See You, Space Cowboy
A transmission crackled in from the drift system this week, all neon and engine-hum, smelling faintly of fossil fuel and cheap whiskey. Daniel (@dungeondive) has filed a three-part voyage through Xia: Legends of a Drift System — Far Off Games’ bright, toy-like space-opera sandbox, the kind of game that conjures Cowboy Bebop and the straight-to-video anime of a misspent youth. The Keeper, who has shelved many a dungeon but few starships, found the cargo a welcome change of orbit.
The arc runs from anticipation to elegy. It opens before a single die is rolled, lingering on the sheer table-presence of the thing and the joy of choosing a ship with a backstory but no stats; it widens into a survey of the dozen roads to fame this open galaxy offers; and it closes with a played-out game, a turn outlaw to sell contraband spice, and a fond reckoning that this is one of the chronicler’s favourites. The blazing Xia star tile, he swears, never stops feeling like an event.
The Keeper has logged the three transmissions below in order, with a later sister-ship sighting folded in.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Xia - Part One — a pre-game love letter to table presence and ships with backstories but no stats.
- Xia - Part Two: The Anxious First Days of a Greenhorn Space Captain — a tour of a dozen roads to fame in one open galaxy.
- Xia - Part Three: See You Space Cowboy — turned outlaw to sell spice; NPCs that climb the fame track on a die roll.
- Spacers: Space Adventure Board Game — the later “Xia: faster, smaller, better?” sister act.
522 transcripts • 601 posts archived
– The Keeper
Notes that a captain who reads his starship’s invented service history before plotting a single jump is, at heart, the same creature as an archivist who reads the spine before the book — and is therefore the Keeper’s kind of cowboy.