I ran my first IHW: StarCluster adventure Saturday. The first half of the session was players gearing up - the armor was new to everyone, and it took some time - but one of the players missed the last session, and had to make a character, and another player decided to drop the character he made last session and create a new one, both of which took up too much time. One player didn't make it - work emergency - so I was playing his character. The character dropped was the winged bioroid - the player decided to go with a human male. The new character was an uplifted housecat named Felix Jinx.
The mission was a hostage-rescue. At least 50 well-equipped, well-trained, politically-motivated men had taken 35 SaVaHuTa citizens - some of them very well connected - hostage at a mountain resort on an earth-like world. SaVaHuTa citizenship is like knighthood in the UK, given sparingly, and with at least the semblance of great service. The leader of the group elected to use drop capsules to insert at dawn, on the other side of a mountain from the resort. On the drop, the missing player's character fumbled his Drop Cap roll, so I ruled he was not there when the capsules broke open and the PCs grav-chuted the rest of the way in. Easy out for me! An attack copter - one of three patrolling - saw something and came to investigate. The PCs managed to evade detection by the helo - one by diving into a small, deep mountain lake - and they gathered together.
They decided to wait until dark where they were, but after a while, they sighted a foot patrol coming over the ridge to the north. The PCs set an ambush. The point man of the patrol saw something funny, but one of the PCs used a LUCK point to convince him it was just an animal. They let the point man walk through the ambush, and the robot took him out with a broken neck. The rest of the patrol almost saw him drag the point man into the bushes, but failed to spot him. The PCs took out the rest of the patrol - two dead, two unconscious.
After a successful interrogation, the leader told Slick to kill the two unconscious guys. Slick, the VaHu, asked if that was a direct order, because she wouldn't do it otherwise. The officer said no, but it had to be done. Hick, the new human, did the dirty deed. Both got a point of Practicality. They buried the bodies on the bank of the stream that drained the lake, but the robot, Melissa, didn't do a good job, which became important later.
At this point, the leader told Slick and Hick, who were both excellent swimmers, to infiltrate the resort by going downstream to the big lake and swimming in. The rest of the gang would go over the ridgeline and attack the camp from the east.
Hick had been reporting in to the enemy's base as the foot patrol, using their frequency and codewords, but they had begun tracking him by triangulation, and knew he was not where he was supposed to be. When asked about this, Hick pleaded that his positioning device screwed up, and they had gotten lost, so the base sent out a search party, without telling him.
As they came down the banks of the stream and were approaching the big lake, the search party arrived just downstream from the west. Standing there in plain sight, Slick had to scramble to the edge of the wood where here active cammo skin could help her, while Hick, who was wearing an active ghillie cammo skin, crouched down and became to the eye a boulder covered in moss, lichens, and weeds. Realizing the search party was tracking them by the captured radio, Hick used a LUCK to have the body that Melissa had done a poor job burying float by at just this moment. He tossed the radio onto the body.
The search party spotted the body and hauled it in. It had a broken neck - the point man for the other patrol - so at first they thought he had slipped and fallen, but they began arguing that that was impossible - the sequence wouldn't work. As they discussed this, they failed to notice Hick in his ghillie skin, one of them even leaning against the boulder as they argued. Slick, listening to the conversation, decided to take the opportunity for surprise. Alerting Hick, she sniped two of the patrol as Hick, jumping up in the middle, wasted the other three. They dragged the bodies under the trees and, reaching the big lake, started the long swim. Session over.
Things worked very well! The players loved the new armor and all its capabilities, and really got into character. The discussion on killing the prisoners was very cool for all of us. Melissa and Felix were both easily distracted - Felix as a consequence of being a cat, Melissa because of aberrations in her robot brain. They all worked well together when they had to, though! All in all, an excellent start for a new game!
-clash
BTW, a couple bits of the Armor rules came in REALLY handy in this game, and I forgot to mention them! Hick's suit was a Scout suit, which has several encoded Comm channels. Hick used one slot for Monitoring, which searches for active channels and monitors them for you. Using this, he was able to figure out what the Base and Search party were up to in real time. The boss decided to fill four slots of his Comm lots with one-on-one side channels, which allowed him to talk to up to four different men at once without anyone else hearing it. Both turned out way cool in game.
In disguising himself as a weed and moss covered rock, Hick used the Freeze program, which held his powered armor absolutely motionless. This also came in handy as the Search Party member who used the "boulder" to lean against found out to his sorrow.
It's these little things that let you know the effort you put in your design wasn't wasted. :D
-clash
You want some more playtest input, Clash? If you do, e-mail me the relevant files. I should have a spare session or two in the next month between SH playtest and starting a new WFRP game.
