End of Year Assessments and Aspirations

 

Gaming projects I've been noodling around with and their working titles, an incomplete list:

 

Flanaess Sector: reskinning AD&D 1E as a space opera game, with new classes, spaceship combat, equipment from 1E/4E Gamma World, and intelligent aliens drawn from the intelligent species of Monster Manual/Fiend Folio/Monster Manual 2.

Towers of Saltgate: city-as-dungeon-crawl supplement in the tradition of City-State of the Invincible Overlord, the Chaosium Thieves' World boxed set, or even modules like "Dwellers of the Forbidden City".

 

Shining Swords: a space opera game in the tradition of Star Wars ("A New Hope" more than any of the other chapters), Traveller, or the Eric John Stark stories of Leigh Brackett, using the rules system found in Flashing Blades, especially including the careers and social climbing adapted to space fantasy; possibly with psionics, but very much not sure about that - even if it does, note that moving things with mind power did not show up at all in that first chapter of Star Wars.

 

Millennium: medieval fantasy, covering 486CE-1487CE, Europe to Persia, Scandinavia to North Africa. Really, a thorough revision and reworking of Fantasy Wargaming by Galloway et al.

 

Alpha Cephei: using the Cepheus Engine SRD to clone the MegaTraveller edition of Traveller, with my own setting centered on Terra.

 

Days of High Adventure: my own D&D, working from the already very stripped-down Swords & Wizardry: White Box, stripping it down to the barest essentials, then building it back up to a more complete rules set focused on long-term campaign play, possibly in combination with Towers of Saltgate, but certainly some sword & sorcery setting; would include faction rules and other GM tools designed to allow players to take full initiative and agency.

 

I really should just pick one at a time, focus on it, and not throw it away when I get frustrated with it… and try to ignore the most frustrating part, publishing and production, until I can actually look for solutions to questions like editing, art, and layout.

My Gaming Life, An Update And A List

My campaign of GURPS set in my own world of the Deindustrial Future is winding to a close. I have committed to running another GURPS game after that, this one being about superpowered humans in the modern day. It's going to try to explore some of the disrupting influence of superpowers, which should be interesting, in the sense that I would not want to live in that world. I  am increasingly certain that, while I still like GURPS quite a lot, it is dropping down my list of favorite systems pretty fast. Still, some settings I want to do are easier to do in that game than in others, since other games would require inventing and writing down game statistics for things and such, where those statistics already exist or are easily customizable in GURPS. It would be so much better if there were some reasonable way to randomly generate characters. Also, GURPS allows for some superpowered characters that are not possible or are difficult to depict in other systems.

I have a friend, a great Lovecraftian fiction fan, who has decided to give running Call of Cthulhu a try, and he is learning very quickly and doing very well. So, that's a second group, and one that is growing. I'm finding that to be a lot of fun too.

One of my players for the GURPS game is now running AD&D 1st edition, attempting to play mostly by the rules as written (no psionics, a few other small changes). We've had two sessions so far, one spent doing a large combat mostly so that we could get the feel for how the AD&D combat rules as written work in practice. It's so much easier than some people say to use weapon vs. armor type, weapon speed factors, charge rounds, and so on. Even so, since it was completely new to some of the players, and years since those of us who had ever played that edition had played—and even then, we weren't really playing by AD&D rules, but rather a streamlined form of B/X or BECMI using the AD&D tables—the second session was completely taken up by that one combat, as we looked up various pieces of information. Even there, we missed important information about how Clerical Turn Undead worked in that edition, but we'll get it next time now that we know.

Playing AD&D has, perhaps paradoxically, re-inspired me to work on my update to Fantasy Wargaming. To do that properly, I think that I'll need to play it as it is in order to see how things work and understand how best to approach any changes. It's been since 1982 or so that I last played that game, and my memories of it are a little foggy. I do remember that the game worked just fine, so it's definitely not "unplayable", as some allege. I do think that there are some areas that I will be changing pretty drastically, such as formalizing fatigue a little more given how important it is as a limiting factor on some activities, changing wounds to conditions instead of a pool of points, maybe tightening up the magic rules some. I have a feeling that I would want to tighten magic back toward things that were supposed to have happened, either as actual magic or as miraculous events given the close affinity of religious miracles with magic in the system, rather than the very wide-open system given—or perhaps I won't, and maybe just tighten up the rules some as they stand, or even work out a way to make it even more flexible. The question is how I am going to manage to get some play of that game in, given the limitations on which days of the week I have available for gaming. I have some ideas on how to make that work, so we'll see if I can get that working.

Which does remind me that I still plan on returning to the series on real magic and how it can be depicted in gaming. Let's just say that the source of inspiration for that series has gone silent for the moment, though I expect it to begin nagging at me again any time.

I've committed to finishing up my conversion of the meta-tasks of the Marc Miller's Traveller (aka T4) supplement Pocket Empires into MegaTraveller equivalents, even though I have no ability to test the rules. That is going slowly but surely.

I've been occasionally noodling around with ideas about running a PBEM game of Realms of the Unknown, which would require me to set up a better record-keeping system than I have managed to put together yet. It's definitely been moved from the back burner to somewhat active development, though. I'm not sure how the setting would look yet, as I'm probably going to wait to work on that until I have more useful tools for that sort of thing.

