Starships & Scoundrels Press

Sci-Fi TTRPG Resources & Commentary

  • Player Driven Loot

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    I’ve always found the way many RPG games dole out loot to be a bit strange. Many games encourage you to roll on a table based on some sort of tiered approach to determine the loot the players get, and then you try to find a way to fit it into the narrative of whatever adventure they’re on. But sometimes it’s very odd and you get very weird situations like defeating a fire elemental dropping a +1 shortsword in 5e, and that has been hard for me.

    Because of this, I tend to not roll on the tables to determine loot for my games, but that can be a bit cumbersome, especially when playing Voidrunner’s Codex. There’s no real loot system or advice in the book, you’re more encouraged to check out Trials & Treasures and determine how many credits they should earn per level by converting gold to credits, and then kind of figuring it out from there. Even if I don’t use the roll tables in 5e, I can at least look at them for an idea of what would be appropriate loot for the challenge they just fought. No such reference exists for Voidrunner’s Codex.

    I’m currently working on a supplement to help GMs who prefer rolling on tables for loot to determine what loot comes up from encounters, however, the approach I’ve been using is that the only loot they’re going to find on enemies is the gear they’re wearing – usually nothing special – or some general gear or medicinals they can find searching cabinets, containers, etc. If they want the good stuff like specialized modified weapons, advanced gear, etc. they need to seek it out themselves.

    Players Planning Sessions

    I like to think of this as offloading the mental load of determining what adventures the players will undertake and what they’ll find there onto the players themselves. If they are about to come into contact with a powerful alien creature that they know spews acid, can crawl on walls, and spawn more little aliens, they’ll want to be prepared for that.

    This is when you would encourage them to look for equipment that’ll help them. Some quick ideas are:

    • Ways to get acid resistance
    • Increase their own mobility
    • Have equipment that works in an area of effect.

    As an example, these can come in the form of an armor mod, jetpacks, and grenades. Grenades I leave pretty readily available – they just need to find a weapon shop – but the others I usually require for the players to acquire from a location or find a specialized seller.

    This results in checks to find information, a travel sequence for them to get to the location with the gear they need, and then either spending credits to obtain them or going on a short adventure to find them. They then need to travel again to where they plan on fighting that strange alien creature, equip what they need to fight it, and then prove their preparation brought them success.

    Encounter Design

    With this idea in mind, you can change the way you drop hints and encounters. You can throw a lot more powerful creatures at your characters as quest hooks if they are able to learn more about it ahead of time and prepare by seeking out specialized equipment. It also rewards player ingenuity, and makes them a lot more proactive in the way that they engage with the setting.

    This does also mean you need to provide plenty of opportunities for players to study and learn about threats they are going to face ahead of time. Luckily in a sci-fi setting, information is a lot easier to access than in a fantasy setting (though there are of course ways to mitigate this in fantasy, especially if you are playing in a high magic setting). Encouraging the players to speak with NPCs, hack into terminals, and spy on locations will present plenty of opportunities for them to learn more about a future threat.

    Location Design

    This does mean you need to focus more on the locations that these encounters serve. You need to carefully study whatever statblock you are using, see what tools that creature has to defend itself and its layer, and create the location to best serve that creature. It ups the danger, but also better rewards any preparations the players make to take on that encounter.

    However, not every preparation has to deal with a monster hunting style mission. If they want to plan a heist, then they’ll need equipment for surveillance and scouting to gain more information from the location, infiltration equipment tailored to the defenses they discover, and possibly an escape plan in the form of a vehicle. All of these can lead to additional smaller missions, adventures, etc. for them to get better equipped. At minimum, at least, it’ll serve as a credit sink.

    Choosing Rewards

    Since players are now deciding where they want to go so they can get the equipment they need to accomplish a larger goal, picking out loot drops becomes a lot easier. They just defeated a bunch of ruffians? The loot is their blasters, combat knives, and synthweave armor (I tend to make these damaged if they are looted after a fight). They fought a xenid? There’s no real loot by default, but maybe they can harvest their acidic blood to create a compound.

    The real loot is going to be in secured armories, storage facilities, and as rewards from NPCs, all of which has been informed to the players ahead of time as they seek to get better equipment. The best part here is you don’t need to have an integral knowledge to how their characters work to know what loot might actually be useful to them – they’ll tell you what loot is useful to them by actively seeking to acquire it.

    Downtime

    This type of gameplay does lean more toward adding more downtime to your game. Downtime is a great opportunity to acquire new information, but also a great way to get any crafting needed to get the equipment players need. It helps resolve player subgoals, gives you a bit more information toward what the player cares about, and helps further the timeline along to make your player characters’ progression make just a tiny bit more sense.

    Overall, incorporating this method of loot acquisition helps alleviate the burden on you as the game master from having to prepare these things ahead of time. You know what they’re looking for, so you can plan your adventures and sessions with the loot they’re looking for in mind, so you can put more of your energy to making interesting locations and encounters.

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  • Voidbringer Session 49 – The Xenid Queen

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    Something I want to try is writing session reports of how some of my games go. I probably won’t be consistent here, and this first one is starting at Session 49 of my Voidrunner’s Codex game, but I figured it would be a fun writing exercise, and I get to boast about my players and their fantastic problem solving skills at the height of danger.

    Since we are jumping in Session 49, a bit of background from the last few sessions is probably needed for a little context.

    The voidrunners had been spending several sessions now on a massive space station operated largely by space pirates, and have been integrating themselves mostly as a means to get upgrades to their capital ship and gather information.

    Over the course of their time there, they found that the main antagonist faction, the Imperium, had infiltrated the ship and had implanted a xenid hive in an old, abandoned deck of the ship. The xenids began spreading throughout the ship, killing indiscriminately and tearing apart everything they could see. The last few sessions involved them gathering data, equipment, and tools to help deal with the xenid queen at the center of the hive, killing the Imperium magistrate in charge of this operation, and traveling through the infested space station to the central location of the hive.

    In this old, abandoned deck they fought off some xenids upon entry by throwing incendiary grenades down a hatch to lure out the xenids one by one. Jumping into the main part of the deck, they located some space pirates that had hid themselves in an old storage closet, and convinced the pirates to help them take down the xenid queen. They chose not to learn their names. A short trip later, and they reached the hive.

    We are now caught up to this session.

    The hive itself was set in a massive, abandoned sports arena that the pirates had once used to set off some steam before this part of the ship fell into disuse over the last few decades. The large, open area had about two dozen xenid eggs spread throughout, and the queen was attached to the ceiling on her massive egg sac. Every round, 1d4 xenid larvae popped out of the eggs (basically weak horde minions), and she’d use her legendary actions to summon xenid stranglers (think intellect devourers but their method of instant drop-to-zero is more akin to Alien).

    The xenid queen herself had a 15 ft. reach with her tail attack, which could do quite a bit of damage, and she could grapple and restrain a target if she hit them twice with her 10 ft. reach claw attacks. She had a pretty high 210 hp health pool, and gained 20 temporary hit points at the start of her turn while connected to her egg sac.

