Wednesday, 12 February 2025

Stars & Worlds

Here's what a star currently looks like in Intergalactic Bastionland.

Remember, this isn't space as we know it, so here the usual black void is replaced with wadable dust and industrial smog, golden highways cleared for smooth travel.

The stars themselves are alive, the clue's in the name really, and they impose their philosophy through boons and banes.

But what's a star without some worlds to visit? This one has twelve, so here's a super early draft of number five.

You've got people, places, and an origins section that acts as a rapid-fire lifepath for new characters. Roll three worlds that make up your life before now, where you were born, made, and broken. These each give you a skill and some other stuff. Yes, watercraft is a very niche skill.

LAPRINS
A sunken maze beneath a frozen crust.

WORLD PROFILE
Class: Ice Giant
Atmos: Pale clouds of ice shards
Pop: Ten-thousands
Surface: Dense crust of blue glass-like ice
Market: Corporate Extractor
Reqs: Vacc suit

PLACES 

1: Lazuli Depot - Low orbit station handling all off-world trade. Corporate brokers from across the system bicker over crystal allocations and trading terms. Also has a nice small coffee shop. Refined crystals (Unstable Mineral, 3F, +1 Sale Value) can be bought here, but supply is starting to dry up until a new vein can be found.

2: The Crystal Mine - Under the maze, pockets of crystals, ripe for refinement. Highly psychotropic in raw form, presenting idealised visions of the future. Miners will sell these on the side (Fragile Ware, 7F, +1 Sale Value). The mine always needs more labour but the work is dangerous, using colossal crustaceans as beasts of burden.

3: The Shark Cage - Heavy bunker, dropped on the crust to monitor the mining operation via a crude mob of hired muscle. Doubles as an extremely feisty bar. Gambling is based around sticking appendages into hyper-cooled liquids (d12 burn per turn).

4: The Maze - A sprawl of trenches deep in the crust-topped ocean, origin unknown. A natural field preserves a dome of air over it. The Maze hates anybody exploring it, sending d6 invisible enforcers (Force 12, 2gd, d8 crush) to repel those who don’t offer proper respect on their visit. Mysterious maze-dwelling people technically own this world.

5: Caleb Tango Memorial Lodge - Dusty old lodge selling gigantic seafood and exploration supplies. Named for the first offworlder to die exploring the Maze. Doesn’t get many visitors. A bored sales attendant amuses themselves by being as unhelpful as possible, knowing they won’t get fired.

6: The Feet of the Elevatrix - An urban sprawl, clinging to the base of the space elevator that connects to Lazuli Depot. Broken miners want out, naive youngsters want in, claiming there’s opportunity to be had when a world hits rock bottom.

PEOPLE

1: Naradutch, Corporate Chronicler 
Observation 12, Climbing 15, Social Cues 2, 3gd, grey chitin, four long spindly legs, cheerful
Concealed pistol (d6 pierce), even more concealed beampistol (d8 burn)
Reports to corporate clients through the wire, selling the latest news and gossip.

2: Riff, Head of the Broken Miners
Machinery 15, Camaraderie 13, Toil 7, 4gd, rocklike but soft physique, weary growl
Mining beam (d10 burn, static), hand pick (d6 pierce), vacc suit
Heads up a group of injured miners striving for better work conditions.

3: Martha Shark, Efficiency Enforcer 
Brutality 16, Economics 10, Fish 8, 3gd, sharklike physique, aggressively self-pitying
Tornado gun (d8 crush, blast), electro hammer (d10 burn, hefty), mech suit (A3)
Knows the mine isn’t operating as well as it should.

4: Arinther, the First Maze Dweller 
Mystique 15, Ruthlessness 10, Flowers 5, 5gd, blue and rubbery, immune to cold, obtuse
Crystalsword (2d6 burn), power suit (A2)
Wants to sell out the mine to a more effective company. Driven by profit.

5: Charto-96, Artifact Hunting Machine
Adventure 15, History 6, Explosives 10, 8gd, clanking body, exposed wires, gruff
Pneumatic fists (d10 crush each), rope launcher, metal body (A2).
Wants to uncover the mysteries of the Maze, and to stop others doing it first.