So, given that my gaming priorities have been changing now that I am back to gaming mostly regularly, let's give a new list of my top 10 games, or really top 12 but who's counting:

1: MegaTraveller and classic Traveller (tied)
2: AD&D 1st edition
3: Fantasy Wargaming
4: GURPS
5: Chivalry & Sorcery (2nd edition, though other editions are fine)
6: Hârnmaster
7: Aftermath!
8: Cyberpunk 2020
9: Swords & Wizardry: White Box and White Star (tied)
10: Villains & Vigilantes 2nd edition

Honorable Mentions: Flashing Blades, Adventures Dark & Deep, Space 1889, anything Basic Roleplaying but especially Call of Cthulhu (and I guess I haven't mentioned that the player who is running AD&D has been low-key hinting that he'd like me to run RuneQuest 3rd edition, which he loved when I ran it many years back, so that's another thing that is impinging on me; if I did, I'd have to choose whether to run it in the default Fantasy Earth*, Glorantha, or a setting of my own design that I've had simmering for a few years and is in fact a development of the setting I used for that game of so many years ago), Lords of Creation, The Arcanum (1st or 2nd edition, I haven't seen 3rd or the 30th anniversary editions yet), In Nomine, Guardians (the superhero RPG based on original D&D), Delving Deeper, Pendragon, Lace & Steel, Marvel Superheroes RPG, Realms of the Unknown.

Settings that I am working on to varying degrees of effort: the GURPS superpowers one, an authentic-medieval one with monsters and such set around the Third Crusade for Fantasy Wargaming, a feudal-medieval-authentic world based on the 20 kingdoms of the SCA that draws loosely on the actual history and notable events of that illustrious organization plus added fantasy (this would be intended for any of Chivalry & Sorcery, Fantasy Wargaming, Pendragon, or Hârnmaster, or really any game that can handle an authentic medieval feudal setting), a setting based on the world of Lords of the Middle Sea—which is an obscure wargame that Chaosium published back in the '70s—and a more detailed deindustrial setting set some time in the further future that doesn't rely on so many fantastic elements as the one that I am currently finishing up. I've also spent a few brain cycles on the Flanaess Sector idea, but it hasn't really gone anywhere lately.

Yeah, as usual, I have put way too much on my plate, but hopefully I can actually turn some of it into practical use.

*The Fantasy Earth setting for RQ3 was set somewhere roughly around the 8th or 9th century, probably, given the territory available to the Byzantines in it.

Some More Campaigns

In the last post, I mentioned six campaigns that I offered to my players that I wanted to run, and let them choose from among them. I mentioned elsewhere that I have a lot more where that came from, and I had whittled my various games down to just that half-dozen. Here are some more where those came from:

First, I have always wanted to run a game using Ken Hite's "Seas of Dread, Sails of Daring" setting that he outlined in the old GURPS 3E supplement, GURPS Horror, Third Edition, then revised (as just "Seas of Dread") for GURPS 4E in GURPS Horror, Fourth Edition. It might even supersede wanting to run Flashing Blades as a pirate game right now. Also, I'd kind of like to run Stonehell Dungeon in my Middle Sea setting using Delving Deeper, Swords & Wizardry Core, the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, or AD&D 1E with some of my own customized character classes. In addition, I wouldn't mind running a sandbox of Hârnmaster starting in Kanday in Hârn. Aside from these four examples of other people's campaigns/settings, though, I have some others.

• AD&D 1E: Flanaess Sector - I still have considerable work that I'd need to do, but in addition to the idea of using White Star, as mentioned previously, I wouldn't mind converting AD&D for the purpose.
• XXXXX: Metahumans Insurgent - This could be run using almost any superhero game. My preferences would be, in order, GURPS 4E, CORPS, Guardians, or Villains & Vigilantes. The idea is that the world woke up one day a month or two ago and a portion of the population had metahuman powers. The players would be in the upper tier, the portion that counts one in a million as members (500 points in GURPS, 200AP/200SP in CORPS, and standard starting characters in the other games). There would be a lower tier, one in a hundred thousand, that have lesser abilities, and the rest of the population have no metahuman abilities. The campaign would start with the world coming to realize that metahumans exist, and then trace the resulting collapse of society into chiefdoms ruled by metahumans and groups of metahumans. Or maybe some other outcome, depending on how things went. It would be inspired by the TV series Heroes, the movies Push, Chronicle, Jumper, Limitless, Lucy, and the like, and the comic book series ESPers. That is, no costumes, no silly names.
• RuneQuest 3 or 6: Time of the Gods - This is a relatively undeveloped setting in my head, of a world in the late bronze or early iron age where city-states legitimize their rule by invoking gods into physical form as their rulers, or are held in control by powerful sorcerers. This would draw on an article by Jenell Jaquays published in Dragon magazine under a different name, titled "When Gods Walk the Earth", in issue 144. I could probably also do this setting in GURPS with a very small amount of work, or maybe using Hârnmaster with a bit more work.
• Fantasy Wargaming: The Crusaders - Mainly, this would be a way to both show off and develop the FW game system. The game would be centered on a group of characters who have gone to join in the Third Crusade behind Richard the Lionheart. It would need at least six players, though, and a couple of the characters would be pre-gens.
• Realms of the Unknown: Tribes of the Volyet - This would use the maps of my Middle Sea setting, though not the "things I know" about that setting. In this campaign, the Long Sea (not the Middle Sea, which is to the east of that map) is renamed as the Volyet, with the players controlling clans on the eastern shore of the Volyet Sea. I have some events in mind, obviously, but the first part of the campaign would be the players getting used to the system and dealing with each other and some of the NPC clans in the region.
• CORPS: Deindustrial Future Dark - This would be the more realistic version of my Deindustrial Future setting. In this one, magic and such is scaled way the heck back, to the point that they are hardly discernible in the setting. No super gunslingers, no spirits, no alchemical potions. At least, not in the same sense as the GURPS version I am running now. I could also run this with GURPS, but I like to find reasons to use CORPS.
• Top Secret: Cyberpunk Shadows - Near-future using the Top Secret rules. There are some basic spaceflight rules in Dragon magazine, along with an article on lasers in Top Secret, and it's not really all that difficult to come up with stats and rules for other futuristic technologies. I haven't really thought through what I'd actually do with it yet, but it's an idea that keeps pushing itself on me.
• Chivalry & Sorcery 2E: Denizens of the Pale - Another one that mostly exists to showcase a rules set, and also the historical setting, this campaign would have the players as Anglo-Norman settlers in the Pale in Ireland in the early 13th century. They would have to live with the surrounding Irish people, as conquerors or neighbors.

