Episode Details

How to play No Port Called Home.

Hi everyone, this is a special episode of Firebreathing Kittens. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for No Port Called Home. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play No Port Called Home yourselves.

There are a dozen different races to pick from in No Port Called Home. They include humans, giant jotunn, amphibious nix, genetically enhanced vesp, nomadic hedonistic fae, indestructible robotic archon, freed former worker drone tsuku, and more. When you build your character, you will pick one of these races. Use the race’s character sheet as your starting character sheet, that you’ll add more and more things to later. The rule book has an example crew mate named Zephyr who is a tsuku race, a freed former worker drone. I will refer to Zephyr’s character sheet throughout this how to play guide, using Zephyr as an example.

Let’s talk about classes. No Place Called Home has nearly forty classes. You will pick three of them to build your character. These classes include a calibrist who obsessively optimizes a firearm, a swordfiend who stabs opponents with point objects, a martial artist who fights with their hands, a brute who fights with this chair they happened to find, a fortress that gains defensive bonuses as long as they hold their position, an engineer who can maintain and improve the team’s vehicle, a strategist who can delegate extra actions to their teammates, a con artist who and lies and fibs, a changeling who can rearrange their limbs, a conduit who can splice their mind into machines to remote listen to conversations, a swarmmaster with clouds of loyal insects, and more. Doesn’t that sound like a lot of fun options? Great news, you get to pick not one, not two, but three of them. Which three should you pick? The rule book suggests picking a combination of classes that empower you to take action both in and out of combat. Don’t limit yourself to only in-combat effects. For our example character build, Zephyr has the three classes of: martial artist who fights with their hands, freerunner who sprints and runs and does flips, and ranger, who prevents their teammates from setting off terrain effects through their expert guidance. Each class has some questions to think and write about. For example, among other questions, the ranger asks you to list four places you have been. The martial artist asks you, among other questions, if you advertise the fact that you are skilled in combat, or do you allow others to underestimate you? The freerunner asks you what you would do if a situation forced you to leave someone behind who could not run as fast. The three classes you pick will have questions that help you think about how your character would act.

Let’s talk about skills. There are four categories of skills: physical, social, knowledge, and practical. Physical skills include agility, dexterity, strength, your ability to orient yourself in zero gravity, stealth, endurance, and how well you squirm. Knowledge skills include your knowledge of biotech, history, people, places, engineering, computers, and medicine. Social skills include your ability to soothe, entertain, deceive, manipulate, persuade, command, and read people. Practical skills include your perception, survival, research, crafting