The Future is Here

“The future is already here. It just isn’t evenly distributed yet.” – William Gibson.

I have seen the future of roleplaying PDFs, and it is EABA v2. Check it out.

Essentially, it lets you roll dice, update character/vehicle/NPC sheets, track wounds and treasure, draw maps etc. all inside the PDF reader on a tablet (or a desktop, but seriously dahling, how 20th century!). I especially like the dice roller, which inserts your last die roll as part of the header – things like Dicebook are promising, but the dice roller gets in the way of reading the text; not so with EABA v2.

You can download a free quickstart version of the rules here with all those snazzy features in, to experiment.

Review: The Yellow Bone Legion

Here’s the latest free download from Sine Nomine Publications, an expansion for the Red Tide setting for Labyrinth Lord. It looks like there will be a series of these under the shared title of Black Streams, in the same way that Stars Without Number has web supplements jointly named the Mandate Archives.

It’s an 8-page PDF detailing a new character class, the Walking Ghost, a kind of semi-undead warrior which reminds me a little of the Harrowed in Deadlands.

Setting aside the front cover and the OGL license, we’re left with 6 pages. The first three are an atmospheric backstory explaining the dire straits which led humanity to raise its own fallen as undead warriors during a desperate war against goblinoid foes, how they did this, and the guilt which led them to eliminate all records of their shameful deed.

The remaining three pages respectively describe the class itself, plot seeds for Walking Ghost antagonists (also usable for other intelligent undead), and the Black Tree (the evil artifact used to create this new type of undead, long thought destroyed, but we know better, don’t we?).

The class is essentially a cleric with no spells, but is compensated for this by several special abilities, which I won’t go into to avoid spoilers as the class seems intended for use as an NPC antagonist as well as a PC, who might not initially realise he is one… I will, however, say that they are interesting, and include both benefits and potential weaknesses.

The plot seed generator consists of three tables, on which the GM rolls to determine the revenant’s dark goal, the special advantage he will use to attain it, and his base of operations. As an example, three quick die rolls tell me that my potential villain is bent on exterminating the last descendants of a family that wronged him, that he is supported by followers of the Hell Kings who will help him in exchange for his allegiance to their cause, and that he hangs out in a remote mountain monastery devoted to the cold powers of death. I could have a lot of fun with that.

The page on the Black Tree explains how it works, the constraints it operates under, and several options for the harsh price its owner pays for using it.  There’s also a short section on how to adapt the Walking Ghosts to settings other than Red Tide.

As ever, Kevin Crawford manages to pack a lot of useful gaming material into a small space, and the price can’t be beat.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5. Goes into the hopper for the next fantasy campaign I run.

Subsector 1977

No game this weekend, and of all the things I could have done, for some reason I got the urge to generate a Traveller subsector. For me, solo gaming in the 1970s was generating setting information; dungeons, subsectors, NPCs, starships, encounters. Here is a completely random subsector using the original 1977 edition of Classic Traveller, rendered in Hexographer; the point of this exercise is to show how subsector maps have changed over the decades.

DIFFERENCES FROM LATER EDITIONS

Under the 1977 rules, a subsector would look more like a Stars Without Number sector; a bunch of black dots connected by lines. However, even then I was writing information on the map; so I’ve done that, and used later conventions for bases, gas giants etc. How is CT ‘77 different from more modern implementations of Traveller?

Jump Routes

These were created using dice rolls and a table showing the odds of a route depending on the starport types at each end, and the distance between them. It was a royal pain dicing for all the possibilities, which is probably why this rule disappeared almost immediately; but I like the outcome better than the contemporary approach, not least because it lends itself to solo sandbox play; you can generate a viable map using just the starport classes, and fill in the rest of the Universal World Profile as you explore the subsector.

Players could travel to worlds not on these commercial routes, but couldn’t buy passage; they had to use their own ship, or charter one. However, you could make a long Jump over a series of shorter ones; so for example, a Jump-3 ship could move directly from 0101 to 0401 without stopping at the intervening worlds in 0201 or 0302. That makes less sense than the rest of the rules on jump routes, but was intended to make subsector maps more legible.

