Ad Astra: And so it begins…

On last Saturday we started our Ad Astra campaign. My group consist of three players. Character #1 is a Gaian war hero and fighter pilot who disobeyed an order to save many lives. Following a court martial he leaves the Gaian military. Character #2 is a strong esper, ship pilot and hobby historian from the Akkathon Federation who tries to find a way back to Old Earth. The last character is a fugitive from the Tovenaar Empire. She was a technician before her latent esper talent was discovered. Because she didn’t want to be part of the Mindwalkers she ran. She also has some strong interest in xenoarchaeology and the Elohim.

At the beginning all three adventurers get contacted by agents of the Twilight Star. Obviously they would make perfect agents themselves and so they are provided with tickets for a passenger liner which takes them to the Rheinland system where they meet their contact Lt. Coh. Coh reveals a few details about the organisation he’s working for and then takes them with a shuttle to the battleship “Vasco da Gama” that takes the aventurers to an undisclosed location where they first lay eyes on the super-carrier “Twilight Star”. On board of that massive space ship they are finally introduced into the ranks of the Twilight Star agents, get some basic training and in the end meet Gordan Griffin, obviously one member of the Star’s inner council.

I used the first part of the evening to introduce the players to the world, the PDQ rules and the Twilight Star, since it will be the organisation they’ll be working for during the campaign. We also had a short combat sequence when character #3 was ambushed by a couple of soldiers from the Tovenaar Empire who tried to bring her back, dead or alive.

That concludes part one of my game report. Stay tuned for part two, where our heroes learn about an ancient enemy.

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.