MotSP Tarot – RELEASED!

This is the PDF version of the MotSP tarot deck. A hardcopy version is hoped to be made available via The Game Crafter within the next couple of weeks.

The MotSP Tarot is intended as an in game prop, inspiration for a Games Master and if you really want to you could try using it as an actual tarot deck.

Want some ‘playing cards’ for your game?

Want the ancient seeress to do a reading for the characters?

Need to know something about a random NPC that the characters have taken a sudden interest in for no explicable reason?

Draw and lay some cards and there you go.

Buy it HERE.

Have some MOTSP stuff

Related to a module I’m working on in my spare time.

Steen Threel-Gawb 100xp

Down on his luck, desperate and behind on payments on his ship, Steen has hit a gold mine… well, a silver mine, with the remains of Banthic station and is paranoid about having it stolen out from under him. He is a short, squat creature in a golfball spacesuit covered in straps and hooks. He has a crew of cheap, barely-usable salvage robots that do the majority of the work for him – but are virtually scrap themselves.

Close Defence: 14
Ranged Defence: 14
Armour: Scrapper Spacesuit 1d4+1 + Natural Armour d4
Hit Dice: 3 (24hp)
Initiative: +0
Movement: 10m per round
Attacks: 1/+1 (+2 ranged)
Damage: 1d4+1 (Fist) 1d20+1 Space Cleaver, Blatter Pistol 1d4.
Saves: 6, Power 7, Will 8.
Traits: Shell, Intrusive, Strong Will
Skills: Security 1, Tinker 3.

SerpyCo Blatter Pistol 125gp

The Blatter is a tiny hold-out pistol used for personal protection from vermin and clearing parasites from ship hulls. Its chief advantage is being able to shoot at a reasonable range during EVA and not being powerful enough to damage salvage. This makes it a favourite amongst scrappers, belters, miners and shipboard security.

Damage D4, Medium range, Ammo Save 20, Extra capacity, Long Range, Targetter+1

 

 

TechWerkz Space Cleaver 25gp

The TechWerkz Space Cleaver is a tiny, folding cleaver made of superdense alloy. It is hugely weighty for its size and can smash and cut through virtually any material. It’s sold as a tool but, despite its small size is favoured as a weapon by boarding parties.

Damage D4, Armour Defeating -8, Vicious x5

 

TechWerkz Scrapper Suit 700gp

A robust spacesuit with good protection, jump jets and power assist favoured by technicians and scrappers.

1d4 Armour, Jump Jets, Power Enhancement +1, Reinforced +1, Life Support.

Reconditioned Salvage Robots 2xp

Steen picked these, spiderlike, robots up in a job lot from the auction houses of Grench – a scrap-ringed planet. He has no idea who made them or when they were made but they were cheap. Fragile and mostly held together by duct tape and wishful thinkings they’re essential to his business. Not that he won’t sacrifice them to protect himself.

Close Defence: 10
Ranged Defence: 10
Armour: 1
Hit Dice: 1 (1hp)
Initiative: +0
Movement: 10m per round
Attacks: 2/+0
Damage: 1d6 (assorted drills, saws, torches and other tools).
Saves: 5
Traits: Brother Machine, Extra Action, Armoured 1
Skills: Tinker 2.

The Daddy’s Girl – Ouatu Class Salvage Scout – 52,550 gp

Ouatu vessels haven’t been made in many years but they’re tough little ships, popular with pirates and wreckers. The Daddy’s Girl is much patched and held together with spit and chewing gum but is a typical example of a maintained – but unmodified – vessel of this type.

Scale: 4
Crew: 1
Hit Dice: 4 (16 hp)
Attack: 0/+3 D8 damage
Armour: 1d4
Defense: 8
Speed: Moderate
Weapons: None
Toughness: 7
Reflexes: 5
Power: 8
Customisations: Aquatic, Automatic Systems, Cargo (100,000 tons), Improved Sensors +1, Absorbtion Shield (10 points), warp drive, tractor beam, repulsor beam, Improved Power +1.
Weapon: Scrap Cannon.

 

Scrap Cannon 1550gp

A ship scale weapon the scrap cannon is more a tool than a weapon. A pulsed magnetic beam that can hurl scrap metal vast distances.

Scale: 4, Damage: D8, Range: Long, Ammo Save: 16, Inaccurate:-1, Long Range, Normal damage + Shocking, 

Camelot Cosmos: Our Honoured Blood RELEASED!

