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20 September, 2010

Smallville RPG: First Impressions

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Okay…I broke down and bought an e-copy of Smallville RPG from Margaret Weiss’ bunch.  I’m a huge fan of the Cortex system, and after hearing about the changes for the setting, I figured I’d go ahead and have a shufty at this rules set.  (I’ve not watched the show, but I do like a good superhero game.)

I’ll do a real review in a day or two, but my initial thoughts:  it’s a soap-opera RPG with stuff for supers tossed in.  Some of the mods could be used to good effect in Cortex (there’s a Cortex Plus in the offing that I suspect does just that.)

I’m a bit iffy on it, but might be interested in running a test game just to see how it plays.  More to follow…

 

18 September, 2010

Hollow Earth Expedition: New Traits and Manuevers

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A lot of the Hollow Earth Expedition traits are designed to give characters certain shticks to play, but one area where they seem to be lacking is in traits for gun-bunnies.  A lot of the pulp characters of the 1930s were double gun wielding, shoot-a-bunch-of-guys types (The Shadow, The Phantom, etc…)  So here’s a few new gunner traits (and a revamped one) to give those twin nickel-plated 1911 users a bit more freedom:

RAPID SHOT (modified):  Prerequisite: Dexterity 3.  Your character can attack the same target tiwce, as per p. 69 of the core book, or they can attack two different characters at -2 die to each attack.  (So you can shoot mook #1 with your pistol at -2 dice, then mook #2 with the same penalty.  Requires the weapon to have a Rate of M or A.)  Can be bought twice — x2 the first attack is without penalty, the second at -2; x3 both attacks are with no penalty.

This will allow you to recreate the cowboy fanning the hammer on his Colt Peacemaker or blazing like sixty on his 1911…

COVERING FIRE!  Prerequisite:  Firearms 3, Weapon with a rate of M or A.  Your character has a knack for banging bullets off in a way that makes the enemy want to keep their heads down.  When laying donw cover fire, they gain a +2 die to their FRIEARMS test v. the enemy.   May be taken twice.

Covering Fire maneuver:  A character may attempt to aid a companion by keeping the head of the enemy down.  The character can roll a FIREARMS test (or if they don’t have the skill a DEX+CHA-2 die) v. the WILL of the enemy.  Each success over the WILL tests adds to the DEFENSE of the characters they are covering.

Suppressive Fire maneuver:  This is a bit different from covering fire — suppressive fire is designed to keep the enemy pinned down and unable/ unwilling to engage.  It requires a weapon with a Rate of M or A, or enough people working in concert (3+) to lay down enough fire.  With suppressive fire, the character may choose to use their Charisma instead of Dexterity (whichever is higher) and their Firearms skill v. the WILL+cover bonus of the enemy.  Every success over the WILL of the enemy keeps them from attacking for that number of combat rounds.  The characters may not actively defend while laying down suppressive fire.

 

16 September, 2010

Week 2: GMing With the iPad

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This is week 2 of gamemastering with the iPad (despite my having belatedly posted on week one yesterday…)  All of the same programs are in use: PDF Reader and Diceshaker the two primary.  All three game books are on the iPad for the reader, as were the adventure notes and NPC character sheets.

The adventure pitted the group against Blood Bay pirates whom they had to escape, using the dilapidated Latham 47.02 seaplane of Roald Amundsen (search posts for a more historically accurate version of the explorer than that in the Hollow Earth corebook.)  Mass volleys of flintlock fire had me roll the attack from pirates against the heroes as their plane was taxiing from the Blood Bay wharf, so i did a bunch of swapping from notes to the Secrets of the Surface World sourcebook (nicely formatted with a table of contents to get to the right areas of the book quickly) for stats on cannons from the pirate frigates, as well as stats for their plane (as I had forgotten to swap over the writeup on the Latham and my friend’s internet was down so I couldn’t pull it off this blog site), then back to the die roller.