I always used the jump routes to identify interstellar empires, although that is not in the rules; I reasoned that any group of worlds connected by commercial traffic would be part of the same political unit – completely unrealistic, but it worked for me, and I’ve used it in this map too. In fact, the 1977 rules made no assumptions about multi-world states, other than a brief explanation under noble titles that “The title emperor/empress is used by the ruler of an empire of several worlds.” Empires were small in those days, and presumably determined by the chance presence of government type 6 (“a colony or conquered area”), although I immediately made the leap to a galactic empire of thousands of star systems; judging by the changes in later versions, so did everyone else.

World Statistics

There are some combinations of world statistics that were legal in 1977, but not possible to generate randomly in later rules sets. Notice the world in hex 0302, for example, which has Population 0 (then meaning 0-9 inhabitants) but a feudal technocracy for its government, and quite a high law level; later editions would assume that Population 0 meant government, law, and tech levels of 0.

Bases

There are fewer types of bases; naval (five-pointed star), scout (triangle), and Travellers’ Aid Society (not shown on the map, because it is implied by the starport type). Quite enough for me.

Trade Classifications

There are only six trade classifications; agricultural, non-agricultural, industrial, non-industrial, rich and poor. Later editions have added many more, which I find unnecessary. In particular, the various versions of “T-Prime” or “Garden” worlds essentially duplicate the Rich classification.

Travel Zones

These didn’t appear until the early issues of the Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society, and weren’t in the rules originally.

-o0o-

What’s most striking about this exercise is how little Traveller’s world generation rules have changed since 1977. I could use this map to run a game under any incarnation of Traveller, from Classic to Mongoose, without doing anything else to it. I suppose I might need to do a little conversion for GURPS Traveller, but that’s about it.

Maybe I’m just a gaming dinosaur, but the first generation of RPGs nailed quite a few things that we’ve drifted away from over the years with more elegant and complex rules. In fact, I wish the Far Future CT CD had the 1977 rulebook on it as well, as there are some bits I find superior to all later attempts.

Watch for future posts on other Stuff Classic Traveller Got Right.

Review: Darklight Interactive Map Packs

So, these were marked down to about a buck apiece, and I got four of ‘em. Each is presented as a PDF file and a set of images, say for VTT use. Here, I focus on the PDFs, as with this sort of product I tend to print and laminate – I can’t seem to get the hang of VTT, or the players that would use it. But I digress. I thought about posting small pictures, but the copyright statement seems to prefer that I didn’t, and I shall respect that.

M1: The Wayside Inn

This 43 page PDF covers a typical fantasy inn (distinguished from a tavern because it has rooms to rent rather than just a bar). It has a two floors, the ground floor featuring a fair-sized barroom, a kitchen, and half-a-dozen sleeping rooms, presumably for the owners and servants. The upper floor has a dozen bedrooms, mostly with twin beds.

Each floor is shown in a one-page overview and a set of tiles to print for the gaming table, and both overview and tiles are available in black and white or full colour. It’s a bit spacious for realism, but that makes it better for miniatures use – buildings drawn to scale have the figures bumping into each other all the time.

There’s a unique flavour piece in the Ethereal Bard, a kind of spell-powered fantasy jukebox. Easy to reframe it as a statue if you’d rather.

This is probably the most reusable one; your campaign is bound to have a pub, and the PCs are likely to return to it often.

M2: The Ring of Stones

This is a small henge in a clearing, consisting of an altar (with a sickle on it), surrounded by eight standing stones, surrounded by woods. Using a 5’ square grid, it would be about 100’ feet across.

Like the inn, it has overviews and tiles, in both black and white and colour. Unlike the inn, the black and white version is the colour version faded to greyscale rather than a separately-created drawing.

This one is limited in its applications. I’d probably use it as a Diablo II-style waypoint, allowing rapid travel across country for those who know its secrets.

M3: Crypt Entrance

This one depicts a plinth, about three feet judging by the steps, festooned with pillars (there may or may not be a roof, it’s not shown), with a smashed stone lid revealing stairs down. The whole is surrounded by woods and the map is about 100’ by 120’. Overview and tiles, but only in colour, no black and white option. That’s not a problem, I can do black and white with printer settings if I need it.

I doubt if I need more than one crypt entrance in my campaign, so not much reuse value here.

