Long ago I wrote a guide to grades here at the Alexandrian, but at the time I was mostly focused on reviewing narrative works (books, films, etc.). I use the same scale and same basic principles when providing review grades for RPG books, but people are sometimes confused about why I might give an adventure I liked a grade of B- or the like. So I wanted to update the grading guide to discuss how I grade RPGs, supplements, and adventures.

Broadly speaking, here’s how I think of the letter grades:

A – Excellent
B – Good
C – Average/Mediocre
D – Poor
F – Worthless

To get a little more specific, let’s first talk about how I use grades for roleplaying games:

A — This game is brilliant. I think it’s destined to become a classic. I’m excited to play it and I think you should play it ASAP. Even if it’s not the genre or type of game you might usually play, you might still want to check it out.

B — This game is very well designed. I recommend it.

C — This game is okay. If it’s in a genre you particularly like and if the mechanics sound like the sort of thing you usually enjoy playing, you’ll probably find something to enjoy here. But there are a lot of problems that will likely detract from the playing experience. Expect to use a lot of house rules here.

D — This game is seriously flawed. I wouldn’t refuse to play it, but there’s not enough here for me to recommend it on any level. Approach with extreme caution.

F — Complete and utter waste of time. Unless someone is paying you to play this game, don’t bother.

And for supplements:

A — This supplement is essential. Assuming you have interest in the topic covered by the supplement, it’s a no-brainer to use it in your game.

B — This is a very good supplement. I recommend it, and you’ll likely find it enhancing your game in a lot of ways.

C — The supplement is functional. It’s giving you the rules or setting information you need for whatever the topic of the supplement is. But there’s also probably a bunch of stuff you’ll want to ignore, tweak, or need to expand to make it usable.

D — This supplement is seriously flawed. I think you’ll end up ignoring most of it, but there a few gems hiding in here that might be worth prying out.

F — Complete and utter waste of time. Whatever the supplement is talking about, you’d be better off designing from scratch.

And for adventures:

A — This adventure is a classic. It makes me want to drop everything else and start running it for my players ASAP. Everyone should play this one.

B — This adventure is very good. I’d be willing to run this adventure without making any changes (although, in practice, I probably will).

C — This adventure was okay. It would be fun to run, but there are significant issues that I would feel compelled to fix before trying to run it.

D — This adventure is seriously flawed. It’s not a complete waste of time and if the concept sounds intriguing it may still be worth checking out. But there’s not enough here for me to recommend it, and you’re probably going to have put in a lot of work to make it playable. Approach with extreme caution.

F — Complete and utter waste of time. Probably not even worth strip-mining.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

Pluses and minuses generally modify or color the grades described above. An A- would be an excellent adventure, for example, but have a few flaws you might want to address before running it. A B+ adventure, on the other hand, would be a really good adventure with a really awesome elements (characters, scenes, situations, concepts, etc.) scattered about.

An A+, it should be noted, is reserved for a game or adventure that immediately finds its way onto my personal Top 50. This isn’t an exact science, since I don’t actually keep a precise Top 50 list, but if I’m giving it an A+ it’s because it compares favorably with Ten Candles, Technoir, Alice is Missing, Blades in the Dark, Suppressed Transmissions, Masks of Nyarlathotep, Banewarrens, Eternal Lies, Dracula Dossier, and City of Lies.

The basic theory of this grading system is Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. I figure if something falls into that 90% range, then it’s not worth wasting the time determining exactly how crappy it is — all of that stuff is just graded F. The other grades deal entirely with the 10% of stuff that’s in any way worth taking our time to consider.

I love using headlines as a GM.

In my campaign status document, these are short descriptions – usually only one or two sentences long – of current events, like:

• Solarians are preparing a pilgrimage to the Ternary.
• The Alshaahin megacorp announces new funding initiative for a colony in the Jadis system.
• The Hephaestus deuterium mining station at Ariel I was forced to shut down operations for five days due to equipment failure. Fuel prices have spiked in response.
• Crackdown on O2 debtors; hundreds thrown into Doptown.

These are not, generally speaking, events that the PCs are directly interacting with. (Although that can always change.) They’re background events: Just like there’s stuff that happens in the real world that you don’t personally witness, so, too, is there stuff happening in the game world that the PCs aren’t present for.

(Although once you’ve established your headlines, it can be fun to start weaving in references to stuff the PCs are responsible for.)

