Hello, all.

I'm looking for playtester feedback on Stars Without Number, a retroclone-inspired sci-fi game that I built to experiment with some ideas about how to mechanically support a sandbox-style gaming experience in a star-hopping science fiction setting. The basic system chassis is almost bog-standard OD&D with the trimmings necessary to deal with genre conventions. The flavor goal of the game is to replicate old-school sandbox exploration and discovery play, translating the dungeon-crawl conventions of freebooting adventurers into a sci-fi setting. The system goal is to provide processes that GMs can use to streamline and simplify the labor of creating a sandbox setting.

In my experience, the burden involved in creating a sandbox exploration setting is even worse in sci-fi games than it is in traditional fantasy. Most sci-fi games allow for the rapid transportation of PCs to entirely new worlds, and it's diabolically hard to create enough content to cope with that. Traditional hexcrawl fantasy gaming at least puts some limits on the places a group of PCs can end up within a given amount of time, but inflicting severe mobility limits on a group in a sci-fi setting tends to require its own set of rationalizations. Instead of fleshing out a country or a continent, a GM ends up needing to put together multiple planets.

Stars Without Number tries to streamline the process by capitalizing on the work done at each stage of world generation. Characteristic elements are picked or rolled during a world's creation and then used as parts for insertion into an adventure framework. Color and flavor are added by hand or from the tables provided in the resource chapter, and local flora and fauna are generated based on the roles they need to fill in a scenario. Chapters on building organizations and governments, alien races, and stellar sectors are included to help tie things together.

What I particularly need are people willing to run through the sector generation process and tell me whether or not it actually works well for anyone but its creator, along with any ways it might be improved in usability and elegance. If anyone has a tooth for numbers, they can take a look at the starship design rules and the faction creation rules and tell me if they spot any glaring problems or trivially optimal configurations.

Even if you're not terribly interested in the concept, you might get some use out of stripping the thing for world creation parts. The latest version of the game can he found at http://sinenomine-pub.com and any feedback can be pitched along to sine.nomine.pub@gmail.com.