Restarting StarVigia

I used to play a lot of sci-fi RPG back in the day at various clubs and amongst friends at each others' houses. It was mostly a very much amended version of the original small black book Traveller which was renamed Auslander by our referee due to those changes, and the occasional tabletop battle. As the years went by, real life got in the way and we all moved away to different parts of the country. Our face-to-face gaming sessions dwindled so much so that the small group of us that were left began to play via email (PBeM). Although it is slower paced than face-to-face, it is still just as immersive.

These PBeM games mainly moved to new "eras" from sci-fi and consisted of a variety of fantasy/faux-history strategy games, as well as games that were higher level that involved manoeuvring forces around a map culminating in occasional face-to-face tabletop battle games. But, that said, Auslander was slowly developed into StarVigia by our referee, so the few of us gamers who are left still manage to get our sci-fi fix.

Free Space Photo from t'Internet

Eventually, though, the remaining group of us have had to settle on only playing RPGs via email. The latest iteration of StarVigia I have played on and off for about four or five years, but I have played prior to this latest resurgence and I think its first iteration was several years prior to this whilst we still managed to occasionally play face-to-face.

My particular character for this scenario, Thomas Aquinas, first saw adventure back in 2020, but there have been delays in playing recently due to real life getting in the way. I had also played one or two other characters by email prior to him and also a number of characters post-Auslander whilst we still played face-to-face.

I won't go into too much detail about this particular StarVigia game here, only to say that gaming takes many forms, and depending upon our individual circumstances, we must play what we can, where we can.

Off on a bit of tangent now as this is mainly just a free-form chat post - I am very lucky that I have had a very full gaming life. It started when I was a mere nipper at primary school in the 1970s with Basic Dungeons and Dragons, which then moved onto a solid group of friends I met at a local gaming club with whom I played with (all sorts of games ranging from Runequest and the sci-fi games mentioned above) for decades slowly moving from meeting several times a week, sometimes with up to 30 players over weekend sessions, to just a handful of us playing by email today. Since having a family, my two sons have played several tabletop games with me and I have had the fortune of meeting a number of other Dungeons and Dragons groups in the last decade or so, including the latest group where we play online TTRPGs.

On top of all of this, I spend a lot of my time solo-gaming and thinking about gaming. This blog is my repository for games played, figures painted and thoughts I have about gaming. It keeps me going.

Sci-fi Play By Email

Over the years I have played many sorts of games; board games, pen and paper role playing games, wargames with miniatures, play-by-email strategy games and play-by-email role playing games.

I have covered most types of those games on this blog at some time or another, but I don't recall mentioning or commenting on the RPG by email games I occasionally get involved in.

So, there is a bit of a change of pace with this post. This one actually relates to some gaming I am currently involved in! A few weeks back I began playing in a new campaign with a brand new character in a play-by-email sci-fi role playing game called StarVigia - designed by my friend Colin (the referee). It is a gritty low-level/low-life adventure game where the PCs work hard to extract themselves from a life of poverty and petty crime, and ultimately (sometimes spectacularly) fail in true future-noir fashion. The turn-around time for each "move" is approximately a week, and the scenario has been set up for my character who is an out-of-work, down on his luck, ex-planetary marine corp type.

Below are a few scenes put together by Colin from his extensive sci-fi miniatures collection that shows what we used to get up to in our face-to-face games of yesteryear. All are 15mm and the scenery etc. is created and painted by him.

A showdown between a gang of heavies and a local biker gang at Colita's Bar...

And what could be a rude awakening for a security force arriving after the alarms went off over an intruder alert at a top secret laboratory in the outback of some desolate world in the Outer Rim...

This sudden delve back into sci-fi gaming has renewed my interest in all things space related, so I am about to dig out my old star system and world creation notes in order to update them with the latest scientific facts and figures on exo-planets and their star systems.

That said, all the new scientific discoveries in our own solar system recently may make this quite difficult to boil down to a few dice-rolls as commented by Colin, but I will update the rules and see if I can perhaps open a spreadsheet to make creating systems easier. Up until now, it has all been rolling tons of dice, cross-checking tables, adding modifiers and so on - a very manual and time consuming process that I will streamline, but Excel may help me automate a lot of that. I am not a computer programmer in any way, shape or form, but I would like to try to write something that will collate all of the system stats, display a table of details and allow for a graphical representation of all the system components to be created.

More on StarVigia and the exploits of Thomas Aquinas in a future post.