Fitz

Re: Playing 3.5 after Fantasy Hero I got all excited about D&D d20 when it came out, because I had so much fun playing AD&D1e back in the Pleistocene. And at first, I thought it was fine, keeping the feel of D&D without the more egregiously pathetic features of AD&D. I played it for about a year before I realised that although it was better than AD&D, it was still a straitjacket system -- just a bit looser under the armpits than the old one. As usual, I went back to the Hero System. I've found nothing to beat it, as long as the GM and players make sure to play the genre, and not the mechabics of the system.

Re: Post-apocalyptic fantasy I have the weidest image of some purple-faced guy with veins standing out all over his forehead shaking his fists and screaming at you "Damn you! Damn you to hell! I was really enjoying myself until we found out this was a POST-APOCALYPSE GAME! AAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!" Seriously, anyone who gets offended by a rpg genre needs to get a life. Or medication. Or both.

I've just been reading Stephen Donaldson's Gap series, and thinking about how to recreate the gap drive in Herospeak. It's mostly very straightforward -- Teleportation with Megascale and Extra Time to initiate. The only problematic thing is that the maximum range is dependent on the ship's velocity when it activates the drive. To simplify matters, I'm thinking of just making it 100 x the fraction of C (e.g. if you're travelling at 0.15 C when you enter Gap, you jump 15 light years; if you're doing 0.01 C you jump 1 light year, and so forth). Any opinions on what such a limitation would be worth? Note: for my game, the actual limitation value is irrelevant since all equipment is bought with money, but I'm curious to know how others would deal with this.

Re: Warlord class Superdreadnought I just wanted to say thanks for posting all these ships -- the .hdc files are really handy. Now, if only we had floorplans for all of them.....

Re: Need small starship deck plans You could try the Traveller Deckplans WebRing at http://nav.webring.com/cgi-bin/navcgi?ring=deckring;list or Downport at http://www.downport.com/ The scales are for Traveller of course, but that's no big deal really. Most of the time I don't even bother to translate but just use them as they are.

Re: Hell Trek Just a quick trivia note: Hell Trek was also the title of a Mega-City One spin-off series which ran for about a year in the 2000 AD comic in the mid-eighties. It was basically a wagon-train story, only the wagons were huge armoured spikey half-tracked winnebago-like things, and instead of rascally bandits and injuns they had rascally bandits and muties. Oh yeah, and giant radioactive dinosaurs of course. It was an OK story, I guess, but not as much fun IMHO as Strontium Dogs.

Re: Terran Empire: Vardel IV My players are making their way there now, though as yet I haven't done a thing about describing the place. As far as I can find, there's nothing in any of the published canon about it, so it's a free-for-all. Next to Adamant, it's the nearest major Imperial world to the Mon'dabi Federation, and it's on a more direct path to the Core Worlds, so I'd assume it would form an important part of any Terran/Mon'dabi trade. It's still quite a long way from the Terran border however -- further than Adamant -- so it should be reasonably safe from Ackalian adventurism. It was well inside Xenovore space, and not far from the Xenovore Throneworld Prime, so there's a good chance that it was a slave/food world at one time. That would have a profound effect on the development of its society and outlook. That's about as far as I've got so far.

Re: TE - Army Surplus pricing I treat credits as equivalent to $ although it's never explicitly stated that that is the case. It's not unbelievably expensive really; consider what it costs for a jet fighter or a main battle tank these days. A Dracon battlesuit almost turns an individual soldier into an MBT.

Re: 'Empire': a cliché? If you'd be happy describing the United States or the USSR as an empire, then fine. If not, then I think you need some other term, because it sounds as though that's the sort of political situation you're describing ("a government with supreme authority over an extensive group of states that have limited sovereignty") An empire implies the existence of an emperor, and although it's possible to have an elected emperor, in practise they tend to create dynasties. I think the term "empire" would give a misleading impression to the players, and it has been overused. I think that about covers it

Re: TE - Army Surplus pricing After tinkering with the Star Hero pricing guide Monsieur Greenwade kindly pointed me to, I came up with a bunch of prices which all please me. The table works quite well. I added a x5 cost modifier for classified military gear, which brought the Dracon to a per-unit cost of about 15 million credits, including the laser, and costing the whole thing as a weapon since it doesn't seem to me to be particularly defensive in nature Lose the x5 "classified" multiplier, and they drop to about 3 million apiece, and if you actually go through and cost out the individual systems according to their item classes, it gets cheaper still (but still in the millions). By comparison, the dearest of the unpowered armours -- the heavy combat armour -- comes out at a mere 50,000 credits. A bargain.

Re: TE - Army Surplus pricing I would expect that they would, if they could get hold of it -- or they'd make clone designs themselves, in the same way that China cloned a lot of Soviet weapons. Presumably it would be fairly difficult to get the appropriate manufacturing specs, but I don't imagine that industrial espionage is any less common in the Terran Empire than it is today. In fact, that very operation could provide endless (mostly fatal) fun for a roleplaying group Sleazy arms merchants (and unscrupulous arms manufacturers) will always be ready to make some extra money selling to people they shouldn't be selling to, as well. If, for example, the Xenovore Fleet hit a transport carrying battlesuited infantry and managed to disable the ship's propulsion and life support, all they'd have to do is wait and they'd eventually have a very valuable cargo to on-sell. NOTE: I notice, after re-reading the description for the Drakon, that there is no time limit given for the suit's Life Support functions -- still, unless they magically replenish their oxygen and nutrient supplies, eventually the wearers will die. Hell, if you've got the patience, you could just wait for them to die of old age.

