Questbird

It's not the Whitaker monograph, but there was a printed Hawkmoon game using Mongoose's Runequest II rules. It was by Gareth Hanrahan I think and it wasn't bad. You might find second-hand copies of that around, though Mongoose no longer has rights to either Hawkmoon or Runequest.

The most recent place I read about this idea was in a science-fiction role playing game called Shadows Over Sol. The idea of using numbers of items instead of absolute weights struck me as a great balance between realism and record-keeping. Shadows Over Sol also had the idea of a container which can hold X items of a particular type (like a backpack or ammunition case). A similar idea was used in gamebooks like Lone Wolf and Fabled Lands. Lone Wolf books had 'backpack items' (max 8 ) plus a weapon, plus so-called 'Special Items', various plot-related things which were the rort of the game because they effectively weighed nothing. Fabled Lands also had a limit of 12 items, though you could stash items in boats and houses you could buy. In that one (and in most RPGs I think) cash was the fudge; you could carry as many Shards as you could find.

So your Bulrathi overlords are mostly peaceful. They have established their Pax Bulratha* across their ruled systems. Their systems are comprised of many races, living under the same controls if not necessarily cheek by jowl with other races. The Bulrathi are technologically superior and have military might. There is no point in rebellion. The control exerted by the Bulrathi on their minions may be slight: Pay your taxes/tribute/DNA samples/work allocation duties to the Empire Don't cause Trouble (Obey your overlords): don't kill Bulrathi don't stop anyone else from obeying the other rules (maybe) Don't travel beyond your colony/Bulrathi space/an arbitrary limit in space Other than these, the Bulrathi don't particularly care about local laws or government. In return for obeying these strictures, planets are given access to Bulrathi technology and generally allowed to get on with their lives. The Bulrathi masters don't care how sub-species regulate themselves as long as the strictures are met. But of course the governed species will care; they will want to enforce their own cultural practices or laws. So at the very least you will get species or regional-specific factions springing up to do just that. So your investigative agency can come from there, a not-quite governmental sub-group. It's in their interest to solve the local problems without getting in the way of the interstellar government rules (principally #1). And such an organisation doesn't need to be an ethical one like the IPCC or EPS either. Maybe the Bulrathi are particularly ruthless when it comes to enforcing those simple rules of empire, to deter future offenders. Maybe their 'legal' system is impossible to understand for their underlings, but its outcomes are all-too similar for the 'punished'. Either way, having a local organisation to investigate local crimes is likely to be useful to both a planet or culture and the interstellar government, because it helps to contain dissent and Trouble (rule #2). * Of course I am referencing Earth's Roman Empire, which was multicultural, technologically and militarily advanced for the time and generally prosperous (if at the expense of surrounding cultures) until rot set in from within. Particularly the Roman's non-interference in religion until the Christians came along and demanded exclusivity. Also the Romans were particularly punitive of rebels, who would be destroyed without mercy and their lands salted to discourage such activity.

Many 'hard' sci fi writers and game designers have given up on FTL drive plausibility and now focus on intra-universe wormholes (plausible) naturally occurring but usually technologically augmented so as to be permanent and large enough to transport a spaceship containing live beings. Sometimes this technology is invented by humans and sometimes by handwavium ancient alien civilisations. Dan Simmons' Hyperion books has those portals so common that you can have your living room in a different part of the galaxy to your kitchen (though that has bad consequences in the books). I can think of at least two game sci-fi settings where oldskool generation ships and portal-using ships meet up after thousands of years. The ansible device is somewhat plausible with known science for interstellar communication only (not transport) because of the entanglement principle, the 'spooky action at a distance' which even Einstein didn't want to believe. And we have teleportation of photons now. If you can imagine scaling up technology to control spontaneously formed wormholes between points then you can probably also envisage scaling up teleporting photons to more complex information and even atomic and more macro structures. In Charles Stross' Accelerando, some humans encode their personalities into a box the size of a slab of coke and accelerate it via high powered laser beam from one of the outer system planets so that it can get to a nearby star. Their encoded personalities have various interactions with the AI culture they find there. I guess that's not what you're after (the transhuman AI-only interaction with the rest of the galaxy).

