seneschal

True, but it'd help to know the average weight of a 6- or 10-foot section of the beast so you could figure out it's SIZ in game terms. Sliced sea serpent, anyone?

After re-watching King Kong a couple more times, I'd estimate his height at 36 feet (6 times as tall as a regular gorilla). Using your cube formula (6x6x6=216 times the weight), that'd make Kong weigh 108,000 pounds, or 54 tons. Which, based on the BRP SIZ chart on Page 296, would make him SIZ 86 or 87. That may explain why he was able to defeat that Tyranosaurus despite appearing to be physically smaller. If we shrink him down to 30 feet tall, his weight would be 62,500 pounds, or 31.25 tons, SIZ 80, still "bigger" than Old Snappy Jaws.

The problem is I'm a BRP newbie rather than a RuneQuest veteran. I'm still trying to dope all this stuff out. As ClawCarver pointed out, many fantasy or science fiction critters don't have easy real-life animal parallels to draw upon, especially when you reach Toho Pictures dimensions. If I'm trying to stat up King Kong or The 50-Foot Woman I can multiply the known average weight of real creatures. If I'm designing my own beasties from scratch, things get trickier. And as soltakiss and ClawCarver said, figuring SIZ in those instances is often a matter of guesswork. I'd try to avoid Strike Ranks. Simpler is better for me.

Thanks, ClawCarver, for the reply. Again, though, you're basing your dinosaur SIZ estimates on the supposed weight of the animal rather than on how tall or how long it is (which is how I conceive of size). For instance, we've got published stats for a gorilla. But suppose we didn't. An adult male gorilla is no taller than a human basketball center, but it weighs 500 pounds compared to the human's 200 or so. If I go by the character height in BRP I'd come up with one SIZ rating; if I use a weight-based chart it'd be something different. Knowing this, we can kind of fake our way in figuring King Kong's SIZ (since you've doubtless statted up a Tyranosaurus, you have to have Kong around to wrestle with it). For ease of conversion, I'll stat the 60-foot-tall Kong version from King Kong Escapes. A 6-foot-tall human might weigh 200 pounds (although I'm much shorter than that and weigh the same!). So extrapolating up, when 6-foot Giant Man grows from 6 feet to 60, his weight increases from 200 pounds to 2,000 - or one American short ton. Kong, then, would be 2 or 3 short tons. Which, based on Atgxtg's chart would make him SIZ 41? 42? On the other hand, the original 1933 Kong was about 20 feet tall (in the movie he actually varied from 20 to 40), about three times larger than a regular gorilla. So we'd guestimate his weight at 1,500 pounds ... SIZ 38 or 39 on the (widely spaced) chart? As you say, "I dunno." BRP may be easy and intuitive for players, but for the GM? Hmmm....

I know someone was working on a weight-based expanded SIZ chart for mecha, and I've downloaded their efforts. But ultimately I didn't find it helpful. SIZ is one BRP attribute I struggle with when designing critters and monsters larger than humans. Ideally, BRP would have an expanded SIZ chart that took you all the way from Mouse Guard to Godzilla but my web searches haven't located such a thing. I can extrapolate a bit from the creatures in the back of the Big Gold Book and in Basic Creatures, but the "levels" among SIZ ratings don't seem consistent. So it's not as if you can pick a creature, say, with a SIZ range of an elephant and calculate up from there. As best as I can tell, the various sizes for published critters is just sorta pulled out of the air. So how do you determine (in SIZ terms) how big Clifford the Big Red Dog is? Or King Kong? Or a brontosaurus? Or any of the Lovecraftian entities in Call of Cthulhu? In that respect,HERO System is much easier: I'd simply calculate the levels of Growth needed to achieve a certain height and adjust the critter's stats accordingly. BRP doesn't seem to have a similar set of benchmarks to go by.

Another good inspiration for this sort of campaign would be Louis L'Amour's Haunted Mesa. It is set in the modern day (but could be re-set to any time) and takes more of a science fiction slant on things, but it is certainly eerie enough. And L'Amour was a master storyteller.