M4: Desert Tomb

This is indeed a desert tomb, composed of short corridors and rooms full of sarcophagi; the figures on the lids look like Christian knights. Rooms are about 25’ by 35’, corridor sections 35’ to 50’ long. There are three special rooms, one with a more ornate and solitary tomb, one with a couple of pillars, and one with a throne; a couple of standard rooms with no special features; and a bunch of corridors, often forming loops.

Again, no black and white option. One gets the feeling that the artist has pruned away stuff he feels unnecessary as he moves through the series. Looks nice, but I’m not sure how much reuse I’d get out of it.

Overall Rating: 3 out of 5. They’re pretty enough, and they do the job. I have lots of maps now, though, and I should probably stop buying them. (No, I don’t think I actually will, either.)

Review: Pad of Geomorphic Intent Sample Geomorphs

The Pad of Geomorphic Intent is an A7 pad of paper with 7mm squares on it, intended for you to draw your own dungeon geomorphs on – another one of those unusual ideas that pop up on Kickstarter from time to time.

The Sample Geomorphs is a collection of… well, I bet you can guess. There are 16 example geomorphs, a page showing how you can make a dungeon by piecing them together, a page of four blank geomorphs each 10 x 14 squares, and a large sheet lined with the same sized grid.

It’s free at RPGNow. It’s got some nice geomorphs and squared paper I can print on cardstock and use to lay out dungeons on the table. I like it.

Review: An Introduction to Traveller

As often happens when there is a long gap between sessions, I started wondering about other games. This time, as I’m returning to SF gaming, I started wondering about Mongoose Traveller.

Now, I’ve already reviewed the main rulebook, but at 194 pages it’s a bit chunky and I was looking for something a bit easier to digest. That led me to Book 0: An Introduction to Traveller, a 34 page PDF by Mongoose, aimed at those wanting to try out Mongoose Traveller before buying the whole thing. I normally use products like this not only for that purpose, but also as a "travel edition" of the rules.

CONTENTS

One page introduction to Traveller – player and referee roles, scenarios vs campaigns vs shared campaigns, die rolling conventions.

Character creation. 12 pages; severely cut down (fair enough) and only covers Army and Navy careers. However, it looks to be complete in itself.

Skills and tasks. 8 pages; this is the core of Mongoose Traveller, and has about 60% of the skills from the full rules, as well as the core game mechanic – which remains, as it has for generations now, "roll 2d6 plus modifiers, try to get at least 8".

Combat. 5 pages. Just the guts of the system, enough to cover personal combat with other characters or animals.

Equipment. 4 pages; a handful of guns and blades, characteristic augments, computers, medical gear, binoculars. This would do me fine, I’ve run entire campaigns with less gear than this.

FORMAT

Two column text, black on white, with black and white illustrations. Simple and effective.

SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT

I’d have picked different careers, myself. My fondness for Scouts is well-known, but setting that aside, Marines and Merchants have been much commoner choices in games I’ve played in.

There are a lot of minor errors, of the kind you sometimes get when converting a file to PDF format; words printed on top of each other, strange gaps in the middles of words, erratic shifts into different fonts. These are really irritating and should’ve been caught and shot at an early stage.

Most games companies would put out something like this – OK, maybe a little smaller – as a free taster; it felt a bit strange paying for it, even though the cost is only that of a cup of decent coffee.

CONCLUSIONS

So very nearly what I was looking for, namely a cut-down version of the rules I could use for quick reference and pickup games; but the continuous blurring, overtyping and midword gaps left me irritated. If I go any further with Mongoose Traveller, I’ll make my own GM sheets; at least this will show me what they need to cover.

Overall Rating: 3 out of 5.

Review: Bulldogs Adventures and Pregens

When I reviewed Bulldogs! last week, I mentioned that the rulebook contained neither pregenerated characters nor an example scenario, but that both were available as free downloads; and I promised to review them. So, here goes. They look like they were all intended for convention games, probably as part of the game’s launch.

