Perseus Now Available on Smashwords

My novel Perseus is now available on Smashwords, as well as Amazon and Nook, and should be going hot on iBooks, Kobo, and other readers in the next fortnight or so. Click on the pic to get to the Smashwords site, which has all the formats your wee heart could desire! Only $1.99!

Thanks in advance!

 

After Action Report: Battlestar Galactica

The final bit of our Sagittaron interlude sees the ship come under attack by Sagittaron terrorists, who use a resupply freighter of a defense contractor to get inside the flight pod of the vessel, then jump out while inside the pod, doing a ton of damage to the craft. There was a bunch of important scenes: the CAG, who had been running a PT test in the companionway near the entrance to the flight pod has to get his people out safely and seal the section. They lose three pilots and about a half dozen enlisted. The command master chief has to run the damage control board and to keep the fires that are sl]pinning out of control in check, he vents the compartments effected — fast! — and then does an excellent job managing the damage containment from the CIC. The commander has to coordinate getting the ship under control: it’s been knocked into a flat spin and lost enough energy it’s slipping into a lower orbit.

While all this is happening, another (they assume connected) attack on the Sagittaron archeological dig they’ve been defending is aggressed. The MARDET commander has to secure the location and send out skirmishers (led by her gunnery sergeant PC) to gain intelligence and knock ‘em down. They finally get support from the local base and air support from Aegis once the characters have everything under control. In the end, they manage to keep the dig site safe.

The ship is headed for Scorpia Yards for repair, so they are pulled off the mission on Sagittaron, which is passed onto the Night Flight battlestar group. But there’s questions unanswered: Where did the ship jump away to and can they find it? Were the dig attack and the attack on the ship coordinated and connected…? It seems unlikely they weren’t. Who stood to benefit from stirring up trouble between the Sagittaron separatists and the Colonial military? It was almsot assured this would go badly for the Sagittarons, and would spur military action…was it a false flag mission?

 

New Version of Valkyrie for Battlestar Galactica

…and here I thought i was done with the BSG-related posts for a couple of weeks.

While looking around for a nifty internal cutaway the inestimable Ice Dragon did (at least I think it was him) on the battlestar Valkyrie (and did not find, by the way), I was looking at his excellent fleet size graphic, comparing the various canon and otherwise vessels and found that my estimate of this class of vessel was smaller than I had originally written up.

So here’s an adjusted version of what I call the Erynis-class (there’s no official class name.)

Erynis-class Light Battlestar

DIMENSIONS: Scale: Spacecraft, Length: 2680’, Beam: 1019’, Draught: 426’, Decks: 17, Crew: 919, Passengers: up to 1000

ATTRIBUTES: Agility d6, Strength d12, Vitality d6, Alertness: d8 **, Intelligence d8, Willpower d10

Initiative: d6+d8, Speed: 5 [SL/JC], Life Points: 18,  Armor: 4W, 4S

SKILLS: Heavy Weaponry d6, Mechanical Engineering d4, Perception d6, Pilot d4

TRAITS: **Early Warning Variant [Has the roll bars seen in Razor] Features a large interferometer wing that gives an Alertness of d10; New Ship Smell d4, Slow to Launch [Complication] d4***

ARMAMENT: Heavy Skirmish-Range Point Defense System [d12W Vehicle-scale], 14 Capital Range Heavy Railgun Batteries [d12W Spacecraft-scale] which can also fire Short-DRADIS Heavy Railgun-Fired Missiles [d12W Spacecraft-scale], 6 Short-DRADIS Nuclear Missile Systems [d12+d4W Spacecraft-scale]

AUXILIARY CRAFT: 18 Vipers, 10 Raptors, 5 Shuttles

*** The Erynis was designed for the primarily modern mission of the Colonial Fleet — piracy and criminal interdiction, and deep-space early warning missions…not Cylon fighting. She only has six launch tubes under her landing bays and either must launch a flight at a time, or launch her other fighters from the launch bays, which takes an extra action to get her fighters into the fray.

