Tweedle

Re: Designing reasonable aliens

And that GURPS .rtf doesn't seem to really be working.

I have a copy on my PC that I can send you (117 kb). Send me an e-mail and its yours.

Re: Using nanotech in a campaign

Thanks for all the suggestions. I;'m still frightened of grey goo' date=' however, as it seems the mpost likely nanotech to get developed. Everyone wants a weapon that will utterly wipe out their enemies, and someone is going to want a weapon that wipes out [i']everybody[/i], friend or foe, someday.

Michael, a quick (and belated!) update. The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology has an article on grey goo - Grey Goo Is a Small Issue - that might reassure you somewhat. (The CRN website in general is well worth browsing.)

Re: Usning nanotech in a campaign

Michael, if you're stuck for sources of inspiration, the Nanotechnology in Science Fiction site has compiled a pretty comprehensive list of SF novels that feature nanotech in some way; the site owner even grades the novels according to the degree to which nanotech features in each book.

The Atlantis Rising sourcebook for the Conspiracy X RPG features a catalogue of nanotech devices, and is worth having a look at. I'd also suggest you have a peek at GURPS Ultra-Tech 2 and GURPS Bio-Tech.

I'd also highly recommend these pop sci works:

Unbounding the Future: The Nanotechnology Revolution Eric Drexler, Chris Peterson, Gayle Pergamit

Nanotechnology: Molecular Speculations on Global Abundance BC Crandall

Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages, and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms Wil McCarthy

Nanofuture: What's Next for Nanotechnology J. Storrs Hall

The complete text of Drexler's seminal Engines of Creation can be accessed free at The Foresight Institute

Re: Firearm Muzzle Energy

Thanks gang for your intelligent analyses and suggestions.

Can anyone point me to a comprehensive web-based resource that lists the muzzle energies of a variety of firearm types? Many thanks.

Re: Mood Music

Thanks for the advice. I'm gonna go out and buy myself the (magical) "Usual Suspects" Sountrack right away.

 

We also occasionally use music from Video and Computer Games, although except for Resident Evil 3 I can't remember any specific titles.

 

Any suggestions?

How about these:

Hitman Contracts

The Hitcher

Ghost in the Shell

Run Lola Run

Blade Runner

Re: Massive engineering projects?

I am creating a hard-science SF campaign (a somewhat more optimistic one than my last dismal failure)' date=' in the vein of KSR's Mars Trilogy. I am looking for really massive feats of engineering for the setting, stuff like the space elevators, the Gibraltar bridge, O'Neill colonies, mass drivers, all the Martian Terraformation stuff, etc., that are achievable with (mostly) hard science, a couple centuries from now. any suggestions?[/quote']

 

Perhaps this might help?

 

Megascale Engineering

http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Tech/Megascale/index.html

 

You might also find some useful ideas in these books:

 

The Next Ten Thousand Years Adrian Berry

2081 Gerard K. O'Neill

The Millennial Project Marshall T. Savage

Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition Ed Regis

Originally posted by Gary

Technically, it can add to OECV and DECV as well.

Yes, but I would hesitate to allow this, as to me it seems rather generous for the cost involved.

Originally posted by Bartman

Good point. At a 8pt level you can add limitations to them though. There are three things you can do with CSLs. Add OCV, add DCV, and add DCs. Since we are eliminating two of the three I would say that counts as a -1 limit. So two 8pt levels with a -1 lim (only to add DCs) gives us 16 AP, 8 RP. How's that?

That seems fair. Thanks Bartman.

That's correct, but those two CSLs can also be used to add up to +2 to a character's OCV or DCV, or +1 to both simultaneously. I'm interested in the cost of an ability that is limited to adding +1 DC to any of a character's attacks.

How much do you think it should cost to purchase an ability that adds +1 DC to all of a character's attacks? If possible, could you illustrate how you arrived at the figure you suggest? Many thanks.