You can deliver “headlines” in a bunch of different ways: The PCs might literally check the newspapers. A news story might be playing on the TV in the dive bar where they find Tony the Rat drowning his sorrows. Or you might opportunistically weave them into any conversation with an NPC. They’re versatile tools that also create a dynamic sense of depth and motion in the game world.

When I’m running a dedicated campaign, managing the headlines is pretty straightforward: I keep a list. When the PCs hear a headline, I cross it off the list. Then I periodically update the list with new entries.

And that’s it.

But when I’m running an open table, things get a lot more difficult.

The difference, of course, is that when I use a headline at a dedicated table, it means that all of the players have heard it. At an open table, on the other hand, only the players in the current session hear it. There might be dozens of other players participating in the campaign who didn’t: Imagine living in a world where only five people heard about the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor. Not only would that be weird, but you’d also have difficulty figuring out the next few years of current events in the United States.

The obvious solution would be to simply share all the headlines with all the players: If your campaign has a Discord server, for example, you might make a point of posting all the new headlines after each session.

I’ve found, however, that this isn’t terribly effective. It tends to require extra effort for me (because prepping a couple sentences I can riff on during a session is different than sharing a coherent written narrative) and, because it’s not a lived experience, it tends to blunt the impact on the players. Plus, part of the fun of an open table campaign is the PCs having disparate experiences, so you need to balance that against common knowledge.

The bottom line is that I limit community news postings to major events (like Pearl Harbor). But for everything else I need a different solution.

HEADLINE PROCEDURE

HEADLINES TABLE: Create a short list of active headlines and organize them into a random table. I recommend keeping the number of headlines relatively small and using a d6 table. (I’m using a d5 table for my Mothership campaign because the system uses d10s.)

SESSSION HEADLINE: Roll once per session on the Headlines Table. Find some way of weaving this headline into the current session.

USING HEADLINES: In addition to the session headline, you can also use additional headlines (rolling or choosing as appropriate). This might be additional procedural generation (in my Mothership campaign I make a Life Events check for each PC and a Headline is one possible result), but can also be opportunistic (e.g., the PCs go looking for rumors or are eavesdropping on NPCs who start chatting about current events). Either way, when you use a headline in a session, tick the headline. (Each headline should only be ticked once per session, no matter how many times you actually use or reference the headline.)

CYCLING HEADLINES: After each session, check each headline by rolling 1d10. If the roll is ≤ the story’s ticks, the story is dropped from the Headline Table. Replace it with a new headline.

If a headline was ticked in the previous session but not eliminated, advance the news story, adding additional details, reactions, fallout, and the like.

Note: Just like in the real world, some stories stick around in the headlines for days or weeks. More importantly, this iteration means most stories get repeated multiple times, exposing them to more players, but the updates also keep the headlines fresh for players seeing them again.

EXAMPLE OF PLAY

Let’s say that I launch a new campaign using the same headlines I used as an example above, but now arranged as a random table:

1. Solarians are preparing a pilgrimage to the Ternary.
2. The Alshaahin megacorp announces new funding initiative for a colony in the Jadis system.
3. The Hephaestus deuterium mining station at Ariel I was forced to shut down operations for five days due to equipment failure. Fuel prices have spiked in response.
4. Crackdown on O2 debtors; hundreds thrown into Doptown.

During the first session I roll 1d4 and get 4, so as the PCs are shopping on Prospero’s Dream at the beginning of the session, I mention that they see Tempest mercenaries raiding a residential block, checking oxygen IDs, and arresting debtors. I also tick the headline:

4. Crackdown on O2 debtors; hundreds thrown into Doptown. ✔

At the end of the session, I check the headline by rolling 1d10 and get a 5, so the headline remains on the table and is instead advanced. In addition, the group accidentally unleashed a bioweapon at the Nanopore Genlabs facility on Katerineta, and I decide that’s a big enough event it would make headlines. So I update the headlines table:

1. Solarians are preparing a pilgrimage to the Ternary.
2. The Alshaahin megacorp announces new funding initiative for a colony in the Jadis system.
3. The Hephaestus deuterium mining station at Ariel I was forced to shut down operations for five days due to equipment failure. Fuel prices have spiked in response.
4. Crackdown on O2 debtors; hundreds thrown into Doptown. ✔
   • Ukka, the Head Gardener of the Solarians, is attempting to recruit Public Defenders to help the arrested O2 debtors.
5. The Nanopore Genlabs facility in Zoyechka on Katerineta has been placed under quarantine by the planetary government.

