Random Thoughts & Links for 2/10/2023

Here are some links and thoughts for Friday.

- I enjoyed these two looks at a boardgame of the Battle of Poltava. I've long been very interested in Russian history, especially the reign of Peter I, first emperor of Russia.

Battle Of Poltava

Battle of Poltava 1709

Both give a good look at how to use game design and rules to channel a game down a specific path. Historically, the Swedes wanted to bypass some Russian redoubts and assault the Russian main force . . . but units misunderstood their orders and tried to assault them, throwing the plan off and - eventually - helping the Russians to achieve victory. The rules of this game force you to play out that misunderstanding, yet don't essentially force you to lose.

- I love these posts. I especially love how unfair the stats are. You need +1 weapons to hit Iuz, but he can create an Anti-Magic Shell at will which will make your weapons no longer magical . . . so you can't hit him. It's only a fair-ish fight if he decides he wants one, and only as long as he wants it to be.

Let's Fight Iuz

- The March Harrier campaign has begun. And much like - okay, exactly like - my two Traveller campaigns, they feature Vargr and the party almost immediately thumbs their collective noses at local authorities and culture and resorts to crime. My experience with Traveller is this:

"We're running a merchant campaign."
"Okay, we casually resort to crime in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . go!"

March Harrier Session 1
March Harrier Session 2

- I like weird henchmen. d4 Caltrops aids in this.

D100 Henchmen Foibles

- Little things I didn't know. I was re-reading a Glen Cook short story compilation. In it is a short story set in the Dread Empire that he wrote while staying with Fritz Leiber, while Leiber was writing "Swords Against Death." I quoted from The Bazaar of the Bizarre from that collection a week ago. He mentioned them featuring each other's characters in their stories. So is it possible that Zindahjira, the Silent One - described by Aristithorn of Necromnos as "Biggest windbag in the trade" - is Ningauble of the Seven Eyes under a different name? A thin thread . . . I'd be curious to ask Glen Cook that.

A GURPS Traveller campaign

I'm excited by this:

GURPS Traveller: March Harrier Campaign Intro

I can't commit to the the game - I have too much going on with work and training and writing and other projects. But I do love Traveller so I will avidly follow along with the game.

I'm reposting it here to amplify the reach of the signal, in case anyone reading this blog but not always this blog missed it. I missed it until today myself!

3D Beowulf

This is pretty cool. Not for me, but pretty cool. A 3-D Class A Free Trader.


I have the SJG Beowulf deck plans in 28mm hexes somewhere.

GURPS Traveller for 4th edition?

I know this exists somewhere, but I can't seem to find it . . . did someone do a conversion document for GURPS Taveller 3rd edition to 4th edition? Unofficial or official?

Random Links for Friday 7/1/2022

- Still finishing up The Traveller Book. The experience system is interesting. Basically, if you spend 4 years and make an 8+ roll on 2d, you can get a +1 to a skill. But then it goes away, unless you roll another 8+ and spend another 4 years to cement it in. So getting from basic familiarity with, say, a Vacc Suit or a Revolver to enough skill for a +1 to rolls takes 8 years and solid dedication. Yowza. More amusing is that a low Intelligence gives a bonus, and a very low Intelligence a big bonus, to that roll . . . to improve Strength, Endurance, and Dexterity. The less intelligent you are, the more dedicate you are to the gym . . . geez, I forgot how deep the jocks vs. geeks rift was. It's codified with rules in Traveller.

- I can vouch for a lot of these - 100 true murder hobo stories.

"There is nothing a murder hobo hates more than imprisonment. They will fight to the death rather than be captured and pronounce it like its a personality trait. "

- A look at Talisman. I play the computer version sometimes, still.

- Big Summer Sale at Warehouse23, with freebies in the physical orders. Most of what I wrote is on sale.

- Summer is a rough time for gaming. We're mid-delve and don't have time to play again thanks to everyone's schedule for a couple weeks and then due to mine for a few more.

Sample Character: Alexander Lascelles Jamison

I like sample characters and examples of play. Growing up as a 9-10 year old trying to learn to play games, these were a window into a world I wanted to be part of.

I still love them. I couldn't wait, upon re-reading Traveller via my first read of The Traveller Book, to get to Alexander Lascelles Jamison.

I wasn't disappointed re-reading him.

Some reactions:

- andi jones pointed this out at a game session along time ago - ALJ is 38, and when we started gaming this was so old. It was hard to imagine even playing somone who was 20. In my 20s, "35" was code for a character who was a long-time old-timey vet. 38? 38?

