LOST in Space: Campaign Retrospective
Intro
Follows is a campaign retrospective for my Ashes Without Number, Cities Without Number, Stars Without Number mashup game set in a hollow planetoid soon after humanity discovers faster-than-light travel. It's the Ashes Without Number game I mentioned in my 2026 goals post and ran weekly for about 40 sessions.
Like the vast majority of my games, I greatly enjoyed the social interaction and literal act of playing/running the game, but thought I could definitely improve in prepping the setting and developing the campaign structure. I'd give it a solid 8/10.
Plot Overview
The game followed a small group of survivors that had crashlanded on the inside of a hollow planetoid after a malfunction in their jump-drive. They managed to survive the initial dangers of the planetoid including velociraptors, lizardmen slavers, rival survivors from a hostile spacecraft, and strange heavily-armed robots. Some of their number wound up captured by the robots, they were freed along with some other prisoners from a robot work camp in a daring raid.
After this initial burst of excitement, they set out to establish a settlement to determine how exactly they got to the planetoid and how to get back home to Earth. They investigated strange ruins that bore suspicious resemblance to late 20th century Earth construction, teamed up with other survivors, and raided the robots for high-tech weapons and supplies. One of the characters hacked several of the robots and overwrote their algorithms so as to convert them to their cause. The settlement was all set to survive and thrive when they were interrupted by an oncoming force of large harvester ships operated by the robot faction.
The party was able to take down and stop some of the harvester ships, but they saw it was part of a wave that impacted the whole planetoid. They took the remaining members of their own faction from their newly-barren wasteland settlement and took the fight to the robots at their central metropolis. The robots turned out to be descended from secret projects enacted by early 21st century techno-fascists craving immortality through mind upload. The PCs were able to aggressively convert existing robot soldiers through forcible algorithm modification and construct new proto-mechs using stolen technology. They took the fight to the robots with the help of their allies and were successful in capturing a massive broadcast dish, the same one that had been used at the beginning of the campaign to hijack their jump and strand them in the planetoid to begin with. They turned the broadcast dish inwards and used it to rewrite the algorithms of all the robots left in the planetoid, achieving total control. They were able to return to Earth and use the planetoid as a new planetary outpost, which was the original reason for their jump.
Pain Points and Lessons
Mystery versus Sandbox
I came into this game really with just a couple of cool scenes in mind: a party of survivors huddled on top of crashed spaceship debris firing lasers at a hoard of velociraptors, paramilitary forces riding a star-wars-esque sand skiff fighting a mirrored force above a steaming jungle far below, and moss-covered stone mechs fighting a giant tyrannosaurus rex. I created the campaign structure (survival game -> establishing your faction -> regional dominance) and split the game into roughly 3 acts to aid me in escalating threats and consequences. I initially set out to make the game a sandbox of moral quandaries and ethical boundaries set against an alien locale, but I didn't realize what I'd actually created was a confusing mystery sandbox that only seemed to raise more questions and never payoff any satisfying answers. Hence, the title of this post: LOST in space.
I'm no stranger to running mysteries and I'm no stranger to running sandboxes, but thinking I was running one and finding out I was running the other set me up for missed expectations. I hadn't established the setting as particularly robust (why were the robots here? why are Earth dinosaurs here? Why does this ruin look suspiciously like a nuclear-waste dump, complete with "this is not a place of honor" signage?) because I had never had to do so with a sandbox, it's something I always did as time went on. Exploring the limits of your sandbox and defining details as they became relevant is a large part of the sandbox process for me, it saves prepwork and ensures I don't waste time prepping something irrelevant. Setting the game in a future version of our own timeline and establishing the play area in a relatively small space (the hollow inside of a planetoid in the middle of space lightyears from anything else) meant that I hadn't established a sandbox with no limits, I had actually drawn a giant box of restrictions around myself and now had to actually answer all the mysterious foreshadowing I was throwing down.
