Showing posts sorted by relevance for query stars without number. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query stars without number. Sort by date Show all posts

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Top Games

Dice Bomb by ~j-burgess
Gnome Stew's and Frothsof's mention of the Top Seven meme got me thinking about my Top Seven's.  FAvorites are one thing, but ones I have actually played are another - and as a mostly DM, the playing list is of more interest.  I've stuck my toes in a lot of rpg pies since 1981, but where have I double dipped the most?  It's hard to quantify - I'll just have to guess.  I really just haven't played with very much consistency.

The Top Seven RPGs I've Played
  1. D&D 4e
  2. AD&D
  3. Champions 4e
  4. AD&D 2e
  5. Holmes D&D (or Molday Basic - they kind of blur)
  6. Gama World 1e
  7. Shadowrun (maybe tied with Risus)

That one in first place is kind of odd, but I guess it is true. I blame my participation in the RPGA for that. ;p

GMing is much easier, since I do it a lot more:

The Top Seven RPGs I've Run
  1. AD&D
  2. RoleMaster
  3. D&D 4e
  4. Stars Without Number
  5. GURPS Space
  6. Twilight: 2000
  7. Fantasy HERO

Funny how this doesn't represent what my Top Seven Favorites are. :)

- Ark




Friday, December 7, 2012

Redshirt: Dressed to Kill

Petty Officer 2nd Class Owlicious
This week's Stars Without Number adventure took the scouts their old stomping grounds, the 1950s planet of Tunguska.  They were just on a refueling mission, but they happened to notice a very high tech ship on the surface, and went off to investigate.

Crazy-Ass Tim and Adelaide's record of the adventure is at From the Ashes.  I recommend reading it, since it's good, and I won't be going over the particulars here.  Go ahead, I'll wait.

While I'm waiting, I'll point out the picture to the left.  The party was invited to a fancy dinner during the adventure.  Adelaide found a dress she wanted her character to wear online, so had the ship's clothes printer spit it out.  The original dress is over on Crazy-Ass Tim's page, so go over there if you haven't done so.  This is just my attempt at drawing a truly stunning dress.

Actually, all of the players went found clothes on their phones or laptops.  No, I don't have one of those phones.  I am happy with my decision to NOT have one of those phones.  But you know, it certainly adds an amazing dynamic to a tabletop game.

During the game, Adelaide even went and dug up pictures of what she thought the high tech spaceship looked like.  Heck.  They were perfect.  And while taking a gander, I saw a name on the web page that was sooo much better than the name I had created for the main NPC, that I changed it then and there.

Now, we've used people's phones to pull up a name we couldn't remember, or a picture of something I'm describing that someone just can't quite get.  but it does seem to be growing into a bigger part of our lives, even around my table, a place which normally has had, at it's height, a mechanical pencil for its technological apex.

The use of gaming technology on Wednesday culminated in a completely spontaneous full length  Bollywood dance routine by Crazy-Ass Tim's character Dr. Ramapudi and a blonde administrative assistant named Yvonne that he had become smitten with - including a dance track on the laptop and holographic backup dancers in the star ship.

It reminded my a heck of a lot of the Bollywood movie Marigold.  Yes, you probably don't have enough Bollywood in your life.  Marigold is a fine entry point for the uninitiated to start.

I'm still reeling from the fact that in my gritty, character chewing  horror show of a sci-fi game that a romantic music and dance production spring up out of thin air.  But really, I guess I shouldn't expect anything less. :)

I don't have to do anything to keep them amused at all.  In fact, they amuse me far more.

- Ark

Saturday, November 17, 2012

SWN NPC Profile: Admiral Beringer

Kaye wanted to know some things about the commander in charge of the Void Expeditionary Force in the Redshirt Stars Without Number game.  That would be Admiral Beringer.  He looks and talks just like General Beringer in the movie Wargames.  Well, as so far as I can imitate Barry Corbin, of course.

McAllen Beringer was born in 3143 CE and raised on the wild island continent of Garuda on Aquila, where his father was a park ranger at the Ganymede National Wildlife Preserve.  He grew up learning to ride horses and the Momma-Long-Legs, a native pack animal, while acting as a tour guide through the region's varied biomes.  He was very involved in helping his father to enforce the park's anti-poaching regulations, tracking and capturing several illegal hunters during his summer months off from school.  He moved to the Aerie, the capital of Aquila Prime, during his last year of high school, and joined the Reserve Officers Training Corp.  After graduation he joined the Aquila Space Navy and went to the Naval Academy on Eagle Eye Station, in orbit above Aquila.