There you go, an even dozen other campaigns that I have desires for in my head, bringing the total I've written down here to eighteen. This is what happens when you don't game for too long. Or when I don't, anyway. Maybe some of them will inspire you to come up with something, or maybe I can figure out ways to run one or more of them. Realms of the Unknown, for example, is particularly suited to Play By (E-)Mail formats.

And, you know, I have still more campaigns in my head. If there's interest, maybe I'll write down some more.

FINALLY!

So, after several years of looking in varying degrees of intensity, I finally have a (hopefully) regular gaming group again, for which I am running the game. It's a couple of old friends who live in the area.

When they agreed to let me run something, I gave them six choices:

• MegaTraveller: Noble House - This would be my own MT setting, using my conversion and update of the Pocket Empires rules from T4 (which aren't complete right now, but I would have worked extra hard to get them ready in time to run the game). The story would revolve around a noble house and its retainers, and the intrigues of a rival house to discredit and dismantle them.
• Top Secret: Special Missions Bureau - A Top Secret game set in the early '80s, with Cold War intrigue and globehopping adventure. I intended to take the results of the game and use them to provide a background for a second arc which would take place in the modern day.
• White Star: The Flanaess Sector - In this one, the players would be gritty, down on their luck adventurers in the Flanaess Sector, against a background of interstellar rebellion against a distant empire. I'm afraid that I didn't present this option to the players very well, though it was considered.
• Flashing Blades: Scourge of the Caribbean - Swashbuckling pirates in the Caribbean Sea!
• GURPS Deindustrial Future - I presented this as a cross between Stephen King's Dark Tower series and Fallout without the nukes. The setting is the future a few hundred years after our civilization runs out of petroleum to fuel it. While electricity, and technology, does exist, the large-scale networks of power transmission and transportation infrastructure do not. Characters have access to items up to TL7 (most TL8 items require far too much interdependent, and so unavailable, infrastructure), but cost 2x as much as normal for every TL above 4 (roughly the 16th-18th centuries), which is the maximum easily sustainable technology level. The culture is heavily influenced by the American West, simply because that's easier to get everybody on the same page, but the world is split into, effectively, city-states and tribal chieftains - not unlike Europe's Migration Era after the fall of Rome. There's also some magic of a relatively subtle kind ("Path/Book Magic" for those of you who know GURPS) along with spirits, and alchemy of the standard GURPS sort ("snake oil") along with some other things like Gunslingers and traveling preachers of a sort.
• CORPS Old Solar System - Dying Mars with its ancient civilizations and canals crossing the cold deserts, overcast Venus and its vast, jungle swamps, shallow seas, and saurian monsters. I hadn't yet figured out what would be around Jupiter and Saturn (or further out yet!), but Mercury was to be largely drawn from Space 1889's "Nodding World" with its planet-girdling World River. Lots of inspiration from C.L. Moore and Leigh Brackett.

After some discussion, the players settled on the GURPS Deindustrial Future game, despite the fact that none of them have played much GURPS (they have an ongoing Champions game and have stayed focused on HERO System, though like most sensible people they shied away from the sixth edition of that game). Since I haven't played much 4E GURPS myself, things have been a learning experience for us all. I hope to write up some about their characters and their first adventure (a saloon brawl that took us a long time because of our collective unfamiliarity with actually playing the game)  soon.

An Update - Still Alive!

Looking around, I couldn't find where this comes
from. I like it, but if the owner wants me to
take it down, just let me know.

Wow, has it really been nearly a year? Last year wasn't much fun for me. Whatever, on to the post.

I'm not quite ready to be back fully yet, but I am around. I'm occasionally posting on the Traveller groups on G+, some stuff on Facebook, and occasional other groups. I do intend to return to the blog.

