It's been two months or so since I talked about Genship Exiles as its own thing, and a lot has changed since then.

Now that Segira's out, it's time to focus on Hwaet and Genship Exiles.

I've already talked a fair amount about Hwaet; it's epic heroic storytelling and not going to deviate that far from what you'd expect for such a thing, but Genship Exiles is more unconventional.

The Pitch

The overall tone and feel that I'm trying to go for with Genship Exiles is a sort of throwback Golden Age with modern sensibilities: it's about exploration and wonder, and developing a new life for the future in strange and alien places scattered through the stars.

It's not designed to be too heavily focused on the technology and what's possible (it's soft-ish), but it's also more of a storytelling framework, so if you wanted to play it with really hard sci-fi elements you could or you could also play it as a sort of space opera.

The game is built around connections and cooperation, and it's going to have a generally bright tone. It's focused on exploration, but not conquest. It's about settling down and finding a home, or at least keeping the ship going to the next place.

Image made for Loreshaper Games by @znkd.

Mechanical Underpinnings

Genship Exiles is a game about relationships and community traveling through space, and as I've thought more and more about it I've basically decided to move it from my Hammercalled system, which is still developing, to the more mature Resistance toolbox (affiliate link), which powers my Game of the Year, Spire (affiliate link).

I used a very modified version of the Resistance toolkit for Waystation Deimos, and I've been sort of itching to take it for more of a spin. The Resistance-lite variant that features in Waystation Deimos won't be the main engine for Genship Exiles, which will use the core d10 mechanic. I might tweak this, but it'll still be closer to the original d10 versus the d6 lightened mechanic in Waystation Deimos. I've been thinking about different die sizes and having bonds maybe tweak the die size from a d10 to a d12.

Genship Exiles is about having connections between characters, and bonds with PCs and NPCs will be a major driving factor in the game. Players advance characters individually, but the generation ship that they're on also changes and shifts, developing as they go.

It's going to be a more conventional storytelling versus roleplaying game in terms of the dynamics: the setting is made by the players and the GM in common, though the GM handles the actual blow-by-blow of play. There is a distinct Session 0 built into the game process, in which this occurs, character bonds are formed, and the like.

One reason I want to go with the Resistance toolbox for this is pretty simple: I'm familiar with it and its dice pool mechanic very neatly scales with the variables that I want to go for. Hammercalled uses a single d100, which is fantastic, and I have a lot of things I can do with that if I need to have more resolution of results, but you can't change the random number generator that easily without opening up a whole can of worms. I contemplated rebuilding Hammercalled to use a dice pool, but I just couldn't swing it so I dropped it.

I'm not ready to get too far into mechanics, but each character will have affinities; NPCs with bonds just have an affinity (and are not typically described further in game terms, with exceptions for when players pursue developing an NPC further), and the ship itself will function more like a traditional PC (in game terms, the genship will have its own Resistances and a bunch of "talents", and a PC will have abilities, ties to NPCs and other PCs, affinities, etc.).

Rather than stress and fallout (which is more focused toward the ship itself), individual PCs will typically be more impacted in the short-term by Entanglements, which represent crises and reduce the size of their dice from d10's to d8's. This is bad, though only one die is reduced per entanglement so it's not immediately catastrophic if a character is "good" at something before taking the penalty. I'm thinking that bonds work in an opposite way, increasing the die size for a die to d12 instead. These counter out. I'm not sure how to mechanically govern this, but Genship Exiles is still a long way from release.