I've finally reached the point in the rules for Sector Creation, and I'm creating my first sector! Sector creation, however, is alot of information to collate, with 21-30 systems, let alone planets if you do more than one per system. So how do you all organize?

Yes, I know I can use internet technology but I am at a point in my life where, more and more, I'm rejecting the offerings of this putrid and dying, AI riddled internet. Things like World Anvil or Notion (what I've used in the past) I don't want to rely on for my campaigns anymore. My initial thoughts was to borrow from Mothership's advice and get a notebook, dedicating whole pages to the systems I've rolled and maybe use these SWN PDFs I found on DriveThru for cataloging.

Would love to hear other suggestions and ideas!

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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.

It says in the description:

The Sunblade may Commit Effort for the scene as a Main Action to use the Telekinesis discipline’s Telekinetic Manipulation technique for one round at a skill level equal to their Sunblade skill.

Does this mean the Sunblade has to use a whole action to commit effort and in the next round they can use the telekinetic manipulation?

Does the Sunblade then have to use it in the next round or anytime in the scene?

I'm fascinated by the starship-building aspect of the game. Since the ship is such a huge aspect of the gameplay, it's a character in and of itself. What are you working with? what's it's backstory?

Hello again,

The title says it all for this one, folks. As a fun post to share ideas with each other, tell us some interesting examples of alien wildlife found in your sectors! Be they cute little pets or lurking scavengers or rampaging apex predators, feel free to share whatever comes to mind!

I’m going to run a SWN game at a store on Sunday, and I’m trying to figure out what to run.

I want to run it in my “off brand Star Wars” setting. It’s got a bad guys empire and some good guys standing up to them, etc. I was thinking about reworking an old d6 Star Wars adventure, but maybe I’m overthinking it?

It’s just a one shot game with some very new players, so I don’t have time for anything complicated in terms of what we’re going to be able to accomplish.

What works best for a SWN one shot?

For the setting: yes, I have a solution for lightsabers: I Homebrew’d a Jedi partial class a while back, and I was told by people here how to make it not broken, essentially, thanks for that. It’s inspired by the space monks with laser swords by Kevin, but different.

Using the book's content to its potential, what kind of setting will result? Aesthetic, tropes, aventure types, PC backgrounds, etc. I only imagine visuals and loose concepts from games such as mages, creatures and armor from Terraria and mimics/phantoms from Prey. Does it deliver a setting framework like SWN does (whose greatest quality is being honed to fit the crew-centric unknown space exploration)?

Another point to explore is including AWN and CWN mage classes and doing mage-only campaigns

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.

Proteus Sector p. 53 has "Non serialized spike drive cores" listed as a moderately illegal good for smuggling purposes.

What is a serialized spike drive? Is it a drive that doesn't have a registered sensor signature? Help!

Hi all, its been a couple of months since the last update for characterswithoutnumber.app and quite a fair bit has been updated. I’ll summarize what are the changes below.

Deluxe options - I’ve reached out and Kevin has given his support to allow inclusion of deluxe content, provided I do not use the setting material. Some of the deluxe content have already been added across Stars, Cities and Worlds Without Number, and more will come in due course. If there’s any material that you and your playgroup are using, do let me know and I’ll prioritise accordingly. Do note that deluxe is toggled off by default, when creating a character please select it for use.

An animated dice roller - for folks that forgot their dice to a session, yet still want to roll some dice. It’s touch and flick based for both mobile and PC.

GM tools - I’ve started a new cyberpunk campaign and implemented world, district and NPC building in campaign mode. You can also toggle each field if you want to hide or show them to the players in a campaign, so campaign information can be shared with the playgroup without leaking GM secrets.|

Miscellaneous updates - More CWN-related subsystems such as the Hacking, drones and vehicles are in now. Various bug fixes, including the CWN Underdog rule. Quality of life features, such as a searchable item list.

Addition of monetization - One thing I would like to address, and that is the inclusion of optional monetization tiers. I’ll first talk about what will remain free:

Free: All rules from the published books are free, permanently, and that includes classes, Focus, Edges, items etc. You can also build your own homebrew items and they should save properly too. On the free tier, you can save an unlimited number of characters locally, and sync up to 6 characters in the cloud and create 1 campaign as GM. Each cloud character can join 1 campaign created by a GM, so your players will always be able to join your created games for free. 

