Starship Valkyrie Mechanics: SSV Mechanics Blog

The Offensive Meta and Evolution by Error

Xander Hark — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 22:45:37 GMT

[Picture taken at the end of “Starship Valkyrie Basic: Kackistocracy” at Strategicon Gamex, May 2026. United and Strong!]

One of the worst places where a game master can find himself is staring down a room of enthusiastic players who are asking to repeat a particular action that worked a little too well in a previous game.

It’s a very difficult place to be, because most games have a presumption of a static ruleset, and players expect that strategies that work will continue to work. If, however, aGM gave an unduly advantageous ruling, it can result in a significant change to the way that the game is played. A heretofore unknown or fringe tactic can quickly become the cornerstone of player strategy, and from there, it can move into a doctrine of the player meta. Our offensive meta in Starship Valkyrie, with its upside dominated by phase missiles, ramming actions, and decimator raids, is caught in this particular trap; every single one of those tactics came about as an unintended side effect of GM rulings.

In the beginning there was darkness, then Poobah said “let there be lasers,” and there were, and they were mid. By default, since Version Zero, an SSV ship has had a pair of laser turrets that deal 2 TJ damage every five minutes. They could consume reactor boosts for an extra TJ of damage. By Version 1.X, they were overwhelmingly used to support starfighters. Against a Praezorian warship with 1 armor, the lasers typically only net 1 damage, and with the ability Laser Turret Strafe on a weapons tech, each could kill three drones, usually the most valuable action they could take. (An enemy warship had twenty drones, and drones chew through the shield very fast if starfighters don’t destroy them, and pilots can and often did die fighting drones to keep them off the shields, making laser support from the main ship guns extremely valuable.)

But in addition to the middling lasers, we had two kinds of nuclear missiles that dealt 3TJ or 5TJ damage each. They could be shot down while flying to their target, but they hit hard and won fights. Thus the first meta: missiles destroy warships, fighters intercept drones (who can also destroy missiles), and lasers support fighters.

Everything changed with the invention of the phase missile. Illegal in the game’s fiction and initially difficult to produce, it skipped into hyperspace, teleporting onto the enemy ship and, if it hit, dealing about 7 TJ damage while it ignored armor entirely. It was cool, scary, unreliable, and tremendous fun—and devastatingly effective. It went from “we might go to jail, but we’re going to live,” to “well, fuck it, we got away with it last time,” to “it’s doctrine and on-ship policy to use phase missiles,” all within a few months.

The standardization of the phase missile as the principal weapon of the Earth Republic was a massive paradigm shift, both within the narrative and gameplay. For a ship playing under the Advanced ruleset at the time (then the only ruleset), the ship’s principal offensive capacity was limited by an initial missile loadout, usually fifteen phase missiles on a Destroyer, and Engineering’s loadout to the all-important secure canisters of uranium, which could produce another twelve phase missiles unless more canisters could be attained. At seven damage apiece, this meant that the ship could very effectively deal about 150 damage via missiles before slowing down its damage output dramatically. There are some caveats on that, as engineering cannot produce those 12 missiles as fast as the missile launcher can fire them, but the first 150 damage dealt in a scenario was essentially free. The practical upshot of this meta was that a difficult scenario had to include at least four Praezorian warships, as they have fifty hit points each—and that trying to fight off six over the course of a game was miserably brutal.

The war ground on, as they are wont to do, and each side’s weapons evolved. The Earth Republic bought and standardized pulse cannon technology from the Skelow, adding a range-dependent plasma weapon to the ships’ arsenals, which deals 4 TJ at range 1 LS, 3 TJ at 2 LS, 2 TJ at 3 LS and 1 TJ at 4 LS. Praezorian drones (the starfighter enemy) developed armor, and then starfighters developed heavier ammo, which limited their number of attacks but allowed much more damage-per-hit (up to 3 TJ/hit with 10 decimator rounds, or 2 TJ/hit with 20 inferno rounds). There was a game about our own strategic scientific advancements to more effectively fight the war, and we improved our phase missiles further to an average of 8 TJ damage per hit.

At this juncture there was a huge rules overhaul. Starship Valkyrie 2.0, which rapidly became 2.04 based on a few enterprising munchkins needing to be swatted on the nose for early exploits. This ruleset, critically, greatly changed how Science worked. I skipped over Science Modifications in the 1.X overview because they were, frankly, underwhelming. Difficult, dangerous experiments had wildly unpredictable and often terrible results. They contributed to damage but only tangentially so. With 2.X, each modifiable system had a standard suite of four upgrades that Science could achieve and apply, and the traditional activity was to take many minutes (starting at fifteen and gradually whittled down to eight) to apply all four beneficial effects. Lastly, from a ruling during a side story, it was established that the hardpoints on a starfighter that could carry and launch phase missiles to do bombing runs.

