Sargon And Beyond: Operation Silk Roads – Part Seven: Re-Mapping The Campaign

This is Part Seven of Sargon And Beyond: Operation Silk Roads. Here are the previous instalments:

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Part Four
• Part Five
• Part Six

In Part Seven, we re-do the tool from Part Six for mapping out your campaign: the ‘Subsector Grid’, using an expanded hex-grid with additional missions. This is to conform with the new map created for ‘Missions Beyond‘, and is compatible with the missions in that article. Simply overlay both grids, allowing more adventures than before. You can also use these missions with Captain’s Log.

Players shouldn’t read any further, as the following is intended only for the eyes of your GM!

Suggested Campaign Opening Arc

(Repeated from Part Six)

We made some suggestions for adventures to use back in Part Two. But here are three adventures that you can use to go from Session 0 (assembling the crew at either Star Station Echo or Deep Space 6), up to crossing the Cordon Nebulae and into the Space Beyond proper. (These adventures will be released soon.)

1. A Surplus of Problems (Mission Brief ADV002): The crew’s starship undergoes final preparations at Surplus Depot I-5, not far from the starbase.
2. Order of the Amber Pendant (Mission Brief ADV001): They hear rumours of Nakotti, who may have explored part of the Space Beyond and returned. They go to the planet Jira near the Cordon Nebulae to find him and possibly enlist him as a guide.
3. Prix and Proxy (Mission Brief ADV003): Nakotti leads them to the planet Renara in the Wairara League, which claims the Cordon Nebulae as their home. The League members are experts in predicting the passageways that appear in the Cordon Nebulae. But the Ferengi have found them too, and want exclusive rights to their help. The Renara decide there’s only one way to settle this: a Grand Prix.

updated Subsectors Grid

Sargon and Beyond is meant to be a sandbox campaign, where your players take the lead in exploration of the various regions. To help you plan your campaign, here is a new Subsectors Grid that breaks down the Space Beyond into 35 Subsectors. Adventures in Part Six are intact; new ones are added for the additional subsectors. The Cordon Nebulae surrounds these subsectors completely. The width of a subsector for the sake of this region is about 1/3 the width of a standard sector (which are about 20 LY), or just under 7 LY across. The grid will help you strategize, and allow your players to plan their trek through the region.

To use it, you can populate the subsectors with adventures and species. First, establish which subsectors house your primary species. Then, you can put an adventure into each subsector. You can put more than one adventure into each subsector, or leave some blank for you to decide later.

Here is an example that I used for my last campaign. It makes reference to published adventures or Modiphius official adventures, and also Mission Briefs on our site.

I may switch around some adventures (e.g., the Supreme Mandate adventures should be run in sequence, so I will always run Adventure 1 first when they enter one of those subsectors, and juggle accordingly).

Feel free to use this sample campaign as inspiration for your own, but don’t be afraid to switch it up and introduce your own species and missions.