Doesn't seem that old, now. Stopped seeming that old when I hit 30, actually. It seems like a good age to go solo and really go for it in the Traveller universe.

- What's the average human lifespan in the TU? It lacks a lot of modern technology, being a now-retro version of the future, but it does have some pretty good medical tech. How long do people live? You must retire after 7 terms unless you keep rolling 12s on Reenlistment, which is 46. That implies you have a relatively low lifespan for such good technology.

- I like how much emphasis they put into the number rolls. When the player rolls a 5, +2 DM for intelligence, to get a 7, the minimum to join the Merchants, he "just barely manages" to talk his way onto a merchant ship crew. A 3 (+2 for intelligence = 5) on 5+ survival roll means he experienced danger, but a 9 (+2 = 11) means a quiet 4-year period. The rolls tell the story just as the results do. Something like this is fun, but I'd rather hand-roll (or VTT-roll) up a guy and have the numbers matter.

- I know there is a house rule somewhere for surviving a failing Survival roll instead of being dead (and thus needing a new character.) Anyone know of a published one?

- I never really deeply loved randomly rolling for skills. Don't get me wrong - it's fun as hell, and it keeps everyone from min/maxing around certain weapons and skills . . . but it does seem like you should get to choose some. If I set out at 18 to be a pilot, I could have had a pilot's license by now. I learned a lot I didn't expect to learn, but I also learned things I set out to do. I didn't randomly roll "Japanese" on my language list - I had to make that happen and did a lot of work and spent a good bit of time and money to make it happen. I'd like some of that.

- I need to did up my GURPS Traveller book and look at conversions. It would be a lot of fun to make people roll up Traveller guys and then manually convert them - probably with customization - to GURPS since it's an easier game system to run at this point.

- I'm still a litttle annoyed with the merchants for forcing ALJ into retirement. One more term and one more roll would have paid off that ship!

- Maybe Kevin Murphy could play ALJ in the Traveller movie.



- I have no idea how to pronounce "Lascelles" but I know I'd do so differently than 10-or-11-year old me would have done so.

I really enjoy this game, for as little as I got to run it.

Traveller Book - arrived!

There was a major sewer issue in Stericksburg, today, which precluded me from getting more than a few free minutes today. That said, my copy of The Traveller Book showed up:

Shiny and new!

The printing is very well done, from what I can see. Margins aren't too tight to the binding - which renders books functionally unreadable for me as I'm too frustrated to keep reading. The type is clear, the pictures aren't too fuzzy or black (although they seem a bit darker than I've seen in Starter Traveller.) I was surprised to see red as well as black and white. I've added this to my "to read" list, right near the top. I'm excited to see how Traveller was in one book I felt even back in the day I should have picked up.

The Traveller Adventure not in POD?

So, why is The Traveller Book available as a POD, but The Traveller Adventure is not?

I'm not even sure why that would be the case. Isn't the formatting you'd need to do to put out a proper, well-formatted PDF just a step or two away from doing a POD?

I'd be very happy to also have a copy of The Traveller Adventure. Maybe then I could run a side campaign of 1st edition Traveller.

I mean, or GURPS Traveller, but part of me really likes Traveller chargen and the damage system of Traveller - which leads to more incapacitation than automatic death, in my experience. But I have the tools on hand for either.

Links for 5/6/2022

A few links for Friday:

- This post convinced me to finally add a copy of The Traveller Book to my Traveller collection. I have the Deluxe Traveller books, the much less good Starter Traveller books (I still feel a little ripped off by that . . . it was $12 when that was a lot of money for me to save up . . . I should have gotten Deluxe for $20 a few months of saving later.)

It didn't hurt that I had a gift card just sitting here collecting literal dust.

I will probably never play Traveller, but, like Star Frontiers, holds a special place in my heart. Both really fit what I like to see in my "hard" science fiction. I was really happy to get a chance to do some editing on some Traveller books for GURPS, too.

On a tangent, Star Ace is what I like to see in "soft" science fiction. Kelibor are so fun - giant psionic bears - but so, so costly in GURPS terms.

- I wondered how Bones VI was doing. It's over. I just lost track of when that would be . . . I was out, anyway. It looks like it did about half of what Bones V did - ~9K backers and $1.7 million vs. ~18.5K backers and $3.3 million. I wonder if that's a blip or a market or demand change.

- I might need this book:

(Amazon.com affiliate link)

You know, for times when you can't remember how Dorcas connected to Severian or what cacogen means. A searchable Kindle or PDF version would be most useful, a print book most enjoyable.

