The D&D Blog Hop last month was interesting. it helped me think over my gaming career. But it's time to move on. Our GURPS Horror Noir game reached a pause point after the group brought down a vampire in Transylvania, and we are off to new skies.
New skies. New atmospheres. Distant atmospheres.
So, we'll be kicking off the GURPS sci-fi campaign Distant Atmospheres soon. The idea is to try to take everything I like about Traveller, Star Frontiers, 2300AD, Stars Without Number, Mass Effect, Lexx, Ghost In the Shell, and Revelation Space, pop in all into a GURPS blender, and see what happens.
In the Distant Atmospheres universe, humans are three centuries into exploring and colonizing their local neighborhood of space. While they have a high level of technology, going faster than light is beyond their abilities. That's where the Reachers come in.
The Reachers are intelligent creatures that can bend the fabric of space time enough to break off a piece and move it around, simulating faster than light travel without actually moving themselves anywhere. It's clear that the Reachers did not evolve this way, but were manufactured by some species long ago whom they do not remember.
Luckily for humans, the Reachers enjoy interstellar travel, can shift around their internal organs to create livable compartments, and they can grow to huge proportions. They can't actually travel in space in their 'natural' state, but humans have learned to augment the Reachers to survive in a vacuum and exceed the speed of light, and perform various feats of heavy lifting and hauling.
To the Reachers, this is all just good fun. They also create such a powerful magnetic field around their body that any human inside a Reacher ship is subjected to a constant MRI in which the Reacher can read their every single thought. It's really, really hard to bluff a Reacher in a card game. Well, unless you are wearing a tin-foil hat.
Originally I thought that the Reachers might look like space whales or something, but after a few drawing they became more squid like. The savvy player might be reminded of Cthullu, or some other non-euclidean nightmare. And to those accusations, this GM can only shrug and grin.
- Ark
Showing posts sorted by date for query stars without number. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query stars without number. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
My Little Star Catalog
![]() |
| Is the French Arm giving the American Arm the finger? |
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. |
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:
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
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, January 29, 2013
Traveller Skill Matrix
Below is a skill matrix for the current characters in the Traveller campaign - in the same format as I had set up in the past for Stars Without Number.
There are a lot more skills in Traveller, though, creating quite a list. That has it's positives and negatives. But since, typically, the player does not have to agonize over which skills to pick - they come out pretty randomly in character creation - it's not too bad.
- Ark
There are a lot more skills in Traveller, though, creating quite a list. That has it's positives and negatives. But since, typically, the player does not have to agonize over which skills to pick - they come out pretty randomly in character creation - it's not too bad.
| Player | Tim | Adel | Merwyn | Kaye | The Boy |
| Name | Elias | Neva | John | Guenhwyvar | Cade |
| Strength | 6 | 3 | 4 |
F
|
7 |
| Dexterity | 6 |
B
|
A
|
6 |
A
|
| Endurance | 6 | 6 | 4 |
C
|
6 |
| Intelligence | 9 |
E
|
8 | 7 | 9 |
| Education |
B
|
8 | 6 | 6 | 6 |
| Social |
D
|
D
|
6 | 6 | 5 |
| Admin | 0 | - | - | 1 | - |
| Advocate | 0 | - | 0 | - | - |
| Animals | - | - | - | - | - |
| Animals (Farming) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Animals (Riding) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Animals (Training) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Animals (Veterinary) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Art | 0 | - | - | - | - |
| Art (Acting) | - | 1 | - | - | - |
| Art (Dance) | - | 1 | - | - | - |
| Art (Holography) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Art (Instrument) | - | 4 | - | - | - |
| Art (Sculpting) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Art (Writing) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Astrogation | 1 | - | - | - | - |
| Athletics | - | 0 | 0 | 0 | - |
| Athletics (Co-ordination) | - | - | - | - | 2 |
| Athletics (Endurance) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Athletics (Flying) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Athletics (Strength) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Battle Dress | - | - | - | 1 | - |
| Broker | - | - | - | - | 3 |
| Carouse | 3 | 3 | 0 | - | - |
| Comms | 0 | 0 | - | 1 | - |
| Computers | - | - | 0 | - | 0 |
| Deception | 3 | 1 | 0 | - | 0 |
| Diplomat | 0 | - | - | - | - |
| Drive | - | - | - | 0 | - |
| Drive (Mole) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Drive (Tracked) | - | - | 1 | - | - |
| Drive (Wheeled) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Engineer | - | - | - | - | - |
| Engineer (Electronics) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Engineer (J-Drive) | - | - | 1 | - | - |
| Engineer (Life Support) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Engineer (M-Drive) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Engineer (Power) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Explosives | - | - | - | - | - |
| Flyer | 0 | - | - | - | - |
| Flyer (Grav) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Flyer (Rotor) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Flyer (Wing) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Gambler | - | - | - | 0 | 1 |
| Gun Combat | - | - | - | - | - |
| Gun Combat (EnergyPistol) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Gun Combat (Energy Rifle) | - | - | - | 1 | - |
| Gun Combat (Shotgun) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Gun Combat (Slug Pistol) | - | - | 4 | - | 1 |
| Gun Combat (Slug Rifle) | - | - | - | 2 | - |
| Gunner | - | - | 0 | - | - |
| Gunner (Capital Weapons) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Gunner (Ortillery) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Gunner (Screens) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Gunner (Turrets) | - | - | - | - | 1 |
| Heavy Weapons | - | - | - | 0 | - |
