Tag: RPG

Dark Space Rules and Technology

I should have mentioned before that I’ve decided, for now, to call my Gothic Space Opera “Dark Space,” though that might clash with a book series I’m reading (Which seems to be called “The Sentients of Orion,” so perhaps not).

Anyway, I wanted to discuss ideas about the technology and core rules.

A Gothic Space Opera does two things. First, it wipes away all that complicated technology that creates a strange and alien future that modern audiences find difficult to relate to, replacing it with something more medieval while keeping “cool” technologies like big guns and powerful spaceships. Second, it establishes a highly cinematic setting, where style counts more than substance. In keeping with this, I’ve established some ground rules for how the universe and technology works.

First, there are no hit locations, to accommodate fashionable armor choices, such as female warriors who go for a little cheesecake, or (more importantly) warriors who choose for forsake helmets to show off their burning eyes and their wicked hairdos. Second, and this is a little more important, we discard the TL familiarity rules. The technology of Dark Space, utterly urealistically, spans everything from TL 9 to TL 11, and using the core rules makes this variation too difficult to deal with, especially when you have knights wearing TL 10 power armor, wielding a TL 9 autocannon in one hand, and a TL 11 plasma sleeve in the other. Instead, we’ll play up familiarity (Knights wielding Robo-angel weaponry is at -2), and establish broader TL rules (“low tech” societies, anything below TL 9 but above TL 0 suffer -5 to high tech gadgetry, while TL 0 societies suffer a -5 to TL 1-8 items, and -10 to TL 9+). If GMs find this problematic, they can further apply familiarity penalties. Your core TL establishes the upper limit on devices you can normally purchase, and allows you to take +1 TL items as Signature Gear. The standard of the setting is TL 10 (the average between the two) though the common man is TL 9.

Ignoring the crazy alternate races (the werewolves, the vampires, the changelings), we have three “core” technological civilizations all interacting with one another in Dark Space. The original “relic” technology from the golden age lingers on, and continues in the hands of the tech-priest type guys. You see the knights using alot of these devices, and these tend to be TL 10-11. The Robots have their own technology, which takes advantage of the structures of their “angelic cores.” This technology is TL 11, but occassionally borders into TL 12. Finally, we have the standard technology of the setting, which is generally TL 9.

GURPS divides technology into four broad areas, but I prefer to discuss 5: Transportation, Medical/Biotech, Military Arms, Power, and Information/Computer technology.

Transportation: During the golden age, mankind traveled in vast “light hugger” ships that moved through physical space. Since the collapse, few planets have the infrastructure to build new light huggers, and if they could, they’d build warships instead. Once a light hugger reached a new world, it established a connection to the “Dark Engine,” a vast web of dark matter which interacted with normal matter only via gravity, and the ends of these “strands” existed in multiple places simultaneously, allowing for rapid communication. These Dark Engine strands also served as a sort of anchor and highway for FTL travel, allowing rapid transportation from one world to another. Since the collapse, the Dark Engine has been wracked with storms and collapse, but most of it remains intact, if nightmarishly disorganized and haunted by wicked, man-hating AIs. Thus, the Dark Engine remains the primary mode of transportation in Dark Space. Outside of space, vehicles travel on wheels and tracks, with contragravity isolated to spaceships, large airships, and robotic angels.

Information: The Dark Engine allowed for instant communication between worlds, and so formed a sort of pan-galactic internet. Each world housed at least one calculation spire, a vast super-computer that contained that world’s data, and at important nodes, humanity constructed planet-sized computer brains which house god-like AI, constantly monitoring the pulses and information of the Dark Engine. Finally, near the end of the Golden Age, mankind learned to manipulate dark matter so well that they created AI nodes that existed entirely in the Dark Engine. After the fall, of course, most of this capability vanished as the Dark Engine collapsed into virus-wracked chaos, and even today is plagued with nightmarish “zones” of legacy code and corrupted data. The data spires also generally collapsed for fell into disrepair or were hijacked by rogue AIs, which forced mankind to recollect data where they could. Datapads have become the primary “computer” of today, worked by data-scribes who carefully collect data wherever they can, uploading it into their heavy “tomes,” and collecting them into jealously guarded libraries.