Fast forward a few more sessions and my headlines might look like this:

1. Solarians are preparing a pilgrimage to the Ternary. ✔✔
   • Solar astrological survey will be departing soon.
   • Ukka hopes that the pioneer pilgrims will depart in 6815.
2. The Alshaahin megacorp announces new funding initiative for a colony in the Jadis system.
3. Novikov protests illegal sleeve trade on Prospero’s Dream. ✔
   • Yandee, leader of the Golyanova Bratva, denies permission for an Investigator General to enter Prospero’s Dream.
4. Crackdown on O2 debtors; hundreds thrown into Doptown. ✔✔✔✔
   • Ukka, the Head Gardener of the Solarians, is attempting to recruit Public Defenders to help the arrested O2 debtors.
   • Brunhildh, Chief Adjudicator of the Court, expresses regret public defender advocates have recently died in trial by combat. “This is what happens when the inexperienced attempt to defend the guilty. Justice will prevail.”
   • Hunglungs air Gaussian anonymized footage. Wearing Rorschach masks they demand all O2 debt in the Choke be forgiven.
5. The Nanopore Genlabs facility in Zoyechka on Katerineta has been placed under quarantine by the planetary government. ✔
   • Nanopore employees released from quarantine, but facility remains locked down.

The Hunglungs threats are a major event, so when those get triggered I’ll also send out a community-wide headline via our Discord server.

You can see how using the procedural generation has caused some stories to get hit more often (becoming surprising backbones of the campaign world), while others keep getting passed over. (I guess Alshaahin still keeping a cap on their expansion plans.)

DESIGN NOTES

This system creates a somewhat amorphous cloud of current events, and that’s by design.

As noted above, using a “standard” system of news events keyed to specific dates didn’t work at the open table because of skipped time and “missing” players.

With game time synced to real-world time and the implementation of downtime actions, I did have the option of continuing to link specific headlines to specific dates, simply delivering the headlines they’d “missed” to PCs at the beginning of each session. This, too, proved unsatisfying. With overlapping player and character timelines, it created a weird need to synchronize PC downtime in a way that slowed play and created a lot of weird headaches. Also, since some players often take long breaks between sessions in an open table, it also created novel bookkeeping issues (how long do I keep older headlines in my active notes?) and would often result in unexpected current event “deluges” that ended up just being unsatisfying exposition dumps without any sense of a lived experience.

In short, a lot of showing rather than telling, in a way that was painful to use and disappointing in its effect.

There are exceptions, of course. Major events so transformative that it’s important to nail down exactly when they happened. These are, of course, precisely the headlines that get shared with the whole community. (In practice, I’ve found this is often flipped around. Rather than identifying something as a major event and, therefore, setting the date, it’s rather realizing that I really want or need to know what specific date something happened that make me realize that it’s a major event and handle it accordingly.)

I’m only about a dozen sessions into using this new system for headlines. (That’s why I’m still referring to it as untested.) But I’ve been very pleased with the results so far.

Review Originally Published May 22nd, 2001

Every so often I read an RPG supplement and I just can’t figure out what was going through the head of the editor who green-lighted it. This is one of those books.

The D&D Gazetteer is, essentially, a 32 page excerpt from the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer which was released several weeks prior to the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.. And I mean that literally: Every last scrap of information to be found in the D&D Gazetteer is to be found in the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. Every last bit. Honest. Scout’s honor. (Would I lie to you?)

So the question which ran through my mind as I sat down to review this product was simple: Why would you release two products with the exact same information in them?

To get an answer I went to Ryan Dancey (a VP at WotC who was previously in charge of the D&D product line), and his answer was simple: There is a segment of the D&D market which doesn’t want fully developed campaign worlds: They want a gazetteer-style product which just briefly covers the highlight of a campaign world – something which gives them a common gaming environment, but also lets them fill in the details.

Okay, I can buy that. Sort of. It still leaves questions in my mind as to why the confusingly similar names were used for the two products (especially since the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer isn’t, strictly speaking, a gazetteer), not to mention the release schedule which seemed to scream “we’re trying to rip people off who aren’t following our upcoming release schedule like a hawk” (since the unwary consumer would most likely pick up the D&D Gazetteer without realizing that the much more complete Living Greyhawk Gazetteer was coming).

But I can buy it. So, if you’re one of those people who prefer a less-developed campaign world, this is the book you want – not the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer.

So what is this, anyway?

