Last night was the first get-together of Dave Hoover's new campaign. The players are my good buddy Pat, his cow-orker Loren, a fella named Joe, and me. The system is Shane Henley's Savage Worlds. Dave pitched two different campaign summaries to us. The first was a near future cyberpunkesque game that I thought looked very compelling, especially since I hadn't really done near future sci-fi before. The second was yet another fantasy game. Guess which one the group chose? To be fair, this particular fantasy game has neither orcs nor elves, but come on people, I signed on for Hoover's game because I wanted something different. Still, I want to see what Dave can do as a GM, so I've decided to do my best to make a positive contribution to the game.

So we hashed out some campaign world details and then made characters. The build system for Savage Worlds was very nearly transparent, with only a couple 2:1 buy ratios. My character is Rondoo the Learner, a monastery-educated young man out in the real world for the first time. I'll post more on him later.

Pat found that old Space Gamer I've been wanting to borrow, the issue with Aaron Allston's review of BattleDroids (known in later editions as BattleTech) and George MacDonald's variant rules for the same. He also passed on his near-pristine copy of the old Rogue's Gallery for use on the Otus Shrine and he lent me his copy of the DDG for a cover scan (my DDG has a much more worn cover).

Early this morning I had an bit of an idea for a Sorcerer game, set in the Star Trek universe. The key idea is that Humanity represents one's ability to ignore Star Fleet regulations/political expediency and do what is right. The premise would be something like "Which is more important, upholding the high ideals of the Federation or furthering your own career?" Demons could be space vessels (all captains are sorcerers under this theory), alien sidekicks (the demon Spock bound to the sorcerer Kirk), or kickass powers (Spock as sorcerer, his vulcan powers being demons or Kirk as sorcerer, his Kirk fu and general mojo as demons).

Two new articles have been posted to the Forge since my last visit: Narritivism: Story Now, the third in Ron Edwards' GNS series and Ritual Discourse in Role-Playing Games, a serious academic look at RPGs as rituals. Both are heady stuff. I'll definitely need to reread both of them before I can draw any useful conclusions. Well, it looks like the link to my BattleTech scenario will be going back up on ClassicBattleTech.com shortly. Although I was initially upset by the modding decision, I'm glad everything got worked out.

So I chatted with my bod Pat a bit. He said Dave Hoover's new game is up in the air right now, but that Savage Worlds and Aberrant were contenders. Savage Worlds I was expecting, Dave mentioned at Winter War that it was his new system du jour. But Aberrant? Totally out of left field. Pretty much my only encounter with Aberrant has been Johnny Nexus' article The Second Worst Scenario Ever Written in the hilarious webzine Critical Miss.

Aargh!
So last night I posted a link to my BattleTech scenario over on the message boards at ClassicBattleTech.com and an overzealous mod pulled it, citing the "no unseen images" rule. Nevermind the fact that the rule provides that links to other cites are excluded from this provision. I sent him a PM pointing this out. Hopefully he will put the post back up. I'd really like to see some feedback from the CBT community.

Been home long enough to check out my recent eBay acquisitions. BattleTech Reinforcements 2 is in pretty darn good shape. The majority of the mech standups are unpunched. I did okay taking my chances with the 3050/2750 set. Plenty of mechs from the 3025 era are represented, enough that I don't think I'll need to get the original Reinforcements anytime soon. I would have liked there to have been more 2750 vehicles, but gaming in that era never really caught on. Still, I think I'll be able to get at least one decent scenario done with the material at hand. I'm kinda thinking I could do the last firefight before Kerensky kicked in the door on ol' Stephan Amaris.

I'm still going over the Starmada Compendium, but so far I'm really happy with it. The race rules are nifty for campaign play. Basically when using these rules each race/faction/whatever has a limit to the variety of technology at its disposal, buying new technologies with a pool of points. The tech sections are expanded too. New weapons and other tech toys are always fun to play with. I'm even warming up a bit to the official Starmada universe.

Well, I got another email from local GM Dave Hoover. Looks like he's moving forward with his plan to run a new campaign on alternating Wednesday nights. Still no word on what we're playing, but there's gonna be some sort of prelim meeting tomorrow night at the FLGS. In a surprise twist my good buddy Pat is also on the guest list!

Starmada, part 3 of 3
These are the slightly more oddball projects.

Red Chicken Rising is a legit sci-fi ship-to-ship game with a rather silly background. I've got the vessels of all but one of the various races coverted. I can milk this baby for at least two silly scenarios:

1) "Everyone Hates Earth" in which the Anti-Earth Coaltion decides to try and finish off those pesky earthlings once and for all.

