[Stories from the Shelter] Seeking Feedback, Reviews, and Playtesting

[Q]

The time has come, the Walrus said...

To introduce to you the game I've been working on for some time now. Stories from the Shelter is a space opera RPG in which players portray runaway and homeless teens recruited off the streets into an interplanetary Police and Protection Corps. The manual is longish, and the game is intended more for campaign play than one-shots. I could really use some feedback on the game, whether it stem from as little as a casual glance to a full-blown campaign playtest. I have done some preliminary playtesting, so the game is not raw, but I need to know how well things work for fresh players. If anyone is interested in the game, here is the beta playtest PDF (http://home.nycap.rr.com/thehudspeths/StoriesBeta.pdf). My answers to the Costisick Power 19 are here (http://community.livejournal.com/shelterstories/3529.html). You may also glean some insight into the game from the design journal (http://community.livejournal.com/shelterstories/). I can be reached for comment either here, or via email (quentin.hudspeth@gmail.com).

For those who might want to playtest, these are some of the questions I'd like you to address:

• Are the instructions clear?
• Is CharGen too long, too short?
• Are Check Caps too abstruse?
• What did you like, not like?
• What information would you deem necessary on the character record?
• How is the length of the book?
• Are there any sections you feel unnecessary?
• Are there any sections you feel are missing?
• How do you feel about the layout (This layout is preliminary), specifically the "chronological" arrangement of the chapters?
• Any other questions your experience dictates I should be asking 8^>

For those of you with a bit of time on your hands, let me try to give a better description of the game, including its history. I warn you, it's a bit long-winded.

General Information

The game mechanics center on attributes and abilities, with the usual dice-mediated checks for success. However, I have attempted to provide a decentralization of the storytelling, allowing players other than the controlling Narrator to inject bits of plot into the story. Players have access to a pool of points (their Chutzpah Cache, from which they can spend to alter target numbers for their ability checks, or even take over momentary control of the narrative. Further, players may buy/create Aspirations for their characters which serve to inform the other players what is important to the character and indicate where that character's player would like the story to go. In addition, role-playing is rewarded through Habits and Tenets, personality related aspects of the character which define typical ways in which the character can be expected to behave. These also serve to indicate where the player would like the story to go. Finally, the mechanics include Plotlets, a method for dealing with players being privy to information their characters are not. Players may buy/create their own Plotlets to provide their own story seeds or simply to flesh out any secretive backgrounds. In addition, the Narrator may use Plotlets to lay out possible secrets of the story for the players to choose amongst.

The game setting can be used for a number of styles of play, from tactical special ops warfare, to investigative police work, to diplomatic peace missions. The addition of explicit rules for social conflict along side the typical physical conflict rules allows for freedom to move between the different styles of play within a single campaign.

Prologue (from the manual)

Over 2000 years ago, an ancient and mysterious alien species known now only as the Usari , served as guardians in the galaxy, watching over, protecting, and sometimes guiding the less culturally or technologically advanced denizens of neighboring star systems. They made gentle, unobtrusive contact with most of their charges, playing the role of mysterious visitors rather than saviors. They kept their interference to a minimum, expanding their sphere of influence further every year...until they met the Cholak.

The Cholak were a violent, virulently fecund species — stellar phages that devoured whole star systems in their greed for resources. They fought a long and bloody struggle for expansion into Usarian space. The Cholak eventually deployed a weapon designed to wipe out the entire Usari species in one blow, but it backfired, destroying the Cholak themselves. In an event the Usari refer to as The Schism, this weapon also turned the Usari into living ghosts — able to observe and communicate, but never to physically interact with our world — trapped somehow between dimensions.

Realizing they could no longer defend or directly aid their charges, the Usari began a campaign of diplomacy — fostering relations among their once disparate wards — and of education — accelerating cultural and technological advancement wherever necessary. They helped to form the Interplanetary Defense Council (IDC), to act as a governing body for the newly emerging Galactic Union. Limiting themselves, at first, to cultures nearly as developed as their own pre-Schism one, the Usari set up training facilities similar to the ancient military training centers of their own planets. However, they feared a future incursion from another warlike species, perhaps even descendents of the Cholak or those from star systems they had subjugated before consuming. Over the next few centuries, they pushed the fledgling IDC to expand their training facilities throughout the Sovereign Volumes (sovols) of every member species, recruiting more and more sapients into the newly founded Police and Protection Corps (PPC).

Eventually, citing the imminent threat of incursion from hostile aliens outside the Galactic Union, the Usari convinced the IDC to construct recruitment and training facilities on a few underdeveloped planets, such as Earth, despite increasing skepticism among many member species. To protect Earth's culture from contamination and artificial acceleration, they worked in secret, setting up underground training facilities in the guise of emergency shelters for runaway and orphaned homeless children. Recruits were trained and protocols were set, against the day that Earth matured or inadvertently discovered their presence, or the war they knew to be inevitable finally began.

The Usari chose to use runaway and homeless human teenagers as trainees for several reasons. First, in pre-Schism Usarian culture people grew to social maturity at an early age. Second, the Usari believed these teens to have the right mixture of self-reliance, malleability, idealism, skepticism, and lack of societal links to make them perfect candidates for the Usarian training program, which involves lengthy periods of rigorous mental and physical exercise, tactical training, battle simulation, and field exercises. Graduates of the two-year cycle of the training program were placed as sleeper agents in various locations on Earth — with temporary memory blocks to protect the secret of the Usarian presence — to be awakened once the IDC officially approached Earth, or kept as backup officers in the event of some emergency.

Recently, the exploits of a now-infamous group of human recruits, have pushed the Galactic Union well along the road to war. During a botched training exercise on a newly charted planet on the edge of IDC space, they opened fire on a group of unknown aliens they believed part of the exercise. The resulting firefight left one human dead, and incensed the Thalock Empire. The Thalocks — half-blood descendants of the Cholak — have now emerged as a threat to the freedom of the galaxy. Diplomacy has failed. The frequency of skirmishes has escalated. It is now only a matter of brief time before all out war erupts.

Earth, fragile and unwitting, lies now almost directly between two factions bent on war. Unable to defend itself, the safety of humanity rests in the hands of unknown, and often unsympathetic, benefactors, and a few hapless humans who fell through the cracks and were given a second chance at life. These are their tales, the Stories from the Shelter.

History

When I was in high school, back in the mid eighties, my buddy Scott Milner shared with me his vision for his perfect TV show. He had been working on this World since he was 11 or 12, and I thought it was the most awesome thing I had heard of. Now, it's not quite so awesome, but I still think the underlying ideas are very cool. We used to LARP out of that World back in highschool, and even into college. Then we didn't do much with it for several years. Back at the end of 2003, when I was back home for christmas, I pitched Scott the idea of turning Stories into a real RPG, to share with others. I got started soon after we returned home, and I've been working on it in my spare time ever since.

Well, that's all I can think of for now.
Thank you ever so much for your time.

Slaintè,
Q

[Q]

Grrrrrr. Broken link.

The pdf is at http://home.nycap.rr.com/thehudspeths/Q_Pages/StoriesBeta.pdf

Q