Anicet District

A post-apocalyptic mini-crawl. For use with Violence., by Luke Gearing. Work in progress.

Weather

Roll 1d6 at the commencement of play. Roll 1d6 each day thereafter, subtract 2 if the previous day's result was 2 or less, add 2 if it was 5 or more:

#        Result
-1       Violent sandstorm.
0        Light rain.
1        Overcast
2        Warm.
3        Warm.
4        Hot.
5        Hot.
6        Very hot.
7        Very hot.
8        Extremely hot. 

Random Encounters

Each day, roll 1d20 and consult the table below. Consider terrain, mode of travel, and intention when determining encounter distance. If in doubt, roll 1d20 for each party - a result of 11+ indicates that they are not surprised.

1d20    Result
1-6       No encounter.
7          (If within 2 hexes of 03.01) 6-man scout team from the depot.
8-11     3d10 feral dogs.
12-16   Caravan of 1d4 traders and 2d12 guards.
17-19   1d6 Parched.
20         (After dark) A Nightcrawler.

 

Hex Key

01.04 

The crow-picked body of Kath (01.02) lies dried and darkened in the sun, bearing a vicious wound to the side and bite marks (human-ish dentition) on the arm. The inside pocket of the corpse's coat holds a scrawled map showing the way to the Anicet District water treatment facility (01.07) from Carches (02.03). A well-oiled revolver holds three rounds. Her canteen is empty. 

 

01.05

The dust-choked remains of a roadside village lie just off the crumbled asphalt of the old highway. Ashen sand has submerged the lower levels of many buildings, but the smashed-in storefront beneath the winking trout sign of 'Jean's Sporting Goods' yawns onto the main strip. The shop has long been stripped of firearms and ammunition, but the storeroom holds a pallet stacked with sealed sacks of pickling salt. A blocky safe in the back office, long seized up and the combination forgotten, holds 3 magazines of rifle ammunition and an infra-red scope.

 

01.07

A rusted chain link fence surrounds the four long sheds comprising the former Anicet District water treatment plant, dried up along with the irrigation canals that once criss-crossed the plain. If the weather has been still, humanoid tracks can be seen ranging around the building - all lead back to the sand-filled sedimentation and filtration pools. A lever-action rifle, machete, and flatbow, not long dropped, lie in the dust near the pools. Bones litter the interior of the buildings, and traces of old gore spatter the walls and floors. Three bodies (02.03), covered in bite marks and utterly drained of all liquid, lie slumped in the corner of one shed. They bear 6 days of rations, thirty rifle rounds, 15 arrows, two knives and a club.

7 Parched lair here, drawn by some unknowable promise of moisture. They are settled beneath the surface of the sand in the pools, awaiting nightfall or the arrival of prey to ambush.

The machinery in the sheds is long-ruined, but there remain nineteen sealed barrels of water treatment chemicals, and two car-sized membrane filtration canisters - each could supply clean drinking water for years to a town of thousands.

 

02.03

Next to a dried riverbed in a narrow valley, dense thickets of swaying willow trees ring the former Carches Agricultural College, obscuring much of the bleached brutalist structure and its satellite houses behind green fronds. The college's intact library is a font of information on agronomy and husbandry, and the facility's veterinary suite possesses a small reserve of quickheal - the existence of which is closely guarded. Each season sees more ground phytoremediated by the groves, the pollarded wood burned, used for building, or simply stacked to dry and seal away the toxins leached from the soil. Crops grow uncontaminated, but the same cannot be said of the water - the village's crude borehole pumps out as much filth as it does potable drink, and the filtration process can barely produce enough to sustain the inhabitants. All who drink the water unfiltered sicken rapidly. In addition, the ancient tractor used to till the fields has failed beyond the community's ability to repair, and they lack suitable equine alternatives.

Alvin, a bald, sun-creased elder who chairs the community's discussions, asked Kath (01.04) and several others to seek out a water line running from a treatment plant to the west (01.07) referenced in old college records. Two weeks have passed, no one has returned - he suspects Verreville (04.05) has something to do with this and will happily divulge information on the matter.

42 combatants. 10 are Blooded in violence, the rest untrained. 8 bolt-action rifles are distributed among the most experienced fighters with the others wielding shotguns, half of the remainder are armed with pistols and the other half with bows. Melee weapons are simple, like spears and clubs, or repurposed farming tools.

 

02.06

An ankheg waits at the bottom of a conical pit in the desert sand. The bodies of its previous victims have been hurled beyond the rim. The creature will wait for prey to approach the edge of the pit before hurling sand and rocks up to destablise the edge and send the unwary tumbling into its maw. Having tasted blood, there is a 2-in-6 chance it pursues an escaping victim, seeking them out via their footsteps in the sand.

Within the rocky cave at the bottom of the ankheg's trap lies an intact 4wd pickup truck, covered in dust and with one door torn off but half-fuelled and functional. A sealed case of computer components lies in the passenger footwell along with a pump-action shotgun. The passenger door is gone and the seat is a shredded mess of dried gore and fabric. A case of 28 cartridges sits in the glovebox.

 

03.01

A pocked concrete-walled depot sits atop a hill. Holes in the walls have been plugged with sandbags and rusted razor-wire, with mines set on the approaches to the gaps. Within dwell 28 souls, the remnants of a remnant that crossed the Parch years past, leaving a tattered regimental flag and a mass grave to be buried by the dust. The inhabitants are well-furnished with Old World military body armour, small arms, grenades, and ammunition from the depot's secure armoury, and a machine-gun nest in the squat blockhouse overlooking the main gate is constantly manned. 6-man patrols regularly scout the surrounding area. Maintenance of the advanced weaponry is beginning to suffer due to a lack of metalworking and gunsmithing equipment, and the depot's automated turrets are offline, requiring mechanical maintenance, electrical power, and a significant amount of computer components to restore functionality.

'Captain' Emmitt, a middle-aged woman wearing a darned and patched camouflage uniform bearing the name 'Livia', receives visitors cautiously but in good faith. She knows that the outpost is doomed without allies and fresh supplies and will use the promise of advanced equipment to secure assistance. Any sign of treachery brings a hail of lead.

28 soldiers, all Trained. Every 3rd is a Veteran.

 

03.02

19 carrion crawlers infest a dank section of old road tunnel in the hillside, coating the walls in sticky secretions. Entrapped in the slime are seven people, three of whom can be saved with prompt treatment. In two days, four more crawlers will hatch. In 5 days, three more. 1d4-1 victims will be found each week, incubation takes a week.

A rusted-out delivery truck, the cab crushed by a fallen concrete span, holds four dumpy bags of pelletised nitrogen fertiliser, and the hollowed-out remains of the crawlers' previous incubators have 3 torches, a bow with 6 arrows, a hatchet, a 50' coil of rope, a battered semi-automatic pistol with 2 full magazines, and a First Aid kit in their bags.

03.06

The ruins of an old farmhouse and its outbuildings, dilapidated even before the days of the Great Dying, sit preserved in the ashen dunes of the Parch. The remains of a campfire, a couple of days old, gathers dust in the lee of the main house and what appear to be wagon tracks heading north have been carved into the hardpan here and there. Wood creaks and wind whistles through the glass-less windows. An outlying barn bears evidence of recent activity with a crude latrine dug in one corner. The interior of the house has been scoured by the constant rasp of desert sand in the wind, surfaces smooth and worn. An enterprising soul stashed 84 tanned leather hides beneath a tarp in the former kitchen, months ago by the dust on top of the cover. A collapsed bookcase blocks a staircase to the basement - beneath the farmhouse lies the remains of an old drug lab. The narcotics within are long-past usability, but 19 sealed barrels of pharmacological precursors remain, as do 25 books of Old World fiction.

Lario's band (04.02) use the house as a stopover camp.

