The One About Star Smuggler Characters

Alright. Tomorrow I want to look at the combat that I just went through. In order to do that, we need to look at a character sheets. And because I am doing that, I need to reintroduce an old cheat that I implemented on day one, and a new one that I will implement tomorrow.

First, let's look at Duke and Emily. Duke is the player's avatar and has some extra abilities no other character has, such as a last name.

Duke has the ability to fly the ship or fire the guns. No other character should be able to do that. He can also use heavy and standard side arms, which is not typical for a pilot. He can also trick people with his cunning skill.

On day one, I wasn't sure how long this game would last, so I declared that Emily would have all of Duke's abilities except cunning. If she had taken over for Duke due to death, she would have been given an Cunning of 4.

Next, I want to talk about the medics. They can keep a character at zero hit points alive until rescue. They will attempt to avoid hand to hand combat, but do have a score.

Medics can assist Duke in certain events in the book, which is hinted at in their introduction, so they are good to have around.

Additionally, they can stop a bullet or tie up a person in melee. It's a bad idea, but they can.

As another limitation, they cannot use the ship's radio.

The next 3 characters are the starship's gunners. They can use heavy hand weapons, the ship's guns, boat's guns and skimmer guns. They cannot drive a skimmer, fly a boat or operate the ship for movement. They can use the ship's radio. This is interesting as the rules seem to delineate characters by those who work on a ship vs. those who happen to be on a ship.

What is interesting about this type of character is, they are better than bodyguards. Bodyguards do have skill to interpose themselves between Duke and a shot, but can't operate the ship's equipment like the gunners can.

Next in the crew are the Engineers. They fix and maintain things. They can use a side arm in self-defense. Oddly, they are one of the few characters that can drive a skimmer. I am not sure why this is.

Engineers can repair the ship, the hopper, robots and other vehicles at a rate of one hit per day in RRR.

One thing that I did over the course of this series was limit the Engineers ability to repair. Technically, you can take a crewman out of service so they can perform RRR while the ship is in motion or while other crewmen do something else. I didn't allow this for clarity.

As you can see, I have been keeping a running tab on how much money each character has. What you are not seeing is an accurate count of hits. Hits reduce endurance and I have been using pen and paper for that. Lucy has a hit of damage, Duke has two and Emily has one.

From this point on, I will be doing a second cheat in regards to crew equipment. If it is on the character sheet, it doesn't count against my CU space on the ship. This is a slight bending of the rules, as a character can wear a suit, carry a heavy side arm and be attended to by a PS bot but that takes up 4 CU's of space. I am ignoring that for simplicity's sake. Someone may have to strip off a suit and drop their weapons to get into a 1 CU space, like a Status unit but other than that, I am no longer counting carried personal equipment as taking up cargo space.

Tomorrow, the adventure will continue and I will do a breakdown of the combat from today.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 058 – Feb 27th

Let’s start today right. I pay the crew. In the next hour, I get side arms TL-1 at 4 secs. each. I buy 8,500 of them and break for orbit. We double jump back to Imperia and have two ours of daylight left.

Our entry encounter is interesting. We respond to a distress call and get jumped by pirates. They storm the ship, 1 through the airlock and 3 enter the cargo bay. They have suits, so depressurizing won’t help much. They carry TL-1 side arms and a magic axe that can incapacitate anyone it hits. Fun.

My crew also has suits, military U-suits with PS bots. We’re going to play this out the hard way.

The first time I read this, I wondered how many pirates there were. The rules say that unless I kill all intruders in a single turn, 4 more enter the next turn in the same fashion. Ok. That is interesting.

Emily and Duke take the airlock. Lucy and Ratchet with side arms head to the cargo bay along with Deadeye, Lefty, David. The non-engineers have Heavy Side Arms with explosive rounds, TL-4.

Duke kills his target in one shot. Emily heads to the Cargo bay. In the bay, the fire fight is frantic. Ratchet hits a target for one point of damage. Lucy misses. The other all hit, leaving only one guy standing with 4 hits left. He fires and misses.