| Heavy Weapons (Field Artillery) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Heavy Weapons (Launchers) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Heavy Weapons (Man Portable Artillery) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Investigate | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Jack of All Trades | 1 | - | - | - | - |
| Language | 0 | - | - | 0 | 0 |
| Language (Anglic) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Language (Aslan) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Language (Oynprith) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Language (Vilani) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Language (Zdetl) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Leadership | - | - | - | 1 | - |
| Life Sciences | - | - | - | - | - |
| Life Sciences (Biology) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Life Sciences (Cybernetics) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Life Sciences (Genetics) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Life Sciences (Psionicology) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Mechanic | - | - | 1 | - | - |
| Medic | - | - | - | - | - |
| Melee | 0 | - | 0 | - | 0 |
| Melee (Blade) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Melee (Bludgeon) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Melee (Natural Weapons) | - | - | - | 2 | - |
| Melee (Unarmed Combat) | - | - | - | 1 | - |
| Navigation | - | - | - | - | - |
| Persuade | 3 | 1 | 1 | - | 0 |
| Physical Sciences | - | - | - | - | - |
| Physical Sciences(Chemistry) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Physical Sciences(Electronics) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Physical Sciences (Physics) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Pilot | - | - | - | - | - |
| Pilot (Capital Ships) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Pilot (Small Craft) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Pilot (Spacecraft) | 1 | - | - | - | 1 |
| Recon | - | - | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Remote Operations | - | - | - | - | 0 |
| Seafarer | - | - | - | - | - |
| Seafarer (Motorboats) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Seafarer (Ocean Ships) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Seafarer (Sail) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Seafarer (Submarine) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Sensors | - | - | - | 1 | - |
| Social Sciences | 0 | - | - | - | - |
| Social Sciences (Archeology) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Social Sciences (Economics) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Social Sciences (History) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Social Sciences (Linguistics) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Social Sciences (Philosophy) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Social Sciences (Psychology) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Social Sciences(Sophontology) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Space Sciences | - | - | - | - | - |
| Space Sciences (Planetology) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Space Sciences (Robotics) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Space Sciences (Xenology) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Stealth | - | - | 1 | - | 1 |
| Steward | - | 2 | 1 | - | - |
| Streetwise | 1 | 0 | 1 | - | 3 |
| Survival | - | - | - | - | - |
| Tactics | - | - | - | - | - |
| Tactics (Military Tactics) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Tactics (Naval Tactics) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Trade | - | - | - | 0 | - |
| Trade (Biologicals) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Trade (Civil Engineering) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Trade (Hydroponics) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Trade (Polymers) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Trade (Space Construction) | - | - | - | - | - |
| Vacc Suit | - | - | - | 0 | - |
| Zero-G | - | - | - | - | 0 |
- Ark
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Death of a Campaign
Redshirts died this week.
The Stars Without Numbers campaign had a pretty good run. I had designed it as an FLGS episodic drop-in pick-up game with a cast of freeze dried, replaceable PCs scouting the unknown horrors of my mind. It morphed into something quite different.
The first oddity was PEOPLE KEPT ON COMING. I finally had to cap the game at nine players. That's enough people in a room yelling at me.
Second, instead of a pick-up game, our schedule became very specifically timed, rotating around the players INSTEAD of me.
Third - we were kicked out of the FLGS by the Chess Club.
Instead, we played every week at Merwyn's house. He has a large table. That table wasn't quite big enough so another table had to be attached. Something like a kiddie table at Thanksgiving.
So what the hell happened - you ask.
Well, I read Kevin Crawford's Stars Without Number supplement Scavenger Fleets. It's a great, free supplement detailing the bands of nomadic star-farers who dig through the trash of the previous civilization.
I got to thinking - what if one of these Scavenger Fleets got too big for its britches? What if they stopped just scavenging dead planets, and began to *harvest* living ones.
Thus, the RECTIFIERS were born. The Rectifier Fleet was comprised of 70+ ships, their tech level passed any in the area, and their habit of implanting all of their 'recruits' with wi-fi brain pain technology made their sufficiently Borg like to scare anyone who met them.
I figured I had a pretty good bag of villains to harass the freeze-dried scouts.
The Redshirts were passing through a system they used 'space highway' when they stumbled on the fleet. Sensors indicated that the sleepy little planet they knew as Tunguska was being invaded, and the gas giants in the area were under lock-down.
I figured . . . well - you know what happens. A DM goes through every thing they could think that would happen and plans accordingly. Players always figure a way around all of that, though.
I made it clear that these dudes were billy-bad-asses and not to be messed with. The mission was clear - find a way to refuel, jump the hell away, and warn the boys back home. Since the CO position was being filled by Crazy-Ass Tim who was playing Professor Ramaputi - a guy who dislikes violence and wants to SCIENCE everything - I figured we were in for some interesting stealth operations.