I don’t think it took any more time than it would have to have shuffled through pages of the physical book, look at notes on the computer screen and roll actual dice (or on the laptop, for that matter.)

The incredible battery life of the iPad is a plus, as well:  last week the device was at a 48% charge and I kept tapping the screen from time to time to keep the notes up — a three hour session left me with about 20%.  This week, I let the thing power off from time to time, firing it up only when needed (this takes a second or two max) and used about 10% of the charge for a three hour session.

Overall, GMing a Hollow Earth Expedition game on the iPad turned out to be extremely easy, and for the most part, it didn’t slow down play.  Next week, we’ll be giving it a good kicking with my Battlestar Galactica campaign, where I normally have close to a dozen NPCs written up in one file, the fleet ships in another, game notes, etc. and I have to roll much more often for Cortex-based games than for HEX’s Ubitquity.

 

15 September, 2010

Week 1: Testing the iPad for GMing

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Starting last week I’m running a Hollow Earth Expedition game using the iPad instead of my laptop.  I did this because I’m mostly expecting to be traveling to and from the session via motorcycle, and minimizing the amount of crap you lug with you is advisable on a bike.  For the first night, I did bring all the books and GM screen with me, although I have the books in electronic format on the iPad.  Tonight, I think I’m just taking the GM screen and iPad.

For the experiment I am running Kdan Mobile’s PDF  Reader for the game books, adventure notes and major NPC character sheets (typed up in WordPerfect X3 on my laptop, then pdf’d.)  For the dice roller I’m using Diceshaker (for the iPhone, as well — it allows you to shake the device to roll.)  Diceshaker allows you to set up multiple dice for rolling — like, say 20d2 for HEX, or any configuration of dice rolled together, just pick the die set and hit reroll.  Or shake the device.  For simplicity, I put the app icons next to each other for quick swapping between notes and dice.

The first night went smoothly — swapping between NPC sheets and notes was simple enough and fairly quick.  I didn’t have to look into any of the books, so I can’t speak to how easy that would be.  The HEX PDFs are well set up with a table of contents to jump to areas of the books (unlike the Dr. Who PDFs — argh!), so I suspect it won’t be a problem.  If I know the critters they’ll run into, I could put up bookmarks, as well, to get me to the pertinent info…

Swapping to the dice is a bit more time consuming than having a die program up next to the WP window, but ordinarily I “take the average” for Hollow Earth critters and mooks, only major villains get rolls.  Also, I occasionally like to have players roll for the baddies — it’s fun as they get to bust on each other for good rolls on the villains.  The lag between the notes to dice, though, is a second or two.  Negligible.

The game venue has a wifi connection, so I can look up things I need quickly on the internet if I need.  Pictures of gear — like the Latham 47.02 seaplane were quick to find and easy to show the folks on the iPad screen thanks to the pinch/zoom of the multi-touch screen.

Overall, I found the experience a lot easier than I expected it to be, and carrying two pounds (the iPad, screen, and sundries), vs. the 15 or so pounds for books, screen, laptop, and the box of spent cartirdges I use as style point markers makes is a very tempting way to manage the games.  The real test will be next week, when I try to run a BSG campaign, where I’ve normally got multiple files for fleet ships, major NPCs, and the mission plan up in different tabs in WordPerfect on the laptop.

 

6 September, 2010

Thoughts on the Reavers

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In Firefly, the reavers were this ever-present bogeyman, lurking in the darkness of space.   In essence, they were the zombies for the universe — people who had gone mad on the edge of space.  There was no telling how many were out there, why people would be attracted to their lifestyle, and what you could expect from them…

Serenity gave us a tidy backstory to the reavers that, ultimately, cut the mystery and danger out of them.  Turned insane by the PAX, these movie reavers were de facto zombies — lots of them, never stopping, senseless.  And ultimately, not as frightening as the TV show version.  By linking them with Alliance malfeasance, the reavers become victims and that removes the awe and fear they should inspire in an RPG campaign.  Moreover, the driven violent and mad meme of Serenity reavers would seem to preclude the notion that they would work in concert.  Zombie-like, the reavers prey on “the living” (just to keep the metaphors straight.)  And for me, this is where we run into problems.  As with other “zombie” antagonists, they work together to plan and execute raids, they work in tandem at time, yet they fly around in their dilapidated spacecraft with no concern for the efficiency of the craft.

