Blue Planet Recontact - looking good

Looking gorgeous.

Possibly my most anticipated game for 2025 is the final offset print version of the new edition of Blue Planet, Blue Planet Recontact. The team producing the new edition just shared the picture above on Kickstarter in an update. It's not the final offset printing, but preparation for a POD version on DriveThruRPG. However it just shows how gorgeous this looks. The interior is just as good, as they've shared sneak previews of that too and now there are PDFs available to backers.

I did some playtesting on this edition and then revisited it with a follow on scenario at another convention. It plays really well, and the Synergy systems is similar to that in Blue Planet v2 but thoroughly modernised. I do intent to offer an episodic campaign once the final books arrive. One of the things they added in this edition was a set of campaign frames to make it easy to kick off a game (as the level of lore in Blue Planet often had people wondering how to go at it). I ran the Red Sky Charters frame and it felt like the kick off to a TV series.

I do recommend this as a great product; there's enough in these two books for more than one campaign, it's beautifully created and very unique.

Recommended!

8 December 2024

Traveller - Geomorph cache (great resource for SF roleplaying games)

 

A fantastic resource for SF roleplaying

I just wanted to give a shout out to Eric Smith's site where he has converted and hosted Robert Pearce's fantastic Starship Geomorphs as transparent PNG or higher resolution PSD files so you can use them with virtual tabletops.

The site is here.

If you've not come across Geomorphs before, they're modular tiles that you can tesselate and manipulate to build a map (or in this case a deck plan for a starship or installation). The site includes links to the original PDF files as well.

I did find the site pretty low bandwidth when I downloaded the files, but definitely worth a visit. 

7 December 2024

The Starship Geomorphs book

Travelling to the Motherlode

A motherlode of scenarios to plunder...

I'm edging back into Traveller, my forever game. Running two new scenarios and playing another at TravCon left me with an itch that I'll continue to scratch over the Christmas break when I run the Far Horizon (Orbital 2100) scenario with Cepheus. 

Listening to First Age's recent musings on Traveller on his podcast left me wondering why I've really not played or run the game for a while, and also why I've not picked up more of the current Mongoose line.

The not running or playing is probably more easily explained than why I haven't picked up much of the new material released. Effectively, I've played in two big campaigns (Eternal Lies and Shadow of the Sorcerer for Conan) since the pandemic and ran two others (Curse of Strahd and the current Achtung! Cthulhu Shadows of Atlantis game). With work, I don't really have time to do more each week than play in one and run one game. But what about conventions?

I've tended to shy away from Traveller recently at conventions as I've been exploring other systems. When that's combined with the lack of TravCons, it's really easy to just not run it. The daft thing is that running Traveller is easy for me; like comfortable shoes, I can just slip into it and go. I've tended to use conventions to run something that I may not run elsewhere, or to run something fun and different like the linked Star Trek Adventures TOS and TNG games that Dr Mitch and I did at North Star.

My reticence for purchasing Traveller material recently has a number of factors at play. I've been reluctant to pick up the updated core rulebooks for Mongoose Traveller 2e (202x) on because they started coming out not long after I had finished collecting the core books for Mongoose Traveller 2e (2017). Mongoose has started to focus on quality and the end result is that the books are towards the high end of pricing. As I'd hardly used the previous cut of 2e, I didn't really have the urge to pick up the same game rules again. I suspect I will at some point, but I've no urge right now.

I haven't tended to pick up the campaigns and adventures as I don't like the writing style of one of the go-to authors Mongoose use, although I've seen loads of positive comments about Pirates of Drinax and others. I know my friend Tom has run a fantastic campaign in the setting. I don't like the more detailed sector books that Mongoose produced (caveat - this is based on 1e) because they provide too much detail for me, having a lack of spaces to breathe. If you've ever seen the GURPS Traveller books, I prefer what was done with Rim of Fire rather than Beyond the Claw.  There was also the matter of the amount of changes and ignoring of previous printed canon (which could easily have been addressed with search of PDFs).

