Announcing: Distress Calls for Space RPGS Resource Book

A month ago, I began a solo Traveller campaign. I rolled up 5 characters, and started with the great (in my opinion) introductory adventure High and Dry. My crew made it through the adventure (no spoilers), and on their way from Walston to Flammarion, they decided to stop over in Bowman, and try their hand at belting. 

It was their, the crew encountered their first distress call. 

I was using the Beltstrike (1984) module in parallel with the crew’s visit there, but I found the distress call tables a bit lacking. After looking back over the core rulebook, I was left with the same feeling. There’s some fun tables for distress calls, but that’s about it. I wanted something a bit more. I wanted to experience a story while responding to a distress call, rather than have to create the encounter myself.

So, I decided to make my own. I’m announcing my next creation: Distress Calls for Space RPGs.

What It Is

Distress Calls for Space RPGs is a book full of 1-page scenarios, each of which is a distress call for your space RPG. To my knowledge, there isn’t anything else like this available. Most currently existing distress call resources are procedural generated – meaning, a few keywords are rolled on random tables, and the game master puts together the encounter based on those results.

Distress Calls for Space RPGs is different. Each scenario has:

• a unique encounter
• character and ship names
• character motivations
• skill suggestions on how to handle the distress call
• mechanics for what happens if a character succeeds or fails
• scenario resolution

Here’s an example distress call:

How Can I Get It

Distress Calls for Space RPGs will be available from both DriveThruRPG, and itch.io. 

The release window is November, but there is not a specific date yet. I will be sure to keep updates coming as things get finalized. You can stay in touch by following me here on the website, or check out my about page for other areas I inhabit online.

What’s Next

I have a fair amount of work yet on this resource. Here’s what’s next, in no particular order:

• Content: About half the content is finalized, and the other half is in concept form.
• Art: The cover artist (announcement forthcoming) is maybe 75% done with the art!
• Pricing: I haven’t even looked at this yet, I still need to do research on similar resources.
• Uniformity: This is something I do, to make sure that the mechanics of the distress calls are presented in a similar way to the reader, to reduce confusion.
• Proofreading: This will happen near the end of development
• Usability: I want to make the resource usable, so it’s not just a giant list of distress calls. I will likely be making a few tables at the beginning of the book, outlining different scenarios by genre, by space system security level, etc.