One good turn deserves another and all that.
Quote from: One Horse Town;281826You want some more playtest input, Clash? If you do, e-mail me the relevant files. I should have a spare session or two in the next month between SH playtest and starting a new WFRP game.
One good turn deserves another and all that.
I will, but not yet, Dan. It's not ready for beta testing yet. Much of it is in note and "mental note" form at the moment. This initial Alpha testing gets it into shape as an actual game, at which point the system should be solid enough for anyone to run a game.
Thank you for the offer though! :D
-clash
Okey, dokey. :) Sent you a PM, BTW.
Quote from: One Horse Town;281831Okey, dokey. :) Sent you a PM, BTW.
Actually, in a couple weeks, things could be firmed up enough to send out. I'll keep you in touch.
-clash
Second playtest session:
As Hick and Slick swam up the lake to the resort compound, Curly (the Mission commander), waited with Spacey and Mittens at the river just beyond the camp. Curly and Mittens noticed an armored hand sticking up from the muck on the river. Curly went towards it, but a rubber boat with a four man patrol was seen coming downriver by Mittens, and the commander went into - and under- the water. Mittens found a hiding space, but Spacey - true to her name - had been skylarking. She walked over to Mittens and asked "What are you doing crouching down there, Mittens?" Mittens grabbed her and pulled her down, but it was too late. The sentry on thoi boat saw this and the rubber boat turned in to shore as the crew cocked their weapons and called into base. Curly, using his combat knife, ripped through eight feet of rubber underwater, and the four men flipped sideways into the drink. One man staggered ashore while the others slashed about, getting their bearings.
Mittens and Spacey shot the one coming ashore, while Curly took out one of the guys in the water with his combat knife. The two others gained shallow water and began fighting back, hitting Mittens, but missing Spacey, but they both fell to a hail of bullets from the two. Curly rejoined them and told them to get across the river and fight openly now that surprise was gone. Mittens noticed the armored hand again and tried to pull it from the muck, but couldn't as he was wearing unpowered Speed Armor. The two others pulled out the missing Captain Crock, who was unconscious. they woke him and started to go, but just then they noticed two attack helos boring in on them, one half a kilometer away, the other just at a kilometer.
Curly was the only one of the four who had a heavy weapon, a shoulder mounted rocket launcher, but the the helos both got off a brace of rockets before he could target them. Three rockets missed, but knocked the team down with their concussion, but the fourth hit square in the middle. Mittens, using his extraordinary leaping ability and the Speed Suit's A-grav flight capability, jumped out of the blast radius and across the river. Spacey successfully found cover behind a big tree, but the tree itself was knocked over, pinning her to the ground otherwise unhurt. Curly and Crock got slammed, with shrapnel penetrating both their armors. Crock was hurt bad, though he managed to keep his feet. Curly was just hindered, and he shot down one of the helos despite his wounds.
At this point Hick and Slick arrived at the base. There some ten men were running towards the big garage type building adjoining the two main resort buildings, while the ground-to-orbit shuttle was beginning to lift off on A-grav, and more men poured northeast toward the rest of the team. Slick had training in flying atmospheric craft, so Hick told her to take the shuttle
while he took ot the guys running towards the garage. Using a powered automatic crossbow, Hick took down three men from behind. Slick ran and launched herself at the shuttle, skimming along the ground at running speed on a-grav.
Meanwhile the other helo fired another two missiles. One missed the three, but another was perfectly targeted and slammed into the ground equidistant from all three. LUCKily (Meaning one of the PCs used one of their character's LUCK points) the safety pin didn't fully disengage on the fuse, preventing the fuse from operating. Crock shot one of the throng advancing from the base, while Spacey changed her malleable hands into shovels and dug herself out from under the tree. Curly badly damaged the helo which had fired on them, and the craft had to crash-land. Two more were coming, from the south and west, but both were currently out of range.
Mittens, alone across the river, used his genetic modifications and released a secreted drug cocktail into his bloodstream, speeding him up to three times his normal speed. Using his armor piercing pistol, he slashed into the oncoming group, firing at six and downing five.
Mittens and Curly were lightly hit, Crock more seriously. He couldn't stay on his feet and crashed to the ground, beginning to bleed out. Spacey was not targeted, due to her being under the tree.
As the shuttle lifted off, Slick made a power-assisted jump and grabbed the tail of the shuttle, punching through the thin skin there into the drive compartment, and hauling herself in. Hick silently picked off three more with his crossbow as he followed them to the garage, the four up front not noticing the others dropping behind them as they entered the garage.
