Steve

I guess it all depends on how Black and White the GM and players want morality to be. A similar discussion could probably be had about Golden Age comic book Nazis, the Klingons of Star Trek or Star Wars Imperial Stormtroopers. Orcs, goblins and trolls have been the footsoldiers of Evil since the earliest days of RPGs and going back to Tolkien, one of the major influencers on the genre. Now it seems everyone wants to do kinder and gentler reinterpretations of such creatures. They can’t just be Evil and acting as malevolent enemies of all that is Good. Now we have to examine their backstories and not judge them.

As I recall, Tolkien’s wrote something to the effect that orcs were beings trapped and in pain from Melkor’s corruption. They loathed and feared Melkor, but their “choice” to do evil was driven and enforced by the pain of their very existence as corrupted Elves or maybe Men. They were perpetually lashing out because of this pain. Maybe causing suffering and death made them feel a bit better about their own situation. Go on long enough, maybe they just got to like it.

One idea for how orcs multiply I once read is due to dark sinkholes gathering evil and starting to produce them, kind of like how their production was shown in the LOTR movies. Orcs are thus a type of corruption of the land.

I suppose one way to look at “Evil Races’ would be to consider them all genetically predisposed to a form of sociopathy. They kill and harm others, and they have absolutely no conscience holding them back. if you want to get more metaphysical, they either have no souls or twisted, stunted ones due to the influences of an evil god. I think this is what Morgoth did to get Orcs. That was his real crime. Not that he created a race, but that he so horribly perverted existing beings and their spirits to create Orcs. That would actually bring in a horror aspect to things, to have one or more created races have to deal with a dark reflection brought about by evil powers. So Humans and Orcs could have this relationship in one world. That Orcs are horrible, twisted perversions of Humans.

Hmm, I’m coming up with a cross of DC’s Lady Shiva and Marvel’s Black Widow. Tempted to go with Widowmaker for the name. I’m thinking a Chinese operative of some kind, enhanced using Cold War supersoldier technology obtained from USSR after it collapsed.

I run an occasional game of Delta Green Hero, and it is difficult to generate fear in players unless the setting for where you play supports it. Sitting around a table in a brightly lit room makes it hard to generate fear, but my players do roleplay their characters being afraid.

I would suggest the Pirates of Drinax setting put out by Mongoose for Traveller. It easily has enough meat for twenty to thirty sessions, and it also has several treasure hunts. It’s a terrific space setting with a lot of plot potential, and I’ve been running it as a Traveller Hero campaign for many months now.

My vote is for option #1. I’m getting flashbacks to one of the seasons of “Agents of SHIELD” from this scenario setup.

I recently picked up the new Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Book and was perusing it for ideas when I came across a mention of what subjects that science officers might specialize in. Two such mentioned science specialties caught my attention because they just seemed to come in from far out in left field: dentistry and podiatry. My imagination immediately began wondering what a medical officer specializing in podiatry or maybe even xenopodiatry might have to deal with on a Star Fleet vessel. Then I started wondering if there were other oddball sciences that people have seen characters take, and if they somehow proved useful.

With fantasy worlds that see undead of various power levels rising from the grave, how might that affect burial customs? It seems like you wouldn’t want any bodies left hanging around to come back as skeletons or zombies, so burning corpses or dissolving them in acid or suchlike would likely become standard practice to avoid having such things happen. Could more powerful undead like ghosts or wraiths then end up becoming more common, taking in more of the dark energies that empower undead? What other effects could the presence of undead cause in societies? Ecologies?

@Durzan Malakim @thudgun@King RedAs you all know, Krrsh the Vargr was an interesting case of NPC neglect that I could finally find a plotline use for. He is a former Vargr pirate captain who was betrayed and left aboard a space station, and the PCs picked him up during one of their earliest adventures. With his aid, they managed to get to the pirate world of Theev, and then he was simply forgotten about and given no duties on board for months of in-game time and also real world time. His character description in the module is that he is a loudmouth, a drunkard and an astrogator, and so in my notes he has just been off in a corner quietly getting drunk while all the PCs have been having their adventures as they jump about star systems in the ship. Months later he shows up again in one of the PCs quarters @King Red, caught raiding his private stock of expensive wine, and then he gets a plotline of getting beaten into shape. I suppose we will see if it takes. I was actually quite impressed with how the whole Vanderbilt storyline last session ended up. This bunch of NPC dilettante losers shows up hoping to sponge off their relative, the PC, who has managed to get a piece of a planet and a noble title (baronet), led by his widowed mother. Despite her having only just shown up for the first time on camera in the campaign, that PC refused to take the easy way out with her, because she was his character’s mother. He could have had her mind wiped and turned into a meat puppet with an AI installed to drive the body. Then there was talk of doing this with useless cousin Gaston Vanderbilt, and he went along for a little while then changed his mind. Then there was talk of leaving a clone of himself behind to deal with the useless bunch of dilettantes that is his family, and the abandoned, arranged marriage fiancee that is part of his backstory, and just heading off for the stars to be a pirate. It was all quite an interesting look into the mind of Harrison Vanderbilt IV.

