Quote from: JohnnyWannabe;283150That's why I am always pushed to front of the line. ;p

You'll have to get behind me!

-clash

I put together an pre-beta-test package of IHW-StarCluster. I decided to go with three alternate T-R sub-systems, StarPerc - the original percentile system, StarPool - the dice pool system found in Sweet Chariot 2 and Blood Games II, and Star20 - a JAGS-dice roll-over system. All three are included.

Space Combat is not yet ready, although there is a Serpent Class Frigate with Rider ship and Tender. Mechanized Armor is also not yet ready. What is in the package is Chargen, Skills, System, Personal Armor, Weapons, the Frigate, and the Character worksheets, with three alternate cover sheets - one for each T-R sub-system. If you already have StarCluster 2, you can use anything in the main book or supplements to plug any gaps.

If anyone is interested in a pre-beta look, let me know via this thread, PM or my email if you know it. Any feedback would be useful!

-clash

We played a short session Saturday - Croc's player was out again, and Mittens' player had to leave early.

The group researches the pirate, Ragnar Austen. He has been coming in and out of the system for 7 years. He has a fair sized organization, more than one ship, and has so far been successful - raiding towns, capturing  cargo ships, and ransoming passengers.

Then they get permission to use the station's military grade deep scan radar. They are looking for moving contacts in the three areas the signal could have come from - Friday 13th, Leading Dark Belt area, and Trailing Dark belt Area.

In the Friday 13th area, there are 3 tagged (transponder marked) non-accelerating bodies, and three tagged accelerating craft, all tags being alien. That would probably be three Etvar ships, and three Etvar satellites.

In the Trailing Dark Belt Area, they see about 300 tagged bodies, and 4 tagged craft. The tagged bodies correspond to asteroid claim markers, and the tagged craft are registered mining craft.

In the Leading Dark Belt area, they see about 350 tagged bodies, one tagged craft, and 2 untagged craft. The tagged bodies are claim markers, the tagged craft is an asteroid miner, but the two untagged craft are unknowns.

They get permission to take out a typical mining craft - Y371 - with the crew of the courier - the Tercel - manning her. They head toward the leading belt area.

They move toward the closer of the two craft, The other craft sees them and closes, matching speeds. It's another mining craft. They watch as three men scramble out onto the hull. Curly orders Hick to get out and see what was happening. Hick gets out of his armor and into a spacesuit, and climbs out onto the hull. He sees a signal from the other guy's helmet lamp. Flash-flash code. Hick hasn't a clue what the return signal would be, so he flashes his lamp at random. LUCKILY, it was the proper signal, or they mistook it for the proper signal.

One of the three men aimed a gun at Hick and fired. A block came over, trailing a line. Hick caught it and secured the line to a cleat. The three men started loading big plasteel crates out of the airlock, stringing them to the line, and sending them over to Hick. Hick asks for help, and Curly sends Spacey out, who is also human in form. Slick, Croc, and Mittens are all non-human in shape.

As the crates are fed through the airlock, Mittens opens the first one - it's full of food - tins, frozen items, and freeze-dried items. It's all good quality, normal food - nothing contraband, Same with the second and third. By this time the fourth crate is on it's way, and the other ship disables the line and prepares to move off. Curly orders the gunner to fire the mining laser across the other ship's bows. The gunner screws up and hits the other ship, luckily not badly.

The team boards the other ship, to no resistance. Mittens catches one of the crew trying to flush something down the zero-G toilet, but it appears to be a personal stash of mildly illegal drugs, not enough to sell. Curly goes up to the control center, where he begins questioning the captain. The captain maintains they did nothing wrong - they interpreted Hick's signal as a request for food, so they sent some over. A humanitarian gesture.

Spacey confirms that the power trace to the transponder has been deliberately cut, though fudged to look like a fault. The captain claims it must be sabotage. The rest of the team reports. Nothing in the hull. No cargo at all except where the four crates of food were. Curly begins to Goad the captain, hoping he's blurt out something incriminating. Finally the captain blurts out "If you'd been who you were supposed to be.." then clams up.