Yeah, right.
They see a Rectifier Frigate nearby, but are cloaking really well, so it doesn't see them. Rather than GTFO, they teleport a mirror outside of the ship and start bouncing LIDAR communications off of it, taunting the Frigate.
It went downhill from there.
It their little stealth shuttle they . . . they attacked the frigate. They had pulled off ship assaults before. Two - if I remember correctly. But those assaults had always been against ships with much crappier tech.
Most of the PCs got to the hull of the Rectifier Frigate, while Ramaputi and two psychics did a halfway planned, halfway accidental maneuver where they simultaneously rammed the shuttle into the Frigate at full speed and smashed the hull with Telekenetic Ram. At the same time, Merwyn's character faked out the ship's AI and nabbed controlled of the jump drive and maneuvering systems.
They blew a hole into the Frigate. Nice going, yes. But the other ships in the area were closing fast. The crew of the Frigate was still alive and not in a great mood, however.
Meryn decided that, since he was in control of the jump drives - that they should jump the Frigate to another star system and deal with the crew later. However, after a few minutes of paper-shuffling - it became horrible apparent that not a single member of the party had the Navigation skill to jump the ship.
At that point, Merwyn decided to accelerate to ramming speed and slam the Frigate into the nearest Cruiser.
Yeah.
The party found life pods to evacuate. However, they were easily picked up by the Rectifiers.
Hmm.
Rather than role-play their lives as mind-slaves of the Rectifier Fleet, we decided to leave it there and let the Redshirts campaign sail off into the horizon, smoke billowing from the water-borne funeral pyre.
I would guess that the following events would happen:
- Capture.
- Torture.
- Integration.
- And then the Rectifier Fleet - with full knowledge of the Aquila Union now, would commence an invasion and the player characters would be a party to the destruction of their own civilization.
Good times, good times.
The Boy, however, is currently writing a story in which the characters escape the Rectifiers and everybody wins. I am eagerly waiting to read that story, since it sounds a heck of a lot more upbeat then what I charted out above.
So, I salute the nine players of the Redshirts campaign for valiantly putting up with all of the horrific things that I threw at their poor, ill-equipped characters - and for the most part surviving. But the campaign was named Redshirts - so it was really just a matter of time. :)
- Ark
Friday, January 18, 2013
Player Portraits: Adelaide
Adelaide has been playing with the group for a while now - Labyrinth Lord, Stars Without Number, and now Traveller. She's typically the most level headed of the group - not poking any great big red buttons that say "DON'T POKE ME" and ducking behind something large and heavy when the rest of the party does something stupid. Her sanity seems to be wearing off, however. In Traveller, she's playing an interstellar pop-star who has a habit of pissing off Planetary Contessas for fun. Obviously, Adelaide has been hanging around the wrong people. :)
I've been working diligently to learn some new drawing techniques over the last few month. I've been unhappy with my progress, but this one of Adelaide didn't come out too bad.
- Ark
I've been working diligently to learn some new drawing techniques over the last few month. I've been unhappy with my progress, but this one of Adelaide didn't come out too bad.
- Ark
Friday, December 28, 2012
Christmas Swag - RPGs I'll Never Play
I normally ask for RPGs that I intend on playing at some point. I think I've just given up and, this time around, asked for games that I want, but would never buy since I don't think I'll ever get around to playing them.
This year, I received Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, and Mongoose's Traveller: Core Rule Book.
Over the years, I think I've probably played five percent of the RPGs I've own. That's a wild guess, but it seems about right. It used to be finding players was the biggest issue. Now the issue is time. Life is funny.
Traveller was one of those games I that I was super excited about when I discovered it in 1981 - soon after my discoverer of Dungeons and Dragons. I ran a few adventures, but the players were far more interested in fantasy, and I think my ability to pull of sci-fi wasn't as great at the time. My attempts later with Star Frontiers were a much bigger hit.
That didn't stop me from continuing to buy Traveller, Traveller: 2300, MegaTraveller, and Traveller: New Era products. I'd sit around and make characters, design starships, and populate stellar subsectors. All my copies disappeared in various moves and book cullings over the years. Then I found Stars Without Number, which has been filling my sci-fi RPG void very well.
Except . . . SWN is extremely abstract about a lot of things, including world creation and starship building - two of my favorite parts of Traveller. During play, the abstract system is wonderful for creating scenarios and having a great ship battle in a short amount of time. But when I'm sitting around, thinking about potential scenario or trying to get a fix on what a shuttle actually looks like and how combat would flow inside, I reach for the detail of Traveller - which just isn't there.
Of course, I make it up as I go along and everything is okay. But sometime I just want some structure - and Traveller was all about structure. I picked up a battered copy of the MegaTraveller Referee's Guide to try to stitch ship building in - but it just wasn't flowing well. This Mongoose edition of the game, while similar, appears to be a much better match.
Reading through the Traveller book has been great fun. It's very much like Classic, with adjustments that I really like. I've sat down and made some characters even. It's great for that. Actually, I think this version is the best organized I've seen to date. It makes me even want to run the game. The big issue for me - the kicker - is lack of advancement. While I don't really care - DMing advancing or static characters doesn't seem to be a problem - I think the players would mind. They are so . . . accustomed . . . to gaining levels an/or skills that static characters would probably freak them the hell out and bore them - or frustrate them - to tears.
