Stars Without Number is based off of old school DnD. Roll Stats 3d6 down the line, and your character's proficiency is at best +3 to rolls. There are no ways to create a really awesome mechanically powerful presence of your character in the system. Even the best Warrior is basically Jayne from Firefly, and without the screen writing plot armor. The way to succeed is to rely as little as possible on rolls. If you play it like a usual DnD system where it is always slanted in your favor and taking down a group of goblin bandits is always a cake walk: you will die very quickly. The actual rolls of minor combat will always be terrifying, and one bad roll from the pilot can result in losing everything not on person as you run to a life-pod. If that sense of gameplay mechanics is not your thing, then this is not for you. The setting itself is ambiguous. Basically the whole collapsed intergalactic empire where only the fringes still using archaic technology are the only ones left after the New Tech imploded. So backwater frontiersmen have accidentally become isolated cores of society. So you'll always be at the far edge of a society rebounding. This is not Star Trek. There will be Basic problems of getting food and medicine that is known to exist, but just not having the producing capacities to make it. Aliens are not new, but just displaced sentients stuck in the armpit of the milky way with you. A Sentient Slug race is just as aloof to the greater workings of what the hell happened as your great grandmas. It's all about dealing with the hand that's been dealt and making new opportunities. Next: This has to be free form, there is no great evil threat, or established evil organisations. Stars Without Number goes to great lengths to randomly generate Sectors from Religion, Planets, Aliens, and Corporate interests. I have a mind for a starting way station, but after that the sector is on fire from dice rolls and player interactions. As long as the players are having fun an dictating where they want to go I have no ambition toward some great story arc. It's a brutal sandbox and if players survive: you get to control where it goes. If you're still reading let me know if there's an interest for that type of play.