    Invictus-3, the android engineer of the party, brought his two remaining drones that hadn’t been destroyed on their journey down, a shield drone and a healing drone, which both proved pivotal in keeping Rust T, their demolitions expert’s health high enough to survive the onslaught of attacks as he ran around with his massive rocket hammer and grenades to clear up the horde and deal big damage to the queen itself.

    Vido, the naato sniper spy of the party, and their newest member after their houseki trooper was killed by a powerful psionic Imperium magistrate, kept the xenid strangler count low by picking them off when he could. Invictus-3 kept up fire damage on high-priority targets, which was important because xenids lost 2 AC and had disadvantage on attacks and dexterity saving throws until the end of their next turn when they took fire damage.

    Zenobia, the psion of the party who specializes in healing and support, but can also dish out big damage with psionic blasts. She helped clear out a lot of xenid eggs before focusing on the queen, who got disconnected from her egg sac when she was finally bloodied.

    When they had defeated the Imperium magistrate in a prior session, Zenobia had attained a way to psionically disconnect her from her hive. However, to do so required the xenid queen to be bloodied. With 9 hit points left, and barely dodging a bite attack that was guaranteed to cause her to make death saves, Zenobia succeeded in her check to bring down the xenid queen, and end the infestation that had plagued the station.

    Within minutes, emergency messages were sent to their personal communicator devices from the panicked surviving pirates who weren’t sure what was going on as the xenids fell, disconnected from the hive. Zenobia took a selfie with the body of the xenid queen to send on blast to the pirates of the ship, and immediately got the equivalent of a restricted call from what is presumed to be the head pirate of the station, demanding an audience and an explanation.

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  • Keying a Dungeon

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    There are almost as many ways to key a location as there are locations to key. What’s most important when doing so, however, is that you choose a format and method that best suits the way you process information and run games. Here is a template that I like to use for most of my locations:

    # – Room Name

    DESCRIPTION: [Room size, basic set dressing]

    INHABITANTS: [List of NPCs, their statblocks, and page number for the statblock]

    CONTENTS: [Things players can interact with: containers, technology, traps, hazards, etc.]

    EXITS: [What type of exit(s) (door, passage, etc.), and their direction (North, Northeast, South, etc.)

    The idea here is I read out the things in order as they appear on the list, and mostly decide how to word it on the fly. Since I like to design my locations with multiple routes, this helps me be able to quickly describe an area despite the situation the player characters are in.

    Note: You may need to reference my post on Derelict Crawling for some mechanics I refer to, such as Alert level. Additionally, the method used above is based off the DICE method of room description detailed in Level Up: Dungeon Delver’s Guide. I do also use their NODES method for deciding what’s in the room, which is not important for this post, but I do recommend it.

    Here are more practical examples from a location I have written for my Voidrunner’s Codex (“VRC”) game. I don’t know how I exactly read out the descriptions during the session, but for this post I read my notes and just did some free writing to spit out a description I might’ve said. I’ll include a bit of an in-depth explanation as to why I do or say certain things, but you don’t really need to do that sort of thinking on the fly. Just do your best to convey the information in front of you, or feel free to write your read-aloud text ahead of time if you need help. If you do, I’d place it just before or just after the Description.

    2 – CCTV Room

    DESCRIPTION: 20×30 rectangular room; disabled monitors; empty chairs & desks

    INHABITANTS: None

    CONTENTS:

    • Projector: DC 21 Engineering check to restore power to the projector, revealing a corrupted, yet still somewhat usable map of the Crow’s Nest. A simple 3-D rendering of the various rooms, each labeled with a letter and a number. This room is labeled as “A-2”, and shows three blinking dots. A room fairly disconnected from here separated by corridors and other intertwining rooms is labeled “A-5”, and has 5 blinking dots as well. The corridor leading up to A-5 has four blinking dots, and is labeled as “A-4”. The rest of the rooms do not display any additional information.
    • CCTV Monitors:DC 21 Intelligence (hacking tools) check to access the security cameras, granting views to The Spine, The Hangar, and The Warrens.
      • The Spine: Destroyed terminals; acid burns across the floors, walls, and ceiling; several vents have been blasted open; bodies of researchers litter the floors
      • The Hangar: Xenids (VRC pg. 350) crawling along the ceilings and walls; xenid eggs attached to various parked ships
      • The Warrens: Active battleground; Void Crew behind last-minute barricades holding ground against xenids; Several pirates fleeing and trying to barricade themselves within abandoned storefronts

    EXITS:

    • East to locked doorway to 03 – Security Gear Storeroom
    • South to locked doorway to C1 – Corridor
    • West to passage to 01 – Security Checkpoint

    This is near the beginning of the dungeon, so they are likely to enter via 01 – Security Checkpoint. Looking this over, I may say something along the lines of the following:

    “You step into a rectangular room. Its walls covered in disabled security monitors, each attended to by abandoned, emptied tables and chairs. At the center of the room is a large table with a projector, which is currently powered off. On the eastern and southern walls are closed doors with bio-metric panels.”

    Since there are no occupants, I will skip that step, but that information is delivered by using words such as, “abandoned” or “empty.” The projector is a specific interactable object that I make sure to bring attention to, and the CCTV monitor interactable is mentioned early on as they’re part of the set dressing of the initially referenced monitors.

    This type of method front-loads all the important information for the players to begin making decisions, and any further clarifications on the room can be achieved through play. The point here is though, by keeping the description short, you alleviate yourself of some of the pressure of prose and more quickly turn the action back on the players to drive the story forward.

    You can of course use the information you wrote for the dungeon room to create your own read-aloud text to include in your notes. However, I personally always find myself rewording or skimming read-aloud text for key words to make my own description, so I’ve largely relegated myself to just having list of things to mention, then coming up with a description on the fly.

    Next, we have an example of a more involved room with a hazard:

    3 – Security Gear Storeroom

    DESCRIPTION: 50×50 ft. chamber; a ‘clean’ smell in the air as if it’s been sanitized

    INHABITANTS: None

    CONTENTS: Eighteen containers: a dozen containers opened and emptied, six sealed security gear containers; nozzles on the ceiling

    EXITS:

    • South to locked doorway to C3 – Corridor
    • West to locked doorway to 02 – CCTV Control Room

    Security Gear Containers (Trapped). Locked with a bio-metric lock. Each requires a DC 14 Dexterity (thieves’ tools) or DC 14 Intelligence (hacking tools) check to access.

    • Failure: Neurotoxin gas trap (VRC pg. 269); +1 Alert Level. If the trap is failed, and all the players are paralyzed, then the players are taken captive by the Void Crew pirates.

