Tag: Ultra-Tech Frameworks

Patreon Poll: Trader Tech 2

Continuing from the poll earlier this week, I have a new set of polls for Trader Tech.  These cover the elements of their military technology that lie outside of the individual.  This includes:

This poll is open to all Patreons of the Companion ($5+) tier.  As usual, please leave a comment as to how you see their doctrine working or what nuance you’d like to add.  I definitely take comments into account.
I know I’ve not yet released the more detailed robot rules, but hopefully you’ll have a sense of what you can do with robots and how they might serve the Traders militarily.  You guys seem very interested in giving the Traders robots, so I hope that particular poll will be useful to you even without worked examples of robots from other cultures.

Patreon Poll: Trader Tech

Back in the tail end of Iteration 5, as we worked on Alien Races, I invited my patrons (Companions and better) to vote on a new alien race. This resulted in the Traders, a race of clever and highly inventive space-wanderers with their own technological infrastructure.

Originally, I had given them that infrastructure, but with a focus on building all our military technology from scratch, I felt it time to revisit Traders as an exercise in building our own military doctrines and tech.  As with all these polls, the point is to get you thinking about what makes a military doctrine interesting, and what you need to make one happen.  Thus, while this will result in a new set of technology for our Traders, I hope it inspires you, dear Patron, to consider making your own military technology (as I know a few of you are working on races or factions that could benefit from it).

For the first round, we’ll focus on personal technology and broad outlines of doctrine.

  • Trader Tech: Military Doctrines, where we ponder if the Traders would even fight and why and against who and what sort of obstacles they might overcome and what sort of goals they might focus on.
  • Trader Tech: Unique Technologies: Once we know how they fight, we might ponder with what they fight.  Not every faction needs unique technologies, but Traders will certainly have some, and we do need to consider what makes a factions blasters and vehicles unique and distinctive from everything else in the galaxy. What makes Trader Tech Trader Tech?
  • Trader Tech: Ground Doctrines: When building personal weapons and armor, for whom are Traders building them?  What sort of roles do they envision using their weapons? How do Traders fight their wars, when it comes to the individual Trader as part of a larger army?
  • Trader Tech: Personal Weaponry: Rather than do line-by-line considerations of specific weapons, let’s first consider the broader approaches Traders might take to their weaponry: who do they build them for and with what ultimate aims in mind? If we combine these with the previous polls, we should have a pretty good idea of what sort of blasters they build.
  • Trader Tech: Personal Armor: Traders famously wear “skinsuits,” tight, form fitting vacuum suits that keep them alive in case of a breach and protect them from germs and infection from outsiders.  Do they augment them with additional defenses and, if so, what sorts of defenses?
This will be part 1 of a multi-part series, and it’s available to all Companion ($5+) Patrons.  Don’t forget to leave a comment about how you see the Traders fighting.  I definitely make use of what Patrons talk about and try to integrate that feedback into the final results.

Patreon Special: the Siege of Centauri Prime

My patrons voted on a Worked Example of an Ultra-Tech Framework setting for this month.  Sometime last year, I created a series on Ultra-Tech Frameworks, that is, how do you choose what technology you want for your setting.  

Today, I present the Siege of Centauri Prime, a worked example of a TL 10 setting, wherein the players play as students in a virtual high school who, when they’re not busy helping with their parents’ terraforming chores, sneak off to fight one another in drone battles with misappropriated terraforming drones.  This is not a full setting so much as a setting seed, and shows how one might go about choosing the basic technology for a setting, and then expanding on existing technological ideas to create nuanced gameplay (Mass Combat, in this case).
This is available to all Patrons ($1 is all I ask) as a thank you for their support.

Patreon Post: Clarktech and using Technology as Magic

For this month, my patreons voted for “Technomagic,” which in this context means technology that fulfills the same role as magic in a fantasy-like setting. I was pleased to see this topic voted up as it was, as it’s been a bit of a hobby of mine for the past few years to ponder how one could create a fantasy-like character with nothing but material out of GURPS Ultra-Tech.  The ideas found their way first into the Dark Engine in my unpublished Protocols of the Dark Engine, then into the Deep Engine of Psi-Wars, and it informed previous games I’ve run like Blackout Saga.  I personally find that a dash of science fiction, if handled well and noted used as a bait-and-switch, adds quite a bit of spice to a setting.

This document focuses on setting building, do’s and don’t’s of techno-fantasy settings, suggestions for handling an overall magic system using technology as its basis, and what specific technologies, if taken out of their usual context and given a fantasy skin, might look like.

I’ve made this a Patreon special as it feels more like the sort of thing that usually ends up as a special, and as a thank you to my patrons.  So, if you are a Patron ($1 is all I ask) enjoy!

Ground Based Military Doctrines

Military personal gear and ground vehicles are ultimately tied to soldiers and military forces. Every weapon manufactured and every tank built are designed to fit the military doctrine of the customer that purchases them. Thus, to understand what military gear we have, we need to understand how a force fights. For the purposes of this post, we want to get a sense of how a military force fights “on the ground,” with infantry, human(ish) scale combat robots, and ground vehicles, so we can get a sense of what sort of equipment they might manufacture to fit their needs.

Infantry

The Basic Soldier

Unless a military force’s goal is extermination, that force needs human or humanoid soldiers, because the point of most military forces is to exert control of a human (or humanoid) population. Soldiers can walk through doors, they can physically restrain someone, they can talk, trade, threaten and negotiate with the denizens of a world. They represent the core of every military force, and the default template from which all other more specialized soldiers are derived.

For a weapon, the basic soldier generallyuses a blaster carbine or blaster rifle. The blaster rifle is typically more accurate and has more power for punching through armor, but a carbine is lighter and thus easier to carry (weight is always a major concern for an infantryman). An infantryman will often need to lay down “covering fire” to drive his opponents out from cover. This is typically done with either a high ROF weapon, grenades, or a grenade attachment. Most infantryman don’t concern themselves with melee, but if it comes up often, they may have a pistol, a bayonet attachment, or a vibro-weapon of some kind (typically a vibro-knife).

For armor, many infantryman have no appreciable armor at all! When they do, something that covers the chest is generally a good starting point. More well protected soldiers might have helmets and boots, while the most well protected soldiers may have total body suits. Generally, the intent of the armor is to turn a lethal rifle or carbine shot into a merely injurious one. Materials include ablative, if weight and cost is an issue and the only real concern is blaster fire; nanopolymer, if the army is cheap or primitive; battleweave, if weight is a concern, or carbide armor. Additionally, some armor may come with built in environmental suits of some kind: they may be specialized for a particular terrain (a desert survival suit see UT 177), for generally hostile environments (an expedition suit, see UT 178) to a sealed suit (see UT 179) or even a Vacc suit (UT 179). Armor might also come with camouflage, either specific to the environment (see HT 76 to 77) or programmable camouflage for multiple environments (UT 99). All such armor generally has attachment points for gear or utility belts.

Finally, the infantryman will need some general accessories. The most common will be some form of communicator, typically a small radio communicator. The infantryman, if he expects long marches, may also carry supplies, survival gear appropriate to the environment, a first aid kit, and something to carry it all in.

The infantryman faces monetary and physical limitations: soldiers will not carry everything because it both weighs too much, and it costs too much. Thus, all armies must make choices. The most common choice is between quantity or quality: some armies will choose to field as many soldiers as possible (who tend to be ill-equipped) or to field as good a soldier as possible (who tend to be well-trained and well-equipped, but few in number). A second choice many armies face is between generalizationand specialization, and if the latter, what sort of specialization.

  • Numerous armies might have cheap, low quality weapons that focus on laying down as much firepower as possible. They’ll rarely bother much with armor.

  • Quality armies might have accurate, robust, high-damage weapons that focus on effective precision strikes. Armor will be a high priority.

  • Generalized forces will either carry a considerable amount of gear, or will have modular gear that can either change functionality or allow for easy change of loadout based on mission (for example, weapons with accessory rails, programmable camoflage)

  • Specialized forces will save weight and cost by taking highly specialized gear custom built for the sort of circumstances they expect to find themselves in: desert warriors in desert survival suits rather than expedition gear; mountaineers with ascending gear and mountain camouflage.

These choices can be on a case-by-case basis (an army might choose to have high ROF weapons but still use heavy armor).

Infantry Specialization

An army might consist of nothing but basic soldiers, but most armies will include a variety of specialists, often more elite than everyone else. By using a mixture of specializations, certain tactical options open up that the army can use to exploit the weaknesses of the basic infantryman. Below, I present a variety of specializations. Note that not all will be present in every force, and that some forces will combine multiple functions into a single soldier. More importantly, while a force mighthave every position below, not all of them need explicit detail; some can be assumed, especially if they make no major impact on the battlefield or aren’t exemplary of that force’s preferred method of combat.

The Officer: All armies have some form of chain of command, but a military force with an “officer” type emphasizes “front-line” officers, integrated with their unit and who lead from the front, rather than remote officers who “lead from behind.” Officers typically specialize in tactics and leadership, allowing them to help their soldiers overcome their fears and inspiring them to success; through superior coordination, they can defeat less well-led infantry. Officers often have pistols in addition to the rest of their gear, and long-range or expensive communication systems to maintain lines of communication with strategic overseeers. They maybe brightly colored to be easily visible to their own men, but this makes them obvious targets to the enemy, so they either wear superior armor, or they don’t use bright colors.

The Assault Specialist: The original stormtrooper, these focus on breaking through suppression fire and enemy defenses to force the enemy infantry to fall back. They typically carry either high ROF weapons that can be easily fired on the move, or they have melee weapons (force swords or heavy vibroweapons) or both. They also need armor that can withstand basic covering fire, or some exceptional form of mobility (such as a jet pack) or both. They tend to be elite, and lead the charge.

Heavy Support: A squad often finds itself facing a difficult situation, typically either an exceedingly numerous enemy, or a heavily armored opponent such as an assault specialist or a vehicle. Heavy support carry the industrial-scale tools necessary to deal with those problems, typically in the form of a ridiculously oversized weapon. For dealing with large numbers of enemy, the support soldier might carry a high ROF weapon (such as gatling blaster) or an explosive support weapon (a semi-portable plasma cannon) or both; for dealing with vehicles or heavily armored opponents, they’ll carry low ROF, high-damage weaponry, such as plasma lance missiles, plasma lance grenades, or a semi-portable blaster cannon. Such weapons tend to be very heavy, so the Heavy Support soldier is usually very strong and very selective about what he carries. Some heavy support units are a team of two soldiers, a gunner and an assistant.

Commando: Recon units and commandos often need to slip behind enemy lines to either gather intelligence or to damage supply lines or sabotage communication networks. Commandos tend to favor stealth and accuracy over armor and firepower. They tend to have sniper rifles, pistols, “submachine blasters,” and explosives, and light armor with many stealth options. Commandos often tend to have extensive survival gear depending on their mission, allowing them to overcome difficult terrain with ease. They may also carry specialized equipment, such as comm scramblers, depending on their mission or role. They also often operate as forward observers for orbital or artillery strikes.

Vehicle Operators:Not properly infantry, they nonetheless have personal gear. They’ll often carry a smaller, more portable weapon, such as a light blaster or a pistol, in case their vehicle breaks down behind enemy lines. They may also need environmental suits if operating a dangerous vehicle, or in a dangerous environment. This is especially true of starfighter pilots, who will often have vacc-suits and need to worry about crashing behind enemy lines or on alien worlds.