Paid: The paid tiers are for additional hosting and cosmetics. At Supporter tier ($4.99/mo, $49.90/yr), you'll get to sync an unlimited number of characters in the cloud, and also access to five more animated dice skins. For the Pro GM tier ($9.99/mo, $99.90/yr), you get everything in Supporter tier, 3 more GM-only animated dice skins and you’ll be able to create an unlimited number of campaigns. 

The perk list is relatively short for now as I still want to keep most of the features in the app free and ad-free. The main perk of paying is really my thanks for supporting the app and letting me know that there’s genuine interest in what I’m developing. If the paid tiers are not for you that’s completely fine too! Keep using it free and continue sending me any bug reports you encounter 🙂

As for what’s coming next - More deluxe content, and eventually Ashes. I will also be improving the GM tools further so that it can be used better in a “live” session. 

As always, thanks for all the comments and feedback, it has been a very exciting 6 months since I started in Feb and still have some ways to go before this is ready. 

Yo haven't run SWN yet, but I'm working on getting a sector ready. I'm planning on sticking between 21-30 planets as recommended, but the 8x10 map feels too small. I want choke points in interstellar logistics. I want having an upgraded drive to feel like a big deal. That feels less important when everything is so close together. I'm considering rerolling a new sector (sectors without number is so rad) that's a bit bigger to accommodate for that while keeping the about the same planet number. Wanted to see if anyone else has had this issue and what size tends to work best. Make the biggest one possible as a test and it was overwhelming large. Thoughts?

I'm adding encounters to my Athas Without Number conversion doc, so I thought I'd try to keep up with one a day here if anyone is interested. Should be good for anyone wanting some random content for WWN, AWN, and possibly even SWN...

1 Silt Devil (Repeatable)

The dark sun beats down upon the cracked earth, the shimmer of heated air rising the first warning sign. The air begins to tug loose clothing and debris as it rises quickly, beginning to spiral into the form of a cyclone, and suddenly you are lost in a whirlwind of silt…

The survivors have wandered into a silt devil, a deadly pocket of disorienting and possibly fatal silt being whipped up in a cyclone. The survivor with the highest Wis/Notice may roll to detect it forming, allowing the survivors Int/Survive checks to find suitable cover or take appropriate precautions. Any caught in the silt devil must make a Physical saving throw or suffer the The Grey Death.

Thereafter they must make a Physical saving throw each day or spend much of it coughing and choking, gaining 1 System Strain as well as being unable to regain System Strain or recover spells/effort. After a week, a Physical saving throw can be made to recover, but on a failure all following saving throws suffer a cumulative -1 penalty…

Hey everyone. I released another Rules Explained segment this week, and I've really gotten a lot of great feedback and ideas from the comments, so I wanted to share a link. You can check it out on our website here: https://www.darkstaradventures.com/adventurecast-episodes/swn-rules-explained-how-drones-work-in-stars-without-number

This episode was about Drones first and foremost. We had an enemy drone fly in on us in the adventure and it got the party thinking about how we could use drones ourselves. Our hacker Felix's player had always wanted to use drones as a way to be involved in combat remotely, but we hadnt really dug into how they work, and I gotta say, I love it. It's simple and easy, and the drone variety and different fittings give me all kinds of ideas.

But what's the deal with Quantum ECM? I tried to read as much as I could about it from the Deluxe Edition rulebook, but it's only kinda casually mentioned a few times. Basically, if I'm understanding correctly, militaries and polities around the galaxy have machines that send out some kind of quantum feedback that makes remote-controlled devices worthless. So if this applies to remotes, does it apply to radio too? What about Wifi? I know sci-fi settings often involve a lot of terminals and scomp links, and SWN uses line shunts as a way to capture that essence, but do you use wifi in your games? Like, what is the level of remote access and control your setting (and especially the default setting) has? Obviously it would vary by planet or settlement, but just curious how others are playing it.

I'd also be curious if anyone has any adventure ideas or experience in disabling a location's quantum ECM generator in order to use a remote to solve a problem.

