Tag: GM

Before I get into describing my battles with Obsidian Portal, or Roll 20 let me take you through the reason why I have bothered with these tools that need dedication to learn.

Today I describe the basic setting of the Lepskin Sector, next week will be the Rebel Council, and the week after will be a few of the things I’ve learned putting both sets of ideas into Obsidian Portal and how doing so can create a better setting.

I understand and encourage players to be spontaneous and I want to give the players in my group a place that isn’t just a set of random set piecess made up from flash cards. I want it to be epic with weird and fun places, as well as dark corners where criminals willingly tread, and to get this a heightened sense of connection to continuity helps. This creates a short hand between the players and the GM to change and detail interactions based on where they take place. A talk in a smoke filled and dimly lit tavern is going have a very different feel and expected outcome than a brightly lit pastel walled open air café.

When coming up with places I used a few tropes to setup specific places for players to know almost exactly what is going on, and others where I try to subvert what the players are expecting. The places then begat a small initial narrative and the two styles together have brought many notable Non-Player Characters (NPCs).

I’ve been working on a setting called the Lepskin Sector. This setting is on the outer fringes of the Star Wars galaxy, but still has a connection to the core and civilization. From a basic narrative standpoint, to be useful to the player, the long term game world needs a few things.

Two Cans and String

The first thing the party needs is a home base for them to come back to and lick their wounds and provide communication to higher ups. For this I created Catiwhinn, an asteroid complex that allows for ships of fairly large size to dock and be repaired. The Rebel Council has ties to the station giving preferential docking and repair rates to the player group. The station is newly located on a trade route that allows for secretly shipping almost anything that people reasonably need and can pay to have smuggled into the sector with little hassle.

An integral thing to any campaign is a change to the status quo. The players are charged with preventing this change, or to channel the change in a new fashion with failure being an unwanted option. Usually this change is a McGuffin that the ‘Big Bad Evil Guy’ is controlling and using to impose their will. To start the first campaign we’ll have a deep space shipyard to deal with. The story is that after ten years spent fixing the yard, the current Imperial Governor is using it to amass a fleet to control the entire sector and expand it into peaceful neighboring systems.

Since The Shipyard is hidden, the party needs a public enemy camp that is identifiable and dangerous to the group. I created Jambat to fulfill this need. Jambat is a planet that is mostly a savanna with small hills and deep gorges carved by wandering rivers. Settled a long time ago, the remoteness of the planet has caught the new governors’ eye as a training facility which has been constructed just recently. This very controlled planet is training a massive amount of troops to help supply the shipyard with crews and personnel.

From that beginning a simple adventure could be had, but I want something more for the players to connect with. The sector needs places for high society and high power shenanigans. Here I have created three places to catch the players’ imaginations.

The Big Three

Slovant is the home of a corporate colony sent out to follow up on reports of a vast natural cave system that was rich in minerals and had enough heat to grow food from the geothermal energy. This corporate sponsorship of the colony has directed it ever since it was founded, from mining to processing and finally manufacturing. The people working know that their conditions aren’t the same as the contracted working conditions across the sector and have been able to wrest reasonable working conditions from Sienar Corporation.

Xix started off as a place to put those too ‘independent’ for easy integration into the larger colonies on Lepskin and Slovant. This has caused much tension as the planet turned into an easy place to start manufacturing and has quickly overtaken the original colonies in its ability to produce saleable items. The independent corporations of Xix have become a driving force in the sector while trying to turn a blind eye to many of the excesses of the ruling oligarchy.

Lepskin is a colony that was sent as an academic campus from the Coruscanti Academy and connections from this slowly led to the planet becoming the sector capital. While there is a united front against any perceived or actual external threat to the sector, the intra-sector politics have become almost deadlier than the senate floor. The collocation of government and academic studies has led to resentment from several of the manufacturing worlds that believe their voice is drowned out because of the closeness of the Intelligentsia. The government understands how precarious its position is and the governor has taken militaristic steps to ensure the control of Lepskin is inviolate.

A Better Idea

With these five planets, and nineteen more, I can send players across the sector on almost any sort of mission allowing for a ready built tone wherever they go. After introducing them to a planet or area I can bring up each of them as settings and the players know what they’re getting.

These broad strokes are what the players, and you, have access to read and start to look at and possibly create links between. Any suggestions will be considered; specifics have a good chance of being integrated while broad concepts could take longer.