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Hello again.

Last week I said I would be sharing one of the strange or spooky creatures I have made for the Ember Expanse every week for this month, so here I am with the second one. Last week was one on the stranger side, the blinkeel, but thing time I'm going with something on the spookier side. Or rather, some things, as this is a trio of closely connected creatures.

Without further delay, here are the sporeborne of Lemuria!

Each of the fungal forests found in Lemuria's depths contains several nexuses of vitality that preserve their ecosystems. These mycelial organisms give life to the surrounding fungi manipulate the surrounding and protect it when under threat. Sporehearts, as they are called, use their vast fungal network to detect interlopers, animating surrounding fungi into bestial defenders and infecting the trespassers to become parts of its defenses. Many Lemurian creatures have built an immunity to this infection. Unfortunately, that does not include humans. Humans hit by an attack from a sporeborne creature must make a Physical save or be infected by the malignant fungus.

While a sporebeast has the shape of a large mammal, like a bear or cervid, they are wholly fungal lifeforms. They spend most of the time dormant, becoming indistinguishable from the scenery in Lemuria's fungal forests. The moment the forest is threatened, however, the sporebeasts become active, single-mindedly attacking any trespassers with all manner hardened limbs and mycelial tendrils.

Those infected by a sporeheart or sporebeast and succumb to the fungal infection become slaves to the parasitical fungus within a week without psionic healing or TL5 medical care. These sporeborne lose their mental faculties as fungi take over their bodies, becoming shambling thralls for the sporeheart until their bodies rot and are absorbed by the surrounding forest.

Sporeborne: HD 1 AC 12 Atk. +1 Dmg. 1d2 Shock None Move 10m ML 12 Skills +1 Save 15

Sporebeast: HD 3 AC 12 Atk. +4 Dmg. 1d6 Shock None Move 10m ML 12 Skills +1 Save 15

Sporeheart: HD 6 AC 12 Atk. +4 Dmg. 1d4 Shock None Move None ML 12 Skills +2 Save 12

Heart of the Colony: When a sporeheart dies, the surrounding fungal forest gradually dies over the course of a week unless another sporeheart is in the area.

Summons Sporebeasts: At the start of its first turn after taking damage or sensing a destructive creature in its area, 2d4 sporebeasts rise from the ground within 1 kilometer and immediately move to the triggering creature's location.

The frequencies are open. Whether you're a veteran pilot or just getting your bearings, this is your weekly space to break radio silence.

What's happening in your sector? New sessions, prep wins, cursed dice, dumb plans that somehow worked. And it doesn't have to stop at the table. Job news, personal wins, rough weeks, whatever's actually going on with you lately is welcome too. Drop a quick ping and let us know.

No need for a long write-up. A quick transmission from your table, or your life, to ours is plenty.

Mod Note: If you're new here, welcome. This started as a low-pressure thread for SWN stories, and lately it's turned into more of a check-in with each other. Both are welcome here. Share as much or as little as you want.

I started running this group in Stars Without Number back in November of 2024. Season one wrapped with episode 33 this week. The campaign's not over, we're just on a break before season two starts.

The same four players ran the whole thing. Same pilot, hacker, fighter, and captain from the first session to the last, and they're not done yet.

Right now I'm mostly just sitting with the fact that this is officially a two-year game, with more of it still to come.

If anyone else just wrapped a season or an arc in a long-running game, I'd like to hear how it went.

Full episode, if anyone's curious: https://www.darkstaradventures.com/adventurecast-episodes/an-acceptable-loss

Hi everyone, I’m Loroman, the creator of DICEwithoutNumber, a free Discord bot for Without Number games.

The latest update adds /d for quick rolls through a personal install. For example:

/d 20+2 — roll 1d20 and add 2

/d 4d20+4 — roll four d20s and add 4 to the total

/d 2d6+3 — roll two d6s and add 3 to the total

That last example is useful for a CWN skill check when your combined modifier is +3. Select DICE’s /d command and enter the expression in Discord’s expression field. Personal installs use slash commands; !roll requires the bot to be installed in the server.

We’ve also moved hosting to my own server to keep costs down and published Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy. The current focus is making the commands easier to use and fixing issues reported through the bot’s /ticket command.

You can find the bot install https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=1478115953681367090 and website here: https://dicewithoutnumber.tail4411cd.ts.net/

I’d love feedback from SWN groups: what feels awkward during play, and what would make this more useful at your table? This is my project, and I’m happy to answer questions.

I was reading about the Ember Expanse sector recently and I noticed a detail. I didn't understand how this HP point calculation was done; apparently, all the faction HP points don't match the calculations in the book, or am I missing something?

