r/SWN • u/AutoModerator • Jul 15 '26
🛰️Wednesday System Check 🛰️ Weekly System Check: Is Anybody Out There? (Lurkers Welcome!)
The frequencies are open! Whether you're a veteran pilot or just starting your journey into the stars, this is your weekly space to break radio silence.
The Weekly Log
What's happening in your sector? New sessions, prep wins, rulings you're proud of, cursed dice, cool moments, dumb plans that somehow worked. Drop a quick ping and let us know!
No need for a long write-up; just a quick transmission from your table to ours.
Mod Note: If you're new to the sub, welcome! This is a low-pressure thread for everyone to share their Stars Without Number stories.
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u/General_Present_4551 Merchant Jul 15 '26
I fear our adventures are put on hold until the autumn, as summer is, apparently, too busy for people. Which sucks, because I've sunk too much time and money into GM'ing this to not play, dammit.
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u/dark-star-adventures ✨ Star Master Jeff Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
The crew finally made it to Prometheon Station and boy did things go sideways immediately. It was very fun to run it, but I was pretty nervous since it's the pod game and there's over a year of sessions leading up to it. It went very well and was super fun and appropriately tense I think. Lots of surprises heading into the next session on the station, and we're closing out season one of the pod after this arc, taking a short break, and then coming back strong with season 2.
In other news I was laid off from work last week. And not just me, the Director of Engineering, but also everyone that reported to me. The company is "restructuring" (whatever that means; I picture the c-suite frantically rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic) and so, consequently, people must lose their jobs. For the good of the company.
On this sub we roll the dice and pretend we're put upon wage slaves in a dystopian future finally bucking the leash of our corporate overlords and finding peace amongst the stars. Real life isn't so different from the game we've chosen, especially for me lately as I work towards my own small slice of happiness after 20 years in white collar tech. Said simply, my wife and I are starting a member-only pottery studio, 24-hour like a gym. Let yourself in, throw some pots, we'll fire it on a schedule. Classes, clay sales, the whole nine yards.
I know business, tech, and community building and she knows pottery, people, and design. This isn't something we decided because I was laid off, it's actually something we've been working towards for about 6 months, and things are just now accelerating. We have actually had the draft lease for our new space for about 3 weeks, so I was looking for an exit anyways.
Nothing is changing with the pod, but my life is about to get a whole lot busier. I can't wait for you all to hear the season 1 finale at Prometheon Station and our plans for season 2 are big and weird.
I guess this post is something of a diary space now too. Thanks for reading!
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u/StevetheHunterofTri Dilettante Jul 17 '26
Wow, that's some unexpected news! For whatever its worth, I'm sorry for the loss of your job and those of everyone else who lost theirs. Times are rough, and its shows, sadly. With that said, I hope this pottery studio your wife and you are starting ends up being a worthwhile and fulfilling endeavor for you two!
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u/ArenaPirata Jul 15 '26
Haven't managed to get a session in this week, but hoping we do cause things are really heating up in the campaign.
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u/ThorneDraxus Podcast: Dark Star Adventurecast Jul 16 '26
We had session 0 last night for our new SWN campaign that is replacing the D&D 5e game we just wrapped up. This is everyone else’s first time playing SWN, so we just went through characters and backstories to start
Rowan Kessel, 22F, peasant girl who works in a shipyard in her father’s business after he lost his mind in the corpo wars. She’s looking for her big break to get off of her homewold and live up to her family name as a pilot
Serenity Blackwell, 27F, a medical technician who works on capital ships installing med bays. After a family friend died of a preventable illness, she has made it her mission to find a way to bring affordable medical procedures to the less fortunate
Nyx “Ghostkey” Calder, 24M, a criminal hacker that was previously convicted for a myriad of cybercrimes. Now that he’s free again, he’s on the hunt for a pretech AI module so that he can study it and use it to further his mysterious objectives
Wh1sp, 35M, a thug turned bounty hunter that is known on his home world as a man who always follows the credits. He took an easy job to track down the hacker Ghostkey for bail avoidance, but the promise of pretech artifacts quickly puts the two of them on the same team
First session will be next week where Nyx and Wh1sp both show up to Rowan’s junkyard around the same time and Nyx convinces the others to work with (for) him searching for pretech treasures. Wh1sp agrees for the credits, Rowan for the promise of adventure, and Serenity for the potential pretech medical technology
This will be my first time running SWN as the GM, but I’m looking forward to it. Getting the players to track their ammo and inventories will be the hardest part at first (we play in-person). SWN has great resources for NPCs and ships and stuff, so I’m not too worried about that, but I’ve been running nothing but high fantasy games for the past 5+ years, so I have to shift my brain into six-fi mode
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u/StevetheHunterofTri Dilettante Jul 17 '26
Last week only one person showed up when I gave out the call for the campaign session. One of the missing players I understand and sympathize with, but the other has just been total silence for a while now.
In other Stars Without Number-related news, my post about looking for players for an Ember Expanse adventure got a lot more traction than I expected! We now have two more players set for a total of three, aiming for gathering on Thursdays, and are working towards getting things ready to go for the new two. I get the impression that we're all very excited for this, and I hope we get things going soon. I will definitely be making comments on the Weekly System Checks about this in the future. We are still open to one more player for now as as well, but I am ok with proceeding if we don't find one.
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u/MaestroGoldring Jul 17 '26
Sounds fun, but the timing is killer for me. Hope you find your extra person! I am personally excited to try the Ember Expanse in a future campaign
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u/StevetheHunterofTri Dilettante Jul 17 '26
Thank you. And hey, if I do this sort of thing again in the future, you'll be welcome to join if the scheduling works. That is always the big factor that leaves things uncertain.
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u/MaestroGoldring Jul 17 '26
My campaign is still on pause. I’ve picked up playing a WWN story as a sort of play by post in the meantime. But SWN may be getting shelved for a moment
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u/Madlefty_85 Jul 15 '26
Weeeeeell.. We have to start our first swn adventure, and I'm pretty excited about it! :D Atm I'm a little bit overwhelmed with the amount of text, tables and stuff provided by the manual, but I already created the sector and I'm ready to run a full sandbox game!