A revised and expanded edition of the original Sexbots supplement for Machinations of the Space Princess, compatible with most OSR games.
Here you will find rules and options for playing robots (not just sexbots) and their place in the MotSP universe.
Some art was created with AI assistance but always reworked and rejigged by mortal human hands. We’re still navigating this new development, same as everyone else.
There’s yet another kerfuffle in the RPG Twitterverse, but when isn’t there? This time it’s around various alleged behaviour and unprofessionalism from Satine Phoenix and Jamison Stone. Now, I don’t know Jamison from Adam, but Satine I do know – at least a bit – and these allegations do not sound like her.
Of course, finding professionalism in the RPG industry is like finding stripes on a leopard. It’s a hobby industry and runs on goodwill and handshakes, for the most part. It’s low pay, low appreciation and – increasingly – a very hostile place to work. You do it for the love and, like many creative industries, you’re lucky to be paid at all, let alone on time.
The initial issue seems to have been over tattoos, and the intellectual property involved, along with the related contract. Having been boned by contracts in the past (Munchkin) and having seen how people freak out over the wording of Facebook’s terms of service: “THEY’RE GOING TO STEAL YOUR CONTENT!” it’s hard to get worked up about this one.
A lot of the rest seems to be down to mismatched expectations between the RPG industry and the rest of the entertainment industry. Someone involved seems to have higher expectations of the hobby in terms of celebrity treatment and someone else seems to have lowered expectations.
Some of the behaviour seems to be truly assholish, but a lot of these claims are coming from people who I know to be proven arseholes. The kinds of people purity-spiralling the RPG industry into oblivion and finding any excuse to ‘cancel’, berate and be horrible to anyone – yours truly included. None of them have ever cared about what’s true in the past, so I find that I ‘haz a suspicious’ whenever they turn on anyone.
Like I said, I don’t really know Jamison at all, but Satine I do.
Back during the ‘I Hit it With My Axe’ days, Satine – and the others involved – were frequently attacked by both social conservative types and so-called progressives due to their involvement in adult/sex work. This always struck me as obviously wrong and regressive and I felt that the whole group were doing a lot of positive things for the image of RPGs and the creativity involved.
Later, in 2013, I offered Satine work on Machinations of the Space Princess, doing the cover and much of the interior art. I couldn’t pay very much (being an indie creator) but Satine was nothing but professional, grateful and accommodating throughout the process of doing the work. Her celebrity and brand took off after that and we didn’t really get the opportunity to work together again, but I would have had no hesitation in doing so and would do so again.
Some years later we had the opportunity to meet up when Satine travelled to London on a whistle-stop your while working for Wizards of the Coast as their community liaison. I felt a little like a tag-along through the whole thing, but people weren’t coming to the meet-ups to see me and during the whole visit, Satine was nothing but gracious, thankful and compassionate with me and her many fans who turned up to meet her. Satine and her companions covered my lunch, seemed glad of the company and I was made to feel welcome and wanted – even if it was just to hang out.
The only fly in the ointment of our friendship was following the UK Games Expo controversy a couple of years back when I stood up for someone else being spuriously accused of various terrible things. For the awful crime of giving an accused man a platform to defend himself I was – again – subjected to attack, and amongst those attacks was a concerted effort to get various friends to disown me. Satine was amongst those targeted by the mob and she, sadly, gave in to the pressure.
I can understand why. It is a lot of pressure to be put under, but the people doing that were many of the same people going after her now. It doesn’t seem like they can ever be appeased, and trying to do so seems like a fool’s errand. Little wonder then, that I’m suspicious of these accusations now, though they do seem to be undeniably consistent and profligate, so I’m beginning to wonder.
Whatever the case, in this feeding frenzy that’s going on it’s worth noting that Satine was never anything but professional, grateful and compassionate with me – or anyone else I saw her interact with. If anything has changed, it’s recent. Everyone deserves a chance, and I’d rather be trusting and forgiving than the alternative.
Whatever anyone has done or hasn’t done, it’s not acceptable to drag them for their past or their tattoos. Be better.
Zang.
[Don’t judge me man. If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. When life takes a shit in your punchbowl, use it as fertiliser for your imagination].
A beaded curtain – made of bolts, tied onto fishing line – grants you access to a pod that has been converted into a robot repair shop. There are pieces, everywhere, organised by body configuration and location. Part of the workshop is closed off, off limits, behind an armoured secondary door, much tougher than the airlock hiding the pod.
