Here’s some art that I didn’t use in Planet of the Week but wanted to highlight.
I have created three new background playbooks for Planet of the Week: the Belter (inspired by The Expanse), the Throwback (think Buck Rogers, or Steve Rogers, and maybe John Crichton), and the Terran.
For my TTRPG Planet of the Week, I’ve created adventures on 11 different planets so far. Which has required me to create at least one miniature constructed language (conlang) for each planet. For unlike Star Trek, with its magical, invisible, instantaneous translator, in Planet of the Week the Universal Translator (UT) is a device that has to be trained over time. So characters always hear a bit of the new language before translation kicks in.
You as GM can certainly handle factions solely through the fiction and the regular rules, but it is great when the game supports factions mechanically. Your characters help this faction, but in doing so run afoul of that faction, and the GM tracks this in some way.
Skills aren’t commonly used in Powered by the Apocalypse games, and take different forms when they are used.
While typically I run year-long TTRPG campaigns, I had an opportunity to run a summer-long campaign. Sometimes less is more, and this was a wonderful experience.
After a thorough review of dozens of science fiction PbtA games, and after hacking the last two TTRPG systems we played quite a bit, I decided to create my own game with exactly the vibe I wanted. Why a new system? I didn’t want to set an adventure in a cinematic universe so that we could capture that feeling of exploring the unknown.
Planet of the Week is my PbtA homage to shows like Star Trek, Firefly, and Stargate: Atlantis. You’re the away team of the research vessel Endeavor Maru. You’re the first group to land on each new planet, making first contact with aliens, investigating strange phenomena, and giving whatever assistance is needed. Can you stay true to your values as you explore?
I love having a Starting Session move. It is a great segue from small talk into the game itself. Frankly, I think I’m going to hack such a move into every PbtA campaign I run from now on.
