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

Thursday, December 8, 2011

Dungeonspiration: Epic Death


Sergeant Loronzo by The Boy -

When I was but a wee role player, I really didn't like the whole character death thing.  It was something to be seriously avoided - going so far as to sit behind a DM screen and never risk a PC by never having one.

But when you come down to it, some of the most memorable moments in role playing are the deaths.  Case in point - The Boy.  While initially horrified by the concept, he is getting quite good at them.

In my Stars Without Number campaign, the characters were contracted by some shady underworld types to shut down a casino.  Not forever, mind you - just for a bit.  Actually, the party never asked - or even seemed to wonder - as to WHY someone would shut down a casino for a bit.  It just enough that they got to cause some chaos - and get paid for it.

The session turned out to be one of those long-ass planning ones.  You know those types.  The players get so interested in the planning aspect that it seems like they never get to the execution.  But several hours later, they had their plan and went ahead.

The plan was to blow up an intra-building sewer main in the casino's hotel and have millions of gallons of raw sewage flood the casino proper.  Actually, the plan was not a bad one at all.  The big problem was that the party's hacker was AWOL (an actual date with his girlfriend!) and so they had to hire a retainer.

The hacker henchman screwed the pooch on his computer and security rolls.  Badly.  Worse than bad. The hacker was particularly nice about the whole thing, calling the party up and letting them know he had miserably failed and had not only NOT prevented the security systems from detecting their activities, but had actually helped the casino security zero in on their nefarious activities.

Ron and Crazy-ass Tim were in the getaway car.  The second they heard the alarm go off, they were out of there.  Completely.  Utterly.  Gone.  Not even a post card.

The Boy, playing Sergeant Loronzo, and Kaye (yeah - the guy who plays Torvalds in the 2e game) were on the third floor, attaching explosives to the sewer pipes when the first security guard arrived, gun in hand.

Sergeant Loronzo picked up a huge plumber's wrench, swung it the guy, and grabbed his Order of the d30 Brand d30, choosing to use it at that moment.  The massive wrench did so much damage it cut the guard in half, showering everything in the room with blood.  They finished setting the charges and high-tailed it out of the plumbing room, racing to get to their long-gone getaway car.

They ran down the hotel hallway to the elevators, but they were too late.  Three security guards stepped out of the elevator firing.  Kaye was hit and died like a punk at zero hit points even.  Sergeant Loronzo wasn't having any of that, so he pulled out his stash of Lazarus Patches. The patches help dead character's come back to life.  Well, very recently dead characters.  And it takes a medic to really apply them well.  Sergeant Loronzo was not a medic.

But damned if he didn't try.  He slapped patch after patch onto his dead buddy, trying to shock him back into life, all the while dodging a hail of bullets.  The other players began a count down to when the timer would kick off the sewage explosives.  Eventually Sergeant Loronzo ran out of patches and the guards - none too happy with all the missing going on - ran up and began to pummel him.

Sergeant Loronzo ran out of patches.  He was very upset that his buddy has died for good.  He mowed down the security guards and proceeded to leave - but more security guards were coming out of the elevators.

The count down to sewage explosion was getting woefully close - like about one round.  Then the boy had an idea. He busted down the door of a hotel room, dove onto the bed, snatched a pillow, shot the glass out of the window with his laser, and leapt out of the building.

The explosives detonated.

Sergeant Loronzo had some hope that the pillow would soften the impact into the ground, but when the true gravity of the situation hit him, The Boy turned, fired his bright blue laser pistol in the air, yelled 'Sayonara,' and made his peace with the universe.

We all thought it was a very epic death - a very inspiring end - and one which should be remembered in the annals of RPGdom forever.

So if you know your character is going to die - think for a second.  What can you do to make the Valkyries sing loudly of that death in their meady halls until Ragnarok comes?  Do something cool - and inspiring.  The skalds will appreciate it.

- Ark

Sunday, November 6, 2011

Rahul and the Bobble-headed Ganesh

I've just come back from role playing tonight and am still basking in the glow.  The Stars Without Number game went very well.  Tim, Ron, Mervyn, Kay and the boy were great as an unsuspecting band of space adventurers who had the all sorts of crap thrown at them.