Weaponry: The guns and armor of Dark Space generally follow the rules of those found in GURPS Ultra-Tech. After the fall, most armies use TL 9 slug-throwers, though Knights use TL 10 “ETK” slugthrowers (though houseruled to be more reasonable). Knights have further access to a variety of “knightly” items, like “lances” and “shields,” most of which is TL 10 and 11. Of course, they have access to power armor. Standard armies do not, and are forced to make due with Reflex vests and such.

Power: It’s a cinematic setting, so naturally, we don’t want to fiddle much with batteries and bullets. Nuclear Fusion is common in the setting, and most vehicles have hand waved “micro-reactors” that mean you never need to fuel them. Standard power cells enjoy the benefits of Super Science, giving them 5 times as much power as normal (meaning most guns don’t need to worry about big, bulky packs or changing batteries often). TL 11 “relic” devices use cosmic power cells that feed off of the Dark Engine directly, and thus, never require power (convenient, huh?)

Medical/Biotech: Many denizens of the Dark Space universe benefit from Biotech, but it has fallen out of favor since many of their creations rose up to destroy them. Medical technology suffered most of all, falling to a mere TL 9 level. This allows us to have medicine that’s “good enough” to keep people safe and alive, but losing limbs or death are big deals still. Robots generally have the ability to upload minds into the Dark Engine, and call those that do so “Reapers,” who generally only collect the dying (or the truly wicked).

Once More Into The Breach

As mentioned in my previous post: Frozen War! We played another session.

Between my classes and my 40k obsession, it’s hard to focus on my standard Space Opera, but thankfully, I managed to find the attention to do so, got it together, and we played it out again. All in all, it went well and was well received by my players. But just as before, there are places I could have done better.

I’m still really uncertain of gravity. I think I might just ditch it in my main Space Opera game, as it doesn’t really seem to bring much to the game except alot of mathematical hassle. Gunplay improved alot, but I made another mistake here: Byler went “down” when he was under suppressive fire. So far, so good. He thereafter tried a “pop up” shot, which put him under suppressive fire for one turn and gave him a -2 to hit. Again, so far so good. Unfortunately, Gunslingers don’t suffer that penalty. He’s even more badass than I realized.

In another colossal screw-up, I really underestimated the defenses of Caldera City, and as a result, the attacking forces were slaughtered. I lied to my players, something I had decided I didn’t want to do: by the rules, they actually should have killed every last man, woman and child that attacked the players, through a combination of the Quetzali leader’s stupidity and the sheer power of Caldera’s defenses. The old rule of thumb is that you need 3 times your defender’s strength during a siege, and I should have used that, but I figured 1.5 times was more than enough. However, with players making heroic actions and the massive defenses of a city, I should have placed alot more firepower in the hands of the Quetzali.

The lowest point of the game, alas, was a player. During an early battle, they managed to ambush some Quetzali, wound their leader, take down two of their infantry, and run them out of town, and Walter qualified it as a “defeat.” He complained when their non-infiltrator types couldn’t detect an infiltrator, when his APC HMG couldn’t blow a flying APC out of the sky. He complained that he’s always losing (despite the fact that the players have won every battle they were allowed to influence), that Quetzali have superior technology (they have essentially identical technology to humans, much to my annoyance), that the Quetzali are superior themselves (They are worth more points, but I’ve designed them to be weak in certain, important areas), and complained that he couldn’t possibly defend his city (“I’m out-numbered!”).

The other guys didn’t complain. They even got on his case for doing so, so it’s clearly not the game itself. To me, the most grating thing about this is that it destroys the illusions I’m trying to create. Now that they won that battle, it sounds like I toned things down based on his complaints, and his victory is now hollow because he won by whining, and that’s just not so. He won through his own grit and (reluctant) determination.

I suspect I know where the real problem is. In the previous session, Walter actually lost, but didn’t complain. This session, he won and complained. The difference, I think, is the role of his character. Byler and Roomie have both slipped into their roles perfectly, and know exactly how to play their characters, and achieved some serious badassery. Walter, once again, finds himself in a sidelined support position, and he does not do well there. Only, he’s not really in a “support” position. His character is just as good with a rifle and UBGL as before. He’s just as well armored as before. And he hasn’t yet mastered the arts of leadership in GURPS. Walter hates to feel useless, and not knowing how to achieve victory is a form of that. As he learns better, he’ll relax. I just wish he’d trust me. I think I’ll have Sasha suggest to him to “get involved” in the next fight as much as possible, commenting that he doesn’t enjoy “leading from the rear.”