    Container Contents

    • Bug (Audio Visual)
    • x15 chemical light sticks
    • x10 handcuffs
    • Long-range microphone
    • Multi-spectrum contacts
    • x3 proximity alarms

    Since there is a trap in this room, I like to include some language that’ll warn the players that something is amiss, potentially dangerous, and needs further investigating. If they enter this room from Room 2 – CCTV Control Room, I might say something like:

    You enter a 50×50 ft. square chamber from the west doorway. The air smells too clean, as if the room has been heavily sanitized recently. You see eighteen containers, twelve of them opened and devoid of contents, and six containers which remain sealed with a biometric lock and each labeled ‘Security Gear’. On the ceiling, there are nozzles equally spaced from each other, pointing down. To the south, there is another door with a biometric lock.

    This, I believe, communicates a decent amount of information to the player. There’s loot that is locked away, which they would know they could probably do some sort of Dexterity (Thieves’ Tools) or Intelligence (Hacking Tools) check to bypass. They also know there are nozzles on the ceiling, which in a sci-fi setting usually means some sort of gas trap.

    Finally, let’s look at a room with some NPCs to interact with:

    C4 – Corridor

    DESCRIPTION: 20 ft. wide passage; acrid scent in the air; blaster fire along the walls; acid-burned plassteel; discarded ration containers and empty alcoholic beverages

    INHABITANTS: Void Crew guards protecting the entrance to 11 – Captain’s Command. Aggressive at Alert Level 3, otherwise will demand reason for presence in The Crow’s Nest.

    • x2 Void Crew Agents (Agent VRC pg. 357)
    • x2 Void Crew Elite Guards (Bounty Hunter VRC pg. 357)

    CONTENTS:

    • Dead xenid stranglers (VRC pg. 351) scattered along the floor
    • Destroyed remains of combat drones (VRC pg. 298) near the door entrance
    • Sandbags piled on top of each other, forming makeshift barricades

    EXITS:

    • East to locked blast door (VRC pg. 266) to 11 – Captain’s Command
    • South to passage to 09 – Officer’s Mess

    There is a bit more detail in this room to pain the scene, largely to help tell the story of what happened here, but also because this is right before where they may either have a high profile meeting with the leader of the Void Crew, a space pirate faction that controls the space station they are on, or end in a violent blaster fire.

    You step into a wide passage and are immediately hit with an acrid stench. The passage turns east toward a large blast door, its security strips blinking yellow. The walls are covered in blaster fire, and the floor has acid burns spread throughout. Four Void Crew pirates, two armed with simple blasters and the other two well-fitted with combat chainsaws, ion cannons, and jetpacks, stand in front of the door. Throughout the passage are the bodies of dead xenid stranglers, pieces of combat drones, and sandbags piled on top of each other into makeshift barricades. You also catch hints of emptied rations and beer cans. One of the pirates raises their ion cannon, the sound of its laser arming fills the air, and you hear them yell, “STAND BACK! IDENTIFY YOURSELVES NOW!”

    Here I mix it up slightly — I mention the exit sooner, largely because this is just a passageway connecting the Officer’s Mess with the Captain’s Command, and also because the purpose of the inhabitants is to guard the door, so it’s a bit more important to describe early on than in most instances. I do include a little big of extra description here as well to set the mood. The key difference between ‘Description’ and ‘Contents’ is the former is generally used for your immediate senses and building the scene, while the latter is for things that could in theory be interacted with or induce a dice roll, though both of those roles can be achieved through either the Description or the Contents.

    After getting the description out of the way — which again in this case included the exit — I then give a description of the inhabitants in this room, and I choose here to describe the equipment they’re wearing to help identify these are two different statblocks, and also to ease my cognitive load a bit just by leaning toward what they have in their statblocks as their weapons. If the players had fought NPCs like this before (which in this case, they had) it helps them also quickly build a threat assessment.

    Next, I go through the contents of the room, letting them know there’s cover available (the sandbags), clues that they are also fighting off the xenids (which the players had been doing this whole time), and evidence that they’ve been here a while (the discarded rations and beverages).

    Finally, I give them a quick bit of initial interaction. Their purpose here is to guard, and only attack if they’re at Alert Level 3. I’ve previously established with this group the following:

    • Alert Level 1 has Green lights
    • Alert Level 2 has yellow lights
    • Alert Level 3 has orange lights
    • Alert Level 4 has red lights

    Since I planned for them to only immediately be hostile at Alert Level 3, and we’re currently at Alert Level 2, I describe the former by having them be threatening, but mostly looking for an explanation, and the latter by describing the light strips on the blast door.

    This is not the only way that you can key a dungeon, but this is the way I particularly enjoy. It gives me just enough information I can to riff off of, and since I tend to do these as physical notes rather than digital, it doesn’t take much space on the page (which saves my hand and is great for quick glances).

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  • Into the Sandbox

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    I run a lot of sandbox style campaigns over linear campaigns. Not only because I genuinely enjoy running them, but I’m also a bit better at running a sandbox.

    A big problem with sandboxes that a GM needs to solve is getting your players invested. With a linear campaign, you have the advantage of the adventures themselves providing sufficient hooks and a goal for your players to build their characters around, and good players will often incorporate themselves into the world through their backstories. With a player-driven sandbox campaign, however, they are the ones deciding their goals, which can be quite difficult for a lot of players to get invested in without a sufficient process.

    There are a few different things I want my players to cover during a Session 0 that both help get those first few sessions going less awkwardly, and to help them make decisions during a game to help push the story forward. But before we get into that, let’s define what I see as a sandbox, and what I see as a linear campaign.

    Defining a Sandbox Campaign

    A sandbox campaign, in my eyes, is one that is inherently proactive. The players pick their own goals for their characters, and the characters spend their time in the campaign pursuing those goals. They have a lot of freedom in terms of how they pursue their goals, and the GM’s role here is to provide interesting and fun challenges between the players, and their stated goals.

    This doesn’t mean you need a big map. A sandbox can stretch across an entire planet, region, or city. What matters is that the players are the driving force behind what their characters goals are.

    Defining A Linear Campaign

    Contrast this with a more linear campaign, which is inherently reactive. This is one where there is some sort of stated goal in the campaign presence: Slay a vampire, stop a cult, find a derelict station, capture a notorious space pirate, etc. The players design their characters who are motivated to complete that goal, and the campaign revolves around pursuing that goal.

    Little Bit o’ Both

    A campaign doesn’t necessarily have to be 100% sandbox or 100% linear, there are shades of grey here. You can have a linear campaign where the goal is to capture a notorious space pirate, but what happens between Session 1 and the final encounter can be a goal driven sandbox. The players could have that predetermined goal, but make some sub goals they want to accomplish while they try to find the bandit, and those aspects would fall under a sandbox.

    Alternatively, you can take the goals your players make for their characters, and find connections between them to come up with a big, overarching goal for them to pursue. This has the sandbox feature of the players proactively chasing their own goals, then reactively pursuing the final, Big Bad Evil Guy goal.

    Setting Up a Sandbox For Success

    Now that we have a definition of what I think of as a sandbox versus a linear campaign, let’s dive into the nitty gritty of how I set up my players for success to be able to play in a game that is primarily a sandbox. All of this should be covered in a Session 0, with the presumption that the players are creating their characters together.