Engineering: Before or after the conflict, some heavy construction may be necessary. This includes rapidly building fortifications, constructing bridges, building communication networks, or destroying these very things. While most such operations call below the radar of Psi-Wars (we don’t need to worry about the stats of the guy who built a temporary bridge), such units may carry unusual weaponry, such as plasma flamers, demolition charges, chemical weaponry, bomb-disposal gear, etc.

Combat Medic: How much does a military force care about its wounded? Few military forces are going to have nomedical assistance (perhaps the Cybernetic Union, which might discard damaged robots and simply build new ones, or slave armies), but having access to medical assistance for wounded soldiers is a different concern than having front-line combat medics. In reality, the latter are more like combat paramedics, whose job it is to stabilize the wounded so they can be transported back to combat hospitals, but with access to advanced TL 11 medical technology, they may operate more like RPG medics, and tending to the wounded with such care that they can immediately return to the fight, provided their wounds aren’t too bad. Forces that choose such a character as a signature character will greatly favor keeping their forces (or at least their elites) in top condition and keeping them in the fight; alternatively, it might be a way of illustrating how compassionate a force is.

Logistics and Maintenance:As with engineering, logistical officers don’t generally need combat stats, but it may be worth stopping to think about the nature of the sort of people who engage in logistics, and what sort of logistics your military needs. These tend to be unstatted NPCs, but might serve as an interesting inspiration for a character.

Personal Materiel

The point of our exercise is not to choose signature soldiers, but to choose signature gear for each faction: the sorts of arms and armor that faction regularly manufactures. Understanding what sorts of soldiers they deploy tells us a lot about what sorts of arms they manufacture, but we still need to work out the details of this final point!

Armor

It should be noted that the armor in UT is not entirely compatible with the armor design system found in Pyramid, and in any case, we have new materials, which means all of our armor will be new.

Uniforms: Some factions won’t bother with armor, but all factions will have some sort of “combat dress” that their soldiers will wear. This is generally below our resolution, though it should be noted that Battleweavedoes offer the opportunity for “armored” combat uniforms, and they can be made stylishor given clothing options from UT 38-39.

Combat Vest: A carbide clamshell or a battleweave tactical vest might act as a core defense for most forms of infantry, but especially the basic rifleman. Armoring the torso defends the vitals and can turn a critical wound into a merely dangerous one. Characters with battleweave tactical vests might also add cerablate inserts for additional protection; as an ablative form of armor, it will only protect the character once or twice, but this is sufficient if the character does not expect to be taking the brunt of fire during an assault.

Full Body Armor: The heaviest and most expensive armor, this is likely reserved for assault or elite troops. This includes everything from carbide laminate armor systems of the Empire to the diamondoid armor of space knights. They tend to be designed to be proof against at least blaster carbines and perhaps proof against blaster rifles, and they’re generally sealed with at least filtered breathers or, possibly, full vacuum support.

Lighter forms of full body armor are possible. A battleweave body suit is light and slim enough to be worn with some other forms of armor, such as a combat vest. A battleweave tactical suit or full vaccuum suit offer protection inferior to full combat armor, but comparable to that of tactical vests or clamshells, as well as sealing the character off from the world, and might make a good “compromise” armor, offering the totality of protection of full combat armor, but with lighter weight and lower cost.

Accessories: Armor for the core of the body is only the start. In addition to cerablate inserts, characters might choose to wear gloves to protect their hands, or boots to protect their feet, or to provide assistance to stealth, hiking or climbing. Especially stealthy characters (such as commandos) might wear programmable camouflage or dynamic chameleon systems. Advanced industries might manufacture some form of force screen, such as the force buckler, especially suitable for assault forces.

Blasters

As with armor, while there’s nothing wrong with the beam weapons of UT (they’re actually fairly accurate for the beam weapon design system), Psi-Wars has some new assumptions that makes it easier to simply rebuild a lot of the old blasters.

The Blaster Rifle: The blaster rifle or blaster carbine will be theweapon of choice for soldiers. The blaster carbine is typically lighter and has a lower bulk, making it easier to carry and easier to fight with in close combat. The blaster rifle isn’t actually more accurate (though we can make it more accurate, of course), but does have longer ranges and slightly better damage. When it comes to specialty weapons, we’ll tend to see either a focus on higher ROF (“assault rifles”) for dealing with large numbers of opponents (especially while on the move) or a high powered weapons, especially with a lower ROF, for dealing with single, heavy targets, such as a “sniper rifle.”

The Blaster Pistol: Most soldiers won’t use a pistol as their main weapon, but officers or vehicle operators (pilots) might, and soldiers that don’t use it as their main weapon might prefer to keep it as a back-up, especially commandos or assault specialists who need to use a weapon in tight confines. The variations tend to be light, heavy and “holdout” pistols. Heavy pistols are ideal for dealing with tough opponents in close combat (the US military chose the .45 Colt because it had sufficient firepower to stop a berserking Moro warrior dead in his tracks; a heavy blaster pistol might have a similar origin), while a “light” pistol is generally sufficient for most cases. The holdout isn’t generally interesting militarily, but might see serious use by spies.

Specialist Blasters: Between a blaster pistol and a blaster rifle stands the “assault blaster,” or a “blaster SMG,” a light but highly rapid firing weapon, ideal for firing on the move. It tends to do little damage compared to a carbine, but tends to be heavier than a pistol. It’s a good choice for light assault infantry or vehicle operators who want something with a little more punch. In Psi-Wars, plasma weapons broadly take the place of the shotgun, and works well for attacking doors or as a sort of “grenade launcher,” packing serious, indiscriminate firepower. This might be an excellent choice for assault teams. Flexible forces might also include plasma flamers (for structural destruction), EM disruptors (to disable vehicles or robots) and stunners; some of these features might be “underbarrel” attachments.

Heavy Weapons: Like rifles, heavy weapons tend to break down into attacking groups (“anti-personnel”) and attacking singular targets (“anti-materiel”). The former includes gatling blasters and other high ROF blasters, as well as EMGLs or hand-held grenades armed with plasma explosives. Heavy plasma weapons might also qualify. For the latter, we tend to see missile launchers with plasma lance missiles, plasma lance weapons, or heavy single-shot blasters. Most military forces need at least light anti-vehicular weaponry, lest they be destroyed by the first IFV they face, but most military forces will also have some sort of anti-personnel heavy weapons (“squad support” weapons). Basic infantry might also equip underbarrel grenade launchers, giving each infantryman the flexibility to be a “light heavy” if necessary.

Melee Weapons: Swords and knives don’t win wars much in Psi-Wars, with the exception of the force sword, but the force sword needs to be in the hands of an expert, and is only useful for an assault specialist in tight quarters (which makes it an exceptional weapon for boarding and taking starships). Vibro-knives see use by commandos who want a silent kill, or as a weapon of last resort; vibro-bayonets are similarly only useful as a weapon of last resort, though they look intimidating. Heavier melee weapons, such as vibro-blades or vibro-glaives only see ceremonial use, or among primitive assault forces. Neurolash weaponry see some use, but mainly for police actions or for capturing targets.

Combat Robots

Military robotics deserves more attention than Psi-Wars has given it; the Alliance almost certainly uses combat robots, and the Cybernetic Union definitelydoes. Broadly speaking, we can define robots in much the same way we define human infantry (especially since Psi-Wars uses very humanoid robots), and they can fill the same niches; however, robots can be built to be much tougher, bigger, stronger and more specialized than their human counterparts; they also tend not to panic or suffer major morale problems and are easier to supply and maintain. Their downsides are that they require major technological industry to build and maintain, and they tend to lack tactical depth and the ability to acquire too much experience without “gaining interesting personalities,” which means they tend to remain specialized. Furthermore, the “best” robots in regards to a lack of panic or morale problems, those that follow orders precisely, tend to lack imagination.

Light Combat Robots: The lightest combat robots tend to resemble humans in scale, size and durability. They tendto be built with cheap materials and serve the role of “warm body with a gun,” being vast, manufactured armies of disposable soldiers. Eliteversions of light combat robots tend to fill a similar niche to the commando: they may have stealth functions such as dynamic chameleon systems and take advantage of their natural silence to better ambush their targets.

Heavy Combat Robots: If we take advantage of the ability to manufacture an inhumanely strong and tough robot, we have a combat robot. They tend to have armor built in, and may also have weaponry built in. These make excellent assault units or heavy support units. They tend to be too expensive to field en masse, but operate well as “elite” combat units. The Combat Android from GURPS UT page 167 is a good example of such a robot.

Super Heavy Combat Robots: Given that we can build our robots as big as we want, we can start to blur the lines between vehicle and robot. In principle we can go all the way up to a robotic tank! For our purposes, however, we’ll treat such a robot asa tank, and thus treat them as vehicles. Even so, we have room between “full vehicle sized robot” and “infantry-scale robot,” including SM +1 to SM +2 robots with unusual locomotion systems and heavy weaponry that put it behind a heavy support unit, but below mobile artillery, such as robot armed with two semiportable blasters and moving on multiple legs. An example of this is the Warbot from GURPS page 167. These tend to be blatantly inhuman in appearance.

Recon Robot: We can also build robots much smaller than a human, and real-world drones often operate in a recon capacity, carrying surveillance equipment to places where soldiers cannot easily go. They generally have some sort of contragravity, surveillance equipment and perhaps some tools to allow them to better infiltrate or attack. They fulfill a role similar to that of commando, but much lighter and less effective in combat. This includes the Scout Robot on page 80 of UT.

Tactical Robot: Robots lack the presence and innovation to act as good commanders (though the Cybernetic Union does not hesitate to use them). With sufficient processing power, however, they can begin to make god-like predictions about the future, and use their superb calculations to offer advice to commanders. Such “robots” are more likely to be semi-mobile mainframes than actual “robots” in the classic sense.

Logistical Robots: The role of the Robot in Psi-Wars (and, arguably, Star Wars) is to take up the jobs that player characters find uninteresting. They can act as medics (nurse bot, UT 202), engage in maintenance and repair (Tech bot, UT 85), perform complex hyperspatial navigation, do the heavy lifting during construction, act as interpreters during negotiations, or servants to help equip and assist elite units with their combat preparations. Arguably, the most commonrobot on the battlefield will not be the “combat robot” of any stripe, but logistical robots assisting quietly in the background.

Ground Vehicles

While not strictly necessary for a functional Psi-Wars military, vehicles can move far faster, carry more armor and heavier equipment than a human(oid) on foot can. They generally cannot replace basic infantry, but they certainly augment them. The downside of vehicles is that they can be too big to easily enter areas that infantry can, that they’re larger and heavier and thus take more room to transport through space or down from orbit and, finally, that they tend to be expensive.

We can break down vehicles into a few different categories, based on their speed, toughness and firepower. In reality, most vehicles will mix these to some degree, depending on the specific needs of the military. As with infantry, a military may have any or all of the below options, but most will mix, and we’ll only pick a few exemplary options.

Fast vehicles

Generally, vehicles that favor speed over every other concern are designed for recon or highly mobile warfare. If a military force can rely on its orbital assets for recon and deployment, it might not need fast vehicles at all, but armies that must traverse great swathes of land or who cannot rely on such assets (due to things like cloud cover, foliage, interference, etc) may need high-speed vehicles to quickly cover ground. High mobility vehicles can also trade “mobility for armor” relying on dodges and lightning quick flank “hit and run” tactics to defeat an enemy.

