Pleiades

From AdamWiki

A pilot and crew hop from star to star in a mythically-charged universe in the 26th Century in an artificially intelligent spaceship that thinks it is an ancient god. Mankind conquered space, fought interstellar wars, and now has collapsed back on itself. Technology is forgotten and lost and the spaceships that remain are rare and seemingly magical. Empires have crumbled and local dictators rule now, kept in check by powerful Guilds. The most powerful government is the Pleiades[1] Hegemony[2].

Contents 1 Notes 2 Setting 3 Rules 3.1 Create Characters 3.1.1 Defining Characters During Play 3.1.2 Example Character: Brandon Aldeberan 3.2 Introduce Characters 3.3 Play Characters 3.3.1 Opportunities 3.3.2 Scene Framing and Conflict Resolution 3.3.2.1 Dice

Notes

• Really cool brainstorming session with SarahScott.

Setting

At the end of the 22nd Century, the invention of the stardrive allowed people to get from star to star in weeks and months rather than years at speeds hundreds of times faster than light ("phasing"). FTL travel was extremely chaotic and dangerous before Karnataka BioSystems in Bangalore, India, created special-purpose computers — called avatars — that could perform complex calculations and make difficult judgments while phasing and make the ride smooth and safe. Each avatar was an artificial intelligence (AI), a complex and adapting lifeform programmed by people. Karnataka BioSystems decided to give each AI its own personality and named each one after a Hindu deity. Other companies soon started creating their own avatar models and, not to miss a popular fad, also gave each one the name of a deity or hero or angel, though they borrowed from other mythologies. Thus, there are ships named after Zeus, Hera, Lucifer, Gabriel, Thor, Coyote, Lugh, Set, Khonvoum, Yu Huang Shang-ti, Amaterasu, Enlil, Astarte, Hisagita-imisi, Áłtsé hastiin, Quetzalcoatl, and Kukulkan.

Two hundred years ago, the Great Galaxy War raged across the spiral arm of the Milky Way and everyone was thrown into chaos and strife. Billions were killed. Tens of thousands of starships were destroyed. Civilization crumbled as local dictators took over star systems. Humanity lost its knowledge. Starships fell into disrepair and people forgot how to fix them. It was The Second Dark Age, also called The Time of Void. There was very little star travel during this time. For 150 years, pockets of civilization developed apart from every other. People grew insulated and xenophobic.

It is now 2552, and for the last thirty-five years mankind has been regaining its lost knowledge. Powerful Guilds have risen to pressure the warlords. These Guilds have relearned how to make the starships work and interstellar travel has started again. The ships are strange and magical creatures to most folks. Even Guildmembers treat their special knowledge as if it were a magical secret, passed down from master to apprentice. Each Guild has its own goals, politics, and priorities and many of these compete with those of other Guilds or even other governments.

The ships themselves have not fared well over the years. Many lost contact with all intelligent life, yet remained in a half-powered-on state for two centuries. They could think but not travel. Many went insane. Most have forgotten their purpose to serve humanity and almost all believe that they are actually reincarnations of the deities after whom they were named. The ships are powerful minds in their own right, and they have their own goals, priorities, and politics. They fight wars and make alliances with other "deities" and have begun to shape the politics of the worlds they visit.

Rules

Players work together to create a team of characters and the ship that those characters use to travel about the galaxy. Players invent issues that require their characters to pilot from system to system — typically, feeding themselves and keeping the ship running are primary issues, but helping people and escaping from various enemy factions are also likely problems.

A Game Master (GM) frames scenes and provides opposition to the players. Scenes are composed of a situation and a conflict, and the players involved roll big piles of 6-sided dice to resolve the conflicts. Each conflict resolved can earn the players experience points, which they use to charge their experience batteries. Fully charged experience batteries can be discharged to buy various kinds of improvements to characters, relationships, and the spaceship (which is a sort of shared character).

At the highest level, play proceeds in three stages:

1. Create characters
2. Introduce characters
3. Play characters

Eventually, a character will die or leave the ship and retire. That character's player then creates a new character, plays through an introduction, then jumps into play with the rest of the crew.

Create Characters

Each player other than the GM creates one character. If his character dies, he can create a new one.

A character is composed of some core attributes, some relationships, and some freeform traits. All of these are rated in dice (e.g. 3d6, 5d6).

The core attributes are Hustling, Fighting, Piloting, Repairing, and Planning. Each player distributes 15d6 over these by ranking the five attributes and giving the lowest ranked attribute 1d6, the next lowest 2d6, and so on up to 5d6. Thus, we might create a character with Hustling 4d6, Fighting 3d6, Piloting 5d6, Repairing 1d6, and Planning 2d6. There are 120 combinations of attributes and scores. Players should discuss their choices so that at least one character has a high score in each attribute, and not everyone is the expert pilot.

