Found In One Folder

I need to sort out my game collection, which includes a few books and zines, a ton of pdfs that I can't even bear to look at for the most part and many, many random folders of things that I've started writing, noted down or half-considered.

In one folder, picked at random for sorting out this morning, I've found:

• Probability calculations for rolling n dice and getting at least one 6.
• Probability calculations for rolling 2 dice and keeping the highest result.
• Pages of notes for random setting generating a series of systems in Diaspora.
• A sketch of a rumours table for a fantasy city I remember thinking about.
• Notes for a new game of Dogs In The Vineyard (I say "new" - the notes are over five years old).
• Notes for a zombie hack of Dogs called Dead In The Graveyard (ugh, such a terrible name!) which didn't get very far, but which had - I think - the neat idea of renaming the stats "brains, brawn, blood and guts".
• What looks like a scrap of paper with PBTA game notes, but right in the centre a single question, "What happened at the Bus Station?" - and I have no idea why that's there...
• Notes on a two-player game inspired by the awful movie After Earth, for a game where two people play characters separated at great distance. One person has experience but is gravely injured, one can move freely but needs guidance. Both will die if they can't work together. There was a wonderful concept in After Earth that didn't work given the world details in the movie, but I wondered (and still do) if there's a neat little story game in there.

And finally, a sheet of paper with brainstormed ideas for a table to generate magical parasites...

I have at least a dozen more physical folders of various sizes.

I have to get organised.

Space demons! and other universal interlopers

At the edge of the solar system, impossibly, They are here, pouring through a hole in reality...

Humans rally their forces and wonder: can we beat them? Is this the end? And importantly, why are they here???

1. Counter-humans from an inverse-universe determined to conquer our space.
2. Insectoid menace plundering precious resources: humans!
3. Blurred-edge fractal-flowers, AIs that want to be the only consciousness.
4. Conceptual bubble-beings; they feed off maths and want more equations to devour.
5. Swarm of nano-constructors; absorbing comet ice and space dust, and looking at that hot glowing ball of gas in the distance with hunger.
6. Spike-ships colonised by ant-people parasite-pilots are searching for something good to drink: humans!
7. Matriarchal anti-entropic space-pirates looking for a new star to turn into pure computronium.
8. Macro-scale germ-hive searching for the ultimate infectees: whales! (or, if whales extinct: humans!)
9. Cat-headed demons of the negaverse; searching for a great big saucer of milk.
10. Aesthovores, art-eating twelve-legged spiders from dream-space; attracted by Earth culture and looking to farm artists from the closest source: humans!

Whoever They are, humans can't win. We can probably hide and survive in the ruins though...

(From notes for an old Into The Oort supplement idea I had. The canon Oort setting had no aliens, just leftover tech from older human communities, but commenters seemed interested in space demons and Other Menaces. The table also probably owes a debt to To The Stars, the shared game universe that I, David McGrogan, Patrick Stuart and others played games in years ago.)

d100 Ship Names for the Oort Cloud

Out in the Oort Cloud people use spaceships. Sure, you could have a lot of fun playing a game about asteroid mining, or what happens on the last human outpost, but for my money you can have more fun flying between different places and causing trouble looking for interesting things along the way. That means spaceships.

I've posted a work in progress idea before about what ships are going to be like in the game, both game-mechanically and setting-wise, but one thing I've not mentioned is names. I am a massive fan of the late Iain M. Banks. The names of the Culture Ships in his novels are astounding; I love the thought, the humour, the outlandishness and sometimes the way a name can make you go "Huh? Why that?" While the spaceships in Into The Oort are going to be much, much lower down the technology ladder than a Culture GSV, two aspects of their names are things that I want to follow: the ship classes and their names.

I'll follow up in another post about ship classes, but for today I want to share a starting point, d100 spaceship names. If you're playing Into The Oort you're free to do what you want, make some up, come up with a cool setting idea and have them be derived from that. Or you can use some of my names, from the list below the cut. And if you do check them out, scroll down to the end for another thing to expect from Into The Oort.