Examples of “fast” vehicles include recon hoverbikes, which are a pure expression of speed often augmented with light weaponry; fast attack vehicles like the TIE Mauler from Empire at War, which operate like light tanks, with an emphasis on light or specialized firepower and little armor.

Most such vehicles will use either repulsorlift technology or, in specialized cases, legs. Most such vehicles will go as fast as they can, typically 100 mph+, but certainly faster than walking. They might also have unique forms of mobility, like jump-jets, but won’t have flight (because then we’re discussing an aerial vehicle, rather than a ground vehicle), but one might conceive of hybrid ground/air vehicles, such as an aircraft that can land and attack.

Tough Vehicles

A tough vehicle’s primary purpose is to overcome the firepower of the enemy. In the case of armored personnel carriers or infantry fighting vehicles this is to protect the soldiers long enough to get them into position and thereafter support them in combat. In the case of a tank, this is so they can blast through a hardened defensive point. Tough vehicles need sufficient defense to pass unscathed through the worst attack they expect to face: an infantry fighting vehicle should be immune to light arms fire, and even semi-portable gatling blasters, while a tank should be able to endure a shot from its own cannon, and certainly brush off anything that could defeat more lightly armored vehicles.

Most tough vehicles, unless they want to be semi-mobile fortifications, are a hybrid of some kind, as the toughness is meant to protect something. In the case of an APC, the vehicle focuses on mobility as well, to get their occupants into position. In the case of a heavy tank, then it needs at least some mobility and solid firepower to do its job. Tanks often have as much mobility, toughness and firepower they can, making them the most defining vehicle of a faction’s arsenal, but often at the cost of a very high, well, cost.

Powerful Vehicles

A powerful vehicle seeks to put as much firepower on a target as possible. These can be broken down into anti-vehicular and anti-personnel. The latter tends to be called artillery, and focuses on explosive ordinance, usually “over the horizon” attacks, either a gauss launcher or a missile launcher, though direct-fire plasma cannons can work too. Anti-vehicular weapons include anti-tankcannons, which focus on having as much direct firepower as possible to defeat the armor of a tank, anti-aircraftcannons, which usually have high ROF and explosive rounds (such as plasma flak) to defeat supporting aircraft, and anti-orbitalcannons, which are often massive behemoths with sufficient firepower to damage a capital-class ship 100 miles away.

Most powerful vehicles need at least a little mobility, because once they attack, they invite inevitable reprisal.

Aerial Vehicles

Starfighters, corvettes and capital ships can all directly support a ground operation, but we need to understand precisely what it is they need to do before designing our vehicles to perform in this arena. Military forces might deploy dedicated air vehicles (such as ornithopters) but most Psi-Wars vehicles capable of aerial flight are capable of space flight, thanks to the nature of plasma thrusters, ion thrusters, etc.

The main missions of aerial vehicles are recon, transport, close air support, and bombardment. Recon can come from orbiting craft simply looking down at the planet and transmitting the results, or starfighters that fly overhead and report the results. Transport might involve bringing infantry and/or vehicles from orbit to ground or vice versa, or moving the same across difficult terrain and then landing them somewhere. If these are to be “hot” landings, they need to have plenty of armor and supporting weaponry, and often come to resemble “flying” IFVs. Close Air Support involves bringing major firepower to a designated area at the request of local infantry, typically do deal with something they cannot. This typically requires precise weapons (missiles, high ROF blasters, etc) capable of dealing with infantry and heavy vehicle and the ability to “loiter” (stay in the area in case more support is needed), which typically means a contragravity device, though most fighters can at least strafe an area. Bombardment involves the total destruction of an area, either via something like bombs or, more commonly, an orbital bombardment. In this case, the aerial vehicle takes on the role of artillery.

Aerial vehicles have the advantage of being able to reach an area faster than most ground vehicles, and are beyond the reach of ground forces not specifically equipped to deal with them. However, they tend to cost far more, and have less “ground presence” which prevents them from intimidating a population or responding as quickly to a problem. Finally, they may have limited availability, especially in the case of orbital support, which means they cannot always be called upon. Orbital vehicles will often have “windows” in which they may operate, times during which their orbit puts them in position to do something. Realistically, an impulse drive or similar device could easily “loiter” over an area forever, but I encourage GMs to suggest that orbital vehicles have these windows to prevent them from being exploited (a ground fight is not interesting if an orbiting vehicle can just destroy everything from its untouchable position).

Building the Psi-Wars Technological Frameworks

“I understand why you’re revisiting this technological stuff, I just miss working on the setting” – Maverick (I think; and paraphrased, because it was ages ago, which illustrates how much of a problem it is)

“I think its time for a new playtest.” – The Secret Council, ominously

I am unhappy. I had wanted to round out a final playtest and a new version of the Dreadnought, but in the latter case, it felt redundant based on what I knew was coming up, and the former felt unfinishable, because I would have to use “Generic everything.” In fact, the reason I came up with the Generic Fleet was to do a playtest, but even as I found myself sitting down to write it, the words wouldn’t come, and I think I know why: it’s because I’m unhappy. I am unhappy because Maverick is right, and that sort of thing is way more fun. I am unhappy because my mind swims with alternate races and lost houses and Alexian secrets. I am unhappy because I know you want to see those things and I watch interest dwindle on my discord and my patreon.

It is very important that a writer be happy. Sure, he can be stressed, push to his limits and freaking out, but he should be enjoying what he’s doing, or the words will stop flowing. Creativity requiresan element of play, as they are deeply bound to one another! If it feels like homework, then, perhaps you shouldn’t do it! Yes, eventually you need to get it done, but pain (and boredom, etc) are indicators of a problem, and perhaps we can solve that problem.

There’s a reason I’ve done Iteration 7 the way I have, and it boils down to dissatisfaction with GURPS Spaceships as a catchall for vehicles. We don’t have Vehicles 4e, and I must say, this journey has showed me a lot, and provided a great deal of useful assets I need to move forward with this, and now that we have them, let’s move forward, shall we?

I want to make December my “Framework” month, not in the bland “Let’s talk about technology in an abstract way” but concrete material that you, as a Psi-Wars player, can use, and I want it to reflect the setting, so we’ll kill two birds with one stone: we’ll build a gear catalog and develop our setting at the same time! Though let’s be honest, this will take more than a month, but let’s see where this takes us!

The Roadmap

As for how to build a framework, I invite you to check out the following posts:

Most of our core elements in the Ultra-Tech Framework have been set up, and so we don’t need to revisit them. Now, we need to tackle the task of coming up with like 50 ships and 50 guns and 50 bits of personal gear and a mess of robots, which seems like a daunting task, but my setting manifesto explains how to break it up into smaller pieces. I wish to draw your attention to rules 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Rule 3: The Setting Fractal

Rule 3 is probably the most critical: the easiest way to break this down is to look at the fractal pattern of the setting, and we already know what that is. We have our core conflictbetween the Alliance and the Empire, and then we have the rest of Alien Kind. For our first, core run, we’re going to stop and focus in on the Alliance and the Empire, on humanity itself, because we haven’t yet discussed aliens, and when we do, that seems a good time to bring up alien technological frameworks.

However, we can dive deeper into the Alliance and the Empire. The Empire itself is fairly uniform, but we might break it up into periods: the Old “Leto Daijin” period, when the Empire was still the military arm of the old Federation and fighting a war against the Great Galactic Threat, the current era of war against the Alliance, and the “future era,” the experimental tech that’s just around the corner, which emphasizes the Empire as innovator.

For the Alliance, we couldlook at each House, but I would argue that this is a step too deep already, and assumessomething, which is to say that the Alliance isthe Aristocracy and it is not. The Alliance is all the varied factions arrayed against the Empire. That is, we’re talking about humanity in terms of “the Empire” vs “Everyone else,” at least when it comes to technological frameworks.

One thing that irritates me in sci-fi settings is when all Aliens are alike (“All Klingons are honorable warriors”) and, worse, when humans are this way (“All humans are charismatic, heroic and liberal-minded!”). One easy way to get around that is to break down a race (humanity, in this case) into sub-groups, to expand their part of the fractal. We in the modern world already do this, thinking in terms of ethnic groups, but I want to break up modern ethnic understanding and push the reader to lump the humanity of the setting into different sorts of “thematic buckets” to give us several different ways to picture what humans might be like and, thus, several different ways to picture their technology.

Maradon: These are the heirs to the galaxy, the rulers of the defeated Galactic Federation and the would-be rulers of the Alliance. They are humanity-as-space-fantasy, with elegant nobles, space princesses, space knights, great orbital fortresses, Dune-inspired houses that once bowed to a feminine order of “witches” called the Akashic order. I think when the average reader thinks of the Psi-Wars alliance, they picture the Maradon. In Star Wars, Leia Organa, Mon Mothma and probably Lando Calrissian would have been of Maradon extraction.

Shinjurai: The technologists of the setting, whose Neo-Rationalism ostensibly serves as the ideological foundations of the modern Empire, they once ruled pockets of the Galaxy and the foundations of their civilization gave rise to the Cybernetic Union. They are humanity-as-cyberpunk, with cyborg punks and strange robotic religions and devoted logicians. There are few such characters in Star Wars, though Lobot might fight the bill, as might General Greivous; instead, they represent a mashing of other genres into Star Wars, and include characters like John Preston from Equilibrium, Clara from Killjoys, and Kanjiklub from the Force Awakens.

Westerly: The common man of the setting, they can be found scattered across the stars, living simple lives and primarily wishes to be left alone; they are the most diverse of the forms of humanity, and worry about survival more than galactic politics. They are humanity as space-Western, with varied and simple religions (from Shepherdism to shamanism to True Communion) and simple and effective technologies. They are asteroid miners, farmers, survivalists, smugglers and gunslingers. In Star Wars, the Skywalker line is probably Westerly, as is Han Solo; outside of Star Wars, we have most of the crew of the Serenity, and we have the Fremen of Dune.

I find it easier to come up with some corporations, give them some fluff and assign them equipment modifiers that they give most of their gear. I then use these corporations kinda like character lens to differentiate my gear to be easier and quicker then doing it case by case (though don’t be afraid to mix methods). In effect they become Corporate Lens. -The Ryujin, Brand Loyalty

We can break down our gear first by human ethnic group/theme: what does Maradonian spaceships look like; what does Westerly spaceships look like, etc. I would propose further do to this along the lines of manufacturingcorporations. Each ethnic group and the design philosophies they stand for can be exemplified by a handful of corporations, each with their own specific themes. We can designthe equipment around those themes, but we can also arbitrarily give them benefits, as described in GURB’s Brand Loyalty article, or the “Gun Cult” sidebar on page 39 of GURPS Gun Fu(“The blasters and vehicles of Not-Kalashnikov are just more robust, with +1 to HT or Malf, just because. Everyone knows that!”). By having a few corporations, we also give the GM and players a few names to toss around and more setting elements to play with.

We can, and maybe should, dive into other frameworks and lost pieces of technology, such as alien frameworks, or the equipment of True Communion, but we might save that for a later time, as the gear here, for these factions, is the most foundational gear of the setting.