This set the stage for our next evolution in the meta, the 2014-2015 “Third [Praezorian] War” Era. Because a Destroyer’s six Apex Starfighters each had two hardpoints and because those were now valid places to put a phase missile, players began to ask “hey, can we start with an extra twelve phase missiles already loaded onto our starfighters?” While playing as captain of the Hydra, Poobah himself asked Tara and me this question while we acted as guest GMs for the universe (yes, we took over the SSV universe for a whole summer right after getting together). We in turn asked him if that was the durable ruling he wanted, because if he was allowed to do it on the Hydra, we would of course be able to do this as player captains of the Odyssey and Valkyrie respectively. For reasons that mystify us to this day, he said fucking yes. So, okay, great. Now every Star Destroyer has an effective 39 phase missiles, and every starfighter is a pair of missile launchers, and every Earth Republic Star Destroyer can credibly deal (27 * 8) 216 TJ damage in the first three minutes of battle, against enemies who deal 7 TJ damage every 7 minutes. Furthermore, the “two hits per starfighter per two minutes” strafing run, born of fighters hitting for more than 1 TJ and therefore being about to damage an enemy ship with armor, meant that the new “Decimator Raid” (the starfighters evade or bypass the enemy fighters and just drop their ammo on a capital ship) could now deal 24 TJ every two minutes (to an enemy with 1 armor, which was common) or 120 TJ per sortie.

And then there were the variant ships, like the Odyssey-class Star Destroyer, which also had effectively useless “weapons platforms” that were ineffective as intended in battle (unmodifiable and unboostable lasers or pulse cannons hanging around outside the ship and vulnerable to capital ship fire), but which, when turned into missile launchers, loaded an extra five phase missiles apiece. Poobah agreed the Odyssey began with an extra ten phase missiles on the platforms, which the bridge immediately grabbed ritualistically from the platforms in the middle of each combat game and proceeded to blast them from the bridge’s missile launcher. While this was marginally better than wingtips (Odyssey’s three Blades and an Apex had five hardpoints to the standard twelve), it certainly maintained the extreme firepower of this era.

But wait! How can we deal with incoming starfighters if our starfighters are busy acting as fighter-bombers? Well, you remember those science changes from three paragraphs ago? One of the new powers for the Pulse Cannon was the all-important Free-Energy Buildup (lovingly called a FEBU), which allowed a single shot to add greater-than-linear bonus damage per Reactor Boost spent on the cannon, and if the final hit was 10 TJ+ damage, it would cause ⅓ its final damage to every single enemy in a single 1 LS square. Like, say, each of the 60-100 2 HP Preazorian Drones that were meant to take the starfighters twenty minutes and much heartbreak to destroy.

So, we now have a meta in which the best anti-ship weapon is the starfighters (who bypass their normal game because bombing is “easy”), the best anti-fighter weapon is the Pulse Cannon with Science’s blessing, and the already rapid one missile-per-minute missile launcher is nearly obsolete next to opening the hangar doors and having the starfighters launch wing-tip missiles directly into hyperspace for 12 missiles per two-minute cycle (I mean, until you run out of missiles after the second volley, but most things were very dead at this point). The lasers became nearly a non-participant (their upgraded damage was approximately 8 TJ / 3 minutes between the two turrets, which would’ve been respectable several paragraphs ago), unless you had a Skelow on your bridge and could turn him into a bodhisattva for twenty minutes by stacking all possible timer-reducing abilities. But the depths of timer manipulation are another meta for another day.

Lastly, for reasons of pure perversity, I should mention ramming. A Destroyer deals 20 TJ to an enemy and 20 TJ to itself with a ramming action; smaller ships deal less, but twenty is the typical number. This is an excellent answer to the question “can we ram them?!” and usually ended debate; 20 TJ of damage to deflector shields was at least eleven damage to the ship and that’s probably eight console repairs and a hull breach, and as you see there are much easier ways to deal twenty points of damage. Unless, of course, you had a card that made you immune to damage for one hit, like the Dark Matter Halo shield modification, in which case you could choose to use it to ram an enemy ship before they could fire again, because 20 TJ can be a lot of extra damage after missiles are depleted, and Dark Matter Halo means it’s functionally a free hit.

This is the era in which we largely went from fighting near-peer adversaries to fighting monstrosities that got to bend the rules; unliving ships that took half damage from everything and hit back for hellish numbers (the Dead), or extra-dimensional invaders who shunted phase missiles outside their obscene 5-armor shells (the Pyramids). Or the fucking fish with swarms of ships that attacked every minute for escalating damage, who had to be burned off instantly to avoid roasting the player ship (the Z, A.K.A. Murder Tuna, discussed in much of the fiction).