PRE-GENERATED CHARACTERS

These are available on the publisher’s website, along with a form-fillable PDF character sheet. Each sheet has selections that let you change the skill cap and power level, so you can play the same character as Fresh Meat, Trouble, Hard Boiled or Serious Badass. I couldn’t figure out how to get changing those to update the rest of the form, but that’s probably just me. The characters are:

• The Black Watch, the ship
• Jocaar Laf’t, the captain (NPC)
• Badd, Urseminite Cook
• Gloop, Tetshuashan Systems Tech
• Big Brunda Margab, Hackragorkan Cargo Loader
• Talus Mrioc, Dolom Engineer
• Nightingale5000-D21, Robot Medic
• Prbrawl awp Yawrl, Ryjyllian Pilot
• Annabelle Quin, Arsubaran Co-Pilot
• Shsss hatched for the Shul Clan, Saldrallan Gunner.
• Sparkle Twist, Ken Reeg Procurement Specialist

ADVENTURES

There are five of these freely available on the web; I got mine from RPGNow. They share the clean, simple layout and comic-book illustration style of the core rulebook.

Each contains the same main sections; an explanation of how Bulldogs! scenarios are intended to be run, an introduction to be paraphrased to the players, a series of obstacles they must overcome to succeed in their mission, and stats for any NPCs or creatures encountered.

The introduction is generally along the lines of "the despatcher gives you this crate to deliver, and by the expressions on his face he doesn’t expect you to come back".

As Bulldogs! PCs apparently go off-piste sooner and more often even than normal PCs, there’s no real attempt to provide a sequence of events after that. The half-dozen obstacles are presented in the order the designer thinks the typical group will encounter them, but the GM is encouraged to change the sequence or even number of obstacles depending on the progress the PCs are making and what decisions they’ve taken. That’s a pretty good approach and I recommend it for any RPG.

In the NPCs section, a different set of stats is provided for each possible PC "rank" – Fresh Meat, Trouble, Hard-Boiled, or Serious Badass – so that the GM can scale the opposition to match the party.

The adventures are:

• Astrozombies Must Die: In which the PCs go looking for another of their employer’s ships, overdue and declared missing. I think you can probably guess what happened to it.
• Ghost Pirates of the Bandeth Sector: Here, the crew must deliver a container to someone who doesn’t actually exist. Tricky.
• Jaws of the Barracado: Even the nastiest bunch of space pirates around needs supplies sometimes. Who better to deliver them than the PCs?
• Pleasure Planet: A retired Templar charters the PCs’ ship to take him to the legendary Pleasure Planet, assuming it exists. Will they find it, or will they strangle him when they realise what a pain he is?
• Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Bulldogs: Why does the Navy want the PCs to deliver a crate to one of their bases? Best not to ask, you know you’re not going to like the answer.
• Stormy Weather: This delivery turns out to coincide with a rebellion. And of course everyone wants that crate.

Overall Rating: 3 out of 5, does the job. Hmm. I wonder what would happen if I Savaged this game and blended it with Daring Tales of the Space Lanes? Hijinks would ensue, I’m sure. It would be pretty straightforward to drop all of the Tales into Bulldogs’ Frontier Zone.

Review: Bulldogs!

While I was experimenting with things for the Free Traders campaign, it occurred to me that I might be duplicating Bulldogs! So I acquired that game to check it out.

In a Nutshell: 170 page PDF by Galileo Games. It’s the love child of Firefly and Star Wars, raised on the wild frontier by the FATE game system. What’s not to like?

If You’ve Never Played FATE before: Everything in FATE – characters, locations, items – has aspects, which you can think of as qualities both good and bad which affect the outcome of dice rolls. Point-buy character generation, extensive use of Fate Points to bring aspects into play and thus gain bonuses, rerolls or narrative control.

CONTENTS

Introduction (2 pages)

This explains the central conceit of the game (the PCs are deeply flawed individuals crewing a heavily-insured tramp freighter on suicide missions) and gives paragraph outlines of the other chapters. It also has a map of the Galaxy, which is basically the Federation on the left, the Empire on the right, and a buffer region called the Frontier Zone between them.

The Galaxy (8 pages)

So, the Federation (the Union of the Saldralla) and the Empire (the Devalkamanchan Republic) fought the Thousand Year War, which ended in an uneasy peace; now they glare at each other across the Frontier Zone.

One of the beauties of FATE is I can just list the aspects those regions have, and you’ll know pretty much instantly what you get:

• The Frontier Zone: Patchwork of Jurisdictions; "On this planet, I am the Law"; Your Rep is All You’ve Got Out Here.
• The Union of the Saldrella: Peace at Any Cost; The Union Stands as One; Troublemakers Disappear.
• The Devalkamanchan Republic: Papers, Please; Never Mouth Off to a Templar; Iron Fist of the Empire.

