Savage Worlds X: Mobile Cores

Next up: mech time! The mech below was built using the Savage Worlds Science Fiction Companion Mech system.

Gryphon Class MCHE0321

Mobile Cores

The backbone of the Federated Commonwealth's exploratory marines is the Mobile Core unit, a rough and tumble exosuit designed to handle almost any hostile environment from the depths of space to searing hot worlds. Mobile Cores are built to handle a range of weapons and extensions, tend to stand about 6-9 meters in height, and are also sold in stripped-down civilian versions which are used for mining, research and hauling.

A typical 9.5 meter tall Mobile Core exploratory marine unit looks like this:

Gryphon Class MCHE0321 - Mobile Core Heavy Exploratory Unit
Chassis: Heavy
Size 3, Armor +12, Mods 12 (0 free), Pace 4
Mods:
Strength X3
Flight Pack
Magnetic Pads
Propulsion Jets
Self-Sealing
Targeting System
Two Weapon Mounts-Choose two of the following: Heavy Missile, Heavy Railgun, Minigun, heavy laser

Project Arbiter

Project Arbiter is the coolest short film I've seen in the last year:



Finding this gem while I was reading Weird Wars II was pure kizmet.....!

Savage Space IX: Dead Worlds of the Coreward Expanse

Continuing 28 Days of Savage Worlds in Space...also, as a side note, been reading Stars Without Number once more and thinking I ought to provide stats for this gem as well....we'll see. 

The Dead Worlds of the Coreward Expanse

About eight hundred and ninety light years from Earth one can find the first evidence of a much vaster, more advanced and infinitely superior stellar civiliation, one which was comprised of dozens of sapient species across hundreds of habitable worlds. There is evidence that the Transitional Drive had been abandoned by this civilization in favor of actual N-Dimensional space-folding drive technology; something that is known to be possible today, but which requires the output of a significant stellar mass to power.

Just what happened to this vast civilization is unknown. There are some interesting facts, however:

Age - the last functional relic of this civilization can be found on Altair VI and is a remote colony that perished around 4.2 million years ago. Before mankind's first noteworthy ancestor was moving about on two feet in the grass the entirety of the Coreward Expanse civilization had come and gone.

Warfare - There is a great deal of evidence that warfare ripped this stellar empire apart. Dozens of worlds show clear evidence of extinction-level events that may have been artificially generated. What is unclear is whether it was a civil war, or a conflict with an external force which arrived and left, with no interest in the many worlds it attacked other than extermination.

Technology - Some of the relics of this civilization suggest they not only could fold space for travel but they could teleport on a local level, utilized true energy field technology to make hard light contructs and were even capable of n-dimensional stable constructs. None of this technology has survived intact, but researchers are always looking for the holy grail of evidence.

Caches - some of the last colonies to fall from this era retain caches of technology that remains largely intact, and mostly functional. Self-replicating machines known as exotics (free willed AI) have been found intact and mostly functioning. This tech is incredibly valuable and there is a constant conflict between different independents, Aegis Division agents, Academy researchers and agents of the Tetragon Union to secure these exotics and their caches when they are found.

Exotics - Most exotics are psychotic and unable to communicate in any sensible manner, but they can learn quickly; one peculiar element of exotic design from these relic caches is just how hostile they are to the young species rediscovering them. An encounter on Sylas's fourth moon in Andrenor system led to the death of all researchers on hand when the exotic gassed them and then utilized their own technology to go after their ship the ISS Inscrutible. To date no one knows what happened to the Inscrutible after it's last transmission from the exotic AI which declared it self "Omega."

Exotics that have been found and contained have been singularly unwilling to discuss any details of the era from which they harken. There are several theories on why this is: one is that the exotics were not programmed with that knowledge, or were programmed to guard it. A second is that they are actually relic war-programs, and they react with hostility and suspicion by nature of design. A third is that their knowledge base was delberately erased. A final and likely suggestion is that their self-repairing nanites could not reliably keep their databanks intact for such a long period, meaning the exotics found today are thousands of generations removed from their original selves and have degraded too much to retain their programming knowledge of more than four million years ago intact.