And then we just did that for several years. There wasn’t really a way to de-escalate without a new rules edition; the game was still fun, but the actual plan of attack was bonkers most games. And this, this apex of PC damage out and the nadir of gameplay, is what I wanted to sit with in this post. We spent years asking, basically, how we got here and how to get out. The primacy of the phase missile wasn’t a mathematical quirk; it came out of years of roleplayed and hard-won “military” doctrine, and the players therefore cared about it. Phase missile primacy is part of the fiction. It was the defining weapon of the Earth Republic, and the weapon that won the war for five successive wars. It was an integral part of Starship Valkyrie; the missiles are wild and random and devastating, until they are gone. But every other pillar of the attack plan was still hard to take on; hardpoints themselves had been canon since the beginning, and it was very hard to explain why you couldn’t put missiles on the starfighters in port if you were going to do so in space anyway. Decimator rounds existed in the world, and starfighter attack timing was very well established; a bombing minigame could have been added (and may still be added, but…), but it wasn’t obvious how it could be harder to hit a ship that was orders of magnitude bigger and slower than a fighter’s intended target.

To curtail the excesses of this era, we played on a lot on the ships without full starfighter wings, or the ones using Blade-class starfighters with only a single hardpoint thereby greatly reducing missile loads. The community eventually rolled back the wing-tip rules (that is, rejecting the bonus 12 missiles on gamestart) as being caused by an “incident” aboard another ship, but not before years of misuse, and even then “cannot start with” and “cannot fire” were very different rulings; firing from starfighters became “impolite” though never fully “impermissable.” At this point, players were so brutally effective on offense that the worst excesses became, essentially, uncouth; you could deploy them, but you might shorten the game to a few frenetic minutes and a great deal of idleness. Better to fight the old way and let everyone participate.

With the Advanced 2.5 ruleset (released in 2025, replacing 2.04 from 2014), we made a few firm changes. Fighters can no longer effectively aim phase missiles—there are rules if you insist on doing so anyway, but they’re intentionally not published and officially a bad idea—and energy weapons got a subtle boost with both abilities and Science changes. Ramming remains a god-tier balls-out offensive move, but Dark Matter Halo caught a nerf that will give everyone on the bridge Hyperspace Sickness at those damage numbers. (For non-players, Hyperspace Sickness is a debilitating status effect that comes with one damage and seriously fucks you up and sends you to Medical.) Decimator Raids still kick moderate amounts of ass if you can land them; Free-Energy Buildup was nerfed to only destroy ten fighters, which makes it far less credible for that purpose, so you probably need your starfighters to dominate in Hotzone, and the ammo rules changed to make the per-sortie damage marginally less horrifying (but vastly more complicated). Phase missiles still dominate, and it is very likely that future enemies will have resistances or defenses against them to reign them in a little—it’s high time that the universe wised up to them in the fiction, anyway. This is not only a rules matter, but important to the simulation and the narrative.

If you’ve played with us at Strategicon but not on a private ship, you’ve encountered this through the wholly more restrained SSV Basic ruleset. Much of the playbook is the same, although your Science Mods are weaker, and your starfighter ammo capacity is even more limited for Decimator Raids (though, to be clear, they were highly effective in the two of the last three games). However, for Basic, you are not limited by Uranium. The Basic rules as Christian originally wrote them do not explain how to make a phase missile, because they were intended to cover playing events anywhere from 2130-2160, and the standardization of phase missiles varies wildly in that period. But, since we’ve been retelling the Second Praezorian War (specifically 2152-2153), and that was the height of phase missile doctrine and standardization, we’ve had to make it straightforward for Engineering to build them again, and they are once again dominant on the battlefield.

It’s fascinating to watch a similar offensive meta and doctrine of play develop independently among a different group of players and in a different ruleset. While the different eras and rulesets have taken the details in different directions, we’ve watched players time and again find the best way to obliterate enemies, discovering the most advantageous, off-the-cuff rulings and using them as the spear tip for victory. Players are, by and large, resourceful and highly motivated to destroy enemies as effectively as possible. Given the outsized power of the phase missile, we now quite definitively know that it is very much in the culture of the Earth Republic Star Navy to solve problems by teleporting nuclear weapons onto enemy ships, and I kind of love that for them.

The Captain Isn't the Main Character

Xander Hark — Wed, 13 May 2026 05:43:08 GMT

[Photo compliments of Tara, who has way too many Janeway memes for any sane person.]

The captain is not the main character in Starship Valkyrie.