They act in mindless, violent abandon in the movie, driven that way by the PAX…yet paradoxically, they’ll all work in concert during the fight with the Alliance.  You couuld make an argument that in a target-rich environment, the reavers would naturally attack whatever they could, and the Alliance ships were simply temptations.  I don’t agree.  We’ve seen on-screen how tough it is to keep a ship running:  why would the PAX reavers fix things enough to keep the ships moving?  How would they decide who fixes what?  Like zombies…why aren’t they attacking each other, if they’re so crazed from the PAX?

Lastly, there was a small percentage of the Miranda residents that became reavers.  There’s a limited number.  The nature of their affliction would seem to preclude breeding (even by rape, if they kill their victims anyway.)  That means it’s a game of attrition.  Eventually, they’ll die out, or be hunted down by the Alliance.  Not scary.

In short, the Serenity reavers stink on ice.  Even as a convenient wrap up for the movie, they offend the storytelling sensibilities.

Returning to the Firefly reavers:  there’s very little we know about them.  We’ve heard they might be cannibals (always terrifying), we know they allegedly rape and kill.  Yet in Bushwacked, the reavers raid a cargo vessel and leave a lone man alive, and that last man slowly “goes reaver.”  In the same episode, Shepherd Book remarks that reavers are “just men” that got to the edge of space and went mad.  These points leave open a much more exciting and frightening door:  reavers “breed” virally, mimetically.  Being a reaver is an idea.  It’s a lifestyle, not a drug-induced disease.

Based on the slim amount of information concerning the reavers in the TV show, I will endeavor to cast a newer — and I hope, from a gaming perspective — better version that is closer to the original concept.

Like the 15th/16th Century family gang in Scotland led by Sawney Bean, being a reaver is a choice (or madness, your choice.)  These are people who were already outcasts, layabouts, madmen — people who had or would eventually slip through the cracks.  Out on the edge of the ‘Verse, these people were outside the law, outside moral structure, and soon began to comport themselves that way.  The ritualistic body modification is a feature, probably the result of someone being into tattooing, self-mortification; that notion of damaging yourself to show strength, individuality, or to just make yourself more terrifying and hence a more efficient hunter, spread.  In this way, the reaver style is something that literally gets under your skin.

(If you know people into the tattoo/piercing/body mod subculture, you might note the almost addictive quality of the practice.  People don’t usually get one tattoo, or piercing, anymore.  And often, others who know people into the practice will buy in, as well.)

Assuming these people are insane, but not zombie-crazy, they are much more likely to work — like gangs — in concert with each other.  There’s a hierarchy, even if it’s more democratic, like many pirate ships were.  Many might be family based, with a patriarch/matriarch (like the Bean gang.)  They care about each other, and occasionally, they fight among their clans. They breed and raise up new generations of psychopathic hunters like themselves.  They leave people that could become like them alive (as in Bushwacked) knowing that, eventually, their victim will find and join them.

Worse, this means that not all reavers will behave the same.  You’ll never know if they’re going to chase you down, as in the Serenity pilot episode, let you live as with the man in Bushwacked, or if they’ll lay a clever trap.  Or clean themselves up and look like normal folk on the street…until they attack.  This past element adds another layer of paranoia:  not all reavers are the campfire bogeyman.  They could be aboard your vessel and you’d not know until it was too late.

And who knows..?  If you’re too much of an antisocial renegade, you might find the life appealing.  Anyone, pushed too far, could go reaver.

