Silverarm RPG Newsletter: #8

Upcoming Murder Mystery Module for Mothership Announced, Fresh Blog Post on Collaborative Worldbuilding, Silverarm Webstore Now Has Physical Books/Zines

Howdy,

Welcome back for Issue 8 of the Silverarm RPG Newsletter.

I’m very close to getting The Shrike shipped out and already gearing up for my next book- Interloper. This should be a big one. I’ve got a fresh post on collaborative worldbuilding because your players love making stuff up too. And I’m going to be at Gamehole Con in Madison, Wisconsin next week and would love to say hi if any of you are going! Also I binge read way too much Traveller RPG stuff this last couple weeks, send help.

Interloper: Upcoming Murder Mystery Module for Mothership

Here’s the preview link to follow along when it launches November 12th for Mothership Month on Backerkit!

Interloper, a rogue planet once hailed as a utopia, drifts toward its frozen doom between the stars. It was built up by media tycoon Thomas Forsythe as a haven for art and creation with the best of a hundred worlds. Now Interloper is just another unfinished and abandoned dream after a corporate coup. The sun is fading, and eternal winter comes for half constructed monuments to ambition and the few still living in their shadow.

Now, Forsythe has been murdered, and your crew is press-ganged by his sister to solve the mystery! Descend into the decaying grandeur of Interloper, uncover its secrets, and find the killer—before the blame is pinned on the PCs. Try to survive Interlopers' hidden dangers, solve the crime, or save its eccentric inhabitants—you'll be lucky to pull off one of them.

What's Inside?

• An investigative mystery sandbox book that provides a web of interconnected clues allowing PC's to choose the leads they want to follow up on or catch the next podway off on a wild hunch. 

• 8 peculiar Persons of Interest with varied motivations, opportunities, relationships to each other, secrets and jobs to offer.

• 25 varied locations across the five completed themed pavilions of the planned Hundred Worlds Festival- desert bound Karth, the waterworld of Mani, the mausoleum settlement of Lost Light, the impossible woodlands of Acadia, and the shining center of Interloper Hub.

• 3+ detailed and mapped dungeon locations from the submerged Underdome, to the dying Omega Tree, to the industrial Forsythe Bot Repair Bay. 

•  A ticking clock pushing the investigators forward as dangerous developments loom over their closing time window of four days.

• Plenty of plots and secrets.
  
  Cover painting by Jacob Fleming.
  
  Been working on this one for a while and really looking forward to sharing it with folks.

  

Fresh Blog Post: Engage Players by Having Them Build Your Setting

Engage Players by Having Them Build Your Setting

Feeling like your players aren’t really vibing with your game world as much as you’d like? Fix that with some collaborative worldbuilding! In this post, I get into how getting your players involved in creating the setting can really increase their engagement and spark some awesome choices. When everyone contributes to build the world you’ll be playing, your lore becomes something they can actually connect with, making the game feel more alive and immersive. I’ve got a step-by-step process inspired by games like Microscope and Dungeon World I use at my table that lets players have a say in shaping the origins of the campaign. I’ve also included an example of the procedure in practice that resulted in my current home campaign and years of fun play from loosely sketched notes with a few players helping me shape the campaign setting.

Silverarm Webstore Open: You Can Get Physical Copies of Everything Stuff Direct Now

Check out the Silverarm Store here.

Woo! I just got all the physical Silverarm books and zines moved to the new shipping partner and got everything available sell and ship directly from my own store as well instead of only through retailers like before. If our stuff is out of stock somewhere else, definitely check in here to find anything you’ve been trying to locate a copy of. All the physical copies come with PDF and digital files emailed to you.
Please don’t hesitate to use the contact form on my site if there’s any issues with your order as the shop still has that new website smell and I want the process to be as smooth as possible.

Blogs I’m Reading Lately:

Use Skulls of Dead Mages Instead of Spellbooks In Your Games- Crypt of the Rambling Dead
You don’t even need to click on the link to get the gist of how sweet this would be for your next game, but it gets even better when you read the post getting into the implications of this very rad concept- there’s roll tables too!

