The 159-page Adventurer’s Guide for VAST – No Port Called Home is a free download.
Citing Rice Boy, Mass Effect, Girl Genius and RPGs like Pathfinder, D&D and Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, VAST is a free, CC 4.0 sci-fi RPG.
The Rice Boy webcomic is important, as Evan Dahm of Rice Boy provides the art.
The game uses stats, skills, feats, classes and levels. In the game, “races” include;
- Various humans cultures
- Gigantic ship-builders the Jotunn,
- The clan-like Nix (with a healthy dose of bioessentialism in there as sci-fi is so prone too),
- Genetically enhanced Vest,
- Nomadic fae,
- Robo-paladins of a dead god in the Archon,
- Homunculi,
- Worker-drones found sentience in the Tsuku.
VAST uses a d20 system, players rolling the dice and adding their stat to see if they make the target number set by the difficulty level of the challenge.
The game often favours storytelling to mechanics and counting, though, explicitly pushing accounting and cash counting to the abstract. The whole system is mastered, thereabouts, by players within the first dozen pages. GMs will have to read more.
Quick Links
- Download VAST – No Port Called Home.
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Oh heck. Didn’t know this was up anywhere. Was still meant to be a work in progress. Hmmmm… ’tis an Honour to be featured somewhere, but still feels weird not being finished yet. Fair call on the Bioessentialism, have been thinking of revisiting that, but also balancing with recognizable races, oh well. Uhhh… if I might offer one correction? SOME of the art is done by the very excellent Evan Dahm, but over half of it, including the pictures featured above, is done by the equally excellent Zonked-Eye . Wouldn’t normally bother offering the correction, but Zonked-Eye was really great… Read more »