Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Fragments of Stellar Technology

FRAGS

Most power is drawn from the stars, stored in condensed stellar fragments, commonly called frags. These double as a universal currency for major transactions. 

Low-power devices can be powered by a single frag indefinitely, consuming its energy slower than it passively recharges itself. High-power devices like ships utterly consume entire frags. 

SUITS AND HELMETS

Only one suit and one helmet can be worn at once. They grant an Armour score and may cause attacks of a certain type to be Impaired. Powered suits require a frag to function. Static suits only offer protection when stationary. 

Enviro Suit: Made for extreme conditions
Battle Suit: A1
Mesh Suit: Impair Pierce
Hard Suit: Impair Crush
Rad Suit: Impair Burn
Cloak Suit: Impair non-Blast Ranged, Static
Flak Suit: Impair Blast Ranged, Static
Kinetic Suit: Impair Melee, Static
Power Suit: A2, Powered
Titan Suit: A3, Powered, cannot run

Breather Helmet: Allows breathing
Combat Helmet: A1
Filter Helmet: Impair Poison
Bonding Helmet: Impair Erode
Guardian Helmet: Impair Warp

SPACECRAFT

Spacecraft fall into three broad categories. 

Boats can be flown by a single pilot, typically with a few support crew. They are built for in-system travel. 

Ships require dozens of crew under a captain. They can use gates to travel to neighbouring systems.

Arks are rare, colossal craft, requiring hundreds of crew. Their drives can jump to neighbouring systems without need for a gate. 

MACHINES

Any piece of technology able to think for itself is classified as a machine. If you aren’t sure, ask them. They’ll let you know.

They typically fall into one of three types.

MAINFRAMES: The largest, most advanced machines. They are very good at knowing things and getting modules to work together, but lack any real capability of their own. 

MODULES: Due to a collective pact, modules each fill a specialist role, and no one module can do everything. Spacecraft tend to have an array of modules working under a mainframe. They are typically portable but lack mobility of their own. Often they’re built right into a piece of equipment. 

MOBILES: These machines are mobile and independent enough to essentially function as people. With sapient life being so diverse this is seen as unremarkable. 

Many work for the joy of being useful, while others demand their share of the frags. This is a source of much inter-machine tension. 

COMMUNICATION

The most suitable method of communication depends on the distance, urgency, and secrecy of the message. 

PINGING: Machines can ping each other for an instant line of secure communication. These reach anywhere within a world and its orbit, provided you know the code for the desired machine. 

THE WAVE: A hum of wireless broadcasts riding on a star’s emissions. Signals are sent to the star, then back out to the rest of the system. Signal delay is a number of hours equal to the total of the broadcast and receiving world numbers. So a message sent from World 3 to World 4 takes 7 hours. Wave communications are open to anybody receiving on that frequency.

THE WIRE: An underspace network sending text communications between worlds, even between systems. Only mainframes really know how it works. Wire messages have a 24 hour delay, regardless of distance. The wire is only accessible from worlds and orbital stations, not spacecraft. Most charge a fee for use. 

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If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

Wednesday, 22 January 2025

The Scrapheap Starter Set - Pegs in Space

New challenge for 2025: Can you make an entire starter set style wargame box by raiding your leftover materials and spending as little as possible?

That's what I've tried to do with my latest Peg Project.


PEGS IN SPACE - A VOID ADMIRAL STARTER SET



See, it fits!

SHIPS

Clearly inspired by the old Battlefleet Gothic starter set, I wanted to build two standard-sized fleets for Void Admiral as my Imperial and Chaos stand-ins. Each side gets a Galleon, two destroyers, two corvettes, a squadron of three frigates, and a few stands of fighters. Clothes pegs and cocktail sticks are all I need.



I tried to give each faction's ships a distinctive silhouette so that you can broadly tell who's on which side even before they're colour coded.



A bit of painting later and they're up to table standard, my favourite standard.