    Building Connections

    When I start a sandbox campaign, I typically present some sort of lore document that gives an overview of the setting. This will typically include a few things like well-known factions, current problems, major locations, and major NPCs. But these are just broad stroke things, and can be difficult for players to engage with in a practical sense. Having your players create connections between their character and the world is crucial, so there are a few different ways I help them make these connections.

    Character Connections

    I like to require that they make a connection with at least one other character, though it’s obviously fine for them to have connections to multiple characters. I recommend checking the Daggerheart classes for examples of connections they could use. They are very system and setting neutral, so they can work whether your game is fantasy, sci-fi, modern, cyberpunk, etc.

    A few simple example questions you could pose to the players if they struggle with building connections:

    • Which of the other characters do you share a secret with?
    • Which of the other characters do you go to in your time of need?
    • Which of the other characters has saved your life?

    NPC Connections

    Another connection that’s important is to have at least one significant NPC connection in your game. The backgrounds in Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition each have a 1d10 roll table for players to roll on to establish an NPC connection, though they can make their own of course.

    To give an idea of what these look like, here’s three examples from the Convict background:

    • Your old cellmate, who insisted they were innocent.
    • The cruel guard who made your time incarcerated even more miserable.
    • The leader of the prison gang you joined or avoided joining at all costs.

    This gives you free NPCs that you can incorporate into the world that your players will have an immediate connection and investment with, and helps them get a bit more involved in the worldbuilding process alongside you.

    You can also have them together choose or create a patron that they are all associated with. This can be someone who hands out jobs, an information broker, or simply someone who lets them stay at their hotel for free due to some favor. Whatever it is, it immediately creates an singular connection point that each player has, a free NPC for you, and grants you an easy way to move the story forward when the players are stuck.

    Location Connections

    The locations listed in the setting document aren’t the only locations abound. There are thousands upon thousands of unique locations that exist in any particular setting. An easy way to get your players connected is to have them create a location tied to their character:

    • The town they grew up in and where their family still lives.
    • Rumored cache of a lost technology on a distant moon.
    • A space station they made frequent deliveries to during their time as a cargo hauler.

    Let them come up with the basics and tie it either to their character’s backstory or their goals, and they now have a method to generate their own location-based plot hooks.

    Event Connections

    A final connection I find is important is for the player to think of an event their character was involved in that’s a bit larger in scope than just their character and immediate family.

    • They had fought in a major war on their home planet.
    • Their town was taken over by a warlord bent on gaining control of their planet.
    • A natural disaster made their home planet inhospitable.

    The key is to almost create their own important event that would be listed in the world’s timeline that they had directly been impacted by.

    Goals

    I talked a bit about goals above, but to elaborate: you want each character to have at least one major goal that they are pursuing (though ideally three to four), and to set up some sub-goals that lead up to that goal. This is covered exceptionally in Proactive Roleplaying by Jonah and Tristan Fishel and is highly recommended reading.

    The main takeaway is that the goal should be something that is actionable and has a fail state. The player should define both what success in their goal could look like, and what would it look like if they failed their goal. This adds some tension and pressure to the player to chase their goal, and gives you clear objectives to track the progress of.

    Making a Goal

    Each goal, as mentioned above, should have some sort of fail state, but we also need to know the reason that the character is pursuing that goal, and what complication has arisen that has so far presented them from achieving that goal.

    Example Goals

    Here are some example goals that a character might undertake:

    • The character’s home town was taken over by a ruthless warlord who they wish to eradicate.
    • The character was once a researcher on an incredibly dangerous piece of military technology that they were a whistle-blower on, but has been cast out of the sector and deemed a traitor. They now vow to prevent this technology from being used.
    • A close friend of the character had a falling out with them and has disappeared. The character has now heard rumors that they’ve joined a space pirate crew and are terrorizing shipping lanes, and they wish to reconnect with their old friend and bring them back from their new life of crime.
    REason

    Let’s take an example of someone who’s town was taken over by a ruthless warlord, and their goal is to eradicate that warlord. Some possible reasons:

    • Revenge, pure and simple.
    • The character does not care for change of leadership, but the former leader is paying them good money to get a resistance together and return the town to the former leadership.
    Complications

    Now we need to find out why the goal isn’t easy to accomplish or, if the goal itself is theoretically simple, why it hasn’t been accomplished yet. Continuing with the goal of taking back a home town from a warlord, the following could be possible complications:

    • Another faction that the character does not want involved is also moving in to take out the warlord.
    • The character has a good relationship with an NPC that is part of the warlord’s administration, and it would destroy their relationship if they succeed.
    • The character has been banished from the town and would be immediately be recognized upon returning.

    Sub Goals

    This part can be a bit tricky, and you may need to give more assistance to your player on this aspect than with any of the connections or their main goals. A big goal is nice to have, but without steps to achieving it, it’ll be hard to navigate the numerous possibilities of a tabletop setting to start moving toward that goal.

    Returning to the above example of removing a warlord that has taken over the character’s home town, we can think of a few different possible sub goals:

    • Find out incriminating information against the warlord.
    • Find a common enemy to help you take them down.
    • Recruit allies to form a resistance to take on the warlord’s forces head on.
    • Sabotage the town’s security to make infiltrating it unnoticed easier.

    I recommend each player to get a few of these together prior to the first session, but likely committing to one being the main sub goal they’ll pursue. Sometimes, they’ll fail at that sub goal, and can try another. More often, they’ll succeed, but more sub goals will now be possible to get them closer to achieving their main goal.

    Wrapping Up

    If each character has three to four goals, it’ll naturally end up that multiple of these will align, and the players should feel invested in not only pursuing their own goals, but also the goals of their party members. This should make them feel more equipped to make decisions that work towards these goals, find ways to make plot hooks you present help achieve their aims, and create a fun, collaborative game that could last years at your table.

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  • Exploring Settlements

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    For the longest time, I found it tricky to run cities, towns, space stations, and other settlements. There are so many little details, and it’s difficult to find out what’s actually important to prep versus what can be made up on the fly. It’s also hard to judge the passage of time, exploration within the city, and figuring out how random encounters can be incorporated into the city.

    In this post, I want to put down some ideas and techniques I’ve slowly been working on to make exploring cities just a little bit more proceduralized.

    Tracking Time Spent

    Much like a Dungeon Turn, we can track the time a player takes exploring a settlement. However, instead of each turn taking 10 minutes, each turn takes 1 hour.

    NOTE: You do not need to do this every time they visit a settlement, however, I find it is helpful when the players have multiple goals and there is a short time limit coming ahead. If they need to be at another location in 2 days, then adding this sort of time pressure can help them make decisions and help you fairly allot time for them to accomplish their goals.

    Every “round”, a player declares what they plan to do in their current location in the city. If you divide your city into districts, it’ll be whatever they’re trying to do in that district. You resolve any rolls needed, then move to the next player.

    Much like Dungeon Turns, each action is resolved simultaneously. If two players are pursuing the same task, then one player provides the Help action to the other. If all the players want to perform the same task, then it’s a Group Check where the majority must pass.