I trusted him last session and gave him a nuke when he requested it, having visions of epic uses of it later in the game. He threatened to use it on a squad of 5 Quetzali at the risk of his own men. Wow. Then he threatened to use it on the city he was defending. Wow. You should never give someone a toy unless you’re willing to let them use it, but man, this is really not how I intended him to use his nuke. I’m not generally a fan of “punishing” a player, but this might be a case to pull out some dirty tricks: All his loud, boisterous threatening of the Quetzali with a nuke has told them that he has a nuke. If they can take it from him, the enemy general who just lurves holocausts can use it on the city. Hopefully, that will make him think twice about blabbing confidential info at the enemy, especially in the form of empty threats.

But beyond this, I think it was, overall, a very good game.

UPDATE: I feel the need to add that, as pointed out by Byler (I believe), Walter’s complaints are a good sign. They mean he cares about the game. If he didn’t, he’d just shrug and disregard any setbacks. Instead, he wants to see his lieutenant succeed! And that means he actually likes the game.

UPDATE 2: I might have given the impression I was mad at Walter, and I wasn’t. I’ve seen players get frustrated with their characters before (Erik, a friend from the Netherlands, was very frustrated with his Dragon-Blooded sorcerer before we fiddled and found a way for his generic Occult to be useful). I’m quite sure Walter is in the same situation.

In fact, he contacted me and apologized. This is what I mean when I say I have good players. According to him, his real frustration is the lack of a decent MAP, since visual input really helps him formulate strategies, so we’ve figured out how to sketch out some stuff on MapTool, and we should be ok. His comment about the nuke was this: “A Nuke is a bluff, a MAD device. Thus, it’s useless if you don’t announce it.” Which is true, come to think of it! I suggested that he might save that bluff for more useful times, however, not overestimate it (You can’t demand the surrender of an entire army just because you have a nuke and you’re in their midst), and to better understand his opponent psychology (Quetzali tend to be skeptical of physical danger, both a great asset and a grave problem for them)

Frozen War: Making Mistakes

My, wasn’t the last blog post fun! We return you to our regularly scheduled gaming discussions.

School is starting now, but hopefully it won’t interfere too much with my gaming schedule. It looks as though I’ll be able to easily manage both and keep the house clean, or possibly get a part-time job, if finances become too tight. So, we press on and look to the next session of Frozen War, which has suffered some delays, but otherwise looks go.

GURPS is a big, complex game, full of tools you can use or not as you wish, and it’s been years since I really ran it, so I often forget things. This is true with just about any game, even simple ones like the WoD, and the whole point of Frozen War is to practice, so we press on.

First, gravity and encumbrance. Ginnungagap is a smaller world than Earth, with about 0.8 times the gravity. This means, among other things, that everyone’s encumbrance is lighter, but they also suffer a -1 to DX rolls, and some other things. I’ve been skipping the encumbrance part, and forgetting the -1 to DX, which is a problem as some players have paid points to be native to the gravity, and thus should have a minor advantage over those who don’t have it. It might be more interesting to give them a +1 rather than everyone else in the entire game a -1, I’m not sure. Encumbrance, though, is a major issue, as I had forgotten the penalty it inflicted on, among other things, Dodge, and so players evaded more shots than they should have. I have rectified this on most everyone’s sheet.

For that matter, I keep forgetting fatigue costs after a fight, which is something I should really remember, as it was something I remembered when I used to run GURPS. Between fitness and extra-effort and hiking fatigue and the like, the players should really be keeping an eye on their fatigue. I want to encourage those who are more durable to feel cool!

Ranged attacks. I’ve got grenades down pat: Hit dead on, do full damage. Miss by a little, do about a third of the damage. Miss by more than that, and kiss most of the damage good-bye. Easy. Suppression fire has been a bit trickier, as it’s new to me, but I need to remember that, first of all, it lasts the whole turn, it only attacks those who go out into it, it attacks everyone who goes out into it, and players can use it too. I think I’ll start directly targeting the players too, but I need to be more conscious of ranged attack penalties: Range, Cover, darkness and, occasionally, speed (-2 for a human running full out, -3 for a fast human or a quetzali, -4 for a fast quetzali). I keep forgetting cover, for some damn reason. Also, Roomie cannot kill a power-armored foe with his 18mm HEMP rounds. This changes some dynamics by quite a bit.

