Thursday, February 13, 2020

#TBT - A Traveller's Atlas of Dunromin and the Land of the Young

Let's take another look at Simon Miles' SM00 A Traveller's Atlas of Dunromin and the Land of the Young published by Dunromin University Press. Set in the world of World of Barnaynia but is easily adaptable to any type of campaign. The city maps are gorgeous and go on and on. As soon as time permits, I will do a full review of this product.

Simon's artwork is impressive. I have not decided if it is all handiwork or digital or a little of both. It looks great, very old school but clean.

This title is pay what you want. I chipped in a dollar, but I think I will either have to go back and bump that up or purchase more products from Dunromin University Press.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 044 – Feb 13th


Since we are in orbit, we are going to take a day of RRR to heal Duke. In orbit, there are no forced contact rolls.



Strangely, medics can’t heal you faster, so Duke will need two days of RRR to recuperate from our last combat. Sorry about that.


Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 043 – Feb 12th


We are continuing Encounter e012. We have to roll 1d6 to see what happens. We get a 4 which is a base price of 1,000 in ransom. Rolling on the modifier table nets us a 20 multiplier.

I’m not greedy or anything, but I have to be a pirate. I want to use one of the doses of pheromones to double the price… but the rules say I can only uses these for purchases or sales.

Ok, fine. We’ll take the 20,000 secs. and get out of dodge. We drop off the Prince, collect our cash and break for orbit, which ends our day. We’d be fools to stay here. Strangely, we are NOT wanted for this little kidnapping scenario.

1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe 117,000 secs. in principle.
1 TL-1 Ship’s Guns.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.
2 CU Status unit in Cockpit and Engineering, 8 1 CU Status units in Crew Quarters and 1 1 CU unit in Gunnery.
10 Fuel Units in the Ship’s Boat.
12 Repair units,
5 Life Support Units in the Ship’s boat,
7 PS-bots, 1 per character,
6 Heavy Hand Weapons for sale, 4 for characters use,
7 Side Arms TL-1, 1 Side Arm TL-3, and one TL-4.
13 U-suits, 7 for the crew, 5 for sale.
5 Doses of pheromones (e009) in secret compartment.
and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges.

I have 23,331 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.


Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 042 – Feb 11th


Causing chaos today.
Alright, let’s do something more risky. We are going to the Palace to see what kind of trouble we can cause with royalty.

We are going to move a different way. We can fly the ship up to low orbit in one hour and spend a hour descending into the Palace area. This avoids contact and detection rolls for all of the intervening areas.

The Palace area has no services or goods for sale, every contact is a special event. On entry, have a chance to sell 3 specific exotic items, if we have them. We don’t have any, so we move on to regular contact roll.

We encounter a Royal Party. A member of the royal family is here protected by 4 bodyguards. We can kidnap him and try to ransom him off. This is wonderfully risky! Failure could mean “wanted” or get all of us killed.

Duke, Lefty, Doc and Ratchet approach the Royal Party and call in Emily and Deadeye to strafe them. Then we open fire with heavy side arms, TL-1.

The enemy has side arms, one TL-4, a TL-3, and two TL-1’s. Higher tech level weapons go first.

The guys with the nice hand weapons go first. They have a marksmanship of 3 each. We add the tech level to their marksmanship score, so they must roll a 7 or less and a 6 or less. They roll a 9 and 7 against Duke which are two misses.

Everyone else goes next. Duke fires a heavy side arm at the guy with the best weapon. Tech level 1 plus a marksmanship score of 5 is 6, and he hits with a 5. The weapon does 7 points damage killing the target. Duke is hit by a side arm for 2 points of damage. Lefty fires and instantly kills his target. The other guard shoots at Duke and misses. Doc can’t shoot and Ratchet only shoots in self-defense.

The round isn’t over, Emily strafes the area. Deadeye has TL-5 guns and adds a 6 to this due to the ship’s targeting computer. He rolls and 11 which is a hit. Starship guns do 10 points of damage automatically. Another guard is dead.

Next round. Since the ship is right here, moves the fastest and has the best TL, it fires first. The last guard is down. And we quickly hustle the Prince or whatever on to the ship at gun point.

Now for the record keeping. High tech devices can breakdown. I have to roll for the ship’s guns and the two side arms used by the guards. I roll 2d6 and if it is lower than the tech level, they malfunction. None of them do. If the Engineer does maintenance on them, they will get a bonus of 1 next time.

Next, each enemy was carrying pocket change. We gather up 100 secs. from the dead.

As a final move, we go to orbit. This ends our day. Tomorrow, we’ll have a princely ransom!

