All posts by Tom

Outline of the Ghost Ship Osiris Module Project

This is a project I’m working on with Bill Logan, the creator of the FrontierSpaceTM role-playing game.  This will be a module for that game designed for somewhat advanced characters.  Bill created the general outline of the adventure, the star system, and the PC’s ship, but I’ve been working on a lot of the rest of the details.  I suspect that as we get further along Bill will be adding in additional details and material as well.

As I was writing up this outline, and the one for the Sathar Assault Carrier, I realized that while the spoiler alert icon was an interesting idea, almost everything I’m creating is for the GM side of the screen and so it is all spoilery.  I’ve decided to just drop that icon and not worry about it going forward, both on this project and the others.  On to the outline.

Ghost Ship Osiris

Project Tag: Osiris

Level

A FrontierSpaceTM adventure for 4-6 characters of rank 1-2.

Tagline from the Title Page

A team of corporate troubleshooters is sent to Outpost Osiris to solve a dangerous threat. What they find may change the political, technological, and scientific landscape of the frontier forever.

Premise

The Nebula Vista corporation operates the Osiris mining base in the inner asteroid belt.  The miners uncovered something dangerous a few days ago and have requested help.  The PCs are being sent in to investigate and assist the mining team.

Basic Story

Outpost Osiris is a Nebula Vista Corporation mining and research base on a mineral-rich asteroid in the Duergan’s Star System. They mined deep into the rock, following unusual readings from their mining scanners. They located what they believe to be the ruins of an ancient alien starship, somehow embedded deep in the asteroid’s core. While probing its exterior, they somehow awakened it from its slumber. Its proximity defense system attacked them, and they were forced to retreat to the warehouse complex on the asteroid’s surface. They tended their wounds and sent a request to NVC for a team of troubleshooters to assist.

Unknown to the miners, their discovery attracted the attention of a crew of independent scavengers who believe such a find would bring forth untold riches. The crew, commanded by Captain Thrawl, intercepted the mining outpost’s call for aid and has contacted a group of hit men on Hawthorne (the closest known NVC administration facility) to stop any departing troubleshooter team, or at least slow them down. Thrawl and his crew landed and took over operations at the facility, hoping to get as much salvaged alien tech as they could before the NVC team arrives. Thrawl explored the alien starship and found a very valuable piece of alien tech: a “phase screen” generator, but lost several men in the process of trying to decouple it from the reactor core.

Hiring hitmen is a bold move for Thrawl and his kind. They’re not normally this violent unless they believe they have vast wealth at their fingertips. The scavengers aren’t looking for a fight. They will dump their prisoners and escape with a cargo bay full of looted alien tech at the first sign of an NVC ship approaching, reluctantly abandoning the phase screen generator.

The activities of the scavengers have activated alien security robots which are not moving through the mining complex.  The PCs will need to neutralize the robot threat, pursue Thrawl, investigate the alien ship to remove the phase screen, and fight off an attack by Thrawl and a rag-tag scavenger fleet bent on capturing the phase screen.

Materials Needed

  • System map showing the location of the planets and asteroid belts
  • Star system description (partially done by Bill)
  • Deck plans of PC ship (already done by Bill)
  • Deck plans for Thrawl ship
  • Stats for the various robots
  • Map of Outpost Osiris
  • Deck plans for alien ship
  • Details on the aliens
  • Bio for Thrawl and other significant NPCs
  • Stats for all NPCs, both scavengers and miners
  • Table of rumors for the PCs to know/learn (partially done)
  • Final adventure write-up

Last Words

That’s the basic outline for this project.  This one is slightly different as it is a collaborative project between me and Bill.  As such, I’ll only be posting what I work on here on the blog.  To get all the details you’ll have to wait for the final product.

Now that the three projects are laid out, it’s time to start working on the details.  If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, let me know in the comment section below.

Outline for the Sathar Assault Carrier Project

Silhouette of the Sathar Assault Carrier. Short squat body with a spherical bow with four engines mounted on struts away from the body.As I was thinking about this project, I realized that if you are a player in a campaign and your GM uses any of my sathar material (probably a Star Frontiers campaign), this entire project is one giant spoiler.  Although if you’ve already read through my Sathar Destroyer Technical Manual, then there will only be a few new things in this project beyond the decks themselves.  Those are the bits I’m going to call out with the spoiler icon in all future posts on this subject as I’m going to assume that anyone here has read the technical manual.  If you haven’t read the Sathar Destroyer Technical Manual, then the following warning applies to the entire series.  You’ve been warned.

blue triangle with gold excalemation mark in the middle

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get started.