 

A Bit More Traction For the New Life

Looks like I’ll be teaching a college-level class or two in history starting sometime around April. Evening classes, enough time to watch the wee one. Very Pleased.

 

No Budget Short Better than Most Big-Budget Sci-Fi Epics

Archetype by Aaron Sims, designers of various sci-fi critters and gadgets:

 

Alternate Cylons for Battlestar Galactica RPG

Here’s a pdf of the new, alternate humanoid Cylons for our campaign. Feel free to use, don’t, alter, or do as you will with it. Comments are welcome.

It should be obvious that there is a parallel to the Greek God/Lords of Kobol here (the models might not match my last post on this. Oops.) but they don’t have to be played that way. The Ones and Twos are supposed to be “more equal” than the other models, but it follows the notion on the show that the Cylons do everything democratically.

It should be obvious that I kept certain characters from the new show — the Threes are much like the D’Anna model, the Fours are almost exactly the “Simons”, the Sixes similar to “Caprica/Gina”, the Nines are the “Leobens”, and the Elevens have a bit of the Eights in them. I made a small effort to make the numbers balance where I could at the veteran level (48 attribute/4 trait/68 skill die), with the Cylon package taking away 28 points from the skills (I did the Serenity style 1 to 1 trade for trait/complication die and skill die.) Added complications gave back points for skills. In the end, though, they were built to what I thought would be appropriate for their portrayal in play.

 

Battlestar Galactica RPG: After Action Report, Part 3

The game really picked up tonight. Last week, the crew finally ventured into the dig site on Sagittaron and were met with the obvious remains of a city street. The caverns they crawled through were the interior of buildings that have been calcified from millennia of being under water. They find the flash image of a couple of people on a wall, and decide to isotope test the place for iodine, strontium, and cobalt — with the carbon dating they estimate the site was hit about 10,000 years before colonization! This screwed with the fairly religious characters — it implies that there was human habitation on the Colonies millennia before they arrived.

The chaplain character posited that if the Cycle of Time is true then all of this has happened before and all will happen again. Perhaps there was a cataclysm before the settlement of Kobol; maybe that’s how the Lords of Kobol knew which way to send the 12 Tribes.

Meanwhile the fallout from the attempted assassination of the commander and the chaplain hits — the Sagittaron Planetary Quorum wants answers about military operations that have not been approved on the planet. Pindarus (the CO) biffs the roll to try and calm the situation in a closed session of quorum. Hours later, the archeologists are to be arrested for heresy, and the military forces are ordered to vacate the dig site.

Pindarus decides to remove the scientists, bolster the military guard there, then lights out for Picon HQ to talk to the expeditionary group’s admiral (his boss) and successfully links the find to the ancient mine they found in their first episode — also very old and obviously a human settlement. Now that it is a national security issue, he is able to pressure the government to allow him to secure the site militarily.

While all this is going on, the investigation into the attack on them hits a wall of silence from the Sagittarons who are not aiding them in their search for the terrorists that attacked them. Worse, they have no legal authority to hold their prisoners and must turn them over to civilian authorities for trial.

The stage is set for a show down between the planetary government and the Colonial military unless they can figure out a way to defuse the situation and protect the dig site.

 

New Take on the Humanoid Cylons — Battlestar Galactica RPG

[Once again, players in the campaign, don't read this post: Spoilers abound...]

Now that we’ve dealt with the chomers in the last few posts, what are we doing about the humanoid Cylons for our new campaign? I’m sticking less closely to the new show that I did in my original campaign, which would have fit into the show canon nicely. First, I’m ignoring the whole Earth Cylons came and convinced the Cylons to stop their war, yadda yadda…the Final Five reveal was a massive disappointment (although it didn’t run me off from the show as it did some fans.)

So — going with what we saw in Razor, I’m positing the Cylons were trying to make life-like infiltration units to collect intelligence and sow dissension in the Colonial ranks; I covered sexbots and similarly android-like toasters in an earlier post. Attempting to reate a more lifelike hybrid android would seem to have led to the modern humanoid Cylon.

