Blakes 7 HERO

[Michael Hopcroft]

Getting back to an old topic from the old boards here, but now that Star HERO is out (excellent book) has anyone thought of what would be required to campaign in the universe of the British TV classic Blakes 7 ?

 

I know it;'s a fairly bleak universe, but it could also be a lot of fun with dry humor in the mix and some very cool characters (including a master villain with the highest COM in the galaxy)....

 

"I never doubted your fanaticism. As far as I am concerned you can destory whatever you like. You can stir up a thousand revolutions. You can WADE in BLOOD up to your armpits. OH, and you can lead the rabble to victory -- whatever that may mean. Just so there's an end to it. When Star One is gone, it is finished, Blake! And I WANT IT FINISHED. I want it over and done with, I want to be free." -- Kerr Avon, "Star One" (Series 2, Episode 13)

[DarkGreen]

HAH!

 

Some proposed Blakes 7 HERO house guidelines:

 

1) Blaster weapons do plenty of killing damage (say 3d6K for a hand laser)

2) PCs are not allowed to wear significant armor or carry much equipment

3) Full hit location and crippling rules are in effect

4) Bring several spare characters to every session

 

That should get you started

 

-DG

[Michael Hopcroft]

I;'m not so sure about that. Vila has been known to carry quite a bit of discreet breaking-and-entering gear.

 

"A Pilot can be easily found. A talented Thief is rare." -- Kerr Avon, "City at the Edge of the World" (Season 3, Episode 9)

[Mutant for Hire]

5) The players are doomed to lose in the end.

[Syberdwarf2]

Hmmm.... dark, mean, and violent. This sounds right up my alley. Know of any good websites about this show?

[Michael Hopcroft]

http://www.hermit.org/Blakes7/

 

A nice British fan site. It includes transcripts of all 52 episodes (for those who didn't get tapes), profiles of the careers of Gareth Thomas (Blake) and Paul darrow (Avon) and even links to thousands of B7 fanzines of every variety you can think of and a few I'd rather not.

 

This site will give you a very good idea what the show is all about.

 

I understand the BBC also has a B7 website, but I haven;t been able to find it.

 

I don't believe there has been a US DVD release of the series, though. The effects are definitely low-tech by modern standards (the series was made from 1978 to 1982). At one point a federation soldier shoots at the gamera and you can see the flash bulb in his gun pop.

[Tamashii2000]

Blake 7 = Good series... Horrible ending.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Whether the ending was horrible depends on who you ask. Dramatically speaking it was a compelling way to end the series -- Blake blinded by his ambition and Avon by his growing paranoia. My one regret was that Servalan wasn't around to gloat over the corpses....

 

No American could have written an ending like that, I dare say.

[Tweedle]

This might be of some interest. I found the folowing message on the newsgroup uk.games.roleplay. The message was written by Robbie and is dated 27/02/2002. Here goes:

 

Further to the discussion about the Blakes 7 RPG in the Babylon 5 thread . . .

 

I emailed Diane Geis of Horizon, the Blake's 7 Appreciation Society (http://www.horizon.org.uk/'>http://www.horizon.org.uk/), about the current availability of the Blakes 7 Roleplaying Game and Technical Manual.

 

She kindly gave me permission to post her reply to UGR.

 

I have both of these items and they are pretty darn good, and for the amount of paper, they are pretty darn cheap too! (Black and white throughout.)

 

I am of the opinion that the RPG shares many of the features found in Chaosium's Basic Roleplay system (i.e. percentile-based).

 

The Technical Manuals (three parts) are jam packed with fold out (A3) plans of costumes, equipment and schematics.

 

Robbie

 

*******************

 

THE HORIZON B7 TECHNICAL MANUAL

(Part 1 1988, Part 2 1990, Part 3 1992)

A4 size, loose-leaf

THE definitive visual guide to the Blake's 7 Universe. Detailed drawings/plans/scales of all the spacecraft, weapons, etc.