Hick figures it out. "They're a supply ship, supplying Ragnar Austen!" Curly offers to let them go free if they help out the team. The Captain admits it. He's been supplying Austen for years irregularly. Curly strikes a deal - if they'll rendezvous with Austen, with the team on board, they'll be off the hook. The Captain agrees. Curly brings the team and the food crates aboard and tells their main ship to stay off.

Later, the other ship - a much bigger ship - noses in and matches speeds. Hick, Curly, and Spacey go out on the hull and rig a line, and begin passing over the crates. Inside crates two and three are Slick and Mittens, covered with food. The man uncrating crate two sticks his arm in, but misses Slick. At the countdown, Slick and Mittens erupt out of the crates in powered armor. Slick jumps up right under the jaw of the guy who almost touched her, smashing his skull and killing him instantly. She fires two bursts from her Ganglaser, and two more of the eight men around them go down dead. Mittens bursts up, cold-cocking the guy unpacking him. He uses his Ganglaser in two bursts and two more go down. The last two begin running up the corridor and around a corner.

Meanwhile, Hick, Curly and Spacey, all in vac suits, skid over on the line. One of the three men on the hull goes for the line, but Hick drills him and he drifts off, bubbling blood. Spacey nails the second guy, while the third man jumps into the airlock and begins to cycle it. As the doors close, Curly nails him three times in the faceplate with a burst from his Ganglaser, killing him with the first hit.

Mittens kicks in his overdrive and tears off after the two fleeing crew. The inner airlock door opens, and a dead man falls through, three holes neatly burned in the faceplate. Slick pulls him through - to allow the lock to function, as a blocked inner door prevents the outer door from opening - and cycles the lock.

Mittens runs down the two crewmen, killing them as he passes. He is automapping the ship as he runs, copying to Slick, who is the only other team member in combat gear.

Slick welcomes the rest of the team into the ship, and together they head off into the ship, following Mittens' map.

Play stopped, to resume next week.

One thing about the latest adventure which was needed was that it took place mostly in zero-G and in vacuum. The first adventure was too much like a Wild Blue SpecOps session, which I've done a lot of. This one is entirely in space and on-ship, and has an entirely different feel. The reason for the first mission being very Wild Blue-ish is that I was using the Wild Blue ruleset to supply missing parts of the new ruleset. Now I have a wider scope.

Next I have to test some new parts - vehicle and then space ship combat.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;283207If anyone is interested in a pre-beta look, let me know via this thread, PM or my email if you know it. Any feedback would be useful!

-clash

Chuck it my way, dude! I'm done with my SH playtest, and fluff-bashing aside (ooh, that sounded dodgy), i should have a session or two spare in the coming month.

Quote from: One Horse Town;283962Chuck it my way, dude! I'm done with my SH playtest, and fluff-bashing aside (ooh, that sounded dodgy), i should have a session or two spare in the coming month.

Sent! Along with a link for the venerable StarCluster 2. That handles a lot of background which isn't in the IHW: StarCluster material yet.

-clash

I worked on the Starship combat system yesterday. It will NOT be using the standard StarCluster method, as that was designed for small civilian ships. It would be awkward as hell to use for large military ships!

Also, I'll be statting ships differently. I have been building them from the Big Book o' Tech/Engineer's Guide, and will continue to do so, but I will only show how to stat a ship build in the new system based on the build once, so you can see how to build your own. Otherwise I will just show new system stats.

-clash

We played again Saturday. This time Mittens' player was sick and at the doctor's office. Since we had broken play in the middle of action, and since Mittens was in the middle of everything, we decided to switch to Navy personnel to try out the new space combat system.

The group made up new characters - all human this time, though from a variety of cultures. All were naval officers on the Frigate Adder. The Adder - like most big Navy ships -  uses a three watch system, eight hours on, 16 hours off. These guys were all from the same watch.

Dramatis Personae:

Lt. Yves DuPont from Glorianna. A member of Glorianna's French-cultural minority, Lt. DuPont is the senior Gunnery officer on the watch.