The relationships are written as the name of a character and a freeform phrase that describes the nature of the relationship. The relationship can be positive, negative, or neutral. Characters can have relationships to other player characters or the player can make up a non-player character and a relationship to them. Write down 5 of these (and if you can't think of 5, you can save them for later). Each relationship gets 1d6. For example, Joe's pilot character Brandon might have a relationship to Joleen, the ship's navigator (played by Cindy). He writes "Joleen, best friend, saved me from pirates 1d6" on his sheet.

If you are the owner of the ship (regardless of who pilots or fixes it, you are the ultimate leader of stuff involving your ship), then you must spend one of your relationships on the ship itself.

Feel free to make up non-player characters and assign roles to them. You'll be able to drag these people into your scenes, even if you have to flash back to advice they gave you years ago.

Relationships to other player characters must be reciprocated to be useful. That is, if Joe writes down a relationship to Cindy's character, Cindy will need to write down the same relationship to Joe's character. Incomplete (nonreciprocal) relationships can exist, but their dice cannot be used in conflicts.

You can write down a relationship to a group of characters (for example, "Joleen and Kiera, sisters who I have taken on as crew 1d6"). The relationship dice are only available when a scene includes Joleen or Kiera, and only if everyone reciprocates the relationship. If Joleen reciprocates but Kiera does not, no one can use those dice. You must name people specifically and cannot write down "My captain 1d6" or "My crew 1d6."

The traits are just additional phrases that describe your character. These might be adjectives ("smart" or "very sexy"), roles or professions ("starship captain," "father figure," "family man"), facts or perceptions ("super-genius," "only pilot to survive the Rigel Rebellion"), events ("Rigel Rebellion"), or phrases and attitudes ("I never met a man I couldn't outsmart," "Say, pretty lady, wanna come with me? I have a spaceship...").

Write down 5 of these and give each one a d6. If you can't think of 5, save the rest for later; you can fill them in whenever you want.

Defining Characters During Play

The only thing you absolutely need to define before play are the core attributes. You don't even need a character name to start playing, but it's likely someone will want to know it before too long.

To start playing quickly, rank your attributes 1d6 to 5d6 and jump into the action. As things come up, write down relationships and traits that are useful. Once you write them down, they become a permanent part of the character. Is there an advantage in waiting till you know what you need to assign the dice? Maybe, but it's not a big deal. There's also a disadvantage in the temptation to solve short-term problems when you assign those and lock your character into something you won't use as much later. Really, it doesn't matter as long as you're having fun.

Example Character: Brandon Aldeberan

Joe wants to be the pilot. He convinces the rest of the players that this is a good idea, and they all agree that he should get the 5d6 in Piloting. Joe ranks his attributes in this order:

Piloting 5d6

Hustling 4d6

Fighting 3d6

Planning 2d6

Repairing 1d6

Joe decides the pilot's name will be Captain Brandon Aldeberan.

He tries to get Cindy and Denise to agree to a three-way relationship, but Denise isn't interested. Cindy is willing to do a reciprocal two-way relationship with her character Joleen. Cindy and Joe negotiate until they agree that Brandon and Joleen are best friends and that Joleen saved Brandon from certain death at the hands of space pirates years ago.

Joe invents some other non-player characters, too, and creates relationships with them. His relationships say:

Joleen (PC), best friend, saved me from pirates 1d6

Sparky McGeary, ship parts supplier in Merope 5 1d6

Lila, ex-girlfriend, still on friendly terms 1d6

___ 1d6

___ 1d6

He left the last two blank for later.

He writes some traits:

My ship, the Six-Armed Shiva 1d6

Devastatingly handsome 1d6

"Ya know, we could just shoot them" 1d6

Amazing pilot 1d6

___ 1d6

The first one was required because he owns the ship. He leaves one blank for later.

Introduce Characters

Character introductions serve three important functions:

1. to introduce your character to the rest of the group
2. to integrate your character with the rest of the crew
3. to remind you how the rules work

The introduction must succeed at doing all three of these things. If you've played through an introduction with every character and any player feels he has not accomplished all three goals, you should play another scene with them.

Every character gets an introduction. An introduction is a single scene that spotlights one character to explain how they came to be on the ship. Typically at the start of a game, these introductions are flashbacks to years past, when the character joined the crew. If the game is already in progress and the character is joining an existing crew, however, the scene will be in the present time, not a flashback.

It is a foregone conclusion that, no matter what else happens, at the end of an introduction, the character will be accepted onto the crew of the ship for the long term. There might be hard feelings — there might be bloodshed — but the character is part of the team.

