The Continuing Adventures in Inkscape - Rocket's Pale Glare

I have to tell you, I've been watching Disney videos again and it's effecting my style.



I wanted to keep the color pallet simple and stuck to 4 colors and two shades of purple, green and grey and blues.


It was kind of fun. I took the idea of rockets and skinned them off in the vein of it's a small world. I'm not sure what color background looks correct to me.


Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Strictly (Duke) Springer - Day 119 – April 9th.

I now have the calendar sync to at least the last digit, which is easier on the mind.

Based on all of the stuff we found, our best bet is to head to New Karma, then Imperia. Skimmers are hot commodity at Colonies and the books we have are worth a lot there, too.

On landing at the colony, we get hit up for custom fees for vehicles. 5 secs. per vehicle, including the ship and boats. How annoying. It burns up the rest of our day and costs us 40 secs.

We have 185,506 in cash, have 7 hypercharges.  We now owe 194,863 on our ship. We are wanted on Palatek.

Encumbrance and Campaigning

I love my characters, but a lot of times they come up with some odd choices. Backpacks are one of my favorite sources of amusement.

I really don't mind overburdened players, but somethings are beyond the pale. The people walking around with stakes and hammers and a small fry pan aren't the problem.

I have a very ad hoc encumbrance rule, one which secretly hides one of those never named zeroth laws. My ad hoc encumbrance rule is armor OR a backpack plus two items in your hands means you are totally encumbered. It may or may not slow you down, but you certainly can't carry more. You can also be encumbered by having stuff (or an opponent) wrapped around your legs.

Romans would pack a lot of stuff on their soldiers. Gaius Marius demanded that the soldiers carry most of the load themselves. That earned them the nickname Marius' Mules. The Romans didn't wear backpacks, but carried a sacrina.

Not a link to Gander Outdoors

The sacrina held a cloak bag, a pot, a satchel, a Patera or mess tin, food, a waterskin and a net for loose items, all on a big forked stick. Notice the rectangular satchel on the back and the net on the front. When they dropped these, they landed on that satchel with the stick projecting upwards for easy recovery and unpacking. The bonus of the sacrina was that it made armor a benefit to carrying one as the armor distributed the weight of the stick on their shoulder. This is probably a better tool for carrying stuff than a backpack over armor or a backpack full of armor.

Here is where my zeroth law comes in. You drop your stuff and I will almost never have someone mess with it. If you leave it behind, that is one thing, but I really don't want to annoy my players with cheap shots like stealing all of their gear. Stealing money, sure. But not a backpack.

In my most recent campaign, my players have made an art of being unencumbered at all times. They have 2 wagons, oxen and a bunch of NPCs in tow. When they say they have a pack, it's pretty much a purse: a snack, some useful items and some water. I'm vaguely annoyed because they should have purchased a boat, but instead got the wagons because I left that word, "ship" out by accident.

Oh, well.

How do you handle encumbrance in your campaign? Let me know in the comments below.

Hot Products - Dishonored, City of Nexus and The Halls of Arden Vul

It looks like the hot product tool for Affiliates is a little broken on DriveThru. For the last week, the site has been telling me that City of Nexus is the hottest new book, while logging in displays Dishonored as number one.

Hottest New Book City of Nexus | 20x30 Battlemaps [BUNDLE]

How annoying. The other day I decided to make up my own links to products I like. They are over on the left hand column. If you want to read how I was able to get a neat little box for a website from data on DriveThruRPG, click here for the tutorial.

What seems to be a truly hot product is The Halls of Arden Vul, in many different forms. Below is a picture and a link to the complete set PDF, all 1,100+ pages.

The Halls of Arden Vul Complete The Halls of Arden Vul Completer

As a dungeon goes, it doesn't get any more mega than that. If 1,100+ pages at one go is too much for you, it comes in 5 volumes. Volume I to IV are $30 for the PDF and $55 for the printed book. Volume V is different, it's the map (well, 33 maps) and sells for only $5.00 digital.

I'm probably going to order the maps for now (Volume V). I love my artwork and the artists on this product are incredible.

Here are links to the whole series:

Volume I
Volume II
Volume III
Volume IV
Volume V
and Complete.

In looking up this information, I found a bundle pack for $275.00. I don't know... it's almost like they gave me a MEGA-amount of information to process.

The bundle pack is a PDF of 1,100+ pages and a physical copy of Volumes I-V. The "complete" PDF is the aforementioned PDF from the bundle pack. If those entry points of $109 and $275 are too steep, ordering the first four volumes individually, entitles you to a copy of that 1,100 page PDF. Additionally, if your order the $109 Complete PDF, you can receive a 33% on print copies of the individual books at a later time.

Wow... just the description is MEGA all on it's own. That is a lot of information to process. 

Digging Deeper into Star Smuggler - Surprises in the Events Booklet - Battleship (e081)

Star Smuggler was a set of rules with two small booklets. The rule set was a 24 page booklet which included everything you needed to play. It was seamlessly integrated with a 20 page event booklet. In doing some careful analysis, I have yet to find a mistake not covered by the short errata sheet.

One of the fascinating things about the rule set is how well it plays off the event booklet. One of the complaints about this game is the number of "game breaking" events that can end your game via a single die roll. Well, those are flaws, those are features of a choose your own adventure style book.

Within the events booklet are hidden 30+ new items for the player to enjoy or be challenged by. They range from axes to battleships and when such items are stat'ed out, they never break the system laid out in the rules booklet.

I'll be taking a look some of these items, as this system can easily be fleshed out into a full rpg, complete with a campaign setting.

The first surprise I would like to look at is a ship described in one of the events - The Battleship. This is a TL-2 ship with 12 turrets and 120 hits. It's a beast. I took the time to stat it up in the normal parlance of the game. To say it's OP is an understatement, but Duke can be victorious over this beast with careful game play.

Using the basic ship, the Antelope, I extrapolated what a battleship might look like. I'm not happy with the re-skin of the Buffalo Transport, so I will be revisiting this ship's layout soon.

The first conclusion that I came to was the fact that this might be a Pocket Battleship. The limitation comes from the description of the ship itself. It's TL-2 ship, which is pretty weak.

Even so, it is a massive ship. The Pocket Battleship is 410 CU in size and it's the largest ship in this image. The Antelope is the smallest ship.

Let me know what you think. I'll be continuing this series on a weekly basis.