Gaean Reach

This weekend I found out that Pelgrane Press has a second rpg out based on the work of Jack Vance. (The first of course being The Dying Earth.) The Gaean Reach, written by Robin Laws with layout/art direction and cover by Chris Huth (who's work you've probably seen a lot of places--not the least of which being Weird Adventures!), takes its inspiration from Vance's science fiction tales and combines the Skullduggery system of the latest edition of The Dying Earth with GUMSHOE.

The Gaean Reach is a sub-setting of Vances connected science fiction universe. It's the setting of the Cadwal Chronicles and the Alastor Cluster trilogy, as well as several of his standalone stories. The Demon Princes series setting (the Oikumene) bears some resemblance to the Gaean Reach and the game assumes they are the same place (though wikipedia says this is inconclusive). In any case, it's a future future setting with the sort of flourishes you'd expect from the works of Vance.

I haven't got to fully digest the rules yet. I like GUMSHOE, but I don't know much about Skullduggery. Still, the setting information alone is well worth the price of the pdf.

Scenes from the Strange Stars

More images from around the galaxy...

A section of the Strip, a megapolis within a 3.8 million km diameter orbital ring habitat.

The sophont battleship Auspicious Thunder Resounding just before the so-called "Kilosec War" engagement during the collapse of the Radiant Polity.

A Smaragdine military contractor poses for a snapshot after a successful raid on a raid on a pirate asteroid hideout. The pirates were responsible for large scale personality theft and numerous mind-slavery related copyright violations.

Bomoth Revisited

In the midst of reading a few FATE games (Starblazer Adventures and Bulldogs! and informed by the SA supplement Mindjammer), I figured converting some of the species I've already created was a good way to try the system out. So here is a Starblazer Adventures version of Bomoth.

Suggested Aspects:
Caterpillar-like form
Invoke: to get into places a humanoid might not be able to go.
Compel: when trying to blend in to a crowd.
Cool, Man
Invoke: to be unfazed in a stressful situation.
Compel: to feel a real sense of danger when it might be imminent.
Hep
Invoke: to find the party or score the drug.
Compel: to fool Johnny Law or pass as a solid citizen.
Live for the Music
Invoke: to play a gig.
Compel: to focus on something else.

Special Abilities:
Extra Set of Hands [-1]: Additional limbs allow a supplementary action without the -1 penalty
Vocal Mimicry [-1]: Bomoth can flawlessly recreate voices or sounds.

Warlord Wednesday: Son Rise

The Warlord is dead! Long live The Warlord! This is my issue by issue examination of his adventures. The earlier installments can be found here...

"Son Rise"

Warlord (vol. 4) #13 (June 2010) Story by Mike Grell; Art by Chad Hardin

Synopsis: Ewan McBane and Jennifer Morgan are standing on a tower looking out over Skartaris. McBane still can't believe it. Jennifer says she can barely remember the outer world--but she does miss the moon and stars. McBane (ever the romantic) says these days most of what she sees would be space junk.

McBane's comments are prophetic as in orbit above the Earth, an asteroid collides with an old Soviet satellite, destroying it. The debris of both streaks earthward. The U.S. military tracking it anticipates an impact at the North Pole with a "Tunguska-type event."

The impact doesn't come. The asteroid disappears into Skartaris. Dinosaurs run in terror from the impact as a mushroom cloud rises. The Skartarian sky darkens.

Alysha and Joshua (Tinder) ride out to investigate. They meet fleeing refugees with a tale of a terrible beast ravaging the land who was either awakened or freed by the impact:

They describe the monster as a giant with a single, blazing eye in the middle of its forehead. They sent their best warriors against it, and they never returned. Their screams echoed across the mountains. The refugees further warn that now that all the food is gone in their lands, the beast will be on the move.

Thinking on this news, Joshua broods. He tells his mother: "I'm not my father." Her reply:

Shakira helps Joshua suit up. He tells her that he doesn't even know what he's doing. She replies that his father didn't either. But he tried. He made mistakes, but he tried.

"You knew him better than anyone," Joshua says. "Perhaps you can help me understand him."

"I doubt it." Shakira replies.

In any case, Joshua is ready:

Alysha and McBane are going with him. Alysha watches Shakira in cat form jump onto Joshua's shoulders. "Some things never change," she says.

Riding into the area of devastation, our heroes are surprised to find an old smith still at work at his forge. He tells them that not everyone has fled. The others that are left realized the beast came out to hunt. The old man offers to buy Joshua's armor as he doesn't expect them to survive. Joshua declines.

Our heroes ride on and come upon a sacrifice in progress: a young woman is tied a stone table. Before the sacrificial dagger can fall:

They free the woman and drive off the others, but they find the woman didn't want to be rescued. It was her lot. She runs toward the mouth of a nearby cave. Still, she doesn't intend to let it take her alive like the others. She puts the dagger to her throat.

A blast from the cave kills her!  And the beast comes forth:

Things to Notice:

• Joshua gets his own Warlord duds.
• Yet another beauteous maiden is offered up as a sacrifice. It happens a lot in Skartaris, apparently.

Where it comes from: 
The title of this issue is an obvious play on words and a fitting follow-up to last issues "Sunset."