I have picked up some compatible material; Cepheus Universal (which feels like a cleaned up and condensed version of Mongoose Traveller 1e with all the supplements in a single book), Hostile and Orbital 2100 have all found their way onto my shelves. I also purchased all the Scoundrels of Brixton zines, and more recently The Jägermeister Adventure  from Moon Toad, all of which are really nicely constructed.

However, I realised that a lot of my interest has been drawn to another game that has echoes of Traveller; Mothership. It may be a percentile based system, but it has a similar format to Classic Traveller's Little Black Books, and some fantastic scenarios, both in-house and third party. Although Mothership was built to play science-fiction horror like Alien, it works fine in the same niche as Traveller, and increasingly there seems to be a wide selection of third party books that aren't pure horror. When I read them, I start to mentally translate them into Traveller, and I know a lot of them could be picked up and run off the cuff by an experienced referee. 

I see more experimental, exciting material coming out in this space that's worth exploring, and I'm happy that it is. There are new riches and ideas to be plundered; a veritable motherlode.

Anyway, the slow gravitational pull of my forever game continues, and I find myself musing on trying to run Hard Times, or The Jägermeister Adventure, or perhaps even The Flaming Eye.

Happy Travelling.

7 December 2024

Why my next campaign won't be using 2D20

Last Night's 2d20 game

I've been playing 2D20 for a while now; First Age ran Conan and I followed up with Achtung! Cthulhu which is wending its way towards a conclusion, most likely in the new year. I've also had flirtations with Star Trek Adventures (1e) and Dune along the way. 

I'd consider myself competent enough running the game now, but I do find that the fiddly differences between the games a little frustrating. The core mechanic is sound and I quite like the meta-game elements like threat and momentum and fortune points, even while I wish that the application of them was consistent between game systems.

I do have Dune 'Fall of the Imperium' which looks like a fantastic campaign (I reviewed it here) but I don't think that it's going to be what I offer next, as I'm feeling fatigued with the 2D20 engine. I think I've played too much of it recently. I will potentially offer Star Trek Adventures at North Star next May if Dr Mitch and I come up with a third part to the 'Echoes' game we ran previously, but I've no other definitive plans at the moment.

Although I like the core mechanics, I do find that the games struggles to really threaten the characters. Across the 20-odd sessions this year, there's probably only been two that have felt that I was putting them in any form of peril; I know that Achtung! Cthulhu is meant to be pulp derring-do, but sometimes it seems to either assume that the characters haven't really developed or that they need to succeed with relative ease. However, I do suspect that the feeling from the other side of the screen may well be a bit different and the players may well have been feeling higher threat levels.

My feelings on this aren't anything to do with the way that Shadows of Atlantis is constructed, despite my previous moaning. I do think that this is a different and interesting campaign which I've enjoyed running, despite the challenges with the writing and structure. 

I will return to the game engine, I just feel that it's time to step away for a bit. 

You can have too much of a good thing.

3 December 2024

Books in November 2024

 

November's reading - cover collage.

Seven books and 2,841 pages in November. Two non-fiction, one roleplaying and the rest fiction. Apparently I'm down by one book but up 32% on pages on October. I'm on 92 books and 28,240 pages in total for the year so far.

The first non-fiction book was Empireland, by Sathnam Sanghera, which explores the impact of the British Empire on Britain. Absolutely fascinating and demonstrates that our multi-cultural society is a reflection of the way we went about conquering large swathes of the globe, and we can't really step away from that. It also explores around the strange way that the UK ignores the British Empire in its school curriculums. Recommended.

The second non-fiction book was Checkmate in Berlin by Giles Milton. This explores the history around the occupation of Berlin at the end of the Second World War and then follows the story through to just after the Berlin Airlift. It's part of my ongoing reading around this space, and will definitely inform any games of Cold City that I ever run! Again, recommended.

