SWN-like skills for fantasy settings.

As much as I dislike d20 skills, I actually have enjoyed using the skill system from Stars Without Number. I've been contemplating for some time adapting that system for use with fantasy games. Even though the OSR community has a general share and share-alike policy, I went ahead and asked Kevin Crawford if it was okay to borrow from his systems and he gave an emphatic yes.

Here are my initial thoughts on what this should like:

Skills should never remove exploration or discovery from the game.

Skills should not be skill taxes or remove game play.

Skills should not be useless.

Since I will be using SWN as my baseline I will avoid the linear-skill roll problem and some of the difficulty with modifiers, character creation, and the like. I intend to rewrite the list of skills and packages pretty much from scratch for obvious reasons.

The Sector

Final (GMs) sector map:

As full descriptions are written for each world (they are just outlines right now) I will post them.

Decision! (And Time-Keeping in Space)

I have decided! After much flip-flopping I've decided that I will run a fantasy game online to scratch that itch and keep Stars Without Number to the table-top. That also saves me from having to deal with meticulous, AD&D DMG style time keeping in my table-top game and frees me up to post more here.

I realized that time-keeping in an AD&D style SWN game is really problematic when the party traveled to a planet 2 hexes away. They were traveling in a spike drive-1 ship so it took 16 days (2 to reach the edge of the solar system, 6 for each hex, 2 to get back in to the next planet). Traveling from one edge of the sector to the other in a slow ship would suddenly add many weeks to one party's timeline. Now, strict time-keeping does not matter for most purposes, but part of the point of running a multi-party SWN campaign was to allow them all to influence the world equally, which is hard to do without time-keeping.

Sand in the Stars

So to cure my burnout on Pathfinder and to reinvigorate both myself and the group we will be playing Stars Without Number. I had been hoping to run a game of it over the summer and so it will be. Hopefully by the fall the game will still be going and all of the groundwork will be done. I have decided that as a build our sandbox I will post the goods here.

The first thing is the sector map:

I used the cosmic tool-set of hexographer. We have a few good star clusters and a couple of isolated star systems.

As this is a far-future game, my chosen constraint is that everything must be digital. Also, I will try to post as much as possible of the material I create in the hopes of turning this blog from random blathering to actual useful content.

EDIT

I am leaning towards running a SWN for UA-LC  so I don't want to spoil things online. So I have replaced the sector map with the players version. I guess that also means if it ends up happening I won't post secret information. Still if you are reading this you can look forward to plenty of SWN stuff.