QuickStart! & Forgotten V01D - Part 1 Adventure Module [PDF]

STARSPANNER QUICKSTART!

SPECIAL STARTER SUPPLEMENT. TRIPLE ‘S’ QUALITY.

Dear friend,

I made this booklet 100% free. That was the point. Free AND easy enough that you could sit down this evening and give it a go instead of holding a committee meeting about whether or not tonight is the night. If you’ve paid for this book, a terrible clerical error has occurred and you should go get your money back at once. Use force if necessary!

STARSPANNER is my science-fiction role-playing game, 100th Edition. What is it? Well, you have a ship, you have a crew, you have a stretch of space that doesn’t care if you live or die. Things often go wrong. Sometimes, rarely, if you pull out all the stops and use every ounce of wit and grit god gave you, they go right.

I am aware there are other games in which everyone is kind, nobody is born awful, and the evening’s crisis is whether the orcs remembered the cookies. I did not write those games. If that is your idea of “”””adventure””””, you are in the wrong place. I say that with love and while holding the door open so you can depart with haste.

Here is what you are actually holding: The rules for basic play. Eight PPCs (Potential Player Characters), already named, outfitted and just the sort of lunatics who would sign onto a 300-ton trader called The Eastwood. Weapons, a lot of ‘em. Enemies and the ships they arrived in. Allies. A map of Subrosa, a sub-sector of the Haunted Stars, which sits at the ugly edge of Empyrean Republic space and has seen better days. Some psionic spells. Some starter skills. An adventure called Forgotten V01D, in which you will meet Hyvver pirates and Baron Allurad and a number of other people I refuse to introduce properly, because I wrote you an adventure and I am not going to stand in the doorway and shout the plot at you.

Now the part where I am honest, because the booklet is thick and I would rather you heard it from me: This is not the Playbook. The Playbook is the rest of the machinery: full item lists, ship design protocols, leveling up and character advancement, skills, intoxication, career ability webs, and a heap of other apparatus I have not had the time or the capital to make pretty. I shoved this QuickStart out lickety-split so you would have something to play while I chase the fineries. Forgive the bare pages, there is a game under them.

If you want the rest, it lives at starspanner.net for a modest sum. If you do not, you still got a free booklet and a night among bad stars, and I will take that.

I have talked too much and you have not rolled anything yet. That is a problem I am uniquely qualified to cause. Download the book. Or don’t, just keep doing nothing…

— Bob R. Black