Captain's GLoG - Intermezzo
F. Meheux. Principal Comets from Astronomy by Jean Pierre Ramboson. 1875.
My regular group has just concluded a micro-campaign of Captain's GLoG, a scifi GLoGhack inspired by Scum & Villainy, Stars Without Number, and Mothership. We're playing in Joel Hines' Desert Moon of Karth. I usually do a debrief after our micro-campaigns, but folks have decided to renew for another six sessions, so this is more of a halfway check-in. It's mostly a record of practice: how I design and steward.
You can find all of the session reports so far here:
On hacking
While this isn't my first time running a system I've written or even running a GLoGhack I've cobbled together, this is one of the ones with the most moving parts. I suppose there is no need to be coy; you can find the most up-to-date version of our rules here. If you aren't familiar with The Goblin Laws of Gaming, I recommend this intro from The Mad Queen's Court.
In this hack, I'm working through what I have come to think of as a "minimalist+" philosophy of design. I want the rules to be as concise and consistent as possible, then selectively open up into exceptions when it is cool to do so.
The game basically hums along on a core resolution system: simple d20 + stat versus 10 or the Defense of your target. Difficulty modulation is handled entirely through advantage and disadvantage. If you do add or subtract any numbers it because we're shing the spotlight on something your class does - that is to say, something cool the character is uniquely able to do.
We pair this minimalist design with Mothership's super greebly equipment list. The players vocally loved this. Many pleasant scenes in sessions were spent shopping for gadgets (very scifi) or whipping out just the right gadget for a complicated job (also very scifi). I couldn't tell you the price of one item off that table, but I trust that if we are looking at it, it's to do something cool.
I also tried to avoid having any stats that mapped one-to-one with a physical attribute. We used Insight, Prowess, and Resolve (ripped from Scum & Villainy). This mostly worked, except Prowess ended up a) being strength and dexterity in practice and b) being called nigh constantly. I'll definitely change this before we resume.
One final aside: I wrote four classes for this and adapted three to varying degrees. They have done a great job setting a tone for who the characters are and how they relate to the world. I think as a GM I could do more to ensure that class abilities are relevant to the scene at hand. For instance, I'm pretty sure most of Hora's class abilities have never triggered.
On improvisation
One goal I set for myself for this micro-campaign was to do as little prep as possible. I read Karth cover to cover a couple times. I made a little folder on my desktop with all the reference images Joel Hines thoughtfully provided. Between sessions I would write a session report, then read it over at lunch on the day of our next session.
Karth provides extremely brief location descriptions. The security gunboat that occupied a good three of our sessions unspooled from the following text:
The Devaluation: Cube security vessel. Missile pod still functional and pre-locked on to Fort Vee Cee.
Then mid-session I googled "security vessel deckplan" and started describing rooms as they entered them. I rolled two encounters (the dawn guard and the circus beetles) and set them up with a plausible relation. As the crew made their way to the cargo hold, I looked up this Bastionland post on trade goods and used them to quickly roll up what was in the cargo containers.
Once I describe something I am pretty good at memorizing it, setting it in stone such that it can become a stable reference point for sessions to come. I can still tell you the exactly what the PCs looted and what the PCs left from our first session of The Electrum Archive last September.
When the players ask if something specific is in a scene that could reasonably be there (e.g. "do any of these marines look like they have a Ritalin-II habit?"), I rely on a fate die. I don't futz with the odds: just 50/50, yes or no. When the players encounter an NPC for the first time, I always roll a reaction. This I'll modulate up or down based on how recently they have helped or wronged someone this person might know.
I love an encounter table and, over the course of this micro-campaign, I have come to love an exploding encounter table in more. Encountering some would-be highway robbers is fine, but encountering them AND a holographic oasis is gold. This is something I will absolutely carry forward to future games.
Frequently, I buy time by asking "okay, how do you do this?" or "what does this look like?" I think this is an old and widely disseminated trick. I actually love these kinds of details, especially coming from a PBtA background. If the players come up with a cooler explanation than my improv was going to, I'll defer to their read in a heartbeat.
I think the trick to all of this is to temper improvisation by treating the actual source text as unimpeachable. If Hines wrote something in Karth, that is absolutely true in a way that trumps all of the above. I frequently invoke the text, saying "well, it says right here..." or "oh, actually, I can tell you that..." I think this is critical practice. It provides ribs that the improv can stick to and stops us from free-wheeling into whatever cliches we pull off the top of our heads in play.
On logistics
This is now our fourth micro-campaign, a structure coincidentally inspired by a post by the same author as Karth. Ironically, I do feel a slight tension between the micro-campaign imperative to ask a defining question which we will explore over our a fixed number of sessions and the sandbox format where players more or less bounce between locations getting up to hijinks and building a network of connections.
We went into our last session with the explicit aim of having it be a "season ender," but we still spent most of the session on random encounters, meeting NPCs, and figuring out exploration logistics. I still like the format, but I honestly think Hines' proposed structure would work better in more of a trad game where I was intentionally tailoring encounters on a session-to-session basis to ensure a consistent narrative arc. That suggests to me that there is more writing for me to do on what specifically makes a successful sandbox micro-campaign.
This is the first of our micro-campaigns where there were players who wanted to play but had mutually exclusive schedules. I opted to ask one player to sit out for this round with the promise of preferential scheduling in our next micro-campaign. Not ideal, but I think running on a consistent night of the week is still better than trying to schedule each session individually.
Currently, our server has nine players, of which which three could play and two wanted to but had scheduling conflicts. That feels a touch low, but three people is still a great group size.