Electronics need to play a bigger role in the game. I need to encourage players to realize that their characters live in an information age richer than our own. Their HUD offers far more than just +2 to guns, but +3 from locks, and as much information as you can squeeze out of your Silhouette program. A few players have grabbed full on AR, so they’ll even get vision bonuses. The best way to show all this is with vivid descriptions.

I need to fully stat the “big villains” of the game, because I’ve realized that even bad guys can have Luck. A few players got lucky in the last game, as players are wont to do, and nearly lost a major NPC. Luck is exactly appropriate to those situations, and the more I look at Luck, the more it feels like a mandatory “cinematic” advantage… which explains why it’s on all the templates in GURPS action.

So there we have it: Gravity should have more affect, Dodge should be harder, battle more exhausting, suppressive fire both more and less dangerous, targeted fire more common but less dangerous, electronics more pervasive, and villains harder to pin down.

Further Gothic Space Opera Thoughts

I’ve been digging through lots of Discovery programs detailing the history of theology, Christianity and the dark ages looking for inspiration and, among other things, it occurs to me that I need to draw from more eras for inspiration. Just as 40k draws from World War I for its inspiration, I need to look elsewhere for mine, as all the best settings are awesome amalgamations of several different cool things. But that’s not really what this post is about.

40k is not christian. Carefully sifting through history has shown me where the Imperium of Man really draws its inspiration: The Roman Empire. Now, obviously, Ultramarines and other clearly draw their inspiration from the Roman Empire, plus all the latin and such, but I think most 40k players assume that 40k represents a post-constantine, “dark ages” Roman Empire, slowly collapsing just as it did into the medieval world, while barbarians beat at its gate. However, worshipping an imperial, military figure head as an incarnate, still-existant god while “legions” go forth and conquer in his name, spreading Pax Imperium in His name, is very very Roman.

This means that my desire to make the faith of my setting decidedly christian, with a gother-than-thou martyr god who dies for your sins will create a different feel than 40k does, which is nice. Our Imperial Knights will be less legionaries and more knights, less military soldiers who fall in line and more elite agents who step up, which is, of course, more appropriate for an RPG.

If we have this martyr god who dies for our sins, though, who is “God the Father” that creates this martyr and gives him to us? I’m showing my mormonism here a little, as most Christians believe they are one and the same, but there’s still a continuity element here, because God existed before Christ was born. So, unless our “Son of Man” was eternal, who made him? It’s an interesting notion if he “made himself,” but the actual agents would have to be the masters of Terra, and since Terra stands in for Jerusalem and the Holy Land in our game (You know, so we can go on a crusade and liberate it from the wicked powers that hold it, just like the knights did), the people of Terra stand in for the Jews, but they can also stand in for God, to some degree. Terra itself becomes the focus of worship.

But I find there’s a further element that keeps cropping up as I work on my setting, namely the notion of the supernatural, technology, and who “God” is in the setting. I know some of you aren’t fans of Transhumanism, but stick with me here. Vernor Vinge argued that technology is leading us to one of two places: It will either destroy us, if we cannot master it and our darker impulses have us flinging nukes at one another fast enough to wipe out our civilization, or it will result in accelerating our progress beyond a point where decent predictions can be made, the so-called “Singularity.” If you talk to most Singularity-loving types, mention the Singularity and watch them. There’ll be a sheen that comes to their eyes, their faces will lift, their voices will rise in an almost religious fervor. The machines will rise up, they will say, and take humanity and lift them into god-hood. They won’t use those terms, but what they talk, and how they talk, reminds me alot of the Rapture.

In 40k, the dark age of technology only exists to get humanity to the stars. Once that’s happened, we carefully wipe it out with a convenient and barely mentioned war, and get on with our dark ages and our many wars. But I propose an alternate take. During this dark age of technology, mankind develops many wondrous technologies, but stands on the cusp of perfection, an edenic state, and then one man reaches too high, as per the tower of Babylon, and is cursed, downcast and the Confusion of Tongues begins the first ruination of technology. War erupts as this master of Babylon, this Beast, conquers the many nations of Man, and even destroys the civilization of Terra, giving us a convenient diaspora and a setting of destruction behind the Rule of Man, and eliminating the technological supremacy that would make the game more THS than 40k. The Son of Man spreads his sacraments before the Beast of Babylon crucifies him (literally or not, I don’t know), and soon, we have sacred Imperial Knights slaying the Beast of Babylon and claiming the empire for themselves, ala Constantine. We have further troubles, but importantly, man is not allowed to do things that would cause the Singularity (because he risks causing more disasters instead) until he finds and returns the Son of Man, who has sufficient wisdom to guide them to technological apotheosis, and we suddenly have shades of Revelations, where a dark age of blood and destruction precedes the return of the messiah to defeat the forces of evil and lead people to Heaven.

