rust

Indeed, and with so many new and interesting d100 systems entering the market Chaosium risks to come too late to the show with BRP Essentials.

By the way, the politics of Thalassa ... Thalassa became an independent member world of the Interworld Council in 2216 when the Council acknowledged Thalassa's constitution. There was a great celebration and Thalassa's first Council representative was welcomed in Geneva with congratulations, fireworks, pomp and circumstance – all very nice in-deed. The subtext to Thalassa's independence celebration was somewhat less nice: „You are independent now, not our colony, and therefore we are in no way obliged to support you. Play nice and by our rules, and we will allow you to negotiate favourable treaties with us. Anger us, and we will ignore you and look the other way when you fail.“ Although the relations between Thalassa and the Council are far from good, Thalassa's representative in Geneva and Thalassa's government have ma-naged to establish and sustain a kind of working relationship with the council majority on Earth and the ICDA staff in Port Rose on Thalassa. According to the constitution, based on the Council Charta, Thalassa is a republic. There is an Assembly with 60 elected members who discuss and pass Thalassa's laws and its budget and elect a Governor as the head of state and leader of the government. Thalassa's assembly has not yet developed true political parties, there are only interest groups like the aquafarmers and the seabed miners which compete for the republic's limited resources. Now, whether all this is of any interest for the players and their characters depends on the characters' goals. In many roleplaying games more than a few characters sooner or later want to get into leadership positions enabling them to influence the setting's development in a big way – which in a republic requires to get into politics. Enter a new skill, Reputation, which is almost the same as Status in BRP or Credit Rating in Call Of Cthulhu. A character starts with an average Reputation, which is influenced (in a minor way) by his career. Whenever the character succeeds with something his fellow Thalassians consider praiseworthy his Reputation increases. And whenever he does something they consider damaging for their community his Reputation decreases. In order to reach a leadership position, for example to become elected into any kind of office, the character needs a high Reputation – the higher the position, the higher the required Reputation.

Back to Thalassa, with a few informations about what lives there ... Thalassa suffered a major meteorite impact about 150,000 years ago. It created the huge impact crater in the planet's western hemisphere and caused a global ice age which in turn led to the extinction of all complex life in the ocean's upper layers, there only some simple microorganisms survived the desaster. However, down in the deep sea the life was based on chemosynthesis instead of photosynthesis, and so some complex life forms survived around the hydrothermal vents of the deep sea. Several species of these „filters“ and „crawlers“ have been discovered with the marine biologists' remotely controlled drones, but very little is known about them. The colonists have introduced a number of species of algae and fish from Earth to their new home world, almost all of them used for the colony's aquaculture. The most famous exceptions are the result of what the ICDA bureaucrats usually call the „elasmobranchii scam“ and one of the reasons for the rather cool relations between Thalassa and the ICDA. When the colony preparation team arrived on Thalassa the planet's atmosphere was somewhat low on oxygen. The team's terraformers therefore decided to introduce genetically modified oxygen producing plankton, but some unidentified trace substance in Thalassa's water made these plankton organisms more fertile than expected. Thalassa's elected governor Carlos Rose informed the ICDA about a possible future „plankton problem“ and requested the additional introduction of plankton eating species from Earth. The ICDA bureaucrats asked him for a list of suitable species, and he sent them such a list of obscure Latin scientific names of plankton eating species – and the ICDA accepted his proposal. What the ICDA officials missed were two species of elasmobranchii Rose had smuggled onto the list under their most obscure Latin names – manta rays and whale sharks, big creatures with incredibly high space transport costs. However, the ICDA had agreed to the list and did not want to see its mistake published, and so Thalassa received a breeding stock of manta rays and whale sharks as a „generous gift“ of the ICDA. Carlos Rose was pressured to resign as Thalassa's governor by the ICDA, but he was re-elected the following year.

Alas, those old habits ...

In my view this is the main problem with all "non-generic" games: Their designers either have the extreme luck or skill to create one of the rather few truly fashionable settings beloved by thousands of players, or the game becomes an epic fail, a heartbreaker that is forgotten almost immediately after it was published. With a good set of generic core rules and a number of different setting supplements the chance to survive on the market seems better than with the "hit perhaps, miss probably" approach of a game tied completely to a specific new setting. However, this may not be true in the case of Runequest and Glorantha, because Glorantha is already a well established (niche) setting with a comparatively large community of fans.

