clarence

The Guardian has published a list of their favourite sci-fi books of 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/30/the-best-science-fiction-and-fantasy-of-2017 My own choice from the past year has even made it onto the list: Amatka by Karin Tidbeck. Very well deserved and highly recommended if you have missed the debut of this rising star (no pun intended). Did any of you read the other titles mentioned in the article? Any recommendations?

I don't know much about the history of characteristics - more than you have already noted - but to me it always felt like a logical progression: Siz and Int are very unlikely to go below 8 in a human. The other characteristics are slightly more flexible. Point buy systems are always possible to exploit by power players unfortunately. In those cases, going for random rolls is a good option. As for myself, I would use the second option in you list. I'm sorry to hear your initial test of M-SPACE didn't turn out the way you wanted. I hope it will get better as you and your players find a few shared concepts to work from.

This looks very promising.

I hope you enjoy it! And yes, there's more coming. Just taking a bit longer to write than I expected. With a bit of luck a teaser is not too far away.

Just a reminder that today is the last day of our Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale! 20% off both M-SPACE and REFLUX.

FrostByte Books is launching its first sale ever! Get 20% off both M-SPACE and REFLUX between November 23-27. PDF: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/10544/FrostByte-Books?term=frostbyte&test_epoch=0 Print (Lulu, Black & White): https://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?contributorId=1360886 Print (Color, shipping from Europe): https://widget.publit.com/frostbyte-shop_2629/page/1 If you’ve been on the fence whether to get them or not, this is a great opportunity.

That's good to hear. Congratulations Paolo!

Very cool!

Haha, no I really can't do the math. Reading that article, my eyes glaze over instantly.

Oh, that's nice. I've been reading quite a lot on the history of medicine lately and it's fascinating how many strange diseases there are, but also humanity's ability to make them worse with treatment. (Blood letting comes to mind, but that's actually one of the medieval practices that a doctor's used on me some years ago).

That's interesting. No direct terraforming and still an atmosphere would be formed 'The shield structure would consist of a large dipole—a closed electric circuit powerful enough to generate an artificial magnetic field.' I wonder what size such an apparatus would have?

Maybe you can put them in the downloads section?

I agree, this is very welcome!

Looking forward to reading it Matt!

It's quite easy to find deck plans of Titanic on Google, but that is too big a ship I assume? Most other plans I have found on the internet are quite low-res.

The Traveller-inspired star mapping tool Sector has been updated to 2.0. I've written about this iOS app before (http://www.frostbytebooks.com/blog/easy-star-mapping) and the new update makes it even better. The top new feature is a more flexible zoom tool. It now allows the user to see an entire sector at once or zoom in to just a few star systems. Using the standard pinch gestures, it’s very easy to move around a sector. Star maps generated elsewhere can now be imported, though I'm unsure what the exact file type requirements are. There’s also a new info pop-up that does a great job of explaining most symbols used in the app, though a few are still missing (like the colored hex outlines appearing in a few places). Editing is just as easy as before: hit Edit and then tap any hex to add or remove a world. Very straightforward. A generous list of information is automatically generated for every system and can be updated if necessary. If you own an iOS device and play sci-fi games, this app is close to ubiquitous. For iPads it really shines. In fact, you will never have to go through the tedious work of manual star mapping again if you get this app, all for the price of a cup of coffee. Highly recommended.

Thanks Paolo! I will check it out.

Very cool!

Sweet!

Ok, so I got a little inspired by the above and checked my own book collection for favourite covers: This is the Swedish edition of Rendezvous With Rama from 1974. Cover by Tom Hultgren. I really enjoy these typography-only covers, but I suppose they were used partially for economic reasons. Swedish is a small language/market after all and illustrations are expensive.

I just found this neat crowdfunding campaign: https://unbound.com/books/wonders-and-visions Two sci-fi critics have collected book covers from the history of science fiction and are turning them into a book. 300-350 covers will be included, from all decades of sci-fi publishing.

Thanks for the link. I'll check it out.

Good work. I have missed the Campaign Logger - what is it?

Affinity Publisher or Scribus are my best recommendations, so I'm not much of a help here. Although you might want to check out any of the web based alternatives to InDesign that exist, but they come with a monthly subscription too. Much lower than Adobe's of course, but still.

Rod's advice sounds very good. I usually go with 1d4 for most normal stuff like chairs, umbrellas and baseball bats. For sturdier objects made of wood or metal I use 1d6. Anything with a sharp edge might be best to compare with a traditional melee weapon and just downgrade damage a bit.