September 23

Star Trek Colony

Note: I started writing this post back on 10  July 2012 and since then it fell by the wayside as things moved on.  Rather than let it go mouldy and have bit rot set in I thought I’d finish it off and post it to the world.  I should also mention that Starblazer Adventures is no longer available and is out of print.

So I’m spending time preparing a stand-by game so that we’ve got something to play when one of us goes on holiday.

I’ve always been enchanted by the various incarnations of the Star Trek RPG; from FASA through Last Unicorn Games and Decipher’s take on things.

Since we’d played the Decipher incarnation of the game I hunted out the books and thats when I hit a snag, a big snag; the important books for the Decipher edition were missing!  Sure I had the players books but the Narrators guide wasn’t there.

So rather than abandon the whole concept I decided to fall back onto another system and hack that to match Star Trek and one book caught my eye; Starblazer Adventures by Cubicle 7.  It’s not hard to see why this book attracted my attention, it is the largest gaming book I own and is over 600 pages of FATE powered Sci-Fi.  The book is crammed to the gills with all sorts of interesting bits and bobs; rules for aliens, starships, mutants and cyborgs.

Of course I had to figure out what parts of the game I needed to keep and how to deal with some specific Trek related themes.   Races became aspects as this seemed to be the best way of handling them, that way you could invoke the aspect to duplicate what we saw of that race in the television series.  Some races were better than others, but then that’s always the way in games.

Era.

I had previously run a Trek game set during the Original Series movie era but wanted to move things into the Next Gen side of things. I wanted to run a game that wasn’t the usual Star Trek trope of Federation vs Romulans or Klingons; I wanted to use a villain that would make the campaign stand out and that called for another alien.  I read all sorts of history for research and found an area of space that was between two of the global powers in the game and seemed to be ripe for using; this was between the Federation and the Cardassians.

So with the history done I turned to Starblazer Adventures and started to hack it to be the game I wanted.  I ran into a few problems with how to handle psionics but the game never got beyond the planning stage so I never addressed this issue.

Planning.

What with the history and the era addressed I needed a world so I decided to generate one from scratch and I used NBOS Software Astrosynthesis to lay down the planetary bodies in the area and followed it up by using the Fractal Terrains software package from ProFanstasy software.

In the end I turned out some interesting planetary maps even if Fractal Terrains kept producing worlds that were a little too Earth like.

Current Status

I don’t want to abandon this idea so that’s why I’m dusting off this old setting and publishing it just to get it out of my system and perhaps revisit the idea soon.

I know if I was to create it now, I would use FATE Core to do so and perhaps the accompanying system toolkit to make it work; or I may use one of the other narrative systems I bought.  When it comes down to things, I feel the mechanics are secondary now to a good idea for a story.

I would reuse the software as they both work very well together and compliment each other perfectly.

Links:

Fractal Terrains 3: https://secure.profantasy.com/products/ft.asp

Astrosynthesis: http://www.nbos.com/products/astro/astro.htm

FATE Core: http://www.evilhat.com/home/fate-core/

Category: FATE, RPG, sf | LEAVE A COMMENT
September 13

September 2014 Blog Carnival RPGBA Blog Carnival: The RPG Blogging Community

RPGBlogCarnivalLogoSmall

In the beginning…..

This months carnival host is the Dice Monkey and they want to talk about the blogging community; something I’m proud  of.

I started an attempt at blogging a little over five years ago with an abortive blog on the blogger platform to chart our progress through the Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign and for one reason or another my blog never materialised.

Then I sort of fell out of favour with writing, I guess I got a bit disillusioned with it.

Fast forward a few years and the creative urge hit me again so I revived the idea of a gaming blog and decided to write once again.

Thats when I realised that once I had written something I needed an audience, someone to read my writing and I looked at ways I could publicise it.  The web had moved on from the early days of webrings and free hosting but networks were becoming popular and I could see that once you had joined a network you could become a part of that community.

The RPGBA was the first network I applied to and I’m glad they took me aboard.  Not only did I like the fact that I was part of something bigger than myself, the blog carnival meant I could collaborate with other network members on similar topics, like this one. Back in May I hosted my first carnival article about Star Wars.

