#Orbital blues

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played ORBITAL BLUES ?

By SoulMuppet Publishing (Zach Cox, Sam Sleney, Josh Clark)

A roleplaying love-letter to off-beat sci-fi, vintage music, and cooperative old-school styled roleplay. Orbital Blues allows you to play out rules-light tabletop adventures in the style of space westerns such as Cowboy Bebop, Firefly and Guardians of the Galaxy. Stepping into the shoes of Interstellar Outlaws, players band together to form Crews, and navigate a hard-going, gig-economy living on the fringes of a space-faring society.

[labelspoon]

two weeks early but here's my valentine

[soulmuppet]

Inspired by @haveyouplayedthisttrpg, we thought it could be fun to ask folk which of our games they've played / read / heard of! So...

A roleplaying love-letter to off-beat sci-fi, vintage music, and cooperative old-school styled roleplay, Orbital Blues allows you to play out rules-light tabletop adventures in the style of your favourite space westerns.

Stepping into the shoes of Interstellar Outlaws, players band together to form Crews, and navigate a hard-going, gig-economy living on the fringes of a space-faring society.

[the-jupiter-knight]

here's my current butch PC, imani, who i promised i'd draw for lesbian visibility week <3

[samarzart]

doodles of a couple terrible lesbians from a couple different space campaigns

[ostrichmonkey-games]

🌱, 📖, and 🌺? :3

🌱 An unreleased/not-yet-crowdfunding game I’m looking forward to.

Okay, so my number one answer is REDACTED, and I can't actually talk about it yet. But, of some of the games I've recently backed or am waiting to see launch;

Deathmatch Island looks so slick. I've been following along on the graphical development that the creator's been sharing on twitter for a long while now, and I'm super excited to eventually try it out (semi-related, but Tim Denee, the creator, has also been sharing sneak peeks of a Blades '68 alternate setting that looks equally slick). I think Tim has a tumblr here, but I am blanking on the url...

A second close runner up is Ave Nox from @feralindiecharlie. Everything Charlie does absolutely shreds, so I cannot wait to see this megadungeon.

📖 My favorite class or playbook from a game.

The Hungry from Apocalypse Keys by @temporalhiccup! All the playbooks from AK are killer (cannot wait for people to get their hands on the stretch goal playbooks too, they rule), but I had an especially fun time playing the Hungry.

One thing that's so cool about the AK playbooks is how flexible they are in allowing so many different concepts and takes on the same idea. Like, the Hungry could easily be a classic vampire, but I played a monster inspired by Sandman's Corinthian. He was an ancient nightmare that ate other dreams. The Hungry is all about grappling with this terrible power; fighting against it, giving into it. It's so much fun sometimes being truly wretched 😌

You can check out a this video to see me play the Hungry if you're curious;

🌺 A game with stunning layout or visual design.

Orbital Blues from @soulmuppet! Both layout and visual design are stellar. Pun intended. Lone Archivist (who has incredible graphical assets you can pick up on itch) did the layout, and Josh Clark did the art. Together, art and layout absolutely sells the vibe of the game. A dusty, kind of lonely, space western. I'm just gonna let a couple of spreads do the talking now.

ask game

[theinstagrahame]

So it turns out I'm prescient

Back in 2021 or so, I started writing an adventure for @soulmuppet's flavor-blasted Orbital Blues tabletop RPG. (Technically, I had a dream about part of it, and then wrote the story around that thing, but I'm choosing to ignore that bit)

A few months ago, an AI-related news story hit my feed, and I didn't realize until like 2 weeks ago how incredibly funny it was. Because it was, in essence, a massive plot point in what became Electric Sheep Shuffle. My goal was to play around with what the early days of AI would look like in the OB universe, and instead I got our universe.

Spoilers under the cut for the Thing I Wrote, in case someone's playing it right now and wants to be surprised:

On the way to Breqin Station, your crew meets a crew whose ship started malfunctioning.

Shortly after the Crew arrives at Breqin, they meet a shady businessperson who promises to sell them an Artificial Intelligence module for their ship. It's absolutely too good to be true, and some investigation into "Lovelace Technologies" reveals that the proprietor is selling you a bill of goods. The AI module is actually some harried and underpaid tech, sitting in a room with long-range comms, remotely piloting peoples' ships--like the one the crew encounters on the way in.

We have a scammer appropriating a famous name in tech. We've got hidden labor behind flashy tech. We've got misused research. We've got people getting hurt by the tech. It's some clever and prescient social commentary that I definitely planned for sure.

When I thought the Fake AI part up, I was like "well, that's a pretty wild scam! It's bad, but also nobody's going to ever try it.

But then some Investors recently discovered that the slick "Just Walk Out" grocery store, allegedly powered by AI, was actually a bunch of guys in a room with a beefy video connection, building a shopping list for customers and charging them accordingly.

So like... Really? Come on.

I will add, though. The ending has the abandoned ship coming back with Real AI, after it's rebooted itself thousands of times and iterated on the operating system until it works. My goal is to have the players wrestle with the idea of what to do with a new being and the new tech.