Well, as most of you probably already know, Greyhawk is – arguably – the original D&D campaign setting; designed and developed by Gary Gygax himself and originally released in a product with a very similar format to the D&D Gazetteer itself. During the last years of TSR, however, Greyhawk – which had been steadily losing ground to the extremely popular Forgotten Realms setting – was canceled. When WotC bought out TSR, however, one of the first things they did was announce the return of “the original campaign” and, with the release of Third Edition, Greyhawk was made the de facto standard of the D&D game once more.

The D&D Gazetteer is a 32 page pamphlet which, basically, serves as a broad introduction to Greyhawk – a campaign world with nearly three decades of development behind it: The history of the world is covered in broad strokes; the significant stats of the major kingdoms are given and they are briefly described (an average of three paragraphs or so is devoted to each); major geographical forms are detailed; and major power groups are given a similarly distilled treatment. A full-color map of the world is also included. All of this is done extremely well.

In other words, the D&D Gazetteer does exactly what it’s supposed to do. I just don’t have that much confidence that a large segment of the market really has a desire for what it’s doing. I, personally, would be happier with the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer – but your mileage may vary.

One thing I have considered doing with the Gazetteer, however, is using it as a player resource. My read-through of the material here didn’t turn up any deep, dark secrets of the world which I wouldn’t be comfortable with my players knowing – and the low price point would make it comparatively easy for me to pick a copy up for all my players (or for them to pick one up for themselves). As a result, the D&D Gazetteer could, essentially, serve as  “player’s guide” to Greyhawk – although you might want to preview the material yourself before okaying it for your own campaign.

Writers: Gary Hollan, Erik Mona, Sean Reynolds, Frederick Weining, Skip Williams, Ed Stark
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
Price: $9.95
Page Count: 32
ISBN: 0-7869-1742-3
Product Code: TSR11742

I remain confused about the decision to publish both a D&D Gazetteer and D&D Living Greyhawk Gazetteer just a few weeks apart. It actually kind of echoes my confusion with Wizards’ release schedule at the tail end of 2025, when they released two different starter sets a few weeks apart, followed by two different campaign settings in back-to-back months.

I remember even in response to this review there were people saying stuff like, “Wait… this ISN’T the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer?” and, “There’s two of them?!”

I also found the decision to make Greyhawk the “official” setting of D&D 3rd Edition, but then only releasing a single setting supplement (or, I guess two setting supplements) to be a weird one. The official explanation, if I recall correctly, alternated between “this way the DM can feel like it’s a setting they can do anything they want with” and “we’re leaving it for organized play to use,” which were basically diametrically opposed. Ultimately, I’m guessing there was just some weird internal politicking going on as a result of Dancey’s decision to ruthlessly (albeit necessarily) slash the number of D&D settings that were being published, and these weird product decisions were the result.

For an explanation of where these reviews came from and why you can no longer find them at RPGNet, click here.

In discussing the design of the Tempest Cluster a couple days ago, I mentioned that using Prospero’s Dream — a mega-station with a population of 5 million sophonts — ended up forcing me to confront some fundamental issues with Mothership sooner rather than later and used shore leave as example. A patron of the Alexandrian asked me what I meant by that, so let’s dive in a bit.

ORIENTATION

During a Mothership adventure, PCs will accumulate Stress. (Which is bad.) Between adventures they can take shore leave, which allows them to relieve the Stress and also potentially convert some or all of it into improved Saves.

Shore leaves are classified, in terms of cost and effectiveness, by port class:

• X-Class Ports cost 1d100 x 10,000 credits, can convert 2d10[+] Stress.
• C-Class Ports cost 2d10 x 100 credits, can convert 1d5 Stress.
• B-Class Ports cost 2d10 x 1,000 credits, can convert 1d10 Stress.
• A-Class Ports cost 2d10 x 10,000 credits, can convert 2d10 Stress.
• S-Class Ports cost 2d10 x 100,000 credits, can convert all Stress.

To take shore leave, you head to an appropriate port, pay the cost, and make a Sanity Save. If you succeed, you can convert Stress. If not, you don’t. But, either way, your Stress is reduced to you Minimum Stress value.

Heading into a Mothership campaign, therefore, I knew that I would need to have one or more ports of each class, and that this could also be used to motivate the PCs to travel to various locations.

