Star Master Log: Season 1 Overview & Faction Deep-Dive

SYSTEM_READY

This Star Master’s Log was originally a Patreon exclusive! To get these logs two weeks early, bonus world-building posts, and behind-the-scenes secrets, join the inner circle at: patreon.com/DarkStarAdventurecast

Star Master Jeff discusses how he planned season one, his philosophy on GMing, and gives an overview of the factions involved in the series.

In this first debrief, Jeff discusses:

• The overarching structure of Season One

• Why he chose the Stars Without Number system

• How ensemble shows like Firefly and The Expanse inspired the narrative

• His unique approach to planning campaigns like a TV series

• The main plot arc, centered around a mysterious signal and the crew’s Canterbury Tales-style focus episodes, where individual characters take the spotlight

• The major factions shaping the setting, including Omnitech Holdings and Nexus Trading

New Star Master's Logs drop every other Tuesday, bridging the gap between our main adventure episodes.

• Show Transcript

  [00:00:00] Hey everyone, it's Star Master Jeff here kicking off a special bonus series where I talk about how I plan the campaign exclusively for our Patreon listeners. So in this first debrief, instead of focusing on an individual episode, which you will see in the future, I wanna focus on season one and the game as a whole and really talk about the arc and the factions and how I prepped the season in general.

  So I'll also talk about the big story beats I hope will emerge, and how much I'm actually improvising behind the scenes. If you're into GM ing world building, or just curious about how the story takes shape. This one is for you. So the big picture goal of season one or really the entire game is I wanted to have fun with my friends.

  So I grabbed my friends and I said, what do you wanna play? We deliberated different systems and whether we wanted to do sci-fi or fantasy or anything like that, very quickly we decided sci-fi. We've, we've played a lot of fantasy in our past and it's always [00:01:00] fun to do sci-fi. It's always fun to do something a little bit different.

  After researching and trying out a couple different systems, we landed on stars without number. It's actually incredibly fun. We really liked the rule set and we've been enjoying it quite a bit. What's been interesting is that although we all read the book and we did play some intro sessions, this is the first time any of us play it.

  So we're kind of learning the rules as we go, and you'll hear it as the season progresses. You'll hear us be like, oh, you actually can't do that, or, we've been doing that wrong, and we'll try to like explain a little bit of the rules in the session. So you kind of get to go on that journey with us a little bit of learning how to play stars without number properly.

  And I'm sure that at points, for those of you out there who are already very adept at the system, you'll be wanting to reach through your phones and strangle us because, oh, you're doing that wrong, but. Hey, we're trying and we're learning, and if we do anything wrong, just shoot us a comment or a DM on Blue sky@darkstaradventures.com is our handle, and we would love to be corrected.

  So once we [00:02:00] decided on the system, I had to decide on what the plot was gonna be. I'm a fan of misfit ensemble shows like Firefly or The Expanse. I really wanted to go towards a feel of semi lawless or outcast group of people that don't necessarily get along trying to make their way towards some goal. I didn't want to necessarily just have them floating out there getting entangled at a bunch of random problems.

  I wanted to give them a really strong narrative goal that they can strive for, even though I know that they're also gonna go off and, and other things are gonna happen that are not necessarily directly tied in with the plot. So the way that I plan seasons, and I've been doing this since I was a sophomore in high school, is I actually do plan a real season.

  So even when I'm not producing a podcast, my games are produced as a season with episodes. And this hearkens back to a Dragon Magazine article that I read in, you know, probably early 2001 or so that talks [00:03:00] about planning your game like a television show. It's like if you look at, you know, Buffy or Xena or Firefly or anything like that where it's, you know, a highly serialized show like that, it's very easy to look at that and then look at a tabletop game and realize how close the two are in proximity.

  So the way that I do this is I create a series Bible, and it's like if we don't do any extra episodes, if the characters don't get super distracted and go off on some side quests, this is what the main plot looks like. Episode one, episode two, episode three, episode four, like walking through it. And each episode has a type.

  So there is plot episodes, ensemble episodes, focus episodes, and change of pace episodes. A plot episode is directly dealing with the plot. So if this was the X-Files, it would be directly relating to the government or aliens and furthering like what happened to Muller's sister. Then there are ensemble episodes.

  It's where you just get the group together and they do [00:04:00] something that's not plot related. So once again, in X-Files, that would be like a monster of the week type of episode. And then there are the focus episodes. So those are ones where we do a deep dive into a single characters past. Finally, we have a change of pace episode.

