A roleplaying game outline is a wonderfully flexible document that bears little resemblance to the finished product. A narrative like a novel has to go from start to middle to end, you have a procession of events that have to be in order. A roleplaying game supplement is a textbook – you have a few topics you have to cover, a lot of topics you might cover, and the order in which you present them isn’t always obvious. As you write the book, you think of more stuff that should go in, and you find that some sections are redundant or a lot shorter than you expected them to be while others just go on and on.

(Outlining Anomaly One is further complicated by the potential for a print version – the length of the pdf is effectively unconstrained, but a print version really has to be long enough to justify a print run and a multiple of 16 pages long  - 32, 64 and so forth. Anyway, that’s getting way ahead of things.)

The content divides roughly into four sections.

1) The player section – background details on our solar system and the future setting. Earth has fusion power and affordable space travel (TL8 in Traveller terms), but we’re running out of various metals. To the asteroid belt, for profit! There’ll be new or tweaked careers, a few spacecraft, and new event tables to match the new background.

2) Anomaly One – the alien ship, and what’s on board. The ship is five kilometres long (think Rama), but the characters initially have access to only part of it. Exploring the ship is something you can do while in jump space (again, using the conventional Traveller jump drive). After the ship has completed its first jump, the PCs can control where it goes next to a degree. The ship bonds to the player characters to some extent, and only allows them to command it.

There are several other groups on board the ship. The initial outline had half-a-dozen such factions, but that’s too many – there’ll be new alien races in section 3 too, and I don’t want to overload the players with weird aliens. So, some of the previous passengers on board the ship are long dead, but they’ve left relics and ruins that the characters can find.

3) The new region of space that the ship jumps into. A full Traveller sector would be overkill, so it’ll probably be a 2×2 or 3×3 grid of subsectors, which is still plenty of planets to explore. There’ll be another four or five alien races here, and the region is on the verge of open conflict. The sudden arrival of a giant super-advanced starship may tip them over the edge.

4) Adventures and GM advice, including several long-term plot arcs and suggestions on what’s really going on and what the Anomaly One is. You can compare it to Stargate: Universe, with its ancient alien ship to explore, or Farscape with the characters being dumped into the middle of alien space with no way home. Or, if you’re feeling ambitious, the Odyssey.

So, the initial outline looks like this:

(more…)

… and Anomaly One wins by the thinnest of margins! A mere two votes separated it from The Basileus of the Stars, so we’ll work on those two projects first.

Anomaly One is intended to be a campaign launchpad. The first two or three sessions of a campaign usually go well, but there’s a lull after that when the initial novelty fades but the game hasn’t yet reached a critical mass of ongoing plot threads. The material in Anomaly One is designed to be a second-stage booster for your campaign, giving it an added boost to make sure it takes flight.

That’s the marketing spiel, anyway. What it means is that there will be enough material in Anomaly One to create your own characters and play through at least four or five sessions of play, and then build your own plots on top of the setting material. Once you exhaust the initial adventures, you can either treat the game as a mini-campaign and bring events to a conclusion, or keep going for dozens of sessions.

Next week: Outlining!

What is Milkyfish?
Milkyfish is the publishing imprint of Gareth Hanrahan & Edel Ryder.

Who?
Gar Hanrahan writes interesting stuff, primarily roleplaying games (Paranoia, Traveller and many, many others). Read his personal blog for more details.

Edel Ryder does art, layout and everything else. Read her personal blog for more details.

What does Milkyfish produce?
Right now, our only product is Fish for Fish, a webcomic. You can read the archives here or even buy a pdf copy here. We’ve even got a few print copies – email us at milkyfishpress@gmail.com if you want one.

In the next few months, we’re ramping up to produce roleplaying games and supplements. Our first few releases will be for the Traveller roleplaying game from Mongoose Publishing. Gar was the lead designer for the new Traveller, so he knows how to make it sing. These books will explore unusual ways of playing Traveller.

What book is coming out first?
That’s up to you. Either vote in the poll below, or email us at milkyfishpress@gmail.com.

What are these books about??

Glad you asked.

First, The Basileus of the Stars: After hundreds of years, the UCEC Empire is in decline. The titanic warfleets can no longer maintain the old borders against raiders and barbarians. To preserve the core worlds, the Empire is withdrawing from this region of space. Word has come from Earth that your ancestral holdings are now outside the Pax Sol that has protected you for uncounted generations. As scions of a noble family, how will you survive in this new anarchic era?

The Basileus of the Stars casts the player characters as members of a noble house, ruling whole planets and commanding vast legions. Enemies – barbarians, revolutionaries, raiders and rival families – covet your estates. Your siblings, relatives and trusted servants are your best allies… unless they too are plotting to betray you.

Drawing inspiration equally from Dune and Asimov’s Galactic Empire, this campaign framework gives the players more power than they dreamed possible – and then challenges them to hold onto it.

* * *

Now We Are Here is the tale of the ill-fated passenger liner Batavia. She’s just misjumped and is falling into the atmosphere of an uncharted alien world. Don’t ask questions, just get to an escape pod! Move!

The pod crash-lands in thick jungle. In the purple skies, you can see the fiery trails of dozens of other escape pods and cargo modules as they fall to Earth, but the comm is dead. Was it damaged in the landing, or does something in the atmosphere of this strange planet block communications? Either way, you and a handful of other survivors are all alone in the wilderness.

At least, you hope you’re all alone. There could be anything in the jungle….

* * *
Anomaly One begins in the asteroid belt of our own solar system. Your characters find the first proof of the existence of extra-terrestrial intelligence – a derelict alien vessel, with no signs of life on board. Before your characters can explore the huge derelict, it jumps through hyperspace – and you’re dragged along with it!

Congratulations. You’re the first humans to leave the solar system, and the de facto ambassadors of humanity to the greater universe. You’ve got an alien ship five kilometres long that seems to be willing to obey you.

Unfortunately, you’ve just jumped into the middle of a cluster of weird alien species, and none of them seem friendly.