Lt. Commander Smoke Jaguar from Katamaran. He is also from a cultural minority, a tiny group of neo-Mayans who have rearranged their DNA to become more Mayan-looking for religious reasons. Lt. Cmdr Jaguar is the watch head of Scan.

Lt. Commander Leif Sharpnose from Loop. Leif's culture is based on Old Norse paganism, but they also had a large Icelandic and Norwegian ethnic base, so he looks the part. Lt. Cmdr Sharpnose is the pilot for the watch, and also watch Captain.

Lt. Sanca "Rusty" Cliff from Humanworld, the SaVaHuTa Human Capital in the Leda system. Like all of Humanworld, Lt. Cliff's ethnicity is from all over the Cluster, but his culture is Rastafarian. Lt. Cliff is the lead Engineer for the watch.

Since both Smoke Jaguar and Leif Sharpnose were of the same rank, we had to determine who was senior, and thus Watch Captain. Smoke Jaguar's player won the dice roll, but declined the honor to Leif Sharpnose.

Since I had thrown the last group directly into situations with no down time, the players had felt they "didn't really know" their characters. My group is used to frequent periods of downtime where they can explore their characters, and I had not given their SpecOps guys any such downtime. I decided therefore to open up with such a downtime.

I told them they had in their hands a week's liberty. They were now on the outside of the lock leading to the Adder, on Aztec Orbital above the planet Aztec, and they were free to do whatever they wanted. Aztec is the system developed in the main StarCluster book, so I was familiar with it.

They first went to the nearest bar, where they knocked back a few drinks while they decided what they would do. They decided they wanted to meet some girls and go dancing. They looked for a nightclub, and were intrigued to find one which featured grav dancing.

They entered the ballroom. Around a central area with tables rotated a circle of disks, which also spun around their own axes. There were six levels of these disks, each circle rotating and spinning faster than the last. The dancers leapt from disk to disk, level to level, as they wished. The PCs met various young ladies and began dancing with them, until they settled on their favorites. Yves ended up with Mona, Smoke with Ciara, Leif with Liana, and Rusty with Bertrice at the end of the night. I randomly rolled the ladies' wealth, and Liana came out as extremely rich. Liana proposed that the group spend the week together at her home on  planet. She had a private yacht to take them down. They all accepted, as they enjoyed each others' company.

Aztec is a dry planet with a very thin atmosphere, but the Aztec colony occupied a deep rift valley across the equator, so deep the atmosphere was at near normal pressure at the bottom. Liana's house was halfway down a cliff - a kilometer up from the bottom and a kilometer down from the top - in a gorge cut by the salty river connecting the rift's several Bitter Seas. Beside them thundered an enormous waterfall, where the Balearic Sea emptied into the Adriatic, the lowest Bitter Sea.

The house was shaped like a fan jutting out from the cliff wall, with wedge shaped bedroom suites arcing out from a central common area. The middle suite was unusual - the floors, outer walls, and furniture were of transparent plasteel. Even the bathroom fixtures were of this material. Liana offered this suite to whoever wanted it. Both Leif and Smoke were intrigued by this room, and a dice roll was made in character, Smoke Jaguar winning the cast. Smoke Jaguar and Ciara both loved the room - Smoke Jaguar's mystic side coming to the fore as they took ritual peyote and sported above the coiling mists of the canyon.

Over the next few days they went swimming and waterskiing, dancing in the nearby city of Venizia, fishing in the freshwater streams that fed the salty seas, and, of course, sex. In my games, we draw the curtain beyond flirting, but this is all outside the scope of the game itself. The rest of this was sometimes played in character, sometimes just mentioned in passing.

On day four, they got a call to immediately report to the Venizia shuttleport. Their liberty was canceled due to an emergency. No other explanation was given. The group said goodby sadly, gifts were given, and the group boarded the Adder's Lighter waiting for them.

I'll continue in the next post.

As soon as the last of the liberty crew were aboard, the Adder dropped away from the orbital and boosted out. The Captain summoned the officers to a meeting. He informed them that several hours ago, the relay bouy at the In-Jump Point from the Sister system had registered a large, ship entering the system without transponder signals. Several minutes later, a second ship dropped into the system, also without transponder signal. Moments later, the bouy ceased broadcasting.

