Archive Delving - Moonsailors

I'm back for another delve into the archive! I've been wrapped up with writing for NEW BLOOD and Daybreak on the Battlefield, as well as scheduling playtests, which has been eating up my ttrpg energy. But I've saved up enough to do a quick little read-through of Moonsailors, an offering from ZineQuest 2.

Moonsailors is among the early-ish ttrpg things I was picking up, and if I had to guess I grabbed it because the pdf was very cheap (and at the time I was pretty direly underpaid), and I'm a sucker for melancholic sci-fi. The pitch - we'll play as solitary wanderers in the vastness of space, discovering evidence of other fellow travelers, but likely never meeting. It sounds GMless/GMfull - players take turns prompting each other with questions. And the pdf is blissfully short, with 10 nicely spacious pages (plus two extra pages of play materials / small illustrations of locations).

The piece of the procedure I'm most interested in is the idea that players will play with their backs to each other - unless they happen to be in the same location, in which case they may look at each other. I think that's really cute, and it makes the game feel like a neat little ritual to me. I think it would also be pretty easy to adapt to voice/video calls, to play online. To close the game, the text has you all turn back at each other and instructs you that "the vastness of space does not separate you anymore." If only that were so!

The rest of the procedure is quite sparse. Besides being prompted by questions from the other players (and the example questions are helpful to me, although I would really love an easy-to-navigate list of questions to help spark me in the moment), the other meaty/thematic thing you'll do is decide what you take with you from the location and leave behind. The examples here are fun too! And these I don't mind not having a list to bounce off of.

The game does have you create a little "map" of sorts (by randomly distributing the location "coins"), which I think would be useful to me in play, but just reading the list of locations, none of them really catch my eye. The coins themselves come with a brief phrase to distinguish them, in addition to illustrations for each - these are great! They're all fairly similar - mostly the descriptions emphasize how empty or in what way they were abandoned, but it's good enough to get me thinking. You can only move between one "space" at a time, so you might catch someone going the other direction, or you might pass each other in empty space, or you might just never meet because you all were too far apart from the start. I think that part seems to me like it would work well.

That's pretty much all there is to this one! I think the only text I didn't talk about is the character creation procedure, which is just to pick a calling (from a small set of five, including "oracle" or "drifter"), pick the object of your wanderings (maybe "things of value", or "meaning"), and pick a descriptor for your ship. You can write a name if you want, and draw your ship, if you want. I left this for last because I'm still working out how I feel about it. I think the object piece could be a little more powerful, for my tastes - what if looking for meaning changed the rules for the things you left behind? Or looking for wealth meant that you always took something valuable but risked damage to the location you took it from? It's ultimately just not what this game is interested in doing, I think - it's less about the "game" than it is the procedure/ritual/exercise.

The last thing I'll note is that, surprisingly, this reminded me a lot of a one-page game that I wrote! Fae-cation is another game about traveling across a map, mostly alone, but with other people journeying too. The goal there was to provide almost an OSR-style set of random tables to roll on to prompt ideas for a fantastical vacation, so the vibe is pretty different. But I included a short phrase for each character type as a "goal" - I think that a few extra words could help distinguish the castaway who's searching for "flotsam" over the surveyor who's searching for "things of value".

I think as a ritual, Moonsailors doesn't quite bring the heat that I'm looking for - if I've managed to get all my friends in one place (including virtually), I'm probably reaching for another sci-fi game that we can play together and enjoy togetherness, or a ritual that provides a little more structure for building a space. Unfortunate for Moonsailors that it entered the world only as everyone was splitting apart! I think a big part of my reticence is that I don't really need the help of the ritual to feel a little bit adrift from my friends. 

That's it for this delve! A easy breezy one. Unfortunately that means we're not loading up on points. First, we suffered two roman attacks - at strength 6, then 7; we squeak by for both at level 9. Oof! I can feel the pizza slipping out of my grasp... 7 paragraphs is 35 points, plus 5 for reading, plus 3 for rating on itch for 43 total - that brings us back up to 312. I'll spend 50 to ascend to level 10, even though it means backsliding to 262. I'll have to do some more reading pretty quick!