With this new take, you wouldn’t always know the ship bearing down on you might be reavers.  Not all their ships are going to be junked up wrecks with nihilists inside hoping to get cooked by their reactor.  They might be lazy and not maintain their vessels, leading to some of the tell-tale signs, but even these reavers will eventually do routine maintenance when they have to. Some might modify and hotrod their rides; the lack of radiation shielding on a ship might be because they get more efficiency and speed without the containment.  Some might paint their ships and adorn them with their victims, as in the movie, to intimidate their prey.

Reavers as subculture, to me, is much more intimidating, and much more useful as a roleplaying hook, than the Serenity version.  Here you have plot hooks galore:  what if someone comes back to their senses and wants out of being a reaver?  What if some rich man’s daughter runs away to join them and he wants her rescued?  What if you can actually make a deal with them, and what would they want in return?

 

30 August, 2010

Writing and Gaming

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I attended Bubonicon this year — the first sci-fi convention I’ve been to in over a decade.  It was an interesting experience in that this time around, I was much more interested in the panels than in the costuming or the merchandise tables. (The rise of the internet and the ability to buy the goods you would otherwise have to wait a year to scarf up at convention prices is why I suspect the merchandise tables were mostly flea market trash.)

One of the panels was on writers who game, and it had a few of the expected names:  Melinda Snodgrass, Walter Jon Williams, etc…  Their comments got me thinking about my own experience as a writer and a gamer, and led to this post…

There are a lot of gamemasters out there that think of themselves as frustrated writers.  I had always been interested in some form of storytelling since I was young — not necessarily writing, per se…I drifted between that, acting, cinematography, comic books, etc. but always with the intent to, some day, tell stories for a living (hence the profession of historian.)

There are some problems with translating your ideas from a game into workable, salable fiction.  First — gaming is collaborative by nature.  The GM might set the plot in motion, and might nudge the players to get through the adventure on track (I have a tendency to do that), but the better storytellers don’t railroad (I have been known to do this, or to bribe the player with story/plot/hero points to stop trying to derail things…but I try to be subtle), and are willing to let the players guide the direction of the adventure.  This collaborative feature of role playing is one of the reasons it’s so fun and social, but is also is a problem for the wannabe writer who wants to cull his gaming for ideas.

There’s the problem of intellectual property.  Do you “own” the characters?  do the players?  Do they get a cut of the proceeds, or maybe a mention in the forward?  Best is to not use other people’s characters.  Come up with something new, or similar.  Avoid the problem entirely.

I’ve found most gamers, when I’ve thought about moving characters to fiction, don’t mind not getting money or credit; it’s usually enough to see their creations in print…but a thank you is appropriate.  It’s a good idea to see if the player is alright with the idea, but once again — I’d suggest against it.

(Caveat: I have written and published a novel with a character culled from a game that another player ran, but the original idea was mine and he simply took it over.  When I wrote the book, I kept the name, but the character reverted to my original conception and away from the stuff that the player had done with him.  He was okay with this.)

Second, storylines and ideas from games tend to have a certain format to them, and these are easily identified by editors who are in certain genres like fantasy.  (There’s a reason that some of the magazines for fantasy explicitly tell you not to write up your gaming sessions as a novel and send them in…they’ve seen this before.)  If you had a good plot arc and want to use it, great, but remember the collaborative nature of the game tends to make the way a game unfolds more unwieldy than a tightly plotted novel.

thirdly, characters — and this was something mentioned in the panel that I agreed with — are central to good fiction, and several of the authors admitted to culling their RPG characters for fiction…but always with some tweaking.  A game system — especially the random creation or the class-based ones — have a tendency to create archetypes that do not translate into fiction well.  Whereas having a Level 2 Elf Fighter is something that gives a nice shorthand for the player to latch onto to play a character, a fictional character is not a stat block…  (This is why I prefer systems where you build your character to the idea — one of the better ones, I think, is Cortex.  Even so, you can “feel”  the advantage/disadvantage nature of characters crafted in a game when they are dropped into short fiction.)