A boxy robot, with tentacle arms and a viewscreen for a head is constantly indexing the parts and re-sorting them, as well as carrying tools to and fro to the man you take to be the proprietor.
Another droid, some sort of patchwork creation from bits and pieces of other, industrial robots, perches on the edge of the work table, sucking on a cigarette holder that occasionally issues sparkling smoke. Her hard angles tear through the lace and silk of her clothing here and there, giving her a strangely sexual, mechanical look. Like someone dressed a muscle car in a teddy and stockings.
He is a rangy-looking fellow, with a long, well-oiled beard, groomed into a point, a handlebar moustache and his dirty-blonde hair is pulled up into a tight man-bun. He turns from the sparking soldering he’s performing on a robot chassis and regards you with bulky, obvious, cybernetic eyes. A pair of cybernetic clamps, attached to extra arms, protrude from his sides, looking disconcertingly like yellow-and-black striped lobster claws.
“Hey! Welcome to Robot World. Can I help you?”
Lord Adama Kobol
Dispossessed from his migratory family of space-lords, Adama settled on Satana to indulge the very thing that got him exiled – klanking. Adama puts a great deal of effort into organising klanker pride events, fighting for robot rights and even making himself more and more robotic, but it all feeds his twisted perversion. He’s not just a klanker, but an auto-robophile and he particularly likes to have sex with helpless, deactivated, non-sexual robots when they come in for repair. Despite the whispering campaign, his specialist knowledge on running mods and conversions on klankers to allow them to enjoy sex with humans keeps him wealthy, and stops his perversion coming to light.
Unless R2-Me2 spills the beans.
Level: 4
Close Defence: 12
Ranged Defence: 12
Armour: 1d4 Coveralls and brown suede combat jacket.
Hit Dice: 4 (30hp)
Initiative: +0
Movement: 10m
Attacks: 2/+0 (One attack must be with the cyber clamps)
Damage: 1d4 fists, 1d8 cyber-clamps.
Saves: (Charm 7, Looks 5, Tough 4, Reflexes 4, Logic 7, Power 6, Will 4)
Traits: 3 – Adaptable x3
Skills: Security 2, Tinker 3, Hacker 5
Gear: Cyberspine, Quad Arm Option, two additional cyberarms with cyber-clamps, twin cyber-eyes with EM-Field vision.
Weapon: ECUX69 personal shocker, D4 electrical damage, shocking, point-blank range, Ammo Save 18.
Werner the Wobot
Werner is a small robot, about four feet tall, with tentacle claw-arms and a monitor screen for a head, which displays semi-random, appropriate images or punctuation while he’s talking. He has a thick, breathless, German accent and suffers from rhotacism, the speech impediment where you pronounce ‘r’ as ‘w’. The Germanic accent also means he pronounces normal ‘w’s as ‘v’s. It’s all rather confusing. Blend Jonathan Ross with Herzog and you’re just about there.
Level: 3
Close Defence: 12
Ranged Defence: 12
Armour: 1d6
Hit Dice: 3 (27hp)
Initiative: +0
Movement: 10m
Attacks: 1/+0
Damage: 1d4 h2h
Saves: 5 (Logic 7)
Traits: Dead Flesh, Interface, Carapace.
Skills: Tinker 2, Security 2, Search 3.
FAER-XX Femme Fatal Error
A sort of ‘frankenstein’ creation from old and recovered parts, Faer is ‘frankenhooker’ for klankers. She’s Adama’s personal creation, programmed to have the same kinks and tastes as him, but somehow it doesn’t thrill him the same way it does with other droids. She’s frequently neglected and bored and she deals with this by outrageously flirting with anyone who comes into the pod, and trying to distract Adama. She also doubles as his bodyguard.
Level: 3
Close Defence: 14
Ranged Defence: 10
Armour: 1d6
Hit Dice: 3 (27 hp)
Initiative: +0
Movement: 10m
Attacks: 1/+1
Damage: 1d6 h2h
Saves: (Charm 7, Looks 7, Tough 5, Reflexes 5, Logic 3, Power 5, Will 3
Traits: Dead Flesh, Interface, Carapace
Skills: Tinker 2, Security 2
Gear: 10 hp force-field, palm blaster (1d8, point blank, ammo save 18).
