G'day
I'm a GM with over thirty years' experience looking for three to five players for a science fiction game. Chime in if you would be interested. Feel free to ask for clarifications and more information.
Prospectus for FLAT BLACK: Survey
Schedule
I'm going to run the game at 8 PM US Eastern Time on either a Monday night or a Thursday night. The day is negotiable. Sessions will be about three to four hours long.
This involves me actually running the game at a completely different time in my time-zone, but don't worry about that. If the campaign lasts long enough to run into the beginning of daylight saving here and the end of it in the USA, I will adjust to keep the schedule fixed in US Eastern time.
Game system
I'd like to run using a game called ForeSight , but that is negotiable to some extent. If players can suggest another simple, reasonably realistic game capable of handling SF adventure I am open to suggestions.
A new version of ForeSight is currently in development hell. You can get a playtest version from Loewald New Media which ought to be adequate, but I might import extra rules from the original (1987) edition, and might offer a simpler character generation system.
ForeSight is niche. I would expect all the players to be complete newbies. No problem.
Playing style
I run a rules-light narrative style, in which the game is essentially a structured story-telling jam session. I view character-players as collaborators in improv storytelling, not as opponents. But I like to have robust rules to fall back on when things get hairy.
I don't run a campaign like a concentration camp, and I like jokes and banter about as much as average, but this won't be a beer-and-pretzels game. Players will be called on to pay attention and make sensible contributions.
Genre & Premise
SF exploration. THE PCs will be comparatively lowly, more-or-less expendable explorers and scientists making up part of a specialised landing team on an Imperial Navy survey frigate: an interstellar spaceship engaged in exploring and re-contacting a series of lost colonies. The campaign is notionally similar to Star Trek in that it follows the voyages of a starship engaged in exploration and discovery, and will consist of episodic encounters with isolated planetary societies. It will, however, differ from Star Trek in the following ways:
1) Less rubber science and techno-babble, and a lot less emphasis on solving problems with tools and technology. Technology will be more realistic, much less powerful, and less important to the story than in Star Trek .
2) The adventures will much more often take place on inhabited planets and in contact with their quirky or bizarre local societies, and much less often in spaceships and in space.
3) The setting has no known space-faring aliens. There are, however, some pretty freaky genetically-altered humans, a few uplifted animals, some artificial species, and people with high-tech body-mods.
4) The PCs will not be the command team, and the mission itself won't really be responsible for fixing big problems. The big issues will be out of PCs' hands, and the adventures will often be about the things that they get up to while doing their work. Think of M*A*S*H , in which the central characters had no way of even shortening the war.
5) The setting is a lot less optimistic, and the PCs will often encounter bleak situations that even their superiors will have no way of mending. Moreover, the Empire itself is no shiny happy United Federation of Planets.
6) Ain't no steekin' Prime Directive.
Extension
If the game goes well and runs long, I may ask the players each to generate a second character in some other part of the crew so that we can play adventures based on, say, what the marines do, what the diplomats do, and what the naval crew do. So that eventually each player might built up a stable of one explorer, one diplomat, one marine, one naval officer, and one member of the command team.
Advisory
I don't go out of my way to work blue, and I don't run erotica. Neither am I at all interested in the pornography of violence. But there are going to be adult themes such as war, famine, plague, oppressive taxation, bad government, and failure. Characters may have normal love-lives. The PCs may deal with societies that have unusual sexual customs. "National Geographic nudity" may be mentioned. There will be some science and anthropology content.
This campaign is not suitable for children: MA 15+ .