Sathar Assault Carrier

Project Tag: SatharAC

Overview

This is a project in the vein of my Sathar Destroyer and UPF Assault Scout technical manuals.  It will cover in detail, including maps for every deck, the interior of the Sathar Assault Carrier.  The design of the assault carrier will be based on the game stats and (roughly) the silhouette from the game rules but with my twist on how the sathar design and use their ships.

In addition to the physical design of the ship I include information about how the ship typically operates and information about the larger divisions of the sathar military (beyond that detailed in the destroyer technical manual).

Finally, I’ll include, either as part of this document or as a pair of separate documents, deck plans for the shuttles and fighters used by the assault carrier.  I provided basic information on the shuttles in the Sathar Destroyer Technical Manual but no deck plans.  I aim to correct that.

I’ll also be creating a 3D model of this ship.

Materials Needed

  • Ship design overview
  • Description of Sathar military structure
  • Fighter deck plan and write-up
  • Shuttle deck plan and write-up
  • Ship crew roster
  • Description and stats for any robots on the ship
  • Plans for each unique ship deck and description
  • Ship silhouette/cross-section showing deck arrangement
  • 3D model of ships (one each of the following for the assault carrier, fighters, and shuttles)
    • basic STL file for printing
    • Blender file with materials and coloration for 3D graphics
  • Complete technical manual write-up describing each deck and the ship’s operation

Last Words

That’s the basic outline for this project.  The assault carrier is a big ship.  Based on the game rules, it’s about 380-475 meters long.  I’m suspecting it will be closer to the smaller end but still, that’s going to be a lot of decks to create.  However, many of them will be identical but used multiple times throughout the ship.  It may actually end up having fewer unique decks than the destroyer did but we’ll see how this all falls out in the end.

If you have any thoughts or comments on this particular project, let me know in the comments below.

Outline of the Death at Rosegard Adventure Project

black and white sketch of the village of rosegardThis is the first of what will be the “Outline” series of posts.  I’ll typically do one of these for the start of each project and possibly smaller ones for major sub-projects pieces.  We’ll have to see how it goes.  In these posts my plan is to lay out the basic structure of the project, identifying what will be included, what needs to be created and so forth.  I’ll tag each of these outlines, along with the post related to that project with a tag to make them easily identifiable.  For this particular project, the tag is “Rosegard” as is called out below.

The first three outlines, for my initial projects, will probably be a bit more fleshed out than later ones since I’ve been thinking about them a bit, or in the case of this one, already mostly finished it.  Or it may be that things go on, these will get more detailed as I’ll be better about thinking of things in advance.  We’ll have to see.  Also, these first ones won’t be open to much debate as they are projects that are fairly well along.  For future projects however, I will be taking input and idea from commenters and Patreon supporters to provide direction on what is created.

This particular project, Death at Rosegard, is an adventure I ran for my on-line Star Frontiers game and I have all the major pieces in some form, I just need to clean them up and present them.  So hopefully it will go pretty quickly.  That’s not true of the other initial projects and any future projects I create.

Let’s get started.

Death at Rosegard

Project tag: Rosegard

Level

An adventure for 4-6 beginning characters.  This was literally written for a group of 6 brand new characters as their first adventure.

Premise

The PCs work for a mega-corp (Streel in this case) which has an arrangement with the small village of Rosegard to operate a mine near the town.  One of the mining staff has been murdered and the PCs are sent to investigate.

Spoiler Sidebar

These outline posts are going to be, by definition, spoilery.  It can’t be helped.  But then again, I think the main audience for this material is going to be game masters more than players.  However, if you want to be a player in these adventures and have your GM run them, I’ll try to flag out things to skip so you don’t ruin the surprise.  To do so I’ll flag spoilery sections with this blue and gold warning mark:

blue triangle with gold excalemation mark in the middle

If it appears near a heading, skip to the next section.  If it appears next to a paragraph or bullet item, you only have to skip that small bit.  Finally, when I do a post about one of these spoiler topics, I’ll put the warning icon right at the top and that means you may want to skip the entire article.  I may not always be successful in tagging everything but I’ll try.  You’ve been warned.

In this particular article, I think the only thing you need to skip is the Basic Story section coming up and a couple of bullet items in the “materials needed” section.