Characters first.  Who are they?  Where do they come from?  What do they do and why?  Add quirks.  You can almost see this template for much of genre fiction — mysteries, especially.  A lot of mystery hero(ines) have that quirks first feel to them.  I need a detective, but I need something different…this one’s fat.  This one has Tourettes.  This one is a chimp.

Stealing well-rounded characters from a game is something that I think is fully doable and can lead to a successful transition of some gaming ideas to fiction.  If didn’t, a friend of mine and I wouldn’t be tossing around the idea of a comic book based on one of our campaigns, right now.  But that’s the key:  based on — not a straight translation.  The best translators (language wise) always play with the language a bit, to fix the flavor of the writer they are translating, rather than a cold mechanical transposition.

Fourth: A lot of games, over time, develop massive backstory, and delve into a lot of ideas.  I’ve run into guys that have complete worlds, worked out to Tolkeinesque complexity and completeness, and who think that everyone in the world will be as excited by, and interested in their worlds as they are.  You’ve met them, the guys that have notebook upon notebook of history, geography, etc. that they will often truncate into a Dickensian players guide to their universe as a welcome packet for the new gamer.  Throwing everything at the wall and hoping it sticks doesn’t work for RPGs anymore than it works in fiction.

(One of my problems when experimenting with science fiction is that I concentrate on worldbuilding and forget, oh, character…plot…that stuff.)

Look at the best science fiction, for example.  Much of the time, there can be a number of intriguing ideas, but they focus primarily on one technology, one trend, and examine their world from that.  It doesn’t inundate the reader, and is more concise and interesting.  Mysteries concentrate — red herrings aside — on the problem at hand:  who killed this due in the kitchen with the candle stick?  Romances are straight-forward:  how do this girl and this guy get together and what seemingly insurmountable problems do they have to overcome to do it.

Keep it simple, keep it concise, keep it interesting.

The general consensus of the panel at Bubonicon was that, in general, it’s not particularly effective to translate gaming ideas over into fiction (Wild Cards not withstanding…)  I don’t agree, but I think it’s necessary to be very careful with what you pluck out of a game to use for fiction.  Basic storylines, character ideas — yes; transcribing your “way cool” gaming night — no.

 

28 August, 2010

Things Fall Apart

Posted by blackcampbell under Life Unconstructed, Roleplaying Games
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There are a couple of different types of gamers, I’ve noticed over the years.  There’s the casual player:  usually someone who enjoys the occasional game more as a social occasion, rather than as a hobby.  This is most often the girl/boyfriend or spouse whose partner games and they join in from time to time, the busy former gamer who doesn’t really have time or interest for more that the occasional session, and the curious who haven’t really gotten into the hobby.  There’s a “hobbyist” gamer, to quote Fear of Girls — people who enjoy gaming, do it regularly or often, but still have other disparate interests that do not have to do with the gaming community.  I say this is the vast majority of the hobby.  There’s the hardcore gamers — people whose life is tightly bound to gaming, with most of their friends and other interests intersecting with the activity.  These are often the sliver of the community that attracts to more interest, ire, ridicule, etc. from non-gamers.

This piece is mostly aimed at the last two groups.

There are few things that cannot be escaped in the universe:  death, entropic collapse, gravity, taxes…the first two are mirrored in the collapse of a gaming group.  There are plenty of reasons for the death or contraction of a group — people move away, they start having families, they get time-intensive jobs, get sick, get divorced, find new hobbies, or have falling outs over various and sundry things.  Almost inevitably, one of these things will happen and your gaming group will lose players, or fall apart altogether.

The collapse of a gaming group can be traumatic — with responses ranging from mild annoyance and inconvenience (“But we were so close to discovering the mystery of the Lost Temple of Badu!”), to alienation (“Geez, I didn’t know that dumping my girlfriend would lose me all my friends in the group!”), to feelings of despondency and mourning (lets face it…we all know this guy/girl…)  As with all things mortal, it’s okay to feel disappointed by the collapse of a group, a storyline not finished, a group of characters never to be seen (in that configuration) again.  Look at the response of fans to the cancellation of Firefly …very similar.