The Mandalorian has these themes. It's basically Sergio Leone with Star Wars dressing. No spoilers but the Mandalorian works for an organisation of bounty hunters (called The Guild) on an otherwise lawless planet. He's also not-so secretly a member of a coven of fanatic warriors, but the existence of the coven itself on the planet is secret. On Guild business he encounters agents of the Kleptocracy (the former Empire). And then those three organisations come into conflict.

Jack Vance's Gaian Reach was a very disparate swirl of planets with no central government. It nevertheless had an organisation called the IPCC (Interplanetary Police Consortium something). They were a mostly incorruptible organisation which enforced law on a whole lot of disparate planets...to varying degrees. Some planets had an IPCC office, others had nothing. There were some parts of the galaxy that were too dangerous for them to have a presence. They were basically a private corporation which had taken on fighting crime as its remit. They were usually welcomed by local planets because they represented the only interplanetary law enforcement organisation. The online game Pardus, which uses elements of Masters of Orion and Elite has an analogue of the IPCC called the Esteemed Pilots' Syndicate (EPS) which cuts across the three political factions of the game (the Federation, Empire and Union). You need to have high reputation to join it and you need to stay pretty clean in reputation in order to remain in it. (In the game that means not being a pirate, buying from black markets or using drugs.) The organisation is devoted to freeing slaves and shutting down drug stations and black markets, tracking down pirates and body-part traders. The IPCC and EPS are like the earliest police and fire departments: they were spontaneously formed due to need, but were nevertheless private organisations. It wasn't until later that their functions were taken over by states. But in a galaxy where central control has broken down, perhaps a return to such 'private good' corporations is warranted?

Maybe poor form of me to revive this topic, especially since I was the last poster. However one idea from lifted from other RPGs which makes Encumbrance more palatable is: use number of items carried as a measure of encumbrance. each Item carried is worth 1 ENC with the following exceptions: 2H weapons are worth 2 items 100 negligible weight items are worth 1 item (if in a suitable container) 4 normal items in a suitable container (like a backpack) are worth 1 item the backpack also counts as an item in the above example it would count as 2 items (one for the container, one for the contents) carrying a body or bulky thing counts as SIZ items Then use a system like the great Outpost 19 one above, same effects but simpler (as in fewer stages of encumbrance): STR/2 items: Light encumbrance STR items: Moderate encumbrance STRx2 items: Heavy encumbrance STRx3 items: Maximum encumbrance It's a lot easier to ask a player if they are carrying more than 5 items than it is to keep track of every single kilo. As with hit points or sanity, there's no particular benefit for a player to rigorously track their weight, so they don't. And it's also usually one more detail for the GM to monitor, hence these things get ignored a lot during play. Armour The Armour table on p. 259 of the Big Gold Book lists a 'burden' level for each type of armour: None, Light, Moderate or Cumbersome (ie Heavy). You could say that wearing those types automatically gives you that level of Encumbrance as a minimum, even if you are not carrying many items.

The rain has helped a bit in Victoria. There are still out of control fires burning in Gippsland (eastern Victoria) and on the border of New South Wales south of Canberra. Other fires are being brought gradually under control. Yesterday a water bomber plane (C-130) crashed in southern NSW while fighting fires, killing three US crew members.

There are bunch of US and Canadian firefighters down here to help us out. The fires across regional NSW and northern Victoria (the two most populous states in Australia) have been prolonged, destructive and lethal. It is true that the major cities where most Australians live are not on fire, but Sydney has come very close and Canberra has been surrounded by fires, even if they didn't come into the city. Both have been wreathed in smoke and haze for weeks, with air quality worse than Beijing at times. These fires are unusual because they started months before our traditional fire season (normally January and February) and have been burning out of control in nearly every state at once.

The Orville is a great Star Trek parody/homily show. I like it more than any Star Trek series I've seen recently. With Star Wars and FN, I really didn't mind that he wanted to defect from the First Order, who were a sort of lame Empire wannabes anyway. I figured that such things could happen were part of the 'Awakening' of the Force which might have happened in the (temporary) absence of the Emperor. But Phasma and the rest of the stormtroopers were still just as evil and I didn't care at all about them getting shot up.

The scenario published 'Ripples from Carcosa' by Oscar Rios takes place across three times: in the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages and in space in the near future post 'End Times' when Earth has been taken over by the Mythos. Different Investigators are used for each adventure, but they have some sort of 'past life' memories of the others. I've not run the adventures though they seem interesting. The sci-fi scenario is good but involves some human co-operation with the more 'benign' of non-aligned Mythos creatures (Yithians/Elder Things) which reduces their horror factor a bit.