ORIGINAL INTENTION

My original plan was to design custom shore leave experiences and assign them to different ports. There would be three different shore leave experiences:

• Vignette: Play the shore leave as a short scene, evoking the experience in a brief back-and-forth with the players.
• Excursion: The shore leave is played out as a full scenario, similar to the beach episode from an anime series. (If you’re wondering what this might look like, check out Numenera Tavern.)
• Slaughterhouse: Similar to an excursion (in that experience is being played out in full), but in a shore leave slaughterhouse something goes horribly wrong. (Think things like Jurassic Park, the Star Trek episode “Shore Leave”, or “there’s an android serial killer loose on the cruise ship.”)

The occasional excursion would be a fun tension relief from the horror scenarios of Mothership, but also set the players up for a future twist where an excursion suddenly turns into a slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse experience, in turn, would color all future excursions with a patina of paranoia.

PROBLEMS

I pretty quickly realized there were a few key problems with my scheme.

First, while I remain pretty confident that the vignette/excursion/slaughterhouse setup could be awesome in a lot of Mothership campaigns, it turns out that — particularly in an open table — the PCs don’t go on shore leave together. Partly because it’s expensive, and so a player will skip shore leave if their PC hasn’t racked up enough stress to make it worthwhile. Having differing levels of Stress is even more likely at an open table, and the PCs also aren’t a cohesive, long-term group that would do downtime activities together.

Note: What if I added a benefit for going on shore leave as a group vacation? If that could motivate a group to take shore leave together, then I could use it to trigger excursions and slaughterhouses.

Second, the Mothership port-based classification of shore leaves works when you’re imagining a universe of strictly small ports floating in the vasty deeps of space. But what happens in large population centers?

Prospero’s Dream, for example, is an X-class station, so shore leave should cost an average of 500,000 credits there. But the Dream is also home to 5 million people. Does it really make sense that the only leisure activities there are only affordable to multi-millionaires? Not really.

So what was I going to do about shore leave in major population centers (including Prospero’s Dream)? And how was I going to incorporate shore leave into the structure of an open table?

The problem of shore leave was also tangled up with a wider issue of money in Mothership. I also wanted to develop a more robust system for downtime in general, which created its own knot of problems around time-keeping and travel times. (I’ll talk more about downtime in the future.)

STOPGAP SHORE LEAVE

During all of this I was continuing to run sessions. (I’m a strong proponent of prepping enough to start playing and then getting to it. Waiting until everything is perfect is a great way to never start playing at all. Plus, in my experience, there’s nothing better for motivating prep than a really great session; and practical feedback from play and players is really the only way to achieve perfection in any case.)

Shore leave, however, is an essential part of the Mothership gameplay loop, so I couldn’t just skip past it. So I implemented a stopgap system.

First, I decided that all major population centers could be assumed to have a variety of C-class shore leave options. Prospero’s Dream would also have X-class shore leave options.

Second, I didn’t want to prep a specific list of shore leave options until I’d figured out what the actual structure for shore leave was going to be. Without a specific list of options, when a PC wants to take shore leave, I just ask them what their PCs would do for relaxation and then riff off it.  I’ve used this as an opportunity to establish other elements of the setting. (And also create and expand those elements.) For example:

• “I’d just go on a bender for two weeks.” There’s a club on Prospero’s Dream called the Stellar Burn. This is a great opportunity to set it up. (Several sessions later, the PC ended up taking a bodyguard job in the club.)
• “Drugs.” Roll on the random drug table on page 23 of Prospero’s Dream, giving a result of, “Liquid Sword. [+] on Combat Checks for 1d5 turns. Take 2d10 DMG after.” Why would they take that drug? Well, obviously because they’re participating in an underground fight club (that I just made up).
• Slickbay vacations in the VR worlds of the Ice Box.
• A farming retreat, working in the glass domes of the Solarian’s religious gardening compound.

We started by resolving shore leave at the beginning of each session, but we were playtesting a lot of stuff for the beginning of each session and things were getting bogged down. So, based on some post mortem discussions with the players, we decided to experimented with moving shore leave to the end of each session: You’d go on an adventure, rack up Stress, hopefully get out alive, and then resolve shore leave to know how long you were out of commission for.

It made sense, but it didn’t work: Instead of good, solid conclusions, the ends of sessions were dragging out. Plus, when a session ended, people often wanted to head home and hit the sack, so we’d still end up with some PCs who hadn’t resolved shore leave and would need to do so at the beginning of their next session.