2) "Battle for Joe's Diner" Joe's Diner is sort of the greasy, smelly Babylon 5 of the universe, a free-floating space restaraunt where lifeforms of all sorts are able to work out there differences over a couple of blue plate specials. The Robots and the Undead attack the Joe's in force. The rest of the patrons defend it.

Aeromada is a conversion of the old BattleTech aerospace fighter game Aerotech. Scaling the dropships in with the fighters has proven problematic, but I believe I can do some good fighter vs. fighter scenarios. I have statted out the smallest dropship, the Leopard. It works sorta okay. I still have a lot of fighters to convert for this one.

Totally separate from Aeromada is my work on the Capellan-Supremacy War. This is a conflict from the pre-BattleMech era between two polities that eventually were subsumed under the larger Capellan Confederation (a.k.a. House Liao). As far as I can tell, the only information available on this war is a few pages in the old House Liao sourcebook, which describes only one or two space battles, though others undoubtedly occurred.

Starmada projects, part 2 of 3
I've already mentioned Starmada Frontiers here in my blog. This project is pretty much a straight conversion of old Star Frontiers Knight Hawks material. One of my goals is to eventually find a good method of recreating the Second Sathar War as a campaign.

The Liberation of Cunnonnic is a multiplayer scenario I've been working on set in Traveller's Spinward Marches. The period is the Fourth Frontier War, a war of starship skirmishes and as such perfect for Starmada. Cunnonnic was one of the few planets that changed hands in the 4FW, going from the Swordworlders back the the Darrians. In my scenario each of these client states receives direct military assistance from one of the superpowers of the region: the Swordworlders get Zhodani help and the Darrians are supported by the Imperial Navy. I'm not sure how many scenarios I can squeeze out of the Fourth Frontier War, but I think this one will shape up nicely by the time I'm done.

Also in the category of straight conversion is Starmada Actions in Deep Space, my 2nd edition Full Thrust to Starmada work. I've got almost all the ships from Full Thrust and More Thrust converted. I just need to figure out how to convert the needle beam and what to do about the Savaska. I'm primarily interested in doing a series on the Battles for Grendel. My take on this is to cast Grendel as the worthless world that is constantly fought over for various 'strategic reasons' that aren't always clear to the captains involved in the battles.

Starmada projects, part 1: Starmada Trek
I find Starmada: the Universal Game of Starship Combat more than suitable for sci-fi gaming. It's quick, easy, has a decent ship construction system, and can easily be modified for specific settings. Here's my list of ongoing conversion projects. For most of these I have many or all of the ships I need done, I just need to sit down and crank out some scenarios.

Starmada Trek - original series style Star Trek. I'm interested in two periods here, both inspired by old FASA products. The main one is the Four Years War. Under the FASA timeline this was a Klingon/Federation war fought just prior to the events of the original series. IIRC Kirk was a junior officer during the war. I feel confident I could get ten or fifteen scenarios out of this project. After all, who doesn't like a good Fed/Klingon shoot-em-up? And it helps that I have a metric assload of ship designs available and already converted.

A smaller cource of inspiration would be the Unknown War, a.k.a. the Demon War. This war precedes the Four Year War and is fought by the Klingons on their front opposite "known space" where the Feds, Romulans, etc. reside. Starfleet calls this action the Unknown War because they can deduce the Klingons were busy on another front, but have no direct knowledge of the situation. To the Klingons these events are the Demon War, a crusade to push back an agressive monstrous race called the Kinshaya (Klingonish for "demons"). Little is known about the Kinshaya, save that they look like demons from Klingon myth and attack with utter ruthlessness. The one illo I have seen of them looks like a cross between Swamp Thing and a balrog. So anyway, the Klingons fought a desparate holding action against these guys, who attacked with no apparent provocation. The Demon War is one of those great "no diplomacy is possible because the enemy are such freaks" type war. The Kinshaya flit about in giant spheres with warp nacelles. As far as I can tell no stats have ever been published for their ships, leaving the field wide open for interesting designs.

Otus Shrine future updates
I'm trying to develop a plan for future updates to my Erol Otus Shrine (jrients.tripod.com/otus/otus.html). Here are my current ideas:

1) New front page. Most of the info on the current front page would be moved to the appropriate departments. I'd like a new centerpiece image, I just need a clean copy of the Deities & Demigods from which to scan an image off the back cover. The links that are bruied at the bottom of the page would be moved to a more visible location.

2) Minigames: Otus did some great work in some TSR minigames. His cover art for Vampyre is a classic.

3) Monster Cards: a great source for color Otus art.

4) An Erol Otus Miscellany: Dumping ground for anything I can't justify a whole page for.

5) Links page. There are a few other Otus sites out there, as well as the publishers once again putting Otus work on the covers of game products.