Even Heroes Bleed Roster Change

 A new player is joining the tribe and it seems appropriate to reflect on the last year of the campaign and how now it is about to change. 

As I’ve mentioned before, the most affordable and complete text of Mayfair’s MEGS mechanics which make up the game engine is the retroclone from Pulsar Games, The Blood of Heroes Special Edition. DC Heroes 3^rd Edition is really good, but I think The Blood of Heroes has all the optional rules ever made for the game beneath its covers.

Anyways, the superhero trio of Olympian, Bug, and Mettle returned from their trip to Belize with the subdued Dr. Good (now calling himself Doctor Draconis) in tow. They deposited the criminal scientist at FBEE headquarters and considered what their next priority is.

This is when Bug’s PC announced he could no longer make our game sessions, and a new player popped up. Big changes in one day!

Bug and Mettle (with assistance from Red Runner) can list shattering the biggest mobs and gangs in Capitol City and, for now, getting them to back off on the street violence, or else! The mystical EE Wotan who was leading the Civil Guard was also banished from our earthly plane. This banishment took the aid of the strange EE called Voodoo, who disappeared with the vanquished Wotan.

These victories did come at substantial cost. Innocent lives were destroyed, and the Baltimore was burned down. The blood toll was so high the young Red Runner hung up his suit and returned to civilian life.

Next, they took on sex-traffickers running out of an Indian reservation, exposed them and got them arrested. After much fighting and punching of faces.

Their next accomplishments were stemming the outbreak of drug-induced violence from the bizarre drug known as BAM! and uncovering the secret experimentation done by the US Government beneath the Pawnsville mine. This lead them on the trail of a criminal mastermind, Dr. Good, which as I have mentioned ended with Dr. Good’s capture.

The new player has a hero who is a person possessed by a demon. Imagine Etrigan from DC Comics and you are not far off the mark, as far as character concept goes. Mystical attacks and strength. Probably a good compliment, team wise. Mettle can manipulate metal and Olympian is a Superman-type heavy hitter. Eye beams, flight, etc. And now a demon who can cast magical spells and rip peoples limbs off. Works for Capitol City from where I'm sitting!

The List of Intriguing Loose Ends is long and subplots too specific to be of interest here in this blog. Here are the major ones I can think of.

The Cockroach Brotherhood, believed to be living in the sewers. Their actual origins are uncertain as well as their motivations. The heroes have been meaning to look for these weird EEs and find out what their deal is, but bigger issues seem to get in the way.

The Roadkill Wrecking Crew. This gang of EE’s has managed four successful high-tech robberies. Why and for what purpose is still unknown. One of their members, Croc, is currently in custody. 

The Congress of Truth. A shadowy organization seeming to continue the work started by the government at Pawnsville. Seems their endgame is delivering utopia through world domination.

Capitol City Mayor. A dirty, racist, power-hungry white nationalist who is responsible for letting loose a serial arsonist on minority neighborhoods. He is making a killing off of subsequent real estate development deals on the burnt property and pays off the heroes each month, so they don’t come at him. But this impasse can only stand for so long before one side or the other makes a move. The Mayor is eager to reassert organized crime as the law of Capitol City, not those damn superheroes!

Deep Ghost, who, what, and where is this guy? Motives unknown. Controls and effects things through internet, cellular, any electronic communication really. Accessing and distributing information seems to be his chief interest. A blackmail expert?

List of criminals in custody due to the heroes actions are;

Croc,

Dr. Good,

Os-M’nog,

Big Man,

Jury,

Lt. James Santavy.

Wargamers roleplayed first.

Recognizing Wargames as patient zero in what would become tabletop rpg’s and go on to infect the brains of millions of nerds breeding ground is usually brought up in the context of demonstrating how DnD is shit for roleplay. Besides the open abyss of vapidness which overtakes me when this discussion occurs. Mostly because it is soft talk around the fact maybe you suck at the game and the person juuust can’t get their head around that. Besides all this, it is the clear miss of most to consider wargames as devoid of roleplay. 

Wargames are historical simulations which get turned into games because optimizing routine behavior is hard-wired into humans. The historical simulation thrill of orchestrating sweeping military campaigns takes back seat in concern of the win. Aside from the obvious competitive urge which can get me to take my eye off of the wargame ball, which I call immersion. I want to see what it would be like to command armies and experience the decisions these commanders faced. If I have no connection to the historical context of the game, I end up playing a complicated game of checkers, looking to leverage all advantages in the system to score a “hit”. Even if I have a keen interest in the historical action depicted, I easily drift into a competitive mindset. I must beat the other person if I am to consider the game fulfilled. That is why I always end up playing the game two times, I’m sure.

