Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 067 – March 7th

It takes 2 hours to get to the base. On our way in we meet a patrol who is looking for people without papers. We have them and proceed after losing another hour.

If only U-Suits looked like this. 

We get military u-suits on the first roll, which is great. I buy 12. That suits everyone with 10 extra for 540 secs. On the second roll, we can slip into an unguarded office and search it. It is so not worth it, so the day ends.

1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe nothing.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.

Cargo:
1 Boat guns, TL-2,
4 CU Status Unit (e103),
2 TL-4 heavy hand weapons with explosive effects,
5 Military U-suits (e044),
7 Side Arms TL-1,
4 Doses of pheromones (e009) in Duke’s pocket,
and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges.

1 Alicorn starship with TL-1 Guns. We owe nothing.

Cargo:
1 Ship's boat
1 TL-2 Boat guns (as cargo, not installed)
5 Military U-suits (e044)
10 TL-1 Heavy Hand Weapons,
and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges.

I have 50,156 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.

Legion of Assassins

Earlier this week, I posted 3 assassins, which I intend to use as Romanesque Legionaries. Why not fighters? Well, with a theoretical background as Citizen Soldiers, legionaries should have some atypical skills for a soldier because they are citizens first. Right within the AD&D description are examples of soft skills: disguise, poisoning, spying, plus a couple of others. In order to do these things, the assassin needs to have people skills. They also need to have other non-combat skills which support this.

Ideally, assassins should always have some sort of secondary professional skill. AD&D assumes that the assassin will take out the wizard, the lord or the high level cleric, but those people are surrounded by eyes. The ability to pass one's self off as a cook, a herald, a guard is paramount. It doesn't mean the assassin can actually do those tasks, they merely need to make someone else think that they can.

This is one of the reasons I wrote Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners. The players need a host of reasonable skills to get into the head of their characters so it is beneficial to have NPC's which operate in that mundane capacity. Zero to Hero gives mechanical statistics to these characters, which might not always be necessary, but can be helpful to everyone. The players are acting out the adventures of a fantastic person which is hard enough, the addition of relatively common folk gives them a scaffold to get there. Plus all of the classes in Zero to Hero have relatively few combat abilities which doesn't increase the mechanical risk to players, it levels the playing field so a small handful of heroes can deal with a huge ensemble of characters on a basic level.

Assassins aren't all about assassination. They break into the sausage factory to make extra special sausage.

This was the operational method of the Romans. They could hand anyone their butt on the battlefield, but after that, then what? Soft skills to get the defeated to continue to defeat themselves. Assassins as soldiers make a lot of sense. Someone needs to collect information and do dastardly things. If you think about it, a legionary was probably eyeing up his compatriots and leaders as much as the enemy. Sometimes, they were looking homeward for any news about family or politics which often ingratiated them to the very people they were looking to take advantage of or wipe out. Assassins make a lot of sense as fighting men.

Even if you don't want to introduce the complexity of a class of classes like Zero to Hero, I hope this changes how you consider placement of assassins in your world.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 066 – March 6th.

I’m not armed as well as I wish, but we are off.

On entry into Palatek, we receive a signal to wait to be inspected. We’re wanted here, so we jump away. Next, we receive a distress call, like the one that caused the problem with the pirates. We jump away again without answering. In the Talitar system, we are buzzed by a scoutship with the evil guns that kill the crew on a single hit.

We have every advantage so I’m tempted to go in guns blazing, but there is a 1 in 3 chance it will simply fly off. We take that chance and lose. He opens fire on us and gets the first shot.

The Antelope takes a pair of hits, which would have knocked out defensive ECM if we had them. The magnetic plasma cannon hits The Alicorn in the cargo hold.

Alicorn misses it’s shot, while The Antelope rains down 3 hits and the scout explodes.

That was not a good trade, but it’s probably what a crew PC’s would have done. We are limping down to the planet. We’re on our way to the Military base.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 065 – March 5th

I need stasis units (a roll of 2), a boat (5), hypercharges (7), PS bots (9), and a gunner (10). So, 5 of 11 rolls should help.

I get 11, 8, 7, 12, 5, 4, 7, 6, 11 and 10. That so-so. We buy the ship’s boat for the Alicorn for 900. It’s TL-1. Next we get our hypercharges, all four of them for another 2,000. And finally, we hire our last gunner named Edith for an initial payment of 25.

That’s a cool 2,925 spent today.

I also dole out the weapons and u-suits. Two of the crew need military U-suits, which will come later I am sure. We are going to depart for Talitar. That is a 3 jump flight and we will have to make it one hop at a time.

1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe nothing.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.

Cargo:
1 Boat guns, TL-2,
4 CU Status Unit (e103),
2 TL-4 heavy hand weapons with explosive effects,
7 Side Arms TL-1,
4 Doses of pheromones (e009) in Duke’s pocket,
and the ship is fueled with 6 hypercharges.

1 Alicorn starship with TL-1 Guns. We owe nothing.

Cargo:
1 Ship's boat
1 TL-2 Boat guns (as cargo, not installed)
10 TL-1 Heavy Hand Weapons,
and the ship is fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I have 50,696 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 064 – March 4th

At the spaceport, there are 11 possible results. One of which is no more rolls, which is an annoying thing. However, since both ships are paid for and I am cheating the system for crew pay, this one is now meaningless except for the fact that it can burn time.

I need stasis units (a roll of 2), a boat (5), hypercharges (7), PS bots (9), a gunner (10), a pair of pilots (11). So, 6 of 11 rolls should be fruitful but sometimes the dice lie.