04.02

11 slavers make their camp in a hollow amidst the marram grass where the dead sea laps at the shore and rusted hulks loom on the horizon. Lario leads them, his skin covered in insect tattoos and his hatband stuffed with body-part trophies. Their clients lie to the east. In the camp are two-dozen captives lashed to a pair of wagons, taken from out in the Parch. They have been fed and watered the bare minimum, and suffered other privations at the hands of their captors.

Lario is armed with a military rifle, semi-auto pistol, and sword; 7 are armed with pump-action shotguns/lever-action rifles, revolvers, and lances;.the remainder wield bows. All are mounted and possess long knives and desert leathers (-1 armour). Lario is Hardened in violence, his men are experienced. Their weapons are adequately-maintained. They will not turn down additional bodies.

The captives are weakened from their brutal journey - treat as Untrained.

The wagons hold a stash of 12 bottles of spirits, 3 packages of Old World medications, 6 drums of preserved seedstock, and 54 containers of fixings.

 

04.04

A sun-bleached concrete water tower thrusts up from the sand, a gaping hole in its side having vomited forth its contents long ago. The interior is cool and sheltered from the elements, home only to the occasional bird nest.

 

04.05

Verreville, home to 53 souls, provides scant welcome to outsiders. Thieves (04.06) have made off with guns from the village's weapons cache and the settlement is on high alert. Maria, the village's stern and unchallenged matriarch, has ordered extra patrols to ward off further attempts, but it is not enough. Verreville sits in the open plain and the aging folk can't watch every avenue of approach, especially in the dark. Jan, a leathery man in late middle age, publicly grouses about the need for new blood and proposes a trip to Navaeiros (04.07) to work something out, but recent rumours from the south have folk unsettled.

The weapons cache still holds enough weapons to equip a company.

24 combatants, armoured with scrap armour (-2 armour), half armed with bolt-action rifles, half with sub-machine guns. All carry sidearms and hatchets/clubs, and are Blooded in violence.

 

04.06

10 secessionists from Navaeiros (04.07) pitch their tents in a narrow canyon overlooking the old highway. Federico, a young, wild-eyed man, has lead them in stealing bolt-action rifles and revolvers from Verreville (04.06) and he now plots his takeover of his home village, believing that only force can bring order against the wasteland. He will launch his attempt in a fortnight, which will see the town burn and the sands run red with blood. In the meantime, the band will happily pick off and scavenge what they can from those they think they can take, and attempt to recruit those they think they can't.

Each bandit is mounted and carries 50 rounds of rifle ammunition. A further 1,000 rounds are stashed at their camp, along with a dozen grenades. Each carries 36 revolver rounds. The camp also holds several bottles of spirits, five well-thumbed novels, and two weeks-worth of rations.

 

04.07

Navaeiros eats itself from within, its 85 residents set against their fellows. Gonza returned from the desert three months ago bearing word of the Unity. His rantings have since attracted some two-dozen followers, not enough to cement the cult in power but enough that they feel able to flex their muscles - beatings and intimidations have begun. Federico (04.06) and his band stole the village's horses and left a fortnight ago after a bloody brawl with Gonza's followers. To where, no-one knows. None have attempted to track them. 

Beatriz, formerly leader of the village council, now futilely looks for ways to avoid further bloodshed - she cannot confront the reality that returning to the past is not possible. Elise, who teaches the children out of battered old texbooks and encyclopaedias, and those aligned with her are not so concerned - arsons against cult houses will begin in the next week and be answered in kind. Federico will return the week after with stolen arms from Verreville, and blood and fire will reign.

50 combatants. All wielding poorly-maintained revolvers, bows, shotguns, and simple melee weapons. All are Blooded in violence.

 

05.04

The mounting pole of a small wind-turbine (5kw) thrusts up from the scrub-covered hills, nacelle and blades shredded from decades of caustic wind. Nearby, almost consumed by shrubs and vines, lies the remains of a small cabin. A hatch in the dirt floor leads down to a dug-out cellar. The jars of preserves within have long since expired, tops bulging and glass cracking, but the shelves hold a full set of turbine replacement parts along with charge controllers, inverters, and other necessary accessories. In addition, a scoped bolt-action rifle wrapped in oil cloth rests on a small table, under which is stashed 200 rounds of rifle ammunition.

 

06.04

Patrice and 9 other tribals make their camp in a small canyon cave, keeping well out of sight. The affable elderly trader's caravan is resting before departing to their range in the Parch having made the dangerous journey to trade in Gaptown. Their wagon is loaded with luxury foodstuffs, salt, Old World medicines, and several technical manuals, which the group are happy to trade for.

Patrice underwent initiation under his tribe's shaman, and failed. The experience left him with latent psionic awareness - to those with the same (1-in-20 chance), he offers a potent hallucinogen which will awaken their talents on a standard roll (add Advantages/Disadvantages as appropriate, trip-sitters are advised).

10 combatants, all clad in hide armour (-1 armour). Patrice is armed with a revolver and hatchet. The others all wield bows, backed up by spears, hatchets, long knives, and clubs. Patrice and two others are Experienced in violence, the remainder Blooded.

06.05

A gang of 17 Eaters squat in the remains of a visitor centre overlooking the wooded valley to the east. The creatures know the region well and stalk all who enter. The interior of the building sees little distinction between living space, larder, and latrine, with butchered corpses skewered awkwardly on rebar, and viscera piled into corners.

A crude pit dug in a former car park holds decayed corpses and several rusted firearms discarded in a fit of primal understanding: a double-barreled shotgun and lever-action rifle can be salvaged. The visitor centre storeroom holds a dozen spare textbooks and wilderness school curriculum dossiers detailing foraging, carpentry, outdoor survival, hunting, and field dressing/butchery skills. The latter appears to have been clumsily thumbed through by a filthy hand before being discarded in a corner.

At any one time there are three victims held captive in an old walk-in fridge. There is a 3-in-6 chance that each has been mutilated to a point beyond saving.

17 Eaters, all wielding crude clubs and knives, if anything.

06.07

An old highway interchange gouges its way through a valley in the hills, spans and stancions still standing in defiance of time. The carcasses of vehicles litter the old blacktop in a tesselated nightmare - the initial wave of strandings shoved to the side of the road only for their followers to run out of fuel in turn. Skeletal remains line the spaces between the rusted hulks, fallen while the great masses of refugees wandered from one starving locality to another.

A small junction has been cleared of old vehicles. Following the road off into the hills reveals them to have been dragged into concentric rings of rusted protection around a small set of cabins, behind which lies the concrete entrance to a bunker. A watchtower of peeled and stacked logs overlooks the winding track leading up the hill. The 127 inhabitants of Santaral are only a few years emerged from their underground haven, having been driven up by the gradual failure of their power generator and life support systems. What little power remains is used to fabricate defences and mechanical parts to maintain critical water purifiers, but the machine operators are also able to fashion simple firearm components with relative ease. The bunker contains sufficient feedstocks for years of work.

The original corporate council quickly disintegrated under the stresses of the Long Night, and was replaced with elected representatives from the different dorms. Marcus, the current 'Head', is gathering support for an expedition to the San Balaldo boneyard to the east in search of the Old World components they need. Sara, from Dorm 3, instead argues for further exploration to the west and making contact with other settlements in the area. Without intervention, Marcus and two-dozen others will journey to San Balaldo in a fortnight. Only three will return.

60 combatants, armed with bolt-action rifles and semi-auto pistols. All are Untrained in violence.

 

Bestiary

Ankheg

−6 armour (thick chitin). Spits acid. Burrows. The size of a small car. Counts as a Veteran of violence.

Tremors.
Further.
Closer.
It hears.
Vinegar stink.
The earth yawns.
Something else swallows.

 

Carrion Crawler

Paralysing tentacles.

The dead feed them, but corpses cannot compare to the embrace of warm flesh. Limp bodies raptured
away in darkness line the nest, feeling only the gnawing of the young.

 

Eater

Strong. Excellent sense of smell. Unintelligent, but not stupid. Use crude melee and thrown weapons. Instinctively Experienced in violence.