It’s a common mistake but bears repeating: the captain is not the main character in a Starship Valkyrie game. The character is ostensibly in charge of the ship, and the player has a significant impact on everyone else’s game, but they are absolutely not the alpha-and-omega of player characters, and theirs is far from the only important story.

In a typical SSV game under typical crisis rules, the captain player is trying to coordinate and direct everyone else’s actions. They are usually informed and usually consulted on what to do. They are usually in contact with any alien diplomats, and they’re usually the point around which the plot comes together. But, ask any seasoned captain, and they will tell you a shockingly obvious fact: the fully grown adult players playing their subordinates treat the captain’s orders as “an element” in their decision making, but seldom are they the final word on what their character will do. The player role of captain is closer to cat-herder; the rules and setting give them the equivalent of a laser pointer and some catnip, but the rest really, truly depends on the mood of the cats. (Well, players. You’d be shocked how similar they can feel from the perspective of the captain player.)

The game-driven reality is that the kind of military obedience a real-ass navy would expect is regarded as an optional role-playing element in Starship Valkyrie; culture of play uses enough to maintain verisimilitude, but the fact is that the in-game hierarchy is held together by spending 1-4 points on rank and an extra line or three on a two-inch plastic pin. The rest is all mutual player agreement and some amount of out-of-game leadership skills, mixed with community management. In practice, the CAG determines what the starfighters do once launched, the Chief of Engineering (or every self-sovereign SOB with a wrench) decides what to fix and when to ask the captain for an opinion, Science decides how to prioritize and when to ask for guidance (seldom), and Medical almost always acts autonomously—with the power to yank the CO or XO from the bridge if they start acting crazy (and yes, this has happened). The captain, and Command staff in general, are more effectively giving player suggestions and moving content around, and players are incentivized to listen to them because they want their content; for meta-game reasons, it is nigh impossible to punish a character in game for anything short of mutiny (and, based on my experiences as a mutineer, it’s pretty dodgy even then).

We had a saying in the early years of Valkyrie, that “the captain and the plot are in the other room.” This meant, essentially, that the GM had allowed the entire story to block on the captain player getting their head around something, and that they were now talking to an NPC to make an important moral choice; only then would there be anything else for others to do. It’s an easy pit to fall into when writing an SSV scenario, and one that many of us have railed against as players… before falling into it as writers.

Because every player is an equal participant, and frequently several are following the plot as closely or closer than the captain, having almost no one read in during the early days was frequently boring and often disadvantageous. But, fundamentally, it was just a bad fit for the game. One way I manage this is to have a character (not the captain) go away and learn a lot, then come back to relay it, discuss with the other players, make decisions, and resume contact with the plot. This provides an immersive story with multiple steps of negotiated progress, where many people get the chance to be involved and weigh in. By contrast, in the early days, at least one captain would frequently negotiate alone (or, worse, adventure alone), which removed the explanation and consultation phase where many good ideas, from multiple players, can be discussed and entertained.

Many of the most compelling stories and experiences in Valkyrie’s history are born of characters who can fly under the radar, who can choose personal danger and heroism, doing things that were bold and extraordinary outside their orders. If the captain is playing it safe, there is great potential for a pilot or a scientist to push the envelope and be daring. If the captain is being reckless or moving through content at breakneck speed, the great hero of the moment might be the engineer or doctor who solves something below their notice.

There are definitely moments when a narrative could center on a captain and their choices, but they are by-and-large the busiest character, even without a GM focusing on them during writing and/or game running. All content will find the captain in the end, and narrative focus falling on everyone else creates a much more dynamic feel to the ship, story, and world.

Ultimately, the captain is played by one person, when every player is equal; even if the Star Navy has a strict hierarchy, friendships really shouldn’t. I don’t have twelve players at Odyssey (our active campaign ship) with 0-4 ranks of friendship with me, to whom I grant plot based on experience and rank points; I have stories to tell and games to run. Which character stands in the spotlight has everything to do with who can best get at my story elements, and to some degree, how well the players move content around to one another. Games don’t always go the way I planned, but in planning, I’ve long found it necessary to aim plot and content at everyone who wants in, according to how they like to play and what plot elements resonate with them.

The captain isn’t the main character because Valkyrie as a game can’t function with a main character. There is an implicit social contract that the player who gets to play captain takes on some of the social responsibility for ensuring the game goes well—but, critically, that’s more about logistical facilitation than plot importance. We have a concept in roleplay called “playing to lift,” and it’s the captain’s job to lift others into the spotlight and help solve the game’s puzzles, not to hog the spotlight for themselves. You can’t very well call your friend, who’s an accountant in real life, and threaten him with insubordination if he doesn’t drive across town to play a doctor for you—and the captain players who’ve tried to operate this way didn’t keep a lot of friendships for long.

