Stern Thoughts

An excerpt consisting of the relevant portion of my latest newsletter ;

““More missions, more mission guidance, and more advice on building the setting, the Fleet, and the Enemy!” That’s what I said last time when it came to A Stern Chase Is A Long Chase. Although those steps have been pretty much relegated to the domain of brainstorming since, the brainstorming has… expanded. I feel like A Stern Chase could be another full-blown project for me, akin to Starlit Wreckage. Sales and bundles mean I have built up something of a budget for the fancy art stuff, but what does ‘full-blown project’ means in terms of design? Just a ton of missions? Doable, feels unsatisfying. 

I mentioned before that A Stern Chase scratched the Band-of-Blades-like itch, but that itch got a bit more reinforcement when I read Back Again From The Broken Land. Like Band of Blades, the Lord-of-the-Rings-but-on-the-way-home Back Again From the Broken Land has an established route that the characters are taking to their destination. Unlike BoB, BAFTBL offers more than one route for its GM to run, each having different set dressing, threats, and themes. 

So pulling from both of those sources of inspiration, now I’m thinking that I should write A Stern Chase to also have multiple established routes, defined by ten specific Advance missions that have to be completed, with a few Assault, Rendezvous, and Supply missions sketched out for each stop along the way. That gives me a framework to create more example missions, but the multiple routes also gives me a way to show off how different versions of A Stern Chase could be. You could have your ‘standard’ Battlestar Galactica, where the goal is to find a refuge from the Enemy chasing you. You could go down the FTL path, where the Fleet is trying to reach allies to warn and rally them to deal with the Enemy head on. Perhaps the Enemy is instead an eldritch beast of the stars, and the Fleet has to traverse an increasingly unraveling reality to try and find a way towards another one.

Perhaps, like BoB, there may even be branching paths, to give the Fleet some interesting choices about which one to take to reach their goal.

In any case, so many ideas! Now to put them into play.”