Mittens slashed through the group again, firing six shots and downing four, while Spacey downed two and Curly shot one of the two helos targeting them as it came in range. Crock bled into the dirt. Curly was hit again, LUCKily lightly as he had accumulated a lot of hits and was barely standing, as was Spacey. Mittens used his LUCK to have the one shot that hit him jam in the gun of the bad guy. The two shots from the surviving attack helo both missed badly.
Meanwhile. Slick kicked in the door connecting to the passenger compartment, which was filled with hostages, and killed the guard, pinning him to the forward bulkhead with crossbow bolts. She ran up to the door to the pilot's compartment, reporting to Hick that there were 28 hostages in the shuttle. Hick leaped through a window into the garage, where he found all aboard an armored grav-vehicle, already moving toward the open door. he leapt up onto the top, punching through a weak point in the armor, and dropping into the interior, killing the guard over the hostages with his crossbow.
Curly, barely standing, knocked out the last helo Mittens, in his last round of speed attack, downed four more as he was shot again, dropping him to hindered status. Spacey was shot at and missed, as was Curly, and Crock bled more, slipping towards death. Spacey managed to bag another bad guy. The baddies, despite their losses, managed to make their morale check.
Slick kicked in the door to the pilot's compartment and shot the pilot dead then wounded the copilot severely, she hauled the pilot out of his chair and grabbed the controls. Hick killed the gunner and driver with his crossbow, and downed the baddie with his last shot. He stared bewildered at the controls as the vehicle slid down the shore and onto the surface of the lake. LUCKily, a nine year old girl among the hostages knew how to drive the rig.
Mittens, a trained medic, dashed back across the river in time to stop Crock from bleeding out completely. Curly and Spacey kept up fire on the last few bad guys left on their feet, downing one each. They made their morale check again, probably because they thought the armored vehicle would come to their rescue, but surrendered when Hick, climbing into the turret, shredded three of them from behind as the girl drove ashore. Slick landed the Shuttle at the pad.
After extraction, Curly handed out the Notice. Slick, Hick, and Mittens reaping large awards. Spacey got a reaming out and some negative notice from Curly because her screw up started the attack too early, but she had enough positive notice to come out ahead. Crock had started and ended the affray unconcious, so he didn't get as much notice as the others. Curly, of course, as the commanding officer got much Notice himself. All in all a good end to a tough day.
We rolled right into the next adventure, which I'll post later.
-clash
Dramatis Personae:
"Curly" - Human leader of the team, from Mickey's Birthday. Badass officer and man of unblinking pragmatism. Curly has risen fast in SpecOps, making every promotion possible. Chews cigars and shaves his head - thus his call sign.
"Crock" - An uplifted crocodile officer. He blew his drop cap insertion on the last mission, but survived the fall. Hasn't yet made an impression, as he was severely wounded immediately after being located.
"Mittens" - A Dyfed Cat from Glorianna. Sgt. Mittens is black, with white face, chest, and mittens. An extremely high-tech uplift, whose species was created as dancers and entertainers, his species is born with uncanny balance and leaping, plus adrenaline cocktail control allowing a tremendous temporary burst of speed.
"Spacey" - A human-looking robot also from Mickey's Birthday. Spacey is driven by quirks in her electronic brain, introduced in her manufacture, which make her apt to wander off, both mentally and physically. She appears to be a human female, and is a master programmer with a direct interface.
"Hick" - Human corporal. Hick is a Ranger, tall and long-legged, and specializes in outdoorsy stuff like climbing, swimming, mountaineering and the like. He's from a planet maintained as a Park-preserve, thus his call sign. He is a slightly better shot than Slick, and thus the best shot on the team.
"Slick" - VaHu corporal. Slick is a human-Vantor hybrid from the water planet Faren. Small and muscular, Slick swims like a seal, using her powerful tail to scull through the water, and has implanted artificial gills to breathe underwater. She has almost no hair at all aside from her eyelashes - leading to her call sign - and a layer of subcutaneous fat to keep her warm. Her skin is patterned with blue, green, and brick-red stripes, with spots of the same color down her back.
-clash
Interesting stuff, Clash. Is this a "for-sure" move away from the original Star Cluster mechanic? If so, are you planning on powering all of your material with the IHW engine?
Quote from: JohnnyWannabe;282963Interesting stuff, Clash. Is this a "for-sure" move away from the original Star Cluster mechanic? If so, are you planning on powering all of your material with the IHW engine?
Hi Rich!
