10% greater than normal.
Eldar PCs speak Eldar and Low Gothic.

Orks

Lenses: Wrath, Tribalism
Government: Tribal
Technology Level: 3 (Basic Xenotech)
Motivation: Waagh!

In the Tellian Sector:

Orks are uncommon in the Tellian Sector, but many systems in the Lost Worlds and the Zul-Kan domains have been overrun by them. Orks are most commonly encountered as sanctioned Xenos aboard Rogue Traders, or being used as mercenaries by unscrupulous magnates. The main Ork presence in the Tellian sector is on the numerous space hulks that trouble almost all parts of the sector. Ork-infested space hulks lurk at the edge of many systems, just waiting for an unlucky traveler to guide them to a nearby world.

Orks get +2 hit points per level and roll 2d6+6 for Strength and Constitution.
Orks roll 2d6+3 for Wisdom, Intelligence and Dexterity.
Orks speak Low Gothic, badly.

Kroot

Lenses: Journeying, Tradition
Government: Tribal (Shapers)
Technology: Specialised 4 (Advanced Xenotech)

In the Tellian Sector:

Kroot are one of the most common kinds of xenos found in the Tellian sector. Several clans are expanding out of the Zul-Kan Domains, where they have been working as mercenaries for several generations, and into Imperial space. They are mostly found aboard Rogue Trader vessels working security and operations, but it is an open secret that the tech-priests of the Xantholinthic Accretion in the Choraia system have begun trading with them. The Kroot have examples of some extremely interesting xenotech the tech-priests are busy evaluating the acceptability of. The real commotion though, is that one of the items traded to the tech-priests was a mere tenth-generation reproduction of a STC print-out for a new kind of ceramic. The Xantholinthic Accretion has demanded the Inquisition not interfere with the Kroot until the origin of this print-out can be precisely determined.

Kroot may only be Warriors or Psychics (called "Shapers").
Kroot get +1 on their initiative rolls.
Kroot get an automatic free level of skill in Perception, Survival and Stealth.
In order to spend skill points to gain new skills or improve skills they already have, a Kroot must eat at least a kilogram of raw flesh from a creature that possesses the skill at the desired level or higher. Until they eat this flesh, they retain the skill points but cannot spend them.

40K Stars Without Number: Eldar

This is written from the perspective of using the Tellian Sector, but the actual Eldar rules at the beginning will be useful to anyone who wants to run a 40K Stars Without Number game regardless of where in the Imperium it's set.

Lenses: Subtlety, Sagacity
Government: Oligarchy (Farseers)
Technology Level: Specialised 4 (Advanced Xenotech)
Motivation: Revanchism

Eldar roll 2d6+6 for Wisdom and Dexterity and 3d6 for all other stats.
Specialisation: Eldar can only spend skill points to learn or improve skills that they have from their class.

In the Tellian Sector:

Most Eldar in the Tellian Sector come from the Milvanen Craftworld, which is passing through the Oort Cloud of the Argurion system, and will be for approximately another two centuries before it slings itself towards the Chinvat system. Milvanen's colours are black and blue.

The Eldar are primarily engaged in the recovery of Vanaste, an Eldar maiden world in the Argurion system currently inhabited by several hundred thousand humans. Rather than kick the humans out, the Milvanen Eldar have chosen to trade with them, dominating them economically and pushing them to break with the rest of the Imperium. The Eldar hope to recruit the humans as mercenaries and pawns for their own inscrutable purposes. The effect of this in the short-term has been a recent flood of illegal Eldar goods in the Tellian sector and an economic boom for Vanaste's middle men. The Inquisition so far has had higher priorities than investigating a backwater world at the periphery of the sector, and responsibility for dealing with the situation is on the shoulders of the planetary governor of Kleist, who is totally unable to contain the situation militarily and has settled for cordoning off his world.

Recent explorator fleets surveying the Lost Worlds have discovered several other human-populated planets that have undergone this process. In most cases, the human population ends up as menials and near-slaves serving a caste of Eldar magnates who strip the planets for resources they send back to Milvanen.

There are webway portals on many planets in the Tellian sector. Its closeness to the Eye of Terror means that the region of space that became the Tellian sector was a frontier in the process of being fully colonised when Eldar civilisation collapsed.

40K Stars Without Number Expert Training Packages

Emissary
The character has been trained a diplomat, representative, or mandatory for one institution or another. This may be a large corporation, a noble house, one of the Adeptus, or even a powerful individual like an Inquisitor, Rogue Trader or High Lord of Terra.

