"Warband/Salvage crew game in the works." Topic

I've been feeling the waters for a bit, so wanted to give you lot a bit of news on what I am working on.

The game will be a Firefly/Traveller/Rogue Trader style warband game where you control a salvage crew/free traders/mercenaries/lawmen/whatever gang of 5-8 figures.

You'll undertake missions, get random events, fight weirdoes, gangsters and the law, earn skills and generally have a good time in a rather unpredictable fashion.

The game will have quite a lot of stuff in it, so it can work for pick up games too but the emphasis is definitely going to be the campaign where each player has their own band of heroes/villains/scoundrels.

Note that I do have plans for a more "battlefield rogue trader" style game but that will be later, since it'll be a huge endeavour.

Mechanics will be based on "Five Men in Normandy" but with a scifi campaign, some wacky guns and a ton of neat character options and types.

I'll drop some teasers here and there. The end goal will be a PDF release in the 15-20 dollar range.

If you bought Five Men, PM or email me ( runequester@gmail.com ) and I'll send you the first draft of the new weapons list, so you can have a peek at it.

There'll be an option pretty soon to buy in early, which will give you access to the rules as they get developed. If you are really eager, email me and we'll figure that out but it's still a bit too early at this point.

Five Men in Normandy link
link

Sounds interesting. Will it contain some sort of "AI" matrix/chart to run the opponents for solo gaming?

There'll be some considerations for that yeah. Five Men had a fairly basic system where you roll for the general stance of the enemy each turn and I'll probably elaborate a bit on that here.

Cool! Looking forward to seeing them.

Sounds like a solid idea, I'll be looking out for your updates!

I like the sound of it so far and will be watching for more updates.

WOO HOO! I look forward to it.

neat

sounds interesting so far…looking forward to seeing more on this:-)

A scavenger who grew up in a war zone looking to find romance and destined for greatness.

A government agent from one of the backwater colonies, looking to survive in the galaxy and packing a huge revolver.

A petty thief from a family of hereditary bureaucrats, exploring the galaxy.

What do these three characters have in common?

They were all generated using the character creation tables for this game :)

Working on the campaign stuff now (which is the biggest part of the rules really).

"Five Parsecs from Home" will be the title.

Okay so here's roughly what things will look like:

Characters will be generated randomly. This is a bit up to the players. Some groups will use all characters generated in detail (background, motivation, profession, special traits)

Others may want 2-3 characters and a handful of goons (basically ordinary people with guns)

The campaign goes in turns. Each turn you assign each of your crewmen a task (look for jobs, train, recover from wounds, look for trouble).
Once those tasks are done, you'll undertake a battle, whether due to getting a job, running into enemies or simply undertaking a random mission.

I imagine players will use a lot of home made scenarios of course.

There'll be quite a lot of random tables: Skills, character and campaign events, enemies and whatnot.
Likewise, I hope to have a pretty good selection of goons to fight against.

Okay sounding good so far.

Hoping that in the next week or so, people will be able to get early access to this.

This will essentially work the same way I did Five Men in Normandy:

You'll pay up front. Get access to the core mechanics and the "beta" rules, get all the updates as they happen and be able to provide input, suggestions and so forth.
Early adopters of course get the final versions when everything is said and done too.

Rather than a crowd funding thing, this time it'll just be through wargamevault, since it's easier to go in and update the files there than having to email things out and fiddle with google drive or similar.

Okay, so if you want in on this early, contact me at runequester@gmail.com

At the moment, character creation is done, weapons are mostly done, campaign rules are getting there.

It'll be 10 dollars which will get you into the beta and get you new versions from now until it's fully released. You will need to have a copy of either the FiveCore rules or Five Men in Normandy.

FiveCore is only 5 bucks so that shouldn't break the bank.