These are expanded into something like a page for each major region, and similarly there are a handful of planets and organisations, each described with a paragraph of text and a couple of aspects.

FATE Basics (4 pages)

FATE is a descendant of FUDGE, and relies on special d6 called a "dF"; two sides are marked +, two sides -, and two sides are blank. To do something, you roll 4dF and add up the marks, giving you a result between +4 and -4. You then add modifiers, for example your skill level, and compare the results to The Ladder, a list of outcomes ranging from -4 to +8. For example, if you roll +2 and add a skill level of +3, you get a result of +5, which the Ladder describes as "Superb"; then you get whatever the GM thinks a Superb outcome is for that roll.

The GM can also assign a difficulty to the roll, which is the minimum number you need to score in order to succeed. For example, the GM might assign a difficulty of +3 to a task, in which case the +5 roll above would beat the target by +2, which is merely "Fair". In play, that would be described as getting an effect of "two shifts".

Characters are defined by their Aspects, Skills, and Stunts. They also have Fate Points, which are the local version of bennies, edge or action points.

Aspects are short phrases that define a character, such as "One Woman Wrecking Crew" or "Everyone Has A Price, Mine Is Just Very Low". During play, aspects are invoked to help a PC, or compelled to complicate his life. If one of your character’s aspects is applicable to a die roll (perhaps One Woman Wrecking Crew in melee combat), you can spend a Fate Point either to gain a +2 on your roll, or to reroll it. If your aspect could get you into trouble ("Everyone has a Price…"), a deal may be offered ("Your pal there has quite the price on his head, it’s tempting to turn him in,"); you either pay a Fate Point to avoid the consequence proposed, or accept the consequence and get another Fate Point.

Places and items have aspects too, and you can invoke or compel those in the same way. This steady trade of Fate Points for narrative control is the engine that powers the game.

Skills are rated using the terms on the Ladder, so you could either say "I’m a Superb pilot" or "I have Piloting +5", according to taste.

Characters also have a Stress Track, which replaces hit points or wounds, and a Resource number, which measures how rich you are in a semi-abstract way.

More on all of those below; this is more of a taster chapter to give you a quick overview of the system.

Alien Species (24 pages)

This chapter covers ten of the most common races, and provides rules for creating your own. I could see myself playing Bulldogs for a long time before needing any other races. The ten basic ones are:

• Arsubarans: Your basic human. Tough, adaptable, ubiquitous.
• Dolome: Big, blue, three arms.
• Hacragorkans: Space orcs. Green, bad attitude, lots of tattoos.
• Ken Reeg: Green, metaphorically slimy; slippery salesmen and ruthless crime bosses.
• Robots: ‘Nuff said.
• Ryjyllians: Samurai catmen; think of them as Aslan, mri, hani, or whatever those cat guys in E E ‘Doc’ Smith’s stories were called, their name escapes me for the moment. Anyway, most SF settings have a feline Proud Warrior Race, and this is them.
• Saldrallans: Cold-blooded both literally and metaphorically, ruthless snakemen.
• Templari: Purple-skinned Nazis in Spaaaace!
• Tetsuashans: Slug people.
• Urseminites: The result of a genetic engineering programme to produce nannies or pets that went horribly wrong. Look like teddy bears, but are homicidal perverts. These are my favourites.

Each race, including the ones you make up, has six stereotypical aspects; two mental, two physical, and two historical. A character may pick any two of the ones for his race. For example, Templars choose two from Superior Species, Imperfection is Unacceptable, Submit or be Crushed, To the Purple be True, Arrogant, or Martial Discipline.

There’s a point-buy system for building new races, listing a bunch of aspects they could have and the relative cost for each.

Crew Creation (10 pages)

Each player creates their own character, but the table as a group creates the ship and its captain.

Before doing this, the table jointly decides on a power level for the game. This is similar to the group’s Rank in Savage Worlds or level in d20 systems; it affects how capable the PCs are, which is implemented by a maximum skill level, maximum number of skill points, and maximum number of Fate Points. The levels are Fresh Meat, Trouble, Hard Boiled, and Serious Badass.

The ship has three aspects: A concept, a problem, and a strength. The example given is the Black Watch, which has "This thing still flies?", No Original Parts, and Deceptively Fast.