I'm in the process of running through the Terran Empire price lists, sorting out the retail and black market costs of various things. Quite a bit of the really useful stuff just has N/A under the Price column of the equipment tables, presumably because it's not stuff the characters can just go out and buy. No "Crazy Vaclav's Used Battle Armour Emporium" on the corner, and that's fair enough. However, it occurred to me that planetary militias, mercenary companies and corporate security are going to have to get their equipment somewhere, and so I thought I'd price some of the unpriced equipment -- stuff like light, medium and heavy battle armour, military (or paramilitary) uniforms, and (god forbid that the party should ever get access to them) Drakon Battlesuits. My problem is that I have absolutely no idea what this sort of equipment is likely to cost. I know that a lot of military equipment is surprisingly costly, but not having had a lot to do with arms merchants, I'm working in the dark. Has anyone priced the unpriced TE equipment? Or, failing that, can anyone point me to a useful url for pricing military/paramilitary equipment so that I can do some comparisons?

Re: Y R axes better than swords???

Re: Limits on CSL's? General consensus? Knock yourself out

Re: Dwarf Martial art Don't forget the feared "grab, squeeze and twist" maneuver -- ideal for dealing with Tall Ones.

Re: Limits on CSL's? General consensus? I put a skill level cap on my fantasy game of 8 assorted levels for *anything* -- note that this applied only to levels; it didn't apply to the base characteristic roll or any environmental/tactical modifiers. It did apply to CSLs as well as skill levels. The reason for this was simply to encourage tactical thinking; if the players wanted to be able to get a skill roll or OCV/DCV up to stupendously high levels, they had to find some way to swing the environment (or whatever) in their favour -- by taking extra time, sneaking up on the target from behind, buying exquisitely crafted tools, and so forth. I found 8 to be a workable cap level for my own game, though it may not work as well for others.

Re: Shelf life for potions and scrolls If I recall correctly, FH introduced a limitation called "Window of Opportunity" for powers which could only be used at specific times. I believe it was intended for spells which could only be cast in the dark of the moon and that sort of thing, but defining the window as "within a month of mixing the potion" seems to me to be a perfectly good use of the limitation. It's easy enough if you want a standard decay time for all potions, scrolls etc., but as mentioned above having some thought for the materials involved would be a good idea in terms of believability.

Re: Galactic Coordinates I've been using this exact system, with a bogus 3rd dimension thrown in just for the sake of SoB. If I were *really* anal, I'd work out how that 3rd dimension affects travel times, but fortunately me I'm not

Re: How do you get players to role play in genre? Beatings. Beatings are the answer, beatings with the stick of pain.

Re: Hero Designer v2 - Helpful or Hurtful My advice would be to get used to making characters manually first, since that will force you to read the books. HD2 is an excellent tool for character creation, and I wouldn't be without it these days, but it makes it very easy to whack together a perfectly point-balanced character without having the first clue what all their skills and abilities actually mean.

Re: Old names? Well, that's a sticky one since every linguistic group has had its own names for everyone else (and themselves, of course). Let's take a look at the British Isles as an example: Britain was made up of separate kingdoms up until about the time of Alfred the Great: Wessex, Sussex, Kent, East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria. Wales as a whole was called Cymryu by the Welsh, but it too was split into Gwynedd, Powys, Deheubarth, Dyfed, and some minors like Gwent and Morgannwg. Scotland consisted of the kingdoms of Galloway, Strathclyde, Lothian, Bernicia, Alban, Moray, Dalriada, Caithness plus the Kingdom of the Isles and the Orkneys. Ireland (Erin or Hibernia) consisted of Ulster, Connaught, Midhe (Meathe), Leinster and Munster. All of these were separate sovereign kingdoms, and just to complicate matters, some were Norse kingdoms. And of course this is just a slice of time we're talking about here; many of these kingdoms rose and fell over the course of a realtively short space of time. I'm sure there were others that I've forgotten about too. The situation on the continent of Europe was similar -- for example, the area we now know as Germany consisted of over 300 separate sovereign kingdoms in the thirteenth century.

Re: Old names? Etruria was sort of northern Italy -- where the Etruscans came from. Hispania was Spain, and was bisected by the Tarraconensis. Portugal was more or less Lusitania. Southern Spain was Baetica. Present day France and Belgium were split into dozens of tribal lands, the most prominent being Aquitania, the Narbonensis, Lugdunens, Belgica. Likewise Germany (Germania) was made up of lands like Rhaetia, Noricum, Pannonia, Germania Superior. Ireland was Hibernia, Scotland was Caledonia. On the coast of the North Sea (Mare Germanicus) were the Frisii, the Chauci, the Baiaui, the Saxones, the Teutones, and the Anglii -- all Germanic peoples. All of this is Europe as the Romans of Augustus' time knew it, and of course there's a lot more if you want any specific bits.

Re: Game Maps and Counters Exchange There's some mapping stuff and tabletop props on my site at http://fitz.jsr.com/roleplay/props.html

Re: Fantasy Art Thread Thanks -- maybe one day I'll even be able to make some money at it

Re: Fantasy Art Thread Actually, just to cut down on the post numbers: there are a few of my pix here: http://fitz.jsr.com/gallery/graphics.html