Preparing for Starblazer Adventures

My current gaming dry spell is about to end next Tuesday evening. A few RPG pub meeting regulars have asked me to run a game for them and I offered to run a SF game for them. Initially I planned to give Traveller a try but more recently I decided to run a FATE-based game.

So Starblazer Adventures it is! Over the last few days I have been leafing through the massive 629-paged book, rereading several rules, checking out the included settings for inspiration and thought about an introductory adventure. But then I realized that I was approaching this all wrong.

Before coming up with my own ideas about a setting, adventures etc. I should talk with my players about it. Starblazer Adventures has a chapter about Collaborative Campaign Creation that provides players and GMs with some simple tools to create whole campaign settings from scratch collaboratively. So what I will do is talk with my players about how FATE works first. Then I’ll ask them what kind of SF game they prefer. This directly leads us to the collaborative campaign creation.

When he have the campaign background more or less nailed down, we can start with character creation. The player characters’ Aspects will further help me to flesh out the campaign setting later and come up with the kind of adventures they really want to participate in.

Between our character/campaign creation session and the first real play session I plan to turn the basic campaign map created using the method described in the SBA rulebook into a pretty starmap using Cosmographer 3.

By the way, FATE will also be the big topic for our next RPG pub meeting. Hopefully I can share the love with my fellow German gamers!