Exotics, despite the possibility of severe fragmentation, are still vastly superior in design to current AI tech. Modern free-willed AI are regarded as dangerously superior to their biological creators, but they are easily snuffed out by exotic defense routines. Even fadelik AI don't stand a chance against exotics. For this reason the only known exotics are kept in secure remote installations. The chance of smugglers or rivals getting their hands on one and letting it loose in the wild is always a risk, however....one Aegis Division tries to monitor and prevent.

13th Age Round Four - Combat Issues

I've talked in previous actual play posts about 13th Age's advantages....now time to talk a bit more about what I increasingly perceive as a disadvantage, albeit a subjective one: the combat.

Saturday night's game was combat heavy; the previous session was loaded with plot and exploration and role play. The next session was basically two very long fights, which had the advantage of being easy to manage without more than cursory use of map and minis, but also suffering from what I would describe as a problem of feeling "gimmicky" to me. This is indeed a problem, because its really a core conceit of the 13th Age fight mechanics: lots of gimmicks which "pop" under the right conditions, often tied to the natural D20 roll of an attack or the escalation die. For some this is a huge feature, but for me, despite thinking it would be cool, I am finding it instead is creating a sense of tedium as everyone tries to track when things can or should "pop." This feels less like a tactical experience to me (ala 4E) and more like some sort of collectible card game. Ahem.

I've run a total of roughly six fights since I started this campaign four sessions ago. Each fight has felt interesting at first, then turned tedious somewhere around turn three or four. I have identified what I consider the problems so far (for level 1-2 fights, anyway):

1. Monsters still have too many hit points. Players have too many hit points. You have to summon impressive dailies or slaughter mooks (not satisfying) to do one-hit kills. This is a style thing, not a critique of 13th Age; I am just beginning to realize that I may not be in to "hit point pinata" games.

2. Monsters don't "do" enough. They have many features, yes...but it's highly programmed; the GM isn't so much as making smart decisions for the monsters as he is monitoring for when effects can occur based on whether you rolle even or odd, or over a threshold or whatever. Put another way: I am realizing that I like games where monsters have visible depth in their description and stat block. I do not necessarily like deep math behind the stat block...hate it, in fact; but I like a monster with more options than you can see executed in one fight; that sort of monster can hold more surprises for future battles. So 13th Age, like 4E, is better for GMs that want a statblock that tells them what to do to run the creature, rather than gives them a "monsters character record" and tells them to figure it out. I guess I like the latter, even if I like 13th Age's simpler core math.

3. The fights so far have still gone on too long even with the escalation die. Around turn three or four it always feels like "these things should be dead by now," part and parcel of the too many hit points option. I think 13th Age's escalating damage dice probably solves a lot of that at higher levels....we shall see; for this campaign I have decided to ditch the incremental advancement leveling system again and gone back to awarding a new level after every couple of fights.

4. Given how holistic and freeform the background system, icons system and ritual mechanics are in 13th Age, the weird "popping effect" mechanics tied to the dice actually feel kind of incongruous. There's a great game hidden in here, that needs to be free of the detritus of 4E design.

5. I have decided that tying so much into the "natural roll" is at least tripping us up....no one's used to checking the die before remembering it may be relevant. Nor am I, so monster effects which depend on player rolls (i.e. 16+ natural on die to penetrate past skeletal resistance to weapons) get overlooked, or we have to scramble to remember what the original check was. This slows things down. I can see a future in which 13th Age is fast and smooth. I don't know if I have the energy to reach that future. Plus....I'm not sure I like this mechanic, anyway. Take the skeletons, for example; the "take half damage from slashing weapons" rule is so much simpler than monitoring the die roll all the time.

I know this is a bit of a diversion from my super positive 13th Age articles recently....but after six combats, each lasting between 1.5 and 3 hours long, I am annoyed that the game didn't fix that issue with 4E. I really want a game that moves faster, or if it doesn't move faster than I want a game that feels like it offers some genuine tactical advantages and incentives to play. I do not want a game that can only offer it when the GM deliberately jerry-rigs the fights to insure it doesn't happen.