Later I'll add in a handful of extra ships for each side, allowing more variety for fleet building, and using up the leftover flight stands.

TERRAIN

You know what's the worst? Starter sets that don't come with any terrain. We won't be making that mistake. Void Admiral suggests quite a terrain-heavy battlefield, with five terrain types in the book. I wanted to include all of them in the box.

Debris fields are mainly a nuisance, usually chipping away at your shields. These were just gravel and sand drybrushed over black primer.



Gas clouds impede fire both in and out. I strung out some cotton wool, glued it down with some sand, applied sealant spray and drybrushed over black primer.



Asteroid fields are risky to fly through, doubly so at full speed. I used small polystyrene balls for these, roughed up, sprayed with sealant before priming them and drybrushing on top.



Large asteroids fully block movement and fire, destroying any ship that flies into them! Perhaps I should have gone bigger with these, but I still wanted them to fit into the box. I roughed them up, primed them before sealing, allowing the paint to melt away at the exposed parts, then drybrushed on top.



Navigational Buoys are used for scenarios. Mine ended up looking more like space stations or flying saucers, but they work.



That gives us enough options to make a nice interesting sector of space to fight over. Oh, and I bought the cheapest stretch of black cloth I could find.







Yeah, I should probably iron that cloth. I'd like to speckle some stars on there too. 

THE COST

Okay so let's work out the damage:

  • Clothes pegs, wooden discs, round gem stickers (£5) I spent about £10 on these a while back, but used a fraction of them for this project. Even if I only count half the price I've still got plenty of material left if I want to add more ships, but that would mean I need more of the next item.
  • Flight Stands (£18) Annoyingly the most expensive part of the project, as I ended up needing two medium packs and two small packs from the Dropzone Commander range. I'm sure there's a lower cost alternative to this, but I drew a blank.
  • Black cloth (£6) for my space battlemat.
  • Cotton wool, gravel, sand, toothpicks, cardboard, round bases for fighters, box to store everything in (£0). I had these lying around, so I'm counting them as free.
  • Polystyrene Balls (£2.50). I got a bag of assorted sizes, using a handful of these for the asteroid fields and large asteroids, plenty left over for future projects.
  • The Rules (£8) I picked up a print copy of Void Admiral in print. PDF is cheaper but I prefer paper rules at the table. I'd also like to try One Page Rules' Warfleets or Billion Suns, which should both work just fine with the same box.
  • Counters (£0) the game calls for a couple of counter types, "sitting duck" or "sealed hatches" so I'm re-using some double sided netrunner tokens I have that will fit the bill. One side is red (sitting duck), the other blue (sealed hatches). The rulebook has a printable token sheet but I prefer something a bit more robust than paper. I'll be tracking shields and hull damage using dice.
  • Time (?) Naturally it takes a bit of time to build these ships and make this terrain but really none of it was strenuous. I've certainly spent longer assembling and painting proper starter sets.
So in total we're just over £40, with the caveat that I've got a bunch of spare pegs and polystyrene balls to use on future projects.

Not really the shockingly cheap total I was hoping for, but I blame that on the flight stands. If I were craftier I could have cobbled something together with wood, but then I do appreciate the luxury of transparent acrylic.

Overall, am I happy with £40 for a full two full-sized fleets with a proper battlefield to fight on? Absolutely.




Dig into your own scrapheap. There might be a starter set in there.

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

Wednesday, 15 January 2025

Electric Broadcasts

Bastion is full of broadcasts. The very air you breathe is filled with transmissions waiting to be received. Radio, telly, machines silently pinging their plots to each other.

Lately everyone seems to be enjoying the telly. Wind out that aerial and flick on the screen. Tap the glass if it doesn't look right.

Current models come with nine of the most popular channels tuned in.

1: Video Nasty
Sedate general-interest programming by day, the most deranged filth you've ever seen by night. They switched their name from "Good Times" when they realised how few people were watching the daytime broadcast.