 

Part One (which comes with a Starter Folder) includes the Liberator (exterior); Liberator, Scorpio and Federation hand-guns, Liberator teleport bracelet, Federation Supreme Command Headquarters and Starburst Class Pursuit Ship.

 

Part Two includes detailed interior plans of the Liberator, Scorpio (exterior), Scorpio teleport bracelet, Federation Transport Ships (including the 'London ').

 

Part Three includes detailed interior plans of the Scorpio, Orac and the Liberator's instrumentation. Also included is a guide to Federation uniforms, more on Spaceworld and on The System. Further parts to follow ... An invaluable guide for all fans, especially modellers and writers! Designed, drawn and written by Paul Holroyd

 

PRICE: PARTS 1 AND 3 (each)

£4.50...P&P-UK:£0.70...EUROPE:£1.30...USA/CAN:£2.00...AUS/NZ:£2.15

PRICE: PART 2

£4.00...P&P-UK:£0.70...EUROPE:£1.30...USA/CAN:£2.00...AUS/NZ:£2.15

OR - all 3 Parts together for £12 + p&p of UK £2; Europe £3.50;

USA/Can £5 or Aus/NZ £6.

 

THE B7 ROLE PLAYING GAME

Fully tried and tested, this manual provides you with everything you need to know in order to play a B7 Role Playing game. Includes background information and introduction to both the programme and Role Playing, rules of the game, possible scenarios, etc. After sales

support/advice available from Zoe Taylor

PRICE:

£4.50...P&P-UK:£1.10...EUROPE:£2.00...USA/CAN:£4.00...AUS/NZ:£4.90

 

Hopefully our new-look website will be up and running very soon, with online secure credit card ordering, but for now these items along with many others are available by post paying by cheque or credit card from Gillian Puddle, Horizon, Rowbarns Lodge, Guildford Road, East Horsley, Surrey KT24 5RY, UK. Cheques payable to Horizon, or send credit card

details (name on card, full address of cardholder, type of card, expiry date, card number and a contact email address).

 

Gillian is shortly due to hand over zine sales to someone else but arrangements haven't yet been made for the takeover. However, anyone ordering after April if the new website is still not online should email zines@horizon.org.uk to check where the orders should be sent to. Our website is at http://www.horizon.org.uk

 

Thanks for your interest.

Regards

Diane

[Michael Hopcroft]

Visited the Horizon website

 

Found out that if you were lucky enough to live in the UK, you could get brand-spanking-new copies of the first series of Blakes 7 on Reigon 2 DVD. No word yet on whether the BBC is planning a reigon 1 release for the North American fans, or whether the show is just too niche to support a USA DVD box set.

 

If it's any help, though, there are Doctor Who DVDs on the American shelves, so evidently BBC-level special effects are not that significant a barrier. If enough people demand it, they'll probably release at least one season.

[Tweedle]

Blake's 7 RPG - a review

 

Posted to uk.games.roleplay on 01 March 2003 by Robbie.

BRP = Basic Roleplay System (I think!)

RQ = Runequest

CoC = Call of Cthulhu

 

 

Here's my overview of character generation and a quick review of the game using, in the main, the context of the BRP/RQ/CoC mechanics.

 

There are essentially 4 parts to generation. Parts 1 - 3, each have an in-line example. There is a complete char gen example at the end of the chapter. The char gen chapter is 6 pages in length.

 

The four parts are:

 

1. Background

2. Attributes

3. Skills

4. Miscellanea

 

A. The background process is fairly straightforward: choose what you want, GM permitting.

 

B. Attributes: Role (4D6 minus 4) 12 times. Reroll any scores of zero. Drop the lowest two sets of rolls, to leave 10 sets of rolls. Add these 10 sets up and, if your total score for the remaining 10 sets of rolls is less than 75, you may add points at your discretion so that your total equals 75. (Basically they are saying that a 75 point character is the minimum 'value' character necessary to play in the B7 game.) Allocate the 10 score totals to your 10 attributes (which I won't list here, but they cover all the usual suspects.) :-)

