…and action!
Where have I been? What could possibly have drawn me away from the keyboard, the page, the work? Well, as usual, tons of stuff are going on. Party planning, cold and flu symptoms, national political turmoil, AMAs, and some 3D printing chaos as well. Keeping that schedule filled, trust. Today, some thoughts on a few cool games. Something about my new game system, some fiction for those who like a free story.
Ronin
For those who don’t know, Ronin is a beautiful MORK BORG hack—everything you expect from an MB Hack - style, flow, cleverosity. True to MORK BORG, the colors are bright, powerful, and engaging. Variety of classes, rules for crits (Broken Bodies), and Honor. Great for Samurai / Ninja fans. Moving to the top of my must-play list.
Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy: Player’s Tome Another win for the grognards and those who can’t let go or spend their time yelling at clouds. I’m kidding - this book is great. It’s the best of AD&D 1st Edition and AD&D 2nd Edition, streamlined and sorted. Charts galore, solid rules we’ve all seen before. After a cursory examination, I feel that I can certainly play this game. It looks like they might be using THAC0, or something similar. Just a quick way to date myself, there are times when I think people don’t even realize THAC0 has a zero, not an O. Fun art, it’s a win overall. A little more crunchy than Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, frankly. Something I find players aren’t often down for. But if you’ve got a curious crew and want some Old-School vibes for the D&D sesh, this is it!
Runeworks Games Updates
Shirts and other merch are soon to be available. Website work, SEO, and all that stuff.
The New Project: Burn Your Transponder I’m working on character creation for the new project. My inspirations are Cyberpunk, Traveller, Alien, Mothership, and so many others. In this character creation instance, I intend to make obvious differences between those who have money and those who do not. As well, there’s a distinction between those who grew up in zero gravity and those who did not.
Character creation is going to have multiple stages, representing the stages of development. For example, a character will have “grown up in a corporate station,” or “a colony, in a gravity well.” So, initial skills will be varied depending on where you grew up.
The next phase of character creation will focus on education - where, when, and how much. Maybe a character grew up in the belly of a vast hauler, half-orphan, half mechanical savant. This section is “what I want to be when I grow up.” Options include Rescue Search & Salvage, Mad Scientist, Corporate Soldier / Mercenary, Pilot, and more.
The final section of skill selection is called “Where I ended up…” Because we all know that no one really ends up in the job they were hunting for. Especially in this corporate privateer dystopia. This is my concern for the week. I’m outlining these elements and establishing charts and die rolls to make this random, with a wide variety of possible backgrounds. This game is going to be much more crunchy than MORK BORG or any of its variant hacks. The Shop It’s still under construction. I think a clever person might be able to find and place an order - and please do, the things needs to be tested - it’s not hidden, but it is “not launched.” A few more T-shirt designed have been added, there are a few more in the hopper. All of these products I’ve tested, I trust and stand by. The graphics I have for the shirts are rough - there’s a little color variation between the uploaded art and the color of the T-shirt, but I ordered and tested - they look great. So I’m not really worried about that for now.
Fiction: Setting Draft
I realize I went a bout this all wrong. I was going to tell my story objectively, from an outsider’s point of view. Realizing that I am an untrustworthy narrator, and that my command of prose might not be as vasty and clever as I once thought, we’re going to do the no-frills approach. We’re going to skip my leaving Earth and jump straight into the piracy. You’ll love this.
2138 C.E. A strange woman (I never met her, but by all accounts from fellow researchers and co-workers, 'strange' is the appropriate word), named Jan Kimbra, posted at a lonely research outpost near Kepler112-b, woke up to find thather research had changed. I now know this because I know who made the change. But at the time, it was terrifying to Kimbra, and she waited incorporate the new data into her research. Eventually, she did, and Dark Energy Sails were invented. They work like solar sails, except they don’t capture photon momentum for velocity. They are tuned by a specialist to “grip” magnetic waves, eddies, and currents caused by dark matter, and a multitude of other phenomena are harnessed, very much in the fashion of the old wind sail ships of Earth. These gravity sails, if large enough and handled properly, can potentially reach beyond light speed. This was a big deal.
