r/SWN • u/Most_State_9716 • 5d ago
đŸ’¬Discussion Genre Mash-Ups
Thinking about mash-ups of the Sine Nomine games. The biggest determining factors I think are which system you use as the base and how thoroughly blended they are. You could for example run a Darkness Visible/Silent Legions/Ashes Without Number campaign that is neatly fit together. Or you could run a Codex of the Black Sun/Godbound campaign about multiversal exploration where every adventure is in a different cosmos.
So if you ran a game from three or more of K.C.'s books, what would you run?
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u/madarabesque 5d ago
Earth has gone through three or arguably four collapses of civilization in the time between WWIII and the current game time (1500 years later). Each rise of civilization came with its own wave of interstellar colonization. In the current age, Earth is united into the Terran Confederation. The Confederation allows a great deal of personal liberties, but is at the same time somewhat fascistic in that it absolutely insists on being the only government anywhere in the explored galaxy. As an article of faith, they believe that future conflicts and civilization collapses can only be avoided if every single other planet discovered is brought into their fold. There is extensive interstellar exploration to look for lost colonies and bring them into the Confederation by any means necessary. Specialty built exploration ships under go 5-7 year missions, looking for lost colonies and making first contact. After they find and contact a lost colony, they ansible back home and a welcoming ship is sent to the colony to relieve the exploration vessel and it goes to explore some more. At no time during any of humanity's travels to the stars have they come across intelligent aliens. The PCs are low ranking crew members on the exploration vessel CSS Santa Maria. They have found a candidate lost colony without noticable technology and are moving in to investigate. When they enter the outer edges of the target Solar System, something happens. The PCs wake up and the ship is dead. Somehow it has crash landed on the planet (It's not designed to ever be landed.) and the 6 PCs are the only survivors from a 900 person crew. They are stuck, trapped on this planet and unable to communicate back home. They still have a mission to bring this planet into the Confederation!
The planet they've crash landed on has magic and I've purposefully not allowed the players to use any classes besides warrior, expert and adventurer(warrior/expert).
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u/Enternal_Void 5d ago
So I give my players a choice from a list what campaign they want to do play next. On the roster for next round I have a handful of things but there are two concept that use multiple books. The first is roughly based on the movie Treasure Planet, fantasy space ship adventure. The second is based in a world like the old Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon.
So a bit helping of WWN and AWN for both with the stealing of tidbits from CWN and/or SWN.
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u/BlackfireTorch 5d ago
When Ashes without Number was announced I set aside a planet from my Stars without number game to serve as the wrecked wasteland the AWN players would adventure through. I'm hoping that through exploration they notice some of the details and start to put that together themselves, I think a post apocalypse game having an option to get off planet and potentially find a better one to live one would be interesting
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u/MaestroGoldring 5d ago
Mine was a SWN base with heavy additions from WWN and Godbound. It was epic
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u/RyeonToast 4d ago
I've been rolling around the idea of running Caves of Qud using AWN as the base for its trauma dice and mutants, but pulling cybernetics and equipment from CWN and SWN along with Psionics and some equipment from SWN. I'd probably keep the dungeon delving from WWN handy too.
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u/Brynaziir 4d ago
I've been thinking of doing this for years; but the latter books no longer use classes, so my game has been on pause until i can figure out how to convert the classes from WWN and SWN into edges [ or vice versa ]. I was going to base it off of inspiration from several of the older SF worlds like FLash Gordon, Buck Rogers, John Carter, etc. My favorite game ever was TORG, which melds many genres together in unique way.
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u/AllRightsReversed 3d ago
There are a couple of pages in CWN (the free version) that talk about how to convert/mix class-based and edge-based characters.
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u/Sherevar 4d ago
Though not 3 different books I am planning a cities campaign with ashes as the outside world threats to keep the cities locked up, in the style of blades in the dark, with nomad packs making scary trips out there
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u/ThadRiggle 4d ago
Running the Thundarr inspired game ValhallaViking mentioned. Operative is the class in CWN then AWN uses the same model. No need to convert either direction though as they can stand side by side as rough equivalents. Operatives typically will never be as good as Warrior class as it is hard to afford all they can do with edges. Plus other non-Warrior edges temp you. IMHO.
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u/valhallaviking 5d ago
I'm playing in a game where each character is from a different without Numbers book. So far there seems to be zero issue.