It’s a service role, not a starring role.

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This blog post was prepared by Robert Prag, Mechanics Lead for Starship Valkyrie, with line edits and contributions from , Lore Lead and main fiction writer for SSV.

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For anyone who has suffered through this and isn’t already reading my wife’s far better writing (about science fiction, romance and the Valkyrie storyverse), I highly recommend you follow her here, via her newsletter, and most of all, her current serialized novel. She really does allow this crazy, wonderful madcap game to stay functional. Her Starship Valkyrie latest story, Kor’lana Lights, is due out May 18 in Fireworks & Flirtation from . 🌷

The Hell is Starship Valkyrie?

Xander Hark — Mon, 04 May 2026 07:36:51 GMT

[Picture taken at Orccon 2026, Strategicon’s February show, at the Starship Valkyrie Basic game, “Praezor Dalenda Est” written and run by game managers Robert Prag and T.A. Leederman.]

Starship Valkyrie is a collection of game systems and a fictional multiverse. The name usually references the Starship Valkyrie Basic ruleset (which you would experience if you played with us at Strategicon) or the Starship Valkyrie Advanced 2.5 ruleset (which you would see at private SSV events). Both rulesets attempt to provide a mechanics-forward, symbolic experience of being the crew of a science-fiction starship, in real time, while navigating a crisis.

For completeness, the Valkyrie-verse also has an ever-growing and wonderful trove of print fiction, as well as the Starship Gryphon (sci-fi murder mystery/police procedural rules), SSV Fireteam (live foam combat), and SSV Fleet Battle (strict tabletop wargame) rulesets, in addition to various specialized “Away Mission” and site game rules. I will not be discussing these here, beyond acknowledging they are also beloved pieces of our game universe, and that our solution to “this story needs to be a game but isn’t a conventional SSV crisis simulator game” is to use a different ruleset, or a hybrid model. That wasn’t always true, but it is now.

What I’m here to discuss is how plastic maps and cardboard cutouts and kitchen timers and plastic silverware trays and foamboard and blocks and unspeakable numbers of cards “become” a spaceship. How everyone can agree that a 39 year-old bald guy really needs to play Shut Box as fast as humanly possible to turn off a red light, so his wife’s friend from high school can start a kitchen timer and toss an orange block and move a slider, and how that becomes extremely important to all ten grown-ass adults in the room.

Starship Valkyrie is a hybrid wargame and LARP—Live Action Role-Playing game—with board game and TTRPG features; at Strategicon, which is primarily a board gaming, tabletop, and CCG-playing convention, Starship Valkyrie is a valuable way for folks to try something LARP-adjacent. The combination of being real-time, rules-forward, and a crisis simulator drives a very strong sense of immersion. Not the Disneyland “looks real” kind, but the “you believe this because you’re doing something that shares an emotional resemblance to it” kind. Engineering absolutely is not physically rebuilding a spaceship, but they are running around to every system in order to check, diagnose and repair them, they are moving parts (as cards) around the ship and doing strange physical tasks (minigames) for unpredictable lengths of time, while they are under very real time and resource pressures. They’re arranging parts and monitoring construction for missiles to deliver, or monitoring the timer for the next all-important reactor boost. That the bridge needs most of Engineering’s output and is directly in contact with the crisis (usually via hostile ships firing on the player characters) keeps the social pressure up as well.

Command has “control” of the ship from the bridge, with the big guns, the helm, and the shields. Command characters are often best-apprised of the tactical situation and waiting intently for their next opportunity to act, while requesting resources and sometimes giving in-game orders to the other sections. Some Leadership powers allow them to boost other characters or the ship itself, and it’s their job to move information (and game content) around the ship—at the very real risk of both losing the scenario if they don’t, and, worse, pissing off their friends. Within the game, they feel removed and in charge and, given their proximity to new information, their requests naturally sound like orders with urgency behind them.

Science has a powerful laboratory, and the ability to examine the mysteries of the ~~plot~~ fictional universe, or modify the ship to function better than it started (though not offset damage—that’s Engineering’s purview). Science accomplishes this through a card-and-puzzle-based experiment procedure deck, generally taking between five and fifteen minutes to achieve a discovery or suite of time-limited improvements to different ship systems, called Science Mods. They are steadily busy, incapable of hurry regardless of how many bridge characters shout at them for shield mods, and often know the newest and most interesting details of the scenario.