I was expecting a sword-and-planet style game with a lot of action and not a lot of questions, but I got the opposite from my players, the majority of which were relative strangers to my table and games. The idea of a "Mythic Underworld" that didn't need (or want) explanation was entirely foreign to them, they were expecting Gygaxian Naturalism even if they didn't know to use those words. I was able to switch tracks and establish an overarching explanation for the scenario as a whole, but it wasn't the mind-shattering "WHOA!" that I had foreshadowed in the first 15 sessions or so. As smaller pieces of the overall mystery were cornered and then dragged into the light for a reveal, they were met with shrugs of indifference and dissatisfaction. Of course the planetoid is filled with Earth-remnants, humanity has figured out FTL travel before this and been similarly trapped here. Of course the robots are also Earth-remnants, they're the oldest thing here the same as the ruins. Of course the robots are descended from mind-uploaded techno-fascists from the 21st century, they speak in the same brainless corporate executive dialect famous to that group. As the game got closer to the end, the game reminded me of watching the show LOST as a teen and being disappointed as the mystery pillars of the show were smashed or discarded or explained away.
I can't really blame my players for this mismatch in expectations either. They were just exploring the world as I had explained it to them, it was my fault that I was constrained and forced to come up with unsatisfying answers. I could have broken continuity in a number of different ways to give myself more breathing room but to do would also be unsatisfying. The plot I came up with as it came clear that I would need one was also perfectly serviceable, even as it answers became more and more obvious. Mystery games also end up in the same spot eventually when it becomes clear what the answer is, they just also usually end soon after instead of spending 10 more sessions to wrap up loose ends.
The lesson I'm taking from this is to give myself more breathing room, more than I think I need. If I set something in any semblance or timeline of our world, players are going to naturally ask questions on why and how it differs. I should be prepared to answer them in satisfying ways, or at least have interesting reasons to deny them the answers. It's also to come in with more concrete expectations: I had a player briefing document written before the game, I had some thought that I wanted a sword-and-planet style game, but I didn't voice that desire because I thought I could convey it through tone. Obviously not!
Systems and Infrastructure
The core system for this game was Ashes Without Number. We extensively used the cybernetics systems from Cities Without Number and the starships and mecha rules from Stars Without Number. I've used the *WN systems for quite a while now and they're good workhorse systems, but the underlying modern *WN chassis feels a little bland and lifeless at this point. I started with AWN because I wanted a survival-focused game built around manufacturing your own weapons and tools, foraging for food, and dodging radiation and strange dangers. Those systems worked fine, even without the zombies or trappings of the modern world the game expects you to have. We pulled in the accessory systems from CWN and SWN as they became relevant and they all plugged-and-played exactly as you'd expect from systems that are essentially the same.
My main complaint about the *WN systems is that they're plenty when what you need is someone to give you the drapery and wallpaper of a system and a setting that you don't have yourself, but that they get in the way if you're already DIYing your own fixer-upper. I primarily use them when I'm running for players that have only really played 5e (or only listened to podcasts that ran 5e...), but I'm ultimately doing them a disservice by running them a generic bridge system instead of just throwing them in the deep end of GLOGhacks and whackier systems more common at my table. The breadth of rules that exist in the *WN books also mean that any obvious exclusions (what do you mean shear rifles aren't possible to create? what do you mean you don't think vehicles will be much of a factor in this game? etc) or departures from the written text feel more like subtraction to newer system-hoppers. I can't really say that the *WN systems don't work or don't have what I need, they just end up feeling overly generic too much of the time for me to feel satisfied using them at the table.
I used Skerples's 1d1000 mutations table extensively in this game. I remain a big fan of it as a tool for generating whacky side effects and permanent changes to a character. The mutations table has become infamous in my games, players always know what's going to happen as soon as I pull out 3d10 and gamble to see how many rolls they get. Highly recommend.
Final Thoughts
While I spent most of this post complaining about the aspects of the game I didn't like, I largely enjoyed this game. It ran for a good number of sessions (almost a year), I got to play with a couple of newer players to my table, and got to run a lot of cool robots-and-dinosaurs scenes. I posed a large handful of moral quandaries to the players and was met with a quick, ruthlessly pragmatic answer to each of them without a hint of regret. A player of mine that doesn't often take the spotlight ended up being the clear party leader and really grew into the role over time. I learned some lessons about setting constraints and establishing mystery that I can apply in future games. Best of all, it gave me ideas for a future space Cataphracts game that I hope to run this summer/fall.