Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 002

Having reviewed the game Star Smuggler, I wanted relive my past and play it. If you aren't familiar with the game, you can read the review here or download the whole game there.

This series will be a day-by-day play through of the classic game Star Smuggler from the point of view of the fictional hero, "Duke".

Dear Diary,

I don't really have a U-suit,
but I do have a sidearm.

It's day two of my criminal career and I am just as bad as being a criminal as I was as a trader. In the last hour daylight yesterday, we took off from the spaceport to the ruins. The ship can move without expending fuel, but is way easier to detect entering an area.  

So what are we doing?

The ruins have all kinds of junk scattered around. Emily and I are scouting around looking for stuff to salvage. I get just two chances a day to find something of use, it takes 5 hours to investigate a section of the ruins.

In the top half of the day, we found an intact but fuel-less skimmer and the bottom half of the day a single repair unit. A skimmer can hold six cubic units (CU) of stuff and takes up 10 CU worth of space in the

At the end of the 10 hour day, we're sore, but have some loot. Here are financials, crew status and assets at the end of day one:

1 Antelope starship,
1 Hopper with 15 units of fuel,
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,
26 Repair units,
1 Skimmer
and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

Crew:
Emily, weekly pay 15 secs. Sign-on bonus of 20. Death pay to the family is 200. Let's not die, ok?
Ratchet, weekly pay 15 secs. Sign-on bonus of 15. Death pay is 120.
Doc, weekly pay 10. No bonus which feels weird and death payment to family is 80.

Designated Heir: Emily.

I still owe 120,000 secs. in principal on the ship. I have 350 secs. in my pocket.

Spacesuits are called Utility Suits
or U-Suits in this game. 

If anything on the ship was more than Tech level one, we'd be doing maintenance to keep it in operation. Tech level adds a bonus to most things, but the higher the tech, the more likely it will breakdown. Rolling under the Tech level indicates a breakdown, which means T-1 level items never breakdown, but have no bonuses. 

The TEK - December 2019 Stats

December 2019 Downloads via DriveThruRPG:
AD&D Character Sheet For Use with Unearthed Arcana - 5
Compass Rose Inn Minisetting - 6
Kobold Folly Minisetting - 7
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 4
Swashbucklers Character Class - 4

Webstats:
Google Analytics Pageviews - 1,345
Google Analytics Sessions - 884
Pageviews per Session - 1.52


Pageviews were up by 11.34% over last month. That is cool.

What did I do last month? I did an update to the Kobold Folly Minisetting. Oddly, downloads were way down. I checked with DriveThruRPG and found out there is no mechanism to see how many people downloaded an updated file. It sort of makes sense, so I hope you got your update if you previously downloaded. Just go to your library tab and the new files will be there.

I also caught up and completed my series called 52 Weeks of Magic, with 17 posts in a month. Behind the scenes, I started preloading posts for January. I had 13 schedule and the first 3 went off without a hitch. I like posting in advance, but I don't have a tool to post across social media, automatically. I need to look into a tool for that. 

This year, you can expect to see many, many more reviews. January already has 2 set to go. Other new changes are I've become a Rakuten affiliate which possibly means better ads. My DriveThruRPG ads are the only ones generating any revenue at the moment. 

Best wishes in 2020.

UPDATE Jan. 12, 2020. I've decided to add some images of my Google Analytics to this post.

November 2019

December 2019

File Under Creep Factor 11 - A Quiet Place 2

For the past few years, film makers have been filming for A Quiet Place around New York. The first film was film closer to NYC, in Ulster and Dutchess county, but they stopped in to Akron and Olean for minor things like background shots, lunch and research.

This year, they filmed a lot of footage in Olean, Akron, Buffalo State College and a few other places around Buffalo. The funny thing is, I work at a school where we sometimes communicate in sign language and take 2 outings a week to places around Western New York.

It's one thing to see a place you've been to in a film, it's entirely different to see characters in a film in places you know, doing things that you do...

Check out the new trailer down below.



It's already creepy enough to have several horror films shoot in the same camp site my kids use.

Can you recognize these totem poles? There are actually 3 of them and they are totally overgrown. They show up very briefly in a couple of horror films at night, mostly for a jump scare. They have nothing to do with the films themselves.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 001

"Duke" Springer is a child of the future...
 of the children of the 80s. Nice shirt, "Duke" 

Happy New Year!

Having reviewed the game Star Smuggler, I wanted relive my past and play it. If you aren't familiar with the game, you can read the review here or download the whole game there.

Anyway, what I am doing for my 2020 series? Last year was 52 Weeks of Magic. 2020 brings Strictly (Duke) Springer. This series will be a day-by-day play through of the classic game Star Smuggler from the point of view of the fictional hero, "Duke". I'm not sure what his first name is, but it has to be better than the one in the quotation marks.

