A game of Bucket of Bolts starts with creation of a ship. Very few prompts for this section, but it’s not as difficult as it seeems. If your imagination is struggling to break through the tyranny of the blank page, do what real writers do - steal from someone else :-)

For ship creation in my first game I’ll be borrowing liberally from Star Trek. Not necessarily for the ship itself, but for the ethos of the society and the engineering team that built it. I find that once you get the first few words down you can properly start envisioning things and everything else starts to flow.

Ship Creation

You were constructed by a team of starship engineers. Describe them, their design principles and their political affiliations.

• I was designed for exploration.
• Redundancy was importatant. As an explorer I was expected to spend months, even a year, between outpost visits.
• Space for a years’ supplies, sample storage, an exo-craft for exploring planet-side in hostile environments.
• My engineers took pride in constructing a robust ship that would protect its crew from whatever the universe could throw at it.
• Funding was not a concern. Safety was always top priority.
• Built by a hopeful, outward facing team of engineers who hoped to advance humanity by unlocking secrets of the universe.

Add three traits describing your ship.

There is a small list of suggested traits to help with this section, I use two from the list and come up with one of my own based on what I came up with for the ship creation section.

• Utilitarian
• Robust
• Adaptable

Give your ship a model name and simple factory designation.

Naming things is by far the hardest thing in roleplaying. I think about ship names in Elite: Dangerous and imagine this this ship is part of a line of exploration models, and that each of the ships in that line is named after a type of bird to reflect their freedom and wayfaring nature. Of course this ship is designed to go for longer than any other without touching the ground, so a model name immediately jumps out at me.

Ship class: SWIFT

And that’s all there is to it. Ship creation is complete. In the next entry we’ll play through the first act and start getting properly into the prompts.