Beringer developed an aptitude for recognizing patterns in data and entered the Communications Corp.  He was assigned to the AUS Hummingbird, a patrol boat in the Ptolemy Wilds that monitored activity in the Atlas system.  He participated in several anti-pirate actions, until the Hummingbird was appropriated by the Naval Intelligence Division for espionage purposes.  The boat did rim dives into the Skorpios held Novikov and Smirnova systems.

This led to the Novikov Incident of 3164, in which two Skorpios patrol boats detected and fired upon the Hummingbird.  The Aquila ship was crippled, but as the Hummingbird was being boarded, the crew killed the Skorpios marines and boarded the enemy ship instead.  Lt. Beringer successfully took over the Skorpios patrol boat's computers, destroyed the Hummingbird with the boat's weapons, and helped the pilot jump the boat safely to Atlas before the other patrol craft could react.  The three survivors were given commendations and Beringer was permanently assigned to the Naval Intelligence Division.

Beringer was then assigned to the Grendel, a free merchant ship secretly owned by the Aquila Navy.  The Grendel plied the spaceways along the Skorpios Cluster, collecting data on ship movements, the construction of the battle station Joseph Stalin around Skorpios held Corvus, and the Skorpios invasion of the Apotelesmatika system.  The latter part of his tour involved running guns to the Almagest rebellion.

He was promoted to Lieutenant Commander on his second tour and took control of the Grendel, continuing to gather intelligence data deep within the Skorpios Empire.  Most of that time was spent setting up a covert base on Smirnova and creating the Smirnova-Harmonics-Almagest Railroad, helping refugees from the war to escape, and sending munitions and supplies to the front. His last official action as an undercover intelligence officer was the sabotage and destruction of the battle station Joseph Stalin around Corvus, which was the first act of the Annihilation War.  The Grendel was destroyed in the escape attempt, and Beringer spent a year on the surface of Corvus, fleeing from Skorpios patrols and radioing troop emplacement data until he could be extracted after the Aquila fleet secured the system.  During his stay, he helped to organize the Witches of Corvus, an indigenous psychic contingent, against Skorpios troops, and they used their powers to help drive the Skorpios away from the planet.

He was then promoted to Commander and put in charge of the Brimstone, a Frigate class warship that was used for long distance intelligence gathering in the Agro system.  Beringer helped lay the groundwork for the Argo Invasion three years later, and then repeated the job six years later with the invasion of Belinski in 3180.  After the front was stabilized, he was promoted to Captain and forcibly assigned a desk job by the Naval Intelligence Division.  Beringer disliked the sedentary life, but did his job as ordered.

With a peace treaty signed in 3182, he worked quietly for Naval Intelligence Division, organizing the intelligence networks.  Over the years, he noticed patterns of movement within the Skorpios Empire and the wilds that disturbed him.  He wrote many reports on what was called the 'System Independence' movement within the Wilds, but his warnings were ignored.  He predicted the formation of the Alliance of Independent States five years before it happened.  But the people of Aquila were tired of war, the Navy lost funding, and complacency set in.

The Peace Movement on Aquila grew so strong that Belinski, then Argo, and finally Corvus were handed back to the Skorpios Empire.  Commodore Beringer had predicted that failure in judgment as well.  He worked hard to create intelligence network throughout the three systems that would survive the hand-over.  Beringer decided to lay low during the Wild Systems independence movement and fallout.  A number of military leaders resigned as Aquila lost the five additional systems in the bloodless coup known as the Alliance of Independent systems. 

In 3197, the Muldoon-Shaw administration was voted into power on Aquila.  One of President General Muldoon's first acts was to promote Beringer, the man who had predicted the loss of eight systems, to Admiral and put him in charge of the newly formed Special Projects Division.  The intent of the Special Projects Division was to, at a minimum, rebalance the strategic power in the Ptomemy sector in favor of Aquila, and ultimately, to complete regime change in the Skorpios Empire.

While marooned on Corvus, Beringer had heard tales of undiscovered caches of military hardware, but could never get any of the top brass interested in the rumors.  With his new authority, he sent covert operatives to Corvus and discovered the rumored bunkers deep underground.  The only problem was that there was no way to covertly reach the bunkers and extract the goodies inside.  