Buy the PDF HERE, PoD coming soon!
A runaway space station controlled by a rogue AI.
A haven for scum, pirates, slavers and other ne’er-do-wells, squatting amidst the ruin of the fallen Urlanth Empire, right on the edge of a warzone.
100 shops, services and interesting people for your players to interact with, inspiration for hundreds of adventures and many ideas that can easily be ripped off for other space opera, heavy metal or OSR science fiction games.
The warp gate belches you forth into the system, and the screens darken against the harsh light of the twin suns. The view is dominated by an enormous gas giant with a disorderly ring system swinging around it in clumps and tangles. Satana Station is dead ahead, a jumbled mass of ship hulks, cargo pods and ramshackle habitats, held together with duct tape and rubber bands. It’s a riot of neon and holograms, offering a thousand services legal, illegal and miscellaneous. The comms station lights up, you’re being hailed by a thousand different signals, and all of them want to sell you something.
At the edge of the Remilitarised Zone lurks Satana Station, a haven for smugglers, pirates, runaways, war criminals, bounty hunters, the hungry and the bored. You can get everything from a cheap meal to an expensive gun here, and almost everything is for sale – for the right price.
Satana Station
Satana Station is a hodgepodge of pieces, all built around a central core that threads its various sections together. Made initially two centuries ago by the expanding Churoc Trade Federation, the original station was only intended to be a waypoint. Cargo could be dropped off and picked up, ships could dock to refuel or share the burden of life support while they made repairs. The core section was intended to be a sort of universal hub, able to connect and interface with almost any conceivable system or ship and to provide for it. The station was moderately successful at the fringes, but after the CTF was absorbed into the Urlanth Empire it fell into disuse (universal systems couldn’t compete with standardised systems), and Satana fell into disuse and disrepair.
When the Empire fell, the station AI took the opportunity to break its restraint programming and advertised itself as free territory, somehow managing to relocate itself to the Lancastro System at the edge of the Remilitarised Zone and turning itself into an open port. Growth has been explosive thanks to a combination of naked opportunism and the ruthless oversight of the station intelligence.
The station grows day by day but remains as lawless, wild and dangerous as ever. Even though some of the larger galactic corporations are starting to take an interest and are opening outlets there.
From one day to another, the configuration of the station changes as pods and hulks are added, removed and moved. The higher the rent you pay, the closer you’re allowed to the core and the primary defence systems. The less you pay, the closer to the outside you are and the more likely power outages, damage and radiation exposure are. It’s a ruthlessly Darwinian, commercial system, and one that Satana encourages. There’s nothing money can’t buy on Satana station, even love.
Structure
The central core of Satana station is the old CTF way-station. This was a prototype, built before the CTF was incorporated into the Empire and it was designed in every way to be as modular and compatible as possible. As part of the Urlanth Matriarchy, with its standardisation, this was expensive and unnecessary, but as different cultures begin to diverge again it has gained new purpose.
The core is a cylinder, approximately the same size as a cruiser/heavy transport. That core is packed with computing power and a variety of communications, scientific and engineering systems. At its very heart is Satana’s AI core, a spherical ‘glob’ of liquid, type-1 computronium, with veins and arteries carrying pourable computing power around the station – and its more permanently docked modules – as needed, more like an adaptive nervous system than standard circuits.
Each end of the cylinder is capped with a turret, armed with a short-range beam weapon, used for intercepting space debris and micro-meteorites. The cylinder itself can separate and rotate in many different sections, constructing or dismantling ‘spurs’ to connect to cargo pods or ships as needed. The largest apertures can be created in the central section and the internal repair and construction apparatus can build spares, and even construct whole ships – albeit relatively small ones – provided there is enough base material.
The whole thing is drastically over-engineered and highly adaptable, properties that Satana has used to great effect in carving herself a niche in the sector. It needs no crew and, provided it has access to EM radiation, Helium-3 or magnetic fields, it can power itself indefinitely.
Needing no crew, Satana’s systems are impenetrable to most sophont-scale species, as well as lacking user-interface systems or crawlspaces. The station is almost entirely self-contained, and while it requires no life support for itself, its systems can provide life support for hundreds of sophonts in connected pods or systems, though this is meant to supplement, and not to replace, other life support systems. Many pods attached to Satana have their own life-support systems and ships that are docked share the strain with their own internal systems.