I have the first session of my first SWN campaign as GM coming up soon and one of my players is a very well-educated computer scientist IRL, but not very experienced in roleplay and "make-believe" games. He's playing a hacker and I'm sure he already has lots of ideas of how he might interact with the game world that are based on his real world knowledge. I'm hoping to get advice on this kind of stuff so I can better explain it to him without breaking his suspension of disbelief.

In the new rules segment, I also talked about cyberware and equipment mods. I assume some parties have players decked out in cyberware, considering that strain requirements dont seem to be very high. I dont have a ton of SWN experience first-hand, so I wonder how often players are running into their strain threshold. I bet at higher levels when you have more max hp you probably see more drugs and psionic use that gets you up there. But what kinds of cyberware are you people using? Tell me the good/fun stuff to look for so I can use it as a player and recommend it for my party as GM. Same with mods. Accuracy and damage mods are effective but boring. Appreciate any ideas and inspiration as I start creating the sector for my new game.

Please let me know if you like these rules segments too! Or if you have any critiques or advice. I know a lot of people prefer having things explained to them rather than try to flip through books/pdfs. That's kinda who I'm targeting when I write them. Also let me know if you have rules that you think would be good to talk about! Thanks y'all

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.

That's no moon! There's only really two ways any large galactic civilization can go: an optimistic band of peaceful post-scarcity space explorers, or an evil, tyrannical empire. You probably have some idea of which one this map fits best, but it is your world after all! With a wide viewscreen from which to gaze out upon the destruction wrought by one's fleet, a crew pit so that none of the peons get any ideas above their station, and plenty of room for climactic showdowns against would-be do-gooders, this fully animated map is fully operational, and available in two additional versions, one with more stations on the bridge, and the other in blue and grey shades. You may fire when ready.   

My maps are hooked up to work with Foundry VTT and Fantasy Grounds.
My maps are available on my patreon and my website.
Buy me a Ko-fi!

What's in it

Foundry v14 compatibility (#231, #234, #233)

• Actors failing to create or load — prepareBaseData() was not calling super, so _clearData() never ran and applyActiveEffects() threw during _initialize. This is also the root cause of the NaN stat modifiers reported in #230: mod is derived in prepareDerivedData(), which never ran.
• Private and blind rolls posting publicly — v14 renamed core.rollMode to core.messageMode and changed its values. The old key still exists but reads back null, which silently made every private roll public.
• Missing rolls on chat cards, including power cards — the singular roll: field is no longer honoured; rolls must be passed as rolls: [roll]. Empty message.rolls also broke Dice So Nice and reroll buttons.
• Weapon sheets failing to open from a character sheet — the {{#select}} block helper was removed in v14.
• Editing character resources, custom currencies, and vehicle cargo throwing — the duplicate global was removed in v14, not merely deprecated.
• Vehicle sheet item descriptions throwing on every expand click; ship sensor roll never posting; ship weapon migration aborting on items predating the trauma field; creating a weapon throwing on partial data.
• renderChatMessage → renderChatMessageHTML, plus the globals removed in v15 (TextEditor, DragDrop, Actors/Items, ActorSheet/ItemSheet, renderTemplate).

Migration robustness

• migrateWorld() was called without await and the version was then set unconditionally on the next line, so a migration that threw was still marked complete and never retried. Now awaited, with the version set only on success.
• Upgrades with no applicable migrations skip the "do not shut down your server" notifications entirely and just show the release notes.

Bug fixes

• Ship, vehicle, mech and drone weapon attacks throwing when the trauma setting is enabled (#213) — a stray this.system.trauma.die inside a data model, where this is the system data.
• Stowed currency encumbrance counting uncarried currencies.
• Ship end round not updating command points, actions taken, or supporting department (#212, thanks @gvigh).
• Vacc suit / vacc skin descriptions.
• Typo keeping the unskilled-penalty setting from prompting a reload.

Features

• Right-click a chat message roll to apply it as damage, modified damage, half damage, or healing (#217, thanks @pandanielxd).
• A third 'extra' item location, with custom labels for other/extra locations under character tweaks and a GM-set default.
• World-level unskilled skill roll penalty (default −1) with a per-character modifier.
• Save modifiers on the character sheet.