In keeping with the new show, there are 12 models that are widely copied and use a shared consciousness (hinted at several times in the early episodes where one Cylon would know things its siblings would.) I’m going with the idea that they vaguely follow the archetypes of the Lords of Kobol or the 12 major Olympians…with their “god” possibly being “the Blaze” or “jealous god” mentioned in the cut scene from Kobol’s Last Gleaming. (I’ve yet to decide on this…)

However — the Cylons can build an android “clone” of a person using 3D flesh printing and programming of the doppleganger. They cannot scan the human brain yet, so they use publicly available information to create as deeply accurate a copy as they can. These can be tripped up by the gaps in their knowledge and mistakes in emulating behavior, but it’s subtle enough people might mistake it for the person “having an off day” or some such. Only with capture and heavy interrogation can the Cylons get a better picture of the person, and create a more lifelike copy. (I’m still tempted to allow destructive brain scanning — they can do a near perfect job, but only if they destroy the original brain…but that doesn’t allow for rescue or escape options.)

The one-offs and copies are similar to the 12 models — they are not biomechanical, other than the cybernetics in the brain, so a DNA or blood test won’t reveal their nature; only a detailed scan or biopsy of the brain would do that. As they are essentially a clone assembled kit-like, they are not super strong or fast, but they have the following traits in common: ELECTRONIC INTERFACE d6 — this is an unconscious uplink to Cylon handlers that allows them to access the perceptions, thoughts, etc. of the agent without their knowledge. They have the complication BACK DOOR d10, where their mind can be hijacked and their actions controlled by their handler. The agent can fight this with a WILLPOWER+DISCIPLINE/RESISTANCE test vs. the WILLPOWER+DISCIPLINE of the handler + the agent’s BACK DOOR complication. Also, they gain the VIRTUAL IMMORTALITY d12 trait, if the Cylons want to resurrect the agent from stored mind-states.

More dangerous are the 12…the command and control Cylons. How these creatures came to rule the Cylons when they were originally just another tool for the centurions to fight Mankind is unknown (or in other words, I haven’t made it up yet…) They are biomechanical androids and gynoids who are good enough copies of humans that they cannot be detected save through a specific test for synthetic material through a biopsy or blood test. They share their memories through staggered data dumps to a resurrection ship or facility (they can do this willingly or schedule times to not distract [usually while they are asleep]) and can communicate wirelessly up to a half mile in urban environments, twice that in open areas. Their muscle fabric is dense and powerful, and run through with synthetic nerve tissue allowing for very fast perception and reaction. Their brains are augmented with biomechanical molecular computers that allow them to store vast amounts of data, recover information faster and with little loss, but their perceptive abilities are hardly better than a human — they see, hear, taste, feel along the same parameters as a person, with only slight improvement to their acuity.

The 12 have the following traits: ELECTRONIC INTERFACE d8, IMMUNITY (most diseases and radiation) d12, PHYSICAL PUSH d8 (they make break the die up to cover any physical attribute for a minute. They need five minutes between each push, and each extra push requires an EASY VITALITY+WILLPOWER test to gain the benefit, +3 each extra time until they can rest for twelve hours.) VIRTUAL IMMORTALITY d12 — if they can run a backup, they can be downloaded into a new copy. The range of these downloads is astronomical and might be some form of quantum entanglement. (this might explain why they don’t spawn their memories outside of their particular model.) Lastly, humanoid Cylons’ cybernetic brains are more robust than their mechanical cousins, and hacking a Cylon is near impossible…but they are also more susceptible to certain radiation frequencies that do not effect humans — VULNERABILITY d8 (they must make an EASY WILLPOWER+VITALITY test after the first hour, with the difficulty increasing each hour by +3. On a fail, they suffer d8W each hour afterwards.) They can be jammed for their communications, if their frequency can be found by brilliant player characters (Difficulty HARD.) ( But not the immortality infodumps!)