The history of the realm of Pendragon is, in many ways, the history of its noble houses, the long, bloody, often glorious and sometimes shameful record of the ambitions, victories and defeats of the powerful individuals who have steered their families to greatness and schemed and fought their way to the very apex of Pendragon society. Noble houses have determined which among their number have held the crown, and have always competed against each other to ensure nearness to or control over the throne. They have also influenced the election of Arch-Bishops of Camelot, placed their second sons in senior positions within the church, formed the backbone of the Pendragon Legion, prosecuted the war against Morgan le Fay, betrayed their King and raised rebellions or saved their monarch’s life and crushed uprisings against him. No monarch of Kingsland can be successful without the support of the great noble houses, and yet each must also be aware that if he allows them too much power or grants them too many concessions his own royal authority is irrevocably weakened.

Get it HERE

Our Honoured Blood is a supplement for Camelot Cosmos.

The game would also make a great background to use Machinations of the Space Princess in.

MotSP: Stellar Villain Generator

Roll	Title	Name 1	Name 2	Descriptor
1	Baron/Baroness	Bay	Att	The Violent
2	Caliph/Calipha	Bar	Eg	The Merciless
3	Dame	Caw	Ig	The Undying
4	Dear Leader	Kah	Ea	The Eternal
5	Despot	Pho	Ted	The Insane
6	Dread Lord/Lady	Mun	Og	The Bloodthirsty
7	Duke/Duchess	Nuh	Oog	The Impaler
8	Earl/Lady	Rab	Eet	The Genocidal
9	Emir/Emira	Rib	Oon	The Uneven Tempered
10	His/Her Excellency	Soh	Noo	The Angry
11	His/Her Majesty	Saw	Ni	The Murderous
12	King/Queen	Suh	Nah	The Maniac
13	Landgrave	Tay	Zan	The Bastard/Bitch
14	Lord/Lady	Tah	Zin	The Unpleasant
15	Marquis/Marquessa	Toh	Pee	The Deviant
16	President	Quee	Muh	The Child-Slayer
17	Prince/Princess	Zay	Buh	The World-Killer
18	Sheikh	Zah	Bee	The Purifier
19	Sultan/Sultana	Zol	Doh	The Vigilant
20	Tyrant	Ning	Ka	The Impolite

EG: Roll of 6,12,4,18 = Dread Lord Suhea the Purifier

Machinations: Design Decisions

It isn’t my game, it’s your game. The idea from the start was to present a game that people could hack, mangle and mutilate into whatever they wanted. It’s worth making a post about the design decisions I did make – and why – though. That might give people a little bit of insight into why and how I came to those decisions.

Some of the feedback I got in playtesting I wilfully ignored (after all, your game is your game and my book is my book!) This might explain some of that too.

Implicit Setting

Quite often I play around with concepts and settings and it was nice to do something different. Selling someone on a setting as well as a system can be tricky and I wanted to go ‘old school’ in presentation. OD&D and its like left a lot of things to interpretation and to the reader, players and Games Masters to join the dots themselves.

I always figured I could create settings later on, or others would, given that it’s open source.

Abilities

I spread bonuses amongst the different stats a bit more to try and prevent ‘dump stats’ and to make everything useful in some way. So that was partly meta-reasons but also in some cases, simply because it made more sense to me. I included Comeliness as a flag that looks are important in the genre, either high or low.

Races

If you look at the Cantina scene in Star Wars, watch Heavy Metal (one or two) or look at a lot of other SF series, comics and art you often barely see two aliens that look the same. Diversity is hugely important and just creating a list of different races wasn’t really optimal. If I provide the tools for creating a huge number of races then people can take it into their own hands, plus publish setting specific ones, new race traits or even books/booklets of races. The reason for making Charisma the first ‘penalty’ for taking lots of traits is again, referring back to the attraction/charm importance of the genre. The less human, the less ‘appealing’ and this was a way to reflect that. If you don’t like it, you can always substitute a free choice.

Skills

There’s been a lot of comparisons to 3e and feats but that wasn’t really what I was aiming for at all. I wanted the simplicity of LotFP skills while allowing a general, broad mechanism for doing ‘cool stuff’ and developing signature moves and attacks that compensated for the penalty. I also wanted to build in a capacity to avoid some of the combat ‘whiff’ factor and skills provided a way to do that.

Saving Throws

Old-School saving throws are pretty damn arbitrary and don’t mean much. Doing them this way (1/2 stat) was a way to address the ‘dump stat’ issue again and to create saves that could be used more intuitively in play.

Armour & Defence

I have never liked armour as making you harder to hit. So I decided to make it damage reduction. I also wanted to reduce the ‘whiff’ factor in combat and to encourage people to try crazy, interesting things that would stack up the penalties. Leaving defence fairly low is a good way to do that and making armour damage reduction – but random – adds a bit of tension and stops it from being all powerful.

