Sci-Fi Fridays! Wanderers of the Outlands Part XX

Welcome back reader. Last week was the end of the materials I prepared for my Savage Worlds sci-fi campaign. This week we played our third session and I am incredibly excited about how the game is going. As a motivator to get players writing session summaries I dangled the carrot of an extra bennie for the player that wrote it. My player came back and offered to write summaries in a round robin fashion, and the idea of a communal extra bennie if the session summary is written. I agreed and the idea has taken off. Following Sara’s suggestion we created a notebook in OneNote and shared it online. Players have been posting in character summaries, started discussions, reflections. Amazing! I truly have a wonderful group of players sitting at my table.

Here are the rules we are using for the summaries and extra communal bennie:

Ship’s Log – Rules and Rewards

As per player feedback and request and the after game discussion on 05-20-2014 I rewrote the Ship’s Log Rules:

• The intent of the  Ship’s Log is to motivate players to contribute to the Ship’s Log, meant to be a journal or summary of our adventures. The intent is neither to assign “homework” nor to force players to do additional chores. Participation is voluntary.
• With the intent of making this a collaborative effort that benefits the majority of the group, here are the rules for the log as they will apply immediately and for the foreseeable future, until we revisit them.
• As long as one, or more, players posts a summary, review, or commentary about the previous gaming session, the group will have available one (1) additional bennie the next session.
• The summary, review, commentary can be written in first person, third person, as a narration or simply a timeline of events.
• You can add what you write in the OneNote Online page for your character, as a post on the Facebook Group or sent as an e-mail to the GM. In the case of the last two options, the GM will repost in the appropriate locations.
• This bennie will be communal and usage of the bennie must be agreed upon by the majority of players present that session.
• The bennie works like a regular bennie and follows all the normal rules with the following exception.
• This special bennie may be used to discard a drawn card during initiative and to draw another card, keeping the better of the two. This adds another card when used with Edges that allow extra card.
• The review, summary or commentary must be posted no later than the night before the next session (normally Monday).
• The official repository of these writings will be the OneNote online notebook, but the GM will update the Facebook document when possible.
• If no one writes a review, summary or commentary, this rule will not apply for that session.

I hope the rules and applications are clear, feel free to ask any questions. Thank you!

Last week I promised to share some of the tools I’m using at the table, both the ones I’ve found online and the ones I have created. There are several great resources online, these are:

The Savage Worlds Player Mat – I gave a color print out to each player to help them organize their initiative cards and bennies, calculate raises, and to remember the wild die whenever they make a roll.

The Savage Worlds Combat Survival Guide – Just to help players know their options…

These images I got from the Pinnacle Forums (and I can’t find the post now, please let me know if you created these images so I can give you credit!):

As the character sheets, advancement sheets and wound track I created for the campaign. Here is a link to the Dropbox folder with the files. Be aware that the sheets are adapted to the house rules discussed on Post VI, read that document to make sense of the lists. I have the files in Word format. Let me know if anybody would be interested in them!

Those are the main things I’m using. I hope you find them useful. Next week, some of the player written character backgrounds. See you then…

Before I got, I think I owe everybody an apology. If you were an astute reader, you might have noticed I repeated a number on the series. We had two entries numbered XVII. I noticed the discrepancy and have since renumbered them and corrected the featured images (the image on the top of the post). Sorry for any confusion this might have caused.