Reluctantly, President General Muldoon ordered a full strike on Corvus, at the request of Beringer.  Caught by surprise, the Skorpios Empire fled to protect the new shipyards at Argos.  With Corvus secured, Beringer and his people located the bunkers and extracted the pretech weaponry.  Regretfully, there wasn't much, but there were enough remaining components to construct a jump-4 spacecraft.  Thus began the Void Expeditionary Force - which officially began when Perimeter Station Nine was destroyed and the AUS Reprieve escaped to Three Sisters.

Admiral Berenger has focused the Special Projects Division on extracting lost technology from the Void sectors.  Once Beachhead Base was established in the Three Sisters system, and additional jump-4 transportation secured, Beringer moved his operations into the Void itself.  He understands that Skorpios has military superiority, better intelligence networks, and more wealth.  Much of the government, and even the military, does not understand how dire the situation is.  Beringer has the weight of the union on his shoulders.

- Ark

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

My Little Star Catalog

Is the French Arm giving the American Arm the finger?
I remember really digging the original Traveller's subsector maps until I got to the Solomani supplement.  It became all too obvious that Traveller's space was two dimensional and just horribly, horrible wrong.  Of course, players never cared, but it bugged the heck out of me.

Star Frontiers wasn't any better, so I remapped THAT universe into 3D - just because.

Then Traveller: 2300 came out, containing a glorious map of the REAL local space.  Besides the map, it came with a distilled version of Gliese Near Star Catalog - version 2 - in a nifty little booklet.  I sat and mapped stars for days with that booklet, a pencil, and graph paper.  I loved it, and that booklet stayed with me much longer than the game ever did.

In the 90s, I found digitized versions of the Gliese Catalog and others - including the Yale Bright Star Catalog.  There was a very nifty BBS in North Texas back then run by amateur astronomers - and it was glorious.  There was a simple spreadsheet program in the Microsoft Works package, and I set about trying to map the galaxy.

Hipparchos parallax - accurate to ONLY 1600 light years.
Running the numbers, I realized Douglas Adams was right.  Space is fucking huge.  Light travels at a snail's pace.  And, for all their nifty telescopes and sciency shit, astronomers are just guessing at the distances of the stars.  BIG guesses.  Most of the stars that we can see are very, very local - in galactic terms.

A much more comprehensive survey came out - the Hipparcos Catalog.  It was so big my computer couldn't grok it.  I sighed and stepped away from star mapping for a while.

By the time I had regained my interest and could afford a faster computer, I ran into Winchell Chung's web page.  Beside's defining the look and feel of Steve Jackson's OGRE back in the mid 1970s, Winchell Chung is also a star mapping freak of the highest caliber. He's got so much about star mapping on his site - it boggles the mind.  Because of his work in this field, he remains one of my favorite people in the universe - even though I've never communicated with him.  Talk about stalky. :)

So much of the work was already done for me on the site that, well, I got lazy.  Any time I'd want to know information - distances - whatnot - I'd just hit the site.  But this year - after delving back into GURPS, I got hungry for star mapping again - BIG star mapping.  It dawned on me that I have been doing database work as a career for almost 20 years now, slicing and dicing huge wads of data in the blink of an eye.  The stellar data, by comparison to bank transactions, is relatively small.  So I pulled in the data and it was glorious fun.

I present to you, without further ado, the Arkhein Derived Catalog (Simplified.)  Please note, this data is not accurate enough for astrogation purposes.  Black holes are not charted.  Your mileage may vary.

ArkheinDerivedCatalogSimplified.csv contains 18,729 star systems within a 135 parsec cube centered on Sol.  It is derived from The HYG Database (a dataset derived from Hipparcos, Yale, and Gliese,) the HabCat Dataset (from Jill Tarter and Margaret Turnbull - a list of systems that might contain a habitable planet) and data from the NASA Exoplanet Archive as of September 22, 2013.

This simplified version I'm putting out for public comsumption is rather slim - with the following columns:

ADCID Arkhein Catalog Derived ID # for my own tracking.
HIP The Hipparcos Catalog Number.
CommonName Of all the names of the system, my own, personal favorite.
Distance In parsecs from Sol.
AbsMag A sciencey brightness thingy.
Spectrum The Hertzsprung-Russell classification.
ColorIndex A sceincey color thingy.
Xg Cartesian coordinates based on a Galactic orientation.
Yg Cartesian coordinates based on a Galactic orientation.
Zg Cartesian coordinates based on a Galactic orientation.
HAB SETI watch candidae per Tarter/Turnbull.
pl_hostname System name per NASA Exoplanet Archive.
pl_pnum Number of verified exoplanets, per NASA.