Highlights of the Night:

  • The party realizing that they just woke up to a fight between a group of bounty hunters and a family fleeing from the clutches of the Holy Order of Sapphic Islam.
  • Mervyn taking out an entire boarding party with some clever computer commands that vented the atmosphere out of a part of the spacecraft they were in.
  • Tim trying to beat a bounty hunter to death from 200 meters away - telekinetically - with the bounty hunter's own pistol.
  • The Boy firing a laser gun at the nefarious Bounty Hunter Tabari, only to find out that she was a phychic with expertise in both the disciplines of precognition and teleportation.
  • Ron jumping the ship out of system just as the bounty hunters attached a cubic meter of plastic explosives to the hull of the freighter.
  • Tim wandering off on a space station unannounced and coming back with a job offer to hijack an ore shipment on an ice world.
  • The party crammed in a tiny shuttle flying from orbit to a rubble strewn glacier field.  Their erratic pilot, Rahul, had upholstered the dashboard with purple shag carpeting and affixed a Bobble-headed Ganesh there to be his 'co-pilot.'
  • The party convincing a convoy of Hindu ice-truckers to drive their 130 foot long tractor-treaded cargo trucks (laden with highly explosive QUANTIUM ore) on a six-hour journey up a glacier.
  • During a kidnapping, Kay stopping to steal the victim's television from the apartment.
  • The party trying to beat the crap out of their underworld contact Mujibar for non-payment of of services rendered (hijacking aforementioned 130 foot long cargo trucks,) only to find out that the funds had been into their accounts already.  They had been expecting to be paid in gold coins, I think.
  • The party pissing off their employer and Ron having to jump out of system in a spacecraft just seconds before a a space cruiser (owned by their employer) blew them to smithereens.

So, the party is wanted by two major interstellar powers for multiple crimes - and it's just one game into the campiagn.  That's pretty awesome.

I think it behooves a game master to end a night with a desperate attempt to jump into hyperspace or be blasted into component atoms by an angry space armada, relying on a sole Navigation skill check by one of the party members.

Tim, however, is still on the fence about what he calls the "one roll party save versus death saving throw."

I am still trying to keep a straight face.

- Ark

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Galactic Proportions

Stars Without Number suffers from the same aliment that Traveller suffers from - two dimensional space.  It's a very understandable affliction.  It's hard to represent a three dimensional stellar map on a flat piece of paper, and even if you do, ho-boy, you have to take out the slide rule to figure distances between the stars.

In order not to upset the hard-core amateur astrophysicist lurking just under my skin, I have to look at the star maps in Stars Without Number as, um, hyperspace maps - maps that are only relevant to the extra-dimensional space that starships hurtle though. This space bears no relevance to real 3d space - just enough pseudo-logic so that the sleeping astrophysicist will not awaken and rain on my parade.

But . . . let's assume that the maps bear 'some' relation to real space.  Kevin Crawford says very little about the 'shape' of human-space, or its dimensions.  The most explicit snippet is this:

"By 2600, the frontier of human space extended almost ten years of spike drive travel away from Terra. Even after taking Jump Gates as far as possible, a fast pretech courier ship required a year to reach the farthest colonial worlds."

That date is just before the end of the Golden Age and the beginning of the Scream, so those dimensions should pretty much be the height of human colonization in the galaxy.  Ship technology was also at it's height, so spacecraft could jump one hex per day.  Ten years equals roughly 3650 hexes.  The author very carefully never states the size of hexes on the star maps, so if we interject Traveller sizing - which if memory serves correctly is one parsec, we get:

3650 hexes X 3.26 light years = 11,899 ly

So, human space has roughly a 12Kly radius.  A little image stealing and circle drawing gets us this galactic map:



That's a fair chunk of the galaxy colonized, but it still leaves ample room for who knows what.  Now, I can start thinking about SWN's 'Known Space' visually - inside my noggin.  Not that I really need to, but it's more comfortable that way for me.

So, that ends my thought experiment for today. :)

- Ark

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Hit Point Survey

Warriors Experience Table, SWN, pg 21
Okay, so this isn't one of those 'click the button' surveys, but more of a 'response requested' kind of thing, involving standard D&D style hit point rolling.

Now, in all my years, I've been under the impression that when you level, you take your Hit Die and roll - then add your new hit points (and perhaps CON mod) to your existing hit point pool.  Everyone I've ever dealt with has been in agreement - it seems to be intuitive.

