Peter Fitz

I found an STL for a 1977 Traveller version of an Air/Raft on Thingiverse, so I re-scaled it to more or less 15mm to fit with my elderly RAFM Traveller minis and printed a couple. The one on the left is resin from my Mars Pro, the barely distinguishable black one on the right is FDM from my Ender 3.

The blue one at the back is one that I clobbered together ages ago from a Hot Wheels toy.

The resin version took about 50% longer to print than the FDM one, but comes out smoother. The FDM print is fine, but the supports in under the dashboard are a bit of a nightmare to remove, and if I was going to do it again I'd probably fill in that space since it's not really necessary for a gaming model.

When Marc Millar invented this thing back in '77, I assume that either (a) he was envisaging some kind of force field to protect the passengers, or (b) he had never sat in an open-topped vehicle traveling at 250 kp/h.

Also, why the slash in Air/Raft? I've always found that incomprehensibly dumb, and if the slash character was closer to the hyphen on the keyboard I'd assume it was just a typo.

I have been (slowly) reformatting the ORC BR:UGE PDF to A5 format, and I've split it into 3 volumes for ease of handling.

I have links to the PDFs on my website at https://mojobob.com/roleplay/roleplay.html

I've done all the layout in LibreOffice, and it's all pure styled text, no illustrations at all except for the BR:UGE logo in the front-page boilerplate.

I've added the latest installment of the campaign journal at https://mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/sci-fi/terranempire/campaign_notes/campaignindex.html

Episode Two of our new space opera campaign finally took place this evening, after several postponements.

I have a bit of a quandary now: the party collectively managed to get themselves into so much trouble that they really all should be off to spend the remainder of their lives on some godforsaken alien prison asteroid.

However, I kind of feel that it would be a bit of a let-down to just have everyone building new characters every couple of sessions, so now I have to figure out some vaguely acceptable way of getting them, if not out, at least through the trouble they've caused themselves.

I didn't sign on to do this much work, ferk-dangit! 😃

That's fine in principle, but it does mean a lot of work for both player and GM. Especially for the GM, who has to maintain consistency in the level of effect from session to session without any clear guidelines.

The advantage of mechanistic magic systems is that it removes a great deal of ambiguity.

Once again I find that because our gaming group's collective schedule is so erratic, I end up spending far more of my time fiddling around the edges of my campaign milieu than actually devising exciting adventures to put them through. If I'm very lucky, we might — might, I say — manage to get a second session of our first adventure next week. Maybe.

Current mood: Somewhat disgruntled. Adulthood sucks.

Here's a comparison of some 3d and 2d minis for gaming purposes.

The 32mm mini on the left is from Reaper, while the 32mm paper mini to its right is from OkumArts.

The little paper mini is another one from OkumArts that I've recoloured and resized to roughly 15mm, while the 15mm 3d mini on the right is an old Traveller figure from RAFM.

The 3d minis are better, there's no doubt about it. But the paper minis are perfectly adequate for TTRPG purposes, and they're much, much less trouble to prepare and store.

NOTE: OkumArts paper minis, unlike most that I've seen, have both front and back sides illustrated. That's important for games in which facing might be relevant.

Wow! 

This sort of thing appeals to my desire to play with little dollies, though realistically I suspect it would be of fairly limited utility within the game.

Cool though.

Once you've got the size, shape, bulk etc. of the weapon determined, and you've decided if it's a melee weapon or a ranged attack, then in my view the most important things about it are the Special Effects of just how it does its damage. In pure game terms, damage is just pips on a die, but if your weapon is, say, a Flaming Sword then the SFX become the most important thing to differentiate your toy.

Are the flames large, like a torch, or do they just lick along the edges of the blade? That may affect the ease and extent to which it will ignite flammable objects or creatures. Can the flames be directed like a short-range flamethrower, or does it just act like a burning brand? Is the blade itself hot? In which case it may cauterize the wounds it inflicts, so less bleeding. Is it always hot, or does it get hotter as you use it? In which case, how long can you hold on to it before you start scorching your own hand? Or does the handle somehow stay cool? Can the sword be used to intentionally cauterize a bleeding wound (i.e First Aid) or will it just do more damage to the victim without helping?

All of these possibilities arise because your Flaming Sword has a bunch of SFX.

Any weapon in a RPG, at its core, is just a mechanism to deliver X amount of damage points. That's not very interesting. The interesting thing is how it delivers that damage, and the consequences of how it delivers the damage.

I've given the party in my revived Space Opera campaign a Far Trader, since I like my players to have more or less unfettered access to a ship. It makes my own life as a GM much easier. There's so much that can go wrong with a spaceship.

To that end, I found some deck plans for the Empress Marava class Far Trader (from Traveller) on the internet, and recreated them as a vector file in CorelDraw. I rescaled it so that it can be used with the old 15mm Traveller minis I have, and printed it out on tiled pages.

I don't know how much use we'll get out of them — I may just have to arrange a hijacking or two, or maybe an invasion by some kind of inimical Space Baddies.

In this photo it just shows the lower deck; there's another sheet for the upper deck as well.

I'll probably get them laminated at some stage, when I have a little bit of spare cash.

I've started converting some of the equipment from my ancient Star Hero campaign. It's not difficult, but I think for many of the pieces a basic description of what it does as all that's needed; actual mechanical definitions will likely be largely superfluous.