As I still have a little more time to annoy harmless electrons by posting here ... Since the Thalassa setting's hyperspace drive is the setting's only „supertech“, here is a short explanation. The hyperspace drive, invented in 2084, enables starships to travel through naturally occuring hyperspace „corridors“ between planetary systems. Before such a corridor can be used by all starships it has to be sea-ched for, discovered and surveyed by a specially equipped explorer starship, a very time consuming and also very, very expensive process. Once a starship has used its hyperspace drive to enter a known corridor it „falls“ towards the corridor's destination system with the specific speed of that corridor, which is the same in both directions – no drive needed inside the corridor. There is no direct relation between the length of the corridor and the time required to move through it. For example, Thalassa is the fourth planet of the Poseidon System, approximately 72 light years from Earth's Sol System. The voyage through the one known hyperspace corridor between these two systems takes about 30 days, but the voyage through another corridor between Poseidon and Sol could just as well take 10 or 90 days. As you can imagine, discovering a new and faster hyperspace corridor between two inhabited systems is a good way to become filthy rich. Since the precise distance between the systems at both ends of a corridor and their precise astronomical coordinates are not needed to use a known corridor, an astrogator's star charts look almost like a kind of subway map, with only the corridors, the hyperdrive settings required to enter them and the time required to move through them. In fact, even a dumb robotic starship could use a corridor – if it were permitted, the Interworld Council still insists on human pilots and astrogators.

Ah, since I basically copied your Dirigible example vehicle for the Aquaculture Floater this credit is definitely yours.

Before I return to the setting itself a few more thoughts concerning the system used for it. In previous water world settings I tortured the players with a technology informations overkill caused by the use of the GURPS technology supplements for the design of vehicles, drones and thelike. In hindsight I suspect that this degree of „fictional realism“ actually turned into a kind of straitjacket for the players' imagination and prevented their own contributions to the setting instead of encouraging them to „play in“ their own ideas. This time I will try the opposite approach, and here Design Mechanism's Luther Arkwright supplement for RQ6/Mythras (thank you again for the recommendation, Belgath) provides a very good base with its chapters on vehicles and on technology. For the setting's vehicles I will now give only the basic descriptions instead of two pages of mostly uninteresting data. Here is an example using Threedeesix's slightly modified vehicle system from the Luther Arkwright game: Aquaculture Floater Hull: 10 (Enormous Civilian), 85 Structure Speed: Ponderous Systems: 5 Traits: Seaborne, Aquaculture [= equipment to harvest algae, catch fish, etc.], Cargo Shields: None Weapons: None Add to this a „narrative“ description of how big the floater is, what it looks like and how it is used, and hopefully the players' imagination will help to fill in the gaps. Another way to hand over much of the setting's technological development to the players' characters is also borrowed from the Luther Arkwright game. It is the system for the Technological Item Creation, which enables the characters to design and build their own equipment as well as all kinds of other gear using Task Rounds. This not only encourages player input into the setting, it also makes the relevant skills more useful and even valuable for the characters – a good idea and invention can earn a character a nice increase of his reputation and a lot of Interworld Credits. These Interworld Credits are still a minor problem for me. In previous settings I offered the players a table of average monthly incomes of the setting's various careers and long lists of goods and prices. This time I wonder whether it would be more prudent to use something like BRP's Wealth Levels and to get rid almost entirely of the financial bookkeeping. The jury is still out, but the wealth level approach seems to become more and more attractive each time a think about the problem.

A few more informations about the Thalassa setting ... The current year on the planets of the Interworld Council is 2226, thirteen years after the first colony preparation team arrived on Thalassa and began to construct the Thalassa Downport floater (a floating spaceport just big enough for orbital shuttles) and the first domed seafloor habitat, Port Rose. The political situation back on Earth is not much different from today, the continental organizations like the European Union work more or less well together in the United Nations. The representatives of the United Nations and the representatives of the currently 32 colony worlds together form the Interworld Council, the ruling authority of the Interworld Space. The council and its sub-organizations like the ICDA have little power on Earth and on the older, well developed colonies like New Hope or Tsinan, but are rather powerful on new colonies like Thalassa. Most of Thalassa's settlers came from the nations of the European Union, the closest neighbouring colony Bolivar, twenty hyperspace days away, was settled by people from the Latin American Union. Bolivar is important for Thalassa because it provides foodstuffs which cannot be grown on the water world, like grain and most fruits, in exchange for the rare earths and crystals mined on Thalassa and exported to Earth. All industrial goods needed by the Thalassians have to be imported from Earth. The majority of Thalassa's colonists lives in the domed seafloor habitats Port Rose and Cavorte Domes. The colony's aquafarmers prefer floater habitats as the bases for their aquaculture, sea ranching and algae phytomining. Both types of habitats use hydroponics and algae tanks to refresh the air, recycle the water and produce some basic foodstuffs. Algae are also used to produce various biotech materials used by the colony's growing light industry for the production of basic equipment like for example furniture and clothing. To be continued ...

During my research for a previous water world setting I found first the GURPS version of Blue Planet and later on the original game and its supplements, but somehow it did not feel right for my purposes. However, since I did read all of it Blue Planet may well have influenced some of my own design decisions.

Great, of course !

