Fluff/Inspiration Game Design Random musings RPG

Astronauts

I finally had an idea for what I want to work on for NaGa DeMon! Astronauts will be a hard sf roleplaying game set into a near future which focuses on human space exploration. It’s not about humans meeting aliens, shooting laser guns and flying through ridiculously dense asteroid fields, but it’s about astronauts doing research on Mars or establishing a base on the moon.
At this moment I am still in the early planning phases, but I thought I start by creating a cover, so that I have something to motivate and inspire me during the coming weeks!

Astronauts RPG cover

I hope you like it!

If everything goes as planned I will post semi-regular updates on my progress. As with all my other games it will probably be freely available under a Creative Commons license. If you have any more questions about this game, feel free to post in the comments below.
Stargazer

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team. In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games. Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.

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6 comments

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Rob Lang

Wonderful! Looking forward to this in a big way!
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Snarls-at-Fleas

Wow! That may very well be the game I was looking for. Eager to see more.
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Mark

That looks fantastic! I cannot wait!
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rainswept

Excellent idea!

Way back in the mists of 2002 Paul Elliott (of Zozer Games) did a rules light RPG on this theme, titled Mars.

Currently it only seems to live in the internet archive.

I always liked it.
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HyenaSpotz

What sorts of conflicts would this game have? If there are no aliens, most of the immediate threat is environmental, the sweeping threats are politics back on Earth, and there’s always the “Why did you bring a gun into space?” scenario among the team…
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    Stargazer

    That’s one of the big challenges I am facing. Currently I am thinking hard about how you could make exploration of for example Mars interesting on the tabletop.

    I’ve checked out Paul Elliott’s game “Mars” earlier this morning and obviously he had struggled with the same issues but he found some clever solutions.

    Perhaps moving from “first mission to Mars” to “first colony on Mars” will make things much easier without abandoning all of my initial ideas. But when you increase the size of Human population from a team of a few astronauts to a larger team of international colonists things get much more interesting.

    I already have a pretty good for the mechanics I want to use, so I have a lot of time to figure out the setting and what kind of games you can run with Astronauts.
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