Rule 4: Themes

So, we have the rough fractal breakdown: we want some gear for each Ethnicity and the themes they represent. We’ll need to think of those themes, of course, but we can break down our material even further by creating another axis on which we think of our gear.

Of course, we already have several subsets of gear:

  • Spaceships
  • Vehicles
  • Personal Gear
  • Robots
  • Enhancements
  • Infrastructure

The first three are self-explanatory. Robots are something easily lost in the shuffle, but someone somewhere has to be making these robots, and it’s thus part of the technological framework. Enhancements represent things like Cybernetics or other purchasable upgrades, and I would argue that these tend to be setting concerns more than something we need to design: we might want to know who creates what particular set of cybernetics so we can put a name in front of it, but beyond that it’s not a major concern. Infrastructure fills a similar niche: we need to have hospitals and weather satellites and power plants and factories, but we worry about them more as setting elements than something the players will directly use.

We also have several broader themes to concern ourselves with:

  • Military: what the wars are fought with
  • Security and Infiltration gear: what special ops, criminals and cops use
  • Civilian: what the guy on the street uses
  • Special/Magical: the gear a faction uses to power its psychic abilities and other secret conspiracies.

These sort of fall into what various characters will do, or what the main conflicts of the setting are. Military and Security and probably the most important, while civilian will mix the two and serve as a backdrop for the first two: a criminal might use a civilian car, or a rebel in a military conflict might use a civilian blaster. The special/magical is like Enhancements: it tends to be unique and special and likely not worth an entire discussion on its own, but is worth remembering.

So, for example we might start with the (Military) (Spaceships) of the (Maradon). Each of these elements will have their own subsets: Capital Ships (which might be broken down into Carriers, Battleships, etc), Corvettes (which might be broken down into escort corvettes, torpedo corvettes, etc), and so on. Once you’ve got the whole complex map built out, it’s not especially difficult to just start plugging ships in, though you needn’t fill every gap.

Rule 2: Keep it Simple

Now that we have our fractal and themes (and fractals of themes), we must endeavor to keep it simple. I think it’s obvious that when looking at just one thematic group (Maradon) with just one aspect (military spaceships) that you can dive deeper and deeper into each set. I would suggest that we limit ourselves: given that the patterns here are sufficiently obvious that a GM can easily see where he can insert his own, we only need to draw in broad lines. So, if we’re talking the military spaceshipsof each group, I would argue we need:

  • 0-3 Capital ships per group
  • 0-3 corvettes per group
  • 0-3 fighters per group

And then we stop. That’s up to 9 military ships per ethnic group plus 9 military ships for the empire, plus up to 9 “spy/security” ships per ethnic group and 9 “spy/security” ships for the empire, and 9 civilian ships per ethnic group and 9 civilian ships for the Empire. That’s already 108 potential spaceships, which is a bigdesign space, and thus we shouldn’ttry to fill in every little gap. 50 human ships would already be plenty, and that means we’re almost certainly not going to have 3 in every category (do we need 3 different Westerly capital ships? Probably not!)

I would like to add one additional thing into the mix as a call-out to Rule 1: We need to know our target audience, and one thing I’ve noticed with mytarget audience is that you guys like specifics. You like named characters, which probably means you like named ships, so we’ll come up with a handful of signature ships per faction, no more than 2-3.

Rule 5: Steal Like an Artist

Where do we get our ships? We’ll look in two major places. The first, obviously, is that we’ll steal from existing material. Obviously we’ll use Star Wars, but we have other sources as well, from the real world to other sci-fi (like the fighters of Cowboy Bebop or the corvettes of Firefly or the capital ships of Battlefleet Gothic). The second is that we’ll stop and think about the reasonsbehind our fighters.

When I created the Military Doctrines of the Empire, I set off something of a firestorm, as well as when I discussed the tactics of rebellion. I’d like to revisit each of these before I dive into the infrastructure of each. Why does the Empire have dreadnoughts? Why don’t the Westerly? The answer lies in how each faction views war, or security and stealth, or their civilian concerns. As we stop and contemplate the circumstances of each group, their technology will naturally flow from this. Personally, this isn’t the sort of setting material that needs to be outright stated, though I do find people reference it a lot (my rebel tactics gets a lot of views), but it’s definitely the sort of work you should do, even if you choose not to “show” it in the end, so we’ll definitely stop to think about it.

Heat the Forge!


And that’s it! I think this lays out a roadmap of how to go about building our technology nicely, and I think we have most of the tools we need to do this. We are missing some pieces, but better to stop and build those pieces as we need them than to set up everything in a slow, boring manner in advance, because we’re often engaging in “premature optimization” which is one of the greatest creative sins one can commit!

So, where to next? Clearly I think Militaryconcerns interest us the most currently. We need to tackle the rest, absolutely, but we’ll start here, because it’s what people talk about the most, and it’ll serve as the basis for my playtest the best. What aspect of the military? Well, we need to hit everything, but I think the most obvious sequence is:

  • Personal Gear
  • Vehicles
  • Spaceships
  • Miscellaneous
We need to know what gear soldiers carry to know what vehicles support them to know how much space a spaceship needs to carry said soldiers and vehicles; things like factories, fortifications, starports, medical facilities, can come later, as they can be fairly easily abstracted away; I don’t think you’d even miss them if we forgot them.

Which faction? While I’m sure everyone would like to start with the Empire, I want to start with Maradon, because I have a pretty good sense of what they look like and they predate the Empire, so the Empire has adapteda lot of its technology to defeat the Maradon-led Alliance. After that, and this is subject to change, I’d like to do: Westerly (as they make up the bulk of rebellions), the Shinjurai (they straddle the line between Empire and Alliance) and then the Empire.

Before I do each, I’ll stop and talk about the doctrine that drives them and their preferred tactics.

Once I’ve finished the militaries of each, we’ll see if we can get a playtest up and running, and I’ll turn my attention to spycraft and civilian elements.

Ultra-Tech Framework Post-Script and Comments

I wrote my Ultra-Tech Framework articles with a couple of readers/patrons in mind, who often had questions about how I put together my own technology frameworks in my campaigns, so I thought it might be nice to loosely document how I handled it.  It is, of course, more art than science, and I could do an entire series on game design elements, but I hoped it was useful.

Given that it might be useful to them, it might be useful to you as well, dear reader, so I thought it might be nice to make it generally available, and I was right!  It seems quite well received, and it generated quite some discussion.  I wanted to tackle, broadly, some of the comments and questions I received over the course of the series.  All the questions are paraphrased, because I received many of them on Discord, and I didn’t save them at the time, thus they are remembered, rather than directly quoted.  Apologies if this makes some inaccurate.

You say to start with the background tech and move on the big, setting-changing tech.  Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

This is an interesting point.  First, I must say that I got this sort of question from the broken up articles, rather than the complete document, as seen on Patreon.  I imagine this is so because if you see that advice in isolation, you might become confused.
The first step in the ultra-tech creation process should be defining your concept and framework.  So, yes, you’re “starting” with what makes your setting distinct and different.  Once you know that, for example, you’re going to feature advanced AI in a campaign that focuses on murder mysteries, then you move on to detailing your technology.  Only once you have this worked out, I recommend starting with the simplest choices and moving on from there: pick your tech level, lay down the most basic tech and work out the tech at increasing complexity and concern.  This is the point where some people object: why not do this in reverse?  Hit the “most important part first.”
I recommend starting simple to establish a familiar, setting baseline.  The “trick” of coming up with the setting defining technology was handled in the concept phase.  Now, we’re working out things like setting implications.  But to understand the setting implications of a setting, we need to know the setting.  Thus, I recommend that as a foundation.  You might see the earlier steps as “getting the obvious stuff out of the way.”  In our AI-who-solves-crime example, we know the TL (say, 10), and we know the feel (more or less like modern procedural crimes, but with an AI).  So we know that we should mostly have familiar TL 10 tech, we can have a few convenience techs (we might make forensics a little easier so a single duo can do quite a lot of it on their own), and certainly some standard sci-fi tropes, like hover-cars and beam weapon side-arms.  Now that we have an idea of what our setting is like, it’s safer for us to go into what the AI is like, and how it impacts the setting.
This has several advantages.  First, I find it tends to “tame” the concept of the setting.  If you challenge a GM to come up with a TL 12 space opera, most will freeze, because there’s way too many choices available, most of which are crazy.  So we start by removing the crazy and adding the TL 12 we find most palatable, the “familiar” technology that helps us grasp how our setting will work.  Once we have that bedrock, once our setting is in our grasp, then we can bring in the crazy.  Miracle tech also tends to be labor intensive.  You need to consider where things go wrong, or how players might use or abuse your technology.  If you use up your energy and time working out the details on your miracle tech, you have no game or setting to run; if instead, you use up your time and energy on all the rest of the tech, you can at least run the baseline setting you created.  Our AI procedural is at least a TL 10 procedural if we don’t have AI.
This isn’t to say you can’t work that way.  If you don’t like a specific piece of advice in a recipe or an advice column, but the rest of it is good, use the rest of it.  I often instruct stumped writers to “write what they know.”  If you know your setting is going to have advanced AI and that’s where your focus is, write that.  If you don’t know what the rest is, you can “grab and go,” especially if you understand the concept of familiar tech, convenience tech and standard-issue sci-fi tech.  So, we know we’re going to have super-advanced AI, and we can work that out in detail.  What’s the rest like? Oh, TL 10, but with a modern feel.  So, you can use modern cars, only they hover; you can use modern guns, only they deal burning (2) damage, or whatever.  If it’s not important, you can “fill in the blanks” later.  This isn’t bad advice; it just pre-supposes you have a good handle on the concepts I outline in my series.

This seems really complicated. Why do you have to make things so complicated? Why do you overprep? Why can’t you just fudge it, like I do?

First, I want to say up front that there are many “right” ways to run an RPG.  I’ve got my style and approach and it works very well for me, and given my views and patronage, I have a sufficient audience that I can safely conclude that my approach has a sufficient audience to justify my continued blogging.  But that doesn’t mean that I expect my approach to have universal appeal.  If you don’t want detailed and richly complex works, then you’re probably in the wrong place.  I understand that my “start simple, get complex” approach can feel like a bait-and-switch, but this is how complexity is built: it emerges naturally from simplicity.

My mother told me to go to the store and buy a dozen eggs and that if they had milk, to buy two.  I returned with 24 eggs and no milk.  She asked me why I bought so many eggs, to which I replied “They had milk!”