But part of me says that they maybe NEED that. Traveller is supposed to take away a big part of meta-gaming by focusing the players on what their character are doing NOW, as opposed to how they should shuffle points or prepare for the next level and worry about that upcoming HP roll. It gives them a character - one they didn't exactly expect - and says PLAY THIS NOW!
I'd like to see that in action one day in a longer campaign. How would it change the player's attitudes? Oh well. I don't see it happening. But I will be stealing the ship stuff and grafting it into my SWN game - assuming that I have the LEET SKILLS to do so.
Okay, I've probably talked enough about Traveller. Now, on to Doctor Who!
I was surprised as hell when I got Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space. It's a box. It's a heavy box. Heavy. It's crammed packed with shit. Pretty shit.
There is a quick start guide, a player's book, referee's book, adventure book, and all sorts of extra thick card-stock character sheets, punch-out equipment cards, and little XP token things. Oh, and there are these awesome Doctor Who dice. Everything is nice and colorful and very pretty.
Okay, I thought, nice try, guys. You spat out a pretty looking game designed by the BBC marketing department to increase the reach of the Doctor Who 'brand.'
Then I began to dig into the books, and was surprised there there looks to be an actual game here - a game designed by people who might know what they are doing.
In the beginning of the players book, it tells a story about Rory - one of the characters (well, WAS one,) of the TV show. The little story involves huge and strange shaped objects going missing all over the universe, and the TARDIS crew trying to track them down. The shapes were odd - tetrahedrons, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, icosahedrons, an the like. Turns out a race of giants was stealing these huge objects to play a role playing game.
Okay, yeah, it was stupid. Doctor Who is often stupid. But it's stupid for a reason, and if you just lay back and relax and go with it, the stupid turns into cool. And that was cool. Like bow-ties and fezzes. And that little story was a nod back in time to the beginning, to Dungeons & Dragons. The game doesn't even use all those dice. It just uses the d6. But they chose to mention the dice anyway. And that tells me that the designers are MY KIND OF PEOPLE.
I have a lot more to read, but the base game appears very cool. You can make whichever character you like - a rival Timelord or a street sweeper or Goldie Hawn circa 1968. The mechanics are basically a 2d6 point by system, like Traveller made love to Champions-lite or something. It's simple, with various levels of success or failure. Nothing innovative here - just comfortable.
Actually, the box, the books, the feel . . . it's all comfortable. Opening it gave me a similar feel to that of opening the old D&D box way back in 1981 - except full color and glossy. Interesting. I think they did that on purpose. AND, this thing is currently cheaper that the Traveller book on Amazon. Go figure.
Regretfully, I doubt I'll ever find enough people interested in playing it in person. Even The Boy is all MEH about Doctor Who these days. He never got over the change from #10 to #11.
So I'm really happy with my Christmas presents. Maybe I should just make some characters, pull out the Mythic Game Master Emulator, and play these in the wee hours of the night.
- Ark
This year, I received Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, and Mongoose's Traveller: Core Rule Book.
Over the years, I think I've probably played five percent of the RPGs I've own. That's a wild guess, but it seems about right. It used to be finding players was the biggest issue. Now the issue is time. Life is funny.
Traveller was one of those games I that I was super excited about when I discovered it in 1981 - soon after my discoverer of Dungeons and Dragons. I ran a few adventures, but the players were far more interested in fantasy, and I think my ability to pull of sci-fi wasn't as great at the time. My attempts later with Star Frontiers were a much bigger hit.
That didn't stop me from continuing to buy Traveller, Traveller: 2300, MegaTraveller, and Traveller: New Era products. I'd sit around and make characters, design starships, and populate stellar subsectors. All my copies disappeared in various moves and book cullings over the years. Then I found Stars Without Number, which has been filling my sci-fi RPG void very well.
Except . . . SWN is extremely abstract about a lot of things, including world creation and starship building - two of my favorite parts of Traveller. During play, the abstract system is wonderful for creating scenarios and having a great ship battle in a short amount of time. But when I'm sitting around, thinking about potential scenario or trying to get a fix on what a shuttle actually looks like and how combat would flow inside, I reach for the detail of Traveller - which just isn't there.
Of course, I make it up as I go along and everything is okay. But sometime I just want some structure - and Traveller was all about structure. I picked up a battered copy of the MegaTraveller Referee's Guide to try to stitch ship building in - but it just wasn't flowing well. This Mongoose edition of the game, while similar, appears to be a much better match.
Reading through the Traveller book has been great fun. It's very much like Classic, with adjustments that I really like. I've sat down and made some characters even. It's great for that. Actually, I think this version is the best organized I've seen to date. It makes me even want to run the game. The big issue for me - the kicker - is lack of advancement. While I don't really care - DMing advancing or static characters doesn't seem to be a problem - I think the players would mind. They are so . . . accustomed . . . to gaining levels an/or skills that static characters would probably freak them the hell out and bore them - or frustrate them - to tears.