Good to see that your hard work shines, even among folks who aren't rabid BRP fans. Two nominations! How do you say "Wow!" in Latin?

Moving on to (hopefully) safer campaign-building topics, what about the role of sports in your sci-fi universe? Star Trek, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels, and John Norman's Gor novels all feature variations of chess. In fact, Barsoomian Jetan is a particularly brutal team sport, similar to the old computer game Battle Chess. The moon exiles on Space 1999 managed to contact Earth and learned that sports had been banned as too divisive in their absence. Star Trek seems to take a similar view; at least we never hear of soccer or baseball leagues among the stars, although Picard included fencing in his workout routine and Riker was a martial arts buff. On the other hand, Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr novels included a short-lived sports fad: low-gravity hopper racing, in which drivers competed in egg-shaped monopod vehicles that could jump 30 feet per hop. At the time of the story, the fad had passed and disused hoppers were to be found sitting idle in folks' garages. Sports might also provide a way to include mecha in your campaign even if you don't want them to be part of the military. There could be mecha races or wrestling bouts in lieu of more lethal contests. So what do you think? Man has always enjoyed games and contests. What sorts of team or individual pastimes can you envision in a futuristic setting?

Apparently, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition!

Conrad, nobody but you mentioned the Spanish Inquisition. I don't know you, your personal beliefs, or your lifestyle. And I haven't attacked you. But you've come close to being personally insulting. That's entirely unnecessary. The problem isn't that Star Trek failed to provide Sunday school lessons. It is that the show clearly reflects Roddenberry's anti-Christian bias, as confirmed by the wikipedia article quoted by rpgstarwizard. This puts the show's tone and subtle message at odds with the cherished beliefs of 80 percent of the American people. And in case we forget, Star Trek is an American TV show. It wasn't produced for a post-Christian European or Chinese Buddhist audience, although those folks might get to watch it, too. It isn't bigotry to point out Star Trek's godless worldview, any more than it is bigotry to point out Star Wars' rather Buddhist outlook. Examining either is appropriate to a discussion of how to create a science fiction society.

We just wanted to ensure that your buckles were swashed and your atomic batteries charged.

It was "The Star" by Arthur C. Clarke, a sci-fi author who wore his atheism on his sleeve. I've read more than one otherwise excellent short story or novel where Clarke brings his narrative to a screeching halt so that he can bash religion in general and Christianity in particular ... again (just in case the reader didn't get the point the first time). The scientist in "The Star" has a crisis of faith because the acheological remains, while confirming events in the New Testament, cause him to question the goodness of God. Compared to Clarke, Jean Luc Picard is a Bible-thumper. But we don't want our discussion of how religion is handled in science fiction to derail the OP's thread. Clarke represents one end of the spectrum, C.S. Lewis ("Out of the Silent Planet" triology) the other. But neither of them ignored religion when worldbuilding.

The Jesuits were, in fact, among the first scientists. The whole Galileo trial wasn't so much a battle between religion and science as a matter of tenured professors squelching a researcher who didn't hold to the current scientific orthodoxy. Whew! Sounds like I ruffled the Lizard Wizard's scales. But I stand by my analysis; Star Trek overall had a subtle but consistent bias against faith in general and Judeo-Christian religion in particular, not unlike other American TV programs of the era. But arguing about it isn't going to help the OP with his campaign. My point was that in building his campaign society, religion need not be ignored or vilified.

Unfortunately I never got to watch much Babylon 5, although its approach does seem more realistic. One episode I did see seems to fit the discussion. The human lady officer was trying to resolve a blood feud between two alien factions whose only apparent point of contention was the different colored medallions their leaders wore. Peace talks failed (the aliens used the meeting as an excuse to ambush each other). Swapping the medallions between leaders failed, since former friends immediately attacked each other once their allegiance was changed. She finally took the medallions away from the aliens and wore both of them herself, uniting the warring factions beneath her leadership without ever learning what the fuss was about or what the significance of the medallions was.

