Great idea and execution with the Breathless SRD. A few pieces of text refer to a Risk Oracle but I don't see the mechanic defined anywhere. Is the intention that the Risk Oracle is a Check?
soypunk (he/him)
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Some notes after reading it closely, trying to setup a play-through for myself:
1. It seems like how you recruit an NP-CM is left up to the solo player for interpretation (whether you role-play out finding one at the spaceport, make a Brains save to find one, or write up your own procedure) - I don't think I missed a rule or procedure around that, other than your Credit Score being a bit of limiter to NP-CM recruitment but let me know if I misunderstood!
2. The Loyalty Stat wording seems at odds with itself:
NP-CM's Loyalty Stat is equal to your current Credit Score, fluctuating as you gain and lose money in your journeys, with a Stat maximum of 5.
Surely the NP-CM's Loyalty Stat can go higher than 5, right? (As evidenced by the Talent Pool table showing possible Credit Scores of 31+) I think the wording is off or I'm misunderstanding Loyalty as a Stat.
3. The Attack Action notes that when an NP-CM attacks, "roll 1d3 and use the result to calculate both the Stat roll and Attack damage". I'm not clear on how a result of 1-3 is going to correlate to a Stat roll. What is the intent here? I wasn't sure NP-CMs had the core Brain/Brawn Stats but rather it seemed like mostly provided Talents that could be used in the game. Do they also have the Core Stats?
4. On a positive note, the Wild Card concept is a good way to reenforce what seems like an implied setting intention that NP-CMs float from ship to ship looking for work and don't typically stick around to form a long-term bond with the crew. Cool sub-system there!
Sorry for all the questions but thanks for making this. Like Perplexing Ruins on the main page comments, I think a game jam for this would produce some really interesting variants and expansions.
The other touch stone here would be Dan Verssen's solitaire roll & write game: Corellian Smuggler. There 's a YouTube page-through review that would give you an idea of the basic game loop and mechanics. It also has crew hiring/management component that's worth a look.
That said - this is awesome. Thanks for putting the solo mode together, that just moved this game to the top of my play-pile :)
Scott, I don't know how you keep pushing the envelope so consistently and also how some gaming company hasn't just paid you oodles of money to lock you into a room somewhere ... cranking out proprietary gems for them but I guess that's their loss and our gain.
There's a neat Quill-like diegetic thing to be had with this game in that your output could be an After Action Report-style artifact (in fact you could probably use this game to generate the conditions for a Quill game which would be a neat little supplement.)
Um, wow?! It is funny the other day I was thumbing through Perilous Wilds and asking myself "can I just lightly reskin this for Sci-Fi?" Ultimately it seemed like a bit too much work and "dungeon crawling" derelict ships isn't really my thing.
Thank you for Perilous Void, it is extremely well done. I appreciate all the procedure guidance for building cohesive components - a lot of Sci-Fi generator stuff is just a mish-mash of tables that don't feel like they fit together as a whole. This is not that - this is very well thought out. I also appreciate that the cohesive bits do have "boundaries" - so if you wanted a game that took place in a single System you aren't required to also generate a Sector for example (ditto a game that takes place a single World.) Same goes for the Lifeforms -> Society -> Faction ... they fit together if you want the whole big picture but you can also stop at very cleanly separated modular bounds.
Just can't say enough how really well done this effort is, thank you.
Looking forward to this! I find myself nodding along with a lot of your observations and those in the comments.
I'll heartily second the ask for procedures for Trade - or perhaps more broadly what a lot of CRPGs cram into the "starport bulletin board" area: bounties, cargo delivery, passenger transport, escort missions, etc. These things tend to be rather template-y and fit nicely into the procedural framework ethos you have for hex-crawls or point-craws.
The other thing that might be handy would be "Patron" missions - where a randomly generated NPC offers a randomly generated mission ("mission target, mission activity, mission location, mission reward".) You could probably tie this into an expanded Faction procedures section - so the missions roll up to the Faction's goals, etc.
Wow, wow wow! Excited to see these resources. For whatever reasons, West End Games, Wizards, & Fantasy Flight/Edge choose not to include a lot of random tables in their materials. There are a handful of them scattered through maybe a dozen books and two books in particular - the WEG Planets Book and the Galactic Campaign Guide from WoTC. So for folks looking to run a sandbox or play gm-less (coop/solo) it is a bit of challenge to find the right random tables to get the ideas flowing. (Starforged's tables are good, but not a perfect fit. Stars Without Numbers' tables don't work at all for me. A handful of things in Traveller are helpful for Edge of The Empire or Age of Rebellion games but not much.)
My apologies, it was definitely meant with the best of intentions. I'll restate: The atmosphere the work implies looks incredibly compelling, even to someone not well versed in the subject matter or genre. I love the idea of presenting the setting as in-world newspaper and it rekindles memories of playing some of my favorite childhood video games where the setting assumptions were revealed through in-world communication mediums (such as newspapers.) It is making rethink how I present setting information in my own games.