So after two or three sessions of that, I bounced it back to the beginning of the session, where it could also get easily folded into the downtime procedures I was slowly bringing online.

CURRENT INTENTIONS

Shore leave is still in a state of evolution and flux in the Tempest Cluster. There are several things I’m currently planning to do.

Shore Leave Menu. I want to create a specific list of available shore leaves, while also leaving open the option for the players to improvise novel experiences their character would want to pursue. This will include multiple options at Prospero’s Dream, but also options scattered around the cluster that would require travel.

Scatter Shore Leave Classes. Prospero’s Dream will have variety of C-Class and X-Class shore leaves, but I want to reserve B-, A-, and S-Class shore leaves for other locations in the cluster. Combined with the downtime travel guidelines, I think this will make them feel like more significant “destination vacations.”

Adventures in Paradise. While it looks like I can’t use “you take a shore leave and it goes wrong” as an effective scenario hook, I could still do stuff like a raid on Pandora Station or “all communication has been lost with the Cretaceous Resort.”

Shore Leave Special Effects. I’m thinking about having additional special effects/benefits that will distinguish shore leave options. Options might include removing conditions, recovery from addiction, speeding up skill training, etc. In combination with variable pricing (“there’s an A-class resort in the next system over, but if you head all the way to Katerineta you can pay half as much for an A-class experience”), this will help motivate the players to seek out specific resort experiences.

The Tempest Cluster was created to be the setting for my Mothership open table. This is a peek behind the curtain for my setting prep.

When I first sat down to design the cluster, I knew a few things:

• As an open table, the PCs would have a home base — a point from which essentially every session would begin.
• I’d read several Mothership adventures, and had a short list of scenarios that I already knew I wanted to use. (This gave me some guidance what the cluster would need so that I could place those adventures.)
• Mothership requires a setting to have some specific infrastructure to work (e.g., ports for shore leave).

I got started with a short brainstorming session, just listing some cool ideas and broad concepts for star systems and planets that I thought would be interesting (or were dictated by the things I already knew the cluster would need). Then I laid that sheet of paper to one side and grabbed two more blank sheets. On one of these I began sketching jump node maps and on the other I started naming and listing features for specific systems.

I knew I wanted to keep the scale of the cluster relatively small. First, if travel time became too large, it would cause problems with keeping the PCs in sync. More importantly, I know that layering material is more effective than dispersing it: It’s more interesting to put three adventures on the same moon and see what happens when their concepts start bumping into each other than it is to, for example, create a whole new system for every adventure.

On the other hand, I wanted the cluster to be large enough that some stuff would be near to the PCs’ home base and other stuff would feel far away. It helped when I realized that, since the nature of the cluster would naturally constrain the open table, I could place the PCs’ home base at one end of the cluster (in what would end up being the Ariel system) and immediately create a “far end” (in the Verstern system). This is also the origin for the Long Road, the series of dark systems between Verstern and Hajar:

There were originally several more dark systems in the Long Road, but they ended up making travel from Ariel to Verstern to lengthy and I needed to adjust it. (In much the same way that I often let players make adjustments to their characters after the first couple sessions of a campaign, I also won’t hesitate to do some quick setting retcons if we discover something isn’t working in actual play.)

HERE THERE BE DRAGONS

I also deliberately DIDN’T fully flesh out every detail of the setting. For example, I could’ve gone through and said things like, “Hajar has exactly nine planets. Hajar-I is a super-Jupiter. Hajar-2 is a small terrestrial planet. Hajar-3 is an all-water planet, and between Hajar-2 and Hajar-3 there’s a binary pair of dwarf planets.”

Filling in concrete details like this can lead you to discover interesting stuff about your setting, but at this early stage I generally prefer to sketch in enough detail to give everything a unique character — Hajar has multiple asteroid belts; the Ternary is filled with lots of Earth-like planets; Mrachni is a black hole — but leave a lot of blank spaces where I can plug stuff in later.

For example, I’ve recently been reading Joel Hines’ Tide World of Mani and Desert Moon of Karth, a pair of linked planet supplements. If I’d already detailed every planet in every star system of the cluster, I’d either be unable to use these supplements or I’d need to open up a new jump point and expand the cluster. Instead, looking around, I can see that there’s plenty of room in the Laxmi system. (I’d previously placed a different adventure in that system, which established that the two major terraforming megacorps are engaged in a large campaign of espionage and sabotage there. So it’ll be really interesting to weave the politics of Mani and Karth into that conflict.)