Not all were lucky enough to perish in the fires of Armageddon. Many lived long enough for crops to fail
and livestock to perish, before turning to the only source of meat remaining.
 

Feasting so in the Great Dying had permanent physiological and psychological consequences.

Nightcrawler

Use Inhuman Violence. Skilled psion - will only attempt to cause fear and misdirect targets.

Evasion: −2 (psionic misdirection)

Shooting: N/A

Melee: 2d8

Harm: Whenever a Nightcrawler would be Injured or Downed from Shooting, instead roll 1d20 and
consult the table below. Melee attacks and explosives are resolved normally.

1d20    Result
1-10     Psionic warping deflects the bullets from its hide.
11-15   The shot disrupts its concentration for 1d6 rounds, rendering it vulnerable to gunfire.
16+      Roll normally for Injury Checks & Down.

The night holds many terrors. Light glints from eyes and claws, real and imagined. Something glides
across the surface of the mind like a knife through silk. The mental jaws bite down before the physical.

Parched

Extremely fast - additional Disadvantage to Shoot while moving. Lies perfectly still beneath sand and
gravel. Counts as Experienced in violence. Never uses weapons.

The Water of Life held a different meaning during the Great Dying. Adapting to a purely predatory
existence was exacting, even for those suffused in the background aura of mutagenic contagions.
Morality, emotions, and finally, sentience were all discarded as unnecessary accessories in a new,
haematophagous existence.

 

Open Table: 12 week retrospective

 Been a while, hasn't it?

I could regale you with tales of getting married and moving to a Scottish island and trying my hand at rearing livestock and potatoes and such, but this is an RPG blog so I will write about something far less interesting.

 

Do not allow him to distract you.

 

Open Table antics

Post-COVID lockdown I took a long hiatus from RPG-related stuff to focus on my non-imaginary life, but over the past couple of years the hooks have started to sink in and draw me back. I ran a few games: a solo Delta Green scenario with my wife, some online Mothership one-shots, and finally an online multi-session run of Wolves Upon the Coast with friends which eventually fizzled due to scheduling issues. All of them were great fun, and then the sickness was upon me once more - I started having ideas.

Enter, the Open Table.

For those unaware, an open table is a regularly scheduled session slot where players sign up in advance. A persistent group is not needed and players can join as and when they're available/feel like playing. The structure lends itself well to 'West Marches'-style play, where parties declare an objective in advance and then return to a safe haven at the end of each session, with time passing in real time between sessions.

I recruited players to a heavily house-ruled Old School Essentials game through a combination of physical posters and posts in local Facebook groups (sadly the island I live on uses Facebook as a primary form of advertising, information sharing, and general communication). The game has been running for almost 3 months and I wanted to get some of my thoughts and observations written out, as much for my own reference as for providing advice to others thinking of running such things.

TL;DR - it has been an excellent experience and I don't know why I didn't run these before. 

 

The Aims

Run a fun and welcoming game where players can attend as much or as little as they want, with a focus on introducing new players to the hobby. Present a coherent and compelling fictional world which draws the players in and encourages them to act as their characters, rather than piloting a set of numbers on a character sheet.

 

The Players

Total signed-up players: ~20, some signed-up via email and some have joined the WhatsApp group used for game discussion and session planning.

Total players who have joined sessions: 13, 10 of whom have attended multiple sessions, 7 of whom I would class as 'regulars'.

Most of the sign-ups and regular attendees are women. Most are either totally new to or have minimal experience of tabletop RPGs. Player age ranges between teenage to middle-aged, most falling in the mid 20s - mid 30s.

The players have all entered the game with a high degree of trust in me as the Referee - I have been extremely careful to preserve this, mainly by always explaining my rulings and reasonings and inviting feedback. All players have expressed an enjoyment of the game up to press - all contribute snacks and £1 per session towards the hire of the room that we use, and I cover the remainder. Several character deaths have occurred and have all been taken in good humour, I believe as a result of this trust holding.

Players have generally acted in a fiction-first way and displayed impressive creativity when interacting with the game, using items, abilities and their wits in clever ways to confront and solve problems before them (my particular favourite was a player who, when confronted with a wide crack in the floor of a room, dropped a torch into the chamber below and affixed a mirror to the end of a 10' pole as an improvised reflector to illuminate dark areas further away). A few have expressed a more mechanics-first attitude, and have queried things like monster HP and abilities in mechanical terms, and have asked to perform general search/perception actions rather than directly interacting with scenarios before them - this has generally been minor and I have encouraged the fiction-first approach embraced by most players, largely through continual requests for task & intent statements.

The group has been very interested in learning more about things in the world, performing research in downtime, asking questions of NPCs regarding the local area and history, interpreting text sources found within the game, and remembering snippets of previous rumours and information gathered to help inform their decisions going forwards.

Several players have embraced faction dynamics, leading the party in performing a (largely) bloodless coup against a previous employer and taking over their organisation, and assassinating the leader of an opposing faction with the aid of a treacherous underling who was willing to make peace with them.

Some players have occasionally gotten distracted during sessions, but the majority have been laser-focused. The distraction hasn't caused issues yet, but I'm keeping an eye on it - if players are ending up on a waitlist while an active player isn't giving the game their full attention then I'll take steps on this.

The party wildly oscillates between cautious planning & a 'fuck it we ball' mindset, and I can't tell which mood will prevail at any one time. Both have been extremely enjoyable, the former lending itself to clever plans which either work out as intended or lead to shenanigans, and the latter having about a 50/50 split between glorious victory and grim fighting withdrawals (both producing excellent war stories).

No player has expressed an interest in learning the rules of the game (OSE). I have presented it in largely a black-box style, where they have character sheets to record information but I will tell them the rolls to make in a given situation. This was not my intention, but it has thus-far worked - see the comment about the high degree of player trust - and I am keen to try it in future games. Players have been quite happy to self-police their own encumbrance limits and draw out their own maps (I break out a dry-wipe board for specific combat positioning).

 

No distractions!

The Game 

Old-School Essentials Classic with house rules ripped from OSE Advanced, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Wolves Upon the Coast, and AD&D 1E. The rules are quite simple, and as mentioned above, run in a black-box style - this was unintentional as I assumed the players would show an interest in learning the game systems, but it has been an incredibly liberating experience as it ensures the players are interacting with the game fiction as directly as possible while I handle the (simple) mechanical load. Combat is where the vast majority of rolls occur and the players have embraced their characters' fictional positioning - they know that flanking and ganging up on enemies is a good way to win, but don't seem to care about the specific +2 modifier for each melee combatant outnumbering the other.

I'm running a megadungeon sandbox and the players have only just entered the dungeon itself - I added a ruined town with some small starter factions and points of interest and they absolutely ate this up, with the first two months being almost completely occupied by exploring different ruins and engaging with the faction dynamics. I'm hoping this bodes well for exploring the dungeon.

I've been gradually introducing elements of the game as we go. Hirelings have become a key element of the game since their introduction, which I didn't expect. The players have been happy to trade treasure and XP for increased survivability in fights. This has also let me be more explicit with telegraphing - nothing gets their attention like exploding a hireling into red mist. Several party members are starting to dabble in magic-item creation, which will be interesting to see going forwards.

There have been a few 'dud' sessions where the party has either not gained any treasure (they spent their time interacting with a strange machine, partially powered up an ancient golem and spent ages asking it questions), suffered near TPKs (don't run into a goblin den and let them encircle you), or combined the two (exploring the dungeon and heading through a secret door into a Minotaur arena, and having to make a fighting retreat with casualties). These have been embraced as part of the game, either because they're happy to spend time digging into the mysteries of the game (questioning the robot), they realise they made a mistake (charging in without a plan), or because they recognise that sometimes you just have bad luck (the Minotaur). In the latter cases they know that I've acted as impartially and fairly as possible, so their response has been to take stock of the situation and prepare for the next round. We also use rules covering Feats of Exploration, and giving fallen PCs a funeral allows you to divide up their XP, which helps to reward exploration and takes the sting out of coming back to town with empty pockets.