6: The Master of the Elevatrix 
Genetics 14, Smalltalk 4, Memory 7, 2gd, long limbs and grey fur
Shock stave (d8 burn, long), ceremonial wings (flightless)
Controls transit to and from Lazuli Depot. Driven to protect the Elevatrix as his ancestors did.

ORIGINS 

Born - Born in the maze, you learned to turn its hazards to your own purposes.
Skill: Traps.
You are blue, rubbery and suffer no harm from extreme cold.

Made - You ferried ultra dense crystals through channels cleared in the ice.
Skill: Watercraft.
Sack of ice picks (d8 pierce, hefty), breaker bombs (2d8 crush, blast)

Broken - You were cast into the maze by Martha Shark but found your way out.
Skill: Pathfinding.
Vision pills (super-enhanced vision, lasts 1 hour, mild hallucinations afterwards)

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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, 5 February 2025

Travel & Trade

What's it like trading goods among the living stars?

MONEY AND POWER
Small currencies aren’t tracked in the game. Major transactions use stellar fragments, commonly called frags, both a universal currency and key to space travel.

TRADE GOODS
Trade requires knowing the good type and market type you are dealing with.

GOOD TYPES:
• Organics: Food, livestock, plants.
• Minerals: Metals, stones, oils.
• Technicals: Tools, parts, chemicals.
• Wares: Consumer products, artwork.

MARKET TYPES (roll d6 if unknown):
1. Grower: Farms and exporters of food and other organic matter.
2. Extractor: Mines and drilling rigs.
3. Foundry: Complexes primarily turning minerals into technical goods.
4. Workshop: Ware producers with little in the way of self-sufficiency.
5. Outpost: Isolated settlements that rely on imports for their basic needs.
6. Nexus: Trade hubs with eager buyers for finished products.

BUYING AND SELLING
This table shows the typical value of each good in each market type.

Standard customs fee is 3 frags. This covers all buying and selling carried out during a single visit to a market.

Deals can be negotiated, but may require a Save to avoid souring things entirely.

MARKET FORCES
Each time you arrive in a market, roll d6 and apply the result to all goods.

GOODS MODIFIERS
In addition to a good type, goods may have a modifier that increases their sell value by 1, but adds a complication.

1. Illicit: Illegal to import.
2. Bulk: Must be traded as lots of 10.
3. Pressurised: Explode if disturbed.
4. Unstable: Lose 1 value every 3 days.
5. Fragile: If broken, worth 1 frag only.
6. Specialist: If sold to anybody but the intended buyer, worth 1 frag only.

MARKET MODIFIERS (roll d12 if unknown)
In addition to a market type, each market has a modifier that affects trade:

1. Rich: +1 to all values
2. Poor: -1 to all values
3. Union: -1 to import values
4. Corporate: +1 to import values
5. Industrial: -1 to export values
6. Civic: +1 to export values
7. Prestige: Double value increases from market forces.
8. Abundant: Double value decreases from market forces.
9. Haven: Customs Fee is 1 frag.
10. Fortress: Customs Fee is 5 frags.
11. Archaic: Frags are not used here. Trade goods for goods only.
12. Volatile: Apply double effect from Market Forces.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, but why?

Intergalactic Bastionland isn't really about trade (well, sometimes it might be... more on that another time).

Traveller isn't strictly about trade either, but the trade rules serve to nudge the players toward adventure (kinda).

I want some of that feel too, where it's difficult to make huge money on a straight deal, so you've got to take some chances.

Remember:

  • Travel costs are not included in the above

  • There's always someone with a bigger cargo ship

  • Markets are unstable

  • If a trade route seems really good then somebody wants to control it

But aside from making life as a pure trader unappealing, this system serves a few extra purposes.

Buying and selling isn't always about speculative trading! Perhaps you need a bunch of organic goods so that your favourite starport doesn't get wiped out by starvation. Perhaps you're selling a bunch of organics because you stole them from that starport you really hate. Sometimes you're just going somewhere anyway, so you might as well try to break even on your fuel costs with a middling trade deal on the side.

I'd also like the type/modifier combination to act as a shorthand reminder of what to expect from each location. Even before we dig into a world's full description we're offered a spark of flavour from whether it's a Fortress Extractor, a Prestige Outpost, or an Archaic Workshop.

Oh yeah, the world descriptions. I'll look at them next time.

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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, 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. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

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, 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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

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!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.