Five Parsecs from Home

 

 

 

 Looks like I found me a new game.
Five Parsecs from Home is a tactical skirmish game with rpg elements. It's probably best described as 'X-COM meets Firefly'.

 I normally don't spend more than $10 on a pdf. But after watching a video from TheSoloWargamingShow, I couldn't resist.

Five Parsecs takes several things that I've been trying to mash together for a while, and not only does it but does it well.
It takes the tactical combat of stuff like X-COM and mixes it with a a campaign flowchart similar to that of Star Smuggler or another game that hardly anyone has heard of, Star Wars: Corellian Smuggler.

Each campaign turn takes roughly a week and you start by doing the activities you'd find in a game like Star Smuggler. Choose to fly, explore or send crew out to do tasks or find work.

Then once that is resolved, there is likely a battle. Things then shift over to a miniatures skirmish game, much like X-COM. You set up the skirmish map, place the enemies and your heroes, then duke it out.

When you've finished the battle, you move on to the last phase of the campaign turn, which is to find out the results of the battle, collect your rewards, count your losses and level up your crew.

Then you can go to the next campaign turn and start it over.

If there's one word I could use to describe the game, it would be 'elegant'. I really like it.

I played my first game of Five Parsecs and here's how it went:

First, I took my D6 Space characters that I eventually moved to Mothership, and pulled them into Five Parsecs. I only had four made: Diegos, Mark-IVan, J'Kara and Renée. So I needed to make two more for the game.

I randomly rolled up six characters, and ended up with four humans, a feral, and a precursor (people from an ancient civilization).
I needed a robot for Mark-IVan, so I rolled up a robot and replaced the fourth human with it.

I made the feral a felinoid to fit J'Kara, and gave the precursor to Renée.

I rolled up two humans with exactly the same Background and Motivation: Wealthy Merchant Family and Wealth, and decided to make them brothers. After a bit of searching for names, I settled on Gerard and Wynston.

So I had my crew. (Btw, generating characters in this game is a snap!)

My crew

 Starting stats:

Diegos
Human, Leader
XP: 2
Reactions: 1
Speed: 4"
Combat: +0
Toughness: 3
Savvy: +1
Luck:1
Weapons: Colony Rifle, Blade
Gear: Communicator
Background: Research Outpost
Motivation: Adventure
Class: Explorer

Mark-IVan
Robot
Reactions: 2
Speed: 4"
Combat: +1
Toughness: 4
Savvy: +2
Weapons: Shotgun  

J'Kara
Feral-Felinoid
Reactions: 2
Speed: 4"
Combat: +0
Toughness: 3
Savvy: +1
Weapons: Beam Pistol
Background: Tech Guild
Motivation: Truth
Class: Ganger

Renée
Precursor
Reactions: 1
Speed: 5"
Combat: +1
Toughness: 2
Savvy: +1
Weapons: Colony Rifle, Blade
Gear: Scanner Bot
Background: Military Brat
Motivation: Wealth
Class: Hacker  

Gerard
Human
Reactions: 1
Speed: 4"
Combat: +0
Toughness: 3
Savvy: +1
Weapons: Marksman's Rifle
Gear: Screen Generator
Background: Wealthy Merchant Family, Wynston's brother
Motivation: Wealth
Class: Starship Crew  

Wynston
Human
Reactions: 1
Speed: 4"
Combat: +0
Toughness: 3
Savvy: +0
Weapons: Blast Pistol, Glare Sword
Gear: Steel Boots
Background: Wealthy Merchant Family, Gerard's brother
Motivation: Wealth
Class: Agitator

Wealth: 50
Credits Ship: Retired Scout Ship
Debt on Ship: 22 Credits

Crew met each other at a bar. They are considered starport scum.
1 Rumor
2 Rivals
+1 Story Points

I named the planet they're on Bollux to match a galaxy map that I plan to use from GURPS Space.

Then I got down to business.
The first thing to do was to get rid of the debt. They paid it off and still had plenty of credits left. New total - 28 credits.

I rolled up some information for Bollux and discovered that it was a Corporate State, and that a license was required to take jobs here.
The crew paid 2 credits to acquire the license. New total - 26 credits.

I determined that the campaign has 6 Story Points, and then rolled to see who the starting Rivals were.
Ended up with Anarchists and Security Bots.

With the week starting, 1 credit was spent for upkeep. New total - 25 credits.

I had already had an idea about Gerard and Wynston's characteristics, with Wynston being something of a slacker. With this in mind, I gave him a special roll to be made each time crew get assigned to tasks.
For Wynston, I'll roll a d6 and if the result is a 1, then he stays on the ship and shows no interest in helping.
Fortunately, I didn't roll a 1 this turn.

I then assigned tasks to the crew.
Find a Patron - Diegos & Mark-IVan
Train - J'Kara & Gerard
Trade - Renée
Explore - Wynston

Diegos and Mark-IVan found two job offers.
Job 1 - Corporation
Danger Pay: +2 credits
Complete by: This campaign turn
Benefits: NA
Hazards: Hot job
Conditions: Demanding

Job 2 - Corporation
Danger Pay: +2 credits
Complete by: This campaign turn
Benefits: Connections
Hazards: NA
Conditions: NA

They decide to accept Job 2.

J'Kara and Gerard did their training and each gained 1 xp.