My 12s: 1) This is a powerful, very intelligent middle-aged looking man [Zeus-like] who is usually the senior commander and rarely scene outside a basestar. 2) More matronly looking leader, also often a senior commander. 3) Smart and vicious females, these act as spies, provocateurs, and front0line commanders. 4) Doctor/scientists, the males are often in charge of Farms, or are colocated with collection teams during the War. They are surprisingly compassionate, but this won’t stop [most] of them from doing their duty. 5) This woman is a hunter/soldier unit with little compassion or mercy. [I'm thinking of keeping the "Simon" 4 and making this 5 a black woman to keep the Artemis twin vibe to 4's Apollo.] 6) Similar to the show’s 6, this is a spy and provocaeur with a massive sex drive [Aphrodite] and bigger ego and need to be loved. Might use a different actress. 7) This warrior is not concerned with tactics and good order [unlike the 3]…he’s a killing machine and loves it. 8) This is a mid-management commander, usually on par with the 3. He chafes at his secondary position vis-a-vis the 1s and doesn’t like the favored position of the 3s with the 1s. [Think similar to the 5 from the show, but a bit more Gerard Butler-ish.] 9) Going with the Leoben from the show — he’s a trickerster, messenger, by turns vicious or compassionate. 10) These are the scientist/engineers of the humanoid Cylons: brilliant, methodical, and heartless. Often colocated with Farms during the War. 11) Another scientist type, this female is much more emotionally engaged with her subjects. She is usually running the breeding programs and most of the effort went into breeding a highly intelligent model. 12) This male is handsome, charming, and unstable, so much so the empathy some of this model show for humans is a concern.

There is rumored to be a 13th model — some kind of machine-man hybrid from early on in the android program. These act as oracles with the One God? Still thinking on this one.

So that’s my ideas for the humanoid Cylons…

 

Repost: New Combat House Rules for JB:007

This is a repost from the early days of the blog, when we had a much smaller readership. I’m looking for comments from the James Bond RPG fans regarding them, especially if you try them out. — Scott

I was reading through an article on Jerry Miculek today — he’s a shooter for Smith & Wesson in the USPDA competition.  The guy is a freak of nature, capable of accurately putting 5 rounds downrange in .45 of a second!  That got me thinking about my own effective rate of fire with a handgun, rifle, etc…even with my 10mm, I can drop with some accuracy rounds at a rate of 1.5/second.  About a round a second with a 9mm or the 5.7mm.

The rate of fire in the James Bond: 007 RPG has always seemed a bit slow to me.  Granted, that’s because the firefights in the old movies usually consisted of the actor taking aim and firing a round, maybe two, in a cautious and considered manner.  But since the likes of Martin Riggs and John McClane came on the scene, the protagonists are a bit more quick n the trigger — in line with what real firefights are like.  (Most police in shootings are surprised by how fast things happen.)

The Action Round for the game is described as 3-5 seconds.  That two second wiggle room was designed to give the GM some leeway in what to allow the characters to do, but it is a bit long for a fist- or firefight.  So I propose a hard target for the time period: 5 second, or 12 action rounds a minute.  What can you do in five seconds?

Figure most people can achieve 2-3 short actions, like shoot something, change a magazine, and maybe do some kind of shuffling movement.  The characters in the game are supposed to be trained, if not exceptional, in moments of action.  So I propose they can do up to an action an action a second.  (Just timing myself now, I was able, without moving, to dry fire three times on three different targets around the room with a handgun…in three seconds.)

Suggestion 1:  the actions a person can take in the action round are equal to their SPEED, as in the rules.  What an action entails:  movement (from shuffling (to give the opponent attempting to hit a -1EF) to running, popping up from cover and getting back down [each an action!]), changing a magazine for a weapon (with the reload time now being the number of actions the move takes; so a  tube-fed shotgun’s RL: 5 would take a character with a Speed of 2 just over 10 seconds…about right under ideal conditions), dropping an object or picking one up, taking a bead (to get the +3EF), engaging a target (so with a Speed of 2, you could engage two targets …but could not move or change mags), or do that many HTH actions (either attack or defense.)

