My playlist has gotten stale. Been running more than I've been listening lately and I know I'm missing stuff.
Actual play, GM craft, theory, interviews. Whatever format. What do you keep coming back to?
Dark Star Adventurecast is a sci-fi audio drama following a freighter crew that's been dragged into a corporate cold war across a dying star sector. New arc starts this week, which makes it a reasonable place to jump in.
Setup going in: one crew member just developed abilities nobody can explain. The ship can't leave the planet without a black market registration module. Someone just threw a grenade at them in a dive bar and they don't know who or why.
New episodes every two weeks. Patron early access: patreon.com/DarkStarAdventurecast
RSS: https://feeds.redcircle.com/f3e0b235-5c48-41c2-ace9-74ee999d2d6d
Creator disclosure: I'm the GM.
No generative AI was used in the creation of this product. Written & edited by a husband and wife team. Keep our hobby human.
The exploration and threat system in this one-shot is the thing I wanted to get right.
The AI starts nonlethal, treating the PCs as patients to be sedated and contained. Players hit a specific threshold and it reclassifies them as threats. Everything changes. They control when that happens (though they may not realize it).
SWN, light enough to port. Free on itch.
https://dark-star-adventures.itch.io/the-compassionate-algorithm
If you grab it, please leave a comment on the itch page!
A corporate fixer had a run-in with my crew about six sessions back. They came out ahead, he went off-screen, and somewhere in the sessions that followed they quietly filed him under "solved."
He wasn't solved. He'd been tracking them, learning how they operate, waiting for a better opening. When the right moment showed up, he took it, and he came back with leverage they hadn't thought to protect.
The moment landed because no one needed to say anything. They knew they'd let it slide. The weight came from their own recognition, not from me explaining it.
I keep a short list of active NPCs with their current goals and what they know about the crew. When something significant happens, I look at the list and ask which of them would notice and how they'd adjust. It's not complicated. But it changes how the game feels from the players' side, because the world keeps moving even when the crew isn't watching it.
The Strake thing specifically (and I realize this is a sidebar, but it's the part that made it sting) he didn't come back with the same plan. He found out more about the crew while he was off-screen and changed his approach entirely. Persistence alone would have felt like a cheap callback. Adapting made it feel earned.
Does anyone else run factions and antagonists this way? Curious how people handle keeping threads active across a long campaign without it feeling forced or like a GM gotcha.
Star Master Log 23 for our Stars Without Number actual-play, Dark Star Adventurecast: https://www.darkstaradventures.com/pick-up-the-box-star-master-log
First pic: I keep (most) of my older stuff on the top shelf in the kid's room, alongside my old Goosebumps and Animorphs books. Here we have D&D stuff, a ton of Dragon Magazines, GURPS, Monte Cook stuff, and more. Even more stuff not pictured is just packed away: 1st edition D&D, Traveller, etc. Not enough for it all!
Second Pic: I keep all my newer stuff and what I'm playing now in my office: Stars Without Number (what I run my podcast on), Dungeon Crawl Classics, reading through Avatar and Daggerheart, and more!
Also in the second pic: that dice box is my "groom dice box" from when I got married. All my groomsmen got one as well, personalized for them.
My old pooch passed away a couple years ago, and you'll see his collar around my mic on the far right. Give it up for Darwin! I added a pic of him because I miss him. He was turning 17 in that pic and got a sweet potato cake my wife made. Practically blind and missing most of his teeth but he wolfed down the whole thing!
Sharing this here because I think there's some audience overlap with this community, even though the format is a little unconventional.
Dark Star Adventurecast is a serialized sci-fi fiction podcast. Corporate cold wars, space mercenaries, a slow-burn conspiracy that's been building for 20+ episodes. The Expanse and Firefly are the closest comparisons I can make without sounding like I'm overselling it.
The unconventional part: it's produced from a tabletop RPG session. Stars Without Number, specifically. I know that's a dividing line for some people here. What I can tell you is the episodes are edited down to narrative fiction, no dice commentary, no rules discussion. Recent episodes have basically zero rules density; the game is the production method, not the product.
Anyway. We just finished a new trailer if you want 90 seconds to figure out if it's for you.
https://www.darkstaradventurecast.com
Curious whether this community has much patience for produced actual play in general, or whether the format is always a deal-breaker regardless of execution. What's your opinion?
Player rolls Sneak, gets a 4, groans. Before I've even described what happens they're already thinking, "I failed, this scene is cooked." Now the roleplay is built around the die result instead of responding to the fiction. The knowledge they failed is out there in the ether and can't be ignored.
So, I've been thinking about rolling all non-combat checks myself instead behind the screen, so the player doesn't see the number. Sneak, Notice, Fix, Know, Connect, whatever. If it's not a combat roll, I roll it.
The player narrates what their character does, I roll secretly, I narrate the world back. Sometimes that's a clean success. Sometimes it's "you make it past the guard post. The far checkpoint's empty, which is weird, because it wasn't an hour ago." They don't know the reality of the result until it matters. You roll Know for a player to figure out what the machine does, and they roll very low. You tell them they have seen something like it before, and give them the wrong answer. The player doesn't know if they really know or not, but it doesn't matter, because the character thinks they know.
Combat would stay player-rolled. When you're in a firefight you know if you missed the shot. That feels different from whether the corporate exec bought your cover story.
Anyway, curious if anyone's actually run it this way. Does it change how players engage, or does it just create friction when they want to understand why something went wrong?
Edit: I'm not saying I am going to do this, but I do find it an interesting an appealing approach, but I also understand it comes with complications.
My players spent a session outmaneuvering Viktor Strake, loss prevention officer for a powerful corporation. Legal gambit in the morning, undercover work at an alien artifact auction, corporate espionage on the side. By the end they were feeling pretty good.
Then they found out the session had already been decided. Strake had made a move earlier in the day, while the crew was working the auction. By the time they noticed, the window to stop it had closed.
I love this for a recurring villain. One quiet move while nobody's paying attention, then wait for the crew to walk into it. Strake didn't even need to be in the room.
My game is SWN, but both it and traveller make this design feel natural, because the ship is always under threat. Get access to the ship and you get access to everything. A villain who understands that can win a session he never even attends.
Anyway, the crew still doesn't know exactly how he pulled it off. They'll figure it out eventually. I cannot wait for that session.
What's your best "the BBEG had already won" moment? Planted asset, triggered event. The moment your players found out the board was already in play.
The session: https://www.darkstaradventures.com/adventurecast-episodes/welcome-to-your-prison