Family drama, Christmas miracles, gods of emergent gameplay, and a strong vibe of ‘I should be writing a book.’ But there’s also a detailed playtest of the combat system! Somehow.
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Welcome back to the solo game of Project Aphelion, in which I take this lovely engine and do weird things with it – and it still works! Now, this episode is mostly a matter of downtime, comes with a very short story, and sets up another scenario. There are no dragon encounters, but I promise it’s still worth the time.
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Strategy Layer: December 10, 2055
Picking where we left off! It’s now only a week until Tomorrow’s meeting with Henequen and there’s research to be done, skills to be learnt, main quest to be progressed, spell research to be conducted, and – let’s not forget – the consequences of the Scenario on the Fly to consider!
It’s been 10 days since the start of the campaign, and Tomorrow already has her hands full.
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Welcome to the Grand Strategy, version Lite. I’m sure Jakub will one day introduce you to Grand Strategy, version Full Aphelion Rules, but that’s not my thing. As always, if you’re new here, I suggest you start at the beginning – and if you’re not, just come on and see me spill the beans.
Project Aphelion works on three separate layers of play, letting the players zoom in and out from one character’s shenanigans to their corporation building a spaceport in Neptune’s orbit. The game comes with Crew Layer (your standard adventuring experience), Fleet Layer (spaceship races or large-scale battles of the infantry), and Strategy Layer (all things Faction related). Strategy Layer is also the default for downtime between Scenarios, letting the characters pursue their long-term goals, keep track of training or carousing, paint their castle pink, do research, or run a tavern if they so desire.
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In the last post, I’ve generated the Scenario I’m going to be playing today. If you’ve missed it, it’s here. If you’ve missed the whole joy so far, it’s best if you start at the beginning and character generation.
This time, we’re going on an adventure!
As a reminder, the main objective (henceforth known as Main Task, or MT) is to get Tomorrow a meeting with Henequen, an art-dealing dragon who has more information about Tomorrow’s missing sister than was willing to share a couple months back. Tomorrow has decided to go about it in an only slightly sleazy way – book herself a meeting as a prospective seller of a valuable art piece used previously in a world-shattering magical ritual. She actually possesses said art piece and she’s reasonably sure she knows what she’s selling. The core objective is to get a deposit on the art piece (1 Payout worth of cred) and make the Henequen’s Faction like her more (3 Payouts worth of Influence) – enough to get the meeting with the dragon scheduled.
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By Anna Urbanek
Art deals! Artifacts! Lore drops! Getting through the PAs and PR specialists, trying to get a private meeting with Henequen – an art-dealing dragon who possesses more information about Tomorrow’s sister.
Welcome to the first scenario in my Project Aphelion’s Shadowrun-esque campaign, where I playtest PA’s solo play system and an exorbitant amount of fun while doing it. If you’ve missed the previous posts, here they are:
Background
During the campaign we’ve played, Tomorrow dug long, hard, and deep into her sister’s disappearance. One night, after an especially deep dive into Chloe’s (probably) friend, Fayette, Tomorrow received a message on her commlink that led to an incredible meeting that I conveniently have archived for myself, so it’s not gone with our Discord server. You’re getting a free short story then, courtesy of Jakub, my amazing GM in that Shadowrun campaign.
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By Anna Urbanek
Welcome back to the cycle in which I take Jakub’s perfectly good hard sci-fi RPG Project Aphelion and cram Shadowrun into it, using a lot of duct tape and hoping it will all hold. This time, I’m creating the campaign I want to play, establishing the goals and objectives, generating factions and the living, breathing world around Tomorrow. It’s gonna be full of sisterly affection, fun, tactical, and hopefully successful.
If you’ve missed it, in previous posts I’ve created my character for solo play, Tomorrow, and homebrewed a career of a professional magician that I needed to pull off what I want to be doing in the game.
Campaign Objective
The ultimate objective of this campaign is to scratch an itch I have.
The in-world objective of this campaign is to find Tomorrow’s missing younger sister, Chloe, who has disappeared about two years earlier, when Tomorrow was still in prison. Over the time of the Denver 2055 campaign we’ve played, Tomorrow has gathered a pile of data on her sister’s disappearance which created more questions than it answered. As we’ve stopped playing SR, I just want to see how all of this works out.
