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Showing posts from October, 2019

The Diselpunk Post

I like dieselpunk a lot. I want other people to like it. Having said that, the major hurdle is to make it look retro in a way that appeal to people in the Twenty-first Century. That isn't much of a hurdle to be honest. The artwork of the period and the machines have their share of fans. There's a ton of reference images and there is a slew of wild inventions and vehicles documented and photographed. There are a few problems though, like the Solar System. from what we know of the Solar System it's pretty darned hostile. Earth itself, our home wrold, is pretty darned hostile and can kill you in a number of ways! Consider 90% of the population is crammed into about 25% of the land area. There's a lot of deserts, tundra, and places with bears! If you wanted dinosaurs on Venus a/o weird elder Martians in a steampunk game, you had to just go with it and say it was an alternate universe where life sustaining planets were the norm. For some reason disbelief is still suspend

We Has Met the Enemy Part Five

With General Buckner en route to the Triumph, Megan Detwiler sought to make the most of his carte blanche. The Flying Dutchman base had a number of tractor/ repulsor engines studding the surface, the better to aid docking and ping stray asteroids away from more expensive equipment. She quietly began supplying these with independent power cells, and it wasn't long before the engineers in the power department noted her activity. That and the fact she wanted them working triple shifts to get it done NOW! The other preparations were by the structural engineers who were Megan's old crowd. She knew them and scared them and they kept their mouths shut even as they worked. The Martian battleship Enforcer approached the Flying Dutchman from a highly inclined trajectory. It had swallowed a lot of its heat to get that far that quietly. It also banked on beamed power from Mars. They picked up the metal beast while it was a half hour from weapon's range. The Triumph was 45 minutes out

Just Chilling with my Yeeps

Last Friday night I had a great time with the Gamer + group on the Discord server at Tenkar's Tavern. It was momentous for me as it was the first playtest of a system I devised and will release soon. The title is Universe Unleashed . This first game was SF. I like having Unleashed in the title because it is a very fast rules light game that gets out of the way and lets you role-play. In fact I think the game system is a success so far. The players were all a little confused at first but quickly got up to speed and it turned out no one had time to read the rules before but were learning on the spot with one or two examples in play. there were two standouts in this first game. The first was a player who came by and asked to join on the spot. Since it was an initial game I ran a scenario that was a dungeon crawl through an enemy base and an alien ship that was docked. The new player mentions as combat is joined that he is wearing and eco-skeleton and has to move last in a turn. Oka

The Gravity of Our Situation

Passenger: Glurrrrgh. I can't be space sick! I paid for a first class transit! Steward: You got it. You're not space sick. you have Downer sickness. Passenger: But ... Urk ... artificial gravity? Steward: This is your first exposure to it? Right. No one reads the disclaimer. See mimicking a fundamental universal force without lugging a billion tons of mass around or melting the ship is hard enough. Making it indistinguishable from gravity is a little much to ask for. Passenger: ... Steward: See we pulse the field a few hundred times per second to reduce power consumption. The field also obeys the inverse square law like any sensible phenomena. That means your feet experience slightly more 'gravity' than your head. Not a lot but it does affect your blood pressure and circulation. This all raises hell with some people's inner ear and kinetic feedback. Basically your body is telling you you're in motion but your eyes are not. Spacers are used to