Monday, November 2, 2020

Antelope Variants - Casual Deckplans

 Before coming up with the Zephyr variant for Star Smuggler, I tried a couple designs. These rules are somewhat related to Traveller, Snapshot or Striker as they darn near follow the design principals. Where as these games have tons of fuel to jump, Star Smuggler has a magic McGuffin called a Hypercharge. Ships are limited in range by the six charges they carry. 

This version is shorter than the Zephyr type and has half as much crew space. The bays are arranged differently, giving 4 40 CU bays. I would think it would make a nice causal carrier or carrier escort ship. That block of cargo space could also be a barracks or brig. 
Since I was already going small, this one is even smaller, eliminating the medical area, the weapons vault and both guns. It seems to be a pure hauler. It's bays are also divided into 3 40 CU sections. 
This version is a single gunned hauler. It's huge, those areas near the rear could be more storage space. 
I am not sure where I was going with this design. The center cargo bay has been given over to some sort of controls. Perhaps it is a lab, an advanced scanner station or controls to direct other ships. It has a single turret and a medical bay. The back of the ship has some odd equipment fittings for unknown purposes. 




This is the largest Zephyr type ship, with 4 bays, the massive crew space, vaults and medical. 



And of course for comparison is the actual Antelope II named the Zephyr. I probably should have made the rectangular cargo hold 60 CU as it is slightly bigger than the boat bay but smaller than the main cargo hold. 

Sunday, November 1, 2020

The Fortress of Titan's Gate

I'm stuck doing laundry tonight, so I sketched out another inside out fortress.
Sorry, I took the picture in my car. 

A couple of thoughts formed this structure. There is a breech to another demonic dimension at the bottom of the ravine. The walls were built over time to make the location defensible. In the center of the ravine is a ziggarat held by the defenders. Immediately to the east of the ziggarat is The Ironwood, the largest living thing in the battlezone. 

Other areas are named:
Ophidian Contagion,
The Seige,
Vermin Sill, 
Axis of Tears,
The Retort, 
Razor Rock,
The Well of Life,
Mantle of the Soul,
The Pale Plain,
The Peril,
Fool's Stand,
Sanctuary Point, 
The Kinds, 
Downer,
The Titan's Gate,
Jen's Barracks,
Banner Harbour,
Bacon Row,
Pride's Spire,
The Court of the Dead, 
Legion Furrow,
And Minstrels Hall. 

This month I'll be making mini maps and telling stories about these places. I hope you join me. 

The Tek - October 2020

My stats for DriveThruRPG were lack luster. I really need to remaster these or do something new. Working on that now. 

 AD&D Character Sheet For Use with Unearthed Arcana: 2
 Compass Rose Inn Minisetting: 2
 Kobold's Folly: 1
 Swashbuckler Character Class for D&D and AD&D: 1
 These Old Games Presents: The Hex Pack: 1
 Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners: 1

My spending on DriveThruRPG was low this month. The only thing I got was Hexcrawl Basics by Three Kingdom Games. 




Webstats are continuing to trend upwards. This month, I fell off again. 

Google Analytics Pageviews - 1,020
Google Analytics Sessions - 770
Pageviews per Session - 1.32

Of particular interest were the Amazon ads, which did three times better than my DriveThruRPG ads. Usually, they are lack luster. I am going to try it again. 

Revisiting Star Smuggler - Session 005b

Ok, this session is part two of Session 005. It starts on the morning of day 10. In my last post, I accidently lost track of one day by not calling it by the number. 

We left the crew docked at the space station, with the intention of leaving for Regari. The crew is most interested in doing something safe like returning to Regari and doing some cargo runs to Palatek. As a game master, this is an unsatisfying development. I decided to throw something interesting at the party. 

On the morning of day 10, there is radio chatter about incoming raiders. Additionally, in the hub of the station, a pair of Mynkurnia death squads appear. The Zephyr wants nothing to do with those exploding suicide troops again, so they detach from the Station and start making for the Spaceport on the surface. 

As they drop into the atmosphere, they get jumped by two TL-6 hoppers, one has TL-6 guns and the other has TL-4 guns. The Zephyr has been surprised and take a pair of hits. 

Wait... I made another mistake. The Antelope II has no hit stats. It's twice as big as an Antelope I but I don't want it to have 20 hits. I give it 15 hits. It also has defensive screens, which will absorb some damage. 

Ok. So the Zephyr takes a beating as it plunges into the atmosphere of the planet. That's one hour of combat. 

In the next turn of combat, they return fire while the crew rushes around to unload the hoppers and make them combat ready. They could simply take off, but the hoppers are holding a ton of equipment. 

The Zephyr has TL-5 guns, while the attackers have TL-6 and TL-4 weapons. These guns lose one die for being hoppers and a second for firing in the atmosphere. I deem that the Zephyr's guns are better because they aren't degraded as much and therefore shoot first. 

My super fancy combat map. 

The hoppers each take two points of damage. But wait! That's not all. The hopper with the TL-6 guns takes a critical, forcing a breakdown roll. It fails and the ship crashes into the ground. The second boat returns fire and hits again. 

The ship is much faster than the hopper so it breaks away and into orbit in hour 3. They fire again on the lone hopper doing two more points of damage. It breaks off and makes for the ruins. 