Except this time, you can’t sit around just waiting for it to happen. You have to find your Messiah, if he ever existed at all, and lift him up.

This notion of Technology in place of the supernatural, not in the sense that “they think it is magic,” but that it is the source of all the stuff in the medieval world would have been magic is now technological in nature, like our angels, our vampires, our miracles, has me on the verge of even discarding the Warp (in the form of Netherspace) in favor of these constructed hyper-space “highways,” and other relics of humanity. What if everything in the setting was either the result of human ingenuity or hubris? I think something needs to be alien, but part of me likes the notion that every monster race (the vampires, the demons, the werewolves) are a result of a human technological sin, those that address our fears of technology: the Vampire is the fear of nanotech devouring our worlds, the demons are the fear of AI rising up and tossing aside their masters, the werewolf is the fear of genetic engineering making us no longer human, and there’s gotta be something about our fear of the technologies of the future destroying our individuality, making us all cogs in a vast machine.

I don’t see a place, a need, for the inhuman, unnatural, cthulhu-like monsters that 40k has. That interests me. I’ll have to explore it further.

Gothic Space Opera

In an effort to get more involved with friends, I picked up some multi-player games, including Dawn of War 2 at the recommendation of a friend. Thoroughly impressed by Dawn of War 2, my fascination for 40k rekindled. Thoroughly obsessed with 40k, I began to ponder how to make a GURPS version once again.

I have a rule about conversions: I don’t do them. Too many people try to get a particular setting exactly right, and either they fail (and the players complain) or they spend years putting together something that will result in a C&D order from the IP holders. So, I don’t do it. Instead, I prefer to file the serial numbers off and make something unique that belongs to me, something that fits well with GURPS with a minimum of work, and something new that my players can explore.

So, instead of making GURPS: 40k, I’d rather make GURPS: Gothic Space Opera.

But what is Gothic Space Opera? If it’s “Star” Marines protecting the “Imperial Dominion” of “Humanity” at the behest of the Divine God-“King” while fighting the evil force of “Anarchy” and “Space Elves” and “Intergalactic Bugs,” you can still read the serial number through my poor attempt at creativity. The first rule of ripping someone off: rip off lots of different people, and you end up with something sufficiently unique that you’re not actually ripping off anyone.

So, what else is Gothic Space Opera? The clearest and most similar example is probably the Fading Suns RPG which I’ve never played, but heard much about. I’ll have to look into it. Going farther afield, Dune is clearly Gothic, with its vast spaceships, it’s ancient orders of secret conspirators, its god-emperors and its elite warriors. Googling up the term turns up a few interesting results: Some people consider Revelation Space to be Gothic Space Opera, which I hadn’t considered, as I started with the Prefect, but indeed, the rest depict the barbaric time following the downfall of civilization replete with immortals, vast cathedral-ships, spiraling gothic architecture and so on. Finally, someone pointed to the Chronicles of Riddick as quite gothic, another source I hadn’t considered.

Some themes emerge: Gothic Space Opera is really just medieval dungeon fantasy in spaaaaace. Nobility is found in the blood, and the knights and warriors of space are inherently superior to those poor, common, dirt-sucking peasants. Everyone follows the edicts of the king, and there is a wide array of squabbling political groups, inquisitors, clerics, nobles, and orders of knights. The empire used to be greater and more awesome, and the further you dig into the past, the more awesome it was (there was a golden age, and then a silver age, and now we live in the brutal “age of steel”). Science is magical and people understand it only poorly, often leaning upon the relics of the past to get by. Stuff is bigger, more awesome, and baroque. Legacy is very, very important, and one gets the impression that the galaxy is huge, and you are just a very small part of everything else that is going on.