The rest is, I think, pretty self explanatory!

Machinations of the Space Princess: Sponsorship Program

So, you like MotSP and you want to hack it, create a setting, run a blog, open a Wiki or publish stuff for it.

Awesome. Please do. Put ‘Compatible with Machinations of the Space Princess’ on the front cover. Knock yourself out.

Do what thou wilt.

If you want to get my seal of approval…

 

 

 

 

 

 

…just fuzz me a copy of the finished thing, a link to the site or whatever and if I think it’s hoopy I’ll give you a medal to proudly display there and I will big you up on the blog and give you linkage.

Machinations of the Space Princess: Gallery

Here’s a preview of some of the interior art for Machinations of the Space Princess

Machinations: Second, fully playable, rough draft up

I’ve put the files for a second, rough draft version of Machinations of the Space Princess up. These are just word files, not even conveniently split by page for you to print out.

Tough.

Please feel free to tear it apart, spot and mention any egregious errors and to take it for a test drive or three.

You can see the update HERE.

Machinations of the Space Princess: Never tell me the odds

I’m working on the spaceship combat section now. Ships are, pretty much, big characters/monsters (there’s a scaling rule but it’s pretty simple). The crew determine what the ship can do, beyond the basics.

Often when you’re dealing with things like this the pilot (or the netrunner or the other specialist) completely steals the show and the other characters on board don’t get to do much of anything. If you watch a film or TV show the other people on board are generally running around, kibitzing or otherwise getting involved in the action in some way.

I wanted to do things in a way that wouldn’t completely take the spotlight off the pilots and gunners, but also wouldn’t make the other players feel like useless bastards.

So, picture the scene from The Empire Strikes Back where the damaged Millennium Falcon is trying to flee the Imperial blockade of Hoth.

***

Han and Chewie are desperately trying to fix the buggered hyperdrive when the ship is rocked.

Han makes a Logic Save and figures out that that wasn’t from a laser blast. Fearing the worst and spurred on by Leia’s bossiness over the comm  he and Chewie run to the bridge.

Leia’s been trying to steer them through the asteroid field but while she’s good in a scrap she can’t – at this point – pilot for shit. Han’s the best pilot they’ve got (Skill 5) and its his ship so he takes the controls and starts making the Pilot Skill rolls. Every time he fails he has to make a Reflex Save for the ship or get dinged by an asteroid and take damage.

Han hits upon the BRILLIANT plan of flying deeper into the asteroid field. On a metagame level he knows that the Star Destroyers are big, slow bastards that can’t dodge for shit and that the TIE fighter pilots are only going to have a pilot skill of 2-3 even if the ship’s Reflex Saves are better. With his skill and the Millennium Falcon being a medium-sized ship that belongs to a band of adventuring heroes, he figures they have a pretty good chance.

It’s not ALL down to him though. The others pitch in and ‘help’.

Chewie – Angles the deflector (makes a Tech Skill Roll) and tries to ward off the rocks as best he can. The Games Master decides this gives the Falcon +1 armour against damage from the asteroids.

Leia – “You don’t have to do this to impress me.” Which means, of course, that Han absolutely does. She rolls a Charm or Looks Save to motivate him into trying harder because he fancies her. The GM decides this increases his Piloting Skill to an effective 6 for the duration of the pursuit.

C3PO – Calculates the odds with a Science Skill Roll While Han doesn’t like to know the odds the mathematical impossibility of what he’s doing may help him to be a bit more cautious. The GM rules that this increases the Reflex Save of the ship by +1.

Han wants to shake off these TIE fighters so he opts for some tricky maneuvers through the field, deliberately crippling his own Piloting roll by -2. If the TIEs want to follow him they’ll have to do the same.

Cue lots of explosions and shiny piloting moves as people succeed – or screw up – on their Pilot rolls and Reflex Saves.

MotSP: Gear

I’m currently working on armour, shields and weapons for MotSP.

I’ve decided to take a fairly generic approach, with the ability to add ‘options’ to the various armour suits, weapons etc. If I want to do an equipment book later I can come up with all kinds of specifics and so on but for the main book I think a generic approach is probably the best idea.

So what this means is that you might buy a…

Blaster Pistol – d6 damage.
Options: Sights +1 to hit, high-energy Crit 19-20

Carapace Armour – d8 protection
Fireproof – Double protection, Power frame +1 Melee damage.

…and so on.

Still, let me know if there’s any specific weapons, armour or forcefields from SF and Sci-Fantasy that you think are particularly cool and I’ll try to get them in!