Point taken, but it would carry more weight if Picard were from a Mongolian Buddhist background instead of a French post-Christian one. Since the character repeatedly espouses his view of the Darwinian evolutionary exaltation of humanity, it doesn't exactly sound as if he's touting ancient Taoist philosophy. I propose that Star Trek's Federation is indeed a very religious society with the established faith being that conservative Christian bugaboo, secular humanism. Contrast the role of faith in Star Trek to that in Star Wars. In Trek, things supernatural always turn out to be ancient technology, shamming aliens, or mind tricks. And religious belief doesn't have any effect on folks' daily lives. In Star Wars, both Han Solo and the officer in charge of the Death Star start out scoffing at the Force but by the end of the saga its reality has been established beyond doubt. Far from faith being an inconsequential private matter, his growing religious convictions (and resulting supernatural powers) enable Luke Skywalker to destroy the Death Star, rescue his pals from Jabba the Hutt, and ultimately persuade his corrupted father to relinquish evil. Now, the Force more closely resembles Taoism or Buddhism than any sort of theistic faith but (in addition to its practical uses in the films) it has a major role in shaping society: in the Old Republic, the Evil Empire, and in the shiny new world the victorious heroes will presumably build after the Emperor's defeat. A character might stubbornly insist that it was all coincidence and bunk, but he'd still have to deal with the beliefs of the New Republic's rulers and the authority granted to the new corps of Jedi that Skywalker will undoubtedly begin training.

And which episodes were these? I can't remember any prejudice against religion in ST:TNG. In fact religions always appeared to be based on alien entities residing in the Trekiverse and were thus given some credibility. and Prejudice is probably too hard a word, the authors usually simply ignored the subject, for example by omitting any kind of chaplain on naval ships. Social science was obviously represented by the counsellor, but organized religion was just as obviously absent. --- It was a little more aggressive than that. Remember, in TOS the Enterprise had a politically correct utilitarian chapel devoid of religious symbols or a chaplain but Captain Kirk made occasional favorable references to the Judeo-Christian God and the Bible (he was an Iowa farm boy, after all). Religion rarely popped up in episodes except where ignorant alien natives worshiped ancient computers but faith was largely ignored as rust said. However, the Captain performed marriages and it was assumed that the crew (except for the main characters, of course) largely adhered to family values that wouldn't ruffle the feathers of an East Texas Baptist pastor. TNG took things a step further. Now we have French martinet Picard as a captain who makes occasional favorable references to Man's supposed perfection via evolution, a holodeck instead of a chapel, and a touchy-feely secular Counselor as part of the official bridge crew whose job description encompasses many of the duties that absent TOS chaplain should have been performing. When Picard is mistaken by ignorant alien natives for a god he is outraged and anguished, not only because he doesn't want to deceive the locals but because the very notion of deity is childish, superstitious nonsense. Mankind has evolved beyond such things and he doesn't want to infect the aliens' culture with religion. Likewise, when Lt. Riker is temporarily given Christ-like power to heal and raise the dead by Q he ultimately chooses not to use it to restore colonists (including children) killed and maimed by an accident. Instead, he relinquishes the ability and apologizes to Picard for nearly succumbing to immaturity. Meanwhile, on the Enterprise-D we have exactly two people we know are married: Chief O'Brien, whose marriage is troubled, and Dr. Crusher, whose husband is dead and who sleeps around despite the tender presence of her tweener son. In fact, everyone sleeps around. Troi ultimately turns down Riker's marriage proposal; likewise Worf's proposal to his girlfriend (with whom he has had an out-of-wedlock son) is rejected. Career and jollies trump marital commitment. Man has evolved beyond such things ... except for, you know, typical human foibles such as lust, pride, fornication, murder, lying, etc. While all this is going on, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (featuring the TOS cast) postulates that the whole biblical Garden of Eden/Judeo-Christian God thing is a hoax perpetrated by an imprisoned alien evil entity who wants to use the faithful to enable it to escape. It is only in Deep Space Nine that faith finally gets a little respect. Not that humans have rediscovered God, mind you. But the Bajorans, whose planet is strategically close to the wormhole the DS9 crew seeks to protect, practice a vaguely Eastern Star Wars-ish mysticism and Federation personnel are loath to offend them. Moral: Organized religion is bunk but primitive shamanism is tolerable as long as it feels good and doesn't place any demands on your behavior. Now, I'm saying all this as someone who, ahem, religiously watched all the Star Trek shows and movies up until the fiasco that was Enterprise. I like Star Trek. My point is that science fiction doesn't have to ignore or be hostile to faith, even organized religion. Humans are predisposed to worship and have done so through the entirely of recorded history. The idea that mankind will suddenly somehow "grow out of it" is dated and a bit silly at this point. So, if Man does make it to the stars, travel through time, colonize the ocean floor, survive a global holocaust chances are pretty good he'll take his religions with him. And there's nothing wrong with your science fiction role-playing campaign reflecting that, if you want it to.