    Moving to another district or area of the settlement similarly takes 1 hour. You can declare a district to be particularly large, crowded, etc. and have it take 2 hours to traverse. If they have a vehicle, you can shorten the time to 30 minutes or 15 minutes, depending on their Speed. They can visit any point of interest (“POI”) in their district within that same hour.

    Finally, for determining random encounters, I roll 1d8+1d20 on my random encounter table every settlement turn. Since this isn’t a dungeon, and a settlement is most likely a lot safer than a dungeon, the random encounter table has a lot less potential for combat. Further below I’ll present a sample, generic encounter table and a link to another blog on advice on creating your own encounter tables.

    Designing a Settlement

    Whether you’re playing Dungeons and Dragons and your players are in the starting hamlet, or Voidrunner’s Codex and they are on a sprawling space station at the center of a hyper-advanced galaxy, the basics of what makes a location a settlement largely remains true, and there are a few things you’ll need to set one up.

    You can think of a settlement as a bunch of interconnected nodes, which I’ll refer to as districts, with limited connections to each other. Each district has its own distinct flavor, problems, culture, people, and features. Much like how you would design a dungeon, you want an overall theme for the settlement, and different ways to make each of these districts unique.

    You can use Johnn Four’s 5-Room Dungeon as the basis of this, Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition’s N.O.D.E.S method from the Dungeon Delver’s Guide, or any other process you use to design your dungeons. Whichever the approach, try to frame the content you include in a district in the same way you would decide what’s actually in the dungeon room.

    If you have a fancy settlement map, like using the Medieval Fantasy City Generator by Watabou or found a deck plan for a space station, you can connect each major district/location through nodes, as if you are running a point crawl. If you don’t have a map, you can make a simple node diagram with numbers and lines connecting them. There are plenty of free diagramming and whiteboarding tools out there. I’m a personal fan of Excalidraw, which is a browser based too. As the players explore the settlement, they’ll either choose to further engage in the current district they’re in, or travel along the connected node paths to explore more of the city.

    TIP: Only include nodes on your map that you plan on making notable in some way. There are, of course, other locations in the settlement but we do not need to prep those extensively ahead of time. If you have trouble coming up with other parts of your city at the table, you can make a short bulleted list of other less important locations to help you improvise.

    Example Settlement Node Map
    settlement flowchart example
    Sample settlement node-map

    The Nitty Gritty Details

    You don’t need to detail and name every shop, give them an NPC, and set up shop inventories. Many groups really do not enjoy the shopping episode, and that can be a significant amount of prep work that can easily go to waste.

    Instead, just think of a few types of locations, shops, and other points of interest that exist in each district. You can think of this as a list of items you would have in a keyed dungeon that the players can interact with. Write the type of point of interest it is and give it an evocative name. Separately, have a list of NPC names on the side that you can refer to. Whenever a character wants to interact with a point of interest more granularly, and it makes sense for it to have an NPC, just grab a name from your list and cross it off. After the session, you can add that NPC to your notes and add any details you improvised for them so you don’t forget.

    NPC List

    This list of NPCs can have any number of details. You can just have a name. But, if you need a little bit more, I recommend at most having their name, pronouns, occupation, a motivation, and 1 to 3 traits. You can use an NPC generator like the one found in Perilous Void by Jason Lutes (easily my most used Sci-Fi book in general) to spend 15 minutes generating a bunch of these, and they’ll last you countless sessions.

    The following example uses the formatting suggested by the Perilous Void, where the M stands for ‘Motivation’ and T stands for ‘Traits’. Following the traits are some descriptive elements:

    NPC EXAMPLE 01
    KANSL: Naato Manager, He/him; M Survival; T Analytical, Spirited, Unbiased. Piercings/alterations; Notable device/tool; Sarcastic/sardonic

    You can keep the descriptions vague on generation, like I have above, or you can be a bit more specific if you struggle elaborating those details on the fly.

    NPC EXAMPLE 02
    KANSL: Naato Manager, He/him; M Survival; T Analytical, Spirited, Unbiased. Sarcastic naato with strange embedded chips featured prominently in his scales. He wears a watch that displays holograms he frequently fidgets with.

    Encounter Tables

    Now for me, this is the hard part. There are many philosophies toward how to make a good encounter table. I’m not the expert here, but Patchwork Paladin has a fantastic post on writing better encounter tables. I recommend checking that out to help set up your settlement encounters, though some adjustments may be needed as the original intent of that post was exploration encounters in the wilderness.

    The one piece of advice I can part with here for specifically settlements is to think about the problems this settlement has, the culture of its people, and the location of the settlement (coastal, grasslands, desert, space, etc.) These will heavily influence the type of encounters that show up. Combining these elements of your settlement with Patchwork Paladin’s interesting encounters should yield an excellent encounter table that will last you countless sessions in the same location.

    Here is a generic table I might use in a settlement with a problem of crime and civil unrest.

    Table: Example Settlement Random Encounters
    1d8 + 1d12Encounter
    02Vigilante mob demands violent justice over an alleged criminal.
    03Local security approaches the adventurers and demanding a “donation” from the visiting adventurers to ensure a safe visit to the settlement.
    04While walking through the settlement, an important item from the adventurer’s pack falls down and falls through a sewer grate.
    05An adventurer notices something they purchased in the settlement is actually counterfeit and does not provide the intended functionality.
    6-16No Encounter
    17A member of the party notices that a hooded figure has been seemingly following them for some time and attempting to stay out of sight.
    18A large crowd has formed a protest over unfair taxation, and a standoff between them and the local security forces has formed.
    19A mob of people rush towards a very popular or important local celebrity trying to get their attention.
    20An announcement from a local shop has declared a store-wide 20% off sale of all goods, and services.

    Rumor Tables

    This is a quintessential part of any adventure in a settlement: carousing and rumor gathering. Developing a great rumor table will help you flavor the conversations your non-player characters are having, give plot hooks to your players, and otherwise help fill out the general culture and vibe of the city.

    The content of a rumor table is largely decided on the campaign you’re running, but this is an excellent way to provide plot hooks and worldbuilding to your players in an immersive way. Similarly, if you utilize The Eight Steps of the Lazy DM, this can be another way to deliver some of your Secrets and Clues.

    I would generally try to get 10 rumors on here, and only deliver one through a successful check to gather rumors, or if the players are in a bit of a rut and you need to get the session moving again. Delivering too many rumors to your players could create analysis paralysis, so try to avoid over-endulging them with plot hooks.

    Because you’re only delivering a single rumor through a check that takes up about an hour, the rumor has to be actionable and useful to your players. You can also create a separate table of false rumors to roll on if your players critically fail the check. You can have it on a normal failure, but that might create too many false rumors flying about making it difficult for your players to make a decision.

    I would have the false rumors be incorrect version of the true rumors you have, to help reduce the cognitive load in setting them up. If you happen to roll a true and false version of the rumor, that could lead into interesting results that I would lean into.

