Do any of you know of a Starcraft world primer for ICRPG? My 8 year old son asked about doing our next ICRPG adventure in the SC universe. That sounds pretty cool, but pretty complex potentially as well.
Starcraft World Primer?
Paxx
#2
I did find this. https://www.alternityrpg.net/resources/646/original/starcraft.pdf
If you reskin it, focused on terrans as PC choices. Make a 3 variants of battle suits, and a few hundred Zerg…it should work for a few sessions.
Starcraft is an issue of scale.
I’d also make the majority of the Zerg something small in comparison. And the swarm has 1 heart, but each creature is 1 or 2. If playing with index cards/miniatures it would mean a few dozen face hugger type aliens. Or you can make a single wide card with 10 on them or some such.
As far as for an eight year old. It’d Be a bug hunt, meet a Portos, fight or befriend the protons, bughunt, kill a giant bug that is not a big bug in the game but with the protos if protos is still alive.
Hard but not too hard to do.
Levi_E
#4
I did find this and downloaded the PDF’s last night:
I think starting with Xeno Deadzone is a good place to start.
I think you’ll find the most success by first determining which elements of the setting are important to him, and why. After determining the kind of game he’s after, we can work on marrying mechanics to those elements. Also, check out The Angry GM’s Eight Types of Fun and see if you can identify your son’s top two and lowest one.
If he wanted to zoom in on the experience of being a unit on the ground (like a Terran marine infiltrating an overrun ship, base, or other more enclosed area), then a reskinned Zeno Dead Zone would absolutely be a winner, and with minimal effort. Using the GM “behind the curtain” method of generating alien spawns would handily function as a “fog of war”, too. He could be Raynor, leading a small crew of marines and flamers to retrieve the data discs in the Jacobs Installation.
For a larger-scale conflict, there’s also mechanics you could cobble together for reproducing a satisfying siege defense (you could use Chunks to represent the different base elements, assigning each one a function that could be used every x/turns or x/rounds, like building a Marine every 2 rounds).
If he just loves the IP and wants to experience it in a new way, you could use Grizzly Encounter JOURNEYS to follow a convoy setting out from a Terran base into Zerg territory. Or maybe a more conventional campaign (utilizing Warp Shell stuff) involving a new character who crosses paths with/works alongside (or against) characters from the game.
Anyway! Hopefully this provides some ideas for how you can render a fun experience for your son, customized based on what he’s really after. Compliments to you for engaging with him! Let us know how it goes.
Grimcleaver
#6
Nothing I can find. My druthers would be to homebrew some bioforms and classes on the fly, use Warpshell as the chassis for the game, get the rest of the setting details from the wiki:
Wikis are the best sourcebooks you can get.
I would honestly let people play whatever they could come up with a rationale for–want to play an infested terran struggling with the voices in his head and constantly having to go under the knife to remove explosive cysts? Awesome. Renegade protoss cut off from the psychic bond of their people by a grazing headshot who wakes up with no memory? Sweet. Want to create a whole different race who was influence by the Xel’naga in some way we haven’t seen yet? Even better.
I mean why have a free wheeling open ended game like ICRPG and not encourage crazy over the top diverse characters? You sort of need that kind of crazy energy!
Honestly I’d save the humans only version for Dark Heresy or some other rules obsessed, lore culty game.