Here are the general rules for this series. "Strictly", means I won't flub rolls one way or another. Second, all commentary on the game itself will be in bold. Third, if Duke dies before all 52 weeks are up, I will simply carry on with a henchman designated as Duke's Heir. If there are no henchmen, I will start over.

Here we go.

Dear Diary,

It's day one of my criminal career. I'm not really good at this. I have an Antelope class starship, starship's guns, a 2 cubic unit status pod, a side arm, a ship's boat called a hopper, 15 fuel units and passion for trouble. I also have 750 secs, which is good because I owe 120,000 secs. for the ship. The interest only payment is 300 secs. A week. It was a better deal than college.

Obviously, I'm at the Spaceport, so I'm going to spend a few hours looking for hirelings... er, employees. My first four hours are wasted, but after that, I manage to hire a few people.

First, I hired on an Pilot/Navigator. I'm a pilot/navigator like her, but unlike her, I can fire the ship's guns. The two of us together can defend the ship. Her weekly pay is 25 secs., but she'll cut me a deal at 15 secs. because the cockpit is equipped with a status unit. She also needed a sign-on bonus of 20 secs., which wasn't too unreasonable. She... she... she...

"Are you looking at a book of baby names?" she asked.
"No, that would be totally demeaning... Emily?" I said.
"My name isn't Em... Ugh. Whatever, 'Duke'. "

With that all settled, I also hired an Engineer I named Ratchet and medic I'll be calling "Doc".

Doc looked sheepish. "I'm really not a doctor, I just have some battlefield experience..."
"Do you want the sign on bonus or what?" I asked. According to the rules, Medics don't get signing bonuses. Oops. 
"You're the boss," he said.

Ok. Having invested some good time with my new associates, I managed to waste most the rest of the day. I did purchase 25 repair units, which are instrumental to my plans. In the 9th hour, I made a 300 secs. interest payment on the ship early, so I don't have much to worry about for a while. The rules don't specify a specific payday except by the last day of week, so I accept early payment within the same week as acceptable. 

We take off and set course for the Ruins of Regari, just an hour away.

At the end of the 10 hour day, we're beat. Here are financials, crew status and assets at the end of day one:

1 Antelope starship,
1 Hopper with 15 units of fuel,
1 Stasis pod 2 CU in size,
25 Repair units,
and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

Emily, weekly pay 15 secs. Sign-on bonus of 20. Death pay to the family is 200. Let's not die, ok?
Ratchet, weekly pay 15 secs. Sign-on bonus of 15. Death pay is 120.
Doc, weekly pay 10. No bonus which feels weird and death payment to family is 80.

Designated Heir: None, but I know it'll be Emily.

Death payments are meant to be a money drain, but there are light consequences for not paying it. 

I still owe 120,000 secs. in principal on the ship, but paid 300 in interest early, which gives me almost 2 ten day weeks until the next payment. I have 350 secs in my pocket, which is only enough to cover basic expenses for another 29 days. At that point, the crew will walk unless I can use some cunning plus the ship will be up for repo. Cunning is a stat that only Duke has, it allows him to roll a die to trick people into doing things. I have a rating of 4 out of six, so I could theoretically keep the crew without pay so long as my luck holds out. 

3.5 Review - Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook

Title: Player's Handbook (3.5)
Code: N/A PHB 3.5, unofficially
Design Team: Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet, Skip Williams
Rule Set: Dungeons and Dragons 3.5
Year: 2003
Pages: 320
Levels: Any
Rating: ★★★★

D&D 3.5 came out in June of 2003. It wasn't until 2007 that I even looked at it. I wasn't mentally prepared to make the huge jump from AD&D and Basic D&D to 3.5, but it turns out I was. This is "These Old Games", I'm not going to review a new game...

The difference between AD&D and 3.5 is huge. Where AD&D hosted all of your character's powers and abilities under the class description, D&D 3.5 gives a cursory example of powers under class then allows you to pick from a menu of abilities.

The system is a standardized d20 system. Standardization from the ground up is very good. One of the great advantages of 3.5 is it breaks every character down into a couple of stat blocks, which makes building a quality, unique character ease. Each character is made of 8 different categories of descriptions, all of which is uniform between classes. As per any type of D&D, you start with ability scores, then everything changes. You select a race, a class, skills, feats, character descriptors like alignment and religion, equipment and finally spells, if any. All characters have the first 7 items, while only spell casters have spells, obviously.

Races stayed basically the name, but the variety of non-human sub-races were put away, presumably so DM could style their own. Gone were most racial limitations, welcoming in an age of official Elven Paladins. Races have a preferred class rather than classes they cannot perform in.