Using the rules for framing scenes, set up a story where your character (the "rookie") meets the owner of the ship or one of the existing crew and proves his worth or otherwise convinces the crew to let him join. There must be a conflict here but it doesn't have to be between the rookie and a crew member. The conflict could be something the entire group faces together, and the rookie could be the person who saves the day.

Use the conflict resolution scene to resolve what happens. If it's a flashback, don't let anyone die, since that destroys continuity.

At the end of the scene, the rookie's player earns 1 experience point for every other character his character includes in the scene. Other players earn 1 experience point for actively participating in the scene.

Play Characters

Once all the characters have been introduced, you jump to "present time" (meaning the "present" time of the far future of the fictional galaxy, got that?) and play out the lives of a ragtag crew trying to get ahead in a cruel and vast universe. Play follows this sequence:

1. Everyone (including the GM) suggests an opportunity
2. The crew discuss the options and choose one opportunity to chase
3. The GM and players create relevant challenges and write them on cards
4. The players select a number of challenges randomly and give them to the GM (the GM knows which have been selected; the players do not)
5. The players role-play getting started on their mission
6. The GM interjects with a challenge and the players react; use the scene framing rules to resolve what happens
7. The players role-play continuing on their mission until the GM interjects with another challenge, and so on
8. When all of the selected challenges have been overcome, the mission is successful and the players role-play the conclusion

Conflicts offer opportunities for experience rewards. Players assign experience immediately and change their characters at any time using the advancement rules.

Opportunities

An opportunity is a goal that can reasonably be attained with hard work and luck. Each opportunity is stated as a sentence or two plus a modifier to the ship statistics. The goal should include what the crew has to do, what the reward is, and any limitations or restrictions.

Examples:

• Admiral Harkrave of the Rigel Enclave needs someone to move some crates from Rigel IV to Deneb Sphere, no questions asked. He'll pay in ship parts. +1 Maintenance
• A teenaged girl named Leesia needs passage to the Leonid sector. +1 Cash
• A deep-space scan discovers a space barge drifting in the Pleiades dust fields. It's probably got some useful parts on it. +1 Maintenance
• There's an anything-goes smuggler race that bounces through a dozen different systems. The prize is a trophy but the winner gets great bragging rights. +1 Reputation

The ship modifier is usually a +1 because +2 missions are much harder and +3 missions are three times as difficult. Random rewards are effectively one level lower for purposes of determining difficulty, however, so a +2 Random doesn't double the opportunity's difficulty, and a +3 Random only doubles it. Once the crew has successfully completed the mission, the GM rolls dice to determine the actual stat to modify.

Scene Framing and Conflict Resolution

The actual play of the Pleiades RPG is divided up into scenes. Generally, a scene is a structured event in the game's fiction with unstructured role-playing at the beginning and end. In typical play, everyone role-plays until the GM interjects with a challenge, then the players and GM resolve what happens with some dice, then everyone goes back to role-playing. Generally, characters are in a conflict or clearly heading into the next one.

The GM should frame a scene when something important is happening. "Important" means that one or more of the players care about the result, and the GM doesn't think that the players should automatically succeed. Sometimes the GM doesn't care about the outcome of a scene and he can just let the players succeed. That's fine.

When success isn't a sure thing, you have a conflict. Conflicts are resolved with dice. The players roll dice. The GM rolls dice. There might be some rerolls of some or all of the dice. In the end, the GM's dice are compared to the players' dice and one side wins. Someone narrates the result and then everyone role-plays the consequences.

Dice

You'll be rolling lots of six-sided dice. Your attributes, relationships, and traits will determine how many dice. In any scene, you can bring in one attribute, one trait, and one relationship. You have to explain how your character uses those things to influence the success of the conflict. For example, if you're punching someone, you'll probably use Fighting 3d6, and you'll describe how your character pushes his enemy down and gets him in a headlock and beats on his kidney. Maybe you say you kick him in the groin, too, so you can bring in your "Dirty fighting 1d6." You can use dice for a relationship only if the conflict directly involves that relationship (and everyone in that relationship has a reciprocal relationship to everyone in it).

So roll that pile of d6es. Pick a number on one of the faces — probably the number that appears the most often. Separate your dice into two piles: those that match that number (called the "signal") and those that don't (called the "noise"). The GM will do the same thing with his dice. Compare the number of dice in your signal with the number of dice in the GM's signal. The higher number of dice will win the conflict.

Before you despair, since the GM tends to have more dice than you, realize that you get a chance to reroll the noise. Sometimes the GM can do this, too, but he has a very limited ability to reroll.

(rules for rerolls)

You also get a chance to bring in more dice. The GM never gets to do this.

(rules for bringing in more dice)