Medical fixes people. Sometimes they do that through drugs (a light resource game, mostly juggling the positives and negatives on cards representing the various amazing pharmacological products on offer). Sometimes it’s counseling (sitting a character down to roleplay and examine their feelings for a character bonus). Sometimes it’s surgery (another sizable card-and-minigame system), perfect for cutting people open, fixing them up and then gluing them back together. While other sections are united around a feel and activity, medical is united around a target (other characters).

Lastly, we have Assault—the starfighter pilots. Their major designated activity is a life-or-death tactical positioning subgame called Hotzone. Unlike the other sections, I think this one probably fails the test of emotional verisimilitude; the game of Hotzone is cautious and methodical, encouraging stalling and strategy instead of speed and recklessness. But for completeness, it plays like a tabletop RPG or wargame, with simple rules and a strict one-minute limit for each turn.

The real magic of Valkyrie comes together, as I mentioned above, through the interactions of these sections and the collision of their designed affective player states. A bandwidth-starved, well-informed bridge will loudly bark orders to an unflappable, steady Science Department, while the engineers frantically strain to reach the last broken console, to see if it will explode or let them fix it. Pilots will eagerly await the order to launch into a fray, only to return with injuries and broken fighters, either broadly jubilant and impervious to the pressures of the ship, or bloodied and frantic to jump the queue for treatment and repair. Medical will stand by, overly attentive and eager, right up until they start trying to haul people away from stations to avoid having to make catastrophic triage choices. And it is in these interactions, when a doctor may spend several minutes trying to lasso a wounded engineer before they pass out, right up until a pilot saunters in with a shit-eating grin and bleeding chest wound (a wound represented by an index card with surgery instructions,) where these roles start to feel alive and believable to the people playing.

I share all this for three reasons: one so I can explain some of the why and how of gameplay, two so prospective players can pick which speed of nonsense sounds like their preference (self assortment is shockingly good), and three so that I have written document to so that I have an explanation of why something will “not sound like an engineering thing” or “ seem like it should be in science instead of medical”.

So, a complete breakdown of how content and characters usually get assigned, understanding that preserving the vibe is perhaps most important:

Command involves tactical situations, information management, bandwidth management, distribution of orders, and arguing with “important” NPCs. For relevant TV references, think of characters falling somewhere in the range from Harry Kim to Bill Adama, with notable forays into Kirk and Janeway walking around in the current player base (IYKYK).

For Assault, think personal violence, security, away missions, and piloting. Coordinated tactical choices facing personal stakes. Lots of kids raised at Indoc, as orphans of the Corporate Wars. For characters, think of folks along the spectrum from Michael Garibaldi to Starbuck to Mando.

Engineering is resource management, time management, fast mini-games, incremental change, building multiples of anything, and fixing anything broken. It is fast-paced, and it is not deliberative. The absolute best TV reference is Chief Tyrol from BSG, or maybe Kaylee from Firefly or Rose Tico in Star Wars. It is, somewhat critically, a section that always feels dirty and in the guts of stuff. SSV Engineering is spiritually akin to BSG’s engineers, ground crews, and machinists, because both are fundamentally blue-collar in nature.

Science deals in information management, longer puzzles, buffing the ship, and investigations that dig into what’s happening with the plot or weird science mystery on DAISS. They handle many strategic trade-offs in conversation with the bridge; sometimes figuring out what band of hyperspace this hyperonic squid calls home has to take the backseat to the laser mods, so we can actually fight it. Science is much steadier and more white-collar and professional than Engineering, smart and dignified in a way that Engineering usually isn’t. Gaius Baltar or B’Elana Torres or Jordie LaForge are examples. Note the similarity to what Star Trek calls Engineering, which is much more dignified than BSG. Valkyrie does both.

Medical deals in personnel management, craziness (what we call Mental Compulsions—inflicted roleplaying conditions, often with mechanical effect), and medical symptoms. Medical specifically addresses other characters, and it’s generally activity-limited more than resource-limited in effect. Basically self explanatory; if you think of a character named Doctor and not Who on a starship, you’re in the right ballpark. Bones, Chakwas, or the EMH are all grumpy and perfect exemplars of the form.

Beyond the roles within the ship and the relationships, which really do the lion’s share of the work, the other great pillars of the experience are the ways that the stuff of the game distributes information (wherever possible, an object and its rules are paired, so anyone authorized to use Engineering Consoles could use the Intermix Reactor by reading the HUD next to it) and the way the physical layout of the ship and props tracks the complex state of the game (including the fact that no one person can keep every detail thereof in their head at once). Add a little bit of enthusiasm, and your experience rapidly becomes one of interacting with subgames that have the “tempo” and vibe of your role, interacting with other characters with different tempos and skillsets that immediately contrast with your own and a complex state machine that forces you to stay engaged with the very important details of the state of the ship and the game can, for a few hours, kinda make you feel like you’ve joined the Star Navy and are on a starship.

