I have finally officially completed the "Session Zero" setup for Starforged!
In my "Session Zero", I set up a bunch of the default 'truths' about the universe and provide a bit of backstory for how humanity went from our current galaxy to find a home within The Forge. This high-level process of defining the Truths about the universe and galaxy we're playing in is completed by rolling on a series of provided tables.
This gives us a background idea of what troubles pushed us from our home galaxy, and what dangers we face in our new galaxy, as well as overall population guidelines, resource scarcity, religion/magic presence, and a slew of other details.
Each of these 14 macro-level truths (if you're rolling for them, which I did), are split into 3 broad categories with some additional finer details. As an example, these are two of the three available sections for defining what drove us from the Milky Way.
So, for the above section, we'd do an initial roll with 2d10 to determine what overall truth we're getting. If we rolled at 1 and a 6 for example, we'd combine that as either 16 or 61 - usually we would pick which dice was the 'first' digit prior to rolling. If we got "16" as the number, we'd go with the Sun Plague option, and we'd then do a second roll to see what caused that to happen on the inner table.
This would provide us the Known Truth about why we abandoned the Milky Way galaxy, and we'd move to the next of the 14 topics. In the end, I was left with a pretty solid understanding of the setting that I'd be playing in. From the results I got, I summarized them as:
As my handwriting is bad and the image is small, I'll transcribe it here:
We fled the ruins of our old ancestral home after the attack of extra-dimensional titans. Ancient wormhole gates now known as Iron Gates were what saved us in the end, thanks to their timely discovery on Luna of Old Earth [A map to a single Iron Gate location was discovered on a monolith on the moon].
Many of us were lost in the Exodus, and we are a tattered remnant of the hundreds of billions we once were. Now, we are few and spread thin, with resources scarce and controlled by a powerful few.
Much like our lost populations, we suffered a great loss of information, and knowledge of the Pre-Exodus era is extremely valuable and highly sought-after.
Laws are varied and poorly enforced, leading to necessary Bounty Hunter guilds with wide recognition and support, whose rulings supersede local laws. War, thankfully, is largely behind us. Not due to any improved morality of humanity, but because of both resource scarcity and the ever-present threat of Forgespawn and other hostile life here in the Forge.
And then there's the Vaults. Precursor-left storehouses of ancient and powerful tech... and magic.
Some few of us have learned to harness this power of the Forge - the other side of the coin from science. Handy, since we lost the secrets of advanced AI in the years since Exodus, so magi and seers have filled some of the void left... and in so doing, spawned a plethora of various religions and cults.
Above it all though is the Iron Vow; sworn on iron from the Exodus ships themselves, these vows are what drive those of us who truly embrace the Forge, and strengthen us to face the horrors of our 'new' home - the only home any of us have ever known.
It took about 45 minutes to roll through all the tables, read all the various prompt options (in case I wanted to switch something for something else), and then write them down and summarize them... but it was extremely fun the entire time... and this section was honestly the boring part!
After the Universe/Galaxy setup, we then create our character backstory, create our ship and describe its details, and then swear our background Iron Vow.
This Iron Vow is the driving motivation of our character and is basically an abstract method of codifying the progress of a character arc in our story. It's considered an 'Epic Quest' and is something we'll work towards for the entire campaign... and may actually not complete, depending on what a person picks as their Vow.
Also, on the topic of characters - we don't have 'classes' in this game. When you create your character you pick two 'Paths' that help define your skills.
You can freely pick any two you want, or you can roll on an inspiration table (or just pick from it) and go from there. There are a whopping 46 Paths to choose from and combine that give a ton of various benefits. I'll show a few below for reference:
For my game, I picked 'Explorer' and 'Lore Hunter', as I wanted to focus on finding new locations and investigating neat stuff in space, while also focusing on learning valuable knowledge... so my entire character is set up to drive him to complete his background vow of finding (and possibly figuring out how to access) a new Iron Gate.
With my character and ship chosen and described, it was time to dive into creating the starting System I was in - which was the freaking coolest part of this and there's stuff I haven't even done yet like creating creatures, precursor vaults, and several other things.
This setup is guided through the rule book, and prompts us to roll on a bunch of different Oracle tables (which is what the random roll tables are called), and taking those results we'll end up with a starting Sector comprised of 3 random locations and two "Passages" which are something like Space Highways for FLT that are predictable and well-used. Every location on this map requires an FTL jump, and anything NOT connected by a Passage is a little riskier to navigate to/from.
It's so much fun creating these sectors. I honestly want to leave my home sector as fast as possible just so that I get to dive into this worldbuilding section again and make more planets, space stations, and other weird anomalies.
To give an idea of what Planet Creation looks like, this is the table I rolled on for the Kepler Station orbital location, which is orbiting a Grave World.
So, it took about... maybe two hours total... to complete this entire pre-game setup, and it was super fun to do!
I think even if you aren't intending to play Starforged, it's worth buying the PDFs just for the tables! You could create a heck of a lot of detail for ANY space setting with the tables and prompts in these books... and it goes well beyond what I've shown. I mentioned creatures before, as there's an entire Oracle dedicated just to creating neat alien species for your worlds. I mean, just look at how many random tables are covered in the ~80 pages dedicated to them:
I'll definitely talk about these more as I actually get to the narrative and actually-playing portions of this series of blogs.
I've completed two small sessions so far, which has almost put me through my first quest. I'm likely going to finish it before I do another blog post about Starforged, and when I do I may split it into either two sections or two separate posts. One will be the resulting narrative that we're creating written out as a small story, while the other section/post will focus on the mechanics and the how behind running this game and using it to create a narrative.
Until then, happy worldbuilding and happy gaming folks!
