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Starship Deck Plans Links Compendium

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Starship deck plans for the U.S.S. Enterprise, rendered as line art.

One of the big differences between running a fantasy campaign and a science fiction campaign is that when playing SF, I find myself constantly looking for starship deckplans.

With a fantasy campaign, many of the maps revolved around buildings, dungeons or overland adventures, and those sorts of maps were easy to knock out over lunch. Failing that, I had plenty of maps from 20+ years of Dungeons & Dragons that I could fall back on.

With my Star Wars campaign though, the adventures are split between world-based exploration and starship- or space station-based combat. Starship based adventures represent perhaps 1/8 to 1/4 of the encounters I run, but when I do run them I often find myself scrambling for deckplans.

The big reason there is that it takes more effort to come up with a rational-seeming starship. A dungeon can be as simple as a series of rooms, but with a starship players always want to know where to find the bridge, engineering, jeffries tubes, etc.

Summon WebScryer: 2010 in Review

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My “Summon WebScryer” column for Knights of the Dinner Table kept rolling along in 2010, continuing a run that began in 2000. Some months it’s a struggle to come up with ideas, other times the stars align and the column writes itself, but it’s always fascinating to see how folks are using technology to promote, … Read more

Star Wars: The Storm Dragons of Tarl

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The storm dragons are magnificent creatures hunt the hurricanes of the storm world of Tarl. The Outer Rim planet’s binary stars provide a constant source of energy for its moisture rich atmosphere, giving rise to an unending series of cyclones. The dragons constantly ride these storms, hunting the great airbag herbivores that dwell in storms’ eyes and battling each other for arial supremacy.

Star Wars RPG Roundup: WotC’s Postfest, Scavenger’s Guide reviewed, Order 66 #100

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Wizards of the Coast’s Star Wars license expires in May, and their web site is going away in August, so they’re posting as much of their unpublished content as possible to the web. There’s so much, in fact, that I can’t include it all in one round up — look for another edition later this … Read more

Once More Unto the 4th Edition Breach

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We’re heading back. A year after our last paragon-playtest of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition (a one shot adventure set  continued our Planetorn campaign) we’re going to be running Revenge of the Giants, a new megamodule for paragon-level characters. I recently received a review copy of the module and that – plus the latest round … Read more

Initial Thoughts about HackMaster Basic

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At Origins 2009 I had the pleasure of playing in an Introduction to HackMaster Basic session run by Steve Johansson, one of the designers (Dave Kenzer, another designer, was running the other table). Full disclosure: I’m a staff writer for Knights of the Dinner Table but when it comes to HackMaster I’m as much newbie … Read more

Podcast Roundup: Cyberpunk’d, Skill Challenges, PHB2, Dungeon-A-Day

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Three weeks of rainy days put a major crimp in my podcast-listening schedule in May as I was forcd to drive (rather than walk) to work. It’s the difference between a 2 minute commute and a 15 minute one … as well as no podcasts or three podcasts a week. With the sun finally shining … Read more

Is this the Golden Age of Scifi RPGs?

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A strange thing is happening in RPGs: science fiction is popular again. While there have always been science fiction RPGs, they’ve always been a distant second (or more often, a distant third) to fantasy and even horror RPGs. Right now though we have three major scifi RPGs in print: Star Wars: Saga Edition, Warhammer 40k, … Read more

Searching for Pathfinder RPG Fan Sites

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I’ve decided to make the Pathfinder Role-Playing Game subject of one of my upcoming “Summon WebScryer” columns for Knights of the Dinner Table. The successor to D&D 3.5 (in spirit, if not in name) is going to be released this summer, so it seems like a good time to write about it. I’m looking for anything that has to do with the RPG; playtests of the beta, campaign web sites, you name it. If you know of one, please post it to the comments or email me at nuketown@gmail.com.