But part of me says that they maybe NEED that. Traveller is supposed to take away a big part of meta-gaming by focusing the players on what their character are doing NOW, as opposed to how they should shuffle points or prepare for the next level and worry about that upcoming HP roll. It gives them a character - one they didn't exactly expect - and says PLAY THIS NOW!
I'd like to see that in action one day in a longer campaign. How would it change the player's attitudes? Oh well. I don't see it happening. But I will be stealing the ship stuff and grafting it into my SWN game - assuming that I have the LEET SKILLS to do so.
Okay, I've probably talked enough about Traveller. Now, on to Doctor Who!
I was surprised as hell when I got Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space. It's a box. It's a heavy box. Heavy. It's crammed packed with shit. Pretty shit.
There is a quick start guide, a player's book, referee's book, adventure book, and all sorts of extra thick card-stock character sheets, punch-out equipment cards, and little XP token things. Oh, and there are these awesome Doctor Who dice. Everything is nice and colorful and very pretty.
Okay, I thought, nice try, guys. You spat out a pretty looking game designed by the BBC marketing department to increase the reach of the Doctor Who 'brand.'
Then I began to dig into the books, and was surprised there there looks to be an actual game here - a game designed by people who might know what they are doing.
In the beginning of the players book, it tells a story about Rory - one of the characters (well, WAS one,) of the TV show. The little story involves huge and strange shaped objects going missing all over the universe, and the TARDIS crew trying to track them down. The shapes were odd - tetrahedrons, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, icosahedrons, an the like. Turns out a race of giants was stealing these huge objects to play a role playing game.
Okay, yeah, it was stupid. Doctor Who is often stupid. But it's stupid for a reason, and if you just lay back and relax and go with it, the stupid turns into cool. And that was cool. Like bow-ties and fezzes. And that little story was a nod back in time to the beginning, to Dungeons & Dragons. The game doesn't even use all those dice. It just uses the d6. But they chose to mention the dice anyway. And that tells me that the designers are MY KIND OF PEOPLE.
I have a lot more to read, but the base game appears very cool. You can make whichever character you like - a rival Timelord or a street sweeper or Goldie Hawn circa 1968. The mechanics are basically a 2d6 point by system, like Traveller made love to Champions-lite or something. It's simple, with various levels of success or failure. Nothing innovative here - just comfortable.
Actually, the box, the books, the feel . . . it's all comfortable. Opening it gave me a similar feel to that of opening the old D&D box way back in 1981 - except full color and glossy. Interesting. I think they did that on purpose. AND, this thing is currently cheaper that the Traveller book on Amazon. Go figure.
Regretfully, I doubt I'll ever find enough people interested in playing it in person. Even The Boy is all MEH about Doctor Who these days. He never got over the change from #10 to #11.
So I'm really happy with my Christmas presents. Maybe I should just make some characters, pull out the Mythic Game Master Emulator, and play these in the wee hours of the night.
- Ark
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Stars Without Number Meat Funnel
It the Redshirts Stars Without Number game, I've been dropping hints and foreshadowing an ancient, hidden menace upon a blacked planet blasted by three novas and bathed in the radiation of their rapidly spinning pulsar remnants.
The players have, understandably, been somewhat reluctant to go take a visit.
I'm not sure who came up with the idea. Perhaps it was Merwyn. Perhaps it was me. But whoever had the idea - it was awesome. Simply turn the adventure into a Stars Without Number/DCCRPG Funnel Mashup.
Ca-Ching! Done!
Welcome to the universe of zero level Stars Without Number characters. They have no class. They have d4 for hit points. They only have 4 skills and three pieces of equipment. And you can't decide on any of it!
I'll be running this next week. I don't think that all nine of our players will show up for this, but if they did, that would be 9x4=36 ponential corpses to be ripped to shreds in a horrific feeding frenzy of character death.
So, here are the character creation steps:
Occupation Table
Skills Table
The players have, understandably, been somewhat reluctant to go take a visit.
I'm not sure who came up with the idea. Perhaps it was Merwyn. Perhaps it was me. But whoever had the idea - it was awesome. Simply turn the adventure into a Stars Without Number/DCCRPG Funnel Mashup.
Ca-Ching! Done!
Welcome to the universe of zero level Stars Without Number characters. They have no class. They have d4 for hit points. They only have 4 skills and three pieces of equipment. And you can't decide on any of it!
I'll be running this next week. I don't think that all nine of our players will show up for this, but if they did, that would be 9x4=36 ponential corpses to be ripped to shreds in a horrific feeding frenzy of character death.
So, here are the character creation steps:
- Create up to 4 characters.
- Roll 3d6 straight for: STR, INT, WIS, DEX, CON and CHA. Note Ability mods as normal.
- No Class, prime attributes, attack bonus, or special class ability.
- Roll Hit points - 1d4 plus CON bonus.
- All saves are at 17.
- Roll 2d10 once to determine Occupation, Skills, and Equipment. See tables below. Skills provide a ZERO level and equipment is AS-IS, no trades. Additional ammo available from corpses of fallen comrades. Stop whining. You are here to die. Quickly.
- Write it all down on the handy dandy sheet (provided below.)
- Poof! You are done.