Originally posted by McCoy

My default is a visual distortion, like heat waves, between the character and the object being manipulated.

There's a nice example of a similar effect in the science-fiction noir film Dark City (1998).

Originally posted by Ben Seeman

And yes, I'm sure there is definitely ONE other form of life somewhere in that picture. If there isn't, then our existence is an abberation in the Universe that seems to be too unlikely to occur if it hasn't occured anywhere else.

Unfortunately, there is at the moment no evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life. Any discussion about the latter must remain for the time being speculative and inconclusive. While looking at pictures such as the Hubble Deep Field Image might fill one with a profound sense of awe, they do not provide any extra evidential weight to pro-ET arguments.

Two titles - though both are out of print - spring to mind:

ICE's Cyberspace RPG. Set in 2090 San Francisco. Has a very dark, high-tech feel to it. Includes detailed descriptions of contemporary technologies, weapons, lifestyles, city locations, and a variety of megacorps and sprawlgangs. A black and white map of a particular chunk of the city is included.

R. Talsorian's Night City supplement for the Cyberpunk 2020 RPG. This product details an entire fictional cyberpunk city - Night City - located on the West Coast of the USA. Comes complete with maps and street by street locations of the city's inhabitants, major players, and assorted lowlights.

Lord Mhoram, have you heard of the Deathstalker series of books by British author Simon R. Green?

The series is set in a pulp-SF space opera type of universe, very much in the vein of the Star Wars films, but with lots of shades-of-grey scoundrels and liberal doses of sarcastic humour. The characters in the series use energy weapons which require a number of minutes to recharge between each shot; this has necessitated the revival of hand-to-hand combat with swords, axes and other low-tech implements of mayhem, as combatants initially discharge their energy weapons and then wade into hand-to-hand combat.

AnotherSkip, have you seen either of these:

Contacting Aliens: An Illustrated Guide to David Brin's Uplift Universe by David Brin and Kevin Lenagh

GURPS Uplift, 2nd Edition

I was rooting around in my hard drive and came across Atomik Aliens, an interesting creature-design pdf written for R. Talsorian's Fuzion RPG that might serve to focus your alien creation activities. E-mail me if you'd like a copy of the relevant files (total size is approx. 300 kB).

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

UK Role Players forum

http://www.modus-operandi.co.uk/ukroleplayers

Re: Designing reasonable aliens

Originally posted by Michael Hopcroft

What is the best way to design Star HERO aliens?

 

I want aliens that aren't "guys with bumpy foreheads". "guys with pointed ears", or "guys in rubber suits". I want aliens with abilities and disadvantages that reflect their, well, alienness. These aliens shouldn;t think or act like humans -- they should thing and act alien.

 

I don't have Terran Empire yet, so I don't really know how Steve and company do it. So how would you guys do it?

Perhaps you might find inspiration with these items:

Is There Life On Other Worlds? by Poul Anderson

Extraterrestrial Civilisations by Isaac Asimov

Evolving the Alien - The Science of Extraterrestrial Life by Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart

What If the Moon Didn’t Exist? by Neil F. Comins

Are We Alone? by Paul Davies

The Cosmic Water Hole by Emmanuel Davoust

Extraterrestrials by Terence Dickinson and Adolf Schaller

Life Beyond Earth by Gerald Feinberg & Robert Shapiro

Extraterrestrial Intelligence by Jean Heidmann

The Science of Aliens by Clifford Pickover

Intelligent Life in the Universe by I. S. Shklovskii & Carl Sagan

Rare Earth by Peter D. Ward & Donald Brownlee

Extraterrestrials - Where Are They? by Ben Zuckerman & Michael H. Hart

I'd also recommend Aliens & Artifacts by David L. Pulver, written for ICE's Spacemaster RPG.

You should also check out this article - creator.rtf . It's an excellent step-by-step guide to designing alien species. It's written for GURPS but is easily adaptable to HERO.

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

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