That said, there’s an important principle that I want to highlight: humans tend to be good at hiding complexity.  We do ridiculously complicated things all of the time without being consciously aware of what we’re doing.  If asked a difficult math question, a student might respond, correctly, with the answer, without knowing how he arrived at that answer: he might remember it from when someone else answered it, or the answer might simply make sense to him.  Even so, most teachers will dock you points if you cannot “show your work,” which means to go through each step and explain how you came to those conclusions. The difference between logic and intuition is that the former is explicit while the latter is implicit, but both deal with complicated things.
The problem arises if someone doesn’t understand the process at all.  How do you teach someone about the complexities involved.  An intuitive person cannot; they can only show the person what they do and hope the other person gets it (this is similar to memorizing all the answers to a math test).  A logical person can explicitly explain each step.  This makes it a more powerful teaching tool: you can understand the principles behind handling complexities, and then apply them on your own.
People don’t always like facing complexities, but they are there whether you want to admit them or not.  My article is explaining what I’ve seen done in every successful ultra-tech game.  A simpler way of explaining it, the sort of advice I more often see is “Pick a concept, throw out all the tech you don’t need, and just keep it simple.  Oh, and be honest about the implications of the technology you do choose.”  Well, how do you pick out a concept?  What tech do I need and what don’t I need and how do I handle them?  What is “simple” and is it always advisable to keep it as simple as possible? If so, why do we have so many different types of guns? Wouldn’t it be simpler to have only a single gun type? And what about the realist/honesty of technological implications? If I introduce a technology am I stuck with all of the “implications?” Is there no good way to control those? Is there a good way to figure out what those are?
When I write, I’m trying to outline all the possible steps, cases and tools you might need.  Sometimes, I worry I’ll come across as patronizing in how much I try to simplify matters, and worry that I assume to much foreknowledge.  I find a lot of people who criticize me assume far, far more foreknowledge, usually either because they’re fairly experienced (but unconscious of that experience), or they simply dismiss the levels of details I offer (“There’s nothing wrong with having just one gun, or faking all the different guns by using a single stat-line and making up bonuses and maluses on the fly”), which is fine, but as an article that seeks to help as many people as possible, I need to assume less foreknowledge not more, and assume more interest in detail, not less.
It’s easier to ignore uninteresting details than it is to fill in blanks, thus more useful to people to be overly detailed rather than not detailed enough (though, naturally, this must be balanced for readability).

How can you say that increasingly complex computers aren’t transformative? I think having a server in hand is pretty transformative!

I didn’t say it wasn’t, I said it didn’t have to be.
This highlights a core and important principle: this series isn’t about what is, it’s about what you want.  It’s about building a setting to your specifications.  You need to pick and choose your technology to highlight the story elements you want, and the rest, where possible, should remain familiar.  Advanced computers are a good example of a technology that can believably stay familiar.
Let’s break down the specifics of that.  If you pull out  your mobile phone and look up a location on google maps, your phone doesn’t know where that location is.  It just has a link to an API that talks to a server that returns that information to you. This is called a thin client.  As mobile devices get better, they get thicker clients, but most of that “thickness” is in clever display tricks (like handling screen rotation) or caching information than it is in complex calculations.  Siri does not live on your phone, she lives in a server, but she can talk to your phone.
If you suddenly had a phone with the capacity of a server: suddenly, you could have Siri and Google Maps loaded directly into your phone and that’s… convenient, but not much more.  The capabilities of someone with a mobile device in such a setting aren’t dramatically different from the capabilities they would have in the present.  A good example of this would be desktop computers, which in the 1990s could engage in gaming, hacking, programming and surfing the internet and today, can engage in gaming, hacking, programming and surfing the internet.  The gaming looks better today, hacking uses different tricks and different exploits, and the internet is better and more useful than it was, but there’s no transformative change here.  If you asked someone in the 1990s to imagine the capabilities of the computers of the early 2020s and he imagined them like the present “only incrementally better,” he’d be pretty spot on.
This doesn’t mean that I believe computers cannot be transformative.  Our 1990s fellow would be dead wrong when it came to how mobile devices would revolutionize the world, as well as the impact of things like social media.  If we create new applications of our technology, that will have implications.  The mobile device turned the desktop into something you could carry around with you, which meant that the world became far more interconnected than before.  Imagine a TL 12 computer that fits in your skull and talks directly to your mind that is as powerful as a modern server, or imagine a TL 10 computer that fits in a pair of glasses and projects images directly in your field of view, layering a digital reality over the real one (“Augmented Reality”) and it has the power of a mobile device.  Imagine a desktop computer that contained programs that weren’t designed, but that were, instead, taught, and could be “taught” in seconds.  This could automate away almost any task in but moments, and would have major implications.  Any similar technologies introduced into a setting have the potential to be a transformative technology around which your story could be told.
The point of my article is not to dismiss the transformative power of computers, medicine, weapons, or any technology you want, but to help you tame that transformative power so you can highlight the transformations you want.  If you want to explore how future computers will change us (a typical theme of cyberpunk), then do that.  But if you don’t, then you shouldn’t.  Most sci-fi out there assumes future computers won’t completely transform how we live our lives, and that’s fair.
Speaking of which:

I think technology should be depicted as realistically as possible; ignoring the transformative nature of any technology is unrealistic, thus to be avoided.

Nobody actually said this, but it felt like an undercurrent of commentary from a few specific quarters.  I’ve seen this sort of commentary and themes before, especially when I get into discussions about “what sci-fi is.”  So I want to address these quickly; this will necessarily involve some definitions, which not everyone will agree with, but I offer them primarily to model how you can handle various forms of science fiction.
First, science fiction is, to me, any fiction that explores the implications of science and technology.  A lot of people like to use the terms “hard” and “soft” sci-fi to define a continuum of how “realistically” or “respectfully” you handle the science and technology vs how loose and fast you play with those rules, but traditionally “hard sci-fi” was fiction about the hard sciences, like chemistry or physics, while “soft sci-fi” was fiction about soft sciences like psychology or sociology.  The desire for intense realism in sci-fi, the other use of the term “hard” in sci-fi is associated with a subgenre that I would like to dub “futurism.” This is not a discussion about a scientific concept, rather an attempt to synthesize all the various advances going on in the present, and attempting to predict what the world will look like in the future, generally (but not necessarily) in narrative for,.  Fans of this genre want their fiction to be as realistic as possible and as authentic as possible.  They will dismiss blue-skinned space princesses as utterly unrealistic, and will concede that while terraforming Mars is possible, will argue that it will not happen on short time tables and might even question whether or not it would be practical given the feasibility of orbital colonies and so on.
I point out this genre not to suggest that it’s a “bad” genre, but to point out that it is not the only possible genre, or even desirable in your specific case.  Many fans of futurism seem to behave as though their genre is the best or most desirable.  I’m a big fan of Isaac Arthur, and in his world-building discussion, he’s as guilty as the rest of doing the same, while I’m quite sure that if you pointed it out, he would realize he finds perfectly unrealistic works quite entertaining. Isaac Asimov is famous for this.  For example, his Foundation series features atomic ray guns and force screens and interstellar civilizations spanning into the deep future, but also printed newspapers; his robots series depicts what is essentially the 1950s and 1960s, only with robots.  In neither case was his fiction “bad.”  It was just focused.  Asimov wanted to talk about the cycles of civilization and the idea of psychohistory (foundation) or the implications of robotics and AI programming (I, Robot).  Good sci-fi authors try to pick and choose what they want to talk about.  There’s nothing wrong with this approach.
My series is about how to minimize your workload and to focus down on the technologies you want for your setting.  This is not to say it cannot handle the “futurism” genre, but that there are more genres than that, and futurism is a remarkably unforgiving genre (it seems to exist primarily so smart people can criticize works in the genre, which is not meant to disparage it: by criticizing works of the genre, you sharpen your own knowledge, provided your criticisms are accurate).  Thus, I disagree with the assessment that “realism is always better.”  Targeted realism that helps you tell the story you want to tell is “always better.”  Unimportant realism represents excessive details threatens to get in the way of your storytelling unless handled very well. There are some genres were no amount of realism is “unimportant,” even if it derails the story you were trying to tell, because that means that the story you were trying to tell was the wrong one.  But this is not the approach every GM will take, nor should you feel compelled to follow it.

This is cool!  Let me tell you about my setting and the technology I used then!

I know the boorish gamer who goes on and on about his character, setting or campaign is a time-honored trope, but I personally never liked the idea of finding such people “boring” or “irritating.” I think if you don’t want to hear the stories of other players, you’re in the wrong hobby!  As a GM, I love it when my work inspired others, either to create their own works, to compare their works to yours, or just offer up their own.  It means my work spoke to them, and I like it when they speak back to me.
What I’m trying to do with my blog is encourage more people to build settings, to master the intricacies of GURPS and campaign design.  Worked examples, whether using my material directly or not, are always welcome. Always.
There have been several such works posted in comments.  You can go back and sift through my posts to find them, but if you post a link to a blog post or a google document here in the comments, or just send it to me, I’ll link it here.

Ultra-Tech Frameworks: Step 5 – Putting it All Together

Once you’ve created your technological framework, you need to get it into your players’ hands. Players will interact and learn about your framework via a setting description, a gear catalog or alternate rules; optionally, they might use it during character creation (but we can treat this as a gear catalog).

Setting description is typically the most key point, as it will occur for any and all sci-fi settings, whether or not the players even have access to a gear-list. Typically, Familiar-Tech is not worth mentioning at all; it should be impliedin the basic premise of “Like X but in the future.” The exception to this is Weird Safe-Tech; you don’t need to be very explicit about it, but painting the technology’s differences helps. Convenience-Tech and Standard Issue Sci-Fi Tech also doesn’t need a great deal of discussion, at least not in the setting description, as they are meant to be familiar or to simply remove problems. These tend to come across nicely in the broader descriptions of the setting itself. In short, unless it drastically changes how the characters interact with the setting beyond default assumptions, it doesn’t need to be stated outright; it can be implied instead.

Miracle-Tech definitely needs a discussion and should be set aside and highlighted. These are the technologies that largely makethe setting. You should also discuss whatever limitations are in place, or any variant rules you’re using, or how people see that technology. This can and should be fairly explicit.

When it comes to a gear catalog, preface it with any sweeping mechanical changes, including the base TL, the effectiveness of power cells, special rules for handling computer programs, etc. The gear catalog, after that, should tackle onlythe things that matter to your game, typically things that the players will want to get for their characters. This can be as detailed as you want, and may be divided up into different markets (“This technology is available only to Alphan players; this technology is available to everyone, but Betans get a 10% discount”) and sections. Use GURPS Dungeon Fantasy or GURPS Action as a guideline.

If your campaign framework revolves around something innovative or requires substantial changes to the rules, make sure those rules are available to the players. For example, if you have detailed hacking rules, players should be able to access those so they know what it is that they need to buy.

Ultra-Tech Frameworks: Step 4 – Customize your Technology

Once we know what our baseline technology is, we can further tailor our gadgets to our setting. GURPS Ultra-Tech offers us only the most generic material. It will offer you a grav car, but not a grav ferrari or grav pinto; it’ll offer a heavy blaster and a light blaster, but not a Deagle Blaster or a 38 Special blaster. If we want more detail than “car” and “gun,” we’ll have to make it ourselves.

This step is not strictly necessary. In some cases, baseline technology is enough. Consider, for example, a high school drama set in the future: generic technology would be sufficient for capturing the futuristic feel of the game, and you could even inject some Miracle-Tech to force your high school students to wrestle with their changing world. They live in a world where “gun” and “car” is good enough.

But we’ll often find ourselves in a situation where we want more nuance to our technology. This may be because the technology in GURPS ultra-tech doesn’t quite offer what we want. A common example of this might be a desire for a specific model of robot that doesn’t exist in the book. More commonly, we’re fine with the technological principles as outlined in GURPS Ultra-Tech but we want to offer more variety, especially when it comes to our core activity. For example if our game is about space soldiers killing aliens, we might want to offer players numerous guns to choose from and we might want to make the various aliens they fight feel distinct and original.

Supporting your Core Activity

In step one, you determined your core activity. The most common reason to expand your technological options is to support your core activity. For example, if your game is about seeking out new life and new civilizations and then killing them, you’ll want a variety of weapons and armor to choose from, both to handle the different aliens the players might face, and to support different strategies the characters might employ (for example, a “heavy assault” soldier will expect to have different options than a “stealth commando” soldier). Similarly, if we’re focused on hacking, we might expect to face numerous different forms of computer security, and we’ll need different means of getting around those security methods.