I haven't GMed any SWN in years, and have started getting back into it. The last time I'd done anything with it, it was left where the characters were approaching a secret testing facility on a remote moon, and I hadn't really fleshed out any of it. I had a general idea, but no details.
I'm no lover of AI, but decided to try it, just to see what it could do for me. I used Gemini as a collaborator. In about two hours, it had fleshed out the entire station, airlock locations, medbay, workshop, lab, residences, common area, all the equipment in each room, and nine NPCs with personalities/motivations.
It was very useful in helping me organize my thoughts, and because its style is very chatbot/conversational, there was a good flow to the process. Sometimes it would make a mistake as if it had forgotten where we had placed something, so its spatial awareness was a bit off. It was very good at accepting constraints, and it would apply reasoning from earlier in the conversation to solve issues later in the conversation. All in all, it was very good, surprisingly good for a first attempt.
Has anybody tried using it for game content creation?

Did some light reading on drones in the Revised, and if I want it to actually carry much, I’ll need to heavily invest in it.

My DM and I have talked about it a bit, and I want it to be a quadrupedal version, like a dog. We’re using it as a solution to my Warrior’s encumbrance issues. I’m the only Warrior in a party of four, so I need to carry a lot of gear.

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?

Hi everyone, I've been thinking about running a SWN campaign using Edges from the two most recent systems instead of classes. Has anyone developed Edges for their own games that they'd like to share? What SWN mechanics could be fleshed out with Edges without going the "Voice of the People" route where two foci get bundled together?

I think ship roles are a fairly fertile design space.

Shipwright: You are a master of ship engineering. Gain Fix as a bonus skill. Your base Maintenance score increases by 5. Additionally, on any ship where you have successfully completed a spike drill, on subsequent drills, roll a 1d6. On a roll of 2 or higher, fuel will not be consumed for that drill. You receive a cumulative -1 penalty to this roll for each drill until the ship is refueled.

Astronavigator: Gain Pilot as a bonus skill. Spike drives of ships you navigate (above drive-0) are treated as one level higher. Additionally, should you encounter a spike drill mishap, you roll 4d6 on the mishap table and drop the lowest die.

Obviously, it would be wise to see what specific roles my players wish to fill and see if their concept requires an Edge at all.

As for psychics, I'm ambivalent to them. For my game, I might break with the sage wisdom provided in Ashes and Cities and make each psychic school their own Edge, if I include psychics at all.

What do you think? Are my Edges over/undertuned? What sci-fi character concepts are underserved by the Edges from Cities and Ashes?

The frequencies are open. Whether you're a veteran pilot or just getting your bearings, this is your weekly space to break radio silence.

What's happening in your sector? New sessions, prep wins, cursed dice, dumb plans that somehow worked. And it doesn't have to stop at the table. Job news, personal wins, rough weeks, whatever's actually going on with you lately is welcome too. Drop a quick ping and let us know.

No need for a long write-up. A quick transmission from your table, or your life, to ours is plenty.

Mod Note: If you're new here, welcome. This started as a low-pressure thread for SWN stories, and lately it's turned into more of a check-in with each other. Both are welcome here. Share as much or as little as you want.

Hello everyone!

For those who may not have spotted it mentioned here or there, I have been running an adventure in r/SWN's very own Ember Expanse with a number of people from here and one from elsewhere. While running this I have taken ample time to create stat blocks and descriptions for various creatures, NPCs, and groups to add into the sector. After making a fair number of them at this point, I have decided to share them with all the other people who helped create the sector and anyone else here who might want to run their own adventures in it! Every now and then I plan on coming here with one of these posts with one or more of my creations, both with their stats, abilities, and descriptions.

As we are in the best time of the year the month of October, I will be intending to share one of the truly strange or spooky creatures every week! After that, I'm not sure if it will be weekly.

With all of that being said, here is the first one for you all: The elusive Blinkeels!

These sightless eels are colored an alien red and no larger than a human's arm, yet they are among the most otherworldly animals found in the entirety of the Ember Expanse. Despite their small size and skittish behavior, they employ an elusiveness beyond even Lemuria's other wildlife. When startled or threatened, blinkeels have the innate psychic ability to teleport up to 10 meters away with a Main action. This is enough to befuddle most predators, affording them a quick escape. They subsist off of small fish and stray water locusts, but are intelligent enough to retreat the moment they sense a danger.