The captain is an NPC, because he (or she) is generally more of an adversary or patron than an ally. The captain also has three aspects; Concept, Trouble (how he makes life hard for the crew) and Leadership (how he runs the ship). The example captain has Disgraced Ex-Nova Legion Officer, Mean Drunk, and Better to be Feared than Loved.

To create an individual PC, the player picks or builds a race, then assigns the character 10 aspects; two of which come from his race, four from his backstory, and four from his current berth aboard the ship. The examples are things like "Apparently Murder is a Crime" or "No-One Wants A Blind Pilot", and convey the kind of play style one can expect from Bulldogs, which is to say fast-moving and none too serious.

Next, you spend 20 to 35 skill points, depending on the game’s power level; these must be spent in particular patterns, say "3 skills at +3, 2 at +2, 5 at +1", and anything you don’t explicitly take defaults to +0. Notice that in FATE, skills include things that most systems would call attributes.

Next, you pick stunts. Each stunt reduces the total number of Fate Points you start a session with by one, so you need to think carefully about his. Your race also factors in here, because effectively each race has built-in stunts. Stunts have their own chapter, below.

Note that unlike, say, Diaspora or Spirit of the Century (oh hey, I forgot I had that! Another one for the review queue!), character creation is done by the individual player, with no collaborative input from the rest of the table.

Again, this is more of a capstone chapter, showing the interaction between stunts, aspects and skills during character creation. You get the details on each in subsequent chapters.

Aspects (12 pages)

I’ve covered the basics enough for a review, I think, so I’ll limit myself to mentioning declarations and tags. You can spend a Fate Point even if no roll is being made to invoke an aspect as descriptive detail; this is called a Declaration. A Tag is when you invoke an aspect without spending a Fate Point, which can happen the first time you create or discover an aspect in a scene.

Doing Things (16 pages)

This expands on the core mechanics. Earlier I spoke of shifts; you can use those to make a task take less time, get a better result, or conceal what you did.

If you get at least +3 shifts, you can use Spin – effectively, a critical success with some game effects.

Combat is a series of task rolls, with characters acting in descending order of Alertness for physical conflicts, or Empathy for social ones. Actions are typically manoeuvres or attacks.

Damage taken crosses off boxes on your Stress Track, which is usually three boxes long. However, those three boxes represent a one-point hit, a two-point hit, and a three-point hit; if a box is full, you mark off the next higher one instead. So, if you suffer two 2-point hits in succession, you cross off the "2" box and the "3" box – and now you only have the "1" box left, so anything other than a one-point hit will take you out, since you have no suitable box to cross off.

You can avoid suffering damage by taking a Consequence, which is a temporary aspect like "Bruised". There are various levels and types to be had, and the more serious one are permanent injuries. If you have no more boxes and have used up your maximum permitted number of consequences, you are Taken Out, and whoever did that gets to say what happens to the PC. However, when you take a consequence you may concede the conflict; effectively, you are then Taken Out on terms that you, rather than the attacker, dictate.

Consequences wear off with time and appropriate action – for example you might take Heartbroken as the consequence for a failed date, and remove it by getting drunk with your buddies.

This is also the chapter with rules for minion NPCs, poison, explosions and environmental hazards in it.

Advancement (2 pages)

This occurs in Milestones, which can be minor, significant, or major; the GM gets to say when a milestone happens and what kind it is.

A minor milestone typically happens at the end of a session and lets you refocus the character without really improving it much; swap a couple of skills around, or reword an aspect.

A significant one happens at the end of a scenario or plotline, maybe every 2-3 sessions, and gives you a minor milestone plus one additional skill rank.

Major milestones essentially step up the power level of the game, and are tied to game-changing events like completing a long story arc. You get a significant milestone, plus a new stunt, plus another Fate Point, and you can delete one permanent consequence of wounding.

Skills (24 pages)

You’ve seen the overview of how these work earlier in the review, and earlier in the book. There are less than 30 skills, each of which can be used in half a dozen different ways. Each skill gets a bit less than a page of expansion in the chapter.

Stunts (16 pages)

Stunts are ways in which a character can bend, or even break, the rules. There is a list of predefined stunts, several for each skill, but the assumption is that a player will create his own stunt to enhance one of his skills in specific circumstances – for example Target-Rich Environment to give him a bonus on his Guns skill if he is outnumbered.