A gravitic flight pack, for example: I guess, if you're involved in a chase, then knowing exactly how fast or how high you can fly, and how maneuverable it is would be necessary. But most of the time, knowing that you can fly about as fast as a car can drive is sufficient. So precise definitions can probably wait until they're actually needed.

Weapons are a different kettle of fish, but rather than converting Star Hero technobabble into BRP technobabble, I'll just replace the SH gear with the nearest equivalent from BRP and call it done.

I like the spinning black hole best.

11 hours ago, rsanford said:

@Peter Fitz are you using Chris’ Quasar rules? If not what are you using?

I have a copy of M-Space to use as a guide, but I'm running the campaign in the Terran Empire milieu I started it in two decades ago when I was using the Hero System (5th ed.)

These are the pages I set up for that campaign: https://mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/sci-fi/terranempire/campaign_notes/campaignindex.html and I'll just convert things as need be as I go along.

We had the very first session of our new BRP space opera campaign this evening, and overall it went pretty well. Most of the session was taken up with character creation, and with the blind leading the blind it was all a bit chaotic. However, the system is so easy and intuitive that once we actually got down to roleplaying it all went very smoothly. Except for the dice, of course. Those blasted dice.

I'm allowing everyone to make pretty much whatever changes to their characters they like for the first few sessions, until things bed in and people get more of a grip on what skills and equipment and what-not they actually need.

The initial adventure is a space-hulk salvage scenario, which should provide a bit of excitement once it gets properly under way.

34 minutes ago, Squaredeal Sten said:

We are talking about a 12 second melee round, and if there is movement involved half of that must be gone.  I would never allow a change to statement of intent to undo that.

Twelve seconds in combat is a looooong time. 

I don't think the statement should be a straitjacket. Obviously the character would adapt to changing circumstances. Maybe you could require an Idea roll or something to be able to change targets on the fly, but as long as there's no obvious attempt to abuse the system I wouldn't even bother with that.

I guess the new cover is more representative of Imperative as a generic-ish rules system, but I think the old cover was much more atmospheric.

4 hours ago, jackleg2010 said:

Who did you order M-Space from?

I bought it through DTRPG.

My copy of BR:UGE arrived today, simultaneously with three other books from all over the world. Booty! Masses of booty! Of course this means there will be no more little presents from Past Me in the mail for a while, but still. BOOTY!

I've read many comments on the supposed illegibility of the text in the new edition of Basic Roleplaying, but frankly I'm not seeing it. Admittedly I need my reading glasses to read it, but then I need them these days to read anything much under 72pt. The printing is crisp and clean, and the paper stock is beautifully luxurious and matte. I love it.

RPG books are getting pretty massive in these modern times — that Lyonesse volume is fully 40mm thick, and the others aren't very much more svelte.

Looking forward to seeing it.

49 minutes ago, SDLeary said:

It would make the book a bit longer, but some of the tables could be rotated 90° and fill the page. At least, that way you wouldn't have to reformat so many.

There are two reasons not to do that.

First, and most important, it would make the book a lot harder to read, especially if you're looking at a PDF on screen.
And second, because rotating the tables in floating frames is a recipe for disaster in a word processing application, and wouldn't be much less trouble to lay out in any case.

On 3/14/2024 at 12:25 AM, Peter Fitz said:

I'm in the process of reformatting the US Letter RTF to A5 ODT in LibreOffice right now, which is a lot more work than I'd hoped because there seems to be some weird glitches with LibreOffice's import of the RTF's formatting. I'll get there eventually.

Here's a screen-shot of the layout I've chosen to go with for my A5 version (that would be Digest for US people, I think). Even with all the text at 9pt, and no illustrations at all, it comes out at about 650 pages, and I haven't made a start on any table of contents or index yet. I've had to break most of the tables up and reformat them, because they mostly sprawl out horizontally too far otherwise, and to fit them in to an A5 page I'd have to drop the font size down to only 5 or 6 pt, which is basically illegible.

On 3/14/2024 at 8:10 AM, Atgxtg said:

That's true with Word as well. Things can move around, in part because of how, where and to what stuff get's anchored to. If you really want to page layout to stay consist while changing page size, you need a desktop publishing program. Scribus is free. It won't help you much now, but might be worth it in the future.

 

 

I do have DTP programs available: Serif PagePlus and Affinity Publisher. I've used InDesign in the past, but the cost of ownership of that is just too high. However, none of these are all that useful for laying out a publication that is light on illustrations and heavy on tables; none of them handle tables all that smoothly.

The best DTP program I've ever used for technical publications was Ventura Publisher (later Corel Ventura), but they stopped making that, and the ancient versions stopped working with one of the versions of Windows — Win2k I think. It was a while ago.

For my purposes, LibreOffice works just fine. It's just a pity that Microsoft doesn't work or play well with others.

I've more or less completed the players' section, and am as far as the bestiary in the gamemasters part. I'm going to have to go back though and completely reformat all the equipment tables though, as they just won't fit on an A5 page.

[Edit] And now I've reached that stage where I wonder why I ever thought it would be a good idea to do this at all 🙂

On 3/10/2024 at 7:44 PM, Atgxtg said:

Your bound to cover it eventually.

I'm in the process of reformatting the US Letter RTF to A5 ODT in LibreOffice right now, which is a lot more work than I'd hoped because there seems to be some weird glitches with LibreOffice's import of the RTF's formatting. I'll get there eventually.