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Showing posts from May, 2017

Grin and Bear It

"Yes my boy, think on it!" Professor Ormsby said. "Were it not for the fortuitous combination of solar storms, x-radiation and novacane ... and a little help from the Cern particle accelerator you would never have made it to our enlightened age!" "I knew I should have broken that appointment with the dentist. Stupid insurance. Stupid before and after x-rays," I muttered. I poked at the IV in my arm putting glowing blue juice in my arm. Blue was god in medicine, right. "Izzat all you have to say? You knuckle dragging primitive ingrate. I brought you to life to aid me in my great endeavors! What say you?" "Can you fix me up with a cell phone at least? I feel naked without one" I asked. "Cell ... phone ..." the professor said processing the words. "Yes ... miniaturized electronics, transistors, you make calls on it, get the weather, internet services?" "Tran-resistors ..." "Fer gosh sakes, y

Dieselpunk Manifesto Episode Five

Buck Rogers Strips 40-49 Buck is surprised in his cell by the lovely Nunah, whom you might remember was the badass aviatrix who strafed the vagrants trying to do for Buck. She tells Buck of her lost love: Lone Wolf who was captured by the Han. Despite being a badass aviatrix and crack shot she needs his help to rescue Lone Wolf from the labs of the evil Airlords. In a show of professional courtesy between badasses Buck of course agrees to help her. They'll rescue Wilma and Lone Wolf! Nunah for her part is deserting her Org and stealing a plane to rescue her love, which is exactly what Rogers did to land in jail and she comes off as a capable, brave character who's easy to sympathize with. Landing near Los Angeles they camouflage their plane and don Han disguises. Wait. Nunah might get away with this, in dim light. Buck is a  six foot three Caucasian with blond hair and blue eyes. Buck makes Superman's trick with the eyeglasses and forelock look like chopped liver. T

The Katana Blaster

The Katana syndrome holds that Asian martial arts and especially sword craft was highly superior to that of Medieval European techniques and blades. Thus the katana is the ultimate melee weapon and should deal out more damage than a European longsword. It has the best grade steel, best edge etc. Katanas are bitching. Samurai are bitching. I just got through laughing and screaming and misting up over the final season of Samurai Jack. However, Toledo steel was the best in the world at the time in terms of flexibility and durability. Many well made European blades were every bit as deadly as the Katana. For that matter European warriors had a better grasp of technique than stand there and taketh it whilst thou hammer the other guyye. But see this mini-series called Shogun came out in the 80's. Everyone got into Asian culture (a good thing) and gamers got carried away. So if you're going to write up a bunch of new weapons, say, you want your stuff to stand out and some people b

The Doorways to Luna

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The post on Luna's engines has to wait a bit. I know what I want them to do and I am in correspondence with wiser heads as to what that entails. So this post deals with Luna's main airlocks. Luna has four largish airlocks around her hull near the stern (which is the bottom in tail landers). Each one is on the Machine Shop Deck. Why so many airlocks? Well they aren't all what you would consider an airlock. All right dammit, there's a fifth airlock. But Ill get to that in another post! The lock by the ladder is the main personnel lock. It can easily hold four people in spacesuits, even the big armored dieselpunk types. It gives access to the Machine Deck for a simple reason. People entering the ship from a walk on, say the Moon, will have dust and grit from their spacesuits. That grit has to end up somewhere. The Machine Shop already has additional filters built into the air vents there to deal with shavings and other cast off metal bits and vacuums and similar

Dieselpunk Manifesto Episode Four

This picks up with strip #30 of the Buck Rogers' strip and reviews 30-39. When we last left our intrepid duo Buck was left stranded in the Southwest desert and Wilma was in the clutches of the Han Emperor and to get her memories wiped after a dramatically appropriate period. Well Buck isn't too intrepid. He gets rolled by a couple of generic murder hobos as soon as he snoozes and is left to walk the rest of the way, no food, no water. He's nearly buried in an avalanche, drinks brackish water and somehow doesn't puke and gets his with a sandstorm. All this time Wilma is a captive in the lap of luxury and told she is about to be made the Emperor's favorite! You gotta wonder what Buck was like before he got buried in that mineshaft. Was he an axe murderer or serial peeping tom? Because his karma seems to be black since strip 27. Seriously if Buck bought stock in North American Inertron that shit would stop falling up. He finally falls afoul of two more murd