Gear (16 pages)

Resources is explained first; it’s effectively a skill, starting at +1, advancing when you make a big score and dropping when you buy expensive stuff. Then we find out about using it to buy things, getting loans, and so forth.

As you probably know, I don’t go in much for equipment chapters, so I’ll just say this covers armour, weapons, personal items, lifestyle, and making your own stuff.

Ships (14 pages)

Actually, this system covers all types of vehicles, not just starships; but that is the main focus. The chapter includes a point-buy construction system, maintenance costs, a discussion of how ships are meant to be used in the game (primarily as a plot device, but secondarily as a home base or battlefield), rules for chases in space and ship combat, repairing damage.

There’s a note on what happens when PCs shoot starship weapons at individual people (come on, you know they’re going to); essentially, if it’s bigger than you, it’s easier to hit but harder to damage.

There are a handful of example ships and vehicles, and a deck plan for the iconic Class D freighter, the Black Watch.

Running the Game (9 pages)

Here’s your setting-specific GM advice, although actually it would work well for any of my games. The highlights:

• If neither success nor failure has a dramatically interesting outcome, you don’t need a die roll.
• Set task difficulties low; the game is more about how outrageously well the PCs succeed than about whether they do so. If they do fail, that should be outrageously entertaining also.
• Use a basic battlemap – divided into 6 or 9 zones – filled with features and hazards the PCs can interact with. List them as aspects of the scene on notecards. (It doesn’t specifically say this, but you could reuse the cards, I think – any docking bay has to have a fuel hose, right?) There’s an example battlemap which I like very much.
• Make the NPCs engaging and make sure all PCs have something to do.
• Embrace crazy schemes and action over contemplation. This is really the core of the game.

You have a couple of pages on adventure design and alternative campaign themes (mercs, free traders, spies, explorers, pirates)…

…and then the book concludes with the usual quick reference and character sheets.

FORMAT

Colour covers wrapped around easy-to-read, two-column black on white text with purple highlights. Colour illustrations in a cartoon style. Simple, efficient, gets the job done.

SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT

Bulldogs itself has no adventures or pregenerated characters in it. That is a significant omission, but I let them off because both are available as free downloads – I’ll talk about them in my next review post.

I’m pretty sure I would have chosen a different sequence for the chapters, but they work well enough as they are.

CONCLUSIONS

I keep finding stuff that I like written for the FATE rules; maybe I should try them out in earnest. If I do, Bulldogs would be the place to start, as it has the simplest and cleanest explanation of the core rules I’ve found yet. I really like the idea of aspects and how they’re used, but the wounding system is irritatingly complex. There’s probably a simpler alternative somewhere online; I could knock one up myself easily enough, but FATE has been around a while and probably someone else has already done the heavy lifting.

I like to experiment with games by playing them solo for a while before unleashing them on my players. I can’t see how to do that with Bulldogs, or indeed any other FATE-based game, because of the way aspects are invoked and compelled. Maybe I should ask around the Mythic forum and see if anyone is doing that already.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5. If there were a Savage Worlds version of this I’d be all over it, but I don’t fancy changing rules system again. There was a d20 version once, I think, so maybe Savage Bulldogs is a possibility someday.

Review: Barrowmaze

You know, I think that with this post, I’ve run out of things to review. Other than the truly old stuff from the seventies and eighties. Anyway…

In a Nutshell:Old-school mega dungeon for Labyrinth Lord and other D&D retroclones. 87 page PDF.

CONTENT

The product describes a large megadungeon, or the first level of it anyway, hidden under a series of barrow mounds in a largely deserted moor. There are four main areas to explore, several competing factions dwelling inside, and a variety of new spells, monsters etc.

Although there is only one level physically, there are several dungeon levels, since things get more dangerous the further you go from the entrance. Getting in and out isn’t easy, either; you’re likely to need several ten foot poles and a fair amount of rope just to get in, which makes getting out in a hurry problematic.

Area descriptions hit a nice middle ground between “4 rats HP 1, 1, 3, 2″ and lengthy descriptions that get in the way when you’re trying to run the game. I haven’t counted the areas, but the place looks big enough by comparison to other mega dungeons I’ve run to keep my lot going for about 6 months of real time. There’s quite a bit of empty space too, allowing the group to pitch camp overnight without leaving.

