Furry Writers' Guild Forum

Converting a setting for use in a TTRPG

General Writing Discussion
#1

I’ve had a setting for a few of my short stories that is shared, but increasingly the stories I had planned for the setting aren’t panning out when I plan them. I really do love the setting though and I play a lot of TTRPGs so I figured I would try to flesh it out enough to be a setting for some TTRPG.

Broadly, the setting is furries in space. Each anthropomorphic species comes from their own star system(s) and has more or less either established their own space nation or been integrated into various empires, federations, and conglomerates.

The nature of TTRPGs being somewhat chaotic, I’m not sure how much of the setting to flesh out if I want to run games with it. For the purposes of stories I always decided most things as needed since that was my scope.

Has anyone done a project like this? If so, do you have any advice or resources?

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#2

I’ve made multiple attempts to run TTRPG campaigns in my Para-Imperium setting, mostly using Fate, and I included a chapter of custom Fate rules in my book Tales of the Para-Imperium (under license).

I also wrote up a Planet Mercenary conversion but never got to playing it, and have considered Traveller and even Starfinder.

#3

I’ve thought about just dropping the setting right on top of Traveller. What things did you find players were asking about settings wise?

#4

Mostly “why” and “where” questions I think. What kind of jobs exist in the setting, why would they go adventuring, where could they come from and where would they go on adventures.

My setting is a limited-FTL space setting populated by a diaspora of genetically engineered anthros with one big federation (some call it an empire) and a bunch of “lost colonies” without spaceflight. The first campaign I ran they were a group of mercenaries hired to fight an outworld civil war, the second they were playing “adventurer archaeologist” on a dead precursor colony.

#5

I think settings are the easiest thing to throw into a TTRPG, especially if you’re fine using an existing system, like pathfinder, or in your example, starfinder https://paizo.com/starfinder

I’ve done this myself, made up a city and some systems and then used the DnD 3.5 system to play it. So long as you can fit the mechanics of your setting with the mechanical rules of the system you’re playing, then you’re basically set! If you can’t, you can always make homebrew rules. “You can’t use this because it’s not in this world, you can use this but it’s banned, this this and this all have -3 attack” etc. etc.