rust

I like John Ossoway's Cthulhu Rising setting very much, and good science fiction material is al- ways welcome as an inspiration to expand and improve my own setting, so you will most pro- bably have a customer here ... :thumb:

Thank you very much. There are basically three types of Varunian adventures: - exploration and environmental problems, - internal conflicts within the colony, - offworld entanglements. The cameo is typical for an environmental theme, an example of an "offworld entanglements" adventure could look like this: The previous government of the Shiva System in the Core Worlds region of the Terran Federation subsi- dized the emigration of Shivanian citizens as a means to reduce the population pressure in the densely populated Shiva System. These subsidies enabled the Varunian colonists to establish their colony, and it was planned to use the subsidies to bring more Shivanians to Varun to increase the size of the colony and develop it. However, the recent elections in the Shiva System caused a change of the government, and the new government has decided to cut all emigration subsidies and to use the finances for a birth control program instead - there will be no more Shivanian colonists for Varun. Soon after these news arrived on Varun, an Embassy Ship of the Terran Federation visits the colony. These ships are huge mobile exhibition centers that distribute political, economic, technological and cultural informa- tions from the Core Worlds and from other colonies in order to strengthen the connections between the va- rious planets inhabited by humans. On board of this Embassy Ship are delegations from several planets that want to make contacts with the co- lonies of the Demidov Cluster, for example to sell their products (everything from software to machinery) or to look for new sources of imports for their economies. One of these delegations comes from the Shiva System, and this is most likely to cause a lot of problems. On the one hand the Varunians want to stay on good terms with their original homeworld and still hope to convin- ce the Shivanian government to support the colony project, on the other hand many Varunians are extremely angry at the Shivanians because the end of the subsidies also means that they will not be able to bring their friends and relatives to Varun as originally planned - and some few colonists might even plan something to force the Shivanians to pay for the transport of their loved ones to Varun. The player characters will be involved in the information exchange with the Embassy Ship (there will be some most interesting new technologies and gadgets among the goods offered), in the diplomatic negotiations with the Shivanian delegation and also in the security measures to protect this delegation from possible attacks by angry colonists.

No "unobtainium" in this cameo, I am afraid. In my setting the cameos are straightforward and comparatively simple tasks created as the results of event rolls. They give the characters an opportunity to influence the development of the setting and to gain some experience and to gain or lose some status, but they do not have the depth and importance of a real adventure.

Just some first thoughts ... General Historical Background - timeline Current Situation - government and laws - economy and coinage - society and culture - powers and factions (political and religious) - ongoing conflicts Cultures - typical characters and skills - typical architecture and equipment ("technology") - everyday life (how do people live) - languages and typical names Creatures

Unfortunately not, because someone has to visit the place occasionally to "feed" the corals with a nutrient, because otherwise they would stop to grow and finally die. Besides, the Plateau Spider larvae will one day become adult Plateau Spiders, and a region overrun by Plateau Spiders would make it impossible to settle there.

I would prefer any non-historical material as an appendix or sidebar.