I can’t really go into the individual areas without dropping spoilers everywhere, but they’re a nice enough mix of traps, treasure, monsters and NPCs.

FORMAT

Full-colour cover, encasing black and white two-column text, with black and white illos. Three-page dungeon map towards the back.

SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVEMENT

I couldn’t help thinking how much more GM-friendly the Savage Worlds dungeon deck paradigm, or the D&D 4th edition encounter spreads, were; I don’t want to go back to flipping between pages every time the PCs enter a new room. The OSR answer to that, of course, is the one-page dungeon. I could always whip some of those up based on the big map in the book, but that defeats my objective of buying stuff like this to reduce my effort. You may have a different objective.

CONCLUSIONS

I think I might plonk this in the Charred Bogs just outside Jalizar and see what the Labyrinth Lord adventurers I have running in the Dread Sea Dominions make of it. How’s that for tweaking?

Overall Rating: 3 out of 5. It’s a pretty good dungeon, but the more I look at these things, the more I realise this isn’t what I enjoy running most these days; truth be told, for me the dungeon was always somewhere the party went when I didn’t have a scenario of urban intrigue ready that night. That’s not really the product’s fault, so if that kind of thing appeals to you, you could do worse than this.

Review: Hellas–Argosian Light Hauler Deckplans

Kephera Publishing, makers of the Hellas RPG, have released deckplans for several of the ships in that game. So of course I had to have at least one.

During character creation, the lifepath may gift a PC with an Argosian Light Hauler, a Helios Space Jumper, or a Helios Runner. (Of course, he can win any ship in a game of chance, but am I going to let a PC start the game with a Spartan Destroyer? I think not.)

Only the Argosian Hauler has a deckplan available, so that was my initial choice. It’s a small, commonly-used space transport; the setting’s equivalent of the Star Wars Stock Light Freighter, or the Classic Traveller Type A Free Trader; cheap, ubiquitous, easy to maintain. Just the sort of thing my PCs would use. The ship is a typical Hellene design, in that it has a central pod holding the crew, passengers, cargo, drives and controls, slung between two larger booms, giving it the look of a spacefaring catamaran. This makes sense in the Hellas setting, where starships typically land on water and park in normal harbours rather than special-purpose starports.

Like the Hellas rulebook, the hauler deckplan is in landscape format and printer-slaughtering full colour throughout. The seven page document has a cover, a general view with basic ship stats, a second general view with generic NPC stats for likely crewmen, passengers and droids (errm, sorry, machina), a page with instructions and a diagram key, and one plan for each of the three decks; essentially, the top deck is the bridge, the middle deck is the crew and passenger quarters, and the bottom deck is for cargo. Decks are parallel to the axis of thrust, as befits a space opera craft.

The PDF file lets you use layers to select whether you see the full ship or just the habitable parts of that deck, with or without a one-metre hexgrid, with or without a key. Note that you just get the deckplans, no 28mm scale battlemats or ship tiles; however, if you have a recent version of Acrobat you can use the poster printing option to blow it up and split it into tiles, although you need to print at 300% to get the one-inch hexes I prefer, meaning the whole deckplan would be three decks each 6 x 5 feet. It would be nice to have the option of printing out just the central pod, without the booms, as it’s the pod I would expect to use most, although in Hellas you can breathe in hyperspace, so you could easily be harpooning kraken standing on one of the booms, six days out of Korinthos.

The ship layout is nice enough, nothing earth-shattering but it does the job, and there’s good use of colour to make things easy to see on the tabletop; I’ll be happy to use it at some point. It would work in any space opera setting, although you might want to repurpose the numerous shrines as cryogenic sleep pods.

On paper, the Light Hauler has a crew of two and 8 passengers at maximum capacity. The deckplan has only 8 beds, so someone is hot-bunking, and only one toilet, which had better not break down two weeks from port.

As well as the shrines, other things not usually found on starship deck plans are the "livestock and food storage area", and the "wench control room" (probably a typo, but made me do a double-take and then start plotting a scenario the PCs are not going to like at all).

Overall Rating: 3 out of 5. Cheap, nice enough layout, does the job; although it will be a bit tricky to print as a battlemat due to the need for tiling. I wonder if I can print specific tiles from a tiled page in Acrobat? Anyone know?