I'm still working on a MegaTraveller retroclone, based on the Mongoose OGL and incorporating elements of other editions. After discussions online and thinking about it, I want to really get back to the sandbox tools of CT LBB77, but with the rules influenced by some of the MT developments. One thing that I've learned about spaceships is that reaction drives are subject to the square-cube law, since thrust increases by the square while mass increases by the cube, speaking roughly. Building that into the ship design sequence should push designs toward smaller ships. I've been thinking about some other things, too.

I'm pretty certain that I am going to continue writing up the project I gave the working title "Flanaess Sector" as an AD&D 1E/OSRIC product. I'll import some of the alternatives to Illithids and other Product Identity races from sources like Adventures Dark and Deep, but otherwise it's mainly writing up tech items, a spaceship construction and combat system, and star system details. I am also trying to decide if it should be more science fantasy like Star Wars, Warhammer 40K, or White Star, or harder SF on the order of Traveller or even Orion's Arm. Maybe somewhere in the middle.

For fantasy gaming, I have changed my default setting a bit to include ideas from a guy named Scott, who was known for his settings such as the World of Thool but has since vanished from the internet as far as I can tell. He worked for a bit on a setting he called "Mandragora: The Mandrake March". It was to be based on Andrew Lang's Color Fairy Books (The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and so on), taking elements from the stories and placing them into an otherwise normal D&D-type game. I want to do that, except that I'll include one area which is based on those (removing the Arabian and Chinese ones), an area similarly based on Irish, Welsh, and Breton fairy stories plus some Arthuriana, and an area based on the Arabian Nights Entertainments (plus the other stories traditionally associated with them, such as Sindbad, 'Ala ad-Din, and 'Ali Baba, and a similar manuscript called "Tales of the Marvelous and News of the Strange"). I'll probably have a land further to the East which is based on Chinese fairy tales (and an island nation drawing on Japanese fairy stories), but that's not the default starting area so I won't bother with it until needed. Some of the setting elements that I had originally developed will remain, such as the dragon-riding peoples of the Northern dales, the bull-riding nomad barbarians, the Southern cities of the sorcerer-kings, the iron-age Aztec island kingdom across the ocean to the West, the pirate princes in a "Pirates of the Caribbean" mode, and the fantasy Egypt-like river kingdom.

I've still been working off and on toward a fantasy setting which draws inspiration from the Wild West instead of Medieval Europe. I've been playing around with ways to approach the rather subtle magic I want, and GURPS remains the best source to do those things. I have considered changing the Swords & Wizardry: White Box rules, especially the spell list, to handle the setting. It certainly helps that it is available in .rtf format to make building a rule set possible. I might put it together as a Lulu project, if I go that way. New classes (Gunslinger! Snake Oil Salesman/Mountebank! Cunning Folk! Preacher! probably more!), new spell list, and so on, all in support of the setting assumptions. The setting itself is also slow going, since I want to create certain effects but I also don't want to be too close to actual history. Plus, I'm trying to figure the best way to have a Wild West with less Eastern Cities, and still waffling on the matter of trains (trains are a major element of Western stories, but they also bring Civilization far too quickly). I also really love pirates, and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise comes close to overlapping with the Wild West - maybe they'll be in there somewhere, like a fantastic New Orleans. I haven't come to terms with the racial politics of the time relative to the setting either, so I am not sure how I want to handle the matters of Native Americans, Africans, and Chinese laborers.

Part of the reason that I haven't completed any of these things is that I still don't have a group to play them with. I still prefer face-to-face gaming, but my attempts to reconnect with the people I gamed with when I lived in this city years ago are running into the problem that a lot of people aren't really willing to change their lives to fit the time for gaming. Oh, I'm probably overstating matters. I'm just frustrated about still not being able to get a group together after such a long, long time. It almost makes me willing to spend time learning how to use Roll20.

How are you doing?

Five Games I'd Like To Run

I guess that it's going around, but I saw Joseph Bloch do it, and now I am. A list of five games that I'd like to run, at least as I am sitting here right now tonight.

1. Spirits of the Trail: This is a sixguns & sorcery game, in which the players are traveling by land from the settled Eastern States to the great port of the west coast, Angel City. It would be a picaresque of adventures through the towns of the sparsely settled western territories where their only protections are the guns at their belts and their spirit allies. At this point, it would be run using GURPS rules, since not only does that game have excellent methods of handling gunfights and hand-to-hand melees, but also the sort of magic I want in the poorly-named "Path/Book Magic" system found in GURPS Thaumatology, which keeps me from having to write a new one to fit into something like Boot Hill or whatever.

2. Dark Space: Back in the '80s, a guy named Monte Cook wrote a setting book which was specifically intended to merge Rolemaster and Space Master in a cluster of worlds that included faeries and Lovecraftian horrors, adding biotechnology on top. I have always been interested in that setting, but never had a chance to play in it. I wouldn't mind running it.

3. Flanaess Sector: I talked about using AD&D to make a science-fiction setting, using the outlandish monsters of the D&D underworld as the basis of aliens. Illithid, Gulguthra, Flumphs, and Grell, among many others, seem like they would make for a fascinating setting in the stars. This would be the hardest to do right now, as I haven't done the work of designing the new character classes and technology I'd want to use. At least 1st edition AD&D already has a psionics system, though.