It also depends a bit on which system you use. In BRP, skills increase by 1D6% if you succeed in a skill check. In Elric! it's 1D10%! I suppose characters in Elric! need to develop quickly before the End of the Young Kingdoms. In Fire and Sword I think it's 1 point on a d20, which translates to 5%. However Fire and Sword is like Mythras in that you get 'improvement points' to improve a number of skills, not limited to the ones you used in the adventure (though maybe guided by those). This is supposedly to avoid adventurers becoming too alike over time (eg, search, sneak, hide, combat skills etc.) I also use the house rule of an automatic on-the-spot increase of 1% if you get a critical success or a fumble.

I bought into an earlier One Ring Bundle of Holding, which had the rules and a few adventures. However I don't think I got around to reading it. Unfortunately with me and pdfs it's a case of out of sight, out of mind. At least it isn't filling up my bookshelves.

So it's a bit like Obsidian Portal or something? An online organiser for campaign notes?

This thread is related, though more about tropes in a psi campaign than mechanics of the powers (though it started off that way):

Not really. In both systems, I am assuming you failed a parry and your opponent succeeded in his/her attack roll. In a normal hit points system (let's say a non-hit location one for simplicity), here's how to die: They roll damage, you subtract armour. If the total is more than your hit points, you are dead. In the hitpointless system in order to die 'on the spot': You must fail a Resilience check (which factors in the damage of the attacker's weapon and your armour) -- that takes you out of the fight After the fight you must roll a Fumble on a CON x5 roll. If so you are beyond help. Otherwise you are alive, for now.

If you want to go the other way from hit locations and beyond even general hits, I tried a hitpointless system based on Ray Turney's Fire and Sword for my Swords of Cydoria campaign, which is a science fantasy campaign. I wanted a system where carrying swords and blasters was practical. It does cut down on management of NPCs in combat because you only care about one thing: can they still fight? (Morale is a different matter). You don't track hit points at all, and it's only players who you care if they are alive at the end of the fight. It worked pretty well for that system. It works quite well for guns because shock from a ballistic impact can knock someone out of a fight even if it doesn't kill them. Ray's design notes for Fire and Sword are gold, by the way. They are in the download section.

Well, modern weapons are deadly and a successful ambush on unarmoured/shielded targets is probably going to be deadly. However in a sci-fi campaign the ways to detect ambushes would also be advanced. Sensors, cameras, drones, we already have them now. Augmented reality can give you social and psychological readouts about everyone you encounter. You could tell if someone had elevated stress levels, for example. It could be multi spectrum, face-recognising, energy-detecting, linked to all manner of databases, able to spot people beyond the visible spectrum. These technologies might be smaller, more reliable, more ubiquitous, maybe even biologically implanted, depending on your campaign. How much control do governments exercise over their populations? How much monitoring? In space, it's likely to be a lot, which means more sensors everywhere. PCs with combat experience are likely to be extra alert/paranoid too; scanning all situations instinctively for danger (might not be good for their sanity or PTSD, but keeps them alive). There would also be technologies to evade or misdirect these sensors, and sensors for those technologies too. The prevalence of detection technologies would probably make ambushes most successful when there has been a human failing, ie. betrayal, a set-up. So if you are going to ambush players: Assume a successful ambush will kill at least one PC But give the players plenty of chances to detect first, using background technology, clues, psychology and personal attributes Or failing all that, Hero/Fate points to avoid instant death

I agree, but even our dear Tilda is getting on a bit.

The show is (maybe) being made in the 2020s not the 1970s. Iggy has too many wrinkles now. You could also suggest David Bowie, but he's dead already.

In the multiverse anything is possible and indeed probable.

If your energy shields are like the ones in Dune, they render ballistic weapons obsolete.

It's nice to have a picture of your character. But the more detailed and elaborate the picture the more likely your character will die horribly during the session you complete it.

I think I was using that system as a base, but changed it to 1 or 2 instead of 0 or 5 so that the 'roll low' concept could be preserved. It's hard to shift to a new dice rolling system if you're used to a different one. And in fact we ended up sticking with the old system because people couldn't adjust their old brains.

It's nice and simple, but BRP has 20% specials and 5% criticals so a 'visual' dice method gets more complicated. I came up with this one.