I have not been posting lately, which vexes me, but the productivity I have been managing makes up for it in my eyes.

What have I been working on, you might ask. Well, my players for next month’s playtest of SaSS:R wanted a settlement/base-building game in their tabletop roleplaying game, and I figured I might as well work on it–SaSS:R now has limited settlement-management capabilities (not as extensive as in ACKS, but not completely dissimilar either) because of it.

I simplified managing a colony or settlement of dozens, hundreds, or thousands into two resource pools (money and ‘convertibles’) and two population mood-tracks (‘Unrest’ and ‘Anarchy’.) There are four areas of management–‘Settlement’, ‘Surrounding Area’, ‘Base’, and ‘Factions’, each of which has its own Actions that raise or lower Unrest, Anarchy, the cost of other actions, or enable the characters to unlock new Actions and just generally do things they couldn’t do before.

Now, because I don’t know if the players will survive the first encounter (which is the only scripted part of the playtest) intact–because it will involve the five of them facing a large number of mechs (not all at the same time) and a decent number of small aircraft–I am doing two different settlements, each of which will have slightly different ‘feels’ to them. One is in backwoods southern Wales, where they would be facing almost exclusively fey; the other in northern Spain, just south of the Pyrenees, which will involve more faction-play, more resources, and faster building, but will also have more potent dangers.

Now, I wouldn’t worry so much about them surviving, but they are not all OSR-friendly players–some of them would be bothered or upset at the loss of characters. This is foreign to me, but I recognize it is a real thing that happens, and if they wouldn’t enjoy I won’t keep the initial encounter an almost un-winnable situation (like I made it originally… by accident.) Let it not be said that I am inflexible all of the time.

I’ve also been busy making up stat-boxes for different fey creatures and mechs, so my players have something to fight in between bouts of mismanaging their people like good little politicians. Here’s one:

I’m thinking of doing another mech from Lions, just to get a change of pace from the dieselpunk.