We’ll look more into this idea later. I do like the idea of coming up with Space Opera Lenses, after I finish my core Space Opera set.

After Action Report: Frozen War: Downfall

See? That wasn’t so bad.

As a game master, I think I can tell when a session goes well, and when it does not. A poor session has distracted players, slow responses, and quick goodbyes at the end. A good session has eager players talking over one another, and babbling commentary at the end. Last nights game had all the signs of the latter, oh boy did it.

The tricky part with a war game, particularly a futuristic one, is the lethality of the weapons. While futuristic soldiers get great armor, their opponents get even better weapons. However, Dr. Kromm had some great advice on how to run a cinematic war: use lots of suppressive, have grenades and such hit some distance away, and keep most actual gun fights with pistols and other light weapons. I also used “goon” rules for most of the enemy soldiers (and allied goon-soldiers too, to be fair), where they didn’t bother to defend, and only had 1 HP before they passed out. The result had the contradictory “scary but cinematic” feeling I was hoping for: I managed to take an arm from a player, badly wound one, knock out another, and scare the holy hell out of the last one, but I didn’t actually kill off any PC. The players wanted it to be a mark of honor that they survived, and I wanted them to actually survive, so walking the line between cake walk and slaughter-fest wasn’t easy, but I pulled it off, thanks to Kromm’s advice, and the surprising versatility and realism of GURPS.

Story-wise, I managed to keep the pace up. It took nearly 7 hours to play out (with interruptions), but nobody actually complained (Tony had to “leave” early, but instead kept coming back to play his character when we needed him. Kudos!), we managed to get alot done (I didn’t have to shortcut through anything), and they did all three final missions. And won. Crazy. I also introduced, uh, 18 NPCs, and the players actually kept them all straight, and cared about everyone they were supposed to care about.

I don’t think I could possibly run this game more tightly. Swift pacing, sweet action, great player response, rich characterizations all around, I’d have to rate this session a rare, golden 10. I bet I’ll have my players beating down my door for this. My only complaints so far: Tony seems weak on the RP front, but that’s to be expected with his lack of experience, and I failed at several rules, forgetting encumbrance, not specifically targetting players when I really should have, and gravity, and finally, I need to stat up my hardcore NPC bad guys. That will come, I think.

All in all, a success. I am pleased.

Stage Fright

I haven’t run a game in several months, not since WoD: Witchcraft ended (with a whimper rather than a bang, alas), and so this will be the first to break the drought. And then it sweeps back in: stage fright.

I always get nervous before a game. I’m probably the most well-prepared GM I know, but there’s always that point before I’ve really put pencil to paper, where I don’t really know beyond the general idea of what I want, and all I can see are the gaping holes, the flaws. It’s alot of work to get past that initial barrier, and so I give myself plenty of time, and invariably, it turns out ok. But it still turns my stomach, everytime.

The first session is always the worst.

I’ll have a new player joining us. The pressure should be low, but it doesn’t feel that way. Still, I’m sure when I’m in my seat, describing everything for the group, it’ll all come together.

Just gotta make sure to review the rules (Simplified suppression fire! Grenades!), make sure the NPCs are ok, and I have the proper sequence of events. Everything else has already been taken care of. Wish me luck!

Insomniac Soldiers

My wife is looking at me (at 11:35 am) and asking why I’m not in bed yet. I hate it when my schedule is like this.

My Space Opera Military mini-project goes apace, with my load-outs nearly complete. This little project is doing just what I hoped it would do: motivating me to work on something (for my players) in such a way that will benefit my long-term project, namely to create enemy templates. Already, I’m getting a picture of what a (human) TL 10 fighting force will look like. Now I just need to create some “player” templates for these lesser soldiers (not the be confused with the Soldier, who I should probably rename the Space Marine, since he’s even on tvtropes), and those will serve as the prototypes for my NPC soldier stats.

Interesting tidbit: I hate power cells. I don’t mind the concept of them, but I hate the fact that your space opera hero has like 50 different gadgets with 50 different power cells that run out at 50 different paces. It’s too much to track! So, I’ve been coming around to the idea of unifying multi-gadgets (such as complete armor systems), and one idea that popped out was a single power-cell pack that powers all the gadgets.