So what to do?  First, be disappointed, feel sad the gaming group broke up for a day or two then press on.  It’s a hobby; it’s not your life.  Find new players: there’s sites like Access Denied, RPG Finder, and the like.  Hit the game stores and see if you can find people (although this is getting harder as shops are more rare and people either buy online or purchase .pdf products from DriveThru and their ilk.  Gather up the remains of the last group, if you haven’t moved away, pissed off everyone in the old group, or even still have an interest…press on.

If you can’t do that?  Get a new hobby.  I motorcycle, I shoot, I hang out in coffeeshops and talk to people, I’m in grad school…plenty of people to meet and the likelihood is a few of them are gamers in one of these other activities you take on.  Maybe you don’t go back to gaming and become one of the first group of gamers I mentioned.  Life goes on.

In my case, two gaming groups have imploded in the last week — all my fault — and while I was the GM for both, that doesn’t mean the groups will coalesce around me again.  C’est la vie…  I have a few players that are still interested, and the groups wil be truncated, requiring me to reformulate my storylines, or ditch campaigns altogether (gaming is, at this time of dissertational annoyance, my only real creative outlet).  It sucks.  C’est la vie…  I’m hoping I can cobble together new groups.  If I can, great; I’m already thinking of new campaigns, characters, stories to tell (and story-telling, as the great Ferenc Szasz once said, is the point of history).  If I can’t..?  C’est la vie…  I have a Triump I can ride, I have guns to shoot, things to see in the Albuquerque area, movies to go to, work to get done.

Ultimately, you can’t let the games become your reality or life.

PS: If you’re in the Albuquerque area, I’m looking for GM/players.

UPDATE: In a particularly interesting turn of fate, it looks like most of the gaming group I thought I was going to lose is coming back to the table…even the person with the most reason not to.  I love it when everyone acts like an adult.

 

21 August, 2010

Review: Dr. Who Role Playing Game

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My friend Berin is preparing to run a Dr. Who campaign for us, and in preparation, I bought the .pdf version of the game’s box set from Drive Thru RPG.  The price of the file set is about $20 cheaper than the print version, but still a bit pricey at $34.99.  There is also a separate Aliens and Creatures compendium on the site for $25.

First off:  the production values on the .pdf are top-notch — about what I’ve come to expect from most new licensed products.  I can’t vouch for the paper and print quality on the books in the box set, but based off of the .pdf, you’re probably looking at high-gloss paper, cardboard counters in full color, etc… The books are chock-a-block with pictures from the new series of the show (all from the Tennant tenure as the Doctor.)

There are three “books”: an Adventure book, the Players Guide, and the Gamemaster’s Guide.  There’s also a bunch of handouts for gadgets, blank and archetype character sheets, and character sheets for the Doctor and companions, as well as story point tokens.

The Adventures book has two scenarios and a bunch of ideas for the gamemaster.  It’s fairly standard fare and will be useful for new GMs, not so much for the experienced gamemaster.  The “Read This First” handout is a simple “what is a role playing game”, “how to play” booklet.

The Players Guide is simply a character creation manual with the basics of the Dr. Who RPG system.  For the .pdfs, the layout is single page, but with the first page being the outer cover of the book…the whole thing as a single unit.  this means that you have a two page layout, followed by single pages.  It’s fine to look at on a computer, where resizing is fairly quick and painless; on the iPad, it’s annoying, especially if you lock the horizontal so you can flip through the book easily.  (I use PDF Reader, myself, on the iPad.)

The chapters are simple:  the first gives you the same general information as the Read This First pamphlet and an overview of the Whoverse.  The second chapter, goes through the process of character creation.  It’s very straightforward and simple — deceptively so.  You can craft a great deal uniqueness into your characters despite the simplicity.