Hour 5 is getting worse, they see two TL-4 Antelopes with the same type of guns. The Zypher has better guns and unloads on the lead ship for 5 points of damage plus a critical. Life support breaks down. The Zephyr's defensive screens eat up the one point of damage. The hoppers deploy and fire their TL-6 guns on the lead ship. They do four more points of damage, one more hit will kill it. The Raiders are screaming for the damaged hopper to come back and it starts it's climb.

The next round sees the Antelopes pull out of range of the party's hoppers, but they get blasted again by the Zephyr's big guns. The lead ship takes another critical to the engines and goes dead in space. The remaining ship takes a critical, a hit to pilotage. The pilot is killed instantly, stopping the ship dead in space. The guns rip off an ineffective shot. 

Also in this round, the last hopper roars out of the atmosphere and right into the Zephyr's hoppers. It's hit for two points of damage and explodes. 

The Raiders crews had two pilots, two gunners, an engineer and a death squad boarding party. They are trying to affect repairs but everything will take a day. 

In round 7, the hoppers catch up and blast the Raider still capable of shooting. They do two points of damage plus 2 criticals. One critical knocks out life support and a second lucky hit strikes Pilotage, where the engineer was attempting repairs. The Zephyr unloads on the ship for one point of damage and two criticals. These kill the crew in engineering and the turret. 

The Zephyr orders the ships to surrender. They do not. So, the crew moves to the closest ship and begins boarding actions. 

With life support down and heavy hand weapons, combat is over as quick as it started. The second ship manages to damage the Zephyr with two points of explosive damage, but then the rest of the crew goes down. They manage to capture the engineer and a gunner. 

The heroes collect up some weapons and spare change from the dead. The total crew was a pilot, a gunner, a death squad per ship, plus an engineer. The hopper had a pilot and gunner plus half of a death squad each. That nets 288 secs. from both ships' crew. They also collect up an assortment of guns, 4 TL-5 heavy side arms and 4 TL-4 side arms. As per e182, they strip the ships for 1400 secs. in fittings. In this case, Imperial Police take control of the ships from the party and thank them for their help, rather than an explosion destroying both ships. 

This ends the week on an odd note. The fund from fittings from the ships go into the Ship's account and the weapons and crew money is split up amongst the crew. Since the crew has already been paid, they get nothing more than prize money. 

I just purchased some graph paper composition books, which is what I use for note taking and rough gaming information. 


These are exactly what I used to map out all of the Star Smuggler events. 

Pluses and Minuses, Pools and Podcast

In Star Smuggler, characters make to hit rolls. They have to roll over a certain number which is varible with 2 dice. Although the rules do not say it, the character receives one die for skill and one die for the quality of their weapon. The rules establish that if you have no skill with a weapon, you can't make a to hit roll. However, theoretically, if you ignored that rule you could have an unskilled character blasting away with a very, very low probability of hitting. 

For starship and boat weapons, the roll is different. You need to roll 1 or 2 to hit. A pair or more of ones indicates a critical. The player receives a 1d6 per roll based on the tech level of their weapon, up to a maximum of 6d6. 

In other parts of the game, there is a standard roll of 1d6 or 2d6, where the character can have pluses and minuses modify the roll. The roll is usually used to determine what of 6 or 12 things happen next not how good you are doing. The evaluation of "good" or "bad" happens as a result of reading a paragraph or two describing an event. Getting in a fight is supposed to be bad, but if you have large party of characters that idea is flipped on it's head because the player can dominate the battlefield. Getting a cool new item is supposed to be good, but if you don't have room for it, it's useless. 

The D&D player in me only noticed the standard roll of 1d6 or 2d6 with modifiers and could not conceptualize why giving modifiers to weapons fire does not work. I know, I've tried. It's because those rolls are from a dice pool, a concept that is totally foreign to me.  

This is a case of knowing your rule sets and having a great background in games, mechanics and theory helps a lot. I am all about D&D while I find Traveller to be entirely opaque. Traveller fascinates me because I can't figure out how the game master and players use the game mechanics to make great things happen. I've heard of people playing one Traveller campaign for decades, as I have been doing with Star Smuggler. The basic mechanics make that happen. 

In D&D, my campaigns fizzle after a few weeks or months because the characters reach a point where the truly fantastic has to happen over and over each session to make the game go. The rules lose their gritty danger as the characters improve. That's baked right into D&D while Traveller has a totally different mindset where it's not likely that your character will mechanically improve at all. They get better and smarter, but everyone is still one blaster shot away from death. It's the psychological threat level that changes, not the characters abilities. It's all in the scope of the story. 

This is probably the reason why I've been listening to Safco Cast so much. I am sure most listeners are looking to Jeff Koenig and Bob Loftin Traveller experiences, I am listening for their Gaming experience. It's this whole "new" world of Traveller that fascinates me not for the world itself, but the whole mechanical framework that makes the play happen. In the last episode I listened to, they spoke all about dice pools and it really sorted out some issues I had with Star Smuggler because of my personal experience with D&D. Bob and Jeff are truly enlightening, because of the way they present the Traveller rules while also looking other systems like Cepheus and make great comparisons in how things are done. 

Amazing. Why don't you give them a try?