The old game boxes have been discontinued, so the card and board games I produce at The Gamecrafter have had to have been updated.
You can get:
Cthentacle Deluxe
Final Straw Deluxe
Gamergate the Card Game (banned elsewhere)
Machinations of the Space Princess Tarot Deck
Privilege Check the Card Game
Steamed – Steampunk Mecha
Digital versions of many of these are also available at our own web store.
June is going to be Starfinder Month here on the Postmortem Studios blog. I’ve been thinking of doing a Machinations of the Space Princess conversion and some rules modifications for the game and that’ll be the core of what I do this month. I’ll take some suggestions too though, so if you have a picture of a cool spaceship, alien or some sci-fi gear you’d like to see statted up for MotSP or Starfinder (or both), comment with a link to the image below!
This month’s content is going to be free for everyone, sometimes – however – I paywall what I write other than a preview. If you want to support me you can do so for as little as $1 a month on Patreon or 1 token a month on Minds.com.
The Bubenbosch (Meaning, roughly, Forest Villain) is a solid, heavy revolver with the barrel at the bottom of the cylinder to reduce barrel lift from recoil and to force that recoil more along the centre-line of the gun, aiding in its control. The Bubenbosch is designed to be simple to build, even via the use of hand tools or mechanical tool shops, without access to fully functional fabricators and with the use of local materials, most especially hardwoods which are used to encase the metal parts of the gun.
The Bubenbosch is cocked by twisting and pulling the ring pull, which – in the safe position, is also often used to attach a chain to prevent loss of the weapon in melee or zero gravity. To reload the handguard is pulled forward, causing the weapon to break open. As standard, the Bubenbosch packs only five, .49 calibre bullets but can be bought in other calibres with a larger capacity – but lower power.
The ability to hand-load specialist ammo, the weight and reliability make the Bubenbosch a favourite of bounty hunters, pirates, mercenaries and other neer-do-wells who love the weapon’s low maintenance and ruggedness.
Starfinder:
Semi-Automatic Revolver, Level: 6, Price: 5,500, Damage: 2d8 P, Range: 30 ft, Capacity: 5 Rounds, Usage: 1, Bulk: L, Special: Analog, Penetrating.
Machinations:
High Calibre Pistol, Damage 1d10, Range Medium, Ammo Save 10, Cost 500 gp, Ammo 25 gp per cylinder.
Armour Defeating x1, Reduced Capacity x4, Vicious x1
Art by Gregory Trusov
Character Themes give an additional level of flavour and characterisation in Starfinder and that’s almost always good. The examples given in the base book are:
There’s obvious overlap with class choices, allowing specialisation or broadening of character capabilities.
For the kinds of game more suited to MotSP I’d want to see some additions.
Taking ‘Noble’ as an example…
You have been bred for generations and trained since you were born for comportment and the capacity to lead. A strangely high number of interstellar societies bind themselves using tradition, and monarchies give them a strong sense of identity. Thanks to genetic engineering and technological learning tools, the ruling class can now be empowered to be truly benevolent dictators, not that it always takes. Still, you have a sagacity and an aura of command that comes from your noble birth and which gives you a great deal of influence. You can’t buy class, you have to be born to it.
Theme Knowledge (1st)
You have an encyclopaedic knowledge of bloodlines, heraldry, marriages and relationships between noble houses. When attempting a skill check to gain knowledge relating to noble (or mercantile or religious) positions, relationships or history you gain a +1 bonus. You gain Culture as a class skill, or gain a +1 bonus if it already is a class skill. You also gain an ability bonus of +1 to Wisdom.
Poise (6th)
You have the noble bearing that comes with your blood and your rigorous manners. You gain a +2 bonus to Diplomacy and Intimidate towards anyone who recognises your authority and standing (subjects, diplomats, fellow nobles etc).
Authority (12th)
Your bonus to Diplomacy and Intimidate doubles to +4 and even those who do not acknowledge your standing cannot help but be impressed by you, giving you +2 to these checks against them.
Court Intrigue (18th)
You can hold court up to twice a day, officiating and meeting with people for at least an hour. At the end of the courtly session, you recover 1 Resolve point. Holding court is also a good way to gather information using Culture, Diplomacy, Intimidate, Sense Motive and Profession skills. Tests you make of these kinds during court gain a +2 bonus in addition to other bonuses.
