Hi there fellow scoundrels! I’m prepping to start my first campaign of Scum & Villainy and am going to develop a new star sector with my group using a combination of Microscope and Stars Without Number. Does anyone have some advice about how to integrate a system concept into the game rules?
Hi there fellow scoundrels!
Hi there fellow scoundrels!
Kyle, generally you can create a sector just by writing up the systems. If you play a Microscope (or roll up a SWN sector … though that’s probably overkill) you can easily just translate your results into a few systems (blank system sheets should be provided) and put factions up on a factions sheet. You shouldn’t really need anything past that.
Stras Acimovic Great, thanks!
Let me know if you get stuck, or how it goes! ^_^
Stras Acimovic My only question is about assigning Wealth / Crime/Syndicate / Tech level / and Weird values to locations. Are there rules for that or should I just mark what feels right?
What feels right.
Generally there isn’t really a balance issue. If you have multiple wealth 3 planets the universe doesn’t collapse (though acquiring rare or obscure stuff or ship-parts on-world may be easier).
You can roll for it randomly if you like (just pick up 10-15 dice and assign some values to planets/stations in different system. 1-3 is 0 or 1, 4-5 is 2, and 6 is 3, try not to have more than 1 3 per planet unless you have a cool idea), or pick some stuff that seems appropriate.
The only rule I had was that in space opera each “planet” is a lot like a city sector – they’re single biome, only have a few key set pieces rather than extensive world building since you’ll be blasting off shortly.
I know John LL did the first pass most of the planets (I generally named everything and punched up the text before laying it out), and some of the stuff we’d ask is things like “so we don’t have a max industry planet, what does that look like?” or “what is a max wealth, no crime station/planet look like?” and just tried moving things around till we had systems that had a sensible or good feeling. Plus both of us are astro nerds so we like strange physics phenomena (like tidally locked planets, or pure carbon planets).
I know it’s not tidy answers but it’s how we did it ^_~
Stras Acimovic Thanks for the thorough reply, I really appreciate it! I will probably use the SWN planet generation to get some ideas and then adapt the results to S&V using your suggestions.