A First Star Wars Adventure Hook

So Star Wars 2020 is coming along, hopefully we'll be ready for a game session on Thursday. So far I would say I'm about half-way there in terms of DM prep:

1. Made a character generator
2. Listed 21 systems in the sector with at least 1 point of interest in each
3. Started mapping the 21 systems(still needs a bit more work)
4. Listed 9 "Princes" i.e. factional rulers, the systems they control, and their relationships with one another(maybe needs a bit more detail)
5. Made an equipment list with some stats(still needs a bit more detail)

And I still have some major tasks to do:

1. Need to put a bit more detail into the starting scenario
2. I Listed 11 "minor" persons the party is likely to encounter in the first session, but they need more fleshing out
3. I Listed 10 types of ship the party is likely to encounter in the first session, but I still need to stat them up
4. Started researching space travel rules. Still need to organize them into 1 page though
5. I need to come up with all sorts of combat stats for potential opponents
6. And I need a to make a table of rumors the party might hear that would lead into adventure hooks

Speaking of that last one, I already have our first rumor.

So the date is 30ABE. The Empire has fallen decades ago and been replaced by a weakened Republic. Now the First Order's Starkiller Fortress has taken out the Republic fleet before itself being destroyed(as per the most recent film). Our PC's are in Airam Sector i.e. a rather remote location on the Outer Rim.

The rumor is that, after the Rebellion victory in this sector, the Surviving Imperial troops, with all their remaining military hardware, took over a remote jungle jungle planet in Nodgra System. They mostly keep to themselves and the locals have never been able to muster the power-base to root them out. In any case, the rumor is that King Ebareebaveebeedee, of the Squib, would pay well for any interesting intelligence as to what they are up to. The last intel photographs from their settlement(see below) are decades old and rather innocuous, but who knows what they may be up to now that the First Order has shown themselves as a power to be reckoned with:

Help Beta-test My OSR Star Wars Character Generator

So I have a working version of the character generator for my Star Wars-Cyberpunk 2020 hack. You can try it out by opening the google document HERE.

To generate a character, you need to look for the "Character Generator" menu and click "Generate Character".

If, for some reason, the menu doesn't appear, go to Tools->Script editor... Select the "OnOpen" function and run it. The menu should now appear.

Once you've generated the character's stats, copy them to a blank spreadsheet. Then you can fill them out in the character sheet pictured below.

So, for instance, you might end up with someone like this Mon Calamari badass:

Anyway, comments on how to improve the tool are welcome, or you can email me at billygoestomordor@gmail.com

Star Wars 2020

Well, I've been itching to run a game in the Star Wars universe, but I don't have any Star Wars RPG products and I can't be arsed with learning an all new system anyway. What shall I do?

You may recall the "All Zombies on the Eastern Front: Polish Resistance" game I ran a few years back. It was Cyberpunk 2020 hacked for a WWII setting. And what is Star Wars if not "Nazis in Space". So Cyberpunk 2020 seems to me like a good fit for running a Star Wars game. Especially with Luke's new cyberhand--you know what I'm talking about! It doesn't get more cyberpunk than that!

That said, I have my work cut out for me:

1. Modify the character generator for Star Wars.

I hacked together a little character generator for Polish Resistance. With a little work, we can make build Star Wars PCs.

1. Add a force stat
2. Change the skills list
3. Change the equipment list
4. Add different species of characters
5. Update the character sheet

2. Build a Setting

sample map

Star wars makes this easy due to the huge amount of world-building others have done before me. That said, I need to pick some small piece of the Star Wars Universe to focus on and then apply Border Princes methodology to it.

1. Map it
2. Detail some adventure locales
3. Determine who are the movers and shakers in this place and the politics between them

I'm currently thinking Airam Sector, 30 years after the battle of Endor i.e. right after the events of the latest film. I figure, after the fall of the Empire, Pirates and Rebels no longer needed to hide in such an out-of-the-way system, so the place went through a bit of a decline. The PCs start as scavengers or slaves under some minor Hutt-type character. The adventure begins when they stumble over on a choice piece of salvage, a working starship--their ticket off this rock!

3. Space Rules

While Cyberpunk 2020 is a very general-purpose system, we still need some starship rules. Fortunately, there's a huge amount of material to help us with these:

• Wookiepedia has ship specifications
• Combine has travel times: http://www.swcombine.com/navcomp/
• Forums discuss fuel usage and costs
• https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/89479-starship-equipment-and-operating-costs/
• https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/88745-fuel-costs-and-hyperspace-travel/

So I just need to collect the rules we'll be using in one place for easy reference...

