So I think I might run Fingers on the Firmament in a few weeks, after I finish with Mouse Guard. I know that might sound a bit crazy, because the game isn’t really “together” in any form, but I feel like I have most of the tool necessary to make it work in 4E and can hack the rest together over the course of trying to play it. I’m going to use this post to try to record some of the thoughts I’ve been having about how to make this happen.

1. I’m hoping I can hack together the first few levels of the three core classes — astronomer, cartographer, and anthropologist (or whatever we end up calling them) — from the basic classes in the PHB. The astronomer needs to be a hybrid starlight warlock / laser cleric / wizard, while the cartographer needs to be more warlord / thief (tagging people as partners and then running away), and the anthropologist… is the hardest one to think about and still needs a clear role.

2. I need to come up with rules for skill challenges that don’t suck and allows encounters to easily switch between being a series of independent rolls, a skill challenge, or a combat.

3. The game starts with character creation and the character’s being trained into some medium-sized human outpost where a community has gathered.

4. Play proper begins when that community is attacked and the PCs are forced to run away, starting their own outpost somewhere and working to reconnect the scattered fragments of the old community or create a new community.

5. The commercial dungeon tiles actually work pretty well to set up the kind of small encounters I’m thinking of. The PCs might stumble on an ancient human shrine built into an asteroid and try to uncover its secrets — artifacts, maps to human settlements — only to find that some of the people who built it are still there, but are monstrous creatures corrupted by the darkness between the stars.

6. The monstrous corrupted humans can probably be hacked or just re-skinned from various undead creatures. Picking up the Open Grave supplement might make sense, in that case.

7. The freedom to travel between the stars doesn’t necessarily making planning encounters harder. I could just make a few different encounters and parse them out depending on where the players travel. Basically, the players would inevitably meet the encounters I planned, but the players would determine where they took place and, potentially, how they were connected narratively by choosing where to travel.