The technology we choose must support our preferred core activity, and while Ultra-Tech might do that “out of the box” (it certainly does with weaponry and armor: see Typical Weapons by TL, page UT 148 and Typical Armor by TL, page UT 186), it often doesn’t, and we’ll need to give our players additional things to choose from.

Building a Mechanical Framework

Without diving too deeply into how to build gameplay (a post, or even a series, for another day), when you expand your core activity, you do so by trying to draw attention to certain mechanics by setting up scenarios around them, and thereafter encouraging your players to explore those mechanics in a variety of ways. What we need then is to define what challenges the players will face, what alternate strategies the players can use to get around those, and we’ll want to “balance” those strategies so that each strategy is potentially interesting, instead of one exceeding all others.

Combat is typically the most intuitive framework for players to understand and a good example to start with. Ultra-Tech already does a lot of the heavy lifting here for you. Most combat technology within a particular tech level is “balanced” with itself and offers a variety of weapons and armor to choose from, allowing you to create interesting combat diversity “out of the box” (as noted above). In principle, Ultra-Tech tends to balance its weapons and armor around an ever-increasing armor divisor: TL 9 is consistent with most weapons having access to an armor divisor of 2, TL 10 around an armor divisor of 3, TL 11 around an armor divisor of 5, and TL 12 around an armor divisor of 10 (later improvements break this, immediately leaping into making all armor useless; you might instead use Armor Divisor 20, 30, 50 and then 100, if you wanted to continue the same sequence).

We can also see some interesting balance options in place around combat. For example, GURPS Ultra-Tech includes multiple forms of damage. At TL 10, one can access gauss weapons, which have an impressive armor divisor of 3 and deal piercing damage, while lasers are less impressive with armor divisor 2 on their burning damage, and one can load HEMP into relatively small weapons, improve your armor divisor to 10 using an explosive shell. Obviously, the last is the best against well armored targets, while lasers are laughably weak (though lasers have other benefits), but different forms of armor offer different protections. One can add reactive armor to almost anything, which greatly reduces the effectiveness of HEMP rounds; nanoweave armor has improved DR vs piercing attacks, reducing the damage of gauss, while reflective armor reduces the damage of lasers. We can shape the gameplay of the setting by making certain weapons fairly common and commonly defended against while making others more exotic or removing their counters entirely: for example, if everyone uses bullets and explosives, then nanoweave and reactive armor will be common, while if reflective armor is disallowed, then lasers might be especially devastating on the battlefield. One can perform similar tricks at higher TLs by defining how force screens work, what they defend against, etc.

We can also add accessories to our combat “mini-game.” For example, personal radar adds a +3 to hit your target, and if you have decent sensors you can easily pick your target out, and with sufficient firepower, destroy them. “If I can see them, they are dead” might be a tactical maxim… but what if you cannot see them? Stealth options like invisibility surfaces, radar stealth and IR cloaking might make you especially difficult to detect, and distortion ECM allows you to spoof your enemy. However, using radar to detect your opponent might give away your position, which means that commando-type characters might engage in a game of electronic cat and mouse, while hulking “tank”-type characters can largely afford to ignore the whole mess if they have sufficient armor to soak the alpha strike of a commando and return fire, giving you a mess of interesting possible tactical options, both within combat, and outside of it.

But what about non-combat arenas? What about focusing our game on computer hacking, viral warfare, the solving of cosmic mysteries, or protecting people from psychic incursions by an elder race. In principle, you apply the same ideas. While I personally recoil from the idea of “social combat,” thinking of various fields as “forms of combat” is a good first step as you can begin by translating familiar mechanical frameworks into a new framework. Unfortunately, these sorts of things often don’t translate well as combat and need an alternative approach. Pyramid #3/21 has an extensive article on hacking, and GURPS Mysteries contains plenty of ideas on how to tackle mysteries of various sorts (though with a focus on murder mysteries); GURPS Monster Hunters also has an interesting research/investigation framework; After the End looks at survival and repair in great detail; Social Engineering gives you the tools you need for social “combat.” Beyond these, you’ll have to do your own homework and find inspiration where you can.

Ultra-Tech has less support for non-combat arenas of interesting mechanics than it does for combat (though it has pretty good support for survival and spycraft). Ultimately, to provide an interesting array of gadgets for a non-combat arena, we’ll need to modify existing gadgets, or create our own, and we’ll need to do it in such a way that we support an interesting diversity of strategies.

I find a lot of people struggle when it comes to an interesting diversity of strategies. An easy way to think of it is to contemplate various “character classes,” each representing a different approach to the core activity (these can be metaphorical: you don’t need to create specific templates, though people often do). This, like most of the best things in gaming, can be fractal and often are, so within a “class” you might have a variety of tactics, and within those “sub-classes” you might have a variety of tactics and so on. You can go as deep as you like, though I find many games get by fine with a single layer and few go deeper than 3 layers. You can add further complexity by adding new “modes,” which allows a character to approach a given strategy with different concerns, resources and themes, not so much altering his approach to a given tactic, but how he enacts that tactic.

As a start, let me propose a simple “sample” framework of 3 and then a “sample” framework of 5.

Once you choose a rough strategy framework, sketch out how it might look, how players will interface with it, and how they’ll encounter choices and how those choices will be presented to them. I try to picture myself playing the game and ask myself why I would choose a particular path, or how I would deal with a particular problem. Try to avoid the trap of making “right or wrong” choices, or situations where if a player chooses a particular path, he finds himself facing insurmountable or excessively easy problems. Ideally, a players strategy should represent a mode of play, which each choice changing how the player interacts with the game.

The Dungeon Crawling Framework

If you play any sort of dungeon crawling game, either tabletop or computer, then you’ll readily recognize three archetypal strategies that come up over and over again, remixed in various forms: the Fighter, the Thief and the Mage. If you imagine those archetypal conceptsconverting into other genres, it might be easy to see what sort of gear such a character might choose and how they might try to use that gear, and then build your gear accordingly.

The Fighter Strategy: At its core, the fighter strategy is any one that focuses on what is obviously useful, and maxes it out at the expense of everything else. In combat, this might be damage and armor, while in a hacking game, this might be brute forcing passwords while having the best possible firewalls. You can diversify Fighter Strategies by including multiple forms of the “obvious solution.” For example, you can have multiple forms of damage and multiple forms of armor to protect it, so we might have bullet-specialized fighters, beam-specialized fighters, and explosive specialized fighters.

The Rogue Strategy: At its core, the rogue strategy is one that focuses on secondary concerns and lateral thinking to use skill and cleverness to defeat the obvious solution, often through technicalities. In a fighting game, this might use mobility, stealth and awareness to avoid taking damage by never allowing an opponent to reach you where you are vulnerable, and maneuvering yourself so you can strike at your opponent’s vulnerable points. In hacking, this might involve researching software exploits unique to the target, tricking people into downloading software that creates backdoors, infecting networks, and hiding your tracks so nobody traces you to strike back. If we want greater diversity of rogue strategies, we create more secondary traits and more lateral avenues of attack; for example, our combat scenario might have stealth/awareness and mobility technology as well as armor that tends to favor one direction over another, and electronic warfare and hacking tricks that allow someone to “shut down” their opponent in some way as well as disrupt their targeting.

The Mage Strategy: At its core, a Mage Strategy is anyone that forces a frame-switch, using some form of limited trick to engage your opponent in some arena other than the standard one in which he is used to fighting in, pulling him into an area where you have an advantage. In D&D, of course, this involves using one-off magic tricks that can only be easily resisted with specialized traits or abilities, or that force your opponent into unexpected win/lose conditions (the classic example being save-or-die spells, but something similar to a mental duel or a curse that needs a special quest to break might also qualify). In a hacking mini-game, this might involve something like using electrokinesis to directly control computers, or defeating your opponent without using a computer at all (tracking them down the old fashioned way and putting a bullet in their rig, or them). If we want diversity of mage strategies, we include multiple possible frame-shifts into new arenas. For our space combat example, we might include psychics, bio-technological terror weapons, and memetic viruses (the hacking example above might also qualify).

The most common means of applying a “mode” in the dungeon fantasy model is with races, the most common being “elf,” “dwarf” and “human,” with elves typically having greater speed and intelligence so attempting to achieve the above three strategies with finesse (elven fighters look like swashbucklers; elven rogues and mages tend to look as we expect), while dwarves typically have greater strength and durability and so “tough out” the three strategies above (dwarven fighters look more like “knights,” while dwarven rogues might look more like engineering and dwarven mages might use their powerful stores of willpower and endurance to cast big, powerful spells, or to work with long-term runic enchantments), while humans typically have greater versatility and so can afford to specialize more deeply in their chosen strategy.

Alternate examples of modes in a combat-oriented game might be different technological bases: we might have cyber-tech assault troopers and commandos (using power armor and bullets), bio-tech assault troopers and commandos (using bio-mecha and poisons), and psychotronic assault troopers and commandos (using pyschokinetic armor and crystal-generated beams). This is, incidentally, one of the mode-themes of Starcraft! For a hacking example, the platform on which the character bases his rig on, or the target server is based on; a real world example (to over simplify) might be Windows machines vs Apple or Linux machines (though this is a little deceptive as Apple and Linux are more closely related than many people realize); games like Netrunner might offer additional inspirations.

The Five Color Strategies

In principle, one can draw inspiration from any number of familiar or unfamiliar games. You could use the five elements of Doaism, or the four elements of Western mysticism. You go with something as simple as Rock Paper Scissors, or look at the rock-scissors-paper within rock-scissors-paper of the surprisingly complex Pokemon for inspiration. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy as emergent themes of Holy vs Unholy and Natural vs Eldritch that you can play with.

Magic the Gathering is a fairly well-known strategy framework, and can also serve as inspiration for your own game design. White strategies involve patience, defense, and making use of mundane solutions well. Green strategies involve maximizing any desirable traits and creating monstrous offense/defense combos that can overpower a foe, but may prove unwieldy. Red strategies involve rapid mobility, quick strikes and offense over everything, creating a glass cannon. Black strategies involve self-sacrifice, and enormous power at a tainted cost, and much of the strategy involves accessing powerful-but-flawed tricks and then either trying to mitigate the flaw or turning it into an advantage. Blue strategies involve defeating your opponent on technicalities, precision and frame-shifts, similar to the mage strategy above.

Hackers using a framework inspired by magic might have the following strategies.

  • Green hackers might have more powerful computers and deeper integration into the internet-as-the-internet. They might have access to AI-in-development, allowing their programs to “learn” and improve over time.

  • Red hackers might have dangerously destructive programs that give them an enormous edge over their opponents but at a risk of burning out their own computer, and may have the capacity to do physical damage to other computers.

  • Black hackers use very destructive exploits that more blatantly violate the law than the rest, often including viruses and bot-nets stolen from others. They make hacking harder for everyone. They excel at turning your computer against itself.

  • Blue hackers have a detailed knowledge of the intricacies of the entire network; they often know of old, outdated architectures that many backbone systems still run on, allowing them to finesse their way through security. They also excel at hiding their presence.

