Category Archives: Project Overviews

Skill for Hire – Introduction

Last Wednesday (May 20th) I ran the first session of a new on-line Star Frontiers game. I’ve been itching to run a game again and I finally pulled the trigger on getting it started. We’ll see how long it lasts.

Game Background

Game Logo

The PCs are employees of Galactic Task Force, Incorporated whose slogan is “Secretaries to Mercenaries, we’ve got a place for you!” They are effectively a mercenary group with a wide range of skills that you can hire out for any kind of job. You can see a more detailed description on the Skills for Hire game page on my wiki.

The plan is to make the games very episodic with each adventure taking only a single session. The goal is to allow anyone that can make a given session the opportunity to play. Each session starts a new mission and it can be run with whoever is available that night. I wanted to accommodate as many players as possible, even if they can’t make every week.

I’m also recording the sessions and I’ll be posting them on-line. The video will go up on YouTube and I’ll be posting the audio-only version as a podcast here on this site (and will list it on various podcast sites as well). The video will be completely unedited and the audio minimally so. More on that when they go live.

Games are Wednesday at 8pm MDT and we play on Roll20. If you think you might want to play and are able to join, feel free to jump over to the Roll20 game page and join. Create a character (instructions on the wiki page) and join us for the next session.

Impact on the Blog

As part of this, I’m also going to return to some of the roots of this blog and be posting the various resources I create for the game as part of my prep. These will be fairly rough and not fully polished but should provide some nuggets you can use from the resources as well as small adventures you could potentially drop into your game if you desired.

This will most likely result in a fundamental shift in my posting schedule and style. Namely, if things go as planned, I’ll be posting more often and the average post length will be smaller as I break up all the information across several posts. For example, I created two new creatures for the first session and those will get posted up as small individual posts to make finding them in the future easier. Similarly, I’ll be posting location maps (when I create new places) as individual posts. Once all the pieces are up, I’ll post up a description of the full adventure linking to all the parts.

All of the posts related to this game will have the “Skills for Hire” tag applied to them in addition to any others. Which should make the easier to find. I’ll also preface the session summaries/game outlines with “Skills for Hire” in the title.

So consider this the first of these small posts. I’ll get the creatures up over the weekend and do the full adventure post as the regular Tuesday post next week. I won’t necessarily get everything posted every week. I just don’t have that much free time. But I’ll try to get the more interesting things up.

I also still plan to do more of the typical posts like I’ve been doing for a while. The timeline posts won’t go away, and I might get back to modeling. The starliner posts has me looking at my custom starship system again so maybe there will be a post soon about that as well.

Going Forward

We’ll see how this goes and if I can keep up this new pace of posting. If there is interest, I might also consider live-streaming the games, either on YouTube or Twitch. I’ll just have to check that my computer is up to it. It didn’t have any issue recording the session locally on Wednesday but I’ll have to see how streaming works.

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for things going forward.

Asset Recovery – Project Outline

Cross section of the CDCSS Nightwind

It’s been kind of a crazy week for me and while I’ve been working on things behind the scenes, between travel for work and getting caught back up once I got home, I haven’t had a lot of free time. Plus I’ve been in a fiction-writing mood and while I’ve broken the 50k word mark on my manuscript, I don’t really want to post anything from this very rough draft.

So today I’m going to post a new project overview for another adventure. This is another one that I’ve actually run before, at least partially, but this version will be a bit more fleshed out. Some of the bits and pieces are already online, like the Ship Dock Crew Lounge I posted last week, which was originally designed as a location this adventure. So let’s dive into this.

Asset Recovery

Project Tag: Asset Recovery

Level

An adventure for 4-6 moderately advanced Star Frontiers characters with level 2-3 Knight Hawks skills. One of the PC’s should be a level 3 pilot in order to fly the ship in the adventure.

The adventure is designed for a single session and was originally run as part of an on-line con back in 2012. This version is slightly expanded.