4. Stat Things Up

Finally, I need to stat-up a whole bunch a equipment, ships, and creatures for use in the sandbox. Again, Wookiepedia should be quite helpful here.

So that's the plan. Hopefully, a week from now, we'll be ready to begin!

Book Review: Red Planet Blues

Wow. That was the darkest book I've read in a long time. It's also one of the better books I've read in a long time.

Robert Sawyer's novel Red Planet Blues is a mashup of the Hardboiled Detective and Science Fiction genres. With regard to the latter, the book draws inspiration from Mars Fiction(Burrough, Heinlein, and probably others), as well as post-humanist Cyberpunk. That said, despite the broad base of inspiration, Sawyer has crafted a story with a character all it's own.

But back to the darkness. Hardboiled Fiction is all about the Hardboiled Hero and Alex Lomax is just such a hero. But there is no Hardboiled Hero without a Hardboiled World, and it is a dark dark world indeed.

Raymond Chandler defines the Hardboiled Hero as a man of honor in a honorless world. Indeed the Hardboiled Hero's heroism is one that springs from the very corrupt world it stands distinct from. It is this very paradox, that Vice can breed Honor, and Corruption Truth, that gives the Hardboiled tale it's redemptive quality.

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption...But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man...He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man...He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. ...He is a common man or he could not go among common people...He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness...He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. ("The Simple Art of Murder", Raymond Chandler)

The world that Alex Lomax lives in is a bleak one indeed, though Sawyer has a way of understating it's bleakness. It is the small world of the Martian Frontier, which draws desperate people, hungry for a new start, certain that they won't get one on Earth. The narrator doesn't shove this point down your throat. Yet everyone we meet seems to be in a state of quiet desperation.

Not only that, but many of Mars' inhabitants Transfer. The post-Humanist angle of the book is that the technology exists to "Transfer", to copy your mind into a cybernetic brain and install it in a robotic body of more than Human ability. This sounds nice, but the law forbids two copies of the same mind to exist, so the final step in the "Transfer" process is to euthanize the original biological copy(though the Marketing types breeze over this point, as the book points out). And many people on Mars do transfer to overcome the harsh environment, so the ultimate implication is that Lomax is living in a society of mass-suicide, with the only caveat being that those suicides are replaced with robotic copies. That said, the narrator doesn't shove this idea in the reader's face. Rather, Lomax finds himself in one situation after another that accentuate this perverse reality. Each time, the the reader's cognitive dissidence is heightened, leaving him, like Lomax himself, wondering why only he seems to be bothered by this state of things.

Anyway, bottom line, really bleak novel, though Sawyer manages to lighten the mood somewhat in the story's denouement. Sawyer is a master craftsman of mood and it's really a wonder to watch him ply his trade...on you, the reader.

DCC Wizards Go Out With a Bang

"If I lose, If I lose, let me lose!" (Gamblin' Man by Welch and Rawlings)

Due to the heart-wrenching nature of today's topic, dear reader, today's post has musical accompaniment, so click play and read on, my friends.

Another One Bites the Dust

Well, as you may have guessed, I lost another wizard.

You may recall how Battle Mage died, fighting the half-dragon cultist and his electric breath. Well, Kunab the Wizbarian has met a similar fate, but we'll get to that soon...

DCC Wizards

High on Style, Low on Hitpoints

I love playing DCC Wizards. Rather than getting a small number of spell slots, you can just keep casting a spell until you fail a spell check. In practice, I found this means a very different style of play.

Standard DnD wizards need to save those precious few slots for when they really need them, as such they creep around the battlefield looking for an opening to cast something. As a DCC wizard, however, you typically just keep casting magic spells each round. That said, spells tend to fail or succeed weakly, so the DCC wizard feels more engaging, giving the player something to try each turn rather than waiting around for your time to come. And sometimes, you roll big so this repeated casting ability can yield incredible power.

However, he's still a wizard, so unless he has great Stamina(Constitution), they don't get many hit points. The result is a character who chaotically wields amazing power but is, as the same time, very fragile. Kunab, for instance, was maybe 7th level with about 11 hit points.

Speaking of Kunab

Speaking of Kunab, I was about to tell you how he died...

DCC Wizard Problems: "Which loincloth matches my skull mask?"

But first let's recall the good times. Remember when the lad's giant Eagles helped defeat the White Dragon? And what about that time when things got awkward with the Half-Dragon warrior lady? Good old Kunab, always good for a spell or a laugh...