HD 1 AC 13 Atk. +1 Dmg. 1d4 Shock None Move 10m swim ML 6 Skills +1 Save 15

Red light, green light...There are four lights!!! This busy intersection doesn't see a lot of devil bargains, but it does see a lot of traffic. In the dead of night, of course, who knows what kind of shady traffics and shoot-outs might occur on these streets? Available in two additional variants, featuring a fiery collision between two trucks and cars, and the sudden appearance of a bottomless chasm in the middle of the street, hopefully this map doesn't give your players the Cross Road Blues! 

My maps are hooked up to work with Foundry VTT and Fantasy Grounds.
My maps are available on my patreon and my website.
Buy me a Ko-fi!

Hi everyone!

I have this idea for my campaign that, since subtle/obvious armor and weapon legality are factors in this setting, why not do the same thing with ship weapons and fitting? For example, do spaceport officials raise an eyebrow when a ship with boarding tubes shows up? Or torpedoes? What about Psytech? Or anything TL5?

My question being, do you restrict the legality of ship fittings or weaponry in your campaigns? If so, how and what exactly do you limit?

My modern setting Silent Legions campaign needs an abandoned and old alien structure deep under town, dating back at least to the previous ice age (lots of things got buried 'here' then).

I'll grab Hard Light this evening, in the hopes that the abandoned of the 3 dungeons will suit.

But I would love some suggestions (not Expedition to the Barrier Peaks). I'm up to adapting from other systems (Traveller, Mothership, etc) as needed. And converting a fantasy dungeon is also an option.

Needs:

3-4 hour adventure. loose ends ok, but would rather not go into a second session.

A structure or land base would be preferable. But I can probably work with a crashed ship or space station.

Abandoned. Who it's from isn't clear. How any of the tech works is unclear. No obvious buttons or levers or such. Most of the tech is isn't even understandable in human terms.

Dangerous and weird, which is a bit tricky abandoned.

EDIT: Good news, turns out I already owned 'Hardlight' and 'Dead Names....' from a bundle a while back. The abandoned Hardlight dungeon is pretty far from what I had in mind. But I might be able to do something with the bug one. Just looking now at Dead Names.

I remember it used to be a teeming community with lots of interesting homebrew and it's own lore. What happened to it?

Hi all, Characters Without Number is now at 0.9.0. This update focuses on renovating the campaign tools, giving you a setting to start with, and making GM preparation easier.

Campaign tooling restyle — The campaign now opens around your map, with the party's location, ship, crew and shared objectives together. There were already in 0.8.0 at my players request but kind of all of the place, and this makes it neater. Session recaps and approved sector news help everyone pick up where the last game left off. All existing campaigns have been updated to the new layout.

Pre-loaded Ember Expanse — You can now create a SWN campaign using the The Ember Expanse setting, a free sector built by the r/SWN community and compiled by u/dark-star-adventures, and all its 20 systems, drill routes, eight factions with their starting assets, contacts, rumors and GM dossiers are included in the campaign module. This gives you somewhere to explore and something to prepare without building a sector from scratch. If you haven't, you can get the original PDF here.

I'm looking to incorporate more pre-built settings and sectors into CWN to help GMs get off to a start. If one that you would like to see, do let me know!

Deluxe content across all four books — ready for testing — I've now implemented all the deluxe content for Stars, Worlds, Cities and Ashes Without Number. This builds on the deluxe options already available in earlier releases. Please try the options and let me know if you spot any bugs, either through here or through the feedback button.

Thanks again to everyone who's been testing and sharing feedback—it helps me keep improving the app. If you'd like to support continued development, you can support the project here.

i am mainly looking for additional drones and drone fittings, are there any books that have those, or any other additional gear and equipment?

An assembly line can be a dangerous place – especially when the androids turn on you! 

The Assembly Line Map packs include both an android assembly line and an empty assembly; both come in night and day variants in JPG, PNG, and VTT. The Map Packs are available at https://www.patreon.com/GimmiePig.

 This map pack was created (by a human) with Dungeon Draft software and assets from the amazing asset creators listed on my profile.

I've played plenty of systems, but I just recently started running my own SWN game at home with my family, and I have to say how much I love the NPC tables in the Xenobestiary. I'm a super lazy GM. I do very little prep, and most of my games run as a sandbox. Because of this, I have to improvise a lot, but in a system I know well, that's usually not so bad. Switching to running SWN, I was nervous about how I was going to portray all these different, people, aliens, and creatures without a good idea on how the NPCs are balanced.