    Table: Example Rumors
    1d10Rumor
    01The settlement’s governing body is contemplating invoking martial law to attempt to quell the frequent protest over recent taxation changes.
    02A nearby abandoned outpost has recently become the hideout of a local criminal faction.
    03A string of robberies has been occurring every night in the Commercial district, and the guard doesn’t seem to be doing anything about it.
    04An ambassador for a rival settlement is arriving with hopes to smooth things over. Protesters are planning to make their voices heard on their arrival.
    05A new underground, illicit gambling ring has surfaced and people are saying that you can earn a lot of money with a few smart moves.
    06No one has actually seen the governor in weeks, speculation running abound that they are dead and the government is hiding it.
    07A pharmaceutical company is planning to introduce a new product that is advertised to be a side-effect free way to cure a debilitating local disease.
    08Weapon supplies have dwindled due to recent raids on shipments coming in from off-world. No one knows where the pirates are stationed, but their attacks have been intensifying lately.
    09An Imperial representative is to arrive in three days to judge the progress of the outpost, and it will largely determine future funding of further development.
    10A nearby mining operation seems to have struck the structures of a previously unknown, undocumented alien civilization, but the mining company has sealed off civilians and journalists from seeing the site.

    Putting It All Together

    With these tools you can run a settlement for as long as your players stay interested in being there. This method is best used for campaigns where the players are traveling frequently, hopping from location to location. If your campaign revolves around a single settlement with minimal travel, then this method would work better best for any ancillary settlements your players travel to. In a future post, I’ll go into detail on my process to set up a more involved settlement.

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  • Dynamic Combat

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    It can sometimes be difficult to make combat interesting. How many times have you entered a combat with powerful characters and what you thought were compelling statblocks, only for it to divulge into two tokens/minis standing next to each rolling to hit each round?

    There’s not much incentive in 5e-style games to do much else without direct thought into how a combat encounter is set up. If there’s one thing I learned from my years of playing Starcraft, it’s that utilizing the battlefield itself can make all the difference in determining the victors of a fight.

    Are there parts of the battlefield that are difficult to move through? Are there places where characters can gain half, three-quarters, or full cover? Is there opportunities for high ground? These are things you generally want to make sure you have at least a few of, and make sure you have statblocks that can effectively utilize these aspects.

    As opposed to my Theater of the Mind: Combat post, this focuses on utilizing a battlemap, though I plan on writing a future post in how to incorporate some of these ideas in Theater of the Mind.

    Alternate Objectives & Complications

    Before focusing on designing the battlefield, I wanted to bring up that one of the most common pieces of advice, and it’s a good one, is to add alternative objectives or other complications to a combat.

    • The characters are paid for guard duty over a highly sensitive, political meeting taking place in a secure location. A group of thugs jump out to ambush the characters at the front, but a character spots a small dispatch trying to sneak around back, break into the facility, and kidnap the people they’re meant to protect
    • A bomb has been armed and it’s being protected by a small contingent of sentry robots. It needs to be defused before it goes off and taking down the entire complex.
    • The characters arrived at the MacGuffin they need to bring back to their patron, but a group of enemies arrived with the sole goal of taking the MacGuffin and running off.

    This can distract players from focusing entirely on their damage per round to divert their attention elsewhere, and can create very distinct decision making.

    Terrain

    When creating a more dynamic battlefield, the first thing you really want to think about is terrain. Having difficult terrain, hazards, or some good old fashion walls to restrict movement and line of sight can make a big difference. In a giant open field, the only real tactical decision is to move forward and fight. In an area with tighter corridors/rooms, a pool of acid, and a cliff can make movement a lot more tactical.

    NOTE ON FLYING CHARACTERS: Flying characters can largely ignore most, if not all, aspects of a battlefield. This option is obviously limited in combat in indoor spaces, but how do you challenge a flying character in an outdoor environment?

    There are largely two simple tactics you can employ. The obvious one is just have your ranged attackers focus them down, but that can feel targeted, might be unfun, and leaves the other players to take out your highest impact targets pretty quickly.

    Another option is to find something that forces them to fly down. Remember, if they’re in the air, their options of directly assisting non-flying allies is quite limited. They can’t perform a Wisdom (Medicine) check to stabilize a creature, they can’t provide the Help action, they (mostly) can’t chase any physical alternative objectives on the map, etc. Try to think of a method beyond just attacking them that might entice them to land once in a while, as that’ll keep up the variety of the combat.

    DESTRUCTIBLE Terrain

    Having aspects of the battlefield that can be destroyed can help add some more unique tactics. Has a ranged attacker climbed atop a wooden balcony and firing from above? Launch an explosive at it and watch it collapse, bringing them to your melee characters and getting a bit of falling damage in. Might even start a fire, introducing a new, hazardous terrain feature to the fight.

    Shifting Terrain

    Terrain that moves, flips, expands, shrinks, or otherwise changes over the course of a combat can be very challenging to navigate. Putting aside any complications in implementing this in a virtual tabletop or a flip map (and I’ll have some tips for both in a bit), this can be a fun way to keep the combat engaging.

    Video games tend to have great examples of this.

    • Platforms that move constantly around a central point, some of which collapse and fall away while new ones form.
    • Walls that close in every round, putting a timer to defeat the enemies quickly, find a way to stop them from moving, or getting out of there before they get crushed.
    • Forcefields that block certain paths and can alternate.
    • An avalanche coming down creating difficult terrain and a threat to take bludgeoning damage from a collision.

    An easy way to think of this is, “What mechanic can I utilize to make certain areas difficult or impossible to navigate, and have those areas shift around?” This is not for every combat, but could make for very fun and challenging boss fights.

    Implementation

    In person you can easily use some materials like coasters, drinking glasses, pieces of cardboard, etc. that you can easily move around. If you have access to actual terrain pieces, or enjoy a bit of crafting, you can also utilize those to move things around.

    On a virtual tabletop, many of them such as FoundryVTT let you import individual tiles that you can add to the field to represent a moving piece of terrain. Alternatively, you can utilize shapes typically provided in some form of measurement tool to represent these aspects.

    Cover

    Having ranged enemies keep their distance from the party’s melee characters and bouncing between cover to have protection against ranged attacks can drastically increase the challenge. It can force some characters to use limited resource area of effect abilities to force the enemies to abandon their cover. You can make the cover destructible, giving a way for characters to influence the terrain and affect the battlefield. Remember that you can also have characters go Prone (costs no movement) to gain increased cover, and it puts them in an awkward position to retreat as standing takes half cover, so it requires some strategy to determine when that’s the optimal tactic.

    High Ground

    High ground also gives ranged attackers safety from melee fighters. They’ll need to find a way up by taking stairs, climbing ladders, scaling cliffs, etc. Even if you don’t have a mechanic like gaining an expertise die in Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition when you have the high ground, the sheer existence of it can make fights more complicated. A character can also break line of sight more easily with the high ground, simply by moving backwards a bit or falling prone (like with the cover strategy).

