OSRx - Take That!

I honestly don't know what OSR stands for. Is it "Revival"? Is it "Renaissance"? I noticed that "Old School Rx" or "OSRx" ends in the abbreviation used by doctors for "Prescription" or more simply, "take that".

You know what you can do for the OSRx?

Right now, you can order order a charity bundle from DriveThruRPG to support those facing the fires in Australia. I've round up all 5 themes, so click away:

Fantasy Core & Settings $19.95
Starships & Posthumanity $29.95
Modern & Urban Horror $19.95
Fantasy Supplements $29.95
Capes, Grit, and Gunsmoke $19.95

EDIT January 22nd, 2020: The folks at DrivethruRPG have added 3 more at $9.99 price point for an even better value. Here is a link to the whole category. I'd also like to thank Jeremy over at Thought Eater Blog, host of The Frothcast podcast and all of the others who reshared this post. What a great community we have.

What if you don't want to do that or don't have ready cash? Linking to or subscribing to a blog could help a lot. The collapse of G+ robbed the community of the means of communication and we scattered. Every blog that shares links is a defense against that sort of collapse. My suggestion is to add those blog rolls, but also sign yourself up for https://campaignwiki.org/osr/. This "blog" serves up dozens if not hundreds of blogs in one feed. It's great. If you already did that, why not check out some of the people who provide content?

As with blogs, podcasts are great. There are so many out there, I don't even know where to begin. You could begin by subscribing to some of the podcast I linked to in the right hand column or share your own favorites in the comments below.

There are all kinds of communities to join, too. I like MeWe best, but there are so many to choose from. Check a few out.

Lastly, and probably most importantly, play a game and do a review. Post it up some place. Without you insight, the community won't know what is good and why. Have an opinion and share it.

Rx... take that.

A little fun, a lot of good for OZ

I was looking for something to buy for my birthday over at DriveThruRPG. Nothing really stood out to me until I logged in to MeWe.

I saw a few people post on some bundles over at DriveThruRPG for the fires down under. 100% of your purchase goes to the following organizations:

Disaster Relief and Recovery - Australia Red Cross
Bushfire Emergency - World Wildlife Fund of Australia

DriveThruRPG and it's publishers have really stepped up, here. There are 5 bundles for every type of interest. I didn't bother to count the number of great titles included with each. All of them appear to gave more than a dozen books each.

Fantasy Core & Settings $19.95
Starships & Posthumanity $29.95
Modern & Urban Horror $19.95
Fantasy Supplements $29.95
Capes, Grit, and Gunsmoke $19.95

Personally, I'm going for the Fantasy and Core Settings bundle. What a great way to celebrate gaming, a birthday or whatever while helping out those in the awesome but beleaguered OZ.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 018

Today, we will recover the cache. It takes 6 hours. From there, we head to back to the Spaceport to get those U-suits and Life Support Units. I roll a new ship, a new boat twice, and a gunner. No help for it. We need another day.

Sigh.

Such is random luck. 

Our assets are:

1 Antelope starship, which I owe 119,300 secs. in principle.

15 Fuel Units,
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,

24 Repair units.

1 U-bot,

2 PS-bots,

6 Skimmers,

1 Damaged Skimmer,

2 U-suit,

and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I have 750 secs. in my pocket.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 017

Maybe a U-suit looks like this.

On our second last day in the Ruins of Regari, we located a damaged skimmer and another U-suit.

I think it’s almost time to move on. We are close to playing “Russian Dolls”, here. The ship has 60 cu of space in the main bay and another 40 of the boat’s bay. I have 40 cu of skimmers sitting in both bays, plus 20 repair units and 15 Fuel Units. We have 3 bots and two suits. Plus 6 people. I have suits and units of repair and fuel sitting in the skimmers’ cargo and crew compartments.

Each skimmer can hold 6 cu of equipment in the crew compartment. We can technically take on an additional 44 cu of junk before I have to start stashing stuff in engineering, the crew space, and my six secret compartments.

We need to dump some of this stuff, but not until I get those LU and additional suits.

Our assets are:

1 Antelope starship, which I owe 119,300 secs. in principle.

15 Fuel Units,
1 Stasis pod 2 CU,

20 Repair units.

1 U-bot,

3 Skimmers,

1 Damaged Skimmer

2 U-suit,

and the ship is fully fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I have 650 secs. in my pocket.

In the cache in the Ruins of Regari are:

3 Skimmers,

4 Repair Units,

100 secs.

Playing with Inkscape and an Orion Type Ship

If I could make my own universe, I'd probably run with something like Traveller. However, the ships I have in mind are sort of WTF level.

This is an Orion Type ship. I'm tinkering with Inkscape and coming up with ship designs. This one is a Bixby class exploration ship. The difference between battleship and explorer is slight with an Orion class ship.

Typical models are 10 meters across and about a hundred meters long. The long spar from the base to the top is where the payload goes, which I haven drawn yet. The whole ship is over 600 meters long.

Orions don't scale down, period. 10 by 100 meters is an arbitrary limit that one hits if you merely want to fill a spaceship with niceties like a 50-100 kg barber chair just because you might want one.

Typical Orion type ships have HUNDREDS of kiloton nuclear devices used to push the ship forward. This one probably has thousands. The grey area above the orange is the magazine for these propulsion devices. Often, the nuclear device will be deployed by a gun like mechanism through a hole in the pusher plate. That is option 1.

Option 2 is to have the nuclear device mounted on a missile that flies out the sides of the ship and to the target area 30 meters behind the pusher plate. The delivery rate is a leisurely 1 device per 1.1 seconds and one launcher would have the ability to perform this task. However, this ramped up version has 16 launchers, each one capable of launching nukes once a second, plus the gun-like arrangement at the bottom.

Theoretically, this is an unarmed ship. You can read a story about it in action here. The tech level in this story is all over the place, no FTL, but lots of AIs and reefer sleep. The AI is beginning to think about arming itself.