I get 11, 9, 8, and 3 which is no more rolls. The 9 is useful, as it the 11. We hire two pilot/navigators, Michael and Jonathon. I didn’t think about this one since the crew is getting a split of the profits, what do I pay these guys? I’ll give them first weeks pay plus the sign on bonus. That is 35 secs. each.

We pick up a couple PS bots for David, Lucy, Michael and Jonathon. The bots are hardcoded to the user, so I can’t purchase them in advance. They cost 120 each. If I had rolled a 9 first, I wouldn’t have been able to get PS bots for Michael and Jonathon, so that worked out well.

1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe nothing.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.

Cargo:
1 Boat guns, TL-2,
4 CU Status Unit (e103),
1 TL-1 military U-suit,
5 TL-4 heavy hand weapons with explosive effects,
7 Side Arms TL-1,
4 Doses of pheromones (e009) in Duke’s pocket,
and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges.

1 Alicorn starship with TL-1 Guns. We owe nothing.

Cargo:
1 TL-2 Boat guns, 
10 TL-1 Heavy Hand Weapons,
and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges.

I have 53,621 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.

Pre-generated Characters - 1st Level Assassins

These 3 first level characters are Assassins, Felix, Laelia and Philo. Click the link to download the PDF file. These characters are almost ready to go. In generating ability scores, I made sure the range was acceptable in both D&D and AD&D. To convert these characters to straight AD&D, simply add or subtract the racial modifiers and class abilities.

In my campaign, Assassins make up between 10-20% of the human Empire's Legionary. These characters have far more than a typical adventurer would have owing to the fact that they are professional soldiers. I will post again with a better explanation of their equipment.

If there is a call for it in the comments, I will make DOCX and Google Doc file available as I have the PDFs. The reason I have not done this from the get go is that I created every character of a class in one document and print each page as a PDF.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 063 – March 3rd

Ok, we are still at the Spaceport on Imperia. We need to get out of here, because everything that doesn’t have a base price is going to have inflated prices. We lift off and make for Regari via Palatek. I could double jump at the cost of 3 hyperchargers per ship or I can risk an encounter passing through Palatek space. Since we are all armed up, we will take the risk of entering Palatek space.

We roll a one on entry, which is e092. We receive a radio message and can proceed as we wish. In the Regari system, we are spotted but ignored. We take the next four hours to land.

We have 54,171 secs. and we need a lot of supplies from the Spaceport. We land with two hours left and make two rolls. We get Usuits or repair units. As of this moment, we have enough of both and end our day.

1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe nothing.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.

Cargo:
1 Boat guns, TL-2,
4 CU Status Unit (e103),
1 TL-1 military U-suit,
5 TL-4 heavy hand weapons with explosive effects,
7 Side Arms TL-1,
4 Doses of pheromones (e009) in Duke’s pocket,
and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges.

1 Alicorn starship with TL-1 Guns. We owe nothing.

Cargo:
1 TL-2 Boat guns,
10 TL-1 Heavy Hand Weapons,
and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges.

I have 54,171 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 062 – March 2nd

Ok, I have to do some book keeping. We are taking a day of RRR. I have two engineers, so I have them get to work on the new ship. They install some guns and stasis units. Lucy, Duke and Emily are healing up.

We decide to name the second ship the Alicorn.

I am dividing the areas protected by stasis units among the ships. There are 4 CU of protected space in each ship’s crew quarters. I move the 2 CU stasis unit from engineering to the other ship’s pilotage. The turret of the Antelope has 1 CU of protected space. There is a 4 CU stasis unit in the cargo hold of the Antelope. I have created a pair of sheets to mark all of this down.

We also redistribute cargo and the crew.

Four crew members are on the Antelope: Duke (pilot/gunner), Bones (medic), Ratchet (engineer) and Lefty (gunner). Five are on the Alicorn: Emily (pilot/gunner), Deadeye (gunner), Doc (medic), Lucy (engineer) and David (gunner). We lose the capacity to fly the hoppers and the ships at the same time. We have 9 crew and need another pair of pilots and one gunner.

In order to protect all of these people, I need to buy some more status units. In doing this, I will refit the crew quarters with 4 3 CU stasis units. This will allow me to protect up to 12 crew per ship in groups of 3. I can move the single CU units to various parts of the ship to protect workstations. I’m almost OSHA compliant. :)

Since I am being so nice to the crew, I am going to cut their salaries and simply give them a 1% cut off of all profits. This is 1% each, not total. Cheating, yes, but this will make record keeping easier. Payouts will be much higher than a measly 15 secs. a week.

As an additional cheat, I will no longer be tracking personal items owned by the crew as cargo. That removes side arms, PS bots and USuits from the cargo hold and presumably into the crew quarters. I am simply going to assume the weekly cost of the bots as a loss, per week.

You'll note on these sheets that I am only coloring very large items like big guns and multiples of repair units, fuel and life support units. The Alicorn has no boat, so the fuel and guns are simply sitting in the boat bay. Since I am actually working on paper, I merely have a sheet with penciled in notations. I may share that later.

1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe nothing.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.

Cargo:
1 Boat guns, TL-2,
4 CU Status Unit (e103),
1 TL-1 military U-suit,
5 TL-4 heavy hand weapons with explosive effects,
7 Side Arms TL-1,
4 Doses of pheromones (e009) in Duke’s pocket,
and the ship is fueled with 6 hypercharges.

1 Alicorn starship with TL-1 Guns. We owe nothing.

Cargo:
1 TL-2 Boat guns,
10 TL-1 Heavy Hand Weapons,
and the ship is fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I have 54,171 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.