Wait, WHY on Earth are you developing this?

This might be an opportune time to explain a little bit about the game I'm intending to make, and WHY I think it's relevant and worth your time.

Since I was a kid watching Star Wars, I've always liked Han Solo a bit more than Luke. Don't get me wrong, Luke's character arc is great, but the transition from ruffian smuggler just barely escaping the long arm of the law always appealed to me. When I was in middle-school, a little PC game know as "Wing Commander: Privateer" was the hot new thing, I was rather taken with it, and I've played through the game and it's expansion several times since then. The fact that there's a thriving community that has made an open-source, modern version of the game tells me I'm not alone. Privateer wasn't even the first game out, "Elite" was made back in 1984 for PC, and has since spawned a couple of sequels, and a recent Kickstarter campaign massed over 1 million BPS, solidly over it's goal amount. There's the infamous Freelancer game from Microsoft game studios as well. In short, there's plenty of fan-interest in this vein of video-game, and I think that a pen-and-paper RPG version would be well-received. 

A tabletop version of that gameplay style opens-up a whole host of options for storytelling - many players have lamented that these type of PC games have 1 'storyline' that concludes, and they're left sorta feeling empty. A tabletop campaign doesn't need to end. Deeper characterization can happen within various factions - no longer are Pirates simply 'Friendly' or 'Hostile' to the PCs. The players can have reputations of varying qualities - good, bad, not-to-be-messed-with, law-abiding, former-pirate, different pirate gangs or syndicates have differing opinions on a PC, etc.  Add a little bit more nuance to the Privateer gameplay, and I think we've got a winning recipe. 

You can play the legitimate trader pushed to the edge and eventually  'Breaks-Bad' to become a criminal
You can play the bounty-hunter with a heart of gold
You can play the space-pirate who turns into a rebel against oppressive governments

And a whole bunch of other scenarios. Space trading simply provides a nice platform from which to launch stories from. Just like a "Mr. Johnson" in Shadowrun hiring the PCs to do something, or a "old man in a tavern" telling the PC's about a dungeon full of treasure, a simple cargo mission lets the GM ship the PCs in a particular direction, and the plots can go from there.



Now, one can certainly say that Interstellar Profiteer is really no different than the vaunted 'Serenity' RPG (which is soon to be revised for a second edition! Horray!), however, the intention is for IP to be a much harder variety of sci-fi, along with having interstellar travel, and a bit more focus on space-combat. I'd also like to say that Interstellar Profiteer's setting has a bit more depth than Firefly's. All due respect to Joss Wedon, Firefly is a wonderful bit of character-driven fiction, not a playground for GMs and players to create new stories. I'm trying to make sure it plays-out as a vibrant and interesting world.  

Musings on Rulesets

It stands to reason that if I'm building a standalone RPG, I probably need some sort of rules. Given that I'm just one guy doing this in my spare-time, I'm generally leaning towards using a pre-published generic ruleset. As if by magic, there are 2 recently-completed Kickstarter campaigns with just such beasts:

• Cortex Plus
• http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1116133034/margaret-weis-productions-cortex-plus-hackers-guid
• FATE Core
• http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/evilhat/fate-core

The various quandaries I now face are thus:

I know little about these systems

Neither are published yet

Lastly, I DO know that another space-based RPG of high critical acclaim is based on FATE - Diaspora, so that makes me lean strongly towards FATE at the moment, particularly as Diaspora is a distant-future, sorta-dystopian thing going for it. Thus I don't feel like I'm just re-inventing the wheel. 

At any rate, at this point I really, really need to settle on a ruleset, as that unknown is getting rather hard to work-around.

Development Status - March 23rd 2013

So far, I've got the basic history, the metaplot, and the overall vibe of the game down. I've got roughly 26000 words so far, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. I still need to find someone to photoshop me a couple of logos for the fake companies I'm inventing, and I really, really should get someone to review the 'science' behind everything, as I'd rather deal with any adjustments now, rather than after things have settled in my brain more.

Trade-goods are coming along as well - just about ready to load them in the database. Next up: start placing the rest various locations-of-interests within the many star-systems in range. This is the part where I realize why most sci-fi settings go far away from Earth - as the Sun's neighbors are pretty well known at this point, and I can't just make-up whatever I want for story purposes. We'll see how this goes.

Trying Something a Little Bit Different

I've been playing tabletop RPGs for quite some time now, and I've always wanted to play an RPG that involved interstellar commodities trading. I wanted to play Han Solo (Or Chewie - he's cool too.) and wiz around the universe buying and selling, getting into adventures, dodging the authorities, keeping the pirates at bay. All that good stuff. If you've played "Wing Commander: Privateer" or any of the "Elite" games, you know just what I'm talking about.

The trick is that most of the published RPGs I've seen don't really support this kind of play-style - most space-based RPGs pay it a bit of lip-service, throwing a quick paragraph or two saying "and if you really wanted to, you could make a campaign out of delivering cargo" and then drops it like a hot potato.

To the GM in me, moving a shipment of stuff from one planet to another seems like a grand plot-hook. You get the PC's to go to a particular place at a particular time - allowing for a wealth of story options. You can throw complications in their way, or just allow them to make the delivery. They can load-up on other commodities and make some side-trips for more profit, or just get it there quick. Throw-in the option of doing bounty-hunting, or perhaps scouting missions, and we've got ourselves a nice little game with plenty of options.

At least that's what I'm trying to make. I've been dutifully churning-out content and debating a plethora of options in my head for the past couple months, and I think what I've got so far is pretty good. I'll be throwing various musings here as I come-up with them, and this will probably turn into a rough "developer's log" of what's new, why I did things, and other stuff I feel like writing.

Thanks for reading this far!
~MikeJ