Anyway, most recently, Kunab found himself soaring on the back of a huge Metallic Dragon, along with the rest of the party. Being such a fragile little spark-plug of a guy, he took the conservative position to aftward of the beast. Things went South fast though, when the party encountered a Green Dragon and his wyvern buddies.

On his turn, Kunab summoned up another of his ever-useful Giant Eagles. Then, the Green Dragon got it's turn. He flanked our silvery mount and sprayed acid all over the beast's tail-end, catching Kunab full-on in the spray. When the dust cleared, the party saw only a Wizbarian-shaped crust on the Dragon-hide where Kunab had been.

The Psychological Trauma

Now, I won't lie to you--it's painful losing a much-beloved character, especially one with such personality and a bitchin' loincloth to boot. That said, I think it was a fitting end for the young wizard. He lived the life of an adventurer/murderhobo to the fullest, killing monsters, looting treasure, and getting himself into all sorts of compromising situations. As such, I think that Tyrell's final words to Roy make for a fitting eulogy:

The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Kunab

Book Review: Darwin's Bastards

I'm not entirely sure what to make of the 2010 short-story collection "Darwin's Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow". From the subtitle and cover art, one might expect a collection of pulp-inspired yards running the gamut from Gernsbackian wonder stories to tentacled Lovecraftian abominations. Instead one will get a mixed bag whose common thread is that they are written by Canadian(often Vancouver-ite) authors. This bag includes, hands down, some of the best post-cyberpunk that I've read to date. It also has many stories that are more experimental or even allegorical in nature, and these generally didn't resonate well with me. Some of the stories aren't really science fiction or even genre fiction and are written by authors who are working outside their usual genre. I'd like to hear the story behind this collection, but my guess is it went something like this:

1. Let's make a science fiction short story collection with all Canadian authors
2. We didn't get enough submissions, let's loosen up our definition of science fiction and ask some local non-genre authors to contribute stories
3. Oh, Weird Tales and other classic pulps are making a resurgence--let's work that into the marketing

So, for the short version of this review, of the 23 stories contained within, 5 were excellent, and a few more were quite good. The book is divided into 4 sections and all the best stuff is in the first and last section, so my advise would be to just skip the two middle sections. You might also want to read William Gibson's story, though I found it a bit underwhelming.

Anyway, for the long version of this review, we won't dwell on what I didn't like, instead let's talk about the best entries in this collection:

Survivors: This is not the end my friend by Adam Lewis Schroeder

A epic road-trip through post-apocalyptic Canada. An action packed story with some subtle, and not so subtle insights into how Canadians view Americans(and themselves, in contrast). Schroeder's tongue-in-cheek humor is great.

The Aurochs by Lee Henderson

A post-cyberpunk tale of the black market for medical treatments, fossils, and car parts. A really entertaining read and another story with a great, always understated, sense of humor.

Survivor by Douglas Coupland

A tale of reality TV(another very cyberpunkish theme) and the apocalypse, brimming with black humor. The jaded British cameraman was an inspired choice for a narrator, taking a so so premise and making it hugely entertaining.

The Personasts: My Journeys Through Soft Evenings and Famous Secrets by Stephen Marche

This is a fictional ethnography of a fictional subculture based around a sort of roleplaying/acting sort of thing. This story isn't really science fiction, or genre fiction for that matter, but it's so good I just don't care. Especially interesting for readers who are pen-and-paper RPG fans like myself.

Sunshine City by Timothy Taylor

This was my favorite story in the collection. It's a post-cyberpunk tale told as a Hardboiled detective story and it's really well-done.

This story taught be something. The plot is fairly simple, the mystery easily unraveled, the characters all hardboiled archetypes(the hardboiled hero, the femme fatale...) but a good hardboiled tale don't demand complexity in those things. A good hardboiled tale is about the setting, the relationships, and most of all the feelings that these evoke.

In Sunshire City, our Hardboiled Hero, a burned-out detective of sorts, has been called to this decadent place to be duped. Everybody is in on the charade and he himself suspects it, though he stays because his old friend asked for his help. All the characters are sympathetic in some sense, all of them have been hurt by this tragedy in some way, though only our hero is the sort of man-of-honor who is willing to seek out the truth no matter what the cost. This code of honor is why he can't bring himself to live in this sort of place and why he burned out and essentially resigned from Human society.

Dougal Discarnate by William Gibson

A ghost story set in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver. I got the impression that Gibson is saying something really deep and profound about his old stomping-ground, but I guess it really just went over my head. This saddens me since I was born in Vancouver and I sometimes like to fantasize what life would have been like if my family had decided to stay there and I had grown up a young Vancouverite, rather than a Southern Californian...