Part of the reasoning behind the cubic shape of the data is to organize the stars into cubes.  Though not in the simplified dataset, I have everything in this 135 parsec wide cube sliced up, identified, and named.  I may publicize this later, as I tried to make it as neutral as possible, naming each unit after the brightest star in the area.

The hierarchy is as follows:

Width (parsecs) Cubic Parsecs Comprised of . . .
Subsector 5 125
Sector 15 3375 27 Subsectors
Region 45 91125 27 Sectors

Thus, the 135 parsec area is made up of 27 Regions, 729 Sectors, and 19,683 Subsectors.  A huge amount of space, yes, but easily slice and diced with a database.

The naming convention of the areas results in Sol being located in . . .

Subsector: Sirius
Sector: Vega
Region: Aldebaran

. . . which seems pretty neat to me.

I've got some ad hoc calculations to randomly (but logically) determine human habitable systems from all of this data.  I get about 520 planets with complex life on them out of the entire area.  A lot more planets with single cell life, but those are far less interesting. :)

So there it is - my life's work.  Yay.  It will all go toward a GURPS: Space campaign one day.  Please let me know if you have any questions or are interested in seeing any of the additional data.

- Ark

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Redshirts: Race to the Reprieve!

The new Stars Without Number campaign kicked off last Wednesday, with six players showing up at the FLGS to participate.  While Kaye had already used the point buy system to create his AI character, everyone else sat down and generated their PCs from scratch with rolls of the dice, 3d6 straight down the line.  It's not such a big deal since you characters get to put a 14 in one of their class' prime requisites, so they don't completely suck.

I was feeling particularly menace-ful that day, so I had everyone roll their hit points, rather that have them start off at max for first level.  Well, Felipe rolled a 1, so I let him re-roll   He got a 2.  Merwyn got another 2.  Adelaide got a 3.  It just wasn't looking good for anyone.

The game began with the characters groggily waking up from medical experiments in Infirmary 47 aboard Perimeter Station Nine.  They were all in hospital gowns and somewhat disoriented, but remembered that they were the last of the scouts to be going through cold sleep checkups before the mission began.  Doctor Bengani and Nurse Tendai were looking after them.  Their ship was far away in Hangar 18, being prepped for launch.

That's when the explosions happened.

Nurse Tendai stuck her head out into the hall and suddenly slumped to the ground, headless.

"The nurse is dead.  The doctor is freaking out.  You hear more explosions and gunfire.  The draught you feel up the slit in your hospital gown makes you uncomfortably aware that you are bare-assed and weaponless.  What do you do?"
Feel free to click for a bigger picture.

I love my job.

Well, of course they freaked out as well, trying to understand the situation and wanting to know what they needed to do and where they needed to go.

Before the game I had sketched out the space station and decided to give areas names so that it would be easier to describe to the players.  That sketch is over there to the right.  I divided the station up concentrically into the outer ring, the inner ring, and the hub, then sliced the whole thing up into Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta Quadrants.  There were four spars, which were the standard areas for people and freight to move through, as well as four spokes, which were primarily for structural strength  but also acted as conduits for pipes, cables, etc.

I explained the layout and that they were in the outer rim of the Delta Quadrant, mid decks, and needed to get to their ship in Hanger 18.  (I don't think any of them got those references, but that's okay - I'm really just entertaining myself.)  I was rather amazed at how fast they took to the description and how they began using the terminology as they made their battle plans.

Lt. McManus pulled up schematics of the station and found a nearby armory.  Petty Officer Owlicious poked her head out the door (like the ill-fated nurse) and saw rubble and twisted metal down the corridor to the right, with a hole in the ceiling.  Hidden in the rubble was a laser rifle wielding man in armor with scorpions emblazoned on it.

Aha!  A soldier of the Skorpios Empire.  The bad guys must have found out about the Reprieve and had decided to act against it.  Spaceman XC-OM (the android) ran out after the armored soldier, dove at him, and tripped over the rubble.  Oops.

Spaceman Kek rushed out in his beautifully flower patterned hospital gown and grappled the heavily armored Skorpios soldier.  Thus ensued a bizarrely homoerotic wrestling match.