This is a for sure move, but will exist for a time alongside the original StarCluster. The IHW mechanics are developed for military emulation, and work far less well for civilian emulation. I will eventually be developing StarCluster 3E to replace SC 2 - there are a lot of small details I need to change, and those changes will be in line with those changes in IHW: StarCluster:
* Psionics will be radically changed. SC2 PSI is clumsy at best. PSI will work more like magic in Blood Games II - PSI is a capacity rating, not a resource pool, and use of PSI burns Stats. This is what I love, self-balancing systems.
* PSI skills will also be changed - much less overtly powerful, overall more subtle.
* I may be releasing three alternate task resolution systems with IHW: StarCluster - Original percentile, StarPool, and RiskDice.
* LUCK will be introduced into the system.
* Human stats will be capped at 15, with 17 being an over-all max. Powered armor will not increase the stat, as it does in SC 2, but increase the
effect of the stat. This is to better integrate with the alternate task resolution sub-systems.
* Damage reduction will be introduced along with type of armor determining hits.
* INT will replace IQ, with IQ only a reference.
* Wealth system will replace costing of items in credits.
Probably more as I get into it.
-clash
Info: The last mission took place on Hoboken, in the Allez-Oop system. Hoboken is a SaVaHuTa Colonizer - a powerful, rich, and populous world. The Drop Ship Aurora is the team's home. A big troop carrier armed with defensive weaponry and a regiment of Drop Troops, she is orbiting Aurora.
Curly is summoned to General Bourdin's office a month after the last mission. The General has a new mission for him - a courier has arrived in system from the next system over - Cry-In-The-Dark, AKA "Dark". Dark has no SaVaHuTa worlds, but does have a SaVaHuTa affiliate - the big, modern asteroid mining station Hammurabi just inside the thick, chunky Dark Belt. The Governor of Hammurabi Station has requested help from the Aurora. His daughter, returning to the station from University on Hoboken, has disappeared along with the Governor's yacht en-route. Foul play is suspected.
The team goes to the Dark system on the courier. After entering the system at the outer jump point, They are contacted by the governor, who confirms a huge ransom has been demanded. When the team arrives on-station, they meet with the governor. Curly orders Spacey to examine the electronic ransom note. After cracking the layers of misinformation and anonymizing, Spacey gives her opinion that the note originated on the station itself, and her opinion that it came from the desk of the Under-Secretary for Mining Relations.
The Under-Secretary lives in a condo adjacent to a park on the station. It has two exits, so Curly orders Hick to cover the back exit while he goes in with Slick. The Under-Secretary greets them, and under questioning by Curley, Slick uses her Interrogate PSI skill, burning several points of END to reach int the Under-Secretary's mind as the woman evades Curley's questions. Under pressure, she finally thinks of her connection to the kidnappers - Slick reaches up and pulls down a book form her book case. The Under-Secretary's face pales. Inside the book is a comm device. Curley examines it. It is designed to encode messages into the carrier wave of standard, innocent station Comm radio. The Under-Secretary confesses all. Her partner is a pirate, but she doesn't know where he is. Slick confirms this.
Curley takes the U-S back to the courier ship, as he doesn't trust the Station Guards - Hammurabi Station is known for it's corruption. Slick collapses from the strain of interrogation. The team sends out a message to the pirate - "SaVaHuTa agents investigating. Getting close. What do I do?" The answer comes back - "Sit tight - we will take care of you." Without a baseline for triangulation, they can't pinpoint the origin of the signal, but by carefully timing the lag, they have a range - within a margin of error for reciept and response - of how far away the signal originated. Laying that zone over a map of the current system configuration, they see it overlaps three objects. Two parts of the Dark Belt, and the planet Friday 13th. Friday 13th has alien (Etvar) ruins on it, and the Etvar have disputed all claims on it on the possibility that it might be their lost homeworld. Etvar ships patrol in orbit over the planet - but ancient Etvar artifacts continue to appear on Hammurabi Station's black market. The Dark Belt is so thick it blocks most of the sunlight from getting to the outer system. Both are great places to hide - if you can get past the etvar patrols on Friday 13th.
The Session ended, and the group broke for the week. This part of the session took longer than the first part, posted earlier, which ended the first adventure. It just looks shorter because of the nature of the investigative vs combat-oriented play.
-clash
I should have added - another change is the elimination of Boost. Boost was a life extending drug used in StarCluster 1 and 2, but the principal self-balancing mechanic of the game is the trade-off between age with lots of skills but physical degradation and youth, with high stats and few skills.
Boost had to go.
-clash
Quote from: flyingmice;283026I should have added - another change is the elimination of Boost. Boost was a life extending drug used in StarCluster 1 and 2, but the principal self-balancing mechanic of the game is the trade-off between age with lots of skills but physical degradation and youth, with high stats and few skills.