Stars Without Number has classes, levels, and hit points similar to D&D, but apparently, that's not the way you do it.  From page 23 in Stars Without Number, under the heading Hit Points:
"Don’t worry too much if you roll a low number. As your character gains experience they will gain more hit points and the chance to reroll poor dice. Some GMs may choose to omit the initial roll entirely and simply start new characters with the maximum possible hit points."
Unless I'm misreading, this seems to imply for SWN that, you reroll your hit point every level.  It's an interesting concept, if it is indeed the concept here.  Has anyone heard of such a thing?

- Ark

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Dungeonspiration: Stars Without Number

I used to have a reoccurring dream.  Well, it was more of a reoccuring theme.  I would be in a comic book shop, or a book store, or a flea market in an ancient submarine, or in the Transylvanian basement of a fetid castle - and I'd be looking through boxes.  These were big long white boxes filled with every role playing game imaginable.  I would dig through them, looking for that one science fiction role playing game that had everything I wanted - good combat mechanics, good skill systems, good starship rules, and good universe generation systems.

I'd inevitably find some rpg system that had an awesome cover and everytihng I wanted inside - and I'd rush to the zombie check out girl or the auto-purchase-bot with a big smile on my face.  Then I'd wake up and start cussing - realizing that it was just a dream.

I've had that dream a LOT.  It's representative of my search for a perfect rpg in my younger years - especially a perfect science fiction game.  I've played quite a few - Star Frontiers, various forms of Traveller (black book, mega, 2300,) Space Master, GURPS Space, Star Wars - and read even more.

Okay, I'm not going to say that Stars Without Number is perfect, but damn, it's good.  It seems to fulfil the promise that Traveller made back so many years ago, but never quite delivered.

Traveller had a fun - if nerve racking - character generation system where your character could die before gameplay started.  It was great for generating back-story - but the actual mechanics were - MEH.  Stars Without Number takes good old fashioned D&D mechanics, simplifies them, and tweaks them with a light skill system.

There are just threee classes, Warrior, Psychic, and Expert - but the Expert - like LotFP's Expert class, is highly customizable with skills, allowing you to create anything from a doctor or spaceship mechanic, to a bounty hunter.

The game tosses out the good old hit charts and follows a simple formula.  Twenty always hits, one always misses, and you determine that with a d20 + your Combat Skill + Att Mod + Att Bonus + defender's AC.  Poof.  Beautiful.  I really wish the d20 developer dudes would have thought of this, rather than having to flip AC on it's head.

And you know when your first level psychic has d4 HP and a sniper rifle does 2d8 - only good things can happen. :)

Where Stars Without Number really shines though, for me, is in it's universe creation.  Just like in Traveller, you sit down and randomly roll up a sector full of stars.  In my youth, I loved this, and as other sci-fi RPGs were produced, they had similar creation rules, but they got more specific on the physical characteristics of various solar systems.

I loved the complexity and exactness of some of those systems.  Charting out how many AUs distant each planet was from it's star, calculating the specific density of a planet, determining albedo, etc - all these were great fun - for me - an amateur astrophysicist.

It never really translated into fun during a game.  Even if the players knew what the term 'albedo' meant, they wouldn't have cared to know that planet X925g-U had a rating of 57%.

Stars Without Number tosses most of the physical nuts and bolts and replaces them with - um - for lack of better words - a SCI-FI-TROPE-A-TRON-3000.

The default setting of the game is that humanity expanded rapidly into the galaxy, achieving amazing technology, then something happened to crash civilization and crash it HARD for a while.  Now humanity is rebuilding and worlds are reconnecting with one another.  You know, that old chestnut.

Rolling up a world, you might get something like this:

Atmosphere: Breathable mix
Temperature: Warm (could result in a desert or swampy type place)
Biosphere: Immiscible (i.e., you can't eat the natives)
Population: Hundreds of Thousands of Inhabitants
Tech Level: 4 - Baseline
Worlds Tags: Police State, Hostile Biosphere
Culture Base: Russian

Looking at the results, and the pointers in the book, a hundred idea pop in my head.  The first to come into mind is a place like Harry Harrison's Deathworld - a planet full of jungle animals and plants ready to eat anyone in a second.  But it could just as easily be a world reminiscent of earth in Stephen King's The Mist or frankly, Frank Herbert's Dune.

The creation process wonderfully tosses a bunch of tropes together and lets that pot full of 'kitchen sink' soup cook in your mind for a while until something awesome pops out.  Who gives a flip about the gravity of a world - unless that gravity is different enough to mean something and be a good plot device.