4. Under the Moons of Mars: I really, really want to run a game set on a Leigh Brackett/C.L. Moore-inspired Mars. I'd probably leave open the possibilities of traveling to Venus as well, but that wouldn't be the focus. I don't have a good opening situation for this yet, but it wouldn't be hard to come up with one. GURPS Mars had a good version of such a world in its "Dying Mars" chapter, which I'd probably use as the basis, though redesigning the canal system to match Lowell's canal maps more - though the canal through the Valles Marineris is so awesome that I'd probably include it nearly unchanged.

5. Hârn: Using Hârnmaster. There's so much to love about that setting, but I've never gotten a chance to play in it. I think that I might prefer to have someone else run it, but I'd do it.

Ruminating On Gaming Projects

Because the best thing to do when stuff needs
to be done is something else.

Sometimes, you have to sit back and take stock. I've been letting myself run wild and take on a number of gaming projects. I'm not sure if I should continue with all of them, what priority I should put on them, and so on, so it is time to think about that. I'm doing it here because it might help someone else see how another person organizes his thoughts, because someone might mention something that casts this all in a whole new light, and because doing things publicly helps force me to discipline my thinking a little.

First, let me just catalog the projects I have active, or at least semi-active, at this time, not counting actually playing games:

1. A Top Secret retroclone.
2. A MegaTraveller retroclone/revision attached to a space operatic setting.
3. Spectacular Science Stories (aka Rockets & Rayguns).
4. A Fantasy Wargaming retroclone/update.
5. A "sixguns & sorcery" setting for GURPS.
6. Flanaess Sector (for AD&D 1E).
7. Updating GURPS Voodoo: The Shadow War for GURPS 4E.
8. Codifying my version of the Trait System.
9. GURPS Greyhawk.
10. A magic system for Flashing Blades.
11. A mashup of Traveller and Flashing Blades.
12. My ideal roleplaying/adventure game system (mostly in the notes stage). It should be "semi-generic" in that it is intended to cover a number of genres, but all with the same "tone", for lack of a better term.

That, you might notice, is a lot. Several of these projects are stalled for various reasons that I will get to in a moment. Note that some of these have been projects I've undertaken for nearly the whole four-year existence of this blog. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might notice a couple of projects have been dropped from the "active/semi-active" list, such as the WRG Ancients-based RPG or a couple of attempts at an AD&D setting. The setting, actually, is also an ongoing project, but I'm not counting it here since it is purely for my own private use. I do intend to post about the current state of it at some point. The WRG Ancients RPG served its purpose and has been put to bed. Some of the ideas that came up in it have been incorporated into other projects.

Here's the thing, though. All of those projects kind of get in each other's way. For instance, I frequently find myself working feverishly at one of them for a while, then stepping away to another one, and when coming back to the first one finding out that I want to tear down some of what I'd already done and rework it. That's not really helpful if I ever want to finish any of these, and I do want to do that.

So, the first thing to do is to figure out what is most hampering each project at this point.

1. I remain uncertain just what direction to take this: should it be updated to the modern world's War on Terror or should it reflect late-'70s/early-'80s Cold War? Each has its merits, and Merle Rasmussen recently presented an adventure for the original game set in the modern day.
2. Rewriting the rules is a bigger task than I had envisioned at first. Yeah, that's mere whining and I should just get on with it, but the core of the game, the Task System, is turning out to be difficult enough to get the same sense in new language that I wonder if I really understand it. On top of that, I've been considering if I want to continue this way or approach the idea from another direction. That is, is MegaTraveller really what I want, or is there another, less drastic revision of classic Traveller that would be better?
3. Writing a D&D-based SF game is more difficult than some might think, unless you're just re-skinning the D&D rules with SF chrome, which I'm not. Plus, White Star kind of did a number on my head for a while, since it explicitly took Swords & Wizardry: White Box and made it SF, which is sort of the remit of Spectacular Science Stories. Still, I'm plugging away at this one pretty solidly.
4. I keep finding myself torn between the desire to present a more-or-less straight retroclone and the desire to update the game considerably. Reining in the latter tendency is exhausting. On the other hand, there were clearly some mistakes made in the original that need correcting.
5. I'm having a sort of crisis of faith with GURPS. It was my go-to, indeed nearly only, RPG for a decade. As I have been examining what I like about RPGs, though, it turns out that GURPS fails at many of those things. Trying to make a random character generation system for it was sobering. I remain convinced that such a random character system for it is possible and desirable, but it seems like too much work when not being paid to write it. I still have much affection for GURPS, but I have things to work through in regard to it.
6. Many of the same issues present with 3. are also problems here.
7. See 5.
8. While I still love the Trait System, I'm not sure that it fills my own needs anymore. It's kinda being superceded* by 12.
9. See 5.
10. Actually, nothing. I just haven't gotten back to it in a few weeks.
11. It's a crazy idea. It's actually more just a "hack" of Flashing Blades as a space opera, but since Traveller is definitive for that sort of thing in my head that's how I conceived it. Mostly, I haven't yet really convinced myself that it's a good idea, so I haven't done much work on it.
12. Work on this will be slow. I'm sort of thinking of it as "Hârnmaster, GURPS, Flashing Blades, Pendragon, RuneQuest, and classic Traveller have a mutant baby". At this point, I'm just writing down notes when I think of something related to it. I want it to have the detail options of GURPS, the breezy character creation of Flashing Blades, the integrated social systems of that game, the personality approach of Pendragon, and the gritty realism of Hârnmaster, RuneQuest, and Traveller. Or something like that. A lot of it is still very much in flux. This is my very own Heartbreaker. Maybe I should call it MOHb (for "My Own Heartbreaker").

