Project Cobalt Adventure Philosophy

Happy Frontier Friday, Spacers! 🚀

In last week's post, I touched briefly on an element of design philosophy that I am really excited about for Project Cobalt Jobs, and that is directly integrating characters into the adventure text.

Goals

This all started when I was making the initial character sheets for the pre-generated characters for playtesting. I had some white space available on the character sheet and decide to include a little goals and secret goals section.

This worked really well in practice and immediately gave the players something to bite on in terms of roleplaying during the session.

When I got started working on the QSR again, I knew I wanted to include this element, and quickly realized that I wanted to expand it.

So the current plan is that each pre-written Job that I make for Project Cobalt will have these personal goals attached to each archetype to give players an immediate easy personal hook to tie them to the Job.

The World Responds

But I want to take it further.

The best thing about a pulp system that uses archetypes is that I can lean into those archetypal tropes when designing Jobs and there's all sorts of interesting ways that can manifest.

As an example, one of the NPCs in the Halcyon Job has some major beef with the corps, so if your Crew includes a Corpo Agent, that NPC is going to respond very differently to if they didn't.

That same NPC also has a specific tie to smugglers, but this time a more positive one, so you immediately get four different types of scene from that NPC:

- If the smuggler is present without the corpo agent.
- If the smuggler is present with the corpo agent.
- If the corpo agent is present without the smuggler.
- If neither corpo agent or smuggler are present.

And this doesn't have to be a mechanized "If X then Y" flowchart type of situation because a big part of the philosophy for designing Jobs for Project Cobalt is giving the GM the tools they need to improvise freely and respond when the Crew do things that they can't possible plan for.

There's almost no value in giving the GM a line-by-line script for how this NPC speaks. It's much better to give the GM a little profile on key NPCs that tells them some key information about them.

Vessa Kade
Local fixer operating out of the Rusting Hauler. Sharp-tongued, pragmatic, and deeply connected to Halcyon Prime’s underworld.

What She Wants
Find Dr. Malix Vance before rival crews or Alliance agents do.

How She Operates
Vessa values competence and hates wasting time. She respects confidence, but distrusts cogs in the corporate machine.

Connections to the Crew
• If a Smuggler is present, Vessa previously worked a job with them years ago, and treats them with respect.
• If a Corpo Agent is present, Vessa is immediately suspicious of them.
• If a Bounty Hunter is present, Vessa may offer additional side work after the Job is completed.

Key Detail
Keeps a loaded hand cannon and a bottle of whisky in her desk drawer at all times.

How much detail a given NPC gets will depend on their importance to a Job and the narrative within, but by constantly contextualizing NPCs by their connection to archetypes it should make it so that players always feel like they are getting unique interactions based on their Crew composition.

Vessa Kade isn't just a quest giver in this situation, she is an old friend of the Smuggler who contacted them specifically for this job, which immediately changes the context of the start of the adventure even though functionally and mechanically nothing changed. The smuggler could then leverage that relationship to get a higher payout. . . but that wouldn't be written in the text, it would be down to the player to intuit.

It also adds a degree of replayability to pre written adventures, because a Crew with different archetypes will have different personal goals baked in, and the NPCs will react to them differently. And after you've experienced that once I think players will realize "oh damn, every person we encounter in these adventures COULD be someone meaningful to someone else on this crew and I wouldn't know it" and that is very cool.

There's no real limit to where we take this concept, either. Maybe some NPCs have specific dialogue or information that only gets revealed or becomes easier to learn in the presence of some archetypes? Maybe some locations will only admit access to the Crew with a certain archetype present? There's a lot of ways we could take this and I am super excited about it.

I'd love to know how you'd like to see this kind of stuff implemented in a game!

Much love
Anto