Mindjammer RPG – Starships

One of the big things about the Mindjammer setting is its starships. Not only are they hyper-advanced, fitted with faster-than-light planing engines, in the New Commonality they’re also intelligent beings in their own right – and in the Mindjammer RPG you can play them as characters.

This week’s preview showcases several pages from Chapter 13: Starships and Space Travel. What you see here are statistics blocks for a selection of Commonality starships, statted in Fate Core terms as minor, supporting, and major NPCs. This means that GMs can use these ship stats as-is in their games, but also modify them to be more or less detailed or powerful; and that players can use them as guidelines or templates for creating their own sentient starship characters. Your Mindjammer starship may vary!

Mindjammer follows the Fate Core Bronze Rule – you can treat anything like it’s a character – when it comes to starships. They’re a type of construct, which includes things like space stations, vehicles, floating grav cities, huge robots, and more, all of which can potentially function as characters. Additionally, you can take any of these things as extras to your human (etc) character, again using the rules and stat blocks in this and neighbouring chapters as guides for description. Do you want a Commonality assault walker extra for your military character from the Armed Forces Instrumentality, or a Stage II Explorer for your Space Force pilot? Look no further.

Chapter 13: Starships and Space Travel presents stats for 36 Commonality, Venu, and other polity starships, and includes illustrations of many of them, and deck plans for the Mindjammer, Profit-class New Trader, Herald-class Fast Courier, and Venu Warhawk. Chapter 14: Vehicles and Installations does the same for ATVs, grav tanks, triphibs, sky cities, floating fortresses, walkers (including Venu Walkers), and more. Chapter 12: Constructs includes rules for creating your own starships, vehicles, and so on, and for playing them, including construct stunts, extras, and equipment. Do you want to know what the Variform enhancement can actually do for your ship? Or what happens during a precipitate 2-space emergence? Or how to track and chase jump wakes out at the heliopause? Here it all is.

This week we’ve also had to realise that we’re not quite going to make our target of this coming weekend for the Thoughtcast Edition Pre-release PDF, unfortunately, and now as we’re hitting the Christmas holidays that means we’ll now be releasing early in the New Year. Layout is proceeding extremely well – we hope you’ll agree Mindjammer – The Roleplaying Game is looking good – and we’re now just up against the natural timescales of layout and proofing. We’re still expecting to open for preorders very early in the New Year – I’ll post an update in the first couple of days after the 1st with with more information. Thanks again for your patience – we hope you’ll enjoy Mindjammer – The Roleplaying Game very shortly!

Cheers,

Sarah

This week’s artwork comes from the pen of the very talented Ian Stead, who provided the deckplans and much of the starship, vehicle, and equipment artwork in Mindjammer; and the awesome Jason Juta.

As ever, please post comments and questions here, or come and join us at the Mindjammer Google+ community.