Game mechanics aside, I am always amazed at how much stuff and how many people they packed into those tiny old sailing vessels, whether we're talking about Lief Erickson, the Mayflower, or Horatio Hornblower. The answer, of course, is that the ships didn't have passenger accommodations or much concern at all for human health or comfort. The crew stowed the cargo and provisions, then slept on top of the luggage. Since the "food" consisted of the equivalent of Melba toast and pork jerky, it didn't take up much room. No bathrooms, you gotta hang your tushie over the side if you gotta go. There wasn't even necessarily a galley; the men might cook their dinner in a sandbox set up on the wooden deck, assuming they got cooked food at all. Can you imagine how many pirates and how much plunder those guys could cram in a modern luxury liner?

Also look over the Classic Fantasy discussions on these boards. That product was specifically designed to replicate the dungeon crawl feel for BRP/RuneQuest. So most (or a bunch) of the work has already been done for you!

The Uncanny X-Men ... in spaaaaaace! Or perhaps Psi World? Traveller covered this sort of thing with psionics and a shadowy organization who could train you in your talents, if (as always) you had the cash. But it wasn't the sort of thing you'd want to announce at the family reunion. And the Big Gold Book already includes a Psionics section for you. Even if you ditch "The Force," that doesn't preclude your including religious belief in your campaign unless you just want to. Game designers tend to ignore the topic to avoid offending potential customers but since this is your personal campaign you don't have to worry about that. Faith needn't be limited to so-called backwards worlds, either. The United States arguably is one of the most advanced societies on earth and 80 percent of the populace say they believe in God. That religious belief equals ignorance is an 18th century prejudice that wiggled its way into Star Trek The Next Generation (Captain Kirk in TOS certainly made periodic references to God). After all, the real world's major religions have survived the Renaissance, the Industrial and Scientific revolutions, the discovery, colonization and settlement of the New World and landing on the Moon. Why should they magically disappear once Man heads toward the stars?

I blame it on our educational system. In contrast, Classic Traveller is about as rampantly Capitalist as you can get, where (nearly) every adventure decision hinges on whether the PCs' actions will earn them enough gas money to make it to the next planet.