The out-of-game WhatsApp group has worked well for organising sessions, but I'd prefer something with threading abilities to delineate things like downtime activities, planning discussions etc.. I play in several Discord servers but I find the platform horrible for useful discussion and information organisation. I currently use a Google Site for recording session reports, player character rosters, discovered lore etc. I'll need to look into this further, but may just have to stick with the current setup as it's where people currently are.

Prep is incredibly easy - I used the Two Week Megadungeon method to knock out several levels of the dungeon, and with a quick message from the party telling me what they're aiming to do in their next delve I can make sure that everything is set up and ready. The dungeon basically runs itself, faction aims drive their expansion and contraction in different areas based on their interactions with the party, and re-stocking zones is a matter of rolling on a few tables. Combined with a simple ruleset this means that my mental load is massively reduced, and running weekly sessions floating between Thursday-Saturday has felt like almost no effort at all.

 

The Minotaur, before things went really wrong.

General Thoughts

I've loved every second of running this, and hope to continue it for as long as possible. I think I've met the initial objective of creating a fun and welcoming game to introduce newbies, with a focus on the fiction of the game.

I genuinely think my Referee-ing skills have improved. I still need to work on making NPCs more distinctive, but running a game seems to be second nature at this point. Having the mental processes mapped out to make and record rulings for spot situations has helped massively. 

I was surprised at how many of the players were brand new to the hobby, but having thought on it I imagine most folk who play RPGs will have found a group that they game with regularly. The new players have been some of the most creative and fun of the lot, and I hope I'm setting them up in good stead to play in other games in the future.

Recruitment has hit a bit of a wall recently - I'm hoping to broaden the pool of players a bit more, or at least get some of the sign-ups who haven't attended a session to come along to one.

Having a discrete objective for each session helps keep things focused - I'm looking forward to opening up play into a hexcrawl as the characters progress.

Running the game as a black-box, despite it being unintentional, has been a real eye-opener, in a good way. The game has ended up almost being a not-quite Kriegspiel, and I'm definitely keen to try running something more explicitly that way. Death to the system, long live the game.

Mothership: Further Thoughts

In my previous post I gave a few thoughts on a rough Mothership setting. Have some more. Note: I am not a physicist so the below is probably very wrong. As I have now disclaimed this fact you can't be mad at me.

 

Marnix Rekkers

I previously mentioned that:

Starships are many and varied. They share this in common: Newton's laws are supreme, artificial gravity is provided by acceleration G- or centrifugal force, and waste heat is a constant enemy. Expect rotating crew quarters, G-force couches, heatsinks and radiators, and barebones design. Very few spacecraft are able to touch down on anything near Earth-gravity planets due to their non-aerodynamic design and the fact that many use fusion torches for void propulsion which would eject a nasty amount of fallout into a planetary biosphere - most have a spaceplane and/or rely on some form of orbital infrastructure to reach ground level and return to orbit...

As I'm aiming for a reasonably hard sci-fi approach (magic FTL notwithstanding) this presents a couple of circles to be squared in the Mothership Player's Survival Guide, in no particular order:

1. Fighter-class ships
2. Thruster speed, fuel use, and alternative propulsion
   
3. Jump drives
4. Stealth, G-forces, weapons, and heat
5. General ship design points

 

Fighter-class ships

Do not exist. Allow me to explain. Warplanes fulfil a niche in terrestrial warfare because they're fast and mobile, can attack targets beyond the horizon out of sight of your big slow vehicles and ships, and they can move through the atmosphere reasonably efficiently. In void warfare there is no horizon preventing your big guns from targeting the enemy directly and there is no atmosphere whose constraints you must consider while moving - there is no reason to close to knife-fighting range.

Furthermore, an atmospheric fighter has the advantage of not requiring life support (beyond compressed air and heating for high-altitude flight) and being able to rely on atmospheric drag and planetary gravity to aid in braking. Void craft do not have this luxury - organic crew require life support, increasing the mass of the craft, and rather than braking via drag a spacecraft must apply thrust in a different direction to slow down/change vector which requires fuel and applies (potentially fatal) G-forces to the organic pilot depending on the acceleration/deceleration. Factor in the additional mass/energy requirements for ammunition or other weapons and you add a greater need for fuel as more mass = more energy to move said mass.

The final knife in the coffin, so to speak, is survivability. Void warfare stands to be a slugfest - there's no 'cover' in space short of hiding behind a planet so once a fight starts you're almost guaranteed to be hit by something as CIWS and EM countermeasures will never be 100% successful. Surprise, physics rears its head again here - a critical factor to consider in a void battle is the amount of surface area your ship has vulnerable to attack as this presents greater opportunities for your enemy to penetrate your hull and smash up vital systems. More surface area will require more armour to protect, which means more mass, more fuel etc. etc. etc.. It may seem like a small fighter would make sense then, as it's smaller and has less surface area. However the laws of physics dictate that the more massive an object is, the lower its surface area proportional to a less massive object. This has huge ramifications for void warfare - a larger ship is inherently more massive with the difficulties that entails but you enter a sort of economy of scale beyond a certain point. You can have a large vessel with high mass but if you arrange it in a compact shape you can concentrate said mass into a low-surface area, pile your crew and vital components in the middle surrounded with armour and end up with an order of magnitude more survivability than a fighter-size vessel. Add the fact that a larger vessel means a bigger reactor and storage room = more missiles, railgun rounds, bigger, better lasers, more fuel (and thus greater delta-v capacity) and bigger engine (meaning better acceleration) and it's a no-brainer. Space fighters are vulnerable, weak and limited in range and scope.

A far better solution would be to strip out the life support, up the armour, reactor and weapons and install an expert system with a control link back to a command ship - essentially turn it into a drone. Or use more missiles. Either way you avoid sending fleshy pilots to almost certain doom.

Ben Nicholas

Thruster speed, fuel use, and alternative propulsion

Speed is a bit of a red herring in space as everything moves super fast - being in an orbit is essentially moving laterally quick enough to miss the ground as gravity pulls you down. As such, any spacecraft is capable of picking up fantastic amounts of speed but what really matters is the ability to change speed and direction and the acceleration/deceleration forces one can bring to bear - delta-v is king. The Mothership core rules use Speed as a catch-all movement stat for starships - it's used for determining the success of complex piloting manoeuvres and as a measure of speed relative to other ships. More ship Thrusters = higher speed in the rules as written. There is also the concept of Fuel, which is used to activate the Jump drive (requiring double the Jump rating in fuel) and using thrusters burns 1 unit of fuel/day. Each engine unit also requires 3 fuel, plus additional fuel as required*. All perfectly serviceable, but not hard sci-fi enough for what we're aiming for:

• Starships do not need to fire their thrusters to maintain a continual speed, only to accelerate/decelerate or change direction, thus there is no flat usage of fuel per day when travelling in space.
  
• I think an 'Engine' probably refers to a reactor of some kind as it references powering the whole ship. I will treat it as such. In a fusion drive (assuming direct thrust) the thrusters function independently of a ship's reactor, fusing He3 and directing the exhaust out the back of the ship, which breaks the required link between Engines and Thrusters in the ship design rules. I like the idea of a ship's reactor powering the Jump drive.
  
• A larger drive (in this case higher thruster level) does allow for greater speed/acceleration (specifically a bigger rocket can produce more thrust) but each manoeuvre undertaken by a starship requires fuel to change speed and direction.
  

*Note: I don't quite get this bit as fuel adds to the total hull requirement but can be stored in cargo space - maybe they mean dedicated fuel storage? - also the engine units can apparently burn fuel at a rate of 1/day under thruster power but require a minimum of 3 fuel each when building the ship?).

With the above in mind, I'd propose the following reforms:

Interplanetary Travel - Thrusters & Fuel

In a ship equipped with a fusion drive burning He3 Speed represents the maximum acceleration possible by a ship. Keep the current thruster > speed relationship as written - a larger thruster means higher acceleration can be reached.

