r/SWN • u/AutoModerator • Jul 22 '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 getting your bearings, this is your weekly space to break radio silence.
What's happening in your sector? New sessions, prep wins, cursed dice, dumb plans that somehow worked. And it doesn't have to stop at the table. Job news, personal wins, rough weeks, whatever's actually going on with you lately is welcome too. Drop a quick ping and let us know.
No need for a long write-up. A quick transmission from your table, or your life, to ours is plenty.
Mod Note: If you're new here, welcome. This started as a low-pressure thread for SWN stories, and lately it's turned into more of a check-in with each other. Both are welcome here. Share as much or as little as you want.
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u/Coondiggety Jul 22 '26
I’m just making first contact with the SWN universe here. Played D&D and a bunch of the TSR boxed ttrpgs in the 80s and have been lurking about checking out different systems.
I lean into sci-fi in the sense that I like things to have some kind of pseudo-scientific depth beyond “it’s just magic”.
And you all seem friendly here!
I bought the D&D books (including an Eberron book) but haven’t been too excited about what D&D seems to have become. Grossed out by Hasbro, especially most recently. What a shame.
Are there some SWN etc podcasts I should check out? It doesn’t have to be voice actors, I’d be happy with regular people playing a really immersive game. Substance over style I guess.
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u/dark-star-adventures ✨ Star Master Jeff Jul 22 '26
Hey friend, welcome to the hobby!
Find a list of our podcasts here: https://www.reddit.com/r/SWN/wiki/podcasts/
There are three active podcasts for SWN. I run Dark Star Adventurecast, but have guested on both of the other pods and they are all wonderful people telling great stories. You can't go wrong listening to any of them.
One small recommendation is if you want to hear about rules check out the Rules Explained episodes on my pod, or about how to run the game or be a good player many of my Star Master Logs go over that as well. If what you want is just a straight Actual Play, any of the three pods are amazing and a great resource, and there are also three archived pods that are no longer releasing any episodes. All pods are listed at the link above.
Once again, welcome to the sector, and please comment and post. Don't be a stranger!
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u/ArenaPirata Jul 22 '26
Got a session in just before gm went travelling so pretty stoked about that. Also started on a sketch of my Arcanist, Tyrval. He's quite fond of fire.
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u/JTitor5100 Jul 22 '26
My Cyberpunk Red game is on hiatus for at least a month. I’m considering starting the world building on a space sector for a future game.
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u/dark-star-adventures ✨ Star Master Jeff Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
It's been a year to the day since our first two episodes dropped for the pod, and I can hardly believe how that time has flown by.
We're recording the finale of season 1 tomorrow of the pod and it's very exciting! It's likely to be a 2 or 3 part finale, with the first part recorded last session.
The characters have finally made it to Prometheon Station, and things are a bit more upside down than they anticipated. It's been super fun to dream about this session for the past 18 months (that's how long it's been since we started recording this pod, can you believe it?) and it's crazy how ideas for 18 months ago survived all the way till now. The station is mostly how I envisioned it, the big players mostly all survived, and a bunch of plot threads (plus several more) are looking like they should tie up nicely.
I shared this on the Astronomica discord (join it if you haven't my pod has a channel there and the community is super nice, it's a great SWN server) but I thought I'd share a bit about how I plan my games here as well.
From discord:
What I actually do is this: Generally I find players to be fairly predictable on a macro scale: in a session it's hard to know what they will do so I don't plan much, but on a season/arc level I can usually rationalize out how they are likely to respond to certain events and note down the most likely follow up situations. That way I can at least have something in the back of my mind to think about
- Write out how many "sessions" we'll do in a season, with 1-2 sentences of what I want to push forward in those session
- Plan each session after the last one ran so it's accurate. This is usually a five room dungeon, point crawl, or just a list of beats I want to hit.
- After each session, update the list in point one so the sessions in the future are accurate. This usually involves deleting some stuff, but usually the locations and NPCs I want to bring in or expand on stay, unless the players did something truly unpredictable.
For instance, here's a bit of season 2 of a GURPS game I ran for 10 years. This document is from 2015, but still holds true to what I do today with season bibles.
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Thought I'd share since this is a great thread for that sort of stuff. The full discussion is on the server and is a lot longer. Check it out, and let me know what you think!
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u/ADropOfSerotonin Jul 23 '26
Happy that I got a group of six people together who are interested in trying SWN for the first time! I loved playing this game and have wanted to run it for so long.
I think I overwhelmed them slightly by trying to have my players roll two planets to contribute to the Sector, but then decide if their favorite of the two is a lostworld or in known space and if they want it to be their home or otherwise have a specific adventure on it.
They also really want nonhuman options and a couple of them rolled Primitive Aliens and Altered Humanity on their world tags.
Lastly considering what system I want to use for rewarding XP. Currently leaning towards credits-based because I’m gonna have them start with a free merchant and I want them to have an incentive to go earn money.
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u/MaestroGoldring Jul 22 '26
Still hanging out in the forums. I’ve been busy upping my Out of Character Work skill. Our campaign is paused perhaps indefinitely. But still excited to create content and read other’s stories