It's been a while since the last update. Our intrepid group of pirates have made a lot of progress in the campaign, traveling up into the Spinward Marches to the distant worlds of Mirage and eventually all the way to Neumann, a journey of almost twenty-five parsecs or 13 jumps. They almost managed to catch her at Fist, at the most Rimward border of the Spinward Marches, but they encountered complications that enabled the nanotech infected scientist to escape and continue to Mirage. Thanks to plentiful expenditures of HAPs at the climax of that adventure, they were able to enact a cure to the nanotech plague on Neumann that had consumed half the planet, ending up getting paid but then subsequently banished from that world. They then made their way back down to the Trojan Reach, trying their hand some more at doing some honest trading along the way. They had done some of this on the way up as well. During their long journey back, they picked up an archaeologist who paid High Passage all the way to Drinax, who had a message globe dating back to the end of the Sindalan Empire, getting the PCs involved in a hunt for a legendary treasure, not of gold and jewels, but planet-destroying weapons of biological and nuclear varieties. The last session had them reach the world of Cordan, where they had gained landholdings and the rank of Baronet thanks to helping the Baroness Lux there. In the many months they were gone, one of the PCs who comes from a fallen, formerly noble family, had his mother show up with a whole retinue of the family, all looking to squat and plunder basically. Thanks to a technological find they made while in the Spinward Marches, they had obtained the equivalent of cortical stacks for use. Using one of them to replace one of the PCs useless cousins with a copy of their ship's AI personality was discussed and almost happened but was stopped at the last minute when the PC decided against the plan after initially being for it. The transhumanism elements of the campaign continue to shine as a major subplot. One of the PCs is a cyborg; they killed and cloned a towering Aslan male pirate lord named Irontooth and implanted within the clone body a copy of their ship's AI; several members of the crew are either robots or advanced bioroids; the captain acquired a genetically altered spare body they keep in a Low Berth to aid him in alternating between his pirate guise and his old Brigadier ID; and they have a dozen spare cortical stacks that one of the PCs is just aching to use, to make more copies of the ship's AI and implant them into organic bodies.

I was working with ChatGPT 3.5 tonight and asked it this. “List Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics” It came back with this. “Sure, here are the three laws of robotics as formulated by Isaac Asimov. 1. A robot may not injure” And that was it. I tried asking it several different ways, and it kept cutting off at the same point. I’ve ever seen it truncate a short answer like that before. While I could get it to give me the second and third laws by asking for them directly, it would not give me the complete first law. Kind of weird.

I wonder if they’ve done any more editing changes on it?

Will there be a Q1 2023 update? It would be nice to see them more often than annually.

I don’t know why the random, spur of the moment NPCs seem to attract more player attention than the painstakingly created ones do. It’s like an RPG trope.

If you want a more Swords & Sorcery feel for magic weapons, there is always the Stormbringer RPG approach, binding spirits (demons) into them as the means of enchanting them.

I personally find travellermap.com to be an excellent resource as a GM, especially since it will give me the book reference for more details. Since I’ve seen books reference that it exists “in universe” as a database players can look at, it also helps them determine where they’d like to go and what kind of planet to expect when they arrive. This is helpful if they prefer to skim a gas giant and process their own fuel, for example.

I can’t recall how it was portrayed in Greyhawk’s history, but magic items, the more powerful ones, could be relics of an older time when magic was more common. Maybe there has been a gradual falling off in the number of powerful wizards, so “common” magic items like +1 or +2 weapons, weak wands, and potions are made now but things like a Staff of the Archmagi are relics of that elder age.

In Greyhawk, I don’t think you’d ever find a Harry Potter-like wizard school, even in the city of Greyhawk itself. Magic was instead passed down from wizard to apprentice. That would really tend to keep their numbers down. A school would be like an assembly line making new wizards every year. Based on D&D having an INT minimum to even be a wizard back in early editions (I think it was 9 or better), that seemed to be the main barrier to entry rather than some kind of inner talent. Most characters treated INT as a dump stat unless they were going to be a wizard, so I guess you could say most people were too dim to handle the subtle intricacies of magic. Holding to the wizard-apprentice setup helps explain why there are so few wizards.

I’m no historian, but I think Horatio used a pile of dead bodies as an arrow shield and funnel for the onrushing enemy Etruscan soldiers. They had to go through him rather than around him. It might be an honor thing was going on too. Change Environment works for me. It could also include a DCV reduction as well, making it easier to kill enemies. Change Environment is apparently not subject to the halving effect of Adjustment powers from what I can tell.

Just asking this question got me a downvote? EDIT: And again? What is this? Could I at least know why I’m being repetitively downvoted?

Kenzer Company had a take on orcs in their game world that was reminiscent to me of the LOTR movies. I thought it was interesting as it got away from some of the moral questions raised in fighting and killing orcs. Basically, there are no female orcs or orc children. Orcs are instead germinated within foul pits under the earth or dark, hidden places that are the result of evil magic. These pits normally churn out “common” orcs, a few spit out each month, I think was the rate. However, if a being of another race is brought and sacrificed into one of these pits, a stronger, smarter, tougher orc is made from them, emerging forever corrupted by the pit into one of these superior orcs. Orcs were monsters, a corrupted creation of dark magic. The concept could likely be expanded into having lesser pits producing goblins.

Kazei Five is probably the closest to a Cyber Hero update we will see. It actually covers most everything in the genre.

In my Pirates of Drinax campaign, some of the characters are fighter pilots, so I came up with some ranged martial arts maneuvers they could use. Fighter Pilot Skills 3 Defensive Shot: 1/2 Phase, -1 OCV, +2 DCV, Range +0, Weapon Strike 5 Dodge/Jink: 1/2 Phase, -- OCV, +4 DCV, Dodge All Attacks, Abort; FMove 4 Trained Shot: 1/2 Phase, +2 OCV, +0 DCV, Range +0, Weapon Strike 0 Weapon Element: Vehicle Weapons What might be some other maneuvers a skilled fighter pilot would have, like Maverick from the Top Gun movies?