Close Shave

Doc: Where the heck are you going? Mukh: I can't watch! Tivk: Doctor ... you are a competent surgeon but this is ill advised. Nok: Bitching. Tivk: Do not encourage him. This is suicide. Doc: Oh for ... I'm shaving. Just shaving. I'm just glad I packed the old razor in my kit. I never thought we'd be stuck out here this long in ... whatever the hell this is. Tivk: You are a doctor. Why would you want to scrape hair off your neck and face with a piece of  razor sharp steel? You are placed a cutting implement in deadly proximity to your jugular vein and carotid artery. How do you ignore this? Doc: Guys, human males do this all the time. I'm nearly done. I just like a truly close shave. Riasi likes it too. This straight razor was my dad's and his dad's. Tivk: Did they slit their throats with it? Doc: Wha ... no! They lived to ripe old ages. Mukh: Mammals. All that silly hair ... and lactation! When you aren't shaving or consuming dairy yo

Dieselpunk Manifesto Episode Three

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In strip 21 Buck and Wilma are making their way in a leisurely manner over the former farmlands of Ohio when Wilma twists her ankle and can go no further. I will give her the benefit of the doubt since the exact nature of her injury is not described and I doubt a mere sprain would stop her, Buck makes like a he-man and carries her (and her jump belt) to the Columbus Org. The sentry challenges them and is revealed to be -Killer Kane. the weapon Kane carries looks like a Bren gun with a circular magazine and it might be the long sought after rocket rifle! He also has a metal helmet with a banded metal visor and frankly looks pretty bitching. While Wilma is mending Kane tells Buck to beat it and when Buck gives him the bird, Kane challenges him to a duel! Yes the Columbus Org has duels and a formal code for them. Seconds are required and appointed by the Org for strangers. Buck's second is a woman soldier named Gilda (who bears a ceremonial baton). The duel is to be to unconscious

The Faces of Luna (Mark 1, 2 & 3)

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The best part of doing renderings is that you never have to throw anything away. As I began pimping the Luna like a found Roomba, I saved the previous renders and now have three different subclasses. Luna Mk1, Mk 2 and Mk 3 (l. to r.) The Mk 1 Luna does not have the stabilizer ring of the later models. It's still a fine ship but a bit trickier to land than the Mk 2 and Mk 3. The second change between the Mk 1 and Mk 2 was adding additional armor to the stern. Ramming was considered unlikely but useful as a threat when boarding suspicious ships in orbit. The reality was the Luna had no landing gear and was often called on the refuel from icy bodies. In that case tit was expedient to smack the ground and break it up before loading ice int a hopper installed that could be set up in the emergency lock at the stern. As you can see the added armor proved such a good idea that the engineers kept adding to it. It made soft landing somewhat academic provided the crew

And We're Live!

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Dieselpunk in a Nutshell is up for sale on RPGNow and OBS! Link is here . Go buy it (c'mon it's only $2), rate it, and roll yourself up some dieselpunk settings! You can even fudge some rolls. I'm not telling!

Rocket Pistols!

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Rocket pistols have seen little development in the present time. At one time they had their fans in SF. With some material advances and research they could be on the verge of a golden age. Any dieselpunk stuff I do is going to have them just because they're pistols that fire teeny rockets! If you're playing in a 2d6 game there is already a rocket pistol -the snub pistol. Snub pistols have their fans because I've already seen rules for snub machine guns and snub carbines. Hell, I wrote a couple of them myself. Following are some system agnostic ideas for rocket pistols.  First they're stupid simple to make (the ammunition is another matter). The rockets have little kick (in the barrel at least). They are caseless which is important if you're worried about brass fouling some machinery or controls or a hot spent cartridge landing inside your shirt. I've had this happen and I swear the little bastards look for any opening and hurt like a sonuva mother.

I Can't Believe I'm Not Vetted Yet and Other News

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I submitted Dieselpunk in a Nutshell to RPGNow. It's my fifth product in as many months and they still need to look it over and decide it won't mean the downfall of Western Civilization. Pfft. Hopefully it will go live on Monday 5/16. Some goodies for you my inner circle. I answered a load of questions about it here . Asking price is $2. My next projects are Alien Capsules Book Three and a catalogue of dieselpunk style equipment (like Helmut's Helmets). This may or may not include stats for the Luna and using Metasite. I want to sell everything for $2 and under.