Don't be afraid to make your setting your own. While you may want to include proud star fleets, animal-headed non-humans, or cocky robot jockeys you don't want to simply dump Wookies and Veritech fighters aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. That's too obvious, and if your players really wanted to run a Star Wars campaign they'd tell you so. Pick a theme or central conceit for your game that you can hang the other stuff on as needed. Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga novels are a good example of this. Sure, it's got grand starship fleets, powered armor, and bizarre genetically engineered aliens. But the central theme running through all the books is "Imperial Russian political intrigue in space." Barrayar is a colonial world recovering from nuclear disaster whose Russian-descended inhabitants have reverted to traditional monarchy. So while the main characters are tackling enemy empires or space gangsters, they always must be on the lookout for assassins sent by rival factions back home, and they always have to consider what the consequences of their actions will be on the Barrayarian political and social scene. One wrong move, one moment's inattention, and their own side could take them out. Or consider Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat stories and novels. The central theme is "a hero in spite of himself." Slippery Jim diGriz exists in a Star Trek-ish Galactic Empire so disgustingly orderly and perfect that the authorities can't handle the space tyrants and would-be conquerors that arise from time to time. They have to blackmail the galaxy's greatest criminal to tackle the bad guys for them. And by comparison, he looks good even though he's inevitably running his own scam on the side while trying to take down the Big Bad. Again, we've got robots and space battleships and fancy gadgets - but the focus is on the antihero sneaking into places he shouldn't be and trying to con everyone.

I dunno. Even in Traveller, the Imperium is not uniformly high tech and shiny. You've got plenty of worlds where the local culture is at Three Musketeers level even if the central government did just build a space port there, and technology (especially weaponry) may be restricted depending on what planet you're on. You could even have wealthy high-tech worlds and poorer low-tech ones in the same solar system or subsector, practically neighbors. Also, all those fancy electronics may fail once you haul them to Planet Dustbowl. One way to help PCs to appreciate the vastness and variety of a single world (as opposed to the Planet of the Week syndrome) is to take their fancy toys away from them. They land confidently with their expensive, state-of-the-art vehicles and gear. And then discover the fuel leak or cracked di-lithium crystal. Or they get shot up by bandits or members of a dissident political faction. Or they touchdown on a bed of quicksand. Suddenly that casual 20-minute jaunt from their remote mining or medical station to the capital city has become an epic journey of weeks or months. Sure, they've got their shiny guns and well-stocked emergency kit. But supplies, energy packs, and ammunition eventually run out, especially if they encounter accidents, adverse weather or terrain, or hostile natives or beasts along the way. Now they're desperately hunting for water and food, carefully considering each shot, which may be their last. The PCs will be miserable but your players will enjoy the challenge as long as they have hope that their characters can eventually win their way through. But you're right, some of your inspirational choices fit better together than others. Star Wars and Firefly assume a lived-in, weathered, sometimes grungy universe where folks scrape to make a living and may compromise their principles to do so. Sure you've got ships that reach the stars, but they can easily be second-hand jobs held together by chewing gum and bailing wire. In Star Trek and Robotech, everything is shiny and new, and the main characters are above the daily struggles of ordinary working stiffs; they may fight to survive the rigors of space, but they don't have to sweat about paying the light bill. In the same way, Star Trek and Robotech assume a rational, post-Enlightenment society where man has dispensed with the need for God, faith, or the supernatural. The denizens of Star Wars and Firefly, however, need to cling to some sort of religious belief, even if it is rather vague, in order to maintain hope and sanity. Since you can't have it both ways (unless your campaign deals with some sort of cultural/religious conflict), you as GM will have to choose which elements you want to include in your ultimate concoction. Don't feel overwhelmed, though. You don't have to figure it out and dump it on the players up front. Just start your story and reveal little bits about galactic society as you go along. Although I understand your concern about including too many disparate elements, it's a BIG universe. Just as the same city can have glittering towers and fancy malls as well as slums and crime-ridden housing projects, so your fictional galaxy can have pockets of wealth or poverty, belief or unbelief, fancy gadgets and homemade tools, human societies and crazy bug-eyed critters. Again, you don't have to figure it out all in advance. Just drop stuff in as the PCs explore the setting.

Recently participated in a 4C supers game (currently on hiatus). I'd never get to play otherwise. Don't know the game system but with a creative GM and fellow players I can get by.

Sounds historically reasonable to me.

Hmmm, the Cthulhu Invictus adventure contest closed June 15, too. But maybe you could still get in on the annual Halloween adventure contest. Don't see an announcement for it yet.