  • White hackers have detailed security knowledge and may well work as security. They excel at defending their own computers and networking with other hackers. They, however, have almost exclusively legal or semi-legal software.

Customizing Gear

Once you understand how your “gameplay framework” works, you’ll need to make sure that you have sufficient technology to handle a variety of strategies, allowing you to create diverse gameplay. Ultra-Tech, being generic, has highly generic technology in it, and has a limited ability to anticipate your choice. However, you can adjust your framework to take advantage of existing gear within the book. GURPS Ultra-Tech has quite a diversity of infiltration, detection and combat gear. It also has interesting strategies built into their microbot swarms, cybernetics and nano-tech. If you’re willing to expand your collection, Bio-Tech and Psi-Tech offer some pretty diverse options too! If Ultra-Tech lacks the technology you look for (for example, it defines very little in the way of computer security or hacking), then you’ll need to build your own gear.

This is where I find most people panic. They don’t have a proper gear-designing book. Vehicles 4e is vaporware and there’s no easy way to look up gear stats on wikipedia. So what can you do? Well, first, you can modify existing gadgets, or you can create your own wholecloth.

Creating your Own Gear

At the prospect of creating their own gear, many people freeze up, lacking a context, a system by which create said gear. To compensate for this, allow me to reveal for you the Ultra-Tech design system: They mostly make it up.

The truth is that we cannot know for sure what a futuristic device does, how it works, or how efficient it will be. So we make guesses or, in the case of super-science stuff, apply arbitrary values. We can acquire these arbitrary values from a few interesting places.

We can convert real-world vehicles from real-world values, after a quick trip to wikipedia and a few basic conversion tricks that are either commonly known, or easily picked up. A similar trick can be done with sci-fi gadgets. For hard sci-fi, we can look to real world physics, prototypes, and back-of-the-envelope calculations. A good place to start for these are Atomic Rockets, anything by Luke Campbell, or the videos of Isaac Arthur. For super-science gadgets, most series include technical volumes or wikis where such numbers as weight and effectiveness can be found or at least extrapolated.

But are these values actually “correct,” per GURPS, given how GURPS works? I see this sort of question asked a lot, or at least implied. For example, are Star Destroyers “actually” a mile long? Do tricorders really work the way Star Trek describe? The answer is “yes and yes.” Of course, some people argue that these numbers or values are “ridiculous” and more realistic numbers would be such and such; if you feel that way, use those numbers. If you must adhere to a system, use the metatronic generator rules: create the device, find the cost, and determine the cost as per those rules.

Many people have this sense that GURPS has this coherent system lurking behind its rules, and to be sure, it has a more coherent system than most other games, but it’s far from a true physics engines that our little minds have merely failed to grasp. For example, the numbers for fusion generators in GURPS Spaceships suggest that, pound for pound, they are about twice as efficient as fission reactors, but GURPS Ultra-Tech suggests, pound for pound, that fusion is 10 to 100 times as effective. The force screens of ultra-tech are far more effective than they should be, given the values given in Spaceships, and you cannot replicate hardsuits with the new armor design rules. In short, GURPS isn’t entirely coherent with itself. There may be numerous reasons for this, but it’s also not important. What matters is not that your game is “coherent” with GURPS, but that it is coherent with itself.

Focus on ensuring that your system is balanced, that values make sense given what you want, and if you’re concerned about mingling your own gadgets with GURPS gadgets, take those into consideration too.

Modifying Existing Gear

These modifications can be added to just about any gadget that has both a specified cost and weight (i.e., not software, drugs, etc.) – GURPS Ultra-Tech page 15, Integrating and Modifying Gadgets

Alternatively, you can take existing gadgets and apply changes to them.

The largest concern here is typically balance; after all, Pulver designed what he did for a reason, right? Well, as established above, I don’t actually believe this to be true. For example, if you allow all countermeasures to exist, TL 10 lasers are pretty easy to defeat, while TL 10 slugthrowers with the ETC option and TL 10 ammunition is pretty lethal and hard to beat. Ultimately, Ultra-Tech is necessarily arbitrary, and built around a fairly generic concept of “balance,” and so may not work for your specific needs,so I wouldn’t count on Ultra-Tech to do your balancing for you. You’ll need to carefully balance your own technology, especially if you want your framework to be especially compelling.

Still, a few benchmarks for balance might be handy, and Ultra-Tech serves as a good foundation for your design. For example, you don’t need to throw out all the weapons of gadgets of Ultra-Tech and start from scratch. You can use them as a jumping-off point. Instead of making new weapons, use the weapons that exist in Ultra-Tech and build variations. If you need new robots, take existing ones and tweak them. Ultra-Tech already has numerous options for doing just this, including making devices more attractive, more rugged, lighter, pricing tools based on quality, integrating additional gadgets into them, etc. Ultra-Tech also includes more unusual options scattered through the book, such as making them out of Smart Bioplastic (UT 170), Living Metal (UT 171) or Memory Metal to give it multiple “modes” (UT 97). Ultra-Tech began as a device design book, and only later converted to a catalog of read-to-use technology, thus most of the devices were built for your modifications. Furthermore, if you’re willing to look into new books, you can use Psychotronics from Psi-Tech, or Bio-Gadget options from Bio-Tech to further customize your gear.

If the tools Ultra-Tech offers are insufficient, you’ll have to adjust technology on your own. The easiest way to do this is to make trade-offs on whatever aspects of technology you have available. All gadgets have a weightand a cost; software has cost and complexity (and memory storage, though GURPS doesn’t get into this much); robots have a traits, point costs and dollar costs, as do cybernetics. Weapons have their weapon stat-line, and vehicles have their vehicular stat-line. All items might have a legality rating, which can change too.

Generic gadgets have very few things they can really change. Most have some measure of effectiveness that you can mess with (for example, a lockpick allows you to pick locks; a better lockpick might grant a +1, +2 or +TL/2), and they also often have power requirements. Cost, weight and power requirements all highly depend on the broader context you’re balancing the devices around. Power requirements will generally be a largely cosmetic concern; weight matters most for encumbrance (though if we include “size” in weight, whether or not the device is an effective holdout can represent an interesting option to play with), and cost mostly matters for budget. If you need more points on which to vary a gadget, you can simply create more. For example, if you need a wide variety of lockpicks, you can include a wide variety of locks; type A lockpicks might only pick type A locks, or might have a bonus to pick them; type C lockpicks might be able to pick type A and type B locks, but be too large to easily fit into your pocket, while type D lockpicks gain a big bonus to pick any locks but burn out when they’re done, making them “one shot.”

Software works largely like generic gadgets, except complexity and/or memory requirements replace weight as the limit on “how much you can carry,” and this naturally depends on the sort of computers available. A complexity 5 program is “heavy” if you only have complexity 5 computers, enormous if most people can only access Complexity 4 computers (you’ll need special computer options then) and inconsequential if everyone has access to Complexity 7 computers. Complexity ultimately determines how many programs someone can run, so an interesting conceit is to worry about computer memory and how many computer programs one can fit onto a computer, and also worry about how many a character can run. For example, a complexity 4 computer can only run two complexity 4 programs, but perhaps it can store10, so you can swap out what 2 programs you’re running. Of course, while we’re modifying gadgets, nothing stops you from changing how complexity and memory works. You need to know how many programs a character can acesssand how many he can use. If you want this to matter, but you want different values than the default values offered in Ultra-Tech, change them. Or, of course, you can ignore them if they don’t interest you and focus on other things that matter.

Robots and Cybernetics are, perhaps, the easiest to modify, and the most self-balancing. Just build new a new template. Use whatever pricing you feel appropriate (in many campaigns, players will purchase robots and cybernetics exclusively with points, so it won’t matter). You can include additional concerns here, like power-drain or “humanity loss” as you see fit, but you’re on your own for balance concerns (a suggestion for power drain, though is to treat power as fatigue points and price the cost of power drain around fatigue costs). Demi Benson’s “Living Better with Cybernetics” in Pyramid #3/51 “Tech and Toys III” also offers some interesting insights into the thought processes behind cybernetics, and if you’re willing to dive into older works, GURPS Robots from 3e and Reign of Steel offer interesting ideas and technological concepts for building your robots around.

Weapons and armor have complex statlines around which to balance them. In general, damage should be balanced around DR. If you allow more than 20 damage in with a typical shot, then that attack is lethal. If the armor provides 6 DR (times the armor divisor of the attack) for every die of damage, then it’s completely invulnerable to the attack. Understanding this, you can play around with the values as you see fit, and add additional considerations (even impenetrable armor can be defeated if it has gaps…). You can also apply arbitrary values against specific forms of damage; Ultra-Tech certainly does this with things like Beam Adapted Armor (UT 190) and Electro-magnetic armor (UT 187); while no special option exists for piercing penetrators, like bullets, armor like Reflex or Nanoweave provides more protection against those forms of attacks than others, so you can really justify armor that’s better against any specific form of attack that you want.

Beyond damage, you have a whole statline you can play with. Christopher Rice breaks this down nicely in “It’s a Threat” in Pyramid #3/77 “Combat.” While this is geared towards Dungeon Fantasy, we can still make some loose observations. A point of accuracy is worth about as much as a point of damage, so they can be traded back and forth. Rate of fire is worth a multiple of damageprovided it applies a bonus, which means roughly every +4 ROF is worth is worth about the same as doubling your damage. I would avoid altering recoil except in extreme cases (it tends to be driven by the physics of the weapon). Weight and ST have a close relationship with one another, and altering ST is worth a little less than accuracy (it affects skill, but only situationally); bulk has a similar relationship. Number of shots isn’t terribly important, and weight or cost can be modified quite liberally. Naturally, beam weapons have their own design system in Pyramid #3/37 “Tech & Toys II”

Most people hesitate to touch Vehicles because of the lack of GURPS Vehicles for the new edition, and I can certainly appreciate this position, as it’s one I hold myself, but you cantreat vehicle statlines the way you would treat weapons. For example, if your main concern is the Action chase rules, +1 handling is roughly equal to +1 to chase rolls gained from speed, so any speed change worth +1 is close to the same value as +1 handling. I would be cautious messing with stability rating, but +1 or -1 is not out of the question, and worth about the same as handling. The same goes for size modifiers. Endurance is largely cosmetic and can be messed with as you please. Cargo is a slightly greater concern, but should be no problem to change by 10-20%. “Cargo” can also be seen as “spare space” in which you can place other gadgets, if you want to add things like force screens, pop-up weapons or distortion chips. You canuse GURPS Spaceships to “build vehicles,” but I suggest caution here, as it plays poorly with non-SS-designed weapons, and can lead to some really weird results. I personally have better results taking existing vehicles and modifying them.

You needn’t limit your modifications to GURPS Ultra-Tech either. If there’s an existing technology that’s very close, you can borrow it and “tech it up.” For example, many of the weapons from Star Wars are drawn directly from real-world weapons, with a few gadgets slapped on and shooting blaster bolts rather than bullets. You could probably take those real-world weapons and swap out the piercing stat for tight-beam burning and give them an armor divisor of 5 and most people probably wouldn’t know the difference. Likewise, you can probably take real-world vehicles and apply some slightly different technologies to them (for example, removing the rotor from a helicopter gunship and replacing it with contragravity, and replacing its weapons with ultra-tech weapons of a similar weight) and use the resulting stat-line without too many problems. If your intent with your sci-fi game isn’t “to explore the implications of technology,” then realistic depictions of that technology are not a priority; it’s often the case that GMs want to mimic a particular genre (swashbuckling pirates, only IN SPAAACE; WW2, only IN SPAAACE!); if that’s so, startingwith the gear of that genre and then adding some ultra-tech wizardry to it already takes you a pretty long way to getting nicely customized gadgetry.