A second wave, an additional human diaspora, set out into the dark reaches of space. New, faster, and better generations of ships were built, outfitted with sails and various other drives and means of propulsion scattered into the galaxy. The sails, though difficult to make and manage, bolstered commerce, colonization, mining, and fabrication in space. It was almost a golden age for humanity. The only problem was that our corporate masters had solidified their grip on space. “In the beginning, even the heavens had an owner.” I was a colonist, simple and ready to check out. Living in Downside Earth was like living in a cancerous soup of poor ideas and random toxins. Failing governments and poison seeping from every porous inch of concrete and capitalism. I’d actually won the Galactic Colonial Corporation lottery and was picked to fly out on a ship in three months. The lottery was used to balance out genetic diversity for generation ships, et cetera. I’d been suffering from an acute existential dread, in my cell-like apartment, where the neons blink pink, red, yellow. Too many stories up to see the ground, too many stories down to see the stars. A concrete and silicon limbo held in check by a universe of rewards and punishments.
I met Jane Hilden, her third alias, she assured me, onboard the Babyface Carloni. The Carloni was a squat dingy converter mega-hauler. I imagined it was used for carrying real manure to agri-stations. While it had been proven scientifically, shit is is shit, and corpses make fertilizer just as easily, some folks insisted on hauling in at least one load of cow shit - it was “tradition.”
Years later I learned that Jane, who had eventually adopted the pirate moniker of Sweet Jane, was on the lamb for a murder - sounded justified, but I was so strung out, I didn’t really care, either way. I’d been on my last inhaler of the narcis 3P (Purple Puff Power - I didn’t name the shit, some fucking egghead in a lab, whose imagination is on a chart in a text book somewhere clearly named this one.) Much less inspired that Sweet Janes contribution to the chemo-narco-uh-oh world. It turns out, I was on a colony ship with the woman who had invented GodSpit. Jane and I became great friends. I’ll admit I developed anexcellent and unhealthy crush on the woman - all science with the answers and Janey on the spot with a little something to take the edge off. I admit that at first, I was pushing my way into her orbit for drugs. Obviously. She was a totaly stranger.
She caught me sneaking morphine from the medical stores and told me to put it back, “I’ve got something so much better…”
We had a blast until pirates hit us. I felt like Jane was ready for it. As if this particular colony shipment was earmarked to be taken. I’m jumping all around - what you need to know now, is that Jane and I ended up in an escape pod after pirate hits and tossed the Babyface Carloni. It was a standard operation - hands up we only want your shit, sort of thing. But somehow it got fouled and people started killing. The short swords, the jahto, common amongst pirates because guns put holes in things (bad for ships), slipped their sheaths and started cutting. I myself had to beat a pirate to death with a crowbar. It was my first kill, and I felt awkward about it. Not bad, because he was trying to kill me, But awkward. All the others, even Jane, made it all look so easy.
Let me tell you, it’s not. The particular pirate I chose to burst my [sexist metaphor] on, would not die. He was armed with a flechette pistol (in short, the fucking thing shoots needles at 30 meters per second), and a jahto. I bashed the flechette pistol away, but I had to, well, crash through his faceplate with my crowbar. He kept twitching. I was sweaty, floating in zero-g flecks on perfect ruby sphere floated about in a galaxy of murder. I don’t feel bad - he was trying to kill us. But I feel something.
The pirates picked up Jane and I about 10 hours later. Which was good - we’d run out of drugs and things to talk about.
Fast forward a few years, and Jane is on the Most Wanted list from Endris Stellar and Averok, Pris & Gilder. Rough couple years back then. Jane took command of The Emerald Viper, while Kal McKyn was imprisoned on Last Stop Station on Europa’s -160 celsius surface.
After Kal McKyn, Sweet Jane took a leave of absence, and command of this lose fleet of pirates fell to Illabella Bosque and little old me.
GREAT APOLOGIES FOR THE DELAYED POST