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James_Kiley

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Everything posted by James_Kiley

  1. My Lovely Wife is running a human of the Spacer variety (spindly, feet are also hands, etc). A male one, which I mention primarily because we are racking our brains trying to find a picture of one to throw onto her character sheet. Anybody got any pointers to one that's either in a gaming book or easily-accessed non-gaming book, or available freely on the Web somewhere? jk
  2. Well I've created, in vague terms, at least non-governmental body. The Interstellar Miners Union is broken up into the Asteroid Miners' Guild and the Independent Planetary Miners' Association. The IMU and its affiliates serve as clearinghouses for independent miners across most of the Terran Empire and it has outposts even in neutral and Mon'dabi space. The IMU provides affordable life and health insurance for its members, escrow services as needed, as well as job leads, training services, and communications for its members. The IMU has gained strength within the last century or so. In that time period, personal exoskeleton technology and telepresence and teleoperation technology have improved greatly; integrated starship computing has also become commonplace. Put those things together and the life of an independent asteroid or planet miner is no longer unthinkable. The IMU also provides a mine-claims paperwork-management service; any member miner who provides proof of a legitimate personal claim to a stake can register it through the IMU. The IMU will provide legal (and in at least one case paramilitary) support to a legitimate member that can prove that another individual or organization has moved in on his claim. Membership in the IMU is a one-point Perk.
  3. Ben: I couldn't have trashed it, honestly; I really did like a fair amount of Spacer's Toolkit. It just lacked a lot of material that would have been useful for my game. I happily admit that my reaction was selfish -- I wanted (and still want) cool stuff for use in my own game. I'll probably also contribute to the online toolkit as well, as soon as I have time to make up more of my own stuff. jk (the guy who wrote the review on rpg.net)
  4. Well, thanks, yes, I knew that; I was hoping for some kind of guidance from the Powers That Be at DOJ. After all, while high school math is right about my speed, it's tricky to look up the real-world costs for laser rifles and antimatter power plants to help build those ratios. Even using froogle.google.com. jk
  5. Other than a fairly rudimentary cost list in the TE book, there's no real indication what various levels of the Money perk/disad represent in the book. This is likely to be problematic for me in the near future, as I want to accurately gauge what kind of payment a potential employer would offer my group, and I am fairly unsure what would be good. Any help? Steve & James? Anyone else? jk
  6. If I'd had access to a good traveller-hero conversion three months ago I probably wouldn't be using TE. I gave serious consideration to using Traveller's Imperium for my own game.
  7. I have both Traveller and SWRPG, I will have to check both. Thanks for the pointer!
  8. So, this last week the PCs, in trying to escape an Imperial Navy Peregrine-class Frigate, found themselves just 37,000km from the nearest terrestrial-sized planet and decided to disengage the safety interlocks and leap into hyperspace anyway -- they were pretty sure they'd be killed or captured if the Dauntless caught them, and weren't certain that they'd die if they jumped too close, so they went with that. Due to various issues, I handwaved their being successful in making the jump. But I'm trying to figure out a reasonable difficulty scale and sense of consequences for a misjump too close to a planetary mass. I tend to think something like: within geosynchronous orbit, hyperspace gravity effects will just instantly destroy a ship. At geosync, you have a -15 or some crazy penalty like that to your Navigation: Hyperspace roll, with the difficulty scaling down as you get closer to the 100,000km limit. For consequences for a failed roll within the unsafe distance, I would tend to think that missing the roll by just a few (say 3) would be an inobvious misjump, going the wrong direction for a few hours before it becomes obvious that you've made a mistake. More serious failures on the dice roll would result in damage to ship's systems or weird psychic effects to the crew, and of course, catastrophic failure should result in the ship's destruction. Of course, I don't intend to end my campaign by destroying the PCs' ship because of someone rolling an 18 in a dire circumstance, so I would probably just catapult them across space and time to somewhere horrible and fun. Anyone else have any opinions about this sort of thing? I'm definitely open to other input. jk
  9. A PC in my Terran Empire/Star Hero game is a Fex. For those less familiar with the TE setting, Fex are Standard Cat-like Humanoid Aliens, with little 1/2d6 HKA claws. She'd like to develop a martial art (which we're referring to as Fex Fu :-)) but I'm not sure if there are any special rules I need to be aware of regarding the relationship between a built-in HKA and martial arts. Can anyone help clarify this for me? jk
  10. Not really, or so I am told. The way I started the game off was to tell the group, "You're a bunch of ordinary people (Competent Normals) in Wyoming in 1987," and let them make whatever they wanted, knowing that something weird would happen to them. Tanner's player figured that if he made a physically adept guy who knew a thing or two about the sciences he would probably be okay no matter what weirdness (magic, conspiracy, space, time travel, etc) happened subsequently. jk
  11. I've got a link to some of the PCs from my TE game at my site. Feel free to peek at them, steal them, use them. The backgrounds are somewhat sparse, and yes, some of them have points wasted on 20th century things that I will pay them back for when the time comes. And yes, some of them have not-entirely-legal sets of disadvantages. I believe that the Hero rules are a tool, not a straitjacket. If you have questions drop 'em here, I'll see 'em. I've got writeups on paper for a typical TE Naval Security officer, and a typical TE starship gunner, and a typical TE starship pilot, but I haven't put them into HD yet. When I do I'll post 'em. jk
  12. As far as I can tell, Traveller TNE failed because I was its only fan. I didn't come into it with any Traveller baggage (never played or even read older editions of Traveller) and TNE struck me as just a great setting. Rampaging around the ruins of an old empire, never knowing quite what you're going to find on the next world? Oh man, sold. jk
  13. The two PCs who are from the present day and are part of the overall TE society are dealing with the sleepers as best they can -- both of them have issues of their own. They're cooperating, because they're stuck in a bad situation together. My cunning plan. :-) The only other people that they've encountered have been the crew of the Dauntless, the Peregrine-class frigate they just encountered. The crew of the Dauntless is rather fascinated by them, from a social, economic, genetic, and historical perspective, but right now the PCs are fleeing from Dauntless and who knows how things will go from there. This is very much a seat-of-my-pants game, so I don't know what will happen next. I have detailed about half of Dauntless's crew and am trying to get the rest of them done before the next session.
  14. I just ran the third session of my Terran Empire campaign. Most of the PCs are 20th century humans, kidnapped in 1987 by some Mystery Aliens. They wake up aboard an Ackalian pirate/slaver ship, the Unfettered Happiness, 650ish years later (2640) -- the Ackalian crew is all dead of a mysterious disease that they contracted when they brought the PCs' cryosleep chambers onboard the vessel, and the computer woke the PCs up because that was all it could do. The ship, at campaign start, was careening through hyperspace in the Vorsan Expanse, just a few hours from Terran Empire space. There are three non-20th-century humans aboard. One Fex (a former member of the crew who seems to have been immune to this disease); one human spacer who was also in cryosleep and had been sold to the Ackalians; and one sentient android from a planet chock full of 'em. I have no strong plans for this game. Typically when I run games I have an end for the game in mind -- I don't in this case. So far they've made enemies of the only Imperial humans they've met (a Peregrine-class Frigate patrolling the border, whose crew was extremely interested in this disease that would kill Ackalians but not humans or Fex), and they're currently on the run from that ship (we're starting next session in the midst of that escape).
  15. About the Champions Interlinks I'm probably not going to use the Champs linkage. It actually will matter for my game, as most of the PCs are starting off as 20th century humans who spend some time at .99... c. I have deliberately obfuscated the opening of the game, and I hope to get good results out of it. Lord knows I'll have the advantage that none of them know the setting. :-)
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