The number of classes and their relationships have changed greatly. AD&D has 11, 12, or 15 character classes, 3.5 streamlined that down to 11. Magic user and thief were renamed to Wizard and Rogue. Bard are a real class which is welcome change. Assassin, Illusionist, Cavalier and Thief-acrobat were all gone, but not really. Also, multi-classing is normal and with few restrictions, while duo-classing is utterly gone. Few very class abilities appear in under character class, they are regulated to feats.

Every character has a set of skills based on their intelligence and class. Each skill is linked to an ability, so no more nerfed Charisma.

Feats are an incredible departure from AD&D. They are special abilities that are so varied that each class can be used to create a completely unique feel. They are wholly based on class and level, so you continue to grow after creation. You can use feats to bring back those lost classes: Assassin, Illusionist, Cavalier and Thief-acrobat.

One downside to the feats system is that it is unbalanced. Magic using players are going to want the ability to make magic items, so they will lose combative feats. Rogues will want observational powers, which in no way equates to magical or combat abilities. While some of the feats are chained together with prerequisite feats, sometimes you can get two things that pair in a very unbalanced way. Usually this comes into play when you get a bonus to initiative plus some other combat effective ability, so that character always goes first with a big hit.

Your character descriptors are pretty self-explanatory, what is your outlook, demeanor, etc. But 3.5 cranks up the effect of religion on your character. You are no longer a psuedo-Catholic priest, but a follower of something out of our world. Spontaneous casting should also falls under this category, but it is described with the classes. Basically, your character can cast whatever they feel like if they have this ability. Additionally, clerics can always cast healing spells if the need arises.

Equipment has been regulated to an abstract system, almost like a tool kit for the class. It reminds of Star Frontiers' Standard Equipment Pack. I find it odd and basically ignore it. Equipment lives in the half-world of wonderfully standardized rules vs. massively extensible character variety. The designers probably realized this and went with it to allow players to access equipment that is otherwise too expensive by the charts at first level. It's not that much of a problem, really because back in the days of AD&D, I, the DM, was forking out cool equipment on character generation day.

Spells have been completely revamped and tied back to the mechanical systems of the game. Additionally, they have been realigned with the various schools and those schools are often dedicated to specific classes. A 3rd level Wizard spell might be a 7th level Sorcerer spell. Also, being in tune with the mechanics of play, there are no oddball spells that work like nothing else in the game.

Back to the standardized rules. ALL information combat information appears in the Player's Handbook. Back in the 70s and 80s, you'd make a character then wonder what you were getting into. With this book, you know. There are a few things relegated to the DM Guide, but they aren't enough to slow you down. THAC0 and decending AC are gone. Your opponent's AC is your attack roll target number, which is reduced by your attack bonus. Combat is speedier, attacks come more often than AD&D. The rounds seem to take longer, but a heck of a lot can happen in a given round without reducing combat to "high roll wins all".

Saves have also been revamped to fortitude, reflex and willpower. It's a nice, easy system. I think it's far better than charts, even though I lament the loss of the marketing statement: "Includes 31 illustrations, maps and charts".

While I still prefer to play my mashup of Basic, Expert and Advance D&D, the benefits of 3.5 outweigh any negatives. If I were doing a one shot or something and didn't have anything in specific in mind, this would be my rule set.

4 of 5 stars.

You can grab a digital copy from DriveThruRPG for less than 10 bucks.

"You're the scum of the Sector!" Star Smuggler Review

Title: Star Smuggler
Credits:
   Designer: Dennis Sustare
   Graphics Design: David Helber
   Map Art: Tom Maxwell
   Cover Painting: Bob Depew
   Edited by Arnold Hendrick
   File prep for online publication: Eric Hanuise
   Digital Character Record Sheets: Ron Shirtz
Rule Set: Unique to set
Year: 1982
Pages: 24 Page Rules Booklet, 20 Page Events Booklet
Number of characters: Solo adventure, many characters.
Rating: ★★★★

This game has a story to start the story. I came by my physical set back in the late 80s and loved it ever since.

But for the publishers, designer and author, the story was a bit more rocky. I don't know all of the details, but the Publishers, Heritage and the imprint Dwarfstar had a run of popular and cool games such as Barbarian Prince, Demonlord, Outpost Gamma, and Star Viking starting in 1981. These were all in house games created by Heritage/Dwarfstar. Two games were designed and created by outside designers, Dragon Rage and Star Smuggler. Hard times hit and the company and their imprint were down but not entirely out.

In 2003, Reaper Miniatures obtained the rights to many of these games allowed them to be reproduced online. (Click the link for all the games) In 2006, Dennis Sustare granted permission for limited online distribution by Dwarfstar.brainiac.com of Star Smuggler.

I snagged a photo of the game for this review. You can check out all of the art and the full game on Dwarfstar's website. I only mention this due to the Distribution Agreement at the end of this post, while the photo is probably fair use, I agree with the agreement below. Although I have a physical copy, I would like to thank Eric Hanuise for all the work in digitizing this game for online distribution.

So how does this game play? Very well for something probably designed, typeset and edited entirely by hand. You are playing "Duke" Springer, a business man turned criminal... maybe. Depends on how you roll, literally sometimes. After a quick read through the rules, you are ready to go. The rules spell out what you can do, but often not what you cannot do. That is to be expected in such a light weight game. Your character has 4 stats, hand to hand, ranged combat rating, endurance and cunning. All characters have the first 3, while only Duke has cunning. Cunning allows Duke to outsmart other characters and enemies.

To play, you write out your character stats, money and inventory on a sheet of paper. Recently, I don't know when, Ron Shirtz published a character record sheet and time tracker to make this task easier. You flip to e001 in the events book and you are off to adventure.

The future of the 80s was pink and green.

In the course of play, you can hire a crew, get in combat, buy and sell or run down many of the special events, some of which are relatively simply side quests. The goal is to pay off your debt on your starship, a total of 120,000 secs. or Sector Exchange Units. Every week you have 300 secs. interest payment and paying on principle doesn't reduce this amount. Back in the 80s, front-ending loans was thing, I guess.

The game has many locations where events occur and these locations are divided up in the System by planet and then planetary regions, like cities, starports, space stations, ruins, etc. It is a rather ingenious system which precludes oddities such a car dealer on a spacestation or military presence in a ruins, except for when those things would make sense in context. Travel from one area or planet to another eats a lot of game time, which is important for making those interest payments. You are totally on the clock, all the time, in this game.

Have you heard the phrase, "You need to spend money to make money"? That is totally true in this game. While it is a solo game, you need to hire a crew to be effective. And the crew gets paid, so you need to be sharp with your money.

How do you win? Pay off the ship. How do you lose? Die or lose the ship. Simple.

However, within the events booklet, there are seemingly dozens of different endings. I've never troubled to count the actual number but there are more than a few. The first time through, these auto-win, auto-lose events add flavor and spice, but on replay, they are an annoyance. Depending on your mood, you probably don't want to win or lose by a single die roll in a game that requires so many die rolls.

One of things that stands out in this game is the ever-changable scenery, the planets, tend to not so much scale as warp so you can have a very different experience on each one with the exact same mechanics. There are very few things in the game that change the mechanics, which is nice. The rules are dense, but once you have them down, they're easy to remember.

Some of the downsides to this game are many, but none of them are a deal breaker. The system has a simple but effective combat system, which is obviously lethal to participants. You can die in a shootout that leaves your crew alive, but purposeless. Game over. There are a number of cheap shot endings, which are annoying if you play frequently enough.

This game is actually complex enough to have a number of things in the middle ground as far as gameplay goes. First and foremost, there are some rather obvious things left out. You can pilot a ship, fight well and use a variety of weapons from ship guns to hand weapons. But you can't drive a skimmer, the 1980s' future version of a car. Skills can't increase, except Cunning. Combat is deadly in a vacuum, but can you depressurize your ship? Not covered, at least not as a purposeful action. Can you have two ships?

One of the stranger bits is the concept of "losing". There are a few events which specifically cause a lose condition, like death or imprisonment, but there are a number of ways to lose everything except your character. Is that a loss? Don't know. Without a ship, you can't do much, but you also have less of a chance of dying. So you can have series of lingering "not winning" scenarios.

There is a difference between the physical books and the digital files. Eric Hanuise remastered many of the confusing typos right out of the books, and incorporated all of the errata into the text. Thank you, Mr. Hanuise. The physical boxed set also had counters printed on the box cover edge. That did nothing for the box, which was sturdy before I cut it. Again, the counters have been reproduced and even improved. The ability to print as many counters as you like is wonderful, but I find myself using random counters.

The main upside of a programmed solo adventure is that it is always there for you. The big downside is, if you are a creature of habit, you can get yourself stuck in the game, repeating the same routes and sequences again and again. This isn't a limitation inherent to only Star Smuggler, it is inherent to all solo adventures.

All and all, I'd give this 4 of 5 stars even though it is one of my most prized games. It has a lot of bugs and flaws, but still worth a play or 100. Download it today.

DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT -- PLEASE NOTE Dennis Sustare has granted permission for digitized copies of this copyrighted game to be posted for public download. The game and files are NOT released into the public domain. You MAY NOT not sell these files or charge a fee for access to them. You MAY NOT distribute these files except as authorized by Dennis Sustare. PLEASE RESPECT THE TERMS OF THIS DISTRIBUTION AGREEMENT so that these files can remain available for free download. By downloading any files from this page you are certifying that you will abide by the terms of this distribution agreement. All of these conditions must be posted prominently and openly on any page or site providing access to these files.