There are six attributes: Awareness, Coordination, Ingenuity, Presence, Resolve, and Strength — these can be paired with a simple list of skills to handle the various tasks presented.  Skills are also stripped down, with 12 total.  There’s also Traits, good and bad, that allow the player to craft various types of companions, aliens, Time Lords, and the like.

Chapter Three covers the basics of the game.  It’s a simple and elegant system: the player rolls 2d6 and adds their appropriate attribute, skill, and possibly a trait to beat a target number.  Story points can be used to alter rolls, use gadgets, or alter the story line.  Combat is not the primary focus of the game or the series, and is reflected in initiative.  There’s no random initiative, rather Talkers go first (to reflect the Doctor’s tendency to talk his way out of trouble), Movers, Doers, and Fighters.  Damage isn’t done in hit point style, rather damage is applied to the attributes (shot in the leg for 3 points?  This might subtact from your Coordination, Strength, and Resolve…)

Other conflicts are mental and social.  Social conflicts can affect your Resolve or Ingenuity; Mental can be something like be frightened.

The Gamemaster Guide parallels the Players Guide in the first three chapters. The second chapter is character creation, the third is the system rules.  There’s more there — rules for chases, healing, experience.

Chapter Four covers time travel, the nature of time, and the Time Lords and their society.  One of the cooler elements is a random table for the appearance and attributes of Time Lords that regenerate.  I had the idea that on regenerating, the Time Lord (Doctor or otherwise) should be shifted to another of the players, as well.

Chapter Five covers the basic aliens encountered in series — from the Autons (the manikin plastic creatures from the Eccelston season) to the Cybermen, to the Daleks, as others.  Chapters Six and Seven comprise the usual tips, tricks, and suggestions for gamemasters found in most RPG guides.

Overall, the look and feel of the book, and the system, goes a long way to evoking the Dr. Who series.  I have yet to play the game, but the books have that Who feel to them.  It’s a buy.

Style: 5 out of 5.  Substance: 4 out of 5 (it would have been higher if they had paired down the “how to GM” material in favor of more of aliens, more gadgets.)

 

21 August, 2010

Reenactors Gone Wild!

Posted by blackcampbell under General Ramblings, Roleplaying Games
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A medieval reenactor in New Zealand went Conan on a photographer that was shooting their event.  They don’t really get into the reason that the 50 year old woman took umbrage with the other woman — perhaps she was worried the wee box would steal her soul.

 

20 August, 2010

Interesting Developments in Manufacture and Gaming Possibilities

Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games, Technology
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The US Special Operations Command has been trying to come up with a way to overcome the problem of getting parts that are vital, but rarely needed in the field.  Enter the MPH — Mobile Parts Hospital.  It is essentially a small fabrications lab that can fit into a standard shipping container (manufacturer’s site.)

When coupled with new advanced in computer-assisted design and fabrication like the Rep-Rap, there’s a revolution in small, to-order manufacturing in the offing.

These technologies — the “print on demand” manufacture, coupled with small manufactories that fit into shipping containers have fairly obvious uses in modern and science-fiction gaming settings.  For a modern day espionage campaign, no longer does the villain need to be holed up in a superbase or factory — even harder to find, they could be building weapons or what have you in a shipping container on a cargo vessel — completely under the radar — using sat-phones or satellite internet to make their deals with customers.  It also could be an excellent perk for the character spy — a small fabrication point in the field that they could, with a few hours work, put together materials needed for an operation.

In the sci-fi vein — this sort of set dressing works particularly well for cyberpunk settings for the same reasons as above.  In the Serenity/Firefly universe, we saw Badger’s outfit operating out of what appeared to be a series of shipping containers mashed into a base of operations.  Having a small CAD computer and fabricator would mean a small outfit could make a killing providing the basic parts and essential tools to a community…and you could transport it on most freighters.

Just a few ideas…

 

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