Boat Loan

Something I'm testing out for my Intergalactic testing, recently added to the playtest doc.

Being part of a thousand-strong crew on a huge starship has become a key part of Intergalactic, something I was eager to explore as a point of difference to the familar sci-fi RPG setup of a small independent crew with their own ship.

From my initial playtests I wonder if I went a too far with this, having a bit too much time cooped up in the ship, sometimes making it easy to forget you're in space at all. Layover offered a chance to get off the ship but you were then confined to a single planet and there wasn't much drive beyond "make some money for yourself", then you were back on the ship for the next transit. None of this was outright bad, but I wanted to make the balance between workplace-restriction and starfaring-freedom a little more even.

Enter the Boat Loan, a replacement for the current "ticket of leave".

[from the Layover Page]

Boat Loan

Crew working Double Duty Detail now receive their Boat Loan, being granted temporary ownership of one of the ship's boats, and the freedom to roam the system. This privilege carries three hard rules:

1. Return on time for the next transit.
2. Return the boat in the condition you took it.
3. Get Officer approval for each trip, agreeing to their modifications and stipulations.

Typical Officer stipulations might be a share of profits gained, an errand to run on their behalf, or taking specific crew members with you.

The Captain and Officers have access to their boats but usually stay on the ship, whether out of fear the ship will abandon them or the lack of appetite for visiting dangerous worlds. 

This opens up little stretches of freedom for the players to explore the current solar system, but still ultimately ties them to the main ship with the pressure to return on time and profitable.

Transit times have been tweaked to make all this a little more viable while still applying financial pressure and uncertainty. Ships are now horribly inefficient for interplanetary transit compared to boats, to the ship is assumed to stay in-place between interstellar transits.

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Circuits and Rallies

I'm back from holiday! I guess coming back to familiarity after a few weeks of novelty got me thinking.

Sometimes you repeat the same stuff over and over. Sometimes you breeze past stuff, never looking back. We’ll use an imperfect racing analogy of Circuits and Rallies. 

Circuits are great because you get to revisit things, building a familiarity with them. In Intergalactic Bastionland this is the ship, where you regularly return to the same place with the same people. 

Rallies are great because you’re experiencing a flurry of new material. In Intergalactic this is visiting worlds, where you get to experience a strange place and meet new people. 

This isn’t a case of good vs bad. Both types of element have their advantages, but benefit from the other in order to shine. 

And of course this usually isn’t a perfect fit. You can encounter new people and places within the ship, and you might revisit a contact when you go back to a world. The purpose of this idea is to consider whether your game would benefit from more of either type of content. 

In my last Traveller campaign I think the crew visited eleven worlds, with no return visits. There were a few recurring NPCs, but they only encountered them on new worlds, usually requiring a little hijinks behind the curtain to get everyone in the right place on time. As such, it felt very rally-like, a road trip through space where the happenings on each planet felt quite disconnected from each other. It felt like a bit of a missed opportunity to go back to a known location.

This is part of my impetus for having Intergalactic take place on a much larger ship, with that acting as the circuit. This is the Star Trek model, right? Planet of the week, with the ship acting as a consistent element.

So why do I worry that the players won’t care about these worlds if they don’t return to them?

At the moment the ship’s movement is unpredictable, largely outside of the players’ hands at the start of the game, but my gut feeling is that new worlds will be slightly more common than recurring worlds. 

So it’s easy to imagine the players not caring about these worlds, beyond a place to pick up a one-off job before blasting off into the void. Maybe they won’t even care if they revisit a world like Labyrinth and find that the planet’s core has finally annihilated itself from within.

I guess this is the nature of space, or at least a game that encourages such wide-spanning space exploration. It’s okay to have the novelty of the rally alongside the familiarity of the circuit.

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.