Renee acquired a Hand Gun and kept it for herself.

Meanwhile, Wynston found a Hand Gun just lying around in an alley. Of course he kept it.

Rolling for an event, Rivals attacked the PCs, preventing them from fulfilling their job.
I rolled to see which of their Rivals it was, and got Anarchists.

I went ahead and got the rest of the encounter information generated-
Deployment conditions: Bitter Struggle
Type of attack: Raid
Number of enemies: 5; includes 1 Lieutenant and 1 Specialist.

Then it was time to move to the board. For this, I used Tabletop Simulator.

I made them standees, using the art from Hero Forge, and made standees from the back of Five Parsecs for the Anarchists, and loaded them up in TTS.

The board is a map I made a long time ago based on the layout of the Danger Room in the old NES Uncanny X-Men game, btw.

I was almost ready. I now needed to fill up the map with terrain. However, since I had been using TTS mostly for playing Castle Ravenloft, I really didn't have a good pool of sci-fi components. So I spent the better part of the evening scouring the workshop looking for mods that had useful terrain.

Five Parsecs guides you on how many of each type of terrain you should have on the map, and I tried to fill things out as well as possible.
I knew their ship had to be somewhere on the map because it was a Raid, but the ship ended up being pretty big. So I put it off to one side of the map and didn't count it as a terrain.

Top view

Side A view

Side B view

Something I did in regards to setting up the terrain...
Five Parsecs talks about zones, and suggests breaking up the map into evenly sized zones.
So, I did that... and then, I randomly rolled to place the terrain.

First, I placed the ship where I wanted it.
Then I did the large terrain.
I divided the map into nine equal parts to establish the zones.
For the large terrain, I ignored the three zones on the right of the map, because the ship was over there.
So I rolled a d6 for each of the two pieces, and placed them down.

For the small terrain and wall/barriers, I did the same, but rolling d10s instead.
If I rolled a zone that already got a terrain of the same type, or rolled a 10, I would go to the next zone that hadn't gotten that type, yet.
Lastly, I added some cosmetic items and a few more terrain items I thought would look nice. Like the thing on top of the building.

Then I randomly determined sides and set up the figures, enemies first, making sure the heroes were not within 18" of them.

Start of combat

At the start of combat, I made a Seize the Initiative roll...
Rolled 8. +2 from Mark-IVan's Savvy score. +1 from the Scanner Bot. Total: 11.
Heroes got a free pre-combat action.

As I played the combat out, I added a few tools to make gameplay smoother.
I placed a turn tracker at the bottom, using duplicates of the standees, and to the right I put the stats for the crew and the anarchists for easy referencing.

I made a campaign turn tracker, using a d6, to keep track of where I was at in the campaign turn.

Campaign turn tracker. It's not fancy because I'm low on ink.

Two of the heroes got taken out: Renée and Wynston. I was a bit worried, with this being my first time. I came to really appreciate the reasons why combat resolutions are held off until after the battle is over. There's a strong degree of tension when you don't know exactly if a hero will survive or not when they get hit. It makes you very cautious.

The heroes finished off the Anarchists.
Four of the Anarchists were taken out and one ran away.
The ship was protected.

End of combat

I then moved into the Post-Battle phase.
Due to the success of my heroes, the Anarchists decided to leave them alone from now on.

The crew collected 6 credits. New total -31 credits.
They also found a dose of Booster Pills, a broken Sonic Emitter and a broken Seeker Sight.

Then came the part I was concerned about the most. I got to roll to see how Renée and Wynston did.
Rolling on the chart, Renée was left with a crippling wound. 4 credits were spent on emergency care. She'll spend 3 campaign turns in sick bay. New total = 27 credits.
Meanwhile, Wynston only had minor injuries and will spend 1 campaign turn in sick bay.

Dealing out the XP for the campaign turn, I ended up with-
Diegos: +4 (Total: 6)
J'Kara: +3 (Total: 4)
Renée : +1 (Total: 1)
Gerard: +3 (Total: 4)
Wynston: +1 (Total: 1)

Diegos spent 6 XP to gain 1 Toughness. (Toughness: 4)
Mark-IVan spent 7 credits to gain 1 Combat Skill (Combat Skill +2) (New total = 20 credits)

Spent 3 credits for a roll on the Gadgets table.
Got a Scanner Bot. Sold it for 1 credit, since they already have one. New total = 18 credits.

I then rolled for a campaign event and got: Noticed by someone we'd rather avoid.
New rival added - Skulker Mercenaries.

And for a Character Event, Wynston spent time studying and gained 2 XP. (Total: 3 XP)

Since Bollux is a Corporate State and the heroes failed the mission, being interrupted by the Anarchists, they are now blacklisted and can no longer find Patrons on the planet. They will need to leave the planet to find jobs.

All in all, it was a good session.

Stuff I know already about the next session:
Renée and Wynston are out of action. So they’ll need to recruit someone, or be stuck with only four crew in the next battle.
They need to go to another planet to find jobs, since they’re blacklisted on Bollux.

I really enjoyed playing Five Parsecs from Home. Once I have a good collection of terrain on TTS, the battle segment of the campaign turns will go by faster.
I look forward to playing more and seeing where it takes me and my crew.
Plus, I think my crew finally found their system.