As those of you who know me will already have guessed, Thalassa is yet another one of my many water world settings, a young colony in a remote planetary system, thirty days in hyperspace from Earth. However, this time I followed the „Dare To Be Dumb“ philosophy: No hostile aliens (actually, no aliens at all), no powerful relics of ancient civilizations, no bloodthirsty space pirates, not even dangerous sea monsters (well, Thalassa is not yet completely explored, and the deep sea …). Still, a setting needs some conflicts, even if low intensity ones should do. In the case of Thalassa the colonists have to face very limited resources, a not exactly helpful ICDA (Interworld Council Development Agency, a kind of colonial office), a rather greedy Interworld Mining Corporation which financed the seabed mines that are at the core of the colony's economy, and – worst of all – each other. The characters' career choices include Aquafarmer, Dolphineer, Engineer, Hardsuit Diver, Mariner, Merchant, Official, Physician, Politician, Ranger, Scientist, Seabed Miner and Teacher. Dolphineers are the handlers of trained dolphins used in aquafarming, underwater work and rescue operations. Rangers are the members of the colony's police force. Seabed Miners are actually drone controllers, there are no humans down in these mines. Although the exploration of Thalassa is a focus of the campaign there is no Explorer career – the colony simply has not the money to pay any full time scouts. The list of skills is not much different from that of Mythras Imperative. I decided to delete Comms and Sensors (both are now covered by Electronics) to avoid skill creep and added a couple of specialties for the Craft (e.g. Aquaculture, Dolphineering), Engineering (e.g. Biotech, Habitat Systems) and Science (e.g. Marine Biology, Oceanography) skills, plus a new Language (Aquasign), the underwater sign language of the dolphineers. There is only one Combat Style, named „Diver“, which covers dive knife, speargun and sonic stunner. The setting's technology is only slightly more futuristic than that of our real world, starships with hyperspace drives are the setting's single „supertech“ element. The watercraft are mostly hydrofoils or SWATH-catamarans, the submarines use fuel cells, the drones are not intelligent and remotely controlled, the best available sensors are imaging sidescan sonars, and so on. Since the starships are only a background element (no starship crew careers) the colony is definitely a „near future“ setting.

In my view this is unfortunately true. For my science fiction settings I tend to use very much simplified combat systems, simple enough to be able to deal with both a successful knife attack and a sonic weapon hit. The (general, not location) hit points are only used for the results of attacks with "traditional" weapons like knives, spearguns and thelike, all "futuristic" weapons incapacitate the victim with the first hit. But this is for settings where combat is very rare and often handled in a rather narrative way, I think few people would like such a simplified system for a combat heavy setting.

"Chaosium" has 8 letters, "Runequest" has 9 letters and "Glorantha" has 9 letters, which would make it the mysterious "Project 899". I wonder what the Kabbalah would make of this, at least it is not the traditional number of the beast, although I suspect it could be the number of the duck ...

After a little research it turned out that it was actually the "Morrow Project Roleplaying Expansion" which used the Runequest system, a supplement for the core rules, which used a different (and rather unplayable) system. Ah, well, it was such a long time ago ...

I just remembered that the very first edition of The Morrow Project (a post-apocalyptic science fiction game) used the Runequest system with Chaosium's permission. However, the current version of the game uses some other system.

Well, since I have just moved both of my current settings to the Mythras system and are very happy about the results, I would vote for Mythras - especially because I have been waiting for BRP Space since you uploaded the latest version of BRP Starships, and would not like the idea to have to wait any longer ... But it is of course your choice, and I will happily grab BRP Space, no matter which system you decided to use.

There are a couple of science fiction monographs for Cthulhu, for example End Time and Once Men.

A well deserved credit indeed. The way you designed the vehicles provides precisely the informations required for the game, very nice compared to the information overkill created the unnecessary higher mathematics of many other systems, worst of all GURPS Vehicles.

Thank you for an excellent idea, I will take a look at it. Edit.: Downloaded and browsed Luther Arkwright, it is really very useful, especially the chapters on technology and on vehicles. Thank you again.

I really like the approach of Mythras Imperative, actually I like it so much that I have now also converted my Thalassa science fiction campaign to the Mythras system. It worked rather well, only a few skills needed minor changes, and most of the science fiction careers had to be designed. Well, and now I am looking forward even more to Mythras and its supplements.

In my view this is the best way to handle the edition problem. There will be some temporary confusion while Design Mechanism's Runequest 6 is still around, but this will probably end not long after its name change to Mythras has been completed.

As I understand it, Runequest by Chaosium will be tied to the world of Glorantha, while Mythras by the Design Mechanism will become more generic, designed for modern and science fiction settings as well as fantasy ones.

Mythras is the new name of Runequest 6 (which became necessary when Chaosium announced their new Runequest, I think). Mythras Imperative is a stripped down version, a full version (with probably only minor changes from Runequest 6) will follow, hopefully soon.

The system is very similar to that of the Pendragon RPG, and in my experience at least it works rather well with new players, mainly because it serves both as an introduction to the setting and as a personalized description of the character's position in it, which helps the character's player to understand his social environment. These background informations can indeed help the player to understand how to create a character that fits well into the setting.