2: New Rural Broadcast
Intrepid far-transmission teams head out into Deep Country, finally giving a voice to those poor marginalised communities. Most Bastiards treat this as a comedy.

3: Civil Information
Urrrgh... I mean you're supposed to watch this on the hour twice a day if you own a telly and want to keep your license, but nobody ever does.

4: Remembrance
Solemn sepia imagery memorialising significant people who died recently. A panel of fame-hungry personalities discuss each life, ensuring they promote their own work in the process.

5: SeeText
Machine-printed text projected onto the screen, turned to new pages at irregular intervals, with relaxing background music. Like a more irreverent newspaper updated almost instantly.

6: The Starry Gates
A bunch of cults banded together to fund a non-stop broadcast of wildly conflicting ideologies. Only worth watching for the awkward handover segments that occur between sects on the hour.

7: Numberhouse
Just a bunch of numbers sung over and over. Stick the kids in front of it and leave them to it.

8: The Open Broadcast
Anybody can get a free slot on this, but there's a bit of a waiting list. In principle this should be home to creative, independently minded programming, but then the sort of twit who has time for this doesn't usually have much interesting to say.

9: Free Alternative Telly
This started out as a slightly edgy Mockery-led channel, but then everybody realised that you can perform all manner of improper, immoral, or illegal behaviour if you film and broadcast it. Looks like utter anarchy, but everybody on there has an agenda.

0: If you know the right tuning you set Channel 0 to something strange, including:

Scrambled Channels
Looks like a bunch of flashing shapes and falling snow to me, but I heard Machines can make sense of it.

Personal Channels
The lonely rich seem to get something out of earnestly talking into the camera and imagining there's an audience.

Warped Channels
I knew somebody who watched the wrong channel for too long and it turned them Alien. Honest!

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.

Wednesday, 1 January 2025

Infinite Couterplay

I previously wrote about favouring Tactical Counterplay over Strategic Counterplay.

In short: I like games where you can counter and counter-counter your opponents through decisions in play rather than decisions that happen before the game begins.

Now that was in the context of miniature wargames, but I think RPGs present a slightly different situation.

In a wargame, if one side is heavily invested in archers and the other has an “immune to arrows” special rule across all their units, that can feel bad. There are a few factors here:

  • Taking the smart approach of “I withdraw my forces and try an alternative approach” typically isn’t an option. We’ve laid out the armies to fight, so we’re at least going to give it a try.

  • Army building isn’t done in isolation. When you’ve bought, assembled, painted, and found storage for 100 archers it can suck to realise they’re useless against your friend’s units.

  • Typical GM-less wargames don’t allow opportunity to adjust to a hard strategic counter. I’ll come back to this.

Now some of this example is hyperbolic. An army-wide “immune to arrows” rule feels like a bad bit of design, but even if it was a milder “arrows get -1 to hit you” rule the point still stands. 

Does this carry over to TTRPGs? Do I think it’s bullshit if gelatinous cubes are immune to arrows? 

Well, no. There are a few factors I think apply here.

  • Tactical Infinity means that you always have the option to do other things beside shooting arrows pointlessly into the cube. Lure it into a trap? Run away and come back with more appropriate weapons? Just sneak past it? Work out some way to modify your arrows to work against the cube? Start a fire? These typically aren’t options in a more rigid wargame.

  • In the types of RPG I play, a single combat isn’t going to take up the majority of a night’s gaming. It matters less if we hit a single combat where some of the players feel like they’ve been hard countered before the fight begins. For most miniature games that one combat is the entire session of play. 

  • With “theatre of the mind” style play a player can adjust their character’s gear, or even their entire character, without needing to buy, model, paint, and store a bunch of new miniatures. In fact, usually this process of equipping yourselves and preparing for an adventure occurs as a group, rather than as a solitary activity, so the team can plan for potential counters together.

So yeah, bring on weapons that ignore armour, shields that block all ranged attacks, and ghosts that ignore non-magical weapons. In an RPG there’s always a tactical counter.

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This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.