Instead of burning 1 fuel/day of travel instead divide a system into zones of interest - a 'zone' is a planet (and its moons), star, deep space observatory etc.. Basically anything interesting in a system and its surrounds is a 'zone' and travelling between these locations takes at minimum 1 unit of fuel to get up to speed and decelerate when approaching the destination. Zones are stacked from the inner system to the outer edge so to travel from an inner system zone to an outer system zone you'd need to account for travelling through the intervening zones. As larger thrusters mean more fuel can be used they can achieve higher acceleration - a ship with a speed of 10 can only burn 1 fuel, but a ship with 20 can burn 2, a ship with 30 can burn 3, and so on.

A ship burning a speed 10 fusion torch can travel from one zone to another in 4 weeks (based on Project Rho's low-end torchship calculations). Burning additional fuel in a higher-rated thruster reduces this travel time exponentially:

• A speed 20+ ship burning 2 fuel will make it in 2 weeks.
• A speed 30+ ship burning 3 fuel in 1 week.
• A speed 40+ ship burning 4 fuel will make it in 4.5 days.
• A speed 50+ ship burning 5 fuel will make it in 2.25 days.
• A speed 60+ ship burning 6 fuel will make it in just over a day.
• A speed 70+ ship burning 7 fuel will make it about half a day.
• A speed 80 ship burning 8 fuel will make it in ~6 hours.

The latter stages begin to get into the region of relativity but the distances travelled are generally so short (astronomically) that this won't have much of an effect. Established planetary governments do, however, tend to take issue with objects approaching c near them and so generally enforce a sort of stellar speed limit (the penalty for speeding is nuclear annihilation and/or parking something in your path before you can turn). A major issue with travelling at the higher tiers is the sheer amount of fuel needed to do so - unless you're in a real hurry and/or have very deep pockets it's usually easier to sit in the slow lane and enjoy the downtime - and the G-forces involved on the crew in such a rapid acceleration over a relatively short patch of spacetime (speed 80 = ~10g for several hours).

This is of course an abstraction - a speed 10 ship could in theory perform subsequent or continual burns to speed up but my reasoning is that zone-to-zone travel on the scale of fractions of AUs means that by the time a smaller thruster has completed its initial burn (larger thruster = more propellant can be fired at once) and accelerated they're either at or approaching the point where they need to perform a retrograde burn to begin decelerating on approach to their destination. This also ignores the movement of planetary orbits, I've tried to take an 'average' value rather than spending time calculating the 'season' people are travelling in.

What can I say? I'm not actually a rocket scientist.

Interstellar Travel - Thrusters & Fuel

If you're not using a Jump drive then the Warden can rule this as they see fit. Using the above example a speed 80 ship (assuming zone-to-zone travel on the scale of 6 hours/AU (150 million kilometres)) accelerating at 10g could cross the distance between Earth and Centauri (~4.25ly) in about 9 months with a time debt of ~4.5 years. However, this would take absolutely astronomical (heh) amounts of fuel - assuming a dry weight of 500 tons would mean over 1 million tons of fuel required to maintain constant acceleration. The ship would almost certainly have to coast for the majority of the journey, which would massively increase the time taken - potentially up to centuries.

Intergalactic Travel - Thrusters & Fuel

No chance.

Alternative propulsion and planetary landings

The above assumes the widespread use of relatively efficient fusion drives throughout human space, but there are other options available as well for systems with well-developed stellar infrastructure.

Solar sails are a viable and cheap option for intra-system travel - bind aluminium to a tough but flexible polymer sheet, make the sheet a sufficient size (kilometres across - an 800m square sail catches ~5 newtons of force at the Earth's distance from Sol, which drops as you get further out) to pull the payload at a suitable speed and let the sun's radiation do the work. Using gravity assists and solar wind alone means for a relatively slow journey, but with sufficiently advanced space infrastructure it would be quite trivial to set up a laser network capable of accelerating/decelerating solar sail craft. As a general rule assume a solar-propelled craft can travel zone-to-zone in about 6 months when receiving a gravity assist from a star (based off the predicted travel times for our solar system). If laser-boosted, however, use the travel times per fusion craft with speed scaling according to the system's development. A system with a laser propulsion network may well require craft approaching void habitats or inhabited planets to deploy a sail and use specific 'space lanes' rather than letting lit fusion torches near habitable worlds - anything capable of applying the energy required for such high acceleration essentially has a huge weapon attached to its rear end.

Ion thrusters have the advantage of being very efficient and can reach high speeds given enough acceleration time but are unfortunately not very powerful. They're useful for deep-space probes that will be travelling for decades and centuries, satellites/stations readjusting orbits but generally lack utility on spacecraft.

In general assume that starships are designed for use in space only and cannot land on planets with an atmosphere and/or anything higher than lunar gravity (0.166g). As I mentioned previously, most will have a dedicated aerodynamic spaceplane either independently capable of single-stage-to-orbit flight (using new types of rocket fuel, dual scramjet/rocket designs, nuclear lightbulbs, or another solution) or relying on assisted launches from launch loop(s), orbital infrastructure like an orbital ring, and/or space elevator(s) (which would remove the need for a separate orbital vehicle entirely). A developed planet with similar gravity to Earth would be able to provide the former but a less developed frontier world may rely on skyhooks or old fashioned chemical rocket launches. The lower the gravity of a given planet, the easier achieving orbit is - low gravity environments can easily achieve orbital trajectories via mass driver, for instance, whereas Earth-gravity planets would need to supplement such a solution with additional thrust from rockets or ground-based lasers.

space gooose

Jump drives

In the Player's Survival Guide actual Jump distances and procedures are left up to the Warden but are stated to be subject to irregular effects of relativity. My adaptation for this is as follows:

Jump rating is the number of parsecs that can be crossed per week (as perceived by the crew) in hyperspace. Jumps always take 1 week from the crew's perspective. Entering hyperspace requires a starship to be at the edge of a system's gravity well in order to create a stable hyperspace bridge - the Jump drive works by searching for a suitable 'mass shadow' and plotting a hyperspace course towards it. The ship can exit from hyperspace once they reach the limits of the target system. Attempting to Jump while within a system is virtually guaranteed to end catastrophically. The real time spent in hyperspace can vary, but on a well-executed Jump on a reliably-plotted route crew time and observer time will generally match, and any route with a known timelag can be accounted for.

Hyperspace is, by its very nature, alien, corrosive, and counter-intuitive to human minds and the very properties that allows starships to bypass relativity when travelling through hyperspace also lead to hyperspace routes shifting and changing over time. Most spacers liken hyperspace to an ocean with tides and currents - by mapping and plotting reliable routes travel disruption can be minimised, and most port authorities demand that berthing ships share anonymised hyperspace route data as a condition of receiving services. This data is then used to update the minute shifts in hyperspace conditions for the given route and is transmitted out to other ships for navigation purposes. Jumping into a less travelled route could mean that hyperspace conditions are wildly different to what the data indicates - most of the time this will mean a greater outmatch between observer and crew time but sudden and violent shifts (so-called 'hyperspace storms') can lead to ships arriving months or years late, at wildly different destinations, or even suffering damage and destruction at the hands of surging metadimensional currents. Bear in mind that this data sharing relies on receiving regular traffic - a backwater system may not be able to provide up-to-date course bearings if you're the only out-of-system ship they've seen recently.

 

Jump procedure

A ship's computer is able to plot and execute a Jump based on the most recent astrogation data available - it will tell you the status of the route:

• Uncharted/untravelled for >1 year - timelag effects unknown, high likelihood of danger to ship and crew.
• Untravelled for 6-12 months - likely timelag ≥1 Standard year.
• Untravelled for 2-6 months - likely timelag of 1d6 Standard months.
• Untravelled for up to 1 month - likely timelag of 1d4 Standard weeks.
• Travelled within last 2 weeks - time asynchronicity within acceptable parameters.
  