- If a character survives, she/he may be upgraded to 1st level and enter the regular campaign.
Occupation Table
| Roll | Occupation |
| 2 | Priest |
| 3 | Journalist |
| 4 | Mechanic |
| 5 | Corporate Suit |
| 6 | Astrophysicist |
| 7 | Field Researcher |
| 8 | Planetary Scientist |
| 9 | Xenobiologist |
| 10 | Xenoarchaeologist |
| 11 | Infantry |
| 12 | Scout |
| 13 | Security Analyst |
| 14 | Medic |
| 15 | Pilot |
| 16 | Officer |
| 17 | Gunner |
| 18 | Combat Engineer |
| 19 | Sniper |
| 20 | Space Marine |
Skills Table
| Occupation | Skills |
| Astrophysicist | Profession/Astrophysicist, Science, Tech/Astronautic, Vehicle/Space |
| Combat Engineer | Combat/Projectile, Exosuit, Security, Stealth |
| Corporate Suit | Bureaucracy, Business, Leadership, Persuade |
| Field Researcher | Science, Tech/Maltech, Tech/Postech, Tech/Pretech |
| Gunner | Athletics, Combat/Gunnery, Exosuit, Vehicle/Land |
| Infantry | Combat/Projectile, Combat/Unarmed, Exosuit, Gambling |
| Journalist | Bureaucracy, Culture/Criminal, Exosuit, Persuade |
| Mechanic | Exosuit, Gambling, Tech/Astronautic, Tech/Postech |
| Medic | Athletics, Exosuit, Perception, Tech/Medical |
| Officer | Combat/Projectile, Exosuit, Leadership, Tactics |
| Pilot | Combat/Projectile, Culture/Spacer, Vehicle/Grav, Vehicle/Space |
| Planetary Scientist | Profession/Geology, Science, Tech/Postech, Vehicle/Land |
| Priest | Culture/World, Perception, Persuade, Religion |
| Scout | Culture/Traveller, Exosuit, Navigation, Survival |
| Security Analyst | Combat/Unarmed, Perception, Security, Tech/Postech |
| Sniper | Combat/Projectile, Exosuit, Perception, Stealth |
| Space Marine | Combat/Energy, Combat/Primitive, Combat/Unarmed, Exosuit |
| Xenoarchaeologist | Artist/Plastics, Culture/Alien, History, Science |
| Xenobiologist | Bureaucracy, Profession/Xenobiology, Science, Tech/Medical |
Equipment Table
Character Sheet
| Occupation | Equipment |
| Astrophysicist | Dataslab, Survey Scanner, Vacc Suit |
| Combat Engineer | Instapanel, Spike Thrower, Vacc Suit |
| Corporate Suit | Dataslab, Portabox, Vacc Suit |
| Field Researcher | Toolkit/Postech, Toolkit/Pretech, Vacc Suit |
| Gunner | Heavy Machine Gun, Metatool, Vacc Suit |
| Infantry | Mag Rifle, Telescoping Pole, Vacc Suit |
| Journalist | Argus Web, Dataslab, Vacc Suit |
| Mechanic | Toolkit/Astronautic, Toolkit/Postech, Vacc Suit |
| Medic | Lazarus Patch, Medkit, Vacc Suit |
| Officer | Binoculars, Mag Pistol, Vacc Suit |
| Pilot | Metatool, Void Carbine, Vacc Suit |
| Planetary Scientist | Dataslab, Survey Scanner, Vacc Suit |
| Priest | Survival Kit, Translator Torc, Vacc Suit |
| Scout | Navcomp, Survival Kit, Vacc Suit |
| Security Analyst | Dataslab, Survey Scanner, Vacc Suit |
| Sniper | Climbing Harness, Sniper Rifle, Vacc Suit |
| Space Marine | Assault Suit, Grenade (x2), Laser Rifle |
| Xenoarchaeologist | Dataslab, Survey Scanner, Vacc Suit |
| Xenobiologist | Dataslab, Bioscanner, Vacc Suit |
Character Sheet
This should be fun. And horrific. And sad.
Please feel free to use any of this for your own games.
- Ark
Please feel free to use any of this for your own games.
- Ark
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Redshirts: Jack Frost Roasting Over an Open Fire
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| HO HO DIE. |
The scouts are getting rusty. I swear. Come on, a robot Santa, reindeer, and elf? That has to mean trouble.
Kal Kek and Roswell were in the Zócalo, and Kal Kek was acting kind of grumpy. The elf came over to cheer him up by pulling out a pistol and shooting him. Then the Santa open his mouth wide and began spewing a green mist that turned people into glowing eyed yellow zombies.
Merry Christmas!
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| Robot Santas are mostly evil. Mostly. |
Much chaos and battle ensue. Eventually, the evil robots were blown up, but Roswell the (sort of) good robot was blown up in the process. Kal Kek grabbed his C3-P0-like head and ran with it like a football back to the ship.
While escaping from the zombie gas, Dr. Ramapudi followed Newt, through the station's air ducts. Newt was the eight year old psychic girl that the scouts had rescued in an earlier episode from an crazed interplannar entity that had inhabited her body for 600 years. Well, Newt, being a bit untrusting, had stockpiled rifles and grenades in the air ducts, just in case something like this happened.