The roleplaying book was the Faded Suns Character Book, the second core book for the game. I did find this heavy going as there's loads of lists, but the system itself is pretty simple. I may post some comments about this in the future once I've read the GM's Book.

I re-read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (Alan Garner) and enjoyed it as much as ever, describing as it does one of my favourite places in my home county with a cracking tale of adventure. 

I enjoyed Francis Spufford's alt-history Cahokia Jazz, set in a world when much of the Native American cultures haven't been wiped out by disease. It presents as a murder mystery, but it also explores the ways that the colonial immigrants to the USA set about wiping out native cultures and influence. An enjoyable story, well worth exploring.

Service Model is one of Adrian Tchaikovsky's latest. I can't believe how prolific he is. The story tells the tale of a robot valet trying to find purpose when his master dies in suspicious circumstances. It expands out to explore the collapse of society in a story that had me hooked.

Finally, I read Jeff Noon's Vurt, which was recommended to me by my friend John. Partly cyberpunk, partly, partly weird reality, the book drew me on all the way through a surreal tale of adventure. I'm still not a hundred percent certain what happened, but I definitely enjoyed it. I will look up the sequel.

Overall, it's a toss up between Cahokia Jazz and Service Model as my favourite new reads.

1 December 2024

Latest Mad Scramble for Shadows of Atlantis

  

I'm about to start Chapter 7, the penultimate scenario for Shadows of Atlantis. Preparing the chapters has become a bit of a chore, only made easier by the fact that I have access to the first edition version of the book that has the useful history extras and lots of extra maps that have been pretty essential for me as a GM. I think they've helped the players visualise this as well. So prep involves opening both sets of documents in Affinity Publisher and extracting images and text as needed to create handouts on Roll 20, the VTT I fell back to after the debacle of Role losing AV. 

Yes, I know that Role has AV back but I wasn't migrating all the material back across after four completed chapters.

I started reading the chapter for tomorrow's game and realised I'd not flow sheeted it (as it was optional so I missed it on the initial run through); that was no bother until I realised that some of the opening act didn' hang together, especially if you used the same team that you'd had in play from the start. Now, the characters in our campaign have been in play since early August 1939, and I was going to pick up the story early 1940 at Section M's headquarters. However, I realised that the loose-goosey way that the campaign (and Achtung! Cthulhu overall is written) means that there will be gaping holes if I just went ahead as things are.

I figured I'd check out the original version to see if I could fix this, which was when I discovered that the scenario was set in Peru originally and had just been translated across to a new country. It explains why there was even less information than previously expected. Oh, and there was a good chance that you could actually be playing the Nachtewolf (German Occultist) operators if you ran it as written. So no real hope there.

The fallback position was that I needed to get some alternative characters in play, which meant taking the ones for the NPCs already available, creating new sheets and getting some nice pictures. As I was rushed, I raided Artflow.ai again and just added the character descriptions into the engine. The results look really nice.

Ms Serena Falconer - Aviatrix & Socialite

Frank Ambrose, Antiquarian

Sgt Bertrand Ross, former French Foreign Legionnaire

Elizabeth Soames, Field Explorer

I'd never touch AI for anything professional, but this was so easy to use for producing character portraits for the game that we're playing. That was fortunate, because I didn't have the time to scan the net for old images that would fit.

Anyway, all the handouts are done and uploaded, the characters built, and we press on. Shadows of Atlantis may be badly organised and hard to use, but the adventure is fun!

I do think that there's a significant chance that the party could be killed on this mission, but then again, this is not the character set we've all been invested in for the last year or so.

25 Nov 2025

Lists, Lists and more Lists - Part 2

An equipment table with unique items highlighted

Following on from the previous post, I quite often skim equipment lists very quickly. The picture here shows why. It shows a table of firearms for Fading Suns (but this isn't about that game, this is just an exemplar I had to hand, plenty of others do this). Within the table, I have highlighted the items where the game mechanic related statistics vary. 