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By Anna Urbanek
Welcome back to my self-indulging project of changing Shadowrun into a strategy RPG, using the engine of our upcoming RPG, Project Aphelion. If you’ve missed it, in the previous post I went through some conversion notes and re-created my character, Tomorrow, according to PA’s chargen rules. What I’ve ended up with is:
Read MoreTomorrow
22-year-old elf, a magician
Attributes: Toughness 3, Fitness 2, Awareness 4, Resolve 3, Logic 5, Wit 4
Skills: Sorcery 3, Conjuring 2, Sciences 1, Investigation 2, Con 2, Stealth 2
Rep: +5 Outcasts, -5 Law Enforcement
Contacts: Citizen R1 (Mommy), Citizen R1 (Daddy), Citizen R1 (Friendly hacker), Outcast R1 (best friend, gang magician), Outcast R1 (boyfriend, gang lieutenant), Spirit R1 (Raven, mentor spirit). Note that ratings of contacts are neither loyalty nor connection – they’re both; they’re an approximation of how mechanically useful the contact can be, not whether they like the PC or are a big fish.Traits: First Impression, Low-Light Adaptation, Fragile, Exceptional Talent (Logic), Lucky (1), Income (3), Low Expectations, Driven.
Gear: a basic jumpsuit, a commlink, a magical-research toolkit, a mini 3D printer, a lockpick set, survival gear, a stealth suit, a non-lethal gun, and a bound air elemental called Steven.
About a year ago, we played a campaign of Shadowrun. It was delightful, even if the rules did what they could to make it annoying. The campaign came to an end of season one and we’ve never picked it up. But I am definitely not done with my character, Tomorrow: a Raven-mentored mystic adept with a head full of mischief and arcane research.
Resolved to not let Tomorrow move to the bleaker pastures of past characters, I’m taking her for a spin in solo play, using the rules of our upcoming strategy RPG, Project Aphelion. As Aphelion is a hard sci-fi game set in the 2280s and I need my character in the magical cyberpunk of 2055, we need to make some changes.
The campaign I want to play solo is going to have one main objective: finding Tomorrow’s missing sister, Chloe, who is hiding from Aztechnology in an undisclosed location.
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by Anna Urbanek
Get ready for the spooky!
Today we will be talking about the spookiest plants you can put in your Halloween game. We’re not here to discuss the most toxic plants, because let’s be honest – death by poison is a rather boring thing to play out at the table. Instead, we’re about to go for a deep dive into the weirdest, the creepiest, and most horrifying.
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If you, like many people in tabletop roleplaying circle, are waiting for the newest expansion for Dungeons & Dragons to land, you already know you’ll be probably spending some months around Icewind Dale. Arctic adventures are on multiple schedules this year, and there’s nothing surprising about it. After all, Rime of the Frostmaiden promises the players an opportunity to boldly go where snowman has gone before.
Let’s go on an adventure!
If you’ve read my previous post, you know we’re big fans of player agency in this house. If you haven’t – go give it a read. I assure you, it will make it obvious why I’m suggesting some of the solutions and not the others.
All of the advice below applies to running arctic adventures, whether or not you want to have them in Forgotten Realms. We acknowledge and support everybody’s right to not play D&D.
Do you want to make your traveling through the arctic tundra fun, engaging, and memorable? Well, read on, because we’re just about to embark on a journey. From prep to random encounters, we got you covered here.
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Our hard sci-fi tabletop RPG is finally in the play-testing phase! Jakub has been hard at work for months writing and polishing the rules for Project Aphelion, and now they’re ready to see the light.
What is Project Aphelion?
If you haven’t heard about the project before, here are the basics. It’s an tabletop RPG introducing elements of a 4X strategy (EXplore, EXpand, EXploit, and EXterminate, see here). It’s clear, streamlined, efficient, and easy to learn.
We’ve play-tested it last Saturday in a team of four; some of us never played RPGs before, some mostly know D&D, some play RPGs for years, some (me) have been with Aphelion since its beginning. Nevertheless, it was the first time any of us played it, and it took barely any time to start using the system intuitively.
It’s based on d10 only and has zero exceptions, yet manages to stay easy and complex at the same time. Crunch? Yes. Three days of character creation? No. (I’m looking at you, Shadowrun).
The alpha rules and the recording of the first play-test (explaining exactly how to play the game and use the interface) are for now available for our Patrons. Why not join them?
The featured image is in Public Domain: The planet Jupiter from the Trouvelot astronomical drawings (1881-1882) by E. L. Trouvelot (1827-1895). Original from The New York Public Library.