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Showing posts from December, 2013

Working Under Cover

I've been considering a pulp staple: covering the bad guy (or the good guy for that matter.) I'm thinking in particular about being able to whip out a small discreet pistol and threatening to blow some gorilla's brains out if he twitches. The problem being that small discreet pistols often do shit damage and big gorilla's often have a lot of hit points or endurance. So the plucky woman reporter grabs a hammerless .32 revolver from her clutch and covers Mickey 'the Rhino.' The revolver does 2d6 damage and as Rhino has 12 hit points he takes the shot and wrings the plucky woman reporter's neck. What can I say? He's a bastard. Players are often guilty of making similar choices (instead of roleplaying an aversion to being plugged.) Covering someone is a great way to set up a tense scene. But to do so you have to have a chance to come out on top and a chance to get screwed over and a few in between results. There is some justification in Traveller and o

Retro Traveler

Mongoose has used their version of Traveller in a variety of different settings as well as giving support for the traditional Third Imperium. Recently a number of OGL supplements have dealt near future and relatively hard SF settings such as Orbital by Zozer games. While working on my Microlite20 setting I received a request to run a pulp SF game using a setting I'd pitched a while ago. Basically humans use unobtainium from a disastrous meteor strike to build atomic rockets and voyage to a pulp solar system. Action is going to center on a Venus full of swamps and dinos. I pondered what system to use and decided to use Mongoose Traveller. It already has good rules for generating and running modern/SF characters and combat, rules for weapons, encounter systems with critters of all sizes (I can just port dinos in) and spaceships of various tech levels. Psionics can provide some mad science as well. Using Traveller in a pulp setting provides some challenges. I'll have to read t