1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe 117,000 secs. in principle.
1 TL-1 Ship’s Guns.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.
2 CU Status unit in Cockpit and Engineering, 8 1 CU Status units in Crew Quarters and 1 1 CU unit in Gunnery.
10 Fuel Units in the Ship’s Boat.
12 Repair units,
5 Life Support Units in the Ship’s boat.
7 PS-bots, 1 per character,
6 Heavy Hand Weapons for sale, 4 for characters use,
7 Side Arms TL-1, 1 Side Arm TL-3, and one TL-4.
13 U-suits, 7 for the crew, 5 for sale.
5 Doses of pheromones (e009) in secret compartment.
and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges.

I have 3,331 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.

Some notes on this post. First, I broke a couple of rules. Since the Starship is faster than everything else, it should have gone first. Also, it has TL-5 guns, which would also make it first. However, I would vaporized a guy in one shot which would have eliminated some of the die rolling I wanted to display. I pretended that one of the players called in the Antelope, which took some time.

Second, the rules state that all characters are matched against one by one, with any imbalance being adjudicated by the player. I had each and every guy shoot at Duke, because I felt that it was obvious as to who was in charge. I also wanted a chance to show the healing system, tomorrow.

Had Duke been killed the game would normally end. However, in post one, I said I was cheating to have a blog series and Emily would simply pick up where Duke met his end. 

Monday, February 10, 2020

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 041 – Feb 10th


I am going to try a different tactic. I am flush with cash and have a full crew, so I feel we can take some risks. We are going to go to the Scientific Area and instead of rolling on the random tables, we will try to make a contact for a special encounter. It’s going to take three tenths hours to fly there and we are going to pass through 3 different areas on our way, the Spaceport, a City and then finally the Scientific area.

Each time you pass into an area, you roll for detection and if detected, there is a good chance of a contact event. In a spaceship, your detection is virtually assured.

Since contact is expected, Emily is flying, Deadeye is manning the guns, Duke is in the hopper and Lefty is manning the hopper’s guns. Doc and Bones are in the crew quarters, while Ratchet is in Engineering. Anyone who needs a side arm has one. The hopper is still on the ship, ready to launch at a moment’s notice.

I roll a three. We are detected. On entry to the Spaceport, we encounter two holdup men. If there are more than two people in the party, then ignore this result.

Next step, roll for detection into the City. We are not detected at all and have no encounter.

When we arrive in the science area, we are detected and have an encounter. This one is benign, we roll on the standard table and have a chance to get commercial transport. I don’t need that, so this will be ignored.

We rolled on table r205n for this result, which is the normal table for trying to obtain goods and services. Since this is strict play through, this roll costs us an hour. It’s sort of a penalty, but not really. At some point I am going to fudge the time scale, either in the fact that it took 30 minutes to fly here, which is less than an hour or this one hour statement. I would still normally get 9 rolls here either way, if I was looking for these goods and services.

But I am here for a contact, which is a completely different table. This 90 minutes of travel and goods may cost me something today. The Entry and Contact table is a roll of 1d6, which is modified for various things. On entry, I subtracted one because I was just breezing through. Now I am looking for people to talk to, so that -1 goes away.

There are 7 rows on this table, one of which takes me to a sub-table which is specific to this planet. Let’s roll.

I got a 5 which is a planet specific roll. I roll again, 4, which takes me to e159. This is an encounter
with a rich man and 11 bodyguards. He has a lot a cash and I can steal it if I can kill all of them in 5 rounds. I already know I could do it, but it will make me wanted in this system… pass.

This roll took an hour, so with 2.5 hours spent and 7.5 left, let’s keep going. Roll two results in a standard roll on the area table for robots. Pass, again.

This is my cologne of choice.
This next one is great. We meet a pheromone dealer, who sells 1d6 doses of an agent that costs a base price of 80 secs. He is selling 5 of them for 160 secs. each. The great part is, he is already using the pheromones on me! I must save vs. cunning to avoid being effected by this. If I can make my save, I can purchase them for half price or not at all.

My cunning is five and a roll exactly a five. I can choose to buy these or not at a cost of 80 each. Since they allow to half or double price on 1 transaction per dose if I roll under a 6, I will buy them all for 400 secs. I add them to my inventory with a reference to the event e009.

This ends my day, which was pretty good.

1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe 117,000 secs. in principle.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.
1 TL-1 Ship’s Guns.
2 CU Status unit in Cockpit and Engineering, 8 1 CU Status units in Crew Quarters and 1 1 CU unit in Gunnery.
10 Fuel Units in the Ship’s Boat.
12 Repair units,
5 Life Support Units in the Ship’s boat.
7 PS-bots, 1 per character,
6 Heavy Hand Weapons for sale, 4 for characters use,
5 Side Arms
13 U-suits, 7 for the crew, 5 for sale.
5 Doses of pheromones (e009) in secret compartment.
and the ship is fueled with 4 hypercharges.

I have 3,231 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.

This is my backup option.