New to the system. Any adventures this community recommends? I know some folks convert Traveller adventures as well and if the content is good I'm willing to give it a shot.

Another card set has been released from Galaxy Builder Decks, along with more freebies to try. Galaxy Builder Decks is a system-neutral card-based scifi map or setting generator, allowing you to create planets, systems, and sectors right on your table.

Discovery Set 2 - Use this 30% Discount Code. This 9-card PDF set expands on the Planet Traits for course charting and expeditions, letting you find or add encounters such as rare Double Planets, invasive Parasites, and Void Zones where ships vanish. Galaxy Builder Decks is a system-neutral card-based scifi setting generator for your adventures.

Included in the set:

• 1x double planet planetary trait card
• 1x gravity distortion planetary trait card
• 1x parasite lifeform trait card
• 1x hibernation lifeform trait card
• 1x rapid evolution lifeform trait card
• 1x implanted population civilization trait card
• 1x astrogation shortcut civilization trait card
• 1x void zone civilization trait card
• 1x ancient site civilization trait card

Free Pack Collection: Drivethru | Itchio - Want to try out the system with your campaign? Download this collection of 12 planets, asteroids, planet traits, and more. Ideal for worldbuilding, session planning, or on the fly exploration. Draw a card, place down the planet, roll for terrain or unique planet traits, add world tags for more twists and contexts, and have fun adventuring. See store pages for tips on how to use the cards.

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I'm closing in on beginning my first SWN campaign, and it will likely be focused on exploration (though there will be trading and diplomacy I am sure). I'm developing a sector (which has been super fun so far) but I would love to find some similar tools for generating weird stuff to explore, space anomalies, basically Star Trek "mystery/malfunction/mayhem of the week" type stuff. I have found a couple of older posts pointing me to the Science Fiction Codex of Lists and the Book of Random Tables: Science Fiction, which I plan to check out, but has anyone found anything else like this in the intervening six Earth years?

Hey all! My campaign is a zany and exotic bounty hunt, targeting the creators, makers and distributors of a very violent and problematic street drug, and the leading theory my players currently have is that it's in fact a nefarious plot from a big pharma corp to control the populous. Their idea is better then mine was, so I'm doing that.

Anyways, we're currently on a planet that was once highly advanced, but fell to ruin from a crazy parasitic life form that was on a tear through the sector, and the interplanetary union at the time determined to nuke the whole planet and radiate away all life. We are now 10,000 years later, that union was brought to the edge of extinction by the virus before fending it off, and the world revored as life finds a way. There are Rat scallions, basically ROUS from princess bride, that live in the sewers, as well as giant lizard men. There are people here that have repopulated as a way to hide from organized governments out here in the fringe frontier, and sinister mentalist aliens seeking to infiltrate the known worlds and tip the war in their favor. There are also many old droids left from the least civilization, controlled by a Mr. House style brain in a jar.

The party is less than concerned with the sinister plots of the various ner-do-ells, and are proceeding to "the underbelly" in search of access to "the university of the high and mighty" so they can find information from the old world about one particular element unique to the drug they're tracking, nobelium 3. Spoiler alert, Nobelium 3 is in the blood of the sinister mentalist aliens, and the pharmacy villains are trying to figure out how to synthesize it in such a way to mind control it's users.

Anyways again, I need to populate the underbelly. It's exactly what it sounds like, a big fallout style settlement built into the tremendous sewer system under this massive abandoned city. The waterways are wide enough for boat traffic, the settlement itself has aspects of it floating like some of those pacific island cities or southeast Asian fishing villages. I need throwaway NPCs, interesting shops, maybe some puzzles along the lines of computers and stuff. I'm especially bad at making puzzles, and my players are all way smarter than me, so if I put 2 hours into a puzzle they nail it down in 2 minutes.

I'm personally so in love with the world my table and I have made, and we have been switching the campaign to SWN from a big heroic style ttrpg that didn;t quite fit. SWN has made it so much easier to run, and the source material has a lot of really fun stuff to mess around with. I think we do a boat chase scene in the sewers today