Ultra tech discusses how best to do this, by simply noting all the power-cells and then bundling them all under the next higher power-cell-category. If you have 10 different gadgets all with B/10 hours, for example, you can just have 1 C cell power them for 10 hours. Easy! Until you have an A/1 hour gadget and a 2B/2 day gadget, and so on.

So here’s what I did: assume that an AA cell has 1 “power point,” an A cell has 10 “power points” and so on. Determine the power/hour ratio for all gadgets (for example, an A/5 hour gadget uses 2 power points per hour), add these all up, and you’ll know how much power every gadget uses per hour, and then you simply apply whatever new power cells you want, and determine how long those power cells will last (assuming continuous usage). For my soldiers, I found that all their gadgets used 46 power points per hour, so I replaced all those power cells with 3 C cells (providing 3,000 power points), which gives the soldier 65 hours of power, just shy of 3 days.

Nice, huh? ^_^

Creating Worlds

I must confess I’ve actually been working on my little Space Opera project for ages now. In an effort to keep it all generic and “purely GURPS,” I’ve poked around at tvtropes.com and ripped things straight from the books. Even so, it’s been slow going, and I’m beginning to tire. I must face cold hard facts: I haven’t run a game in months, and it’s wearing on me. Writing in the abstract is not nearly as much fun as writing for people. I have some thoughts on why I’ve avoided running recently, but I’ll discuss those at some other time.

So, I have a new project for myself: Design a quick-run military sci-fi scenario for the infant setting that’s still growing in my head. Creating a scenario will give me something to work towards, so I won’t need to design such abstract rules. Instead, I’ll have actual situations in mind. Plus I have Dawn of War 2 on the brain.

Thus, I must create a world to act as the theater to this war. This conjures up lots of immediate thoughts, like why would people go to war in space? Sure, it’s Space Opera, but “Because it’s cool!” doesn’t fly for alot of people anymore. I can come up with a few reasons:

  • Unique resources (real ones, like habitable worlds or Berrylium deposits, or fake ones, like alien technology or applied phlebtonium),
  • Infrastructure (Factories, jump gates and laboratories don’t build themselves)
  • Position (Assuming limitations on FTL, some points in space might behave like bottle-necks, or open up more territory for an attack),
  • Pride (some alien races just love war, while even in less aggressive species, a general needs some way to make a carreer)
  • Paranoia (if any of the above are true, you might be better off attacking before you get attacked)

GURPS Space, like most GURPS books, offers some interesting insight into how you might create a setting. Among them, it estimates approximately 5% of all stars will have worlds with complex life. That’s as good a number as any, and if we assume that means “One in 20 star systems is interesting enough to colonize and/or fight over,” we can reach some interesting numbers: There are 100 star systems within 20 light years of earth. That means, within 20 light years, there are approximately 5 interesting worlds. If we use generic GURPS FTL travel times, that’s about 1 day per parsec (about 3 light years), which means there’s 5 interesting worlds within a week’s travel of earth. If we assume interstellar government cannot exert real power a month away from its central worlds, we get a radius around earth of 80 light years. Poking around on the internet shows that within 75 light years, there are nearly 4,000 stars, which gives us 200 interesting worlds… plenty to fight over!

Among my infrastructural ideas, I like the idea of using Jump Gates, listed in GURPS Spaceships, as an alternative to normal space travel (which will probably be Warp, since it allows a ship to be detected coming in, and thus defended against in an awesome space battle, it allows ships to go to uncharted systems relatively easily, which is vital for space opera, and it lets the crew encounter Strange Space Phenomenon that are the bread and butter of most Captain and Crew type Space Opera). Interestingly, it costs approximately 150 times the cost of a star drive to create a jump gate, but this is fair as you’re creating infrastructure that will benefit many other ships. If this allows rapid transit, it becomes analagous to laying down rails between two cities, which makes our inner worlds more “connected” than the strange, rogue outerworlds, but all it takes to fix this is some serious industry on both sides. This also creates vital choke points, as navies will fight over jump gates, and possibly destroy them to prevent rapid enemy incursion.

Such meandering thoughts. Well, the whole point of this blog is to give me “someone to talk to” when nobody rational would like to listen to what I have to say. Well, except for you, whoever you are mysterious reader. I need to set aside some time and come up with a world for my scenario, and see how it shapes elements. I promise, it won’t be a one-biome world (no “Jungle worlds” for me, thanks), as the rest of this post should make clear how clarifying putting the abstract into practice can really be.