A Lucky Hand

The story begins with the player sitting with some buddies at a table in the bar, enjoying a few drinks after a long day's work.  The four of them are enjoying a "friendly" card game, which progresses until one of the npc's put the title of a ship on the table.  The player wins the ship, and is finally closer to leaving this rock behind.  I enjoyed using this intro because it also help me establish some of the social nature of Antemadus as a setting.

Antemadus is a mineral-rich volcanic planet, with an insufficient and semi-toxic atmosphere, dotted with mining outposts.  Typical outposts may house several hundred people, and are supplied by regular runs from merchant guilds and the like.  The people who live there as miners get paid a pretty good wage doing such work, in some sense like oil-line workers in Alaska can make pretty good money.  But the cost of living there is also higher, so there's a bit of off-set too.  With the limited amount of space and other factors, entertainment can be hard to come by.  I fell back on the blue-collar staple of the bar-pub-tavern, as probably the most common means to pass the time or try to enjoy it.  So for miners making more money than they have decent things to spend it on might be likely to gamble with each other much more freely.

I used this to introduce a driving story device: the player/character's ship.  This represented the character's freedom to "leave this boring rock behind" and explore what the Cluster has to offer.  It also gave me an interesting character origin as a miner, encouraging me as a game designer to make it also an effective and plausible aspect of gameplay and story.  Now of course every good game needs an introduction, and I also didn't want to open everything up without exploring Antemadus and who the character is to begin with, so the ship was in a state of disrepair.  This gave me most of the tools I needed to start playing, and I feel by working with a more general idea of critical moments it allowed me to better roll with how the players wanted to achieve their goals or find solutions.

And I think it's a fun notion to try to make a solid campaign around a Miner character who runs a crew.  That's not to say it hasn't been done or the idea is original(the movie Armageddon is an example of a high-profile mining situation), but I think that if pulled off well it would create an original-feeling and cohesive experience.  And as a crew/team-building experience as well, which is something I think Bioware has done a pretty good job of in their games.  But enough references and ramblings.

d10: Visceroth Cluster is a work-in-progress, and while my opinion is obviously biased I believe it has potential.  Feedback would be appreciated, as well as I love tabletop games and gaming in general so input about that is also welcome