Smoke Jaguar summoned up the scan data from the bouy, and examined it. The two ships were of the same size, based on the entrance duration, and the missile that took out the bouy was a standard SaVaHuTa military M/AM weapon, based on the approach speed.

The Captain noted that taking out the bouy was not the act of a peaceful bunch transiting the system, and asked the officers for ideas. They suggested three. Given the likelihood that the vessels were SaVaHuTa Navy or member Planetary Defense Space Forces, they thought it could be a rogue group from within  the military, or terrorists who had somehow stolen or coerced such vessels, or maybe some SaVaHuTa Black Op.

The Captain called for a vote as to the one they felt most likely, and the first two tied while the Black Op idea came far behind. The Captain concurred, saying it agreed with his judgment. He called for another vote on the more liekly of the two scenarios, and the results came back slightly in favor of the Rogue ships. The Captain again agreed, as this also matched his gut feeling. They would proceed on the assumption that these ships were Rogue, but keep in mind the strong possibility that they were co-opted or somehow stolen.

As they headed out towards the Jump Point, Smoke Jaguar noticed that they crossed the trail of the two ships. Using the unusual facilities of the Adder - the ship was equipped with Spectral Analysis sensors and program which could even match individual ships to their characteristic trail emission signature, let alone find emission trails, if the trails were fresh as these were. After analysis, Smoke identified the ship class, SaVaHuTa Navy Brilliant Class cutters of 1500 tons apiece, but could not match the individual ships. On request, he passed the data to Leif, who broke the emission trails down.

The ships were the SaVaHuta Navy cutters Diamond and Aurora, according to their last information, supposedly at Sector Headquarters above Glorianna. The Captain mentioned that he had gone to the academy with the captain of the Diamond, Jack O'Rourke. When Lt. Cmdr Sharpnose asked if in his estimation Commander O'Rourke could have gone rogue, the Captain hesitated for a moment, then nodded. O'Rourke was the type that could, under the right circumstance, turn rogue. Lt. Cmdr Sharpnose then added that the emission trails showed an unusual proportion of water in composition. Lt. Cliff suggested that this was done to sustain speed while husbanding anti-matter. In his estimation, the ships were running low on anti-methane.

There we ended the session. The players voted to continue this Navy segment when Mittens' player returned next week. They thought they had a good hold on their new characters, and wanted to play them for a bit before returning to the SpecOps guys.

What hasn't come through in this actual play was that this was one of the funniest sessions we'd ever had. We were continually laughing our asses off at the antics of the player characters. An example - throughout their stay in the cliff house, Rusty's girl Bertrice had worn him down with bedroom games. He was trying desperately to keep up, and continually complained of this to the others. When the call came to return early to the Adder, Rusty said "Oh shit! I just took viagra!"  - which cracked everyone up.

An extremely fun session! Until next week!

Here's the map of the Aztec colony from the StarCluster 2 core book. This should help in visualizing it.


Adriatic is the lowest sea, with the small sea of Marmara somewhat higher. Balearic and Aegean are higher yet. The small Alboran and Ligurian Seas are somewhat higher, with the Tyrrhenian, Cretan, and Ionian Seas the highest of all. The higher the sea is, the colder and thinner the air. Most of the tourists stay around the Adriatic and Marmara, where the air is thick enough to breathe without respirators.

-clash

I finished the first draft of the space combat system last night. Man! What a piece of work! There are so many variables to cut down to size, yet keep the players involved... I expect to hone this down as it's playtested, but this is something I can playtest.

-clash

The Space Combat rules have met with the approval of Klaxon, my son and most helpful critic. He pointed out that I either need to put starship construction rules into the game, or include a slew of varied ships. I opted for the slew of ships, as the StarCluster 2 starship design rules available in various forms work just fine, and the page count of this baby is growing exponentially. I included a section on conversion from StarCluster 2E stats for those who have the starship construction rules already.

