Radion-Accelerator Drive

This is how you hack Ribbon Drive to play Firefly.
It’s better than other Firefly games because it focuses on what matters to Firefly: capturing the feel of different locations, challenging the roles we cast characters into, and focusing on the relationships at play and how they develop in close quarters.
It operates well as a one-shot but also offers campaign-play rules.

An Introduction: Why Firefly works with Ribbon Drive

Firefly is a road story, about a group of real people who face real struggles. Their ideas about right and wrong, their future, who they are and what they want from life all get tossed about, sometimes hold steady and sometimes fall by the wayside. Sometimes, obstacles are resolvedwith heroic action or meaningful characterization. Other times, they are insurmountable – at least at first. Several episodes include capture, running out of gas, being stranded, and being stuck in a rough situation. Ultimately, people are put into the pressure cooker of stressful situation + close living quarters, and thrown onto the open road. Er, open space.

This is what Ribbon Drive is designed to do! Some tweaks are needed before it’s a setting-immersed, action-packed serial adventure, though.

Step One: Pitch

Instead of calling up your friends and saying “hey, friends! We should play Ribbon Drive,” call them up and say “hey, friends! We should play Radion-Accelerator Drive!” If they are confused, explain that this is a Firefly-hack for Ribbon Drive. If they are still confused, link this page.

Step Two: Assigned CDs

Instead of having a free-for-all with the mix CDs, you have each person write a specific CD. Assign each player one of these mixes, going down the list. If you have more than five players, double up on Frontier Planet, Alliance Planet and In Space! (in that order).
Opening Situation: This mix should be short, and starts with your theme song (either use the Firefly theme or choose a new one).
The Job: The first song in this mix will detail a mission of some sort.
Frontier Planet: When this CD plays, you’re on a cowboy planet (or, at the very least, everything has an extremely wild west feel).
Alliance Planet: When this CD plays, you’re on a sterile high-tech planet (or, on an alliance ship or outpost)
In Space!: When this CD plays, you’re in space! (possibly stranded, or infiltrating a reaver ship!)

Example. Joe, Andy and Lukas decide to play Radion-Accelerator Drive. Joe will make the Opening Situation CD. Andy will make the Job CD. Lukas will make the Frontier Planet CD.

Example. Joe, Andy, Lukas, Lesley, Dawn and David decide to play Radion-Accelerator Drive. Joe will make the Opening Situation CD. Andy will make the Job CD. Lukas will make the first Frontier Planet CD. Lesley will make the Alliance Planet CD. Dawn will make the In Space! CD. David will make the second Frontier Planet CD.

Step Three: Setting Up Play

Start with the Opening Situation CD, listen to the first song in silence. Pause. Discuss what your ship and crew are like, and generally what they do. You can play the Serenity crew, but don’t have to. You can set it in their universe, but don’t have to. Assign each character an archetype, before playing the second song. Follow the regular rules from there out.

Example. Joe puts in the Opening Situation CD, and the first song is the Ballad of Serenity. The group discusses, and decides that they will be idealistic rogue smugglers, brought together by circumstance and held together by chemistry. They choose some archetypes: the stern captain, the tough guy, the exotic courtesan.

Example. Joe puts in the Opening Situation CD, and the first song is the Ballad of Serenity. The group discusses, and decides that the crew is assigned by a central governing body to establish peace treaties across a war-torn galaxy. They choose some archetypes: the idealistic rookie, the depressed doctor, the never-satisfied first mate.

If this is a one-shot, write characters like you normally would.
If this is a campaign game, write characters with a session-long Future and a campaign-long Future.

In either situation, communicate that traits will apply to lots of situations against “bad guys” (be they outlaws, Alliance officials, mysterious agents, turncoats or Reavers). This won’t be exclusively true, but largely so.

Step Four: Stranded, Not Detouring

Replace the word “Detour” with “Stranded”. You don’t switch CDs when Stranded. Instead, immediately frame a scene about how these characters are detained, isolated or run into the ground. If some characters aren’t Stranded, the next scene is a rescue mission! If all of the characters are Stranded, the next scene is an escape sequence!