    Interactables

    Having options for your characters to interact with can also add some variety to a combat. The classic example of, “I swing from the chandelier and attack!” is fun and all, but unless it actually has a mechanical benefit, a character is likely to just use it for flavor.

    What we want to look for is to sometimes add objects into our combat that provide some sort of benefit if utilized. If it’s especially useful, including a drawback can keep it powerful and not by default the best option.

    • A barrel full of oil that can explode, but ignite the room.
    • A level that can add some of the other topics of this post, such as lifting barricades to create more cover, shifting the terrain, or creating/removing high ground.
    • Traps with their triggering mechanism within reach, allowing a character to turn its attention to the other party.
    • Ways to affect lighting by either removing or adding it (snuffing out a torch, flipping a power switch).

    These interactables can also easily tie into an Alternate Objective, and multiple could be needed to be interacted with before the alternate objective has been completed.

    Not all of these need to be incorporated into every combat. For most combats, just having some cover and possibly high ground is more than enough to keep it dynamic. When you are designing more pivotal combats or boss battles, however, keeping these in mind as you design the encounter can help you make a memorable experience for the whole table.

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  • Theater of the Mind: Combat

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    I tend to run a decent amount of the content in my games in theater of the mind. In fact, I tend to only take out a flip map if the combat gets particularly complex. However, in general I like to avoid doing so as it can often slow the game down, and many combats aren’t impactful enough to justify the time it takes to set it up.

    Personally, I’m a fan of using the theater of the mind combat rules from the Enhance Your Battlefield: Combat Arenas from Gatepass Gazette Issue #29 for both Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition and Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. They provide a solid framework to be consistent with your rulings, and provide helpful tables for things such as area of effect. You can get the article on their Patreon (requiring a paid subscription) at https://www.patreon.com/c/gatepass/ or you can view them for free by visiting https://a5e.tools/rules/gate-pass-gazette and scrolling down to Issue #29.

    I do have my own system for What’s OLD is NEW, and some house rules for how I handle positioning in both Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition and Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition. They all boil down to the same framework, and I believe they can be ported to other systems as well, provided they have some form of stacking bonuses. However, all of these assume that you are utilizing a zone system, which I’ll cover first.

    Zones

    The battlefield is divided by zones, and each zone has a size of small, medium, or large. The exact measurements of zones do not necessarily matter, but aim to max out a zone at about a 60 ft. by 60 ft. or 12 square by 12 square area, for simplicity. A small zone can have up to 3 occupants, a medium zone up to 5 occupants, and a large zone up to 8 occupants.

    Advice: Do not have more than 5 zones, as it can get quite complicated to keep track of everything.

    Each zone has a direction relative to another zone. Using the cardinal directions of North, South, East, and West keeps this simple. Describe where the zones are relative to each other at the beginning combat.

    Advice: At the start of combat, state where the zones are, and who’s in what zone. At the start of each character’s turn, remind them which zone they’re in, which zone their allies and enemies are, and what direction it is. Once you get into the flow of doing this, it becomes quite natural and easy. You can do a quick sketch of a node map of the zones if it helps you.

    You can always move within your own zone without spending an Action or using your movement speed (system-dependent). Moving to another zone takes 1 Action, or using your movement speed. Moving over two zones takes two Actions, or the Dash action.

    If a character is in melee combat with another character, they have engaged that character. Movement away from that character would trigger an Opportunity Attack, if your system has that mechanic, even if it’s with their free movement within the same zone.

    Range

    Assume that all targets within the same zone are within range of a ranged attack. Attacks that are greater than 60 feet, or 12 squares, can reach into an adjacent zone. If your system has a mechanic where a penalty is applied when an enemy is within melee ranged of a ranged attacker, this occurs when a melee attacker is engaged with a ranged attacker.

    Area of Effect

    For dealing with area of effect, check out the general area of effect ranges for your game. Taking 5e-based games as an example, each area of effect ability effect starts at sizes of 5 ft., 10 ft., or 15 ft., and scale by doubling. Other systems may handle area of effect sizes differently, but if there’s a consistent scalar for your system, you can utilize this method.

    • First Size Increment: Targets up to 2 characters in the same zone
    • Second Size Increment: Targets up to 3 characters in the same zone
    • Third Size Increment: Targets up to 5 characters in the same zone
    • Fourth Size Increment: Targets up to 8 characters in the same zone

    Make a little reference guide for these sizes, such as the table found in the Running an Arena header in Enhance Your Battlefield: Combat Arenas (which can be easily used in any 5e-derived system).

    Positioning

    Here’s a system neutral explanation of the system I use. Any time I refer to a ‘bonus’, this could be applied to a stacking bonus method your system uses to give bonuses to characters. If your system does not provide such a bonus, then this method would likely not work for you. Enemies can gain these bonuses as well.

    As an example of a stacking bonus, What’s OLD is NEW is a d6 dice pool system, so you add +1d6 per environmental advantage you gain. For Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition, you have the expertise die system, where you have a scaling die that increases (starting at +1d4 and scaling up to +1d6, then maxing out at +1d8) from each expertise die bonus source. I do also use the expertise die system in Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition for the purpose of this system, but you could also easily have a +2 to their roll for each source, maxing out at +6.

    Additionally, when I refer to an action below, this is in reference to What’s OLD is NEW action points. In What’s OLD is NEW, you have two action points you can spend on your turn, and almost everything is 1 action. For games with a different system, like 5e-based games, these can instead cost half of the character’s movement. Other systems that use Action Points can likely have Take Position only take an action.

    • NEW ACTION – Take Position: You can use an action to Take Position to gain an environment benefit, such as taking cover, gaining the high ground, setting up a flank, or setting up a crossfire. It takes one action to gain these benefits, and you can only gain one environmental benefit per action.
      Example: You can use one action to scale a 10 foot wall to gain the high ground, and another action to declare that you want to set up a crossfire with the enemy bandit. If you want to benefit from cover, it takes one action to gain half cover, but two actions to gain full cover.
    • Crossfire: You can only gain this benefit if at least one ally has used the Take Position action to set up a crossfire on the same target as you, and only up to three allies can gain this benefit with the same target. You gain a bonus on ranged attack rolls made against that target per ally who has used Take Position to set up a crossfire on that target.
      • Note: If you are using zones, the target must be in the same zone as each character that has used the Take Position action to set up a crossfire.
    • Flank: You can only gain this benefit if at least one ally has used the Take Position action to set up a flank on the same target as you, and only up to two creatures can gain this benefit on the same target. You gain a bonus to melee attack rolls made against this target.
    • High Ground: You gain a bonus to melee attack rolls made against targets that you are at least 5 feet above, and a bonus to ranged attack rolls made against targets that you are at least 10 feet above.

    Environmental Hazards

    An excellent way to spice up or diversify combat, and add complications to the situation, is to add environmental hazards. This can be traps, natural obstacles, or a change in the situation caused by a character interacting with the environment.