I haven't even touched on the half-baked ideas I've had on which I haven't done any significant work. An adventure game that uses the Car Wars pedestrian combat and character rules (yes, yes, Autoduel Champions, Car Wars Tanks, and the Ob-Racing article) as its basis, probably scaled up 4x, so that 1/4" in Car Wars is a 1" square in the adventure game. An edition of Traveller that hits a spot somewhere between the Classic and Mega- editions (probably as a supplement to the Classic edition, since The Traveller Book is back in print). An entirely new Pulp Solar System setting, with my own versions of ancient Mars and swampy Venus (and the other planets). Returning to the WRG Ancients-based adventure game in a more serious fashion. My own attempt at GURPS Warhammer 40,000.

So, how do I prioritize these? I'm thinking that Spectacular Science Stories is my most important project right now, so that should be what I work on until it is finished, with the only intruding project being MOHb. After that, I'll pick whichever one is the most interesting to me at that moment (probably not Flanaess Sector, though, because that would be just too much SF all in a row) and work on it until I'm finished with that one, and so on. One project at a time might just be the best way to go.

What do you think?

*Some people say that this is an incorrect spelling of "superseded". Those people are wrong.

Aliens In Spectacular Science Stories/Rockets & Rayguns

Yeah, I am still thinking about which name to use. I think that, at least, SSS will be the working title.

Anyway, aliens. Since the game draws on a wide range of sources for its inspiration (I'll do an "Appendix N" post soon), it also draws on a wide array of types of alien races. On the one hand, humanoids, even ones that can intermarry with Humans, should be really common. On the other hand, some of the aliens in the source material get really weird and "out there". A really common trope is the alien race that is a lot like our stories of spirits and demons, being non-physical and capable of manipulating the physical universe in various ways. The original Star Trek series was particularly good for providing visual examples of these, but they were common throughout the history of the pulp raygun fantasy stories.

I'd talked earlier about the idea of the Flanaess Sector, but that was originally targeted at a more "hard" SF setting, where what we know of physics was important. That isn't a concern in raygun fantasy, so I've been looking at other monsters to include as aliens. I probably still won't include elves, since that would make things look a little too much like 40K for comfort!

I'm particularly interested in some of the more obscure entries to be found in the OSR, actually. The Kzaddich and Tsalakian (pdf), originally found in Footprints magazine (and John Turcotte's dreams prior to that), were put into the OGL when they were added to the Swords & Wizardry Monster Book. I think that they would be perfect for raygun fantasy. In the Adventures Dark & Deep Bestiary, Joseph Bloch provides an interesting creature called the "Genius Loci", which resembles a number of creatures from the original Star Trek, from various adventures of Northwest Smith, and so on. Mr. Bloch helpfully included that entry under the OGL.

I mentioned a number of creatures that fit in the Flanaess Sector article, such as the Flumph, Grell, Otyugh (or Neo-Otyugh), Myconids, Ropers, and so on. I think that I can replace the Mind Flayers with the Thelidu (they fit into the idea of raygun fantasy a little better anyway, since they were specifically developed for a science-fantasy influenced setting, Dwimmermount), which were included in the Swords & Wizardry Monster Book by James Maliszewski. The Umber Hulks who attend on Neogi could be replaced by Joseph Bloch's Underground Goliath.

All of that aside, it should be pointed out that nearly anything that fits into a fantasy world will also fit into raygun fantasy worlds. Notably, some of the horrors in Rafael Chandler's Teratic Tome are extremely appropriate to the sorts of pulp SF that falls into the raygun fantasy category.

I should write a manifesto, of sorts, of raygun fantasy.

The main thing that I'll need to do is work out which aliens are most common and have star empires of their own. I already know that I want the Thelidu to have one, with a sector of Ropers resisting them, and I certainly want an empire of Myconids (or maybe Skathros's Mushroom-men).

In the end, though, all of that is pretty much background to the central theme of the game, which I will talk about next time.

Edit 4/26: I didn't get around to talking about that central theme in the next post, but I will. I started to approach the discussion a couple of posts later, when I began to lay out what, exactly, I mean when I say "raygun fantasy".

Maybe I'm Back, Plus Updates

Sorry for being away for a while. Burnout, self-criticism, and numerous projects sort of ate my interest in posting for a while. Still, I thought that it would be nice to update you lovely people.

The main project I've been working on, gaming related, is a game that I'm calling Spectacular Science Stories. It is a raygun fantasy game, inspired by the likes of Northwest Smith, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers, but also Commando Cody, Star Wars, Captain Video, Barbarella, Firefly/Serenity, Krull, Dune, Foundation, Cowboy Bebop, Lensman, and the Blue Öyster Cult song "Veteran of the Psychic Wars", among other things. I've discussed it a bit before, but I thought it would be worthwhile to give a brief description again.

The basic rules will be derived from Swords & Wizardry: Whitebox. Players will have several choices for their characters, selecting a class and a background. The classes will include (for human characters) Adventurer, Psychic Warrior, and Scientist, and non-human options will include Robots and Aliens or Genelines (with their own class options, usually one or two per alien race or human geneline).