Ultra-Tech Frameworks: Step 3 – Choosing Available Technology (Part 2: Miraculous Technology)

One way to classify SF worlds is to consider what technological miracles are inherent to the setting or story. In this context, we can think of a “miracle” as some area of technology that has a significant effect on the environment in which adventures take place. A technological miracle defines a significant difference between the fictional setting and the real world familiar to the reader or player. – GURPS Space page 29; A Taxonomy of Miracles

The previous sections may make it sound like one should avoid any technology with broader implications at all costs. This is not so! You should, however, only introduce the setting-altering technologies that you wishto introduce, and ensure that all other technologies don’t interfere with them. In fact, “Miracle-Tech” is often the most interestingpart of your setting.

Now, to be clear, you don’t need“Miracle-Tech.” Much sci-fi out there uses space tropes as an excuse for exploring exotic things, much as fantasy uses magic for the same purpose. If you want your hero to rescue a blue-skinned space-babe from a tentacled monstrosity, it’s a little more believable if it’s set on the moon of a dying Jovian world than it is if it’s set in the modern world, but that doesn’t mean it must have transformative technologies and tackle deeper philosophical implications unlessyou want it to. If not, then use the previously mentioned technologies as advised to create a familiar setting without worrying about exotic technologies.

But if you want Miracle-Tech that provokes thought and exploration, the first thing to realize is that nearly anytechnology can be miracle tech. For example, even if we set aside the qualitative differences TL 12 medicine might have and just look at the quantitative differences of a TL 12 physician’s kit, imagine the sweeping implications if modern doctors could treat five times as many patients five times as effectively? That alone would mean many more lives saved and an absolute improvement on standard of living. Most of the work I’ve done in the past there sections is about downplaying the potentially transformative nature of technology. Here, we do the opposite and play it up. The best candidates, however, tend to be fairly obvious. Anything where I tell you to be careful of the broader implications is a great candidate for transformative technology.

The next question is, of course, how muchMiracle-tech, and this is entirely up to you and your setting. You must understand, first and foremost, the mental cost of such a setting, and try to understand your target audience. For some groups, the crazier the better: they want to explore every facet of future technologies and how different and weird the world could be in the future. For others, the weirder the worse, and they’ll react with hostility to things that take them too far from their comfort zone. You’ll have to tailor to what your group can handle. One word of caution on excessive miracle-tech: the weirder your setting, the harder it is for your group to relate or to know what to do. A poster child for this sort of game is Transhuman Space, and the most common criticism made about the setting is “What do I do with it?” You’ll need to double down on your core activity and focus your players attention on it, so they have a starting point from which to jump into the setting. This can require a lot of work on your part as you carefully spoon feed the weird to your players in bite-size pieces until they fully grasp the setting and its implications. If done correctly, though, it can be an exceptionally rewarding experience.

The Miraculous Transformation of a Setting

As more technologies advance beyond what is currently possible, society (and the backdrop for adventure) will become increasingly unfamiliar. At its extreme, the addition of miracles gives rise to settings in which nothing is familiar to the GM or players! Such settings can be interesting, but very difficult to sustain for a lengthy campaign. – GURPS Space Page 30: More Miracle

As stated above, nearly any technology can becomeMiracle-Tech if explored to its logical conclusion. Even innocuous technologies that usually lurks around, undiscussed in the background of sci-fi, like advanced power cells or fusion power could have enormous and far reaching effects on our society. What makes a technology miraculous is its transformative nature. It encourages the exploration of philosophical or sociological questions; such settings are often built around such questions.

The easiest way to make a technology a miracle-tech is to make it ubiquitous and then explore how it would change society. What problems does it solve and, in solving them, change society? What problems does it cause? If the technology might not realistically make a big impact, pair it with innovations that maximize that impact. A good example of this in modern society are cameras: their ubiquity means many crimes can be easily solved or even prevented, but at the cost of privacy. Of course, this is limited by the number of human eyes that can attend cameras, but imagine of facial recognition software also became powerful and widespread, and computers could automatically scan camera footage and pinpoint the location of anyone anywhere with the push of a button. What sort of impact might that make on society? You don’t have to explore every possible implication; it can be enough to look at a single aspect of it (in this case, its impact on crime, and those that ruling elite wishes to present as criminals; or what happens when you combine this with excellent forgery or hacking).

Another, common approach is to allow the technology to change some fundamental aspect of the human condition, something that we build our current worldview around, and have that technology remove it. Antibiotics and vaccines had such an impact: before, disease was virtually ubiquitous; nowadays, the death of an infant is considered a tragedy while in yesteryear, it was quite common.

Topics often tackled include:

  • Memories and continuity of consciousness as identity.

    • Brainwipe Machine (UT 109)

    • Neural Programming (UT 109)

  • The concept of “character” and the perception of personality as an inherent, rather than mutable, characteristic, and the character has “free will” and can dictate his own actions.

    • Neural Programming (UT 109)

    • Dominator Nano (UT 162)

    • Psych Implant (UT 217)

    • Puppet Implant (UT 218)

  • Death, and how society builds continuity and legacy around it, as well as how it creates a sense of urgency.

    • Chrysalis Machine (UT 201)

    • Uploading Technologies (UT 219)

  • War costs human lives and are fought by humans. Heroes sacrifice their lives to protect others.

    • Drones (UT 26)

    • Robots of any sort.

  • The march of maturation, how children become adults, and how adults gain experience, and then age and die

    • Regeneration Tank (UT 201)

    • Regeneration Ray (UT 202)

    • Biofabricator and Growth Tanks (UT 204)

    • Instaskill Nano (UT 59)

    • Chipslots (UT 216)

  • Our civilizational ascendancy as the only sapient race

    • Volitional AI (UT 28)

    • Uplift technologies (UT 218)

  • Individuals as distinct, concrete entities, as opposed to hive minds, copied mind or minds that can merge and diverge.

    • Mind Emulation (UT 27) and Uploading Technologies (UT 219)

    • Sensies (UT 57)

    • Neural Interface technology (UT 48) and Neural Communication (UT 46)

  • We have a humanoid form and senses that dictate our experiences

    • All cybernetics (UT 207+)

    • Total Cyborg Conversion (UT 27)

    • Implant Seeds (UT 202)
  • We exist primarily in a concrete and largely immutable physical world, as opposed to a world we can directly control.

    • Virtual Reality (UT 53)

    • Interactive Holoprojection (UT 53)

    • Neural Interface technology (UT 48)

  • Our economic systems are driven by a lack of material goods, food and energy

    • Fusion Power (UT 20)

    • Cosmic Power Cells (UT 19)

    • Robofacs, Nanofacs, Replicators (UT 90-93)

    • Food Vats (UT 74)

  • We cannot know the future, and we cannot experience or change the past

    • Timescanner (UT 67)

Limiting the Impact of Miracle-Tech

If a technology or gadget seems like it may cause problems in a particular campaign, there are various ways to handle it – GURPS Ultra Tech page 12, Preventive Measures

You may want to include a miracle-tech without actually making huge changes to your setting, or making only specificchanges to your setting. Carefully controlling Miracle-Tech is crucial to getting precisely the setting you want! Fortunately, we have many options to control our miracle tech, many of which Ultra-Tech already discusses, as noted in the quote above, but we can expand this further.

The most common way of limiting miracle-tech in a setting, especially in many sci-fi short-stories or in supers settings, is to limit the setting to a single, or a few, devices, typically prototypes. The technology may have been freshly created, or only a single person knows how to make that technology. For example, there may be only a single sapient robot into the entire world, or only a single gadgeteer super-hero has created a cosmic power-source, which powers all of his super-gadgets and is constantly on the run from villains who want to steal his technology. This approach allows you to explore the philosophical implications of a technology, or allow you to fully embrace its awesome impact, without substantially changing the setting. The two cited examples could fit perfectly well in the modern world.

Another common approach is to limit the scope or scale of the miracle technology. You might remove or limit those aspects of the technology that would be truly transformative. Regeneration rays show up in Star Trek, but seem to do nothing for aging or restoring functions to plot-interesting injuries (typically certain handicaps, like blindness or infertility). You can also limit the scope of a technology: perhaps cosmic power exists, but it can only power certain, specific devices; perhaps replicators exist, but can only produce certain specific gadgets. You can also limit their impact on time. Perhaps instaskill nano “fades” after a couple of hours, or perhaps timescanners can only look back a day.

Finally, while the technology might be potentially transformative, either society or the story itself just ignores those transformative aspects, or doesn’t use their technology that way. Nuclear weapons serve as an excellent example of this, as they had the potential to dramatically shift the world, but instead everyone assiduously avoided using them in such a way as to create a radioactive hellscape; most “standard issue sci-fi tech” falls into this as well: human-level AI in androids might raise all sorts of philosophical questions, but people just don’t treat AI like people, and tend to avoid those questions where possible.

Mixing and matching your controls of miracle tech can help you explore the story that you want, and can be part of the story themselves. There may be very few robots, people might also dislike robots and those choose not to use them further, and their may be limits on how robot minds work (for example, they must reside on a neural net and cannot be easily uploaded or copied); taken together, this might allow you to explore artificial minds without also worrying about the nature of identity or what happens when you introduce total cyborgs, and the social limitations and prejudices themselves might be interesting to explore. Some GMs might bristle at such limitations as “unrealistic,” but such limitations seldom are: our predictions of the future are as often overly optimistic as they are pessimistic. Atomic technology represents a good example of this in both ways. Due to social pressures and unexpected impracticalities, neither the utopian nor apocalyptic predictions have yet come true.

Embracing the Transformation

On the other hand, if your setting is abouta particular miracle tech, or you wish to explore a specific issue deeply, you might want to take the brakes off and really, dramatically change your setting with that specific technology! This has the downside of often creating unexpected results, but if your intent is to explorewhat might happen, those unexpected results may well be a feature rather than a bug. Furthermore, if you follow the rest of the advice laid out in the above sections, you should have enough of a handle on the rest of the technologies that you can afford to unleash one or two.

One way to ensure that a technology makes a huge impact on the setting is to make it ubiquitous. What happens if anyone can go downtown and pick up a fusion generator for the same price as a gasoline generator? What happens when every home has an android or three? What if an entire civilization embraces VR and becomes a “sleeper” civilization, living in a virtual, rather than real, world?

Ultra-Tech has been careful to balance some of the crazier technologies, but there’s no reason you have to accept those limitations. Perhaps AI technology advances rapidly and allows for even smarter technology on relatively simple devices (for example, volitional AI’s IQ is limited to complexity*2 rather than complexity*2-3). Instaskill nano has an upper limit on how many skill points it can grant, but what if it didn’t? What if Timescanners could also scan alternate timelines or the future?

Upgrading miracle technology can be combined with limiting the technology, and often should be so you get exactly the results that you want. Perhaps androids are ubiquitous and can reach super-human levels of IQ relatively easily, but hide this fact from humanity, and cannot “upload” their minds (being locked into neural nets) and cannot “make back-ups,” or timescanners can look into the future and into alternate timelines, but only one such device exists.