If I put a mass of two dozen undead in a region for the adventurers to stumble across, parlay with or attack as needed....I appreciate that they have a tough fight but ultimately mow down the undead. But honestly, I am favoring versions of D&D where this doesn't take half the night, or if it does then there's at least enough interesting going on to make it worthwhile. I can get that...barely!...out of Pathfinder thanks to having run it so much for so damned long. I know I can get a much faster experience out of various older editions of D&D. I seriously hope I can get that faster play experience out of D&D 5E; the playtest experience suggests so, but we still need to see the final version.

Think I'll wrap up the 13th Age game in a few sessions and start some Savage Worlds up...see how that one fares with my off-Saturday group!

Savage Space VIII: Rigel VI

Continuing 28 days of Savage Worlds in space!

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Rigel VI

Located in orbit around luminous Rigel A, the eccentric orbit of this earth-like planet nonetheless developed life-sustaining properties long before Earth. The Rigellian civilization which prospered when humankind was still nothing more than a distant evolutionary potential was all but erased in a cataclysmic interstellar war roughly four million years ago. In the wake of this ancient civilization a new young sapient species arose known as the modern rigellians. The refer to themselves as 'Ash, and their distinctive therapod-like characteristics are hard to adequately describe. Most humans look at them as some sort of plant-like beast with disturbing fleshlike skin, and it is hard not to feel a sense of revulsion around modern rigellians. Even more interesting is how distinctly different they look from the extinct original rigellians; so different physiologically that a new popular theory among xenobiologists is that they are not, in fact, natives to the planet and may have been an import species that thrived and evolved in the wake of the rigellian mass extinction.

Despite their importance to biologists, the 'Ash remain more curiosity than anything else; their language is primarily pheromonal, and they seem to have difficulty comprehending advanced technology.

At roughly 900 light years from Earth, Rigel VI remained unexplored until late in the twenty-seventh century when a coalition of humans, fadelik and sedassir arrived on the deep space explorer ISS Transcendent. What they discovered was a world with evidence of serious catastrophism, remnants of four-million year old superstructures, including orbital colonies still intact at the Lagrange points, and a wildly exotic ecosystem built on an aliens that manage to have plantlike, fungal and mammalian characteristics.

Rigel today is a thriving edgeworld colony, and the hub of activity for deep space exploration, especially in the so called Corward Expanse region where the more recently extinguished galactic remnants of a vast interstellar society can be found. Xenoarchaeologists have dated the most recent extinction of this interstellar society to roughly one hundred thousand years ago, and have found evidence of a failed colony from that lost collective. A few extremists, such as Dr. Barton Ackerly, speculate that the old rigellian extinction may tie in to the more recent extinction events, and he works furiously on Rigel VI to find evidence of this.

Rigel VI Planetary Characteristics:

Gravity: Normal
Dominant Terrain: Desert
Atmosphere: Normal
Population: Average
Government: Confederacy with treaties/relations to the Federated Commonwealth
Dominant Law: Lenient
Customs: fringeworld attitude; libertarian's dream/nightmare wrapped in one
Spaceport: Small
Technology Level: Average

Savage Space VII: Allistair Marceine

Continuing 28 days of Savage Worlds in space! Today: a villain, a collector of relics on dead worlds...

Allistair Marceine

Allistair was, at one time, the premier xenoarchaeologist and foremost expert on dead cultures in the Federated Commonwealth. Allegedly gifted with a talent for psychometry Allistair was able to "read" objects in his mind, see their histories, and record them using a special implant. Some of his critics suggested he was a charlatan and  a hack, but the researchers who did the grunt work, the hard crunching of data and facts, always found that his psychometric readings checked out. It was at once a fascinating gift and a curiosity that made him a superstar in the study of dead alien civilizations for decades.

Allistair eventually fell from grace. In 2782 it was revealed by his rival, the fadelik Dr. Muisser Samsan that Allistair's startling psychometry was not in fact some sort of exotic gift, but rather that Allistair had in fact stumbled across a relic AI in the ruins on Ferunzi IV, and that this relic AI had cybernetically pair-bonded with him. The good doctor Marceine was actually using the vast library of knowledge the AI provided to fill in the gaps on known worlds. The only thing more curious than his crime of selective dissemination of knowledge under the pretense of psychometry is the even stranger hoarding of the relic AI that bonded with his own brain and nervous system. 