But I also can get into the groove. I can tell the stories in my head of the sections and squadrons, what they did on that day. The flipped over chit on the hex map is now the smoldering pile of defeated men and machines. And it is happening on a certain day, a certain hour under certain weather conditions. I feel the wind in my face as I lean against the hatch, scanning the horizon for the enemy. Fuck, I can roleplay the shit out of my wargame. I didn’t call it that because I had never heard of ttrpg’s when I first started playing at Rommel in the Libyan desert.

And that is the wargame ball and it has been an immersive roleplay experience ever since Tactics hit the table for a shit-ton of people who enjoy this kind of thing. If you can ttrpg a wargame you can roleplay anything which comes after marketing itself as a ttrpg. Wargames don’t lack the role play experience; it just doesn't appeal to many people. It is mostly a solitary experience, that is the key difference. Once you start thinking how to make the experience a shared one with multiple people you will notice the nugget of gold which is buried in a wargame can be extracted and applied to other imaginary experiences. Not something better either, just different. I want to get my rocks off this way as well as that way.

DnD didn’t introduce ttrpg’s to the world, wargamers had already created this for themselves. Eventually someone participating would (and did) make the connection simulated fantasy play would have broad appeal. And they worked on it until they had what they were after. And they were right to do so.

SciFi Setting Size Comparison

 I finally got around to sizing up the Space Opera official universe and the Traveller official universe to see how they compared size-wise to each other. First I need to figure out how big a Traveller Subsector is and compare that to a Space Opera Star Sector, these being the basic unit of measurement for their respective maps of known space.

The Star Sector for SO is easy to figure out, a 200 ly x 200 ly x 200 ly cube of space (ly = light year). Here is a picture of the Star Sector map for The Confederate Systems Alliance. 

There is no superimposed hex grid over the sector map, only grid locations indicated by letters and numbers coded on the top and side of the map. Much like a street map. For example, Doug's Groceries is in grid BB04. Everything is plotted on an x/y/z axis, with the Star Sector's Primary as the 0/0/0 point. The maps are created to scale, 1 cm = 10 ly. To find your straight-line distance between planetary systems you plug in your values into your formula for a right triangle.  For example, Janus to Lilith is 128 ly apart.

Classic Traveller (CT) on the other hand, measures distances by the parsec. A parsec is 3.26 ly. The traditional Subsector map is laid out on a hex map 10 x 8. So 32.6 ly x 26.08 ly. There are no values for up or down, the map is a 2-dimensional representation. The distance between two planetary systems is determined by the number of hexes needed to cross to get there. Therefore if a system is three hexes away that system is 9.78 ly away.

It is clear already the SO universe is much larger than the CTU (Classic Traveller Universe). But how much bigger? CT does offer us another map scale, the Sector. A Sector is made up of 16 Subsectors arranged in a 4x4 grid. 130 ly x 104.32 ly. Here is the well-known map of the Third Imperium by Sector.  

This map is arranged 8 Sectors x 16 Sectors, which, if using the Sector values established above yields 1,040 ly x 1,669.12 ly for known space in the CTU.

Here is a similar map for SO;

These are 200 ly x 200 ly cubes so sizing it up against the CTU should be a snap. 5.2 cubes x 8.34 cubes. It looks like to me the Space Opera universe is about 6 times the size of Traveller!  

USR Sword & Sorcery Reaches Electrum Best Seller

 USR Sword & Sorcery notches another medal achievement at DriveThru! We've gone plaid! No, I mean Electrum! USR Sword & Sorcery is now an Electrum Best Seller. 

The little game which launched a thousand and more unpaid hours devoted to learning Scribus, Indesign, Photoshop, Live Streaming games, podcasts, blogging about games, going to game conventions and getting suicidally drunk, etc.

I have a return date expected for work on Deluxe USR Sword & Sorcery (title is still in the air). It is August. This is predicated on my DC Heroes 3rd Edition retro-clone manuscript being complete and sent to the editor. This is looking good so I might even be able to return to the Word of Xoth setting guide even sooner!