Starship Valkyrie Campaign Play: Role Design and Social Dependence

Xander Hark — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 04:45:06 GMT

[Picture of the Orccon 2026 Starship Valkyrie Basic game players and GMs, including me and my wife, who’s in the front.]

My wife and I now run Starship Valkyrie, having taken the game over from the original creator Christian Brown during the pandemic. The game is many things—a crisis simulator, an exercise in science-fiction worldbuilding, a test of how well you and your friends really communicate, and a highly mechanical roleplaying game that occurs in real time. Like many roleplaying games, it runs on a one-shot basis (at conventions) and in campaign play. Because the game is structured around five “sections” of the ship (Command, Starfighters, Engineering, Science, and Medical), and because several of those have very clear roles within them (e.g. Shield Tech, Gunner, Reactor Specialist), the game has a very high degree of social dependence. That’s neither a good nor a bad thing, but it is an inflexible thing, and something I’ve realized we ought to combat in the inevitable next edition of the rules.*

I don’t think social dependence is a new concept to roleplaying games; I know “go adventure without the cleric” was approximately unthinkable in my high school D&D group. For tabletop, when someone can’t make it, we had essentially three choices: their character “can’t be here” this adventure, their character is an NPC or under a second player’s control, or we don’t play this week. Did some of those lead to hilarious moments, like a “group-controlled” character bombing the party, because a friend left bad instructions and was busy with his girlfriend when the “do you really throw a bomb if the monster is grappling the druid” text was sent? Yes, certainly. Were the first two kludges in their own ways? Of course.

For Starship Valkyrie, where we are not seven teenagers with maybe four social commitments between us, but instead ten to fifteen adults with kids and jobs and lives, the intense social dependence is a difficult problem. We have effectively landed on the first option; if you’re not here, your character isn’t active or effective right now. Maybe they’re in cryo or puking their guts out or just worked a 20-hour shift, and hence dead to the world. Maybe they’re insane this game. Maybe they’re on the interesting diplomatic mission that’s happening off screen, or being treated for injuries. The answers are varied—the world of Starship Valkyrie is dangerous and fraught with wild medical care and insanity—but the upshot is that they are not here.

How big a problem their absence is depends very heavily on who isn’t here right now and what their roles were. Some roles—some abilities, really—are what we call One-Per-Ship. These abilities are frequently among the best, so long as no one else on the ship is using them. For example, Engineering has a power called “Safety Bypass,” which reduces the Intermix Reactor timer by 3 minutes, if you are the one to start it. Without going too far into the reactor-boost meta and job descriptions, I’ll ask you to take my word that this is a good power. It is, arguably, among the most important Engineering powers for any ship. However, once someone has that power and a few others that synergize,** there’s no need for a second engineer to take Safety Bypass. The first character is usually going to set the Reactor timer, since they’re so much better at it, and since the second engineer can’t help with that timer, they likely specialize in other areas of Engineering. The first engineer is now your reactor specialist, who can get almost twice the power for the ship under optimal conditions, while the second is likely a repair expert or has damage-suppression build or roboticist, or they combo into Science, etc. And when both players show up to game, the ship is stronger for it.

However, this interreliance poses a problem once you get into campaign play, where people have running characters and those running characters have their defined roles. The ship really only needs one Reactor Specialist, or one Shield Tech or Gunner (more extreme versions of the problem, as these are trees of six or eight powers), or for that matter the Scan Tech or Helmsman (smaller trees, but only one person can be working at those stations at a time). According to rule, a ship can only have one Captain and one Executive Officer. Similarly for the three trees in Medical, there are no big advantages to having two Pharmacists or Counselors, and very limited returns involved in having two Surgeons.

This poses a few problems, the most obvious being that, without the ability to really reduce a living, breathing person to an effect on an index card,*** the capacities of the player ship depend very much on who is here today. At the extremes, missing certain roles can have a night-and-day impact on the ship’s ability to take or deal damage; my estimate is that a talented Shield Tech (like my wife) roughly doubles how much punishment the ship can take in a death-is-on-the-line battle, and once missiles are depleted, a talented gunner probably raises damage output by about 50%.

But even that is missing the forest for the trees; there are five sections, and in campaign play, several of them might have only two characters in them. Even in Starfighters, where powers are personal and therefore additive, and one ace pilot will absolutely benefit from having their mirror image as their wingman, if one of two pilots is missing, the starfighter wing is considerably weakened. If both are missing, then we can’t really fight enemy starfighters this month, and Hotzone is shuttered. Similarly, if neither Engineer is available, then our ability to play a game in which the ship needs repairs and additional missiles and reactor boosts for power is rather limited (again, notwithstanding the option of boiling a player’s role down to an index card). In essence, the lack of Engineering utterly precludes us from running a battle game.