It will also mention any known hyperspace conditions, like known danger zones or patches that slow or speed travel for whatever reason. I've not done a list for these as I figured that the above would be sufficient and additional features can be made up on the fly as appropriate.

If attempting to plot a Jump while in combat or undertaking some other stressful task an Intellect/Astrogation or Hyperspace check may be called for - the Warden can determine any deleterious effects caused by a failure. Radiator panels and other external instruments are normally retracted if possible to keep them well within the realspace bubble.

All organic crew must enter cryosleep for the duration of the journey and androids a hibernation state. The effects of hyperspace on the human psyche are well-documented - human minds gradually deteriorate if left awake while undergoing a Jump. Chillingly, a similar effect is seen in active persona cores leading to an intense study on the effects of hyperspace on conscious minds and lending credence to the idea of strong AI personhood - weak AI software appears to suffer no ill effects. Any characters awake in hyperspace must make daily Sanity saves.

 

NASA

Stealth, G-forces, weapons, and heat

There is no stealth in space, with some caveats. I mentioned previously that fighter aircraft make sense on Earth due to the existence of the horizon - the higher up you are the further away the horizon is and thus the further you can see. Space has no horizon - everything not blocked by a stellar object can be seen, the only limiting factor is the amount of time it takes for light/radiation from the object to hit your sensors. And there will be emissions from your ship. Space is big and dark, which sounds like it would be a great place for hiding but all it does is make the big plume of heat emanating from your drive extra-visible to your opponents' sensor suites - while humans are lazy and prone to error, a shipboard electronic warfare suite will be able to home in on a fusion drive signature on the other side of the system in seconds.

So, what if you don't light off your drive and rely on gravitational slingshots to send you on your way? Unfortunately, every action taken on a vessel creates waste heat (thermodynamics is a bitch). Space, being a vaccum, makes it impossible to conduct this heat away as one would in an atmosphere. As such a spacefaring vessel is equipped with extendable radiator panels that emit this waste heat as infrared radiation - the moment a starship begins dumping heat it might as well light off its drive, though this can be mitigated by radiating away from the target's sensors. So what if you do this, running your ship in minimal power mode with internal heatsinks absorbing as much waste heat as possible and radiating the rest away from obeservers? Unfortunately your ship will still be emitting detectable IR radiation, even if coated with a 99.99% non-reflective substance. There's also the problem that you'd need to keep some reactor functionality going to keep basic functions running which will have its own hotspot signature - if a space telescope can detect the Voyager probe 18.5 billion kilometers away radiating the approximate energy of a fridge lightbulb then advanced starship sensors can spot you, though they'd probably need to be actively searching for you. You could try beaming the waste heat away via laser, but due to the laws of thermodynamics this would take additional energy to do thus increasing the waste heat total and be less efficient, to boot. It's also easily spotted by an observer using a network of sensors rather than their own ship. Also, to refer back to the point of burning and then coasting, if anyone detects your initial burn and trajectory they'll be able to predict where you're going and your ETA with a high degree of accuracy.

What about decoys? They're really, really hard to get right. Anyone with half-decent sensors will be able to read your drive signature and acceleration, thus being able to approximate your ship's mass. If you send off a bunch of decoys you'd need to make them with almost identical drive signatures and masses otherwise it would be obvious, essentially you'd need to recreate your ship. Note that this is only relevant to a stealth situation - in active combat decoy signatures can be a vital part of ECM and make or break a ship's survival.

Active and passive sensors do need to be accounted for. Active sensors use LIDAR or some other electromagnetic detection suite to actively 'ping' a target and read a reflection of the sensor's signature. Passive sensors instead simply observe and take in data from the environment without actively broadcasting a signal. Running active sensors allows for quicker and more efficient target identification as you're able to actively seek out and get a response from an otherwise inert target, but it has its downsides. Using active sensors is akin to flicking a torch on at night - it improves your vision but everything in the dark knows exactly where you are. Passive sensors are less precise, but also don't reveal where your ship is.

Stealth, for the most part, is best done by hiding in plain sight - disguise your vessel as a shipping freighter, engineer a distraction to draw attention away, and as a last resort by shielding yourself behind interstellar objects. In game terms starship stealth can be dealt with as an opposed Intellect check (Astrogation or Vehicle Specialisation (Starship) possibly applying bonuses), with the following applying:

• If running cold and from a hidden starting burn (Warden rolls a d100 setting the chance of being spotted as they deem reasonable, i.e. hidden asteroid base or gas giant outer atmosphere is plausible; undocking from a major spaceport is not - it's rare that anywhere is completely unobserved) then the party in stealth rolls with advantage.
• If the searching party is using active sensors they roll with advantage.
• A ship undergoing a burn, dumping heat (unless doing so in the opposite direction to the target), or running active sensors is not capable of stealth - its presence is obvious to any observer.

 

G-forces are a perennial foe of spacers. While a fusion torch can produce fantastic amounts of acceleration, old Isaac Newton takes his due in the form of Newton's Third Law - every force is matched by an equal and opposite opposing force. This g-force can wreak havoc on crew and ship alike - a hasty manoeuvre at high acceleration can leave a crew member as nothing more than a smear on a bulkhead. At the same time g-forces created during normal acceleration and deceleration are either not enough to fully recreate Earth gravity aboard a starship or much too high, requiring rotating crew quarters to provide centrifugal force to simulate 1g effects (we're not in the realm of constant 1g acceleration yet) and crash couches to support the passengers during a high-g burn. As such much of a space voyage is spent in zero-g when outside of the rotating quarters. Tracking g-force will only really come into effect during combat manoeuvres.

When making a combat manoeuvre (i.e. taking evasive action against torpedoes) the captain must choose what speed the manoeuvre will be made at:

• At speed 10-30 all passengers must make a Body save or suffer 1d10 damage and gain 1 Stress.
• At speed 31-50 all passengers must make a Body save or suffer 2d10 damage and gain 1 Stress.
• At speed 51-80 all passengers must make a Body save or suffer 3d10 damage and gain 1 Stress.

Similarly all passengers must either be in crysosleep or a crash couch whenever the ship undergoes a burn or be subject to the above - save against Speed instead of Body as you struggle to find a brace position against the sudden acceleration rather than straining against the g-force.

The starship weapons in the Player's Survival Guide are great, but need a bit of reworking. Our ships will be engaging at hundreds of thousands kilometres with near perfect visibility, as such the existing ship weapons are as follows:

• Laser Cutter - designed to fire at relatively low power (it's cheaper for mining rigs). Useful as a last ditch weapon but no match for an armoured starship - targets roll Armour with advantage. Conversely a dedicated laser turret is far too powerful to reliably ablate and process asteroid resources, reducing the rock to slag.
• Autocannon - unfortunately not really viable on the scale of starship combat. Useful as a drone mounted weapon in conventional combat where it does D% damage.
• Railgun - now we're talking. Even though the distances in starship combat are massive, being able to accelerate a stream of kinetic kill slugs at massive speeds into the predicted path of your enemy has its perks. Leave as-is but need to factor in heat use (not as much as a laser, but still decent).
• Mounted Machine Gun Turrets - use as-is, useful for mounting on spaceplanes and atmospheric craft.
• Torpedoes - the real stuff. Nuclear-tipped or not, a projectile that can adapt to your opponent's position, home in on their active sensor signatures and overwhelm their point defence all while not burdening you with increased waste heat is a valuable tool.
• Rigging Gun - useful on tugboats but useless in a fight. Utilises a magnetic grapple.

I would also add the following:

• Laser Cannon - essentially replaces the autocannon, trading kinetic slugs for pulses of high frequency lasers. Doesn't use ammo but produces prodigious amounts of waste heat despite advances in laser efficiency - that's the price for being able to target an enemy at the speed of light.
• Combat Drone - a small decoy/weapons carrier capable of interfering with enemy sensors and weapons via ECM or occluding agents or deploying torpedoes/kinetic kill vehicles. Usually programmed with combat parameters before launch and updated via tightbeam (at least until EM interference gets too bad) - usually released in a swarm to overwhelm enemy point-defence.
  