Eventually, the party made it back to the ship, where they found out that the Reprieve had been undergoing maintenance and had it's engines dismantled. Having no other craft that could mount a defense versus the Skorpios attack fleet, they hopped in the Molten Rain mech suit assault shuttle and blasted off.
The plan was simple. Everyone was to get in their mech suits and be shot out of the mech suit rail gun at the oncoming Skorpios Cruiser that was making an attack run on the Beachhead Base. At the end, "Profit" was somehow to be gained, but plan for everything in-between was somewhat hazy.
The Skorpios Cruiser was actually an old, run-down ship constructive with run-down, primitive parts at the Lost colony of Ukraine, so luckily, it didn't have much defense against seven human size projectiles shot at it. The scouts didn't have much defense against being shot at a cruiser, either. Kal Kek ented up penetrating a armored turret with his head.
The scouts began to dig through the ship like miners, using the mechs' urban assault abilities to turn the cruiser's bulkhead's into Swiss cheese. They plugged Roswell's C3-P0 head into a computer conduit in a maintenance tunnel to begin the cyber assault. Roswell took over a pack of maintenance bots that launched an assault on the bridge while the party split up in an attempt to take over engineering, nullify the angry grav tank muscling it's was through the maintenance shafts, and eliminate the threat of unattended cafeterias.
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| Admiral Beringer looses eye in attack. |
The guns on the asteroid base mopped up the stream of evacuees and the scouts took control of the devastated, burnt out hulk. Regretfully, the resident psychic was killed in a munitions explosion. Attempts to revive him by The Boy using an untested nanotech revitalization system proved to have horrific results, turning the dead body into an ever expanding ball of gray goo that was eventually isolated by Aquila scientists.
As a reward for saving the day, Admiral Beringer cancelled the scheduled court-martial of the group for horrendous crimes to humanity that they had perpetrated on previous missions. Merry Christmas, Redshirts, Merry Christmas.
- Ark
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
Top Games
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| Dice Bomb by ~j-burgess |
The Top Seven RPGs I've Played
- D&D 4e
- AD&D
- Champions 4e
- AD&D 2e
- Holmes D&D (or Molday Basic - they kind of blur)
- Gama World 1e
- 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
- AD&D
- RoleMaster
- D&D 4e
- Stars Without Number
- GURPS Space
- Twilight: 2000
- Fantasy HERO
Funny how this doesn't represent what my Top Seven Favorites are. :)
- Ark
Friday, December 7, 2012
Redshirt: Dressed to Kill
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| Petty Officer 2nd Class Owlicious |
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
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Redshirts Christmas
After last night's Redshirts game, I was wondering exactly what time it was. In the game, I mean. We've had nine sessions in two months, and I was estimating that it had been about a year in game. Looking at my notes, and slapping them into excel, I saw that I was wrong. It has only been ten months. In fact, the crew of frozen Popsicles was due to be back at their base on Christmas Eve.
Now, I've done holidays inside of RPGs before. My favorite has usually been Halloween in D&D. That's no-brainer right there, especially if you use zombies.
Heh.
I don't think I've ever done Christmas in Space before, though, and definitely not in Stars Without Number. I'm not exactly sure what I should do. Something horrific, of course. Cthulhu Claus. Yeah. I like the sound of that. Well, maybe that wouldn't the the best Christmas present for the players, but it would be one heck of a present for me. Ho ho ho.
I supposed, at the very least, the characters should exchange gifts. I'll let them mull that over in their minds. Great - not only do they need to really go shopping, they have to go virtually shopping as well! ;)
So has anyone else put Christmas into their games? Anything good come out of it? Anything horrible?
Here is the timeline, for what it is worth:
| 2/2/3200 | The Reprieve blasts out of Perimeter Station Nine. |
| 2/7/3200 | Arrival at Three Sisters system. |
| 2/9/3200 | Exploration of the Biotonics Ark 3 begins. |
| 2/15/3200 | Arrival at Ukraine system. |
| 2/19/3200 | Alpha Team captures a Ukrainian Patrol Boat. |
| 2/25/3200 | Escape to Three Sisters system. |
| 2/28/3200 | Beginning of the construction of Beachhead Base. |
| 6/11/3200 | Completion of Beachhead Base. |
| 6/28/3200 | Arrival at Banyan system. |
| 7/1/3200 | Alpha Team delivers gun printer to the Brambles. |
| 7/2/3200 | Lifter pyramid explored. |
| 8/2/3200 | Arrival at Tunguska system. |
| 8/3/3200 | Submerged Jump Portal discovered in ocean. |
| 9/4/3200 | Ship building activities complete. |
| 10/3/3200 | Arrival at Thomas Jefferson. |
| 10/4/3200 | Alpha Team encounters Warchou and Berserkers. |
| 10/24/3200 | The court-martial and execution of Lt. O'Brien. |
| 11/21/3200 | Arrival at Levant system. |
| 11/24/3200 | Alpha Team acquires the Molten Rain. |
| 12/8/3200 | Refueling stop at Tunguska reveals mystery ship. |
| 12/9/3200 | Alpha Team meets Charles Shuttleworth. |
| 12/24/3200 | Arrival at Beachhead Base on Christmas Eve. |
Ho ho ho!