The new rules conceptually borrow heavily from the ship to ship rules of In Harm's Way: A Napoleonic Naval RPG. In detail they are very different, and are closer to the rules for air combat in IHW: Wild Blue. One good thing is that they are very scalable - you can use the same rules for everything from fighters to dreadnaughts. One neat trick I came up with is using range for some different applications - like Stealth coatings. Effectively, the Stealth Coating changes your range. Neat multiple use of a mechanic, I think, avoiding yet another bonus or penalty to be included in the roll.

I'm going to include the section on the setting from StarCluster 2E, straight up. I can't think of a shorter way to present it, and it's necessary for running the game. For one thing, unlike every other SF game I know, you can have multiple "States" with varying allegiances within a system. This has to do with the pattern and nature of colonization from Earth in the Diaspora.

I may include a different example system than the one I used in StarCLuster 2E though. I'm thinking of Cry-In-The-Dark system. Nicely varied, but a different flavor than Aztec system.

-clash

Well, we had our space combat Saturday. The combat took far longer than I would have liked, but this was a try out, and much time was spent looking up, explaining, and changing rules. The good news is that the space combat worked just like I expected. There were a few rough areas, which is to be expected in an alpha test, but everything we found was minor, and easily enough changed to work when we came to it.

The PCs determined that the two Cutters were heading for the Diasporan Community's Descartes Station, orbiting the planet Retron. Retron and it's major moon Bailiff are DC dependencies - Retron as a Backwards affiliate member, and Bailiff as a protectorate. One of the PCs thought it was possible that the ships could intend to take Descartes station, pretending to be under SaVaHuTa orders, and thus precipitate a war with the DC. They certainly needed AM fuel.

The Captain ordered two of the three Rider Ships to delay the two rebel ships until the Adder could arrive. The two were the S-3449 "R2D2" under Marine Major Dindar Hoden, and the S-3450 "One Eye Jack" under Navy Lt. Julio Molina y Alvarado. Under 8G accelleration, the stealthed Rider Ships just make it to Descates in front of the two Cutters. Without waiting to ascetain facts, as time was short, the two ships made a surprise attack on the Diamond, the lead Cutter, using their single Torpedoes and their Cogar. The attack was effective, as - unable to acquire the stealthed Rider Ships, the Diamond pulled off the Descartes, followed by the Aurora.

The two Riders continued to harry the Diamond - inflicting minimal damage, but drawing unamed fire as their stealth coatings and great acceleration prevent the Diamond's or Aurora's Scans from locking onto them. Eventually the Adder arrived in range, and rocked the Aurora with a first strike, crippling their Shields, hammering their Armor, and destroying two Laser Pods and tho Missile Launchers. The third Rider, the S-3448, joined the other two in harrying the Diamond, which  switched targets to the much easier to hit Adder.

Each round, the Adder focused on the Aurora, gradually cracking their defences and hitting their drives. The three Rider ships did the same to the Diamond, though the damage was mostly reparable, unlike the hammering the Aurora was taking. Both Cutters were mostly unable to penetrate the Adder's Shields, and Damage Control kept the damage they did inflict to minor ablations. By the time the Diamond was dead in space, its drives unable to function, it surrendered to the Rider Ships. The S-3448 took their surrender while the One Eye Jack and R2D2 took on the Aurora.

The Aurora's damage was far more permanent than that on the Diamond, most of which could be repaired, but their most deadly weapons, their Particle Accelerators, were still working, hammering the Adder's defences, always on the verge of breaking them down. The R2D2 got in a hellish critical, destroying their drives almost entirely - The main drive could be repaired to 1G max, and Jump Drive and A-Grav were completely destroyed. The crew of the Aurora mutinied, killed their Rogue Captain, and surrendered to the Adder.

The rest of the session was weeks later, the resumption of their Liberty on Aztec. I'll post that later.