Skills: Bureaucracy, Culture/Any, History, Language, Leadership, Perception, Persuade, Steward

Explorator
The character has been trained as part of an explorator crew, surveying new worlds and strange sights for either the Imperium or the Adeptus Mechanicus or a private interest.

Skills: Combat/Any, Culture/Spacer, Exosuit, Navigation, Perception, Survival, Tech/Any, Vehicle/Any

Priest
The character is an ordained priest of the Imperial Creed. Priests may be missionaries, monks, or secular acolytes in charge of specific locations or congregations. Priests are expected to defend their flocks against external threats, and many are trained in the use of chainsword and flamer to do just that.

Skills: Bureaucracy, Combat/Primitive, Culture/World, History, Instructor, Leadership, Persuade, Religion/Imperial Creed

Recidivist
The character is a working criminal. Recividists tend to differ from common gangers in that they use skill and intelligence, instead of muscle, to get what they want.

Skills: Athletics, Business, Computer, Combat/Primitive, Culture/Criminal, Gambling, Security, Stealth

Scholar
The character is widely trained in intellectual fields and was probably trained in a formal institution of education, like a schola or a college. Many scholars are doctors or archivists or specialists in forbidden lore.

Skills: Computer, Culture/Any, History, Instructor, Language, Religion/Any, Science, Tech/Any

Tech-Priest
The character has been formally ordained into the Adeptus Mechanicus. Such characters focus on technological and scientific knowledge, and grow less human over time as they replace their flesh with cybernetics.

Skills: Combat/Energy Weapons, Exosuit, Security, Science, Tech/Imperial, Tech/Any, Vehicle/Any

Throne Agent
The character is a specialist agent of the Inquisition or another powerful organisation such as the Ecclesiarchy. He acts outside the formal hierarchy of the Imperium to safeguard it against threats both internal and external.

Skills: Athletics, Combat/Any, Computer, Perception, Persuade, Security, Stealth, Tactics

Voidmaster
The character is specialist in the operations of a starship. Such characters may also be familiar with operating the support craft that swarm throughout space.

Skills: Combat/Energy Weapons, Computer, Culture/Spacer, Exosuit, Navigation, Tech/Imperial, Vehicle/Space, Vehicle/Any

Stars Without Number 40K Skill Conversion and Background Packages

I enjoy elements of the 40K roleplaying games, but I find the system extremely cumbersome and hard to modify, and this led me about a year ago to want to experiment with running 40K using Stars Without Number. I ended up using the world generator pretty extensively, but never ran an actual game using my house rules. I did end up creating a ton of stuff that numerous people have said they found interesting, so I'll be putting it up.

Notes for Converting Stars Without Numbers Skills to 40K Appropriate Ones

Culture

The Culture skill has an additional specialty called "Ruinous Powers" that covers familiarity with the traditions, organisation and protocols of Chaos cultists, traitor space marines, and daemons.

Religion 

The Religion skill now has specialties. When an individual takes the Religion skill, they must pick a specialty, and must buy all specialties separately. The specialties are: "Imperial Creed", "Ruinous Powers", "Xeno Religions" and "Cults".

The "Imperial Creed" specialty covers the varieties of religious worship in the Imperium that are accepted by the Ecclesiarchy, including the variant used by the Astartes.

The "Ruinous Powers" specialty covers all worship of the Chaos Gods, demons, and other denizens of the Warp.

"Xeno Religions" covers all religions of nearby Xenos, including the gods of the Eldar, Orkish idols, and the Kroot Shapers.

"Cults" covers all non-Chaotic heresies, including pre-Imperial religions, the religions of lost worlds, and unsanctioned variants of the Imperial Creed.

Tech Skill

"Pretech" becomes "Archaeotech" and covers all archaeotech devices
"Postech" becomes "Imperial" and covers all devices currently built by the Imperium
"Psitech" becomes "Warp" and covers both technology affecting psy-powers and technology that interacts with the Warp (including pentagrammatic wards, psy-trackers, etc.)
"Maltech" becomes "Xenotech" and covers all technology of alien origin.

Additional Background Packages

These are 40K specific background packages that supplement the ones in the SWN corebook. Most of them can be used in other settings pretty easily. The format is:

Name of Background Package

One line description.

Skill, Skill, Skill, Skill

By the way, if you want to design your own background packages, that's all designing one takes. These are all mechanically unique from the ones in the corebook.