A while ago someone proposed to post some adventures to share ideas. Well, a full adventure would be a bit too much for me to translate, but I can offer a "cameo", an example of one of the small sideline ad- ventures the characters have to deal with now and then between the big adventures as the result of an event roll. Trouble at H-2 Construction Site H-2 „Habitat 2“, located about 600 km northeast of the Ghara Dome, is the construction site for the future second habitat of the Varun Colony, a dome with a diameter of 130 m for approximately 2,000 inhabi- tants. The foundations of the new dome and of a nearby ocean current power plant are grown with Biocrete, a fast growing genetically engineered coral. Once the foundations will be completed, Seacrete will be used to build the dome itself, which will finally be sealed with several layers of Bioplast. Since even a fast growing coral takes some years to create a structure, the construction work started soon after the arrival of the first colonists on Varun, even before the first habitat was completed. Right now H-2 consists of nothing more than a flat sandy plain with a low circular wall of artificial coral reef, a couple of similar coral structures and a few containers for the equipment used by the workers who occasionally visit the site to feed the coral and control its growth. Here there are Predators When the exploration team choose the site, the H-2 region appeared to be free of any dangerous native creatures. Even the Plateau Spiders common in most parts of the Ghara Shallows were extremely rare in this region. However, a few months after the Biocrete coral had been seeded, the first Sumatis began to visit the site, and soon afterwards the extremely dangerous Species Alpha also made its first appearances. A few days ago one of the workers at the site was attacked and severely wounded by a Species Alpha, and his colleagues threaten to refuse to work at H-2 unless something is done soon to get rid of the steadily increasing number of dangerous predators. The colony's aquafarmers also demand swift action, because the presence of the predators will make aquaculture in this area almost impossible. Conflicting Interests While the workers, who are members of the Miners' Union, and the Aquafarmers ' Cooperative demand that the Council orders the Security Service to kill at least the most dangerous predators, the Jain Alliance insists that killing any native creatures except in self defense would be both immoral and a breach of the Colonial District Authority's regulations. The New Society depicts the problem as an example of the Council's incom- petence and attempts to use it in order to win additional votes in the upcoming referendum on the colony's constitution. And the Council complains about a potential error made by the exploration team that chose the site for H-2, blaming the problem on you. You could ignore this problem, but it has already begun to damage your reputation, and it could soon lead to a loss of Status, with all the consequences this would have for your career ... You know there were no predators anywhere near the H-2 site when you made your survey, simply because there was neither any potential prey nor any ecosystem that could have provided enough prey to attract predators. There was only a flat plain, volcanic rock covered by sand. So something must have changed there ... --------------------------------------------------------------- The Problem Plateau Spiders give birth to hundreds of tiny larvae that look a bit like Terran shrimps and are the pre- ferred prey of Sumatis. Before the construction at H-2 began, these larvae avoided the region, because there were no opportunities to hide from the Sumatis. But with the Biocrete coral walls this has changed, the walls have lots of tiny cracks and holes where larvae can hide, and this attracted thousands of larvae from neighbouring regions to the construction site. With the larvae came the Sumatis who hunt them, and with the Sumatis came the Species Alpha who hunts the Sumatis. Encounters Sumatis and Species Alpha - lots of them. They do not understand the concept of peaceful coexistence with creatures that have the right size to be eaten. Sumati's Fish STR: 2D6 - 7 CON: 3D6 - 10 - 11 SIZ: 2D4 - 5 INT: 2 - 2 POW: 1D4 - 2 - 3 DEX: 2D6 - 7 Move: 7 Hit Points: 8 Damage Bonus: -1D4 Armour: none Attacks: Poison Stinger 40 % POT 8 (intense pain, immediately) Skills: Listen 75 %, Sense 75 % Species Alpha STR: 12D6+14 - 56 CON: 3D6+6 - 16 - 17 SIZ: 12D6+14 - 56 INT: 4 - 4 POW: 3D6 - 10 - 11 DEX: 2D6 - 7 Move: 8 Hit Points: 35 Damage Bonus: +5D6 Armour: 5-point shell Attacks: Claw 50 % 1D6+db Skills: Listen 75 %, Sense 75 % The Solution To kill the predators would only make the problem worse. There are far more predators around than even an army of combat robots could kill, and the dead predators would only attract even more dan- gerous scavengers and predators to the site. It is not wise to start a war against an entire biosphere. To kill all the larvae would solve the problem at least temporarily, but there is no way to kill thousands of tiny larvae individually, and any area effect weapon like poison could also damage or kill the Biocrete coral and thereby ruin the entire construction project. The Council members would not be amused. The best solution seems to use Bioplast or Seacrete to seal the lower finished parts of the coral walls, closing the larvaes' hiding places and forcing them to migrate back to where they lived before the coral walls offered them a new home. Edit.: Meanwhile I have edited this five times, and each time it reverted back to a formating mess when I opened it the next time. Either I am too stupid for editing, or there is some problem ...

Tastes differ widely, but for me something with about the amount of information found in Call of Cthulhu monographs like Secrets of Morocco or Mysteries of Ti- bet would be most welcome - at least not significantly less, although it could of course be "streamlined" to fit an adventure instead of an entire campaign. The reason is that I would like to have the option to add to the adventure if it goes well, and for this I would need enough background information to design my own follow on adventures.

I would very much prefer a sourcebook. Most historical periods are not very well documented, and often there are only very unclear or even contradictory accounts. Therefore, if I had only the adventure without a description of the back- ground and had to research the background myself, I could easily end up with a research result that does not really fit the adventure, at least not as it was intended by its author.

Yep, and whenever one assumes that things cannot get worse, something like this here happens ...:

Just imagine the first one to be an untrained elderly bureaucrat and the second one a young and well muscled Marine, and all bets are off.