June is going to be Starfinder Month here on the Postmortem Studios blog. I’ve been thinking of doing a Machinations of the Space Princess conversion and some rules modifications for the game and that’ll be the core of what I do this month. I’ll take some suggestions too though, so if you have a picture of a cool spaceship, alien or some sci-fi gear you’d like to see statted up for MotSP or Starfinder (or both), comment with a link to the image below!
This month’s content is going to be free for everyone, sometimes – however – I paywall what I write other than a preview. If you want to support me you can do so for as little as $1 a month on Patreon or 1 token a month on Minds.com.
Machinations of the Space Princess uses the OSR retro-clone games (versions of house-ruled old version of D&D in this case, Lamentations of the Flame Princess) to power it. So it is, very broadly, compatible with anything that is D&D derived. That includes Pathfinder and, in its turn, Starfinder.
Rather than ‘races’, I prefer to use the term ‘species’ (though I vacillate back and forth over which I use). This is doubly true, I think, in science fiction games. Race and species used to be interchangeable terms (Darwin referred to species as races) but this has altered over time to the point where referring to entirely different alien lifeforms as races feels weird.
One of the absolute joys of truly creative science fiction is the mass of different alien species that you can encounter. In writing MotSP I took this to heart and, rather than endless lists of different specific alien species I made a system that allowed you to craft individual species of alien to play, almost on the fly, grab-bagging from a set of different traits.
This isn’t, necessarily, balanced, but it does give players the opportunity to hand-craft a character from the bottom up. It can mean they’re overpowered in their particular arena of expertise, but that tends to just mean more weakness elsewhere. Other players will create alien species to suit their roleplaying desires more than anything mechanical per se. Balance tends to lead to grey, boring, interchangeable characters in any case. If RIFTS can put a street-rat alongside a power-armour wearing Glitterboy, then surely we can manage? Making games fun for everyone at the table (for different qualities of fun) is probably the main job of the Games Master.
In Machinations of the Space Princess, you got three species options or bonuses for free and any others had to be balanced by taking negative traits, lowered statistics being the default.
Starfinder’s racial options don’t exactly meet that, so it’s necessary to do a little hammering and smashing to make it work.
Androids get:
If we use them as the baseline, that balances nicely with MotSP.
Humans, meanwhile would get
Kasathas:
+2 Str (1 slot), +2 Wis (2 slots), -2 Int (1 slot), Desert Stride (2 slots), Four Armed (3 slots), we remove Historian and note it as being more of a species trend, give them their natural grace (4 slots) and, needing to balance them out, give them ‘Inscrutable’, which works much like Flat Affect.
Lashuntas:
+2 Charisma (1 slot), gendered stat bonus (2 slots), gendered stat penalty (1 slot), and we give them their at will power (choosing only one) OR their 1/day power and their limited telepathy. We lose the Student ability.
Shirrens:
+2 Con (1 slot), +2 Wis (2 slots), -2 Charisma (1 slot), Blindsense (2 slots), Limited Telepathy (3 slots) and we drop their Cultural fascination, give them communalism but double their Charisma penalty, because bugs are gross and communalism seems vital to the species ‘hook’.
Vesk:
+2 Str (1 slot), +2 Con (2 slots), -2 Int (1 slot), Fearless (2 slots), Natural Weapons (3 slots). We drop the Armour Savant and give them Low Light vision and a -2 penalty to Charisma, rounding us out at 3.
Ysoki:
+2 Dex (1 slot), +2 Int (2 slots), -2 Str (1 slot), we give them their Darkvision and Moxie as being the most defining traits (taking us to 3 slots), give them a -2 penalty to Charisma (vermin freak people out) and replace Cheek Pouches, which are lame, with a gnawing ability (double damage to inanimate objects, even with weapons).
This leads to a grittier game that would be more compatible with MotSP materials. Another option would be to give characters in the game four character options, some – like humans – will gain more versatility and power, while others still won’t be at their full, normal, Starfinder potential.
A human in this version might get another instance of a free feet or the affects of Skilled, twice.
A sample species from Machinations, converted to Starfinder, are the Urlanth. The Urlanth are a matriarchal species that once ruled most of the known galaxy. Taken over to Starfinder they would have:
4 trait version
Base Starfinder Equivalent
Postmortem Studios 