Act 1 - The High Era

The first act of the game shows the ship at its peak. This is a time of glory, before hard use and the ravages of time have had a chance to inflict scars, physical and/or metaphorical.

Captain 1 - A bold, optimistic explorer

Captain creation

We start by generating our first captain. The game provides a number of pre-sets themed for each era, but I’m going off script to get something more closely tied to my ship creation.

Describe the Captain and consider how they took command of your ship, and any notable crew or assets.

• Name: James Deckard
• Appointed captain by the organisation that constructed the ship.
• Military veteran with spotless record, known for fair and principled leadership.
• Crew of scientists and explorers, not great fighters but expert survivalists.
• Exo-vehicle mech-suit intended for moving cargo on board and planetside exploration.
• No offensive weapons fixed to the ship, just EMP cannons to ward off aggressive intent. Believed not carrying weapons would make it easier to cross borders.

The pre-sets come with their own question/prompts depending on captain type, but the format is simple enough that I had no trouble imagining a couple of my own for this bold explorer and his decorated military background. The game encourages you to see the prompts as guidelines and to go off-piste if it makes sense for the story you want to tell.

How did your captain get their reputation?

• James Deckard was best known for averting a shooting war with a neighbouring civilisation by standing his ground and talking them down.
• Made reasonable promises and kept them. Was respected by both sides.
• Turned away from a career in diplomacy because he loved the stars.

How did they lead by example and gain the respect of their crew?

• Picked a first mate from the scientific institute rather than a fellow military mind.
• Regularly clashed with them but James wanted to make sure that the core scientific mission was represented in the command structure of the mission.
• The two were never friends but kept each other honest and pushed each other to achieve great things.

Memorable events

Since this is the High Era and our mission is the betterment of mankind we’ll take our memorable event from the Love and Triumph table. And no more off-script work needed, it already has the perfect prompt.

You struck out into the unknown, discovering a brand new stellar phenomena together exploring distant stars.

• Discovered humanity’s first wormhole and gathered information that revolutionised our understanding of the universe.
• The Captain and First Mate decided to call the phenomena the Decker-Maillard wormhole in recognition of the fact that neither could have completed this assignment without the other

Ship Question

As you are shaped by your experiences under each captain you get to answer a ship question to flesh out your character. I’m going to start with the fundamental one.

Every good ship needs a name. What is it and why?

And because naming things is hard, I’ll be stealing this from history. The ship was built to explore - to boldly go where no one has gone before and to chart new phenomena that no one has seen before. And it does’t seem a huge stretch that they might look back into the history of exploration and pull out the name of a great explorer’s ship.

• The ship is named The Endurance in honour of the famous vessel that was captained by the explorer Ernest Shackleton.
• The captain personally cast the vote that sealed the decision. The historic Endurance may have been lost to the ice, but the crew all survived and he believed this reflected the boldness and the people-first spirit of his expedition.

How does the captain and ship’s time together end?

• After many years of hopeful discovery the captain James Deckard retired and the ship was transferred back to the institute.
• The ship was no longer cutting edge, but was still in pretty good shape and with a storied history and some good science to its name

Resolve a Rest

The final part of each captaincy is to decide how long it takes before the next captain arrives and to envision what happens to the ship or the universe around you during that time. In this case I think it would take some time for the institute to make a decision about what to do with the Endurance - probably via some kind of committee - and so I’ll pick the maximum waiting period allowed for act 1.

• Wait: 1 month.