Adventurers are typical action heroes in the Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers mold. Psychic Warriors are, obviously, inspired by Lensmen and Jedi (and Blue Öyster Cult!). Scientists are researchers and inventors, along the lines of Dr. Zarkov or Dr. Huer. These define the basic approach of the character toward the game: the Scientist will have rules relating to discovering the secrets of the universe and building superscience devices, Psychic Warriors will be pointed toward engaging with the moral dimensions of the setting, while Adventurers will be given the normal hustling and murderhobo activities traditional to adventure games.

I will be underscoring the non-physical nature of hit points by four means: the use of a "Death & Dismemberment" table for injury, greatly increasing recovery of hit points, causing Psychic Warriors to spend hit points to power their psychic abilities, and making use of the Swords & Wizardry: Whitebox method of determining damage (that is, everything does 1d6, with a +1 or -1 for particularly large or small attacks; artillery is another story, of course).

I'm planning to give Robot characters an entirely different approach, where they improve only by spending money to buy better body components or software, and giving them a starting budget. This will allow those players who demand the ability to design their characters a route to go, and also play along with the idea that Robots aren't the same as living beings.

I don't know for sure which Aliens I want to include with the basic game, but I am considering Draug (sort-of wolf-bear-men that I found in the Swords & Wizardry Monster Book), Giff (from Spelljammer), Haashek (Lizard Men, though I am not wedded to that name; I might change it to Gorrans, from Starships & Spacemen 2nd edition), Koni (basically humanoid bunnies; Bunnies & Burrows!), Moonspiders (intelligent giant spiders), and Tabaxi. I don't know if six aliens is too many, though, and I'm not sure which ones to cut if I do end up having fewer. I'm pretty sure I want to keep the Haashek and the Moonspiders for sure, and probably the Koni. That would give a tough warrior race (like Dwarves), possibly a subtle and wise race (like Elves, if that's the direction I take Moonspiders), and a small sneaky race (Halflings). Moonspiders and Koni (as Bunrabs) originally were inspired by intelligent races in Swordbearer, but I like them a lot. In the long run, I want to take the Flanaess Sector idea for the Aliens of the setting.

The setting itself will be centered on a Galactic Republic that has stood for a thousand years. Despite living with its old ideals, it has become a corrupted system, with overweening bureaucrats and self-interested politicians running matters for their own benefit. The Temples of the Psychic Warriors have become increasingly out of touch with the needs and situations of the common people, though some Psychic Warriors still try to live up to the spiritual and moral imperatives of their calling. Rocket Rangers with their special battle suits rub shoulders with the Space Patrol and small-time (or big-time) hustlers. Aliens who have transcended the need for physical bodies help and hinder curious humans in distant worlds. Meanwhile, unknown horrors from beyond spacetime threaten to break through and dissolve the minds of humans in backward colonies off the main spacelanes. In this tottering interstellar community, the players scramble to make an honest, or more likely dishonest, Credit.

I have some ideas for spaceship combat which will hopefully give the feel of science fantasy space combat. Well, I plan to adapt one of the abstract space combat systems I've seen. The main slowing point is coming up with inventions for Scientists to develop, but I hope to have at least a couple dozen examples.

Science Fantasy Space Opera Game

One of the things I am working on lately (because apparently I don't want to have any spare time to rest) is a science fantasy space opera game based on S&W:Whitebox. I like the streamlined mechanics and simplified character system. I've been thinking that there should be three character classes available to players for human characters: Adventurer, Psychic Warrior, and Scientist. Adventurers will be the general sort of adventuring character. Psychic Warriors take a cue from Star Wars, Lensman, and Blue Öyster Cult. Scientists will be of the sort who want to learn about the universe and build new inventions (and there is absolutely no truth to the idea that any of them are "mad", that's just absurd; "mad" they call me - but it is not I who am mad, it is they, with their blind adherence to "convention" and "morality"!). I plan to adapt the invention rules from the original Space 1889 for them, changing the specifics to fit the setting.

After that, I want to allow robot characters, but they won't get experience points. Instead, they will spend money to buy better equipment for their bodies and software upgrades, or even backup copies and extra bodies. The idea is that robots don't actually "think" or "learn" as such, but act in a way that is very sophisticated otherwise.

Alien races will probably have 1 to 3 character classes available for each, and I'll probably include a couple in the base rules that are just variations of Adventurer. I also might include one alien race that is more complex, as a sort of example of how it can work. I don't know if I'm going to adapt some of the ideas I had for the Flanaess Sector to this, but it would be pretty cool to have at least one or two of the aliens be from D&D. Gulguthra are pretty alien and fit the tone, and I've always liked the Neogi/Umber Hulk pair (though, of course, I'd have to use one of the Umber Hulk simulacra out there, since that is one of the monsters that WotC has reserved to themselves; I like the Underground Goliath of Adventures Dark & Deep). Not sure if those are suitable for beginning players, though.

I'm going back and forth on adopting an idea from the WotC Star Wars game and having the Psychic Warriors power their abilities with Hit Points (and then have a second pool of Body Points based strictly on Con). Right now, I am leaning away from the idea and just using a regular pool of Psychic Power Points for Psychic abilities.