But in light of the last couple of years of AI developments, with OpenAI eating the Internet alive for misinformation. I think the question I'm ending up asking is, where can the technology go from here? We've got Google's massive screwups with the tech, the general disdain for AI art, and the researchers out there who are about to lose their jobs when the hype bubble inevitably bursts stuck in the middle.

What do we do if they ever get real AI? Can it survive the Scam Period?

[superdillin]

Howdy Space Cowboys!!

There's a new series starting on One Shot this week, playing Orbital Blues from @soulmuppet with an absolutely monstrously talented crew!

Join me and the crew of The Rust Bucket:

Brian Flaherty Shenuque Tissera Drakoniques and Edward Spence

[captaincleverusernamehere]

Character creation is going well

[mildperilmedia]

Space ship from my Orbital Blues campaign with and without damage.

[ratwavegamehouse]

Cover for my upcoming Orbital Blues adventure; The Man We Knew.

It's a pastiche of The Third Man transplanted to the Frontier Galaxy.

Let's get sad!

[the-crows-codex]

Just some thoughts, since season 2 is still in production.

I've recently had the wonderful chance to run two ttrpg's which are wildly out of my normal realm of comfort - mechanics-wise anyways:

Apocalypse Keys by Evil Hat Productions

& Orbital Blues by Soul Muppet Publishing

While my experience running Apocalypse Keys (AK) was more educational for myself, it's worth talking about how much better my time with Orbital Blues was because of AK and why.

The largest take away I had from AK was that in a system with absolutely no hit points, ability saves, or skill lists, it is immensely difficult for myself to figure out where the game play actually should happen. Sure, we can go back and forth improvising a scene but that's not a game. A game needs stakes, chance, and mechanics. In AK, with most traditional mechanics eschewed, it relies on feelings. In fact the whole thing is about feelings but that is an entirely separate post to cover. The point is that I had to learn how to get players involved emotionally. That's a big ask, and I didn't feel very up to the task of intuiting how to trick players into gettjling ingested. So I didn't trick them. In the end I asked questions. I asked hard questions like "In your past, you hurt someone that you loved. What happened and why?" then after the player gave me an answer, I worked that into the game.

My instinct tells me that this is a short cut and will be completely transparent. The fact is that yes. It is. It's both of those things. But it also fucking slaps when players get to engage in these parts of their character which they came up with and shared with the table. It's transparent but fun. Even if they know I have this information and intend to use it, they don't always know when it's going to come into play and that's fun for both of us.

When I ran a one shot of Orbital Blues this past Friday, I had a little bit of a head start since part of that game has the player define "Troubles". This is stuff like "On The Run" which has the player define something or someone from their past which they are running from. They accumulate Blues points when they are reminded of this, feel like they want to run away from something in the same way, etc. As a one shot I didn't want to ask too much of players so they gave me a little bit of ammunition to build a sandbox for them, and off we went!

Come game day I still had a task, I had to help the players flesh out their characters into more than just something to pilot around. They had already laid some good ground work, but I wanted to give them some room to explore the persona.

Fortunately my time with AK taught me well and I lead them in a similar way that I did in AK. Lots of questions. "You recently found yourself down on your luck. You're broke, in a bad way, and in a cityscape. Where would you go and what are you doing to distract yourself or cope?"! Because of this, we all got to really learn about each character before they had some action and I was ready to ask them fun questions. Most importantly they are all excited to contribute to the world and show us a bit of their style.

So to wrap this all up, here's the TLDR:

Don't be afraid to ask your players fun or hard questions about their character and they world they occupy. It's not cheating to ask them what they want, what makes them happy or sad, and people still have fun when they can see your hands during a magic trick. They came to the event to get invested. Facilitate that.

[drvonchickenstein]

Felicity my character from the orbital blues roleplay game.

[soulmuppet]

Did you know you can get started with any of our core line games for FREE?!

Thats right £0, in this economy ?!?

We aim to design Quickstarts with a few things in mind:

Simple overview of the rules including character creation or premade characters.

An adventure! Its no good having the rules for a game with no guidance on how to get a group to the table and actually PLAYING.

BIG VIBES - truthfully we want to sell you on the full thing, we do that by showing you what the game has to offer in STYLE.

Ready to try one out?

Paint The Town Red: a sad gay vampire rpg of found family, boozy nights out and stinking hangovers.

Inevitable: A doomed arthurian western of cowboy knights trying (and failing) to save the world.

Orbital Blues: a lo-fi space western ttrpg of depressed outlaws trying to make ends meet in a hypercaptalist dustbowl americana far-future.

Best Left Buried: a gritty horror dungeoncrawl where characters suffer the consequences of their actions.

Gangs of Titan City: play as as desperate gutterscum and either dominate the underworld as crimelords or end up riddled with bullets.

[the-jupiter-knight]

imani, my orbital blues character <3 world's most divorced autistic stud

[nemospecific]

Oh, hey, this was on the One Shot podcast last month.