 

C. OK, Skills _are_ a little more complex to allocate than in BRP. Basically a skill is associated with an attribute(s). Each attribute gives you a (5 x attribute) number of skill points to spend. So, for example, if my STR is 10, I have 50 STR-related skill points to spend. Say I want to raise my Unarmed Combat skill (base is 25%), I can raise this to 75% if I want, spending all my STR points in one go. However, if you want to put my STR points into a non STR-related skill, it costs me double. So, if I want to raise my Disguise skill (base 5%) using all of my STR points, I can, but at double cost. Disguise has a base percentage of 5. So if I spent my 50 STR points, I could raise my Disguise to 30%. I.e. (50 points / 2) = 25 + 5% base.

 

The other facets of char gen are:

 

Hit points: (STR + SIZ + END / 3), round up.

 

Advanced Combat Points (optional). This is akin to the RQ method of allocating points to 1 of seven areas of the body (head, chest, abdomen, arms and legs). If you want to keep things a little more simple, ignore this rule entirely.

 

Wound Status. This is a stat that basically effects your initiative (Strike Rank in RQ/Order of Attack in CoC) in combat: the more injured you are, the slower you become.

 

Hand-to-Hand Damage. This is akin to the Damage Bonus in RQ/CoC.

 

Throw Range. How far you can throw up to a 1kg weight in metres.

 

Load. How much you can carry in kg.

 

PSI points (optional). Used only if a character has psionic ability.

 

Stress (optional). Well, I would describe this as being pretty much CoC's Sanity rule in reverse. I.e. the _higher_ your Stress (which starts at zero) the more . . . skittish, unable to perform tasks (in game mechanic terms this works as a negative to skill rolls) you become. At very high levels of stress you can go MAD!

 

That's pretty much character generation in a nutshell.

 

They advocate a Task Difficulty system. (I.e. an easy task confers a +25 bonus to a task/a difficult is a -25% etc.) Most CoC Keepers I know do this anyway.

 

There is no Resistance Table -- that would be 'stealing' from Chaosium! Instead contested tasks are handled very simply, but effectively. (I do like and use the Resistance Table a lot in my CoC games, so I'd be inclined to nick and use in the B7 game myself.)

 

Combat is pretty much: my combat skill vs your combat skill. Wounds are rated by their severity, and so a character's health is measured in terms that range from Uninjured to Seriously Wounded to Dead! There is an optional extra feature for dealing with crippling injuries.

 

As to the rest of the rules? Everything I would expect to see is there: psionic rules, experience points, space combat(*), planet generation, non player characters in the game, how to GM (Referee to use the game term) and a very brief overview of the B7 universe, equipment, some sample scenarios, and finally some game sheets (character, liberator, Scorpio, Federation Interceptor, your bog standard (prison) transporter), a _very_ basic index, and a Character Generation Worksheet, oh, and the stats for the 9 folk who were part of the B7 crew over the 4 series.

 

As mentioned previously, layout it very much what I'd expect from a 'minor' publication of the 80s (ish). It's fine, but there's no attempt to 'jazz' things up here. Artwork varies: from very basic (crude one might say), to OK, to good, to photographs that have converted to 2-colour black and white. :-) If you've ever seen RQ 1 or 2, or indeed the early incarnations of CoC, that's what we are looking at.

 

All in all, though, a pretty good attempt at a B7 game book. If there is one thing that is missing it is background material to the game universe. Other than the overview in the Refereeing chapter, you have to have watched/be a fan/own some other reference material to be able to inject the feeling of the Blake's 7 universe.

 

Robbie

 

(*) I always tend to ignore rules in sci-fi games for combat, preferring instead to rely on characters' role playing / die rolls that I ask for (i.e. roll your Piloting/Navigation skill. Did ya make it?). So I am not going to comment on the space combat mechanics. They may be good, they may be awful. :-)

 

 

--

Robbie

 

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