Similarly, I also left the precise history of the Tempest Cluster rather nebulous. This is somewhat unusual for me, as I often enjoy exploring and developing a setting through its history, but in this case I wanted to let things cook a little longer before nailing down dates to things. (Part of this was also that I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to handle the calendar yet.) After about a dozen sessions of play, however, I ended up with some tangles of continuity — between character backgrounds, scenario setup, and player questions — that needed specificity to work out. My current timeline, therefore, looks like this:

• 90 Years Ago: The Long Road discovered between Verstern and Hajar.
• 80 Years Ago: KAS operations in the cluster abruptly come to an end.
• 25 Years Ago: Golyanova Bratva takes over Prospero’s Dream.
• 15 Years Ago: Ternary discovered.
• 10 Years Ago: Jadis discovered.
• 2 Years Ago: Cloudbank pulls out of the Tempest Cluster.

As you can see, this is still pretty barebones, but it’s enough to make sure that historical cause-and-effect stays consistent. (KAS can’t shut down before they discover the Long Road; the Bratva needs to take over Prospero’s Dream before the Ternary is discovered. And so forth.)

A key question for me in setting these dates was how long the “land rush” in the Ternary had been going on. I wanted it to be recent enough that I could justify having whole new worlds which had been barely been touched, but also long enough that if I had a “colonists have been here awhile and then things went to shit” scenario, then I could slot that in.

Note that leaving room for the adventures you haven’t dreamt of yet means (a) leaving undefined space, but also (b) making sure you’ve got the broad conceptual scaffolding. For example:

• An adventure set on an asteroid? I’ve given myself both the debris fields of Mrachni and the multiple asteroid belts of Hajar.
• Urban adventures? Katerineta is an older colony world with established cities, etc.
• Colony worlds? Gave myself a lot of conceptual space for this.

In many cases, I’ll try to give myself a couple different options. As continuity begins accumulating around one option, it may box other stuff out, so it’s nice to have a fallback.

My inclusion of dark systems also plays a part here: If I ever need more space… well, I guess one of those undefined dark systems actually has some interesting stuff in it!

Of course, not everything needs to be (or should be!) left a cipher. Where you need or want detail, don’t hesitate to lock it down. For example, I knew that I wanted the Ariel system, where the PCs’ homebase would be located, to be fairly barren (as a contrast to all the exciting places they’d travel to). So in this case I did describe and define all the extant planets in the system.

MEGACORPS

Having multiple megacorps in the cluster similarly gives me options: If a particular mission, project, colony, or facility doesn’t feel right for one megacorp, I can assign it to another. Plus, with multiple megacorps in play, I can have them in conflict with each other, and all kinds of adventure scenarios can spill out of that conflict.

From the beginning, I knew that I wanted two megacorps fighting over colonization and terraforming in the cluster. I’d created the name Salem-Watts when I wrote up the description of pseudomilk predators last year: They ran the Kikkomari V colony. I briefly played with the idea of including the Kikkomari system in the Tempest Cluster, but ultimately decided it would instead exist “offstage” in the Oberon Cluster.

Meanwhile, I’d used Behind the Name to generate some names, and that pushed me into Arabic influences for the Hajar and Jadis systems. (I can’t actually reproduce the steps that led me to Tasm and Jadis, but that’s the fun part of going down the research rabbit hole.) The Alshaahin megacorp, with its operations based out of Imliq Station (named after a king of Jadis), flowed pretty smoothly from this.

I added Namir-Radi as a sort of catch-all megacorp for any projects that didn’t fit Salem-Watts or Alshaahin. This has inadvertently, and largely through coincidence, caused it to become the most prominent megacorp in the campaign so far.

The last megacorp, Cloudback, is taken from the Gradient Descent adventure, which I’m planning to incorporate into the open table. My original plan had been to swap out the name “Cloudbank” for one of the other megacorps, but I wasn’t sure which one, so I decided to put a pin in it. Before I had a chance to circle back to that, however, one of my players rolled up an android character and, in exploring their background, I ended up invoking the name Cloudbank.

This turned out to be fortuitous, however, because it led me to develop the “Cloudbank mysteriously pulled out of the cluster two years ago” concept, which has created some low-level intrigue for the players who are paying attention and is also beginning to spin off a lot of ancillary developments that are really interesting, too. (For example, what happens when the megacorp who was providing hospital services to new colony worlds suddenly shuts down all the hospitals?)