Basic Story spoiler warning icon

One of the mine staff is a sleeper agent for the sathar and has been recently activated.  He has been slowly over the past several months been “liberating” supplies from the mining facility and providing them to his sathar handler.  He has been aided recently by someone from the town providing supplies as well.  His actions were discovered and caught off guard, he killed the discoverer.  He then disposed of the body in a way to attempt to make it look like it was done by the native fauna but that failed.

The PC’s are sent to attempt to find the murder and in the process should uncover the sathar connection, discover another sathar agent unconnected to the town, and a small sathar base in the mountains.  In addition, they will get to interact with the village, meet the inhabitants and possibly form some connections to the village.  There is also the person in the village that is aiding the sathar agent at the mine to discover

Materials Needed for the Adventure

  • World map showing the location of Rosegard in relation to other points of interest
  • Area map of the countryside around the village and the mine
  • Village map (rough draft appears above)
  • Mining compound map
  • Stats and bios of the mining staff
  • Stats and bios of the villagers
  • spoiler warning icon Map and bio for location with the external agent and how he’s connected to the story
  • spoiler warning icon Map and stats for the sathar base
  • Various bits of background and history for the planet and area
  • A “Where to go from here” section with further story ideas

 

Last Words

And there we go, a basic outline for the adventure and a list of what is needed.  Normally that “materials needed” section would be the final bit of the outline but seeing as this is the first one, I thought I’d talk about it and how it will be used.  At a most basic level, that list is the roadmap for upcoming blog posts.  Those are the bits and pieces I’ll need to develop (and share) as I build the adventure.

The list will probably be incomplete and often a bit vague in the beginning as I’ll think of other things that need to be added along the way.  It’s not my intention to come back and edit it as we go but I might do a post at the end to compare what was made to what I originally envisioned, in part to just see how it fell out and partially as a learning tool for myself to get better at planning and estimating what is involved.

In this particular case, most of what is on that list already exists, either as notes, sketches, rough drafts as I have already run the adventure.  We’ll be working on turning those notes and drafts into final forms over the coming weeks.

What do you think about the outline format?  Are there things you’d like to see included?  Things that need more detail?  Should I not worry about the spoiler alerts?  Let me know in the comments below.

 

 

Contacting Me

Iclassic brass rotary dial telephone would love to hear from you!  If you have suggestions, comments, or questions about any of the stuff I post or am working on feel free to reach out to me.  If you do want to reach out, there are quite a number of ways to get a hold of me.

The most obvious is to comment on the post here on the site you want to discuss. I’ll respond here as well and we can have a public discussion on the topic that anyone that comes after can read and learn from.  This works best for discussions specific to the post in question.

If you want or need a non-public discussion, feel free to e-mail me at tom[at]expandingfrontier.com.  I check my e-mail regularly so you should get a fairly timely response although it definitely won’t be immediate.  If you are a Patreon supporter at the Senior Advisor level or higher, you will also have a private e-mail channel to contact me at.  Those e-mails will typically get a faster response, or at least a higher priority in responding to them.

If you are a Patreon supporter you can always contact through Patreon or on the Discord server as well.

Beyond that, I’m active on social media in a variety of places and you can find me in those venues by clicking on the social media icons in the sidebar.  Twitter (I’m @dagorym) is probably best as I typically have my Twitter feed up on a side screen during the day but my phone will ping me when I get direct messages at any of the other locations as well.

So don’t be afraid to contact me.  I want to interact with those reading the blog and supporting me on Patreon.

That said, I’ll probably be off-line from now until Tuesday (May 8, 2018) as my wife and I are headed out of town for our 24th anniversary and for at least part of the time will be places where there is no internet or cell service.  I’m going to try to get a post queued up to post tomorrow but beyond that I’ll be back next week.

Some Example Content

After I posted my announcements about this site on my various social media platforms, someone asked about content samples.  The plan to post some examples was already in the works as part of launching this site so here we go.

Let’s start with this one, the image I’m using as my cover image on the Patreon campaign.

Collage of various pieces created for the Assault Scout Technical manual showing the range of items produced from sketches to deck plans to write-ups to 3D models and printed 3D objects.

This showcases a few of the bits that went into making the Assault Scout Technical Manual (link downloads the PDF) that I released back in Nov 2017.  The deck plans on the right fade from my initial sketches through different iterations to the final labeled deck plan.  Then comes the cross section created to show the relative positions of the decks in the ship.  Next comes a page from the technical manual where that cross section image is featured.  The yellow ship is the full 3D model of the ship based on the deck plans and the final image is the 6″ printed version of that model (1/333 scale) fading from unpainted to painted (with a different color scheme that the digital image).