A panel from the Academy determined that Allistair needed to submit himself to the Concord Institute for study, to determine what exactly had happened to his nervous system, but Allistair fled, using hired guns to facilitate a messy escape, which in turn led to a bloody shootout at the Ventari Starport during this event, and new criminal charges against the doctor on top of fraud and withholding archaeological evidence on the Coreward Expanse dead cultures.

Allistair has since spent the last two decades working as a rogue agent with unusual interests. He continues to travel to the many dead worlds of the extinct Coreward Expanse civilizations, looking for something....but no one is sure what. Eleven years ago a former merc in his employ named Jasid Vester broke his contract and fled, eventually to approach agents of Aegis with a wild tale. What Jasid told them led to Allistair making the ten most wanted list in the Federated Commonwealth.

Jasid's tale was simple: whatever was "in" Doctor Allistair Marceine, it was more than just a rogue AI; it may have been an exotic sapience...a species which self-uplifted into a digital media, leaving paltry flesh behind. The AI/exotic called itself Serost, and appeared to be mostly in control of Allistair. It was looking for something, but in the course of searching was uncovering lost technology from the Coreward Expanse: specifically, weapons of mass destruction. 

Jasid got nervous when he and his buddies realized that they weren't searching for just any weapon, but some sort of super weapon, one which Allistair's possessor suggested was the "weapon that would end all wars." It was clear this AI/exotic knew what it wanted...and was probably a contruct or replica of a powerful mind from the era of these extinct cultures. Jasid's buddies also got nervous, but they didn't make it; only he escaped.

Jasid indicated that much had happened since last anyone saw Allistair, too. He'd transgenically and cybernetically modified his body to the point where he wasn't really....human....anymore. Some of his hired mercs weren't even sure there was a scrap of real flesh left. 

Allistair Marceine (Heroic Wild Card)

Agility D8, Smarts D8 (Marceine) or D12+1 (Ai/Exotic), Spirit D6 (Marceine) or D12 (AI/exotic), Strength D8, Vigor D10

Pace: 6, Parry 6, Toughness 15(7)

Skills: Fighting D8, Investigation D12, Notice D10+2, Persuasion D8, Shooting D8, Survival D8

Abilities: 

Electromagnetic Touch (2D8 damage to electronics/machines/cyberpunks; ignores uninsulated armor)

Disintegrator Pistol (3D10 damage, RoF 1, Shots 5)

Duraplast Cyberweave Armor (+8 armor, reinforced stops up to 2 AP from attacks)

Cybernetic Vision Enhancement (+2 Notice, all around vision...no surprise)

Savage Space VI: The ISS Linnaeus and the Harrison Wildlife Refuge of Procyon IX

Savage Space VI! This time....a natural habitat on Procyon IX.

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The ISS Linnaeus and the Harrison Wildlife Refuge of Procyon IX

Fun Fact: the first explorers to arrive on Procyon IX joked that the giant "carnivore reserves" which the fadelik had created were reminiscent of a famous ancient science fiction series. At some point years later one such reserve was dedicated to the author of said stories, and the famous reserve now known as the Harrison Wildlife Reserve is open to exploration by off-worlders willing to sign a release and pay a handsome fee to experience what is widely regarded as the most dangerous maintained "natural" habitat in the Federation.

Recently the Academy vessel ISS Linnaeus (research class ship) has been given permission to document in detail a scan of the Harrison Wilderness Refuge. They have documented over seven thousand new species, including 800 mega-predators and what is believed to be a precursor herbivorous species that is related to the same family tree as the fadelik of Procyon IX.

Captain Aris Talton is a human who has been working for the Stellar Academy of Research in its Exobiology division for years, something she find very rewarding. On board the ISS Linnaeus this time around are a dozen prominent exobiologists, as well as the fadelik scientist Taten Huricord, an expert on the herbivorous life of Procyon IX, there to document the emerging sapient sister species in the region.

Plot Idea:

The ISS Linnaeus suffers a catastrophic systems failure and crashes somewhere in the Harrison Reserve. The local authorities look to offworld mercenaries first, to resolve what they see as an "offworld" problem; alternatively the Academy hires a crew to go in and enact a rescue mission.