- Ark
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
The Void Quadrant
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| Klikbikken |
Hmm, I might have given away too much with that sentence. :)
- Ark
PS
Oh yes, a key . . .
Black - Explored Space (inasmuch as space can be explored in SWN)
Purple - 'Hunch' Space (big bags of guesses from old charts, here-say, and psychic divination)
Dark Blue - The righteous Aquila Union
Orange - The Ptolemy Wilds, controlled by the Alliance of Independent Systems
Red - The foul fungal Skorpios Empire
White - The El Dorado Archipelago, a sort of close cluster in the El Dorado Sector
Yellow - A horrible, horrible place filled with genocidal machines and dog-bear things with horns.
Light Blue - The New Mandate, a place quite unknown to the PCs, that sounds pretty well organized.
Okay, that's about it.
- Ark :)
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Redshirts: Courts-Martial Carnival, an Email Interlude
The pre-Thanksgiving week Stars Without Number session was so odd - from an outside perspective - that I felt that a higher authority should get involved. I mean, while the scouts were initiating first contact with two genocidal species - the Berserkers and the Warchou - the CO had been killed by friendly fire, a team member had allegedly committed treason against the entire human race, and another team member had tried to murder that alleged traitor.
In a D&D game that would be nothing strange. It would not even be that strange in a tramp steamer space opera. But Redshirts is a military scouting expedition. Yeah, it's specifically set so far away from the brass back home that the PCs have a lot of autonomy and leeway in how they accomplish a given mission, but the results of this particular mission were on the order of several levels below 'complete screw up' and dangerously approaching 'fire everyone and outsource to the another dimension.'
So, between games, I had the players give email testimony in various courts-martial regarding the mission, having the top brass level charges against the scouts. They really got into it. I swear, some of them must have had lawyers coaching them. It was funny.
Here are some quotes from various players:
Lt. Miles O'Brien was convicted of high treason against sanctity of the Aquila Union, and had his rank reduced to Midshipman. He was then released on his own recognizance into the depths of space without directional control or atmospheric succor.
One player thought that meant I was giving him a shuttle and letting him go. Funny . . .
- Ark
In a D&D game that would be nothing strange. It would not even be that strange in a tramp steamer space opera. But Redshirts is a military scouting expedition. Yeah, it's specifically set so far away from the brass back home that the PCs have a lot of autonomy and leeway in how they accomplish a given mission, but the results of this particular mission were on the order of several levels below 'complete screw up' and dangerously approaching 'fire everyone and outsource to the another dimension.'
So, between games, I had the players give email testimony in various courts-martial regarding the mission, having the top brass level charges against the scouts. They really got into it. I swear, some of them must have had lawyers coaching them. It was funny.
Here are some quotes from various players:
"On charge D. Spacer Kal Kek's attempted murder of Lt. Miles O'Brien. Not Guilty, the Lt. O’Brien is a traitorous scumbag, and he was about to divulge the location of the secret asteroid base and the rendezvous location for the ancient mother ship to a known race of hostile creatures."Yeah. Miles O'Brien was his name. Yeah. Anyway, more quotes:
"On charge C. Spacer Kal Kek's negligent discharge in the death of Lt. Commander Nathaniel Taylor. Guilty, but I wish it to be here recorded that I was attempting the execution of a well thought out rescue plan to retrieve Lt. Cmdr. Taylor. But despite my best intentions, my understanding of the spatial rotation of space born rotating mass was lacking, and I could not preform the calculation well under pressure. These facts lead to a miscalculation and a mis-fire. I there for ask for the leniency of the court in sentencing as it was not my intention to damage the Lt. Cmdr. Taylor, but rather to assist in his rescue."and:
"Spacer Kal Kek's attempted murder of Lt. Miles O'Brien. Not Guilty. Officers have the right to put down members of the team that are endangering the mission. Kal Kek was simply the weapon used to do so. Due to incompetent training Lt. Miles O'Brien was only wounded. Requesting Kal Kek be put into Field Arms Training course to better prepare for such events. Requesting Lt. Commander Mark Five be sent for a brush up on Officer Training, with possible officer candidate evaluation. Lt. Miles O'Brien should have been apprehended after such an encounter, yet was not. This is against regulations."and this gem:
"Lt. Miles O'Brien's high treason against the Union. Guilty. Knowing full well that these aliens had already exterminated the humans in the area, O'Brien gave away the biggest secret known to team, endangering the mission and all Humans in the sector. Requesting evaluation of loyalty, Evaluation of officer candidacy, Psychological Evaluation, Back ground check, Drug check."In the end, all charges were dropped except one. I mean, really, all of the friendly fire was basically a lot of natural 1s rolled one after the other, and a DM who is a prick. (Yay me!)
Lt. Miles O'Brien was convicted of high treason against sanctity of the Aquila Union, and had his rank reduced to Midshipman. He was then released on his own recognizance into the depths of space without directional control or atmospheric succor.
One player thought that meant I was giving him a shuttle and letting him go. Funny . . .
- Ark
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