Thank you.

Suffering from a mild case of writer's block and waiting for some inspiration to hit me, I used my time to take a look at biz information's evaluation of websites of roleplaying companies and forums. The really big one is still Wizards of the Coast with 46,000 visitors to its website per day. Next on my list is Steve Jackson Games with 6,800, followed by White Wolf with 3,300. Mongoose has about 450 website visitors each day, and Chao- sium ... well, see for youself. By the way, does anyone know what could have caused the spike in September 2009, I cannot remember what it could have been ?

Skill/15 seems a bit too tough for my purpose, a character would need a Swim skill of 75 % to get the basic MOV 5 or 90 % to get MOV 6. I prefer to give just a MOV+1 to those characters who are "professional swimmers".

I was thinking about something like this for the Swim skill in my Varun setting. In my view an experienced and highly skilled swimmer who uses Swim as one of his professional skills should probably have a higher Swim MOV than someone who is only an occasional "hobby swimmer". Therefore my setting's Dolphineers will all get a Swim MOV of 6 instead of the usual 5.

Yep, a formula would have to consider far too many factors, for example where the creature lives (speed is more useful on the steppe than in a dense jungle), whether it is predator or prey (the predators usually are faster than their prey), and dozens of other things. In the end one would probably need a different formula for each creature, and so I decided the speed for each creature of my Varun setting individually to fit it into the "system" of the biosphere. A nice side effect is that the various creatures now have a wider range of speeds, with values across the entire scale, while any formula would tend to generate only a limited number of possible results.

The problem is that the fastest quadrupeds are neither very strong nor very big. A slender and comparatively small cheetah can run circles around a much stron- ger and bigger lion or tiger, and an antelope can do the same with an elephant or a rhinoceros. So, to make the formula work, one would have to give the cheetah, the antelope and so on an incredibly high and completely implausible dexterity.

Potential Advantages: - no character development restrictions through classes and levels - percentile systems are intuitive and easy to understand - BRP can be used for all genres and genre crossovers

If I try that, I need anagathics to become able to see the first character generated by the program ...

Hmm, those 5 minutes to create a character ... :shocked: Over the last weeks I have designed a number of detailed NPCs for my Varun setting, and I think that I can meanwhile handle my modified BRP system for this setting quite well. I use both a spreadsheet and NPC data sheets, so all I have to do is to decide upon the kind of character the setting needs for a specific slot (e.g. "Nordican ambas- sador to Poselok"), what skills such a person would need and be likely to have, to ge- nerate the stats with the spreadsheet and to enter them and some few background notes into the NPC sheet. It usually takes me about 15 minutes per character, and I seriously doubt that there is a faster way to do it that also gives reasonable results.

As has been mentioned, it depends a lot on the players. Someone with a clear idea of the character he wants to play in a specific setting can translate this idea into BRP stats quite quickly, especially if he does not care for a few percentage points more or less here or there because roleplaying the character is more important to him than "playing the system". Someone with a powergaming min/maxing approach can turn the BRP character crea- tion into a kind of fake rocket science and spend a lot of time to search for the "perfect" combination of characteristics, skills and weapons to get the most "bang" for the least points out of the system.

Comparing BRP to the other systems I use, it seems to me the character design with BRP is on the comparatively fast and easy side. In Traveller the character creation is almost a game within a game, because the lifepath system also creates much of the character's background history and contacts. The result is worth the trouble, but the character creation takes some time. GURPS with its many possible combinations of advantages and disadvantages is also not exactly a fast and easy system. And in my view D&D 4 is only fast if one creates a 1st level character, the creation of a more experienced character can easily become very complicated and time consuming.

Strange ... for me it just downloads the PDF when I click it. :confused:

I do not know how it is handled in your country, but over here you would only have to prove that you are the author, and the company would be happy to get the job.

The first adventure of the campaign will see the player characters on a mission to the Chandalini System with the task to verify the previously obtained data, to explore the planet Varun and to find a suitable location for the advance base and the future settlement. One of the "props" I intend to use for this adventure is the "survey map" of Va- run. Unlike the normal maps of the planet, this one is divided into hexagons, and each hexagon represents the area the player characters can survey in some detail within about one week. Since they have only a few months before the freighter with the advance team arrives, they will have to make choices which parts of the planet to explore in some depth and how to best use their available equipment.