  That's an episode that is usually extremely different in tone from the rest of the episodes in the season or even in the show. In the XFiles, we have flashback episodes that don't even have Mulder and Scully in them. Or I am reminded of the Xena episodes where it's a glimpse into the future. It's all the same cast, but they're playing different characters and they're playing like the descendants of Zena or of, you know, Gabrielle.

  So it's good to throw those in for fun. So I always do my seasons like that. I've always done a good mix of all those different types. So how did I specifically do this one? Obviously the plot is that there was a. Mysterious signal that came in from outside the sector. We learned that within the first few minutes of episode one and the characters have been contracted by Omnitech Holdings, [00:05:00] a mid-sized corporation to go out and investigate a signal after picking up Dr.

  Vos on Wolffia. Once they pick her up on Wolffia, there's quite a long trip to get out to the coordinates of the signal. So what are they gonna do? Well, there'll be some plot, there'll be some ensemble. There'll be a change of pace episode or two, but most importantly, there will be focus episodes, and this is where I wanted to do something really fun.

  I'm a fan of the Canterbury Tales, and recently I reread Hyperion, which has a very Canterbury Tales esque format to it. The characters are going on a journey and to pass the time, they tell stories of their past and the stories of the past mesh into the web of the current narrative in some way. I really, really like that and I've wanted to attempt to do it in a tabletop setting.

  So what you're gonna hear when they start out on that journey out to the signal coordinates is these individual focus episodes where a [00:06:00] character tells the story of their past or one of the big plot points of their past and their history, and we're gonna play it out. So the character, let's say it's Thorn, Brian will still play Thorn, but everyone else, Stephanie.

  Doja and Scott, we'll play three characters that existed in Thorn's past and we'll play through it. So I'm really, really excited to do those at this time. We've already recorded one and it was amazing. We did Felix's, so you can look forward to that and I'm so excited to do more of those. So that's the main source of my excitement for this season, is getting through these focus episodes and showing how they narratively tie into the whole and setting up what season two is gonna be.

  So I'd like to take a minute and talk about factions next. So we have many, many factions here in the Viridian Expanse, mostly corporations that are all tied together in a hierarchy. So, of course we know about Omnitech Holdings. This is who hired the characters to go and [00:07:00] investigate the mysterious signal coordinates.

  Omnitech Holdings is mainly invested in planetary mining. On the planet PolyPhen, which is a ultra urbanized forever nighttime world that holds actually several different corporations that have split up PolyPhen over the generations, and they each have their own claim. Under PolyPhen Surface is actually a whole under city and mixed in with that, under City, when they were digging it out, they found alien artifacts.

  It wasn't the first alien artifact that was found on PolyPhen. It was found on a different planet altogether. But finding that alien artifacts exist, kind of started like a gold rush of alien artifacts and finding that PolyPhen in particular had kind of an ancient alien civilization under the surface, just set off a huge chain of events that caused a lot of corporations to rust, to PolyPhen.

  It became ultra urbanized, and they're kind of hollowing out a bunch of the planet looking for these artifacts. The thing about these alien [00:08:00] artifacts is they are completely inert. They have never been turned on. They apparently are supposed to be powered, but no one can actually make them work. So there's a huge sprint from all these corporations to be the first one to figure that out.

  Other major players include Verdine Labs. They're the owner of Omnitech Holdings. They mostly deal with genetic modification, cloning, and Helios, which is a stellar mining company, is owned by Omnitech. You're also gonna hear Drax Access Goods. Drax Access Goods is the company that Thorne's family owned, but they lost and Thorn ended up going to jail for smuggling that's owned by Nexus Trading.

  You're gonna hear a lot about Nexus trading in this season. They're a long haul trading group that has a major player by the name of Sist working for them, and you'll hear that name thrown around quite a bit as well, because he is the man who betrayed Thorn. Then Prometheon owns Nexus Trading, and Prometheon is [00:09:00] also owned by Virodyne Labs.

  Prometheon is a cutting edge, dark energy and antimatter research company. So these are kind of the major players. Omnitech, nexus, Prometheon, and then the top level company of Vene. There's actually a much larger tree of companies underneath Vene. If you check out the Patreon post, I'll post an image that shows these different companies in their organizational structure.

  So that's the idea of the factions and the plot and how all that's gonna come together. I'm currently not doing Faction turns, though. I do provide some sort of like news updates to the players. I am thinking about implementing Faction turns. So if you are a fan of Faction Turns, please leave a comment and let me know, and I will seriously consider adding them in.

  So that's my general overview of season one and the game as a whole. So thanks for listening and thanks for supporting the Adventure Cast. I really, really appreciate it. Love you all. Bye for now.