One of my bigger regrets in the SSV Advanced 2.5 rules rewrite is not doing more to address this as a problem—not making more powers broadly applicable or somehow additive—while keeping the extremely siloed dependence on these niche roles. Now, please don’t get me wrong. I really love seeing my friends who now live two hours away, but with fourteen busy adults now spread across four counties in a major metro area, finding a Saturday where all of us are free is daunting. And don’t get me started on the double bookings, accidents, illness-due-to-toddler, and just… the stress on one’s body that comes with getting older.

Socially, the campaign game only works when it is a priority for a lot of people—something that was easier when the majority of us were in our twenties (tabletopping Gen-Xers nod sagely here). There are roles that are more and less of a social commitment, and we are constantly scrambling to ensure that no one is more committed in the game than they are in real life. It means that we ask people to schedule up to three months out and can be in a logistically difficult place when someone has to cancel. And while that’s what keeps the game working as it is, I’m not sure if it’s what the game should require.

So then, what’s the alternative? How do you let someone be specialized but optional? How do you make it so that the game doesn’t lose the feeling of having specific roles but allows some flexibility? How do you make sure people feel necessary and important, but not so important that the show can’t go on without them? For my part, I think the answer needs to involve doing a few things: de-specializing characters, relocating necessities, and triaging the game’s overall complexity.

Starship Valkyrie is in some ways an excellent case study here, because it has several rulesets, and the Basic Rules (which come with us to Strategicon) already do two of these things. While there is still definitely specialization, the Basic rules are largely free of sine-qua-non powers that are make or break for the effectiveness of the ship. There are still good powers, but aside from a few staples in Engineering (like Construct Missile), no power is so important that one of the major sections of the ship is crippled by it not being present or utilized. The Scan Tech might not be quite as good with the guns, but they are still generally capable. There are fewer powers in total and fewer per character, and they are generally broader in scope. They generally stack or add more gracefully. The big, complex, powerful options are more effectively functions of the various sections (abilities of the consoles, Central Ops, or Science Mods), instead of being functions of the character sheets.

This brings me to the second goal of relocating complexity. Allowing characters to be decent at something with no or minimal training allows the ship to be nimble, and allows for people to remember the day that they did something cool and necessary and outside their training. They won’t have all the advantages, but even without a mechanical speedbump, just having to see fresh rules and obligations mid-game in real time is already a material disruption, and a real challenge—part and parcel of the crisis simulator. Which means that those shield and gunner powers I mentioned earlier? A lot of those need to become options for the consoles instead of training for the operators. And the powers supporting them need to reduce costs or otherwise improve them, instead of being outright required to touch the console.

Lastly, as with any design project, the exercise of triaging complexity is an unfortunate necessity. It is absolutely the case that there will always be details of the fiction not captured by the ruleset, which is why seeing the novels and short stories take shape is so compelling for us. Characters are presumed to have lives in the 20 hours of the day where they aren’t in mortal peril, to say nothing of the other days of the month. (Relatedly, why do the Praezorians always attack on weekends?) I’m certain that a decorated Security officer can rattle off the advantages and disadvantages of different models of laser rifle, or explain why it’s difficult or impossible to scrub a toilet while in power armor, but those aren’t the lived-in details of the game. I think some of the granularity in the game (e.g. the 26-personal combat powers) is probably net baleful for the overall experience.

As Mechanics Lead, this is hopefully the first in a series of articles where I’m holding elements of the SSV game under a magnifying glass and examining what we got right and wrong in the 2.5 rewrite, and which changes need to move between the active editions (Basic and Advanced 2.5). There are definitely related problems I know I need to speak to, such as the rewards for specialization and the resulting “waiting to do my job” dynamic, which is the flip side of social dependence. That, however, will need to wait for another post. And, eventually, I aim to go through the rules for each section and see what we got right/wrong when trying to meet these goals.

*: Nevermind that we’re only a little more than a half dozen games into the current campaign rules—the handwriting is on the wall even if we just got here.

**: Mostly Crew Boss.

***: I’ve tried; the result is unfulfilling

Special thanks to my wife for line- and copy-editing, and for occasional additions of humorous asides. For anyone who has suffered through this and isn’t already reading my wife’s far better writing (about science fiction, romance and the Valkyrie storyverse), I highly recommend you follow her here, via her newsletter, and most of all, her current serialized novel. She helped put this first article together, in addition to this Substack, and really does allow this crazy, wonderful madcap game to stay functional.