Into the breach!

Near the end of my previous campaign, as it usually is, I started to think about the next one. I haven’t run a sci-fi campaign at that point for at least 5 years so I was getting cravings. It had to be GURPS, because I really got back into tinkering with it during that previous campaign after running a couple D&D & Pathfinder ones. I really missed it. Mulling over some ideas I decided for a kitchen sink space opera heavily influenced by D&D and Dungeon Fantasy, so basically those things in spaaaaaaaaaaaace! I never was big for realistic games anyway.

After some group brainstorming, the initial idea of using a published setting as a base and then throwing in basically any kind of SF thing the players wanted, including from other settings, got rejected by the players. It was to be only that published setting. Why a published setting? For a long time I have been feeling rather burned out creatively and had very little time to prepare my games. That meant running exclusively published adventures and campaigns. Mostly Paizo Adventure Paths and D&D 5e stuff. So I decided to run GURPS Starfinder, since I took a bit of a liking to the setting, and Paizo’s APs provide the best what I need the most: detailed descriptions of combat encounters, together with maps. Coming up with adversaries and treasure was somehow the hardest part for me during my burnout phase. I was to run the first Starfinder AP, Dead Suns, in GURPS.

But recently something got my creative juices flowing again, especially after spending some time on the GURPS Discord server (https://discordapp.com/invite/vk5GtQy). So I started thinking and ended up wanting to run a sandboxy minisetting-based campaign with the core activities of exploration, combat and unearthing wonderful loot. The result of that you will be able to follow here, mostly through my prep thoughts and a play report now and then. If it doesn’t pan out, I can always fall back to the original plan of running Dead Suns.