Metasite is Outasite

Metasite is the unobtainium powering my dieselpunk world. It can power yours too. Metasite is a material with unique electromagnetic properties. The electrical forces holding its atoms together are very malleable when subjected to different  magical  magnetic fields. Subject it to one field it becomes hard enough to shatter steel or scratch diamonds. Another treatment will make the same Metasite as clear as the finest glass. In building ship hulls viewports and hull are one and the same, the ports merely being sections of hull made transparent. There's more, the conductivity or metasite can also be tailored with the same magnetic fields. It can be a nearly perfect insulator or a superconductor holding vast amounts of energy. The energy can be released again by spinning the metasite through a specific magnetic field and the energy will be released in whatever form desired: em, nuclear, repulsive or gravitic. Space craft can use the repulsive or gravitic properties to travel in

The Luna

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I freely Acknowledge my inspiration for this ship came from the grandfather of all SF comics. The Luna project had the benefit of a rendering program that was unknown in the 1930's as well as a lot more time than a cartoonist banging out a daily strip say. I have changed some design features and conjectured on what others were and added and subtracted and I think I can  say this is my design now. That is to say I'm going to put it in a product and hopefully not incur anyone's wrath. The Luna What is all this? I'll probably put the Luna out as a series of small booklets. Tomorro for ur regular post: more shinies for the dieselpunk adventurer.

Dieselpunk Manifesto Episode 2

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So which helmet do the bad guys wear? That's just to remind you I'm still laying out stuff (and selling said stuff). Anyhoo ... When last we left Buck Rogers (strip #10) Wilma was missing on patrol. Buck was placed in command of a small squadron (three biplanes!) and sent to look for her. Considering the Americans were still under constant raids by the Airlords, who also controlled the skies, this was a helluva a case for no one left behind. While searching Buck receives a transmission from Wilma saying the Airlords are at Akron and heading towards Cleveland or Buffalo (she apparently had a poor sense of geography outside Pennsylvania.) In a flashback in strip 11 the Airlords use a sensor device that can scan through the trees of the forest to spot Wilma and (being a squad of flesh peddlers) they pronounce her beautiful. I guess the sensor was very short range. Otherwise they'd mount them on their ships and wipe out the Americans once and for all or American inst

Tales of Tail Landers

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Short post of necessity this Friday. I spent the day in the ER due to a family emergency. It's all going to be all right though. Whatever happened to tail landers? There was a time when they were the standard for space craft that errr ... landed. Here's my treatment of an old favorite: the Luna! A little color makes a big difference. In doing this and beginning my researches  realized that most of the deckplans I've seen are for space craft that are treated as aircraft (or hotels). So I plan to address that.

The Coming of Gorg

I wrote this with Mighty Eroc (especially his avatar) in mind. 1938 Professor Prost, the archaeologist were searching for preserved specimens of mammoth in an Alaskan glacier when he found the mummy. it was perfectly preserved, a man a good 7 feet tall, from an unknown and gigantic subrace. Prost worked to free him from the ice to transport him to a refrigerated storage vault for careful examination. It was a race against time with the glacier already showing signs of melting. Prost awoke in the morning to renew his labors and found two intruders in his camp: a Kodiak bear and ... Gorg. Apparently just resting, the giant human fossil attacked the bear. With speed belying his great size Gorg climbed on its back and slipped a chokehold on it, throttling it unconscious. The paleolithic giant then made his introductions to Professor Prost. "Gorg!" Prost was no fool and took the man home to examine, educate and then publish. After Professor Prost passed away and Gorg wal

Dieselpunk Manifesto

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This is going live next week. I'm not sure if I'm vetted and can put it up immediately or I still have to wait an indefinite period before the folks at RPGNow decide it's innocuous enough to be posted. It is a systemless set of tables to establish the basics of a dieselpunk style setting. It is running about 24 pages for $2.00. Note the rest of this post deals with the 1929 vintage comic strips which are insensitive in some sensitive matters. You been warned. It started with my love of dieselpunk (it had no name when I first encountered it here: The first Buck Rogers strip (I got a hardbound collection of these for christmas one year) Buck Rogers strips 1-10. Anthony 'Buck' Rogers first had his story told in Amazing Stories. He told his tale his story was  in two parts: Armageddon 2419 and The Airlords of the Han . The stories were later combined as Armageddon 2419 in novel form and then picked up by the papers. Tony's name was changed to Buck b