A friend of mine sent an email to our group of friends earlier this week seeing if anyone wanted to try out the Serenity RPG. I have been trying to get this group of friends to try RP for years so I was delighted, nay giddy, when I opened the email and read through it. I replied almost immediately with the affirmative to his hint at me running the game for them.

I ran a Serenity campaign down at the store for almost six months until some personal things within the group meant that I wasn't comfortable running the game anymore; Which was a shame because some of my favourite scenes I've ever GM'd came from that campaign.

My friend had some questions, and when I was replying to his email I ended up sprinkling in a little of my gaming philosophies, so I'm reproducing the email here in it's entirety.

Mr Doug, and others;

How do you come up with the story of how your crew gets assembled? Is it going to be like the first episode of Firefly where they all just meet and events bring them together for a more long-term arrangement? Do we even RP the start or does the GM just tell us why we're together?

An excellent question. And the answer is: it's up to you guys (the players).

A longer answer might be.. In the last Serenity campaign I ran, we had the crew all start on a space station (I wrote and handed out reasons for each character being there, then negotiated with the players that had a better reason / one that fit into their backstory more) and we started the first session like that. Some characters had a motivation (ie.. get off this station before the bad guy finds me) and others knew each other. We spent the first session role playing the meeting of the crew. It was a good fun session that set up the crew, and allowed the characters relationships to develop naturally through role play. It also gave everyone (some who hadn't RP'd before) a chance to see how it works by letting some of the more experienced guys take the lead. It gave everyone a chance to try out their characters, and introduce them to the other characters, in ways that.. perhaps hid their true intentions :P

The campaign I'm playing in now started a similar way.

That's not to say that just starting on a ship with a crew that already knows each other won't work; but I'd suggest we RP out the first session as a kind of 'getting to know you' session (It'll still most likely have action and combat :P).

Also, Steve and I were talking about ships. I figured we'd probably start off with a pretty basic ship. I think there's an old Firefly in the book for less than 2000 credits that might be a good starting ship depending on how we start off . Can you build your own ship? I think I read that you can somewhere and Steve and I came up with some pretty neat stuff while brainstorming.

Again, this depends on the players.

In the campaign I ran, the players had to work together in the first 'episode' to get/find/acquire/build a ship; I left it up to them how they wanted to get off the station. They could have hitch hiked a ride somewhere else if they'd chosen. My style of GMing has always been reactionary; that is, I like the players to be able to make decisions about where the game goes. Often times I've sat down to run a prepared session and had to throw most of it away (into the "for later" folder :P) because the players have taken the game in a completely different direction than I intended. And that's ok, it makes it more interesting for all of us, and gives you guys a chance to direct the action. For me RP is more about collaborative story telling than "GM vs. Players".

So, to answer your question more directly, it depends on how we decide to start the 'season'. You can already have a ship, or you can find yourselves in a situation where you need to 'acquire' a ship.

I hope that answers your questions. I'd suggest we all sit down together and nut some of this stuff out. We can work on characters, and decide how we want to go about starting the Season.