Future Armada

Way back in March I mentioned Future Armada in a post about the Fate system. With the demise of the d20 license the creator of the series, Ryan Wolfe, emailed all of his customers to let them know that he was uploading new versions of the older ships minus the d20 logo, and with a few minor corrections where errata had been found.

This prompted me to take another look at my collection, and I'm still amazed at the quality of the product. The ships are beautiful and the deckplans are both beautiful and well thought out in terms of what humans would actually need on board a starship. For example, far too many deckplans tend to leave out rather essential plumbing fixtures. Passengers and crew aboard a ship from the Future Armada won't have to search frantically for a restroom that doesn't exist.

The ships themselves all share a common backstory in the form of the so far minimally detailed "Future Armada" universe. This lets the ships be described with a story and crew, but the universe itself is generic enough that they can easily be adapted to other settings. Prime candidates would be Star Wars Saga Edition or Serenity (the latter of which already features deck plans designed by Ryan Wolfe). They work less well with systems that feature strict starship design rules, such as Traveller, but could be used in those kinds of games if the GM is willing to be flexible in interpreting those rules, or just decides to set them aside for the campaign.

The scale of the ships range from tiny one man fighters and small Millenium Falcon style freighters to the giant 2400ft long Invictus carrier and the Argos III deep space port. They also have a nice mix between 'practical' and 'adventuring' ships. The latter are suitable ships for small adventuring parties to have while the former are things like the Prosperity class modular container freighter and the already mentioned Invictus. Ships that fill obvious roles in a science fiction setting, but which aren't likely to be owned by the players.

Every single one of these designs provides inspiration for adventures, if not entire campaigns, set around them.

For example, the latest release is the Misfortune Container Ship. The Misfortune is an aging Prosperity class container ship officially named the Fortune, but which has had a long history as a hard luck ship. A few paragraphs go into the history of the ship and the very real reason behind why it has had such an unfortunate history (I won't spoil it by saying what it is). This seed alone could easily make for an interesting adventure set aboard the ship, but there's also a few more paragraphs that work up a specific scenario that the ship could be used in.

The Misfortune product also shows one of the other strengths of the Future Armada series: modularity. Almost all the larger ships in the series use modular floor plans that can be combined in different ways to make different ships. The Misfortune includes three layouts. The basic Prosperity class container ship, the Prosperity Alpha that replaces the containers with regular cargo bays, and the AJAX military transport that radically shortens the ship, adds basic weaponry, and makes other changes to better suit the design for transporting cargo to the surface of a planet in the midst of military conflict.

One final strength of the line represented in Misfortune is the extra attention to detail. In this case the Sherpa class freight hauler stands out. Detailed in the product because it happens to be carried as a shuttle aboard Prosperity class ships, this little ship is essentially a one man cockpit and set of engines arranged in a framework designed to match up with a single modular cargo container. They're basically space semi-trucks, especially when the long haul option is added to the package that includes a little extra storage and a restroom (a bed is included in the basic package). The ship isn't just mentioned, it's given a complete set of plans including ten different modular containers running from the basic freight container to a specialized bounty hunter layout with holding cells and work areas.

The result is a ship that could be used for any number of NPC encounters or as a 'starter' ship for a small adventuring group or solo player, and this wasn't even the main feature of the product!

I just can't get enough of the Future Armada sets and highly recommend them to anyone running a space based science fiction RPG.

The only thing that would make them better for me would be if someone would put out a line of miniatures based on them.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the ships all come as pdf files, usually at least three separate ones: an overview file with the background text layouts and pictures, a full color deckplan file, and a more printer friendly black and white line art deckplan file.

The Fate of roleplaying

I'm a sucker for deck plans.

For a while now I've been eyeing the Future Armada set of deck plans. I got one for free as part of a promo a few months ago, and it was beautiful. When the GM's day sale happened on RPGnow I couldn't pass up getting the rest of the series.

I enjoy just looking at them, but I really want to use some of them in a game. The question is which game? The answer, for me, is Fate.

Fate is the system that Spirit of the Century runs on. I want to run a space opera game using some of the Future Armada deck plans. SotC is a pulp adventure game. Space opera is more or less pulp adventure with a sci-fi theme, so SotC should be a good fit.

I can just swap out the Mysteries skill for Computer Use and then pretty much wing the rest. Some stunts need tweaking, but that can be done as they come up in play if necessary.

It didn't take me long to stat up a character described in one of the Future Armada products. A solo scout with an idealistic streak. While I was doing this I happened across a link to Spirit of the Far Future, an adaptation of the Fate system to Traveller. Now, Traveller is too gritty for the kind of game I wanted to run, and so is SotFF, but the latter is full of really good ideas on how to tweak Fate. One of the best is the way they simplify stunts.

Stunts are the one thing about SotC that I have problems with. I like the concept well enough. You take stunts to allow you to bend the rules in a specific way. The problem is in the execution. They're like feats in d20 in that each has its own set of special rules. The result is that a quarter of the SotC book is basically a catalog of stunts. What SotFF does is to look at what most of those stunts actually do, and then group them into a small number of generic stunts rather than a large number of specific stunts tied to individual skills. The result compresses the ninety pages of stunts in SotC into two pages of generic stunts with a further two pages of specific examples. Of course, some stunts are lost along the way, but those are mostly the more fantastic pulpy stunts. Stunts that I'm not sure will fit in my campaign anyways.

Another idea I really liked was the addition of a Wealth track to the standard Health and Composure tracks. When a character does badly on a resource check, they might or might not get what they were looking for, but in either case their Wealth takes a hit. If the players need to buy off a hit with a complication then the GM can tag that complication. So if a player takes "owes a loan shark money" as a temporary complication due to a hit to their Wealth, then the GM can tag that at some point in the adventure to have some thugs show up to collect.

There are a lot of other little tweaks to make the system either more deadly or to give it more of a Traveller feel. A lot of these don't really fit my game concept, but really help to show how the Fate system works.

As an extra bonus, SotFF has some interesting ideas on adapting deck plans to the range system used in Fate, which ties it all back into what got me started on this road in the first place!

So now I've got three options: go with a barely modified SotC, go with SotFF, or use ideas from both SotC and SotFF to create a more space opera oriented system. If I proceed further with this project, then I'll talk about which option I choose, and how I go about using it.