Administrative Assistant
The character spent time as a valet, emissary, majordomo or assistant to a Peer of the Imperium, or working in the Administratum.
Bureaucracy, Culture/World, Leadership, Steward

Artisan
The character is a skilled worker capable of making a living off their trade.
Artist, Business, Culture/World, Profession: Any

Colonist
The character is a hardy colonist either sent to or born on one of the many Frontier Worlds of the Imperium.
Combat/Projectile Weapons, Vehicle/Any, Culture/World, Survival

Cultist
The character is a member of a heretical religion and is infiltrating the Imperium.
Combat/Any, Culture/Ruinous Powers or Culture/World, Religion/Ruinous Powers or Religion/Cults, Persuade

Heretek
The character is an apostate in the eyes of the Tech-Priests for his misuse of technology.
Culture/Traveller, Computer, Science, Tech/Any

Investigator
The character worked for the Adeptus Arbites, planetary enforcers, or even the Inquisition investigating crimes.
Culture/World, Perception, Persuade, Security

Mind-Cleansed
The character's past and memories have been erased and replaced, and the character turned into a Throne Agent.
Athletics, Combat/Energy Weapons, Combat/Unarmed, Stealth

Monk
The character is part of a mendicant order that contemplates the Imperial Creed.
Culture/World, History, Religion/Imperial Creed, Survival

Omnissiah Adept
Born in one of the Mechanicus demesnes but considered unsuitable for ordination, this character was one of the countless individuals assisting the Tech-Priests in their work.
Culture/World, Computer, Tech/Imperial, Vehicle/Any

Pilgrim
The character has spent years of their life travelling from one holy shrine to another.
Culture/Traveller, Navigation, Religion/Imperial Creed, Survival

Schola Prodigy
An orphan raised in a Schola Progenium to serve the Imperium. Schola graduates often become storm troopers, commissars, bureaucrats, priests and Throne Agents.
Combat/Any, History, Leadership, Tactics

Shrine World
The character was born on a shrine world and spent most of their early life immersed in the rites and rituals of the Ecclesiarchy and working for the glorification of the Emperor's domain.
Artist, Culture/World, Religion/Imperial Creed, Profession:Any

Surveyor
A specialist in the discovery, cataloguing and exploration of new worlds for the Imperium. They are often attached to explorator crews.
Culture/Traveller, Perception, Tech/Imperial, Survival

Underhive Ganger
The character grew up amongst the half-mutated killers of the underhive.
Combat/Any, Culture/Criminal, Gambling, Survival

Xeno-arcanist
A specialist in unlocking the mysteries of xenos, including their languages and their strange and unholy artifacts. A key part of any explorator crew.
Culture/Alien, Language, Religion/Xeno Religions, Tech/Xenotech

A Few Modifications to the Stars Without Number Planetary Generator

There was a point at which I had used the Stars Without Number planetary generation more than just about anyone else, excepting perhaps the author of the game himself. By the time I'd drawn up the Tellian Sector for 40K using it, I had 130-odd locations drawn up. While the generator is very good (the best since Traveller's), it does tend to produce extremely normal worlds - easily inhabited, populated by hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. I prefer a little more variety in my science fiction settings, so I came up with the following modifications to the system:

1) Roll 1d6 for interesting locations within a system to be statted out.

2) Change some of the ranges to create fewer garden worlds. The norm in SWN is a world with a breathable atmosphere, a human-miscible biosphere, temperate temperature, with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants at TL4.

Specifically, I would change the Atmosphere table to read

2 Corrosive
3-4 Inert Gas
5-6 Airless / Thin
7-8 Breathable Mix
9-10 Thick, Mask-Breathable
11 Invasive, Toxic
12 Corrosive, Invasive

Temperature to

2 Frozen
3-4 Variable Temperate to Cold
5-6 Cold
7 Temperate
8-9 Warm
10-11 Variable Warm to Temperate
12 Burning

Biosphere to

2 Biosphere Remnants
3 Microbial Life
4-6 No Native Biosphere
7 Human-Miscible Biosphere
8-10 Immiscible Biosphere
11 Hybrid Biosphere
12 Engineered Biosphere

and Tech Level to

2 - TL 0
3 - TL 1
4 - TL 2
5-7 - TL 3
8-10 TL 4
11 TL4 + Specialty
12 TL 5

3) The book recommends rolling for two tags, but I think 3-4 is more interesting and helps to throw planets into sharper relief from one another. This is especially true if you don't use the above altered tables, since you'll need something to make all the garden worlds the base tables generate distinct.