Scum & Villainy
I’ll be running my first session of S&V in about 12 hours. This will be my first time ever playing any Forged in the Dark product. I’ve read both S&V and BitD, and watched some of John’s campaign on itmeJP’s channel way back.
As per the rules of the game we’ll begin with character and crew creation before moving to the Starting Situation. The group (of three players) has been kind enough to decide on the Stardancer before we even sit down at the table, meaning I’ve had some time to mull over potential factions and elements to introduce.
All in all I feel pretty well prepared in my non-preparation.
Regardless, I feel compelled to ask: Got any tips?
1. S&V can suffer from the ‘ship problem. If it’s one person’s ship, they can over-ride the others on where it goes. Figure out why they are in this together, and how they resolve disputes about where the ship goes.
2. Think about how the systems are connected, so that you know how faction status will interact when they change planets. Some factions will have a lot of pull on one planet, but little to none elsewhere; others will be present on lots of worlds. This really effects how important pissing off individual factions is.
3. Perhaps this has changed from the playlets, but it was somewhat unclear how different lanes and moving undetected in space worked. Unless this has been clarified in the final version, you should decide as a group what ‘being stealthy’ in space and using dark spacelanes actually entails: risks and obstacles that might be encountered there.
4. Again, I have not played since the playtest, and this may have been resolved, but formerly the structure of how magic/the force worked was very vague. Have a good idea of what kinds of magic you want to exist in your campaign so that someone committing to a channeler character can work with that.
Well, since this post is two days old, I’m not too sure how my good my advice will be now, but two things I did:
1) When selecting factions for crew relations during crew creation, I created a “short list” of factions of each type (Hegemony, Syndicate, Weird) for the players to choose from. I chose from faction I thought would be interesting in play, narrowing the choices the players have to make at the table, but letting the players make the final choice lets them steer their crew in a direction they find intesting.
2) When running sessions, I created a technique I call the trouble menu. Before the job begins, I try to come up with 3-5 answers to each of the following questions, and use that as a source of inspiration when a complication or devil’s bargain comes up during the game.
Q1) Consider the complication (that you created, or selected/rolled from the job tables). How does the complication present problems?
Q2) Consider the Work (that you created, or selected/rolled from the job tables). Why is the Work difficult?
Q3) Consider the plan and detail the players select (see pg 148). What would they NOT want to happen for the plan to proceed?
Everything worked out great in the session! They planted some of the scoundrel’s illicit drugs on some workers and got shot it the gut for it, and then there was a chase before they crashed a car in front of their locked ship.
With one exception a lot of your tips didn’t really apply to what came up in the first session. I’m happy to take them for future sessions though. Thanks for the help!