Next round. Duke incapacitates another target. In the bay, the fire fight continues. Emily, Deadeye, and Lefty down 3 bad guys, David misses. Lucy and Ratchet fire on the last guy doing one more point of damage each. He fires back and hits Lucy for one point of damage.

Third round. Duke retreats to the cockpit area where the doctors are and vents the atmosphere. In the bay, the team guns everyone down again, 3 are incapacitated and the last guy is dead.

Round four. Duke returns to the airlock and is fired on. He’s hit for one point of damage. Emily returns to the airlock area. David, Deadeye and Lefty all hit with explosive rounds. It doesn’t matter what they roll, they all have ruptured suits and drop.

Round Five. Let’s start in the Cargo bay. Round four is repeated, with all three pirates going down. Duke and Emily get the same result. The battle is over.

Time to gather up the goods. We strip the enemy ship of 1000 secs. worth of stuff before it’s engines malfunction. I take another 640 secs. from the dead pirates, plus their 20 side arms.

Duke and Lucy are hurt, suffering one point of damage each. Could be worse. I am also out of hypercharges, so we can't jump.

We descend toward the planet, in our final hour of the day. We are heading to the slums to unload these side arms.

1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe nothing.
1 TL-1 Ship’s Guns.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.
2 Boat guns, TL-2.
8,520 Side Arms, TL-1.
2 CU Status unit in Cockpit and Engineering, 8 1 CU Status units in Crew Quarters and 1 1 CU unit in Gunnery.
4 CU Status Unit (e103),
10 Fuel Units in the Ship’s Boat,
8 Repair units,
5 Life Support Units in the Ship’s boat.
7 PS-bots, 1 per character,
10 TL-1 military U-suits.
6 TL-1 Heavy Hand Weapons for sale, 4 for characters use,
7 Side Arms TL-1, 1 Side Arm TL-3, and one TL-4.
10 TL-4 heavy hand weapons with explosive effects
4 Doses of pheromones (e009) in Duke’s pocket.
and the ship is fueled with no hypercharges.

I have 6,271 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.

#TBT review - Miniature Treasures - The Moldy Unicorn

Title: The Moldy Unicorn
Code: N/A
Author: Nate Treme
Rule Set: Angostic
Year: 2019
Pages: 6
Number of characters: As needed
Levels: N/A
Rating: ★★★★★

If a book has a good cover, I'll probably take a look. If it has that haute 70's look, the smash of day old banana and lime colored paste, I'll do a double take. If it has both of the above, plus the childish, rounded look of a composition notebook, my brain shuts down and the money comes out, no questions asked.

Well, that's what happened with The Moldy Unicorn a few days ago. I purchased one of a few physical copies based on a single image on MeWe.com. And then I forgot about it.

It arrived today.

I opened the envelope and was all disappointed. It was tiny. Really tiny. "I paid money for this?"

Then I opened the booklet. And the frisson hit. Suddenly, I was 8 year old me, standing in Walden Books, smelling nasty carpet chemicals and mall pretzels, looking a copy of the Red Basic D&D rule book. Gary, Dave and Tom whispered, "Go ahead, turn the page."

The thing is six g-ddamn pages, packed with amazing stuff. Pages 1 and 2 describe The Moldy Unicorn with a colorful map. Page 3 lists encounters for the Inn. The next page describes how to design a Demon, with 3 tables, conveniently labeled 1-12 for easy die rolling. The last two pages are a mini dungeon, Grotburk Crypt.

The artwork is excellent. It isn't excellent in the sense of a masterpiece, but the odd, brightly colored outsider art that masters cannot duplicate. The text is tight, it has to be in a volume this small.

While its only 6 pages (8 if you count the covers, the thing that made me **WANT** this 'zine), those pages are highly concentrated. Being so tiny, it is delicate. I already know that I am going to buy a special picture frame for this. I am just moments away from heading to DriveThruRPG and purchasing an electronic copy, to jealously protect the physical copy like mage protects his spell book.