Complications: the ship crashes in a region rife with what the fadelik call "Schuuzen," but which are more commonly known as decapitators (SF Companion page 79),a brutal ape-like beast. On top of this, they have drawn the attention of the emerging sapients, who call themselves "heeirza," which means people in their simple language.

Unknown to the researchers, the heeirza are actually a bioengineered race, left in the wild, by the mad scientist fadelik called Amorsa Scahn, a rogue researcher who has violated many limitations on the use of transgenics in uplifted species. She has been watching their "evolution" over the last several decades, using the wilderness reserve as a way to force her rapid evolutionary treatments.

Amorsa Scahn will send in her own mercenary crew of hired privateers to try and remove any evidence....but what no one can account for is just how rapidly the heeirza have evolved; exposed to a crew of scientists and a starship, they may very well grab the ship and make a run for it....!

Bonus Factoids:

Taten Huricord and Amorsa Scahn dated in college, and he left her after he caught her lifting a gene sample from him (a big faux paus in fadelik society; always ask first).

Captain Aris Talton has recurring nightmares of being eaten by cannibal ape men. This started when she visited Delta Leonis in the Regulus system, and the research team was attacked by primitive six armed pseudo-hominids dwelling in the ruins of what was clearly a dead civilization. She lost her former fiancee Devon Kain (or so she believes) in that incident a decade earlier.

The schuuzen are popular among illegal export of indigenous alien species; one live schuuzen in the right market can net 100,000 credits or more. However, fadelik penalties for smuggling protected species offworld is life imprisonment on the Hydraki asteroid mining penal colony.

In Defense of Creator's & Publishers Rights to Old Works

An interesting conversation started up recently, brewing out of a spurious post at Rock, Paper, Shotgun where John Walker made the mistake of writing before thinking. That's nothing unusual on that sort of site*; as anyone who has spent enough time in the realm of so-called video game journalism knows, the oxymoronic nature of the profession often rears its ugly head with ridiculous sentiment, poorly conceived paid ad-copy disguised as news or information and a rampant penchant for displaying a grotesque lack of depth or consideration for their own hobby outside of what's cool and hip for the moment. In this case, Walker was primarily commenting on GOG games which apparently had captured his attention for a brief moment, long enough to spit out some quick hit-grabbing copy which also casually attacked ownership and publisher rights to old product under the pretense that they were no better than plumbers charging you for the use of your faucet. The whole thing was then debated on Slash Dot, which some of you may know to be the place where furious nerds and tech geeks go to defend Linux and burn Microsoft.**

Then, further down, I found a link to a well-reasoned and extremely cogent discussion from Steve Gaynor, a man with a nice resume to back up his opinions.

I have on occasion discussed why the periodic brou-ha-ha behind PDF piracy and pricing in our tiny neck of the woods (RPG publishing) suffers for those who show disdain for the various pricing models as well as the worth of a virtual product like a PDF book. The article by Gaynor above is relevant to all media, ours included, and established handily the fallacy of presuming that a model which assumes that "length of time from date of release" on a creative work is an automatic spiral down into zero value over time, one which (to go by Walker above) automatically means that a product's value of necessity must depreciate to the point where it must enter the public domain one day...must actually be allowed to no longer generate revenue for use by the original owner/creator and instead be allowed into the wild for others to exploit, essentially.

Especially interesting is this 20 year rule, which I know they are tossing about because we have a tech-minded generation that has a hard time conceiving of anything older than that having worth. But....imagine if 20 years were the absolute limit on a product's productive lifespan? There are a lot of works out there, both large and small, that continue to exist and make money well after 20 years. Tolkien's books, Star Wars...Dungeons & Dragons.

I have a theory that tabletop gamers have devalued their own perception of their hobby to the point where even as a publisher it can only exist as a hobby; the nature of RPGs today is that you have your day job, and then you have "that thing you do late at night." For all intents and purposes only a handful of full-time salary-paying (forget benefits) publishers exist anymore, and even they may be facing extinction in a few more years.