Boost had to go.
It's a good thing you are a systems' man. A full conversion can be painful; sometimes more painful than building a new system from the ground up. Still, Star Cluster 2.5 shares many similarities with IHW. An IHW Cold Space edition would be nice.;p
Quote from: JohnnyWannabe;283059It's a good thing you are a systems' man. A full conversion can be painful; sometimes more painful than building a new system from the ground up. Still, Star Cluster 2.5 shares many similarities with IHW. An IHW Cold Space edition would be nice.;p
Agreed - I've been thinking about it. It was a tossup over what would be first - StarCluster or Cold Space, but I was always taught "age before beauty." :D
-clash
Quote from: flyingmice;283061Agreed - I've been thinking about it. It was a tossup over what would be first - StarCluster or Cold Space, but I was always taught "age before beauty." :D
-clash
That's why I am always pushed to front of the line. ;p
Quote from: JohnnyWannabe;283150That's why I am always pushed to front of the line. ;p
You'll have to get behind me! :D
-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.
(http://i518.photobucket.com/albums/u341/flyingmice/BitterSeas.jpg)
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. :D
-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:
(http://i518.photobucket.com/albums/u341/flyingmice/Rider-Ship.jpg)
-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
Clash, if your still looking at some playtesting than I would be happy to help (and this time not get side tracked by things).
Rog.
Quote from: Roger Calver;339662Clash, if your still looking at some playtesting than I would be happy to help (and this time not get side tracked by things).
Rog.
Hi Roger!
I'd be happy to ship you the latest playtest doc once I've got it up to speed! The carriers and fighters test I mentioned in my last post went badly - it was boring, boring, boring! I had to completely reconceptualize fighter combat if it was going to work. The problem was that there were no maneuvers they could perform, so all combat turned into slugfests. This was fine in a frigate, but a fighter isn't designed to slug it out. Why no maneuvers? Well, SC is a pretty firm SF game, and actual science is important, so fighters can't bank or gain height advantage or dive or do all the cool things you can do in atmosphere, and I could think of nothing else.
I decided to shelve the project for the time being, and completed Commonwealth Space, guide to Created Creatures, and OHMAS. When OHMAS was released, I came back to IHW:SC totally refreshed, and this time, rather than approaching it as "How can I emulate aerial dogfights in space?", I approached it as "What kind of cool things can I do in space that would be impossible in the air?", and it all stated clicking!
I've also decided I need to create a system to build ships directly in the game, as well as allowing use of the stuff in the Big Book o' Tech/Engineer's Guide. It's going to be a simpler, snap-in process. With the supplements, you have complete control, but the process is involved and tme consuming.
-clash
Having a ship construction system in it would be a big advantage.
After watching Babylon 5 Ive always seen fighters as mobile turrets as they can pivot and turn without changing their direction.
In space you cant hide unless your near objects and so the advantages come from design and technology the actual skills involved are not as important.
Quote from: Roger Calver;339689Having a ship construction system in it would be a big advantage.
After watching Babylon 5 Ive always seen fighters as mobile turrets as they can pivot and turn without changing their direction.
In space you cant hide unless your near objects and so the advantages come from design and technology the actual skills involved are not as important.
Yep! That's one of the important differences, and a core maneuver. I talk about some of them in my blog (http://iflybynight.blogspot.com/2009/10/heres-few-maneuvers-from-in-harms-way.html). I never watched Babylon 5, so I didn't have this visual clue.
-clash
I will take a look over on youtube and see if I can find it.
I dont know if its OK with Pundit to post it here so if I find one I'll PM it.
Quote from: Roger Calver;339694I will take a look over on youtube and see if I can find it.
I dont know if its OK with Pundit to post it here so if I find one I'll PM it.
Sweet! I'll take a look when I get home!
-clash
No problem.
Thanks, Roger!
I looked at the videos, and that's indeed some of what I had in mind. I've sent you the latest build of IHW:SC, so you'll see what I mean.
-clash
Cheers Clash Im looking at it now.
Rog.
Quote from: Roger Calver;339897Cheers Clash Im looking at it now.
Rog.
Very cool! I've still got a lot of work to do, but it's playable as is. :D
-clash
I'll take a longer look later tonight.
Quote from: Roger Calver;339937I'll take a longer look later tonight.
Cool! It's already a big book! Take what time you need.
-clash
Check your PM's Clash.
Quote from: Roger Calver;339975Check your PM's Clash.
Got it! Take care, Rog!
-clash