    In general, characters can use their system’s equivalent of an object interaction to directly interface with the environment. This can include things such as opening doors, pulling levers, picking up an object, etc. If there is a hazard in a zone, characters should be able to use the Take Position action to keep themselves safe from it, but this can also require a check to accomplish.

    Hazards should always be intractable to both the players and enemies’ advantage or disadvantage, such as pushing enemies into open pit traps, knocking out a bridge, releasing a gas valve, etc. It can create cool, cinematic moments, and helps with the problem of not everyone’s vision of the battlefield being the same.

    Most Important: Be Open to Ideas

    The mind map of the situation is going to look different to everyone, no matter how evocative or descriptive you are of the situation. Lean into the fantasy that your individual players create, and be open to allowing whatever shenanigans they come up with to utilize the battlefield to their advantage. Theater of the mind gives a lot of breathing room for creativity, and it should be fostered and encouraged wherever possible to create memorable combats.

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  • Derelict Crawling

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    In any system that’s based on an edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the concept of dungeon crawling is almost integral to the experience. There has been a recent interest in the concept of dungeon turns, which traces its roots back to the earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons where turns were taken in 10 minute integrals.

    I wanted to provide the dungeon crawling mechanics I use in my Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition game using Voidrunner’s Codex. Since this is a sci-fi expansion to the system, I decided to call this Derelict Crawling to stay a bit more thematic.

    Going forward, you can equate to any usage of the word ‘Derelict’ as you would a ‘Dungeon’ in typical fantasy RPGs. A derelict doesn’t necessarily have to be abandoned. In fact, many are occupied by interested factions or strange alien creatures. These rules can also be utilized in locations you would very well not consider derelict, such as a colony outpost or research facility, and those locations would likely benefit significantly from the Alert Levels mechanic described later in this post.

    This post assumes you are in a smaller location where your players are traversing a location room-by-room. In situations where they are in a larger derelict space station that’s several miles long, these mechanics would likely become tedious or boring, and would be better suited to a point crawl. This will be explored in a future post in how to adapt these mechanics over longer travel times between interesting locations.

    Derelict Crawling Mechanics

    When exploring a derelict, each action a player character makes takes 10 minutes, and these are performed in 10 minute rounds. In each round, each player declares what they are doing for that round and makes a check, and each check is done simultaneously. Since the check represents an action that takes over 10 minutes, features or psionic powers that give a bonus to a single roll are not applicable.

    Ability Checks: The player describes want they want to do, and the Narrator determines if a check is appropriate. The Narrator then informs the player what ability score and skill combination is appropriate. If two players want to perform the same action, one would give the other the Help action. If more than two players want to perform the same action, then this would be resolved with a group check:

    • If all players pass, the check is a critical success.
    • If the majority of players pass, the check is a success.
    • If the majority of players fail, or there are an equal amount of failures and success, the check is a failure.
    • If all players fail, the check is a critical failure.

    Combat: While the actual combat encounter will likely only take 6-30 seconds to resolve, treat it as taking 1 minute for easier tracking. This can be justified by the lead up to the encounter and the immediate aftermath taking additional time.

    Movement: There are three speeds that players can traverse a derelict: slow, normal, and fast.

    • Slow: This speed can only occur when players are exploring each room. Exploration of the room takes 10 minutes. If they spend no additional time in this room and move to the next, movement to the following room is included in that 10 minutes.
    • Normal: Moving from one room to the next takes 1 minute and is unexplored. They have a -2 to passive Perception, and do not notice any traps. Additionally, if you are using the Alert System (described below), roll 1d6. On a result of 5-6, the Alert Level increases by 1.
    • Fast: Moving from one room to the next takes 30 seconds. They have a -5 to passive Perception, do not notice any traps, and have disadvantage on any saving throws made from any triggered traps. Additionally, if you are using the Alert System (described below), roll 1d6. On a result of 4-6, the Alert Level increases by 1.

    Random Encounters: Roll 1d6 for random encounters every hour, triggering a random encounter on a result of a 6. If utilizing Alert Levels, use the frequency and chance to trigger a random encounter as described by the current Alert Level.

    Optional Mechanic: Alert Levels

    If your derelict is actively being guarded and occupied by a hostile force, they will react if the players perform any actions that make them aware of their presence. To abstract this, you can utilize Alert Levels when it becomes applicable. Most locations should begin at Alert Level 1, but you can always start at a higher Alert Level if the situation calls for it.

    • Alert Level 1 (1 Encounter/1 hour): The guards are unaware of the party and are not actively searching for them. When making Stealth checks, players roll against their passive Perception.
    • Alert Level 2 (1 Encounter/1 hour): The guards are aware of a presence on the derelict, and are actively searching for them. When making Stealth checks, players make a contested roll against the creatures’ Perception.
    • Alert Level 3 (1 Encounter/30 minutes): The guards have identified who has infiltrated the derelict and are on high alert. Frequency of random encounter checks double.
    • Alert Level 4 (1 Encounter/30 minutes): The guards have identified who has infiltrated the derelict, and generally knows where the party is. Increase the chance that an encounter is rolled. For example, if you are rolling 1d6, and a result of a 6 would trigger a random encounter, increase the success range to 5-6.

    Beyond the movement mechanics, other things can increase the Alert Level. Breaking down doors, using thunder damage, failing an Intelligence (hacking tools) check, or any other action that would bring attention to the party increases the Alert Level by 1.

    There can be additional consequences at higher alert levels as well. More doors can suddenly be locked, anti-personnel turrets can be deployed, etc. In particularly secure and occupied locations, it would make sense that traps only become activate-able at higher alert levels, as the security team engages them to try to catch the party for their forces to appear. I would recommend these types of scenarios to occur on Alert Levels 3 and 4.

    Decreasing the Alert Level

    There are many ways that your players can also decrease the Alert Level, and this will largely be determined by the Narrator’s discretion. However, some ideas to keep in mind:

    • Using the hacking maneuver implant data on a security camera, terminal, or other similar device to convince the guards that the party is no longer there, or any other creative tricks the party comes up with to deceive the guards.
    • Disabling the security system. While this would not in-fiction reduce the alert level, it will mechanically have the same effect as the guards will have greater difficulty locating the party.
      • Instead of reducing the Alert Level, you can alternatively treat any stealth checks as if the party was moving at one movement speed slower. For example, if they are moving at a fast pace, use the passive Perception and Stealth check mechanics of the normal pace. If they are moving at normal, use the passive Perception and Stealth check mechanics of a slow pace. Finally, if they are moving at a slow pace, give them advantage on Stealth checks.
    • Persuade, intimidate, bribe, or otherwise convince a guard to reduce the Alert Level.

    Other Systems

    These mechanics can obviously also be used in 5e-based fantasy games using Level Up: Advanced Fifth Edition, Tales of the Valiant, Dungeons & Dragons, etc., or adapted to non-5e based games. As long as your goal is to be able to effectively manage the time your party takes in a dungeon and adjudicating threats and consequences, a version of the above mechanics should prove helpful.

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