Across ninety-one data points (13x7) there are six numbers which are ever so slightly different. four of those relate ammo capacity and only one of those is a really significant change.

Yes, there are differences in the provenance (faction) of the weapons, and their names, and some slight variations in costs, but they really don't make much difference. There's a lot of effort here for very little benefit. I do wonder it it would have been better done with a base weapon and some tags for extra features that adjust cost, and some modifiers for price and quality based on faction.

I do know that there can be some pleasure in looking at weapons when the statistics make meaningful differences, but here they don't really. When they're all so close mechanically there's very little point in have a table to differentiate, especially if there's no flavour text that may call out the difference.

Then again, I'm not really a gun bunny any more, my days of getting excited over getting hold of a M41A Pulse Rifle in game have long gone. Except in the Alien RPG...

Hat tip to Dr Mitch for triggering these thoughts in his response to the original post on Facebook.

10 November 2024

Lists, Lists and more Lists

Lists, lists and more lists

I've just finished reading the second of the Fading Suns 4 core rule books, the Character Book. It's the largest volume and it was a bit of a slog. Although the book is well written, albeit occasionally a little long-winded, it nearly killed my interest once it hit the lists.

The game uses traits as a broad descriptor and there are pages and pages of descriptions. I nearly game up as it bored me. It's the kind of thing that you won't see in play and I'm sure that players will have loads of fun working through and making choices about their character, but reading the book from a GM perspective it just disengaged me. I had the same issue with Old Gods of Appalachia (and I know I will with Numenéra once I dig into that). I've lost the passion I once had for reading spell lists, monster descriptions and all the various forms of list that certain flavours of roleplaying game.

It's strange, as I used to pour over these in detail, but now they bore me and I end up wishing for a hypertext linked character generation tool where you can just click through. At least the Cypher games abstract this all away for the GM when creating characters. I need to read the next book to see how Fading Suns deals with this.

I know that it all falls away when it's on the character sheet but it just doesn't excite me anymore. Is it a sign of age or perhaps a change of taste? How do you feel about this kind of approach?

8 November 2024

 

Books in October 2024

 

The October cover collage

October brought eight books and 2,147 pages. One non-fiction, one roleplaying and the rest fiction. Apparently I'm down 27% on books and 30% on pages on September! I'm on 85 books in total for the year so far.

The non-fiction was 'Pathogenesis', by Jonathan Reynolds. A fascinating listen on Audible, it covers the impact of infections disease on human society, a very different lens to the usual 'great men and empires' take. 

The roleplaying game was 'Root' by Magpie Games. A superbly written and beautifully illustrated Powered by the Apocalypse game of the boardgame of the same name. Characters take the role of a band of vagabonds in a war-torn wood. Putting the anthropogenic animals to one side, it's probably the closest take to a decent Robin Hood roleplaying game that I've seen. 

I read to Aliette de Bodard novellas, 'In the Shadow of the Ship' and 'Navigational Entanglements' and enjoyed them hugely. Her books remain an automatic purchase and go to the top of the reading pile! James SA Corey's 'Livesuit' is set in their new SF universe, but there wasn't an initial obvious link to the first book. I'm sure that will develop as the series progresses. An enjoyable novella.

'The Wife Swap' by Jack Heath was an impulse by on a Kindle offer, and it was a diverting murder mystery. Different to my usual fair and consumed quite quickly.

'Moscow X' by David McCloskey was pretty brutal; once again, this wasn't James Bond style spy fiction but espionage seen through the lens of realism. I look forward to the next book. This was just pipped to the post as my favourite read of the month by 'The Curse of Pietro Houdini' by Derek B Miller. Set in Monte Cassino around the time that the Allies assault the Abbey in World War Two, it tells the story of a young refugee from Rome who falls in with Pietro Houdini, a man sent by the Vatican to help protect the art at the Abbey. It felt very different and I enjoyed it immensely.

1 November 2024