Suggestion 2:  The maximum number of targets a character can engage with a non-automatic firearm is equal to their Speed, and they may fire a number of rounds at each target equal to their Speed or the S/R of the weapon (whichever is lower.)  If they shoot at a single target, the rounds that can use are equal to the Speedx2.  If the character can fire 5 or more rounds at a target, resolve it like burst/autofire with one roll and add +2DC to the weapon (So a Beretta 92 in the hands of a character with a speed of 3 could go Martin Riggs for 6 rounds, with the gun DC rising from F to H.)

For burst or autofire weapons, the number of rounds is the maximum number of targets that could be hit by the burst or strafing attack, minus the QR of the test (so an MP5 with a S/R of 6 could hit up to six people, but with a QR of 4, at best the character hit two targets.)  Instead of gaining negative modifiers to their Ease Factor for the number of people they are engaging  (Spray Fire rules, p.50, main book), the character gains a -1EF for each 10′ wide area.  Each extra 10′ arc also halves the maximum number of people you can hit.   So if you have to spray an area 20′ across with an M4 carbine (S/R: 2 or 10), you would gain a -2EF and could only hit up to 5 people.  Now you could mitigate this a bit by taking a number of your actions — say you have a Speed of 2 — two bursts of fire (really one long extended one) across the 20′ would be two 10′ arc attacks.

Suggestion 3: Using spray fire to do suppressive fire (keep an enemy’s head down):  You’re not really trying to hit anything, and your Ease Factor to do this is EF5.  You automatically use the maximum number of rounds you could use on a single target (for a handgun with S/R:2 and a Speed of 3, that would be 4 rounds, or an autofire weapon’s second rating [S/R: 2/6 for example].)  For each action used, you gain a +1EF for the test.  Additionally, the bad guys will keep their heads down for an extra round/extra success.

Example:  If you have a Speed of 3 and a handgun with an S/R: 2, you fire 6 rounds for suppressive fire.  The gun has a magazine with 15 rounds, so you decided to use all of your actions on suppressive fire, hoping to allow your teammate to move unseen to an advantageous position.  The total rounds fired would be 15, with a +2EF to the test.  The character gets a QR3 — the bad guys stay down not just this round, but the next.

Suggestion 4:  Hand-to-hand combat is a bit more time consuming than pumping a trigger.  You are, by necessity, moving — shuffling feet, swinging arms or kicking, grappling or otherwise engaged in multiple complex actions.  The number of actions is equal to the character Speed.  The character can use the actions for attack or defense (not in the original rules.)  Attacks are handled as they are in the original rules, but if a character chooses to, they may rather than attack, instead defend from an attack, using their HTH Combat skill in an opposed test.

Example:  Bill is in a fight with a couple of goons.  He has initiative and chooses to punch Goon 1 in the face, trying for a knockout blow, but wants to use his second action as a defense, blocking an attack from Goon 2.  He tests against Goon 1 (with a -2EF for the knockout blow) and succeeds.  Goon1 is down and Goon 2 swings a lamp at Bill.  Goon one hits him with a QR3 (Good) — Bill tests his HTH against the QR3 (that’s his Ease Factor) and succeeds.  The attack fails.

Suggestion 5:  New Speed Ratings.  No one is so slow they’ll act once every 10 seconds (Speed 0 in the original game rules.)  So here’s a more realistic Speed rating.

Speed is figured by adding DEXterity and PERception: 2-8 = Speed 1, 9-23 = Speed 2, 24-30 = Speed 3 ( An alternate idea is to expand the speed ratings: 2-6=Speed 1, 7-14=Speed 2, 15-22=Speed 3, 23-28=Speed 4, 29-30=Speed 5.) With this alternate suggestion, there’s the possibility of a character, really going super-badass.  If a GM wanted to avoid this, they might be worth it to use Draw on a firearm or melee weapon to slow the number of attacks (so a submachinegun with a DR: -2 would mean no more than 3 targets with a Speed of 5.)

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

 

Cars and Motorcycles in a Drifting Competition

This is insane.