Example. Joe’s character (the amnesiac captain, Orville) and Andy’s character (the violent doctor, Jem) are faced with the Obstacle “Alliance officials order you to halt, intent on arresting you for blackmarketeering.” Joe and Andy decide to become Stranded. They cut to the next scene, inside an Alliance holding cell. Jem gets mad at Orville, and proceeds to throw his meal tray at the wall. Orville clutches the bars of the cell and asks, aloud, “Why does this feel familiar?” When this scene ends, Lukas will frame a rescue mission!

Example. The same as above, except that Lukas’ character (the inept mechanic, Dustin) is also Stranded with them. After their scene of detainment, they frame an escape scene: one of them picks the lock with shoelace (!), and they flee the jail (along the way Jem punches out a guard, and Orville pauses in a hallway, lost in memory, before Dustin pulls him along).

Step Five: Using the CDs

The Opening Situation CD is used to establish a premise and crew. Do not introduce Obstacles during this CD. Instead, play it until everyone feels grounded in their characters and the tone of the ship. At the end of every scene, ask “do we want to continue this CD, or move on?” When you decide to move on, shuffle the remaining mixes and draw one at random. (During a session, if you run through all of the CDs, don’t repeat the Opening Situation CD.)

Frontier Planet, Alliance Planet and In Space! are all CDs that exist within a certain location (albeit broad). If you put in the Alliance Planet CD, frame yourselves onto an Alliance planet. If necessary, have a bridging scene to explain why you’re there. Don’t worry about the fact that there was potentially a big voyage that you just breezed over. Use aggressive scene framing to get yourselves onto an Alliance planet as quickly as possible while maintaining thematic coherence. The same goes for the other two.

Obstacles during these CDs should be sparse, but large. Things like “Mysterious agents wearing blue gloves are hot on your tracks, but haven’t found you yet” (Stranded would likely mean detainment) or “you run out of gas” (Stranded would likely mean sitting idle, casting out SOS signals).

The Job is the CD where you have a specific mission (like recovering an item or smuggling someone) and a reward (cash, or the preservation of personal freedoms, or something). Obstacles should be frequent, but small in scale. Things like “Crow shows up with his men, intent on fighting” (Stranded would likely mean being tied up, possibly even returned to Adelei Niska).

Step Six: An Option For Campaign Play

If you are doing campaign-play, one of your Futures should be specific to each episode. One should be campaign-long.
In each session, everyone should resolve their episode Future one way or the other (succeeding or letting go).
In future sessions, write a new episode Future.

Some characters will address their campaign Future in any given session/episode.
If you don’t resolve your campaign Future, keep it for next session.
If you succeed at your campaign Future, or let go of it but don’t become the Protagonist, write a new one for next session.

If you let go of both of your Futures, you are the Protagonist for this episode.
For the rest of the campaign, keep your campaign Future crossed out (but still rewriting your episode Future each episode).
You cannot become the Protagonist of any more episodes.
The campaign ends when every character has been a Protagonist once.

If you have a Protagonist emerge before everyone has resolved their episode Future, frame scenes to resolve them before ending the game.

Between episodes, write new Traits to replace any that were unactivated as well as any that were used up (leave traits that were activated but not used up).

In Conclusion

Wow, writing that it seems like a lot. To summarize: give everyone a CD assignment to cover a different part of the Firefly universe, establish archetypal roles before listening to song #2, establish ground rules for when you can introduce Obstacles, Obstacles can be Stranded (which detains the characters but doesn’t switch CD), aggressively frame to new situations when you insert a new CD.

If you play a campaign, create rules for episode and campaign Futures. Have people tie up the loose ends of an episode by making everyone resolve their episode future. Allow a rotating spotlight by restricting someone from being the Protagonist more than once.

You could always just use the regular Ribbon Drive rules. They’ll do Firefly. But if you’re wanting campaign-length games of action-adventure serial that blends several distinct genres/tones, and you want to have an ensemble cast which gives spotlight to different characters in different episodes, and you want to play in the Firefly universe… then these tweaks and hacks will do you well.

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