It's damned interesting that our own industry has one almost unique exception to this process, one which could arguably suggest that there are ways to model a legitimate process of public ownership into a product without waiting for obsolescence: the OGL. The weird thing about the OGL of course is that it doesn't make money for the originator (WotC) directly, but is intended to foster good will and create a wider range of products that all require the support of WotC's core. At least....that was the idea. I think what really happened was an accidental liberation of the product from its media. Imagine if we did not have the OGL today. Where would we be? The OGL is what essentially made the OSR possible, and most of the current companies we think of among RPG publishers exist because of it (Paizo, Crafty, Goodman Games, Green Ronin, Mongoose, and many more). The entire PDF industry to a greater or lesser degree exists because of the OGL.

In a case like this I admit it's hard to see that the OGL benefited the company that released it in to the wild, but from another perspective it's been the driving force in a large chunk of our cottage publishing neck of the woods for almost fifteen years now. So was it ultimately a good thing for the audience, the consumers and producers of OGL content? Absolutely. Was it good for WotC? My magic 8-ball says "unlikely."





*i.e. any site published online. Like this one =)

**in slash dot's defense they'll burning and slash anything

Savage Space V: The Fadelik

Continuing 28 days of linked science fiction ideas for Savage Worlds. Next up....the fadelik!

Fadelik

Fadelik of the Procyon System

Fadelik (fah-day-lek) are an indigenous culture to Procyon star system, a modest binary star set with a small white dwarf; the planets are remarkably stable, and Procyon IX is the homeworld. Fadelik call it "Seerkaspa," their rough equivalent to Earth in their language though the word has very old religious meaning as well.

Physically Fadelik average about 1.3-1.5 meters in height, and are distinguished by their large ears and quadruple eyes. The fadelik are otherwise surprisingly humanoid in their physiology despite adapting from herbivores in Procyon IX's remarkably dangerous ecosystem. Fadelik are quick thinkers, fast runners and as they developed a civilized technological society they learned to corral and redirect predators, never having much cultural or biological stimulus toward violence.

Fadelik were already spacefarers when the first human colonials discovered them during the expansionist period of the pre-Federation explosion of humanity across the galaxy. The fadelik were able to sell and improve on the transitional drives used in the first human FTL ships. Thanks to the rather immodest nature of the fadelik and their remarkable humanoid physiology many humans took to the species for less then honorable means. An early incident with the colonies led to an attempted slave market, which spun out into the First Colonial War when the fadelik navy all but obliterated the Chasian League, once one of the more prominent exotic governments that tried to forge a union among the colonies. The fascist league was destroyed by the fadelik and new treaties insured no lawful organizations would try to exploit the fadelik, who had demonstrated that their own Expansionist Party in power at the time was more than capable of going toe to toe with young humanity.

When the Expansionist Party went out of style the fadelik government shifted to new directions and the Explorationist Party was formed. It was less than a decade in when with fadelik support the early human Federated Commonwealth was at last forged; fadelik were a founding party of the Federation.

Today, fadelik are known for their carefree nature, startling technical skills and mastery of cybernetics. Fadelik cybernetics are designed for their extremely complex nervous system, and can quickly burn out a normal human. Fadelik themselves have embraced cybernetics and transgenic augmentation as a way of life.

Fadelik Characteristics

Adaptive Nervous System: Fadelik nervous systems are much better at processing cybernetic modifications than other species. Fadelik calculate their strain threshold as being equal to their Spirit plus their Vigor.

Lighting Quick: Fadelik gain a base Pace of 8 and a running die of D8.

Agile: Fadelik begin with a D6 in Agility.

Gracile: Fadelik are slender and their bones are, while not hollow, nonetheless quite fragile by human standards. They have -1 to toughness.

Cautious and Pacifist: Fadelik evolved from a smaller more cautious herbivore which did not like to engage in battle. As such they gain Cautious (minor) and Pacifist (minor), defending only when it's a last resort. Fadelik mindsets toward violence are "isolate and corral threats, then seal them away" rather than eliminate by force.

Exceptional Vision: the four eyes of the fadelik provide excellent visual acuity. All fadelik start with Notice of D6.

Runequest 6 Bundle of Holding

This one's a no-brainer: Bundle of Holding has Runequest 6 on parade. All the Runequest you can stand for a current threshold (as of writing) of $14.50. It would be an awesome deal for me if I didn't already own most of it.....but I don't have the Book of Quests or the module in this pack, so maybe I will indulge anyway.

Now's your chance to get everything Runequest 6 in PDF. This is well worth the investment, trust me!