Joshua's Warlord outfit is a bit more modest than his old man's. Actually, it harkens back to the original black outfit Travis Morgan wore up until issue #9. He retains the metal shoulder guard and winged helm, though. He doesn't have his father's pistol, though. Instead, he carries a bow.

The "willing sacrifice" is a trope Grell employed before back in issue #48. Ironically, the danger being placated there was from outside Skartaris, too.

Libram Mysterium

Pulp Mill Press just released the Libram Mysterium volume 1, an anthology of pulpy fantasy short-stories. Here's the blurb:

THIRTEEN TALES OF THE WEIRD AND FANTASTIC!

Join vengeance-seeking ghouls in Dylath-Leen; an expedition to the cursed ruins of an ancient city; and a mercenary company with only one criterion for recruits: they must already be dead.

This anthology recalls the pulp fantasy stories of the early- to mid-twentieth century: from pulse-pounding sword & sorcery adventure to chilling tales of the macabre, eldritch horrors, ruthless warriors, and fabulous treasures await within!

Sounds cool, right? I'd be bringing this to your attention even if I didn't have a short-story in it.

It's available in pdf  for $2.99, trade paperback for $14.49, and $15.49 for the trade paperback/PDF combo. Order your copy at DriveThruFiction.

A Traveller's Life

E.C. Tubb's Dumarest of Terra novels are one of the primary inspirations for the game Traveller, though the game doesn't bother the central conceit of the novel. Tubb's protagonist Earl Dumarest other travellers are essentially space hobos: they book dangerous low passage in cryogenic berths from world to world. This contrasts with the wealthy in high passage, who take quick time drug to slow their perception and make time pass quicker to shorten the ennui of the voyage.

Though the Traveller mixes in other influences and gives PCs their own ship and faster FTL, Tubb's original set-up would make a good game all on its own. What's more, it strikes me Dumarest would be pretty easy to turn into a "hard" science fiction game. It would be trivial to dispense with artifical gravity (and antigravity), but I think you could even dispense with FTL.

Alastair Reynolds's novels in the so-called "Revelation Space universe" show how this could be done. Reynolds has no FTL, but does have interstellar travel via "lighthuggers" making voyages at close to light-speed with relativistic time dilation at play. Passengers on lighthuggers are put in cyrogenic freeze because of the length of the voyages. Just like in the Dumarest novels, cyrogenesis isn't without risks. Some passengers die and many have temporary amnesia.

In a modern, hard science fiction approach, low passage wouldn't just be cheap, it would be the only way for the middle class and poor to travel between worlds. Middle passage (the crew) might be more like the Ultras in Reynolds's books: transhuman space-mariners, living their lives on board ship and looking down on system-bound folk. High passage is still for the wealthy, but I don't think quicktime drugs alone would be enough the years (or even decade) long voyages. The wealthy (like the ship's crew) would no doubt have extended lifespans: perhaps into centuries, and possibly even into immortality, barring misadventure. Superlong lifespans,quicktime drugs, and brief periods in cryo-sleep would make it possible, though the the ships would have to have a lot of entertainment available, and be pretty large.

Obviously, you could do a lot a travel back and forth between worlds in this sort of set up, but if like Dumarest you mostly kept moving from one adventure to another that wouldn't really be necessary. Travellers would always be on the move to the next world, far away and years into the future.

Calibrating for the Strange Stars

Before I mentioned that I was checking out Starblazers Adventures (a FATE game based on the old British comic) for running my Strange Stars setting. While I haven't finished my read through, I definitely have found a lot of things to like about it. The test for me with a new game system always comes down to: Can I get it to do what I want with a minimum of fuss?

Starblazers Adventures is geared on traditional space opera (at least of a 70s variety). While that's the mode of a lot of science fiction rpgs (Traveller, Star Frontiers, Star Wars, Star Trek), it does cover the more modern elements that are part of the Strange Stars: the internet, mind-computer interface, nanotechnology, etc. The FATE system is flexible (in fact it's been turned into a generic system), but with SA alone, it isn't always easy to see what would be the best way to model some of those elements.

Thankfully, there is a supplement that does a lot of that. The Mindjammer supplement came out in 2009, and it presents a more "transhuman" and/or modern science fiction setting--which has a lot of those elements I was looking for. Most characters would be constantly linked to the "internet" (in Strange Stars, the noosphere; in Mindjammer the Mindscape), so some traditional knowledge type skills would very easy. Mindjammer has "Mindscape" becoming an Aspect characters can "tag" to their advantage. An elegant implementation.

Mindjammer also has uplifted animals, artificial beings, and AI characters. Those would have probably been fairly easy to figure out how to do with SA alone, but I always like having examples.

Another help in regard to different species or types of beings was Bulldogs! It's a separate FATE-based sci-fi game from SA, but same basic stuff. It's probably got the best alien write-ups of the three and gives a number of them. Unlike Mindjammer, whose pdf is no longer available (awaiting a 2nd edition--a standalone game--which has yet to appear), Bulldogs! is still "in print."

So those are the things I've been looking at so far. Next week I'll probably try adapting a Strange Stars culture or two.