Lasers and Broadswords: Five Parsecs From Home Campaign turn 1

Post from Lasers and Broadswords blog. 

Written By Alexander Wasberg

Five Parsecs From Home Campaign turn 1 I have finally gotten my Campaign going!

My Adventurers can be found here: Link


Currenty stuck on a sandy, somewhat inhospitable world known as Ares-2, our heroes find them-selves in an unenvious position. This planet is a dump, quite frankly, and they would like to head to one of the myriad of other worlds on the fringe.

But there is a problem; in their latest attempt to "hit the jackpot", their spacecraft was destroyed when they tried to evade the local customs agents. The ship was a rickety old death-trap, to be sure, but it was their ticket out of here as well.

Now they find that they have no choise but to try and find a patron, do make enough dough to get a new ship, or failing that, a shuttle-ticket to a slightly more civilized planet.

Tasks:

Captain Black: As the leader, he goes out to find a job, and without too much trouble or haggling, he finds a Calamian diplomat, who offers them a job.

Mr. Hammer: The warbot is left behind to guard the room the group resides in at a local seedy motel.

Chiyo: Goes out to find something to barter for, the rent needs to be payed, even if they can't find a job!

Mr. Smith: Strikes out to look for a patron as well, has preciously little luck however.

The Job:
As the diplomat explained to the captain, the job is simple; Go to an run-down settlement a few miles south of town, explore the area and assess the damage on the remaining structures and the local micro-plant.
The reason is simple; the Calamian corporate interests in the area is great, but buying unsurveyed property on the fringe is unadvisable, so our heroes are doing so for them.

What he failed to mention is the gang of punks who have taken over the area since it's official abandonment a few years ago, but that information felt irrelevant to the diplomat, it didn't have anything to do with their main interest in the area after all!

The Mission:

The Group meets up back at the motel, grabbing gear and getting ready to head out:

The Captain brings his trusted revolver.
Mr Hammer is wired up with a Gattling gun (counts as rattle-gun) and a brutal melee weapon.
Chiyo carries a handgun, as well as her wrench.
Mr Smith has a modified assault weapon (counts as rattle-gun with assault module)

As the approach the area, they notice that there are indeed punks there, and not being terribly surprised at their employers failure to mention this, they get ready for work. 

FiveCore/Five parsecs from home cured my slump. A rules overview.

Written by Spacejacker Zero of Tiny Solitary Soldiers
Originally posted here. Used with permission.

FiveCore/Five parsecs from home cured my slump.

Well, I made it back to the UK. I'm much happier and my adventures continue.

This week I took a chance on "Five Parsecs from home", a sci-fi campaign book for the FiveCore system. I say took a chance because I couldn't find much about the product on the internet, but it seemed ideally tailored to the sorts of game I have been looking for, basically forever.

(I bought the PDF versions of Five parsecs from home and FiveCore Skirmish Rules from Wargames Vault.)

Here were the selling points that grabbed me:

• 5 figures per side average game
• Narrative heavy campaign system
• Fast playing, narrative based combat system (as opposed to simulation or math heavy)
• Firefly-esque setting and scope
• Sandboxy, but not a totally blank slate
• Provision for solo play

Unbelievably, every one of these claims was completely accurate. The FiveCore rules are a separate (inexpensive) download but the campaign book is where the whole package really starts to shine. It has a lot of very sci-fi specific extra stuff that meshes seamlessly with the core rules. This is because almost all new rules introduced still follow the same basic (and dead simple) dice mechanic.

This one point makes it very easy to make up new rules, even on the fly if you want.

The campaign system features a plethora of charts to generate characters and events. What I liked about them was that they provide enough detail to get your creativity fired up, but are not especially constrictive. The whole thing is designed to assist imaginative narrative.

The bottom line is that after reading the books, I immediately set to rolling up a Group and playing a game. An extremely rare occurrence!

I used my freshly rolled team against a simple gang for this first skirmish. I would definitely suggest using at least a couple of talents or special bits of gear on each side, even for your first game. Testing the game using bland identical figures will not reveal the richness of the system. It is not an exercise in power-gaming.

The game went splendidly. My group attempted to blow up a parked vehicle and escape into the woods. After 13 turns, 2 of team had bailed (run away) two were down on the ground from gunfire and a brawl respectively, and the last man (alien) standing detonated the vehicle's fuel tank with some well placed rifle fire.

Both downed team members recovered, although one will have to skip the next 2 battles and has a permanent limp, and the other has suffered mental scarring.

I will close this quick post with a bombshell. I've found my system.

I have no regrets about the last 4 years of buying, reading and testing rulesets (e.g Multiple Ganesha games, most THW, Pulp Alley, iTen, FUBAR, Savage Worlds et al) which have all had some really cool points... But the FiveCore Skirmish Narrative campaign combo has rendered all of them second-place in one play through. (at least as far as solo small-scale sci-fi narrative skirmish gaming is concerned).

Thank you Ivan Sorensen for writing such a great set!

New Skirmish Ruleset: Five Parsecs From Home Now Available

By Harold

Nordic Weasel Games has released their latest ruleset, Five Parsecs from Home for $14.99

Salvage crews, free traders, mercenaries, bounty hunters, tax collectors, and secret agents. The fringes of colonized space are teeming with those who seek fortune, freedom, or are too crazy to fit in anywhere else.

Bounty hunters are on your trail, you're pretty sure the new girl that just joined the crew is crazy, and that battle droid you bought last week seems to be convinced it's in love. Time to lock and load. You're Five Parsecs From Home.

Five Parsecs From Home is a skirmish science-fiction game where you follow a small band of unique characters as they try to make their fortunes in the backwaters of human space. Watch your group advance from game to game, learning new skills, finding alien artifacts, and contending with everything the Fringes can throw at you.

Using the Five Men/FiveCore system, the basic game mechanics are extremely quick to learn, and incorporate elements like reaction fire and one of the simplest and fastest suppression mechanics out there.

You get fully fledged campaign rules with random events and encounters, a wide range of possible characters, enemies and opponents, and a flexible system that covers items such as psionics, trade, bluffing, and randomly generated encounters and enemies.

Look at your shelf. Pick out five miniatures you don't get to use too much. Roll up some characters, and see where it takes you.

Please note: This is an expansion for the FiveCore system. You will require a copy of the FiveCore main rules (or Five Men in Normandy) to use these rules.

I've picked up the new expansion and base rule set and I really like what i've read so far!  It's a very interesting system and I look forward to trying it soon and putting up a review.