- Just a note that I almost forgot to go check Forge for updates. I try to regularly update just because I don't want to suffer old bugs longer than necessary.

- I'm thinking I should finally re-install and play Torment: Tides of Numenera. Maybe after the NHL playoffs.

Why don't I do this more often? Multiple languages, one race

In my non-dungeon-bashing, non-DF GURPS fantasy games, I tend to make languages more of a campaign issue. In DF Felltower, quite the opposite. But in general?

Regional languages? Check.

Foreign visitors with odd languages? Check.

Languages changing over time? Check.

High and vulgate versions of some languages? Check.

One thing I don't do enough of, though, is different languages for other races. If you speak Elvish, that covers the elves in the bounded sandbox of my campaign area. I don't put in multiple languages for non-human races, most of the time.

Re-reading Traveller Alien Module 3: Vargr has made that omission clear.

"There are hundreds of Vargr languages [. . .] The most commonly encountered language in the Spinward Marches and adjacent regions is Gvegh. Counting the related languages Gvegh-Aek, Kithnour, Uedhu, and Taeksu, the Gvegh language family is spoke by about 60% of the Vargr encountered in the Marches and neighboring Gvurrdon sector."

The Vargr make the Aslan, with their singular language and culture, seem just a little more alien from them.*

This is a reminder for me for next time - add some variations.

Immortal (or nearly so) Elves could have a unified language of great complexity and historical weight. It could be mastered over centuries of study and use, and while non-elves learn just the vulgate form, the elves learn the full version and are able to convey cultural meanings that others don't live long enough to master. Or they may speak many, many different elven languages, each as complex and nuanced as the next - perhaps by family group, or political or cultural group, or by hobby and interest. They have the time to learn them, so why not? Both fit.

Orcs don't have time to be unifying all of their lanuages - if they're short-lived like I often make them. They're likely to have tribal languages with a lot of overlap in the middle, especially if you use an AD&D-like approach of mutually hostile orc tribes.

Dwarves might have clan tongues, or be that race that has One Correct Way of doing things. Depends on your take - are they insular and family oriented, or feel themselves one very tight, unified culture?

And yeah, to my players, maybe you speak Manticorian, but do you speak Manticorese, it's closely-related but not identical language? Heh.

Something I'll have to make more use of, if/when I run another fantasy game. Or, given the reminder from the Traveller book, a sci-fi game.**

This does get pricey with GURPS 4th edition's language pricing, but that can be addressed with a simple switch - make all languages both written and spoken for the same price, so they're 1/2/3=3 not 1-3/1-3=6 total points to master. Learning a few 2-point languages isn't a big thing, and having enough to get by in emergencies in a lot of languages is pretty cheap. Illiteracy is simply a quirk-level disadvantage for a language, and "broken" assumes illiteracy.

* As an aside, I'm pleased that I still have my copy of Traveller Alien Module 1: Aslan. I knew I'd purchased it, and read it, but I hadn't laid eyes on it in years. I was relieved when I was able to just pull it out of the Traveller pile.
I'm only sorry I don't have all of the Alien Modules.

** I've done it before, but I'm more "hard space opera" and a lot less "fantasy with blasters," and I want vac suits and engines that need overhauls and maybe some weird psi-like powers of limited effect, and generally my players want to run Jedi. It's not a good mix.

Vargr

I really need to get the rest of my GURPS 3e books out of storage, but I don't actually have room for them on my book shelves. One of the ones I need to get back out is this one:



I want to read it after I finish re-reading this:



I recently got a copy from Noble Knight.

I had access to this back in the day, when I ran a two person campaign for one of my current players, and one of my former players. I can't put a finger on the year, but I was in High School, as that's when I first became friends with one of my current players. I think the copy of this book belonged to the player who ran a Vargr. For all I know, he sold the book (likely) and this is that exact book (unlikely, although it's happened before.)

When I've had a chance to re-read it completely, I'll do a review. I really, really like the Vargr. They're such an interesting race, and, like most Traveller races, they're both accessible and alien. That's a tough combo. The rules around them make it easier to run them as written than as men-in-suits.

I'm looking foreward to finishing a re-read and getting into making some Vargr Corsairs. And to be honest, having done graduate school work in Linguistics, I'm way more interested in the whole section on the Vargr language!

(I almost forgot - here's a rock opera about a genetically modified vargr! I wear my The Lord Weird Slough Feg "Traveller" t-shirt to Gamma Terra games sometimes.)