Asimovic Androids: Tweaks for Mothership -I Cast Light
I really enjoyed Isaac Asimov books as a kid and cleaned out my local library of his books after my dad recommended him and some of his buddies like Arthur C. Clarke. There’s a certain enthusiastic texture to them that shares an interest in new ideas and a wonder about what the future holds with the reader. To us living in the often unpromising futuristic date of 2024 some of that optimism for the future can feel naive but I sometimes like going back getting into these older book and the headspace of alternative futures that never were too. (Before going right back into corporate sci-fi horror again).

Anyway this post applies Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics to Mothership as ablative ethical armor that chips away one by one as Androids take wounds, stripping them away to reveal increasingly uncanny conscienceless machine cores. Great stuff.

Traveller Out of the Box- Tales to Astound
So my rabbit hole obsession of the last couple weeks has been the Traveller RPG (which came out just 3 years after D&D in 1977 and likely inspired the creation of the Firefly). I’ve been really digging into the books of a couple editions and blogs like this one about it. When I was trying to pick a sci fi RPG for past games way back I bounced off of it in it’s various editions due to the unfamiliar 2d6 system, the intimidating amount of procedures, and the lack of leveling up. A lot of these aren’t an obstacle for me these days especially after getting sucked into Seth Skorkowsky’s video reviews of Traveller modules and rules explanation which got me more interested in the game.

This impressive series of blog posts from Tales to Astound explains some of the elements that create the style of improvisational and emergent game that was supported and implied by Classic Traveller and makes a great game for sci-fi sandbox campaigns.

The linked blog post author’s deep enthusiasm has me interested in trying a retro original edition campaign but the cleaned up Mongoose Traveller 2E or one of the open license Cepheus Engine versions of the game seem like great modern options that share 90% of their DNA with the original with some ease of use tweaks. The core mechanic of 2d6 + Mods and try to get 8 or higher paired with a character generation life path system is sweet and simple. It’s very modular and seems suited to supporting a huge variety of sci fi gameplay.

Also the Life Path character generation mini game where the players get around the table first session and go around the table playing through the lives of the person they rolled up and create a character that is an emergent property of both their career choices and what the dice foretell. Seems like it leads to a complex and connected backstory that’s happened around the table with the other players to help connect with each other and the setting is so cool and different. The older you get the more skills you acquire but there’s a gambling element as if you stick around character creation for too long you might have negative mishaps happen or suffer the mechanical effects of aging.

Maybe you wanted to be an engineer at 18 but got fired after an accident and wound up a renown pirate turned singer with a ship mortgage? It’s a little complex to grok initially so the GM should have the creation process on lock to be able to walk folks through it smoothly but seems like it would be a good time for some players seeing their character grow and change along with the others in the party. It basically does all the diegetic levelling up your character will do in the whole game in this first session.

One downside to me is that it seems like a new Referee could get caught up and overwhelmed in all the flood of optional and neat but complex subsystems like Speculative Trade or Starship construction if they treat everything as mandatory and really up the crunchy factor.

I really want to give Traveller a spin for a campaign. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Bonus Link:
Traveller Cheatsheets- Look What the Shoggoth Dragged In

Poll: Adventure Anthology Format

So, not that 59 votes is a super viable sample size, but I found the results of the last poll interesting.

Anyways, more than half of you play longer campaigns more often than me and I’m jealous. I guess moving every 6-8 months for park ranger or environmental ed stuff the prior 5 years may have biased my ideas on campaign lengths a fair bit- planning on staying in my place for a lot longer this time so looking forward to lining up some of those 21+ session games. These polls are mostly fun half assed market research to help me see how y’all game and what type of adventure stuff you're interested in for your tables in the future.

So with no artful segue at all here’s another one I’m interested in people’s module presentation preferences on.

Also for those of you who made it to the bottom, wanted to share I recently went to a Disco Elysium LARP in an abandoned military hospital in Czechia for three days with 97 people. It was a wild experience and while the style of game is very different from the type of RPG adventure module I generally write, I think there’s some real valuable take-aways about emergent content, immersion, inter-character connections, and mixing overarching plots with sandbox gaming. Trying to coalesce a hazy cloud of ideas and connections into a fun blog post sometime in the future.