Says Who

Orbital Cold War Sessions

Welcome to Unity Base: a shining beacon of NATO-Warsaw Pact cooperation in lunar relations.

A technical SF game run by SammyJ using a homebrewed ruleset named Freefallers. The number of session reports are off-by-one, since I only started playing in session 2. The intended runtime is approximately 10 or so sessions as the Cold War heats up and the technical debt grows.

A hillshaded map of the Moon showing craters, mare, and base locations

Freefalling Orbital Cold War - Session 3

We shifted to thinking about things in weeks rather than days, at least for this session. We might change things later. Things felt a little loose in the timeline in regards to the time taken for various tasks, which was not bad, but felt a little odd given the premise of technical things. More notes on expected time frame for those tasks might be useful: potentially can work on a few small things instead of one big one?

Freefalling Orbital Cold War - Session 2

Fairly straightforward session. The troubles that keep building triggered a few times: We needed to deal with an intensification of the Cold War (the USAF and some Soviet soldiers arguing over a weapon test in no-man’s land between bases), we had an issue with one of the vehicles, and a personal Trouble. This all worked quite nicely, and having the players make the choice of which one of a few gives control over pacing, or lets more appropriate things happen.

Freefalling Orbital Cold War - Session 1

Recently Sammy, of Scattered Amusement Machine/TrashedTabletop fame, has been running an Orbital Cold War campaign, using an early but complete enough version of Freefallers. I missed the first session, but joined the second one. My PC is Jean-Jacques Desjardins, a CanadianQuebecois mission specialist at Unity Base. Chargen was pretty painless: assign some attributes, assign some skills based on the role (mission specialist, security officer, lunar scientist, that sort of thing), choose a trouble and a couple of things like that. No hassles here if you are comfortable with RPGs in general.