I'm also going back and forth on genetically modified beings. I think that, if I do include them, they'll just be another sort of alien species, game mechanically speaking. I kinda want to have a space nation that is all about bio-tech, full of gene-lines that act as a social stratification, and such. Not sure, though, how I would make it so that players wouldn't just choose a genetically "improved" gene-line as a matter of course. Maybe I should take a hint from Dragonquest on that.

I'll include a form of alignment, based on the idea of Light Side/Dark Side Force (actually, I plan to draw on the ideas of community power as opposed to individual power), but it will only be important at all to Psychic Warriors. I like that idea of a sort of "paladins", "fallen paladins", "anti-paladins", "redeemed paladins", and so on.

I want the setting to be centered around a Terran Federation of some sort, but one that is teetering on the brink of collapse, like Rome in the early 5th century or so. I have some ideas for surrounding stellar states that can act as the barbarians getting ready to overrun the Federation. I also think that it might be worthwhile to provide hints that could lead to the Star Wars storyline of an evil manipulator setting up conditions for the Federation to become an autocratic state, but that a Referee could ignore if she wanted.

I do want the Federation to be an increasingly militarized one, with police forces that set up checkpoints where they check people's papers at random, engage in warrantless searches in force, and so on, because that stuff can lead to fun adventure, I think.

Flanaess Sector

One of the campaigns that runs around in my head, that I'd like to run or better still play in, is what I tentatively call "Flanaess Sector". This is AD&D as a science fiction/science fantasy setting, though running it as a nearly hard-SF game (as "hard" as Traveller, say) could be very interesting indeed. Psionics and the Psionicist replace magic, technology is used instead of magic items, and the alien races are drawn from the more outré AD&D monsters. What it would need is a collection of new character classes, new technological items, starship rules, and perhaps trade and commerce rules (to handle Traveller style merchant campaigns, which are wonderfully flexible).

The aliens are mainly what I've given my thought to, little though it has been so far. I imagine an empire of Illithids, Ropers (which I imagine as being the first race that the Illithids were parasitic upon, drawing on the Urophion from The Illithiad) in a small sphere of resistance to the Illithids, Grell (in the Colonial Grell variety from Spelljammer), Neo-Otyugh, Neogi from Spelljammer with their Umber Hulk servants, maybe Xorn treated as a silicon-based life form, Flumphs, Ixitxachitl (suitably modified to not be based around Clerics, though they would make a great evil theocracy), Aboleths, and maybe a few others. I also greatly enjoy the Tyranids from Warhammer 40,000, so maybe those too. I don't have much love for humanoid aliens, but who knows? Maybe there are orcs or tabaxi among the stars.

The character classes might be based on the ones in Stars Without Number or maybe even Starships & Spacemen 2nd Edition, but rewritten to fit better with AD&D rather than B/X. Or, more likely, a set of interesting classes could be written from nearly whole cloth. I envision, in addition to the Psionicist I mentioned, Soldier, Pilot, Engineer (or Technician), maybe Merchant, Conman, and a few others. It being AD&D, there would be room for quite a few character class options. The classes in the old WotC Star Wars game might not be a bad set of choices.

Starships could be handled with any of a variety of systems. The aforementioned Starships & Spacemen and Stars Without Number are the obvious choices, but Terminal Space or some other OD&D-based SF supplement would be workable, as well. For that matter, Traveller's starships would work well, too. As an alternative, perhaps a system of Gates, similar to the ones in the Judges' Guild "Portals" trilogy, could connect the worlds. Perhaps not, though, as starships are half the reason to play SF instead of fantasy.

Here's a list of all the intelligent monsters from AD&D that I think would make good aliens: Aboleths, Beholders (but I don't want to use them, although there is a whole society built around them, especially in Spelljammer), Dopplegangers, Dragons (maybe, but if so, then especially the Blue or Black varieties), Flumphs, Formians (centaur-ants), Galeb Duhr (maybe, they're perhaps a little "magicky"), Grell (Colonial), Intellect Devourers, Ixitxachitl, Lizard Men, Mind Flayers, Myconids (there's also an ecology of mobile fungi for their homeworld, not to mention the special molds and slimes could be from their native environment, too), Neo-Otyughs, Ropers, Thri-kreen (mantis warriors), Treants (should they keep their ability to animate trees? I don't know; probably not, which is also a way to "fix" Galeb Duhr), Umber Hulks, and Xorn. Mi-go (if the DM has the first print Deities and Demigods) would fit perfectly into the setting.

As I said, I would prefer not using any humanoids (other than Lizard Men, Dopplegangers, and Myconids, perhaps), but if I did I would stick to the less common ones like Crabmen, Aarakocra (bird-men), Tabaxi (cat-men), Banderlogs, Grippli, and the like. Xill could be interesting, though they should probably have their ethereal powers and nature removed.

It might be interesting to include a "transcended" species that manifests as the faery creatures like Sprites, Pixies, and the like (there's a useful "ruling caste" for them to be found in Adventures Dark and Deep called Faeries). There's a race like that in the Star Fleet Universe, in the Omega Octant, called the Loriyill. Their starships have semi-magical effects like space fireballs and such.

Anyway, it seems like it could be a lot of fun, and leveraging the more science fiction/science fantasy elements of D&D seems like a good idea to me.