• Close-In-Weapons-System - small laser point defence grids designed to defend against incoming torpedo fire and general debris. The lasers usually can't destroy the missiles outright but even a small jolt can ablate enough material to interfere with speed, vector, guidance and payload delivery, thus enhancing your survivability.
• ECM Pods - specialised electronic warfare suites that interfere with target acquisition and communication in the electromagnetic spectrum.

As most of these weapons will rely on the ship's reactor for power I'm going to add an Engine requirement for the majority of them to ensure they can be run adequately. Then there's the thermal waste generated to consider...

 

Heat is the other perennial enemy in space. Everything, from firing weapons, scanning the dark reaches, to simply keeping the air and water flowing, incurs a waste heat debt which can't simply be conducted into the vacuum of space. Luckily starships have extendable radiator panels that can radiate this heat away as infrared radiation. Most starships will keep these extended and radiating in order to keep their heat debt to a minimum - thus marking them out clearly to sensors against the cold background of space. Ships committing to high-g manoeuvres will often retract them to keep structural strain to a minimum and all ships in or anticipating combat will retract these vulnerable lifelines of their ship to protect them from weapons fire. Internal heatsinks provide precious additional time to keep radiators retracted in a battle but eventually even these will give out. Thus fighting represents a constant ante between ships attempting to damage each other while maintaining their own waste heat within reasonable limits.

In game terms each vessel has a heat tolerance representing their ability to endure waste heat before it needs to be dumped. This is determined by the overall hull size of the ship (I can't figure out a way to take surface area into account without going into a minutiae-fest so the more hull points you have the more heat you can diffuse throughout your ship because you have more internal heatsinks, or something). Each 10 points of hull gives 1 heat capacity. Actions in combat like firing (most weapons), performing a burn, or powering up the Jump drive incur a heat cost - once the heat tolerance theshold has been reach the radiator panels must be extended to dump heat or on the next turn the ship suffers a Critical Hit caused by overheating subsystems and all crew members must make a Body save or suffer 1d10 thermal damage.

If a ship has its radiators extended and suffers a hit roll a d10 - on a 1-5 in addition to dealing hull damage subtract the same amount from the target's heat tolerance.

I'll be doing a wider section on starships in a later post with some more fleshed out rules for space travel and combat.

 

ROBOTS V DINOSAURS

General ship design points

A few final points to consider:

• Even though fusion torches allow for Brachistochronic trajectories between orbital bodies rather than relying on Hohmann transfers, mass is still an important consideration. Ships will be built as spartan and barebones as possible to save on fuel. This won't have a mechanical element (I'm not masochistic enough to try and puzzle out a relationship between hull and fuel) but is more of a descriptive one - think exposed bulkheads, plain decoration and minimal personal effects.
• Most crews will spend the majority of their time in zero-g outside of rotating quarters. Corridors and walls will generally be rounded with padding (to prevent too much damage when losing control in zero-g or, more likely, being suddenly subject to a different g-force during an unexpected burn) and grab loops regularly spaced to anchor and propel oneself while weightless.
• Fancy tech with bells and whistle is great but when you're travelling through a medium of certain death in a sealed metal can you want reliability above all - manual backups and workarounds, robust computerisation, the works. This is so I can have Alien-style retrofuture style tech justified in-game.
• Ship combat is deadly - expect even unarmed ships to possess some degree of armour. As a corollary to this many battles will end with one side surrendering when their radiators have been slagged and they need to shut down their reactor to prevent themselves from roasting alive.
  
• In terms of ship structure you'll see a difference between explicitly military ships and not - combat vessels will want to concentrate their mass as much as possible in order to armour up their vital components, civilian ones probably don't mind spreading out in a length as it's cheaper - but most spacecraft will be built upon similar lines: thrusters, power plant and fuel towards the back, cargo space in the midsection and crew-critical areas at the other end. Alternatively, ships could use a more spherical shape with the reactor and drives extending from the rear. There's a plethora of plausible designs. You'd probably see a lot more standardisation in the Core, with different designs becoming more common the further towards the Beyond you get.
  

Mothership: Thoughts

This post is brought to you by Dan, RimWorld and NewSovietWave.

I started writing a post last year that I never ended up publishing which was intended to be a review of sort for Mothership, from Tuesday Knight Games. My review is as follows:

Mothership is pretty great.

Normal service will now resume.

 

Glenn Clovis

I ran a small adventure for some friends of mine using the core rules in the Mothership Player's Survival Guide not long after picking it up. It was fairly simple - the PCs were passengers on a ship who awoke from cryosleep to find the vessel stranded in a system's Oort cloud with the laws of physics behaving weirdly, the crew having gradually been driven insane and consumed by an energy-vampire entity that lived in interstellar space mostly interacting with dark matter. They loved it, and most of them even survived! Since then I've been thinking about it on-and-off and have a few ideas about a general setting.

The below is mostly predicated on the existence of non-relativistic Faster-Than-Light and the theory of the mind as essentially non-computable. I've got a few ideas for a subsequent post where FTL travel incurs serious time-debt and Dan has some excellent stuff on digital posthumanity (it's great, go read his blog).

When?

Some time in the mid-late 22nd century. The exact date doesn't matter a whole bunch for a few reasons:

• Mothership is a pretty lethal system and having a vague idea of time works easier for me to drop a new party into rather than strictly defined chronology.
  
• FTL travel, while not strictly relativistic, has its vagaries with regards to the passage of time for both travellers and observers.
• FTL communication isn't possible - information travels at the speed of the fastest ship - leading to a large information timelag the further across space one travels.

Time is still generally tracked on a 24 hour day ((Earth) Standard Day) and 365 day year ((Earth) Standard Year) largely out of inertia, but decimal time is also popular on starships. Extrasolar residents will usually keep a parallel Local time system.

Where?

Human space is laid out in three rough concentric spheres centred around the Sol system, comprising a diameter of ~300 parsecs (Rigel here we come!):

The Core sphere

The space occupied by the initial extrasolar colonisation efforts and, thus, the oldest and most developed worlds. Travel time between these systems is reasonably quick and the relative speed of information and travel results in the Core largely existing under the iron fist of UN Intersolar Authority (UNISA) with centralised government (read: corporate) structures, component standardisation and elements of cosmopolitanism. Also the region of space that bore the brunt of the PERIMETER Crisis - the Sol system is still cut off from hyperspace. You can get from one side of the Core to the other in about 3 months in a Jump 4 ship.

 

The Outer sphere

The space colonised by the second wave of Terran efforts. The UNISA still holds authority here though their structure is necessarily decentralised given the less well-established hyperspace routes and distance from their Core strongholds. As such nominally independent 'sovereign system' polities have emerged - this process has accelerated in the wake of the PERIMETER Crisis as requisitions and taxes have been levied by colonial authorities to assist in Core reconstruction efforts, sparking brushfire wars and insurgencies. Travelling from the edge of the Core to the boundary of the Outer sphere takes about 6 months at Jump 4.

 

The Rim 

The far frontier holding the furthest documented human colonies in the Milky Way. Hyperspace travel is still risky and unpredictable here and the authority of the UNISAis virtually unrecognised and grows weaker every day. Cult leaders, political dissidents, corporate prospectors and more congregate at the fringes of human space and society. To travel from the edge of the Outer sphere to the loose boundary of the Rim takes around 9 months at Jump 4.

 

The Beyond 

Non-colonised (officially) space past the boundary of the Rim.

Who?

Most of us could be transported into this setting and not notice much different about our descendants, but it depends where you look - metahumanity is emerging:

Mind-machine neural interfaces have allowed for advanced cybernetic implantations - cosmetic implants, heads-up displays, fully-immersive VR, truly integrated synthetic limbs & organs, implanted or wearable-wirelessly-linked eidetic memory storage, full cyborg-isation (humanoid or otherwise), and more, are available. Some corporate employment contracts are more akin to cybernetic mortgage clauses.