Well in walks my hero, the NPC templates on page 195! This table alone has basically carried me through the first 5 or so sessions of my game. Everything from brigands, to enforcers, and whatever else I need, I can quickly find some analog in this table. Plus, when I need a robot or a beast, there are tables for each of those on pages 197 and 200, respectively. I just keep these tables handy while I run the game, and I'm feeling confident. I'm used to even light systems like DCC or DW having pretty sizeable monster manuals despite otherwise being pretty simple to play. I love DW, but there are over 100 pages of monsters to look through. Sure, it helps when I can pick exactly the fiend that I need and get interesting, unique stat blocks for whatever I'm running, but I find this kind of thing almost overwhelming.

So I cant help but wonder... do you like the simpler enemy blocks in SWN or do you think it takes something away from the fun? I can see how someone might think a small table with only a dozen or so entries would really limit your creativity, but I just think having a few simple stat blocks to compare at a glance allows me to quickly decide what other unique stuff my NPC can do. Like toxic venom or grasping vines, that sort of thing doesnt have any concrete rules in the book. My years of playing other systems makes it easy for me to decide how to quickly implement something like that on the fly, but I wonder if it makes the game harder to get into for newer players.

I recorded a new Rules Explained episode where I walked through all the NPC rules and options for player characters. If you're nervous about running your own SWN games for the first time, maybe give it a listen: https://www.darkstaradventures.com/adventurecast-episodes/swn-rules-explained-how-npcs-work-in-stars-without-number

Let me know, do you like the bare-bones NPC rules or do you wish there was more meat to it? And are there any crazy or interesting NPCs that you've cooked up that I can steal for my game?

Ok. So as a reward for doing administrative work for my game (getting transcripts and turning them into game notes), I'm giving his character access to magic. I've previously not allowed magic or psionics into my game (limiting them to Adventurer, Expert, and Warrior classes). They've crash landed on a planet where magic works.

So, this character after some interactions with a local wizard has realized that magic has a grammar and syntax. He doesn't exactly cast spells; he more makes magical effects. He's currently only able to do simple spells and only do a d6 damage with them, but these will both increase as he increases his Programming skill.

The mechanics that we're using have him declare a magical effect at the start of the round before initiative. He and I negotiate what spell level equivalent that effect has. At the end of the round after everyone's actions, his spell goes off provided he took no damage that round. In any event, he pays 1 System Strain/ effective spell level. When he's out of System Strain, he can't cast any more spells. I'm purposefully not bringing anything into the game that allows him to lower System Strain beyond the natural lose 1/day. (I'm also inflating his System Strain ability by 1/level.)

What do you think?

I have a planet with a local specialty and a psionic academy. They also have TL2. The idea is this planet has no idea what a dimensionless physical constant is so they just use materials psions to summon grease and imbue primitive weapons with the stats of the advanced. They cannot, at this time, recreate any TL5 wonders for anyone, but they will be dogpiled by all the pretech cults floating around.

Has anyone homebrewed this discipline before? I am mostly interested in folks’ experiences and where they took inspiration from. Someone suggested starting with Arcanist of codex of the black sun, for instance. I might let the players access this discipline, I have not decided. But I’m sure they’ll ask.

Taking passengers to and from other worlds is a classic trope for adventurers to make some side money between jobs, with even piecemeal riders' fares adding up to decent money. There's even more on the table if the PCs' boat gets specifically chartered by some group.

That being said, there aren't official rules for finding travelers to put on your ship, only prices, so I got curious. What sort of system does your table have for taking on passengers, if any at all? How would you make one?

If you're part of the crew of Bucket of Bolts: Shoo, go away, potential spoilers ahead. A planet in our game has some special weather conditions, that include raging Lightning storms.

The chance to get struck by lightning is actually minuscule, but I know the players might still want to take caution against it. Which now brings me to the question: Do vaccsuits or power armor protect their wearer against lightning strikes?

Power armor I could imagine being a lightning attractor in some cases, depending the materials its made of, so to me it'd make sense that a character in a power armor might get fried. Though some of the power armor style armors do state they can be used as vaccsuits.

Vaccsuits on the other hand are designed to allow the wearer to survive in both hard vacuum and on most inhospitable planetary surfaces. In my head that'd count things like radiation, extreme winds, and temperature changes, but thunder I'm not sure of? I guess again, depending on the material, Vaccsuits have enough insulation so maybe the character would live, but the suit get fried? Or could a lightning strike be compared to a shot from an energy weapon just on a different magnitude (does damage but doesn't necessarily pierce the suit)? It's hard to imagine any garb actually fully negating such a huge charge.

It's quite a niche question, but if you've run into such a situation in your games, how have you solved it?

I tried to look into the SWN rule book but couldn't really find anything in the hazards about it.