Now I'm not sure about this, but at some point I thought I read something about A). the skill rating of your ship's crew, and B). a way to up their stats at character creation/start of game, and I was just wondering if this was something that actually exists or if I'm just making stuff up in my mind.

Rael Azimaet said:

It's in the Constructing a Starship overview on page 193 - you start with a Competent (30) crew. You can gain 5 extra Ship Points by reducing the crew to Incompetent (20), or you can spend 5 or 15 Ship Points to increase the crew to Crack (40) or Veteran (50), respectively.

Do you happen to remember where one can find rules on increasing the quality of one's crew in-game?

Thanks.

Macharias the Mendicant said:

I've not seen any in the rulebook, though there is a Crew Improvements ship upgrade in Into the Storm - this doesn't increase crew rating by a full category, it grants bonuses to morale, and in the case of the highest quality upgrades, grants them a +5 bonus to the value of their crew rating.

Thanks. I'll keep y eyes peeled for that in Into the Storm , though I guess is can be "acquired" like any other "ship component or ressource in the meantime.

Out of curiosity how were you thinking of adjudicating the acquisition? via the standard rules or the ship component rules?

It seems like buying a whole new crew might be more of a component test to me since you are not just filling empty spaces but replacing all the officers, NCOs, Voidmasters, Adepts...etc. Another way might be to spread the upgrade out via an extended test since these beings exist on stations on various worlds and it might make for interesting opportunites for the GM to snag the players in an Endeavour.

Nalroth said:

Well, since we were playing DH this week and RT maybe next week, my GM and I had not really discussed it at length but what we're considering instead is finding some crew for those we've lost but investing in training for our current crew instead of replacing with a new crew completely (which just doesn't make sense to us). So, I suppose we'll count it as an acquisition test but instead of "replacing" the crew, we'll simply assume that the "new" crew is actualy just the current crew getting better with experience and training.

And I guess we would treat this as an acquisition test for new spaceship components but we have't decided yet. Heck, for all I know, he might ask us to spend XP on it - like we're spreading it around to "give" it to our underlings. I think that suggestion came up also.

Interesting. I would like to hear the results of this, if you don't mind.

No problem, Nalroth. I just forwarded our conversation to my GM. We'll see what he has to say...

I'm pretty curious about this as well. Our generic crew is infamous for some... shall we say, underwhelming results. We have no Voidmasters on our team, so the "Masters" of Augers, etc. all seem pretty dang lame!

GM's taking his sweet time to get back to me...