Twilight of the Gods by David Whitton

I enjoyed this little post-cyberpunk story of soldiers entangled in a messy maritime conflict. Quite entertaining, through. Like most Norse mythology, it ends rather disappointingly.

Gladiator by Jay Brown

A post-Cyberpunk story where the Libertarians have won and medical research can legally be performed on any Human subjects who are willing. The protagonist reminded me of The Count, in Gibson's Count Zero, when we first meet him, a poor white kid who grew up in the inner city and harbors unlikely dreams of success. The difference is that, rather than dreaming of being an amazing hacker, our protagonist dreams of being the Guinea Pig in the development of the next big drug. The Existential tragedy that ensues is both predicable and compelling.

On Lego Castle Design

My kids have finally reached the age where they can play with legos, so for the last couple months I've had the opportunity to build things with them once or twice a week. I was really into legos as a kid, but it's been 15-20 years. Anyway, getting back into it, I'd like to talk about designing castles.

Simple castle construction

As a kid, and even as a teenager, I remember finding lego castles a frustrating challenge. I would get a castle play-set, build the thing according to the instructions, and it would turn out great, but if I tried to build something of my own design, it would end up quite disappointing.

Now, working with my own kids, I've build a few, rather humble castles, each a bit more complex than the previous one, and I'd like to take the opportunity to share my novice thoughts on castle design.

Sorting Pieces

So this is something which is so obvious to me now but which I don't

Corner piece

think I knew as a kid. Before you start building something, take five minutes to sort out the pieces you will likely need. This saves you time looking for specific pieces later, and it also gives you an idea what materials you have on hand. When building a castle, that usually means:

• all the various large castle wall pieces
• a good supply of the various types of pillar pieces
• any grey or black arch
• lots of assorted grey bricks
• a good number of black bricks

The Walls

Castle with various wall types

Now let's talk about the walls. When I was a kid trying to do this, I would connect several lego wall pieces together and get a very boring castle. So the first thing I would like to point out is that you have many options regarding walls:

1. Wall/Door Pieces are quick to put up and cover a lot of space. 
2. Arches on Pillars are a great alternative to a filled-in wall pieces since they are quick to put up, don't use a lot of bricks, and give decent access to the inside of the castle, which is important if this castle is for your kids to play with
3. Open it's also valid to leave rooms artificially open on one or two sides so the kids can play. That said, you still need to keep things structurally strong. 
4. Bricks can be used to fill in between wall pieces or even to build entire walls, but this is time consuming and uses up a lot of pieces. They're nice and strong, though
5. Crenelations are good for the top level or can even go under an arch
6. You can also make a drawbridge, portcullis--I'm not there yet, though. It requires hinge pieces, string...

Castle Walkway/Flooring Example

The Floors

So you've finished a level of walls on your castle. Now you're going to need to put floors and walkways.  This isn't just a place for your lego men to hang out. Having a broad and well-supported floor will help you put the next story on your castle.

So you pick out some thin lego pieces for your flooring, but how do you support them? The castle wall pieces have a lip to support a floor, but that usually only gets you 80% of the way to something load-bearing. You'll need to come up with a creative solution to get you the rest of the way. Upward-slanting pieces can help with this.

The Foundation

Foundation needed...

Another challenge is if you have an irregular base plate like ours. Before you can even start your castle, you need to create a surface to build on. That means covering over the pits and expanding the floor with pillars and arches. It's a bit of work, but it results in a more more interesting construction.

Embracing the Subjective

So these are the general ground-rules, but you can take them in a lot of different directions and create some really diverse castle designs. There's no correct design, but there are a few categories one can judge the castle based on:

• Complexity of design- how many stories does it have? Are there separate sections?
• Structural integrity- how strong/stable is this Tower of Babel you've erected?
• Accessibility- I mentioned this before. Can the kids easily access all parts of the castle and put their guys there?
• Colors- is the coloring aesthetically pleasing?(This is a hard one--takes a lot of work if you're picky about colors)
• Variation- do you just have flat, featureless walls or are their variations? (bonus points for greebling!)
• Decorations- are there flags, crenelations, colorful roofs, etc?

A whole lot of castle!

All in all, this is a very deep, complex creative venture and I completely understand the guys who make a full blown hobby out of building gigantic lego castles. A lot of things are like this: coming up with an idea, developing it, modifying it, trying to get everything to fit together just right like a puzzle. DMing your own sandbox can definitely be like this. Even composing a semi-coherent blog post...