I had posted most of the images used in this collage on-line in the process of creating them.  Here’s a few links to some of the posts with full versions of the images:

  • The unpainted model  – The image at this link is actually the 4″ one unpainted but there are pictures of all of the various sizes I printed including the 12.6″ (10mm scale) version of the model
  • A Star Frontiers logo I made (that I’m trying to get permission to make a patch out of) that used the painted digital 3D model used to make that cross section image.
  • The painted physical 3D model – This is actually the 7.6″ (6mm scale) version and is sitting here on my desk next to me as I write this.
  • The cross section image – unlabeled in this case.
  • The unlabeled deck plans

In addition to the Assault Scout Technical Manual, I also created a Sathar Destroyer Technical Manual (link is to the PDF) back in 2014 to describe that ship.

Here are a couple of other large maps I made, recreating the big poster maps that came with the original Star Frontiers boxed sets.  Unfortunately I can’t to link to the full files since I was asked by WotC not to and they own the IP

Original Port Loren map digitally recreated
This is recreation of a fan map of the Port Loren starport redone in the same style as the original map.
Space station map from the Knight Hawks box set digitally recreated.

Here’s a “family portrait” of many of the 3D ship models I’ve created (this one predates the assault scout model).  All of these models were designed to be used as tabletop minis.  Several are based on the old Star Frontiers metal miniatures and are replicas of them.

Family portrait of a number of digital models I’ve created

Finally, I’m going to link to you my collection of Two Sheet Locations on DriveThruRPG.  These are small four page write-up (the first 4 are free) that provide a map, location description, and NPC for use in your games.  The are mini versions of the types of things that I’m hoping to produce with this project.  The only reason that project stalled was that I reentered grad school for my Masters of Library Science degree and just didn’t have the time to keep producing them.

I hope that gives you a feel for some of the things I’ve created in the past and what to expect in the future.  In addition, you should check out my posts (published under my dagorym handle) on the Arcane Game Lore blog to see some the “behind the scenes” materials I’ve posted in the past.

Initial Projects

To get this project started, I plan on working on three initial projects.  This will help me get into the swing of things and figure out my workflow for this site and Patreon.  The three initial projects are detailed below.

Sathar Assault Carrier Technical Manual

I created a detailed set of deck plans and write up for a Sathar Destroyer several years ago.  Part of the reason was to create a miniature for the ship.  Since there is no miniature for the Assault Carrier, I thought that might be a fun project to tackle.  The project will include:

  • a full set of deck plans for the ship
  • a write-up on the ship and its operation
  • a 3D model of the ship that can be printed for use as a miniature
  • a fully textured 3D model for use in digital images

 

Death at Rosegard

This is a complete adventure that I recently finished running for my home group.  While it is based on Star Frontiers, the adventure could be used in almost any system.  This project will include:

  • several location maps (town, mine facilities, and other locations)
  • numerous NPC bios
  • full adventure write-up
  • new creatures

 

Ghost Ship Osiris

This is a module for the FrontierSpace RPG by Bill Logan that I am working on with him.  This will be a DWD Studios product when completed so I need to talk with Bill a bit about what I can share but given his license on the property, probably most of the things I create can be shared here.  This project will include:

  • Several ship deck plans
  • Several robots
  • NPCs
  • Locations (with maps)
  • A full adventure module
  • possible 3D models of the ships

 

Those are the project I’m looking at starting off with.  You can also expect to see tweaks to the web site as the content expands and I look more at the presentation  Is there one you’d like to see prioritized over the others?  Any thoughts on other types of materials you’d like to see produced?  Let me know in the comments.

Welcome to the Expanding Frontier

Welcome to the Expanding Frontier. This blog and site is dedicated to creating gaming resources focused on science fiction role-playing games.  I’ll be posting maps, locations, ships, vehicles, characters, and more that you can use in your games.  I’ll also be talking about the tools and processes I use to to create the materials.

I’ll primarily be focusing on creating adventures and all the bits and pieces that go along with that.  There will occasionally be other stand-alone or one-off projects as well.

A lot of the work I do is supported by may Patreon campaign.  Some of the posts that appear on the blog will be only available to Patreon supporters but most will be publicly available.  If you want to help support the work I do, just hit the “Become a Patron” button on the right and sign up.

This is very much a work in progress so don’t be surprised to see changes and updates to the site and the things I work on as time goes on.  If you have suggestions or requests, feel free to comment below.