It seems that I got more traffic via the network than I do through search engines and that makes me somewhat happier.

So if you like this article, please comment on it and let me know what you think.

Category: RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT
September 11

Closing comments

It was a measure of regret that I have taken the decision to close comments on posts older than two weeks.  I haven’t made this choice lightly, despite the best efforts of me attempting to moderate all comments on this blog, having to deal with the thirty or so spam comments on one page has convinced me that this is probably the best choice for me to make.

So I’d rather spend the time being creative and writing new content for this blog than have to clean out the junk on a daily basis.

Category: RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT
September 10

Top 10 RPG list – number 3 Spirit of the Century

Evil Hat Productions

This game is another example of one of my happy accident purchases.  It all stated when I’d heard a lot of good things online about the upcoming Dresden Files RPG and thought that it may be right up the alley of the gaming group and after seeing the short lived television series of the same name I thought I’d give it a try.

It was only when the game arrived did I realise that it required special Fudge dice to play it and that was something I didn’t have so I visited the website of Leusire Games who had sold me the Dresden Files to see if they had the dice I needed.

As it happens they did have a set of dice, the Fudge Gamesmasters pack which had several sets of dice within and I looked for another game that used them that’s when I saw Spirit of the Century.

I decided to do a little reading on this game and the more I read about it the more I fell in love with it, the whole era of the 1920s which I was a fan of excited me more and more. On top of that it was a pulp genre game, although some critics claim it is a very specific pulp world.

The FATE system is built upon the very flexible but often overlooked FUDGE RPG, which I think is a crying shame.  FUDGE gives you a complete toolkit to make your own game but there is a lot of work involved in setting it up; FATE is FUDGE with some extra house-rules grafted to it.

Character creation is quite easy, just answer a few questions, come up with ties to the other characters, pick skills and stunts and away you go.

Since the release of this excellent game FATE has undergone an evolutionary step going beyond the version here and The Dresden Files into something a little more streamlined. I’m looking forward to seeing the revised Spirit of the Century set in the 1980s when the Evil Hat crew are finished with it.

Honourable mention.

There are a number of pulp themed games on the market and I have several of them which makes picking a runner up hard to do.

Thrilling Tales

Adamant Entertainment

Using the popular Savage Worlds game engine this reasonably priced pulp game has a lot going for it, especially the plot point campaign in the book and the background information on nefarious villains for the PCs to battle.  I’ve never run it just mined it for the background information.

 

Category: pulp, RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT
September 9

#RPGaDAY Conclusion

I had a blast writing each individual post for a specific day as I have never attempted anything like this before.

I found it a useful exercise in writing to a deadline which is one of my weaknesses, hopefully David will do another topic next year and with enough warning I can devote more time to writing the entries.

I did find the ability to schedule posts an absolute time-saver as I could write each days topic in advance and have them automatically posted on each day.

 

Category: RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT
September 6

#RPGaDAY Day 15: Favourite Convention Game

The one convention game that sticks out in my head more than the others was the Feng Shui game we played at Killercon one year.  It was a pulp game very much in the style of Indiana Jones and the party was questing after a crystal skull before it fell into the hands of the Nazis.

The session was a resounding success as we stopped it from falling into enemy hands and the skull was given to my character to pass on to British intelligence; well that was the theory as it turns out that my character was a double agent working for the Nazis so at the end of the session I’d handed it over.

Oh well 🙂

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September 4

#RPGaDAY Day 13: Most Memorable Character Death

I haven’t lost many characters recently and I am aware that we all lose PCs as we get used to learning a new game system; either through a trap or inexperience.

The most memorable for me would be when I lost my Werewolf character Slash of the Wendigo tribe in a ritual duel with a Black Spiral Dancer.  It was an epic fight during which both sides put down their weapons and allowed both pack leaders to duel one-on-one to determine the outcome of the fight.

Unfortunately Slash was fatally wounded in the combat  but the duel had bought enough time for our sides theurges to complete a binding ritual, so it was nothing more than a Pyrrhic victory for the Black Spiral Dancers.

Category: horror, RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT