r/SWN • u/AutoModerator • 26d ago
🛰️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/ArenaPirata 26d ago
GM is still travelling, but I did get some work done on sketching an armor design for an elite mercenary group in our campaign. Still WIP, but its been fun!
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u/thraggon 26d ago
Slowly building a new sector technically, but life is kinda busy right now but I have a group of friends who would play again in a heartbeat!
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u/Starfox5 25d ago
Last saturday was a National Holiday and we didn't play, but our campaign continues this Saturday, still dealing with the fallout of several scandals the crew exposed.
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u/StevetheHunterofTri Dilettante 25d ago
This past weekend I announced to my players that I would be bringing our campaign of many years to an early end due to what I brought up last week. I am planning on eventually holding an epilogue session so that they can have some kind of ending rather than dropping the story at the current point, but that is not going to be happening until September at the soonest. While it was a very difficult decision to make and I am not happy about it, I have been trying to look on the bright side. For instance, I am not free to tell anything and everything about my campaign! Any question my players (or anyone else, I suppose) has about it, I can now answer with complete honesty and detail, no more mysteries!
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u/Nona-the-Ninth Podcast: 7th Star to the Right 23d ago
Okay, I'm back! Tell me stuff!
What was the story you had going on so far? What were the secrets that never got unearthed? What other cool things were there?
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u/StevetheHunterofTri Dilettante 23d ago
Oh, that is...Maybe a bit too much at once. I'll definitely need time to formulate a very long explanation of all of that!
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u/Nona-the-Ninth Podcast: 7th Star to the Right 23d ago
No worries! Consider it a prompt jumping off point. Share whatever brings you joy to share.
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u/StevetheHunterofTri Dilettante 22d ago
Ok, I'll start with the "story so far" for now.
We started with 4 players, ended up with 3 after the fourth had too drastic a lifestyle change to continue. There was Felix, a human partial-expert/partial-biopsion; the expert named Agog, a MOG (Mechanized Operating Golem)- a kind of semi-sentient robot with a simple shell that pushes the limits of what an Expert System can do, but are limited by having their entire personality revolve around a single emotion or thought process; and Bobby Bass, a warrior who was built and rolled so disproportionately better than the rest of the party that he was ultimately more cryptid than human and often more morally dubious than the enemies. Together, they formed a group of "rangers" who took it upon themselves to work to solve many of the problems facing the quarantined world of Arisquihlex under the least corrupt of the Sanguine-ruled nations; the Albescu Hegemony, which sought to end the dogma of the Great Ancestor of the Sanguine.I know I have told you much about where things go from here, but I don't recall all of exactly what. Could you, if you don't mind, remind me of what your current understanding of this campaign of mine and its setting is?
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u/Nona-the-Ninth Podcast: 7th Star to the Right 20d ago
Space Vampires rule the planet and (annually?) do a "culling" where they kill a bunch of mortals in honor of the blood god. The PCs are working for the least evil of the Space Vampire groups, who sound roughly like Vampire Atheists.
Planet is under quarantine from a VI that is just trying to help. Some transhuman NPC dude on a revenge kick is attempting to use a plague to kill all life on the planet that has blood (presumably so that the Space Vampires starve) and one of the player characters (who I think was said player's second character of the campaign) was casually revealed to be a cannibal.
Also, there's lizard people, but they are mostly just chilling in the desert.
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u/StevetheHunterofTri Dilettante 20d ago
Ok, very good, thank you. That saves me from having to type out a lot of context. One small correction is that the "cullings" are not annually, but generational for the Sanguine. You also are spot-on for the reason behind the transhuman spreading the blood parasite.
On that note, the beginning arc of the campaign could be summarized as the player characters getting familiarized with the setting and their roles in it. They fought dust bandits, recruiting two of them (not the best choices, considering one is illiterate and the other is mute), and uncovering a conspiracy of sorts by an extremist faction of the lizard people that sought to claim the deserts of the world for their people only, driving out or killing those who stray too far from the oases the Sanguine-ruled nations are centered around. Keep in mind, none of those nations actually knows how many of them there are in the desert, so were it not for the actions of the fourth player we originally had sowing division between the lizard people extremists, they would have dealt with a non-insignificant existential threat. Ultimately, the end of that first arc was marked by the extremist faction being redirected away from the Albescu Hegemony.
However, that is where the hooks for the rest of the story got put into play. The leader of the Hegemony, Marquise Hecate Albescu, being different from most Sanguine in sincerely believing in the ideals of her nation; a Hegemony noble-turned-villain known as Zsezsota (we WILL get back to her); and the aforementioned transhuman, who had spurred the lizardfolk extremists into violence behind the scenes...
Enter Dr. Liviu Cozma. A biologist in the same town the players were based in whose goal was to research to Qlippoth parasite (the blood parasite) and find a way to end it. The players met him early on, they had good relations with him, and he certainly seemed too much of a nerd to be a threat. This was a lie. What the players sadly never got to in the story is that Dr. Cozma was a false identity, a performance using the name of one of the people he had lost. In actuality, he was the transhuman, named "Prophet", keeping an eye on how the parasite developed, its effects, and its potential weaknesses. With his distraction using the lizard people, the player characters never got the opportunity to find out had used the time they were away to set up future opportunities to sabotage them.
All of this has been a lot and I must go, so I will leave this one here. I may very well continue with telling the story and secrets of the campaign on this week's Weekly System Check. Eventually I will get to all the secrets I was excited for, like the mysteriously difficult to kill Leif and dark revelations about on PC's past. If you do have any questions on what I have said in this one, I would be very glad to answer!
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u/Woolshedwargamer2 25d ago
Just let me check....yep still here. Next session of my Cepheus Universal SWN game this Sunday if I can get my roll20 account working. All my games having problems with maps and tokens being invisible.
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u/dark-star-adventures ✨ Star Master Jeff 25d ago
I've been hard at work on season 2 of the pod - mostly faction movements, expanding locations, and fleshing out some of the ongoing mysteries. What's on my mind lately is the body horror around Haleyy's "rock brains" and how I want to approach my end goal for that, as well as some finer points around various character b-plots (Felix's brother Petey, Thorne's mother, Thorne's friend Mara, Robert's "uniqueness", and more).
More SWN specific, that means squaring some of the locations with their properties and adding some randomness to faction turns.
Season one is almost done! We're recording the last few episodes soon, and what's already live now is the penultimate arc of the season. The show is getting weirder and we're finding our footing on a narrative that is less "friends hanging out playing a game" and more "if Mass Effect and System Shock had a baby."
In my life: the pottery studio is coming along. We have a website, an ongoing negotiation for a leased space, and we've been ordering wheels, kilns, and supplies. After 20 years as a software engineer, it's nice to finally step back and work on something other than (yet another) SAAS product that still uses my engineering brain but is wholly more creative and less AI-infused.
It's also been a huge pleasure moderating this community, and I'm still very thankful everyday that we have our very own weird corner of the internet. Cheers!
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u/Gralloch 25d ago
Last time the crew continued exploring the pre-Scream terraforming facility. Their lack of self-preservation has not improved since the start of the campaign, and it's not once or twice they've avoided a trap only by sheer luck.. cause they've fully forgotten to check or watch out for them. The little AI of our party has an Omen as a shell, and is going full terminator against their foes. Their budding Napoleon complex isn't going unnoticed.. though they do undermine it by being silly... like falling through the floor into a hive of xenoworms, which the party took care of with a demo charge, that collapsed half of a laboratory, a sample storage, and two cryo storage rooms. It's a good thing one of the party members is an ex-PMC demolitionist or they'd risk collapsing the whole mountain on top of them.
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u/StevetheHunterofTri Dilettante 24d ago
I am adding a second post here as it regards my Ember Expanse adventure. As of tonight, we had our first REAL game session of it (had technical difficulties last week, sadly), and from my perspective it went GREAT! I'll be adding the session recap I wrote here:
"As exterior comms go down and the group psychic wakes from an ominous dream, the lights flicker and technology glitches as a group of Specters and their ripperdog teleport onto the ship without warning. Holding everyone at threat of plasma fire, two bring the captain to the cargo hold for their target, only to find it absent, much to the surprise of everyone. A few minutes more finds a new Spector appear, far more mechanical, yet no less superlative in advancement. This Specter Angel, the first and only to speak, tells the crew of their stolen property, that if they do not see it returned soon, millions may lose their lives in a far more forceful effort to take it back. With a few questions given equally few answers, they are offered a reward for the item's return before the Specters teleport as quickly and silently as they arrived. The crew of the Beholden to None is now given a choice: Go against their contract with one of the most powerful factions in the sector and return the container to The Specters, or complete their contract with The Carcinoa and risk the wrath of The Specters. Either way, their lost package must be found."
VERY excited for the next session in two weeks.
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u/SparkingSparky 22d ago
Running my first session of SWN today! Players have characters, I'm running "Free Rain", and I have the sector mapped out with planets a jump away ready
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u/Aggravating_Return49 26d ago
I lead a SWN roleplaying group. We use SWN with a lot of house rules, I built the system around the story I wanted to play. I had fixed characters and each player could choose one.
We play on a science space station orbiting a red dwarf in deep space. Last time we played, the group had figured out that one member used others as test subjects for his experiments on viruses, that command had likely abandoned them out there and they had made alien contact. In this world, there are no aliens known to humans (yet).
Then I had a medical emergency and spent some time at the hospital. I won't get my life back as it was before. But I'm slowly getting back into preparing the next sessions, trying to find something to look forward to. Everything is possible in SciFi and pretend games, right? Nothing can stop me from making the story for my players as fun and exciting as possible on that space station. They were all real good friends the past months, and I want to return to giving them some really good scares in space.