 

Genetic engineering has improved to the point where genetic illness has largely been eliminated and resistance to many diseases can be conferred (if you've the cash to pay for treatment). Changes can be made to the human genome to aid in colonising extrasolar or void environments - adaptations for low- and high-G environments or low-light, aquatic, or low-oxygen planets, for instance. Somatic (non-heritable) genetic augmentation can be made without too many problems in advanced medical settings (although requiring appropriate therapy while the changes take effect). Germline heritability, however, is heavily scrutinised by the UNISA. The mega-rich Core families have surreptitiously begun the gradual process of marshalling their familial genes into that of a genetic over-class and colony worlds in the Outer sphere and Rim have begun the slow path to true speciation as their citizens choose to adapt further to non-Terran environments. Transgenic changes have been made to Terran bacteria, animals and plants to aid in colony establishment in extrasolar environments.

Further to the above improvements in the human genome via gene editing and subsequent augmentation are able to confer increased longevity, extending the lifespan of a Core world citizen almost indefinitely. Outer sphere and Rim residents see this as paltry compensation for having to live in the Core.

 

Human tissue cloning is widely used but regulations against reproductive cloning or full-body recreation exist in UN space, and among many independent polities. Elsewhere it's a free for all, but the immortal holy grail of mind-transfer remains thoroughly out of reach.

 

Mind digitization remains elusive - the data requirements are immensely prohibitive and even where this has been surpassed the recreated digital minds quickly degrade into a roiling mass of insanity for lack of biofeedback from the brain's physical structures. The future remains, in this instance, meatbound. An exception of sorts exists in the use of neuronal network data to act as 'seeds' for artificial intelligences.

 

Truly artificial intelligences, on the other hand, do exist in strong and weak varieties. These are strictly regulated.

 

Alien ruins and artefacts have been found but mankind has thus far encountered no 'intelligent' life among the stars. Microbial and even complex organisms are present, though rare, so the lack of intelligent life has promoted huge discussions around the Great Filter and what lies in wait for humanity.

 

3AAA

How?

What are the tools by which humanity has cemented its place in the stars? I'll dig into this in a subsequent post, but general details below:

Jump drives are the lynchpin of humanity's spread through interstellar space. Whereas travelling under conventional power, even at relativistic speeds, would take years to cross even minor interstellar distances (not even getting into the time debt of the crew) Jump-capable ships can cross these distances in a fraction of the time. A Jump 1 rated ship can make the journey from Sol to Centauri (~4.25ly) in ~9 days travelling at ~1 parsec/week without experiencing relativistic time-debt. Higher Jump ratings are capable of increased speed, with Jump 2 drives capable of travelling ~2 parsecs/week etc.. Jump 4 is the general maximum most vessels will travel at due to the sheer financial and energy cost of increasing Jump capability and the increased hyperspace fluctuations that follow higher Jump travel - it is possible to travel at a lower Jump rating with a more capable drive thus saving the increased Jump ability for a true emergency. Jump transitions take place at the edge of solar systems as a star's gravity well (being what you might term a 'big boi' of physics) distorts spacetime too much to allow a safe transition within a system.

This hasn't stopped sleeper ships from venturing out into the great beyond at sublight relativistic speed - sometimes things are just that bad that you want out of life for a few decades/centuries in cryosleep to start things completely anew.

Even with Jump drives providing a way around the hard limits of relativity, it's not enough for the UNISA to remain in control. An interstellar polity's ability to control far-flung systems relies on its ability to project force, economic or military. The UNISA controls the wealthiest and most developed systems but they're hamstrung by the limitations of jump technology - how can you control a recalcitrant subject (of suitable development) when it takes you up to a year to bring any real military force to bear (bearing in mind the timelag in receiving notification of a rebellion) and the target, by virtue of the cost of interstellar shipping, is largely self-sufficient in most industrial and material needs out of necessity?

Hyperspace is the key to the operation of Jump technology. Hyperspace is a higher dimension that interacts closely with spacetime: Jump drives expend huge amounts of energy to bridge the gap between the dimensions, allowing a Jump-capable ship to travel outside of spacetime and bypass relativity. A complex quantum field encases the vessel in a bubble of spacetime as it travels through the currents of hyperspace as the dimension itself is corrosive to physics as we know it - travel time and distance is not a sure thing. Organic crew will normally spend the Jump portion of their journey in cryosleep and leave navigation to the ship's computer or astrogation android - even the latter will undergo a full systems error check after emergence from hyperspace. Those who remain awake in hyperspace have reported visual disturbances, auditory hallucinations, nausea and a sense of persistent unease - androids questioned on the matter describe their experiences as unpleasant. Whatever lies outside the realspace bubble of a Jump ship apparently cannot be viewed by the human mind - any attempt to do so results in visual white noise and a nasty stinging sensation.

 

Starships are many and varied. They share this in common: Newton's laws are supreme, artificial gravity is provided by acceleration G- or centrifugal force, and waste heat is a constant enemy. Expect rotating crew quarters, G-force couches, heatsinks and radiators, and barebones design. Very few spacecraft are able to touch down on anything near Earth-gravity planets due to their non-aerodynamic design and the fact that many use fusion torches for void propulsion which would eject a nasty amount of fallout into a planetary biosphere - most have a spaceplane and/or rely on some form of orbital infrastructure to reach ground level and return to orbit. The prevalence of fusion drives has led to He3 becoming a future 'gold standard' for currency exchange.

Artificial intelligence exists in strong and weak varieties. Weak AI are advanced intelligences built from the ground-up towards a series of specific tasks but lack the capacity for generalised intelligent action or self-improvement - ship computers are weak AI constructs able to manage and maintain a ship's systems and assist the crew but limited in their ability to act outside of their operational constraints. Strong AI, by contrast, are capable of human-level or greater intelligence and have the flexibility to apply this intelligence to any situation facing them. In contrast to the step-by-step algorithmic creation of a weak AI a strong AI is 'spun off' from the neural patterns of a human brain and gradually moulded to produce the desired outcome - while a human mind cannot be digitised a full neural mapping can form the basis of an AI neural network, but the failure rate is still astonishingly high. A strong AI is not capable of surviving in an active state in any and every computer system for two reasons: storage and complexity. A human brain can hold ~2.5 petabytes of data, even advanced computers in the future lack this storage space as standard. In addition, creating a functioning digital intelligence requires specialised circuitry to simulate the emergent properties of neurons in a human brain. As such strong AI inhabit nanite-infused 'persona cores' that are linked into other systems or implanted in android bodies, as appropriate, but are able to store inactive copies of themselves in a regular computer given enough storage space. These cores are unique to each AI - they're able to make new ones based on their own neurocircuitry patterns but can't inhabit another AI core without... weirdness... A persona core inhabiting an android shell will possess roughly similar intelligence to a person, although their demeanour can be a bit 'off' and their core processes will possess innate preferences for tasks and types of work, but a core linked up to additional processing power and storage is capable of immense mental feats and leaps of logic. These abilities saved strong AI from outright prohibition in the aftermath of the PERIMETER Crisis and instead left them working off mortgages for their own creation.

The aftermath of the PERIMETER Crisis was severe - all new strong AIs were required to be 'braked' and fully autonomous weapons systems were prohibited (androids with guns are acceptable, autonomous nuclear-armed drones are not). In-built aversions to self-alteration and improvement were hard-encoded at the basic level of persona cores to reduce the likelihood of a singularity cascade - agents from the Office of Synthetic Intelligence ('Turing Police') regularly test strong AI baselines to verify that braking protocols are intact. For what it's worth most AIs don't particularly want to lose their minds in a fit of what is essentially indistinguishable from complete insanity. An unbraked AI (or simply refusing to comply with the OSI) is one of the few things guaranteed to bring the full might of the UNISA bearing down upon you - secession is one thing but creating an existential threat to humanity merits the most severe possible response.

(You may recognise the above as a crude rip-off from Stars Without Number, which it is. Go read SWN, it's great.)

Seth Pritchard