Stars/Worlds Without Number (General Thread)

[kenada]

Do you have any thoughts on how to approach this?

Do you have the Deluxe edition? It has an additional chapter, “Arts of the Gyre”, with several partial classes that use arts for customization. I’d look there for inspiration as well as in the user-created content post on r/wwn. In particular, Kevin Crawford has posted a prototype alchemist, which I believe will be included in some form in an upcoming supplement for WWN.

It seems like partial classes choose between ten and fifteen arts (without a relationship between how many picks they get and how big their pool is). You can look at existing partial classes as benchmarks for arts, but the “Uncanny Powers and Abilities” section of “Creatures of a Far Age” chapter might also be useful. Arts seem to be equivalent to a 1 or 2 point power. If your idea for an art seems too much better or worse than that, it might need tweaking.

 

[Yora]

I ended up going with a Focus instead of a mage tradition.

At level 1, you get Magic as a bonus skill, an Effort pool (Magic + Wis), and the Sense Magic art to sense magic effects when committing ongoing Effort.
At level 2, you get the Counter Magic art, that lets you commit Effort for the day to make an opposed Magic skill check to interrupt another character's spell casting, and the Suppress Magic art, which lets you commit Effort for the day to suppress an ongoing magical effect for 1d6+character level rounds, unless it was cast by a higher level character.

You do get quite a lot, but it does take up two of your five Any foci, and you get much less use out of the Magic skill than a Mage does, so your Effort pool is probably quite low. If you have 3 Effort, that's one for sensing magic, and it lets you counter and suppress magic once per day. That's nice, but I don't think that amazing. And it's primarily meant for worldbuilding, not necessarily a great option for Player Characters.

 

[kenada]

Saw this on reddit, the designer of the official sheet posted a clean version (without the auto calculations).

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Just popping in to say glad to find this thread. I ran a 3-shot of SWN earlier this year, and the players want to jump back in for a short 2-3 session adventure between chapters of the D&D 5e campaign another player is running.

Anyone want to share their SWN 2-3 session adventure concepts? Homebrew or published adventures are cool - well really anything is good for inspiration.

My 3-shotter was about a hidden school of psionic students (so all PCs are psionic) where their school has been found and burning down - but everyone seems to have been captured. So the PCs have to go find who did it and end up taking over a ship after freeing the teachers and students. So now they've got a ship - but haven't really tracked down who was behind the kidnapping.

 

[kenada]

I haven’t run SWN, but I’ve had good luck with the adventure generators in WWN. Roll an adventure seed, roll some tags for the world where the person behind the kidnapping resides, and synthesize it into something interesting. Unlike WWN, you don’t even need to worry about a map and key.

 

[kenada]

Session three is down. We got to do some in-town stuff. I used my new rule for social roles where you roll against the reaction table. I feel like that went really well. The thief had stolen something and was looking for a fence, so I had him roll Cha/Connect. He got neutral, so he found a fence who was willing to deal with him but not particularly willing to bargain (especially since he had partially destroyed his loot in the process of stealing it).

I was also able to get the town prepped for this session, so I was able to use the tags and plots I had generated to make things interesting. I’d generated community tags plus a few organizations. That gave me enough NPCs to use the tavern time technique from the Alexandrian to have people show up the PCs could meet.

I also got to exercise the exploration procedure a bit more. It’s a bit of an adjustment to just thinking about things in terms of time, but it ends up feeling pretty natural. We had a conversation when they wanted to leave, and I was like: when do you want to leave? The system doesn’t assume anything, so they could just do what felt natural. That was also the case for exploring to look for the place they wanted to find (it increases the time it takes to “move through a hex” by 4×).

We ended with starting Halls of the Blood King. For the conversion, I kept most things pretty much identical. I tweaked some of the math because WWN does do some things differently (such as having the attack bonus usually be equal to the creature’s HD). The biggest change was vampires. Doing level drain feels too harsh, but the suggested ability for undead in the book (“draining”) is too mild.

I ended up making their touch “draining” but also had it cause the target to gain System Strain. If that maxes you out, you turn into a vampire in three days. That should keep vampires as a scary foe you don’t want to fight while not being so punishing that they drain two levels just by successfully attacking you. As a rule of thumb, I try to tweak non-damaging abilities when I convert them over from OSE to bring them closer to how WWN does things (e.g., ghoul paralysis only requires one saving throw per turn per ghoul).

After four sessions or so (including the one-shot), I’d say I’m pretty happy with WWN. I did hack a bunch of OSE stuff into it, but the core is still very WWN. The system gives us enough structure while staying out of our way, which seems to be the sweet spot for my group. Everything is very OSR, but there’s fun stuff for players, and it’s not quite as brutal (but still very dangerous, especially since the most hit points anyone has at 3rd level is 13).

 

[Liminal Syzygy]

I forgot that I had linked the file when I cleaned up my online files.
I think it would be this one. I wrote that at a note for players in a specific campaign as a quick heads up for notable differences. There might be some changes to the actual rules that I forgot I made, and I id leave out some things I don't plan on using, but I think it's still a decent summary.

Thank you!

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I'm planning on doing my Dark Sun WWN game with the 7 player group.

A bit of some thread excavation digging this back up. I’m guessing you did a straight import of the SWN psychic, true? Any other significant adjustments you put in for a Dark Sun vibe?

 

[kenada]

Finally finished up running Halls of the Blood King using WWN. All I can say is it went pretty darn well. In spite of the power differential between WWN and B/X characters, the adventure still felt scary. There actually wasn’t any combat at all, but it still felt rewarding due to the way XP works in WWN.

I feel like it’s actually blown open the campaign a bit now because the PCs made several new friends during the adventure (both Seleana and the Princess of Blood returned back with the PCs). They also saved the guards, so got even more Renown than usual, which will be handy since they want to improve their property now (yay domain rules). Of course, there’s also the wonderful tools for keeping the adventure going.

I have my quibbles with WWN, but I have to say it’s quite impressive that we’ve played six sessions with only a couple of combats, and it it still feels like we’ve accomplished a ton. That’s not something I’d usually say for a D&D-like system. You’d think you need combat to keep things exciting, but you don’t.

Edit: I replaced the sun ray pistol with a laser pistol from SWN. My players love the idea that vampires take double damage from lasers. I also converted Seleana over to an SWN character. Really digging the compatibility between systems for injecting a bit of extra weird into things.

 

[Malmuria]

Finally finished up running Halls of the Blood King using WWN. All I can say is it went pretty darn well. In spite of the power differential between WWN and B/X characters, the adventure still felt scary. There actually wasn’t any combat at all, but it still felt rewarding due to the way XP works in WWN.

I feel like it’s actually blown open the campaign a bit now because the PCs made several new friends during the adventure (both Seleana and the Princess of Blood returned back with the PCs). They also saved the guards, so got even more Renown than usual, which will be handy since they want to improve their property now (yay domain rules). Of course, there’s also the wonderful tools for keeping the adventure going.

I have my quibbles with WWN, but I have to say it’s quite impressive that we’ve played six sessions with only a couple of combats, and it it still feels like we’ve accomplished a ton. That’s not something I’d usually say for a D&D-like system. You’d think you need combat to keep things exciting, but you don’t.

Edit: I replaced the sun ray pistol with a laser pistol from SWN. My players love the idea that vampires take double damage from lasers. I also converted Seleana over to an SWN character. Really digging the compatibility between systems for injecting a bit of extra weird into things.

Do you feel that WWN combat is more fun than b/x combat? And what makes WWN good out of combat?