Star Without Numbers also allows for the same type of randomized trope construction of cultures, aliens, npcs, religions, political parties, and corporations. Each of these systems is geared towards creating conflict and issues that will provide ample adventure opportunities for the pcs, wherever they go and whatever they do.  It's a wonderful sandbox creation system, and very fun to work with.

I mean, I would have never thought to make up a low-tech world where the entire society had to hunt down alien whale-like creatures to survive, in some sort of Moby-Dick-gone-viral planet, but with a roll of some dice, my mind began churning along and I was there.

Sine Nomine published the original version as a free pdf, and I bought a physical copy of it.  Enjoying that, I grabbed Skyward Steel, which is a sourcebook for space navies.  I liked that so much, I went and got the updated version of Star Without Numbers from Mongoose - and it was worth it - rules for AI's and mech, and an entire world culture generation system.

I'm really impressed with what Kevin Crawford has been doing with this game.  I haven't been this inspired to run a science fiction game in quite a while.

So if you haven't yet, go grab Star Without Numbers.  It's free, and even if you don't intend to play it, it's chock full of good adventuring ideas that should impress even jaded players.

- Ark

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Metallic Mouse That Doesn't Rust

I just devoured The Stainless Steel Rat.  I forgot how much I enjoyed my first reading of it, circa 1982, or how much the Stainless Steel Rat series influenced my playing of both Star Frontiers and Top Secret.

The books follow the adventures of  'Slippery Jim' DeGriz, one of the biggest thieves and con-men around.  It's over 32 thousand years in the future, and most of humanity has grown up and solved problems like war, plague, famine, and crime.  This has left the universe a very boring place, and for hyper-intelligent people like DeGriz, such boredom is simply unacceptable - so he stirs the pot and sows as much chaos around as possible.

He's not a 'bad' guy.  Slippery Jim doesn't like hurting people - and killing people outside of self-defense is definitely not on his list of things to do.  But as long as he's sure the insurance will cover it, he'll steal anything - and the more complicated, the better.  His sheer outrageousness and intelligence puts him at the top of the most wanted lists, and makes him the target of the galaxy's super police, the Special Corps. who eventually employ him to catch other ne'er-do-wells, stop war-mongering planets from mongering, and fix time itself.

The Stainless Steel Rat books became a template of how I constructed just about every Top Secret and Star Frontiers campaign I even ran.  'Slippery Jim' is essentially a PC - straight out of a game - a smart ass there to amuse himself and put on a spectacle for others.  The stories are essentially sandboxes with some loose 'mission' that ties everything together, but the Rat is free to wander entire planets to complete his objective - usually in whatever timeframe he feels like.  One minute he's pretending to be a janitor herding robots with a whip, the next he's a billionaire on a golden space yacht.

The players fell into the pace quite easily.  A grumpy 'administrator' gives the team an assignment.  They get dumped off undercover far away somewhere and start snooping around.  They discover the 'bad thing' is being done by some rich guy. They need funds, so they knock over a bank.  They then go pretend to be millionaires (well, at that moment they 'are' millionaires)  A chase ensues.  The bad guy gets away.  They chase him to another planet.  Then they discover that the rich guy controls the mafia on that planet, so they have to join and work their way up the ranks until they have access to the guy.  Etc.  Great fun, and lots of role playing,combat, scheming, lying, and stealing to be had.

The formula worked for both Top Secret and Star Frontiers.  On the surface it may seem very James Bond-ish, but there is a certain air about The Stainless Steel Rat.  It's . . . well . .. it's chaos.  Much like the Honey Badger, 'Slippery Jim' DiGriz don't give a shit.  He does what he does for fun - not for duty, honor, or what is best for society.  That's really what makes it.  There is nothing to 'convice' the PCs to do.  They are given a job, and they figure out the most fun way to accomplish it - preferentially with lots of explosions and loose cash.

And, strangely, the books allow for a great way that relative npcs can be useful and fun.  See the novels for details. :)

I'm already chewing through the second book in the series - The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge - grinning away.  I've also got Retief of the CDT next to me as well - speaking of great books to turn into adventures.  It's giving me a big itch to run some Ratty Sci-Fi games, big time.  And over on the table is Stars Without Number.  Geez.  Gamer ADD, take me away!

- Ark