-clash

Here's an illo of a Rider Ship:



-clash

The gang went back, resuming their liberty, after first repairing what could be repaired aboard the captured Cutters. This time they went down to stay with Julio's girl, Anna Maria, in the City of Mists. This is a floating city on the Adriatic Sea, and Anna Maria's house is built up over the hull of a barge, connected to her surrounding barges by walkways and cables. some of the rooms are without walls, cloaked only in the omnipresent fog of the city.

Rusty Cliff was enjoying the after effects of ingesting large amounts of peyote with his GF in one of these rooms, courtesy of Smoke Jaguar, who is trying to recruit him into his Neo-Mayan cult. Suddenly the mists swirled and took him off, naked into the mists. He was enjoying the sensation while still conscious. His GF, Bertrice, ran to Smoke Jaguar's room, unsure whether it was a hallucination or real. Smoke found tracks of booted feet on the damp floor, walking from and back to the open edge. The boots matched those of skinnable Marine armor. The assumption now was that Rusty had been kidnapped by a Marine in active fog camo for reasons unknown. This is where the previous week's session ended.

Saturday's session began with Dindar made a Locate PSI check on rusty's necklace - the only thing he was wearing -and got the direction, so the gang followed in a cab. Unfortunately, while they were moving in, the trace went ballistic up overhead - the Marine had decamped with Rusty to orbit. They called in to the Adder, and the Captain told them to come up and locate Rusty from the ship. The Captain had been contacted by the kidnappers, and the ransom was to be the Captain of the Diamond, currently in the Brig.

They returned to the ship, and tried to figure out a way to find out where Rusty was in the stew of space junk orbiting the colony. Finally, Dindar burned out his stats using Telepathy to contact Rusty. Rusty was conscious. He had a small window in his little orbital, and had looked out the window. The orbital was seemingly motionless over the surface, and he could just see the Rift of the colony on the horizon to his left. This gave them a good position - He was in geo-synchronous orbit, which meant that he was over the equator at a known height and speed, and the Rift on the horizon gave them the angle. The orbital was at the intersection of the angle and the geo-synchronous orbit.

They approached the orbital in Julio's Rider ship, the One-Eye Jack. The Jack's stealth EM coating allowed them to approach very closely. The orbital was guarded by five jury-rigged one-man fighters cobbled together from repair pods. Yves sent out two missiles which knocked out two of the fighters, and Julio got two more with the Cogar before the last fighter had a chance to respond. The fifth fighter got a hit in on the One-Eye Jack, but the shields deflected it. Yves nailed him before another shot could be made.

Meanwhile, Rusty was being flung about his room with the shock of the M/AM
missiles exploding around him, and didn't notice the camo'd Marine enter his room until an arm went around his neck. LUCKily, Rusty slipped out before anything happened, as the One-Eye Jack made it's final approach, and the Marine decided he had best face the assault prepared. He left the room just before the station was depressurized. Julio had used the defensive shield lasers to cut open the hull of the orbital.

The gang assaulted through the breach, led by Leif Sharpnose, the XO. Leif was hit by fire, and saw the Marine lurking in his camo. Leif shot back and hit the Marine with a grazing stun, which the Marine shook off. Smoke also saw the Marine, and hit him with his sidearm, and automatic with AP bullets. Dindar hit him with a stun gun, which put him out of action. Smoke walked up to him, realizing he hadn't returned fire since the first hit, and read off the suit number so he could immobilize the suit.

They realized Rusty was in the undamaged portion of the orbital - they had hit the other section because of that - but was naked and unable to face vacuum. They had a spare suit ready. They cut though the vacuum interlock in the bulkhead door then opened the door, depressurizing the room. Rusty, knowing what to do from drill, evacuated all the air in his lungs as the atmospere streamed through the door. By the time they could get to him, he had only seconds left.

Smoke jammed Rusty's legs into the bottom of the suit, while Leif crammed his arms in the top. His right arm wouldn't go in, so Leif broke it while stuffing it in the sleeve. Lief got a point of Practicality there. Dindar slapped on the helmet just in time to prevent permanent damage.

Notice was handed out to one and all, and the session ended.

Next week, we play test Fighters and Carriers, but I won't be posting any more. It's stupid talking to myself - I know what went on.

-clash