CHARACTER BACKGROUNDS

This touches on something else I think about when developing a new setting: I want enough context that we can hang PC backstories off it. Furthermore, I’ve learned the power of being able to give players a couple different choices.

Player; I’m playing a Marine.

GM (Me): Okay, there are a couple military outfits in the cluster. First, there’s the Tempest Mercenary Company. There’s also the Novikov Naval Eskadre based  out of the Verstern system.

For an open table like this, what I’m usually doing is asking for an initial concept pitch (“Tell us about your character”) and then following up by either (a) taking a general idea (“I think I came here to do scientific research”) and making it specific (“you could’ve been working for Namir-Radi”) or (b) prompting them with a question (“if you came out here to research terraformed biomes, how did you end up bumming jobs on Prospero’s Dream?”).

Even with this limited background development, it’s remarkable how much it can end up driving the development of the settings (like the example of Cloudbank spinning off in a completely unexpected direction because someone happened to roll up an android).

PROSPERO’S DREAM

Using Prospero’s Dream as the home base for the open table was a gut instinct. Reading A Pound of Flesh, the supplement where the station was first detailed, I was really intrigued by the three phased fronts and how they’d been cleverly integrated throughout the book to create a palpable sense of passing time and escalating stakes. I saw the contours of how I could bootstrap that structure into an open table to potentially create something really cool, but I knew it would only work if the PCs were based out of the station.

We haven’t played enough to be sure how all that will turn out, but the initial results have been really promising.

On the other hand, having a space station with a population of 5 million as a home base for the campaign also forced me to confront a lot of issues with Mothership (like shore leave being classified by port type, which bizarrely means Prospero’s Dream has no dive joints) sooner rather than later.

The layout issues with A Pound of Flesh (pink text on a pink background?!) also make it incredibly unfriendly to use at the table. I have “completely reorganize all this information so that it’s not a headache to use it” on my To Do list.

TO DO

Speaking of my To Do list, this write-up of the Tempest Cluster is very much a beginning, not an end. My own version of the document has already expanded quite a bit as I add emergent details from character backgrounds (“kinfolk mines? interesting…”) and cross-reference scenario notes (Nirvana is one of the moons of Apsaras; Ypsilon-14 is located in the Hajar system; etc.).

But, as I talk about in So You Want to Be a Game Master, one of the great things about this initial setting write-up is that it also doubles — with little or no change — as a setting briefing for the players that I could post to our Discord.

(In practice, at an open table, many players nevertheless won’t have the opportunity/time to read it. So I have a five-minute spiel for new players sketching in the broad outlines of the cluster, which I can then flesh out with additional details as they roll up their characters.)

Some of the stuff on my lengthy To Do list dates back to when I originally wrote the setting up (stuff that I knew I would need to add at some point), while other needs and opportunities have been discovered through play. Examples of stuff I need/want include:

• A menu of shore leave options that the PCs can choose during downtime.
• Exotic shopping options, where the PCs can seek out non-standard equipment.
• Alphanumeric codes for the dark systems (KU-2B, KU-17, etc.) for easier referencing and keying.
• Name lists for the major cultural groups in the cluster.
• Name the spurs of Prospero’s Dream for easier referencing/keying. (Possibly add urbancrawl layers.)
• Figure out exactly how the NNE Volk 79 security patrols along the Long Road work.
• Where is the Stratemeyer Syndicate?

At the moment, pure worldbuilding stuff — no matter how interesting — is largely backlogged behind finetuning my open table procedures (downtime, life events, job board, journeys, etc.) and scenario prep. So my setting notes are largely only getting expanded as those needs dictate.

Honestly, this is how I do most of my worldbuilding. Every so often inspiration will strike and I’ll start exploring the setting out of pure curiosity, but for the most part I’m designing stuff for play and letting the setting slowly accrete over time.

Which also means that I have only the slightest inkling of what the Tempest Cluster will look like a year from now. Particularly since, if all goes well, the players will begin having larger and larger effects on the state of the world.

And given that this is Mothership, the whole place might have been eaten by an Elder God or invaded by time-traveling aliens unwittingly released by the PCs.

MORE MOTHERSHIP
Mothership Review: Adventure Sphere
Mothership Review: Trifold Adventures
Mothership: Thinking About Money
Mothership: Thinking About Combat
Untested Mothership: Astronavigation
Untested Mothership: Ablative AP
Mothership Monsters: Pseudomilk Parasites & Predators
Unboxing Mothership!