With things getting all Greco-Roman, the rest of the scouts hustled down the hallway to the nearest armory and began to grab weapons.  Another Skorpios soldier from the level began shooting at Spaceman Kek through the hole in the ceiling and hit him.

The newly armed scouts, with Petty Officer Loranzo, then jumped out from the armory and blasted the soldiers to bits.  Lt. McManus dug through the local Net and found the CCTV feeds.  Investigation showed Skorpios soldiers marching down the Alpha Spar towards the Hub, and twisted metal being all that remained of the Delta Spar between the Outer and Inner Rings.

Hacking away, Lt McManus took control over the environmental systems in the Delta Spar and vented the atmosphere   This did not deter the soldier as they were in EVA capable armor.  The party then discussed using the maintenance conduits in the Alpha-Delta spoke, but instead decided to perform their own EVA through what was left of the Delta Spar.

Past a few bulkheads, Petty Officer Owlicious found a Gravitation Propulsion Manned Maneuverability Unit, which I like to call a Grav Ski-Doo.  She mounted it while everyone else connected tether lines, and away they flew through the airless void of twisted metal through what had once been the Delta Spar.  While en route to the Inner Ring, a pair of soldiers having lunch on an exposed beam felt it would be funny to snipe at them.

The return fire from Lt. Five's heavy machine gun make short work of the soldiers, but the recoil in zero G almost smashed the whole party into the incredibly sharp, twisted wreckage - but - yanno - TPKs are just part of the adventure, right?  Well, Petty Officer Owlicious' piloting skills saved the day - but I would have other chances.

While Spaceman XC-OM was using his blowtorch to open up the Inner Ring airlock, the party noticed a sizable enemy fleet battling their own defenses, and saw that a large troop transport was approaching.  Lt. McMannus began to hack the Transport's Wi-Fi in order to take control of the ship.  Regretfully, the ship's crew noticed and fighter squadron was dispatched to bombard the party's position.

Lots of shrapnel later, and Lt. Five's colon was exposed to the vacuum of space and decided to take a little EVA of it's own.  The party busted into the Ring proper, carrying the poor Lt. Five, and got him to Infirmary 34, where a Happy Brand Med-Bot-1000 cheerfully stitched the officer up.

Eventually they made it to the hub and Petty Officer Owlicious hot-wired a fork lift and the party raced off to   Hangar 18.  They went to the control room and found Drago there.  Drago was a big, muscular, mean, cigar smoking vat born Skorpios soldier ready to stomp the PCs into tomorrow evening.

However, much like that scene in Indiana Jones, they all opened fire, shredding him to pieces.  In the control room, they could see down into the hangar.  Twenty soldiers were inside, all around the Reprieve.  They were operating a laser drill, trying to carefully bore their way into the players ride.

Hatching a plan, they secretly contacted the crew of the Reprieve, left Spaceman XC-OM in the control room to coordinate, boarded the forklift, and charged the twenty soldiers.

It was a bloody and short battle, aided by the fact that the crew of the ship ignited their thrusters, charring many of the soldiers to cinders.  However, in order to pull it off, the safety clamps had to be removed and the hanger doors open.  The crew of the ship decided to leave without securing their wayward scouts.  Luckily, the party engaged the forklift's magnet, which slammed and locked it against the outside of the Reprieve.

Spaceman XC-OM tried valiantly to jump from the control room to the ship before it left.  Regretfully, he missed, was hit by the backwash from the engines, and was slammed into the hangar wall, shattering into a million pieces.

So, imagine this - a slightly damaged an wobbly experimental spacecraft racing through the area where two naval fleets are trying to pummel one another, dodging rockets, explosions, shrapnel from blown up spacecraft, and an occasional screaming, spaceshipless fighter pilot on fire.  And image a forklift magnetized to the side of that spacecraft, with five screaming scouts hanging on for dear life, hoping that their tethers are not shredded by the G forces.

That kind of thing makes players really nervous. :)

Eventually they got inside the ship, where Lt. Mcmanus beat the first Lieutenant he saw down to zero hit point.  Then the ship's marines forced the scouts into jump seats, and the Reprieve rode out of Dodge of a metadimensional spike.

In the end, I had killed one character and reduced everyone else to 1 hit point, or had hit them so hard they needed Lazarus patches to stay alive.  So, all in all, a good little short intro adventure, to get the players used to what will be happening on a weekly basis.  Nine people want to play now, so I'll try to accommodate.  Fun - no?

- Ark