Sunday saw the kickoff of my Strange Stars campaign using the awesome White Star rules. This is the first game I’ve run with my group since my burnout nearly 4 months ago. My original group (peeps I’ve been playing with for about 10-15 years) had sent me text messages (or emails) asking when we were gonna game again- so I decided to keep it small and more manageable and play with just four people. See if my diminishing burnout could handle that.
So my group looked at the classes from the book and what I created and we ended up with and the races that I stated up from Strange Stars and made their decisions.
Aside: I’m also using the skill rules I ported over from Beyond the Wall:
Skills: Each class, unless stated in their description starts with two skills of their choice. Rather than creating an extensive list of skills, let the player come up with their own skills. These can be things like piloting, hacking, security, technology, alien cultures, trade, persuasion, intimidation, etc.
By-and-large a player character is able to attempt anything (however a GM is free to decided that certain things do require a skill, especially highly specialized things like hacking locks, etc.). To do this the GM decides which attribute is appropriate and the player rolls a d20 and must roll equal to or under their attribute. If they roll over, the attempt fails. When a player character has a skill, they receive a +2 bonus. A player may take a skill twice, giving them a +4 bonus.
Example: Big Eye James is attempting to pull a card from out of his cuff in a game of poker. The GM asks if he has an appropriate skill. James has sleight of hand, which the GM feels is more than appropriate for this situation. Big Eye James has a Dexterity of 13- adding +2 to that for the Sleight of Hand skill. Big Eye James rolls a 11 on his d20, thus succeeding on placing a card in his hand.
Here’s what we ended up with:
Liam– An Assassin Djagga
Liam choose his two skills of stealth and escape artist. His race also gave him notice as a skill.
Fletch– A Tech Specialist Kosmonik
Fletch choose BLANK as his four skills
Nate- A scoundrel “Cold Egg” Ksaa (he’s an archaeologist, really).
Nate choose computers, stealth, archaeology, alien history, and xeno-biology as his five skills.
The Set Up
When we originally discussed what the group wanted to be, the vote was treasure hunters. None of them wanted to captain a ship. They wanted an NPC to “captain” and they would go where adventure led them or through discussion- steer the ship… That’s Jake with me.
So the three of them are traveling on a medium transport by the name of “Within Arm’s Reach” captained by Reeves “Trick Shot” Hammond. Trick Shot was a renowned scoundrel in his earlier age, but had taken ill with a rare wasting disease. He lost his left eye, his right arm, and both his legs before a cure was found. Trick Shot had a cybernetic eye and arm to replace what he lost, but refused to get his legs replaced, and instead uses a hover chair to cart himself around.
The group had landed on the dying planet of Deshret in the Zuran Expanse after receiving a tip from a friend that they had discovered an energy signature that was most likely a derelict ship that had crashed down in one of the few remaining patches of jungle left on the world.
The adventure starts with them roaring out of Within Arm’s Reach on their “Fingers” (hover bikes) along with two NPCs (a djagga named Fix and a human named Smelly) and Trick Shot and two NPC gunners riding in the Palm (a cargo loader). See picture below.
To be continued- Riding through the jungle! Ambush! Crashing! And Death!
DIY RPG Productions 
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