Premise

The PCs work for the Cassidine Development Corporation (CDC) as troubleshooters that are assigned missions to solve problems for the corporation around the Frontier. A starship prototype, which vanished six months ago, has suddenly turned up under a new name. The PCs are assigned to recover it for CDC and return it to Triad in the Cassidine system

Basic Story

The CDCSS Nightwind is a prototype, para-military freighter that finished completion six months ago at the CDC shipyards orbiting Triad. On its maiden voyage and shakedown cruise, the ship supposedly misjumped on it’s way to Prenglar and disappeared. Now six months later, it has reappeared in the Theseus system registered as the Timeon Star Ship (TSS) Stargift.

The misjump to Prenglar wasn’t a misjump at all but a calculated jump by the astrogator to take the ship astray. Together with the chief engineer, and one of the gunners, they took control of the ship with the help of a pirate vessel at the end of the jump. The three original crew members are listed as the ship’s owners under pseudonyms and the ship is listed as found in the Timeon system and claimed under salvage laws. The Nightwind’s current crew have loaded a shipment of air cars and are awaiting several cargo units worth of StarPlay robots for delivery to the K’sta-Kar system.

The PCs will need to determine if the ship is legitimately salvage or not (it isn’t) gain access to and control of the ship, and successfully return it to the Cassidine system. There is another ship (an East Indiaman Freighter) in the system allied with the Nightwind’s current crew, as well as those that might help the PCs. If they get control of the ship, there will be a pirate ambush waiting for them on the route back to Cassidine.

One of the features of this adventure, in a nod to long time Star Frontiers players, is that one of the ships currently docked at Minotaur Station is the IRSS Gullwind, before the Dramune Run module. This crew and ship are potential allies of the PCs. The Gullwind and the East Indiaman are docked in adjacent berths with the Nightwind (sharing the same crew lounge area).

The two main parts of the adventure are figuring out how to get onboard the Nightwind and then a mini dungeon crawl with the PCs traversing the various decks of the Nightwind trying to capture/incapacitate the crew and take control of the ship while being opposed by the crew and security robots.

Materials Needed for the Adventure

  • Deck Plans for the Nightwind – these were published many moons ago in issue one of the Frontier Explorer.
  • Crew Stats
    • Original Nightwind crew (dossiers provided to the PCs by CDC)
    • Current Stargift crew (to be determined by the PCs)
    • East Indiaman crew (allies to the Stargift crew)
    • Gullwind crew (potential allies to the PCs)
  • Details and stats for the shipment of robots being taken on by the Stargift.
  • Stats for StarPlay contact about the robots
  • Stats for contact about aircar shipment
  • Stats and reaction notes for station security
  • Map of public observation area
  • Map of dock lounge area – This was last week’s post
  • Some basic responses to possible player options for getting on the Nightwind.
  • Stats for Knight Hawks encounter (optional) on the trip back to Cassidine.

Last Thoughts

I have scattered notes for a lot of the pieces of this adventure in notebooks and digital files. Part of the purpose of this project is to get it all collected into a single cohesive form. I already have the beginnings of an adventure outline and I’ll be fleshing that out and posting bits in the months to come.

I ran this as part of an on-line con many years ago and due to some technical difficulties getting started, we ran out of time and the team only got as far as getting onto the ship. But fun was had. I’d like to run this again and so there may be an opportunity for a one-shot on-line session in the coming months and my ultimate goal is actually go to a gaming convention and running this there. I’m looking at Gary Con in 2020 in Lake Geneva, or maybe ORCCON 2020 in LA. Although I may have to wait to go to a con later in the year as ORCCON is just before my birthday and Gary Con is just before a potential work trip to South Africa. We’ll see how it goes.

I also already have a 3D model of this ship. The model was made directly from the deck plans published in the Frontier Explorer so it matches the irregular deck structure exactly as detailed. It’s even one of the few minis I’ve actually painted (although I can’t seem to find it at the moment, my boys have probably made off with it).

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.

 

 

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.