The Basic Premise
Player-characters were held in stasis in a prison awaiting transport to a penal colony.  When the spaceship they're on gets attacked, their personalities are "quick-loaded" back into their bodies.  The PCs manage to get to an impounded ship and get off the transport before it blows...

The "quick-load" is a narrative excuse why we don't have all the history and background about our characters and the state of the galaxy in general.  The character's have a fog because we, the players, haven't defined things yet.

Note:
You can also, if you wish, go with added layers of complexity by having had a  malfunctioned quick-load (getting the wrong personality loaded into your body, or fragments of another, etc...)  These are options, not requirements.


To RTJ to this game
Please submit the following:

• A Name   - How should we list your character?
• A Basic High-Concept
• Why were they travelling to a penal colony?
  Were they a criminal, a political activist, a deposed noble?  Were they unjustly accused or did they do everything they were accused of--and maybe so much more?
• What does this character want?
  What do you want for them as a primary story-arc?  I don't want characters who don't want anything.   This should be a concrete goal, not a generalized ideal.
• A high-concept for an alien race that might be commonly encountered in this game...  I don't mind if you include one or two lines to flesh it out a bit further.

Note that none of these ideas are final.  These simply give me an idea of what kind of character you want to play, and what kind of conflicts you want to play through.


Game-Feel Influences
Dark Matter, Killjoys, Firefly, Serenity, Guardians of the Galaxy
Bulldogs, Diaspora, Scum & Villainy, Eclipse Phase, GURPS Transhuman Space
This message was last edited by the GM at 05:15, Tue 02 Mar 2021.

GM Profile
The player set goals for their characters and pursue them through the scenes the GM develops.  Good characters are proactive and flawed.  They want something.  Good play isn’t a win/lose kind of thing.  General Familiarity with the (Fate Core) rules is necessary but detailed familiarity isn't required.  The good of the story will occasionally trump adherence to the rules.   Narrative storytelling is more important than mechanical crunch.  The rules are necessary to provide context and impartial adjudication during times of conflict.


Auditioning...
The RTJ is a audition... an expression of interest.  The real audition (for both of us!) happens during character creation and world-building.  This is where we get a feel for whether we'll play well together.  It is not just the GM auditioning you for fit... it's also you auditioning the GM.  It's way better to know if we're going to rub each other the wrong way before the game goes live...

Fate Core == Proactive Collaboration
Fate Core works best when the players have the authority to introduce new elements to the scene.  I'd rather complain that you added too much than that you weren't bold enough to add anything at all.

Meta-Game Discussion
We will have a fairly active metagame discussion.   It's how we discuss ways our characters might interact and discuss how the story might evolve--like a bunch of writers around the conference-room table at a network TV show, discussing what's gonna happen in this episode.... I encourage you to direct the character based on metagame discussion.

Your Character Will Have Rough Times
As a player, you accept that drama involves conflict and sometimes your character is going to get into a bad spot.  That's the trade-off for the ultimate success I hope they'll experience.

Erratic Pacing
This game will have an erratic pace.  I have a fair bit of ups and downs in my life.


Dropout Notice
My biggest pet peeve with RPOL is people ghosting--GMs, players and applicants, alike.

If you need to go offline for a bit, tell me.   If you haven't logged in for several weeks or--worse--have been logging in but not posting, I'll be left with the assumption that you've lost interest and have chosen to drop out but couldn't bring yourself to say so.  Chances are real good that I'll just drop you from the game.  You're not a child and I'm not a babysitter.   You can avoid all that by just dropping me a line, even if 'ts "Things're fucked up.  I'm offline for a bit."

For my part, I warrant that I will always issue a closing statement if it comes to that.  I do not believe in leaving players hanging.
This message was last edited by the GM at 00:20, Tue 02 Mar 2021.

Aliens
I want to limit the number of alien species we've had contact with...  So... there are probably no more than a half dozen foundation genotypes out there.  For our purposes "alien" means that the species follows a completely different evolutionary path and likely a different process of breathing/digesting food.

As for PCs... transhumanism isn't new, and "human" can encompass a whole lot more in this setting than it does today.  We'll need to cover these things via Aspects.

Humanoids Please
All PCs in this setting must  be able to walk, talk, and breathe--unaided--in human breathable atmosphere.  For roleplaying interactions, I prefer that the PCs are humanoids, as it removes a level of complexity from the game I'm not interested in entertaining.

Options will be available in-game to temporarily switch out to other physical forms.

Sentient Androids?
I'm okay with androids and the like, though I have several ideas about what this means that we'd need to discuss.

ASPECTS
You get Five Aspects to begin with.  You might take on more as we go (though rarely a whole lot more).  Consequences/Conditions (same thing) may also be expressed as Aspects.

One Aspect must be your character's "High-Concept"

One Aspect must be Wanted by the Galactic Authority.


SKILLS
There are 22 skills.  You have 35 points to spend on skills.  Each point buys one rank for one skill.  There may only be one skill ranked at Superb(+5).   You may opt to have less skills higher-up for more lower-down, should you so wish.  Each rank must have the same number or less skills than the next-lower rank (except that the number of Average(+1) skills may exceed the number of Mediocre(+0) skills).   Please do not delete the Mediocre(+0) ranked skills.

Our skill list:
Athletics, Burglary, Command, Deceive, Empathy, Fight, Investigate, Knowledge,
Notice, Perform, Physique, Pilot, Provoke, Rapport, Science, Shoot, Stealth,
Systems, Survival, Tech, Will

• Changed:
  • Academics & Lore combined to become Knowledge
  • Crafts becomes Tech
  • Drive becomes Pilot
• Removed:
  • Contacts is removed - due to the set-up of the game, Contacts is not a skill available to your characters.
  • Resources is removed - I'd rather deal with resources via Consequences and Stress than via skill methods.
• New Skills:
  • Command - I wanted a social skill that doesn't depend on the like/dislike dynamic of Rapport/Provoke and wasn't necessarily based on lying (like Deceive).
  • Perform - Likewise, I wanted a skill that talks about
  • Systems relates specifically to programming and interacting with computers and AIs, etc... basically the programming side of tech (there may well be bleed between the two skills in any given situation).

STUNTS
You may take three (3) stunts for free.  Then, after that, you may purchase additional stunts at the cost of one "refresh"   The refresh diminishes your base fate-point pool that you start with in each new episode.  Before purchasing stunts, you have three (3) refresh.

You are not obligated to assign your stunts up front.  Please reference your sources.  If you pull a stunt from a website, please provide the URL.



STRESS
Each character starts with four shifts of stress per track (Physical & Mental).  Each rank of the anchor skill (Physique for Physical Stress-track and Will for the Mental Stress-Track) adds two more shifts of stress to the track.  Rank +5) also adds an additional consequence slot, just like it does now.

Each slot in the stress-track absorbs 1-shift of stress and there is no limit to how many stress-track slots you can use for a given hit.

Physique(+0) gives a Stress-Track of 4:  [_][_][_][_]
Physique(+1) gives a Stress-Track of 6:  [_][_][_][_] [_][_]
Physique(+2) gives a Stress-Track of 8:  [_][_][_][_] [_][_] [_][_]
Physique(+3) gives a Stress-Track of 10: [_][_][_][_] [_][_] [_][_] [_][_]
Physique(+4) gives a Stress-Track of 12: [_][_][_][_] [_][_] [_][_] [_][_] [_][_]
Physique(+5) gives a Stress-Track of 14: [_][_][_][_] [_][_] [_][_] [_][_] [_][_] [_][_]
This message was last updated by the GM at 08:32, Thu 27 Jan 2022.