It's been decades since I have been this happy with a purchase. Of course, I've read it cover to cover. But I'm going to do it again tomorrow. And the next day. This is great buy. This is well worth the $6.00 for the physical copy (Sold out, sorry), $10.00 for the PDF.

To put some perspective on the Star Rating above, I review a lot of things. Computer hardware and software, novels, games, historical books, etc. If I'm not going to give something 3 stars, I'm not giving any stars. If you're not going to give at least 3 stars, its like trash talking people. This is the first time I have been compelled to give 5 gold stars, underlined. I've reviewed several of my mom and dad's books. I don't hand out gold stars. It is very rare that I am so enchanted with any product to completely rethink my rating system.

#TBT review - Dunromin University Press' SM00 A Traveller's Atlas of Dunromin and the Land of the Young Review

I just picked up a copy of SM00 A Traveller's Atlas of Dunromin and the Land of the Young and it is my new favorite item.

Title:  SM00 A Traveller's Atlas of Dunromin and the Land of the Young
Author: Dunromin University Press (Simon Miles)
Rule Set: OSRIC
Year: 2018
Pages: 28
Number of Players: N/A
Rating: ★★★★★

This is supposed to be a full color map folio of the Free City of Dunromin, but the work goes so much further. In addition to the beautifully drawn Free City, Mr. Miles killed it with amazing details of the surrounding area, political and physical maps of the Land of the Young, barony maps, maps of the continent and of the world.

The artwork is incredible, a great addition to any old school gaming campaign. Being a set of maps designed for OSRIC, it is generic enough to fit into any fantasy game system.

I just can't get over the art. The cover and some other images are wholly digital, but others look hand drawn. It's a near thing, I can usually tell the difference, but not in this product. Many of the pages are on a graph, but I can't tell if it's pencil on graphpaper, or digital work meant to look old school. There are a few pages where I think I can see blowthrough, like a scanner picked up information from a page behind the scanned page, but I can't be certain it isn't photoshopped to look like that.

I probably won't use this in my campaign, but I am already looking to see which pages I will print and frame. Simply put, it's awesome!

Priced a pay what you want, you can't go wrong with this title. I can't wait to check out the rest of the series.

If you need a Christmas gift and you have a nice printer and paper, this is perfect.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 057 – Feb 26th

We break orbit in the first hour of the day. We have 9 left. Where do I go from here? We are going to make a double jump for Cubro.

On entry, we stumble across a 4 CU status chamber from e103. We pick it up, but have no way to open it now. There is not much on Cubro, so we head for the slums with 4 hours of day light. We run right into a riot in progress. Duke has to make a save vs. cunning or every person and every vehicle will take a point of damage. We succeed in escaping unharmed.

Each roll takes 2 hours and we have 3 hours to spend. The rules say that if you can start before time runs out, you complete that last action, so I can make two rolls. Except I roll a 4, which results in no more rolls.

Sigh.

1 Antelope starship with TL-5 Guns. I owe nothing.
1 TL-1 Ship’s Guns.
1 Hopper with boat guns, TL-3.
2 Boat guns, TL-2.
2 CU Status unit in Cockpit and Engineering, 8 1 CU Status units in Crew Quarters and 1 1 CU unit in Gunnery.
4 CU Status Unit (e103).
10 Fuel Units in the Ship’s Boat.
8 Repair units,
5 Life Support Units in the Ship’s boat.
7 PS-bots, 1 per character,
10 TL-1 military U-suits
6 TL-1 Heavy Hand Weapons for sale, 4 for characters use,
7 Side Arms TL-1, 1 Side Arm TL-3, and one TL-4.
10 TL-4 heavy hand weapons with explosive effects
4 Doses of pheromones (e009) in Duke’s pocket.
and the ship is fueled with 6 hypercharges.

I have 38,731 secs. We are wanted in the Palatek system.