IYKYK. Though I still want a good-looking t-shirt with these on the back.
In 1872, a crack team of archons was sentenced to destruction by the Ventrue Justicar for a crime they didn’t commit. These Kindred promptly escaped from a maximum-security conclave to the Anarch Free State. Today, still wanted by the Camarilla, they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem… if no one else can help… and if you can find them… maybe you can hire… The V-Team.
For Star Wars (any system, but preferably Fantasy Flight’s):
Another starfighter pilot concept. This one’s a human, an Imperial instructor pilot who defected with an early-model Interceptor. He’s still a starfighter pilot and still flying it, but for obvious reasons, he’s a better fit for an irregular unit (like the PCs’) than a fleet squadron. He may have done a tour as an aggressor pilot in a Rebel training unit, so he likely has an encyclopedic knowledge of the capabilities and flight dynamics of most of the galaxy’s common starfighter designs. For best effect, and because the Star Wars universe has always implied social status with accents, play him as a WWII British Spitfire or Hurricane pilot: upper-crust accent, unflappable, prone to understatement, immaculate hair and mustache, silk scarf, tongue like a razor if you get on his bad side. Tallyho, chaps!
His bird was from his training squadron, so it was fitted with ion cannons in place of the lasers (no sense in needlessly killing the cadets too early). Rebel techs have restored the original laser capability but the ion guns are in a shipping crate just in case they’re needed. He’s named the bird To Serve the Empire… in the same sense as To Serve Man. Add appropriate nose art…
For Star Wars (any system, but preferably Fantasy Flight’s):
This pitch is for is an R2-series astromech droid starfighter pilot.
Yes, pilot. He flies an X-Wing or Y-Wing from the astromech socket. His organic partner was killed by a cockpit hit. He got the bird back to base at a time when the situation was so desperate that someone in authority let him keep flying. He’s steam-cleaned the gore out of the cockpit but otherwise left it gutted by the turbolaser hit (hey, not running life support means more power budget for shields). The starfighter is now painted in a monochrome version of the standard Rebel Alliance palette to make it look like an unmanned ghost fighter.
While the concept is wholly playable, the droid’s designation is the joke:
R2-F4.
Elsenet, a colleague recently asked about the likelihood of Twilight: 2000 4e PCs making it to various numbers of lifepath terms before the war kicks off. Assuming a RAW implementation of a 1d8 roll under the number of terms taken thus far, the distribution looks something like this:
… so your “average” 4e PC will four terms of character development before the war breaks out. Anything above 6 terms is a significant outlier (and probably doesn’t have great attributes from all those aging rolls).
(I think I got this right, but my math is not guaranteed. It’s been a minute since I did anything with probabilities, and I somehow managed to get a master’s degree without ever taking a college statistics course.)
It’s hard to believe I’ve kept this blog active for a year with at least one post per week. That’s largely attributable to two things:
First, I’ve been using this platform as a means of recycling old material from my defunct LiveJournal account and various forum posts. All of those will eventually go the way of all bits, and while there’s no guarantee my hosting provider here will stay afloat, it’s a centralized repository under my administrative control.
Second, the Kaserne on the Borderlands campaign log generated a ridiculous amount of material (and was a ridiculous amount of work to maintain). The campaign has been on hiatus since late August, but my current intent is to restart it in the spring.
Because I’ve been relying on recycled material, my actual “new” content creation here has definitely not been in the once-a-week model, with the exception of the aforementioned campaign log. I currently have (pause, count) 14 recycled posts scheduled after this one. Once that well is dry, I don’t know that I’ll be able to maintain the once-a-week schedule. I also have some major life changes coming up in the next couple of months that are outside the blog’s scope but which definitely will affect the amount of creative energy I can invest here. The result of all of this is that I expect my posting frequency here to drop off sometime in April.
Because I have comments disabled (all the better to not be spammed with), I can’t tell whether anyone is actually reading this thing on a regular basis. This is strictly a hobby thing, not a revenue-generation attempt, so I’m not advertising the blog. But I hope I have a few semi-regular visitors who are getting some use out of it.
Continuing from the original post here, based on the Juhlin.com forum thread here. I realized I’d never recorded my follow-up thoughts on the blog. Let’s rectify that.
Twilight: 2000 in all its editions is much more post-apoc adventure survival fantasy than excruciatingly-accurate simulation (Apotheosis Saga, anyone?). So treads and lube aren’t usually tracked to the level of tank extinction. But let’s talk about the mechanics of mechanical issues for our hypothetical T-72 owners.
v2
A T-72 requires 14 hours of maintenance per week. Potential breakdowns occur every 8 hours of movement or combat, rolled against the vehicle’s Wear value (10% for like-new, to 100% if it’s on its last legs). If there’s potential for a breakdown, the mechanic who did the last maintenance rolls a Difficult Mechanic check to see if his work prevented the breakdown.
Assuming a well-optimized but not maxed mechanic PC (Strength 8, Mechanic 8), a Difficult Mechanic check has an 80% chance of success.
v4
Every vehicle requires the same amount of maintenance: 6 hours per week in which it was driven at least one hex on the overland map. Maintenance requires a successful Tech roll. Failure reduces Reliability by 1 (with most vehicles maxing out at Reliability 5, so you have some margin for error).
Assuming a well-optimized but not maxed Mechanic PC (Intelligence d10, Tech d10), a Tech roll has a 75% chance of success.
v2
A well-buried rule indicates that parts need to come from a vehicle identical to the one being repaired. Furthermore, there’s some text indicating that parts are also component-specific (engine, main gun, radio, etc.). There are no explicit rules for scrounging or buying parts.
No roll is required to cannibalize a donor vehicle’s component for parts. However, if the component is damaged, there’s a 30% chance that the part is useless.
A character who’s a capable machinist (or gunsmith, for ordnance repair) may also fabricate mechanical parts with a successful skill check andaccess to a machine shop.
Most repairs require 1d10 parts (1d5 for minor breakdowns).
Damage is tracked by vehicle component, with most components having two states: OK or inoperable/destroyed. A few have an intermediate damaged-but-still-partially-functional state.
v4
“Vehicle parts” are generic – when needed, a bolt, brake cable, or turbocharger materializes out of the quantum foam of your mechanic’s spares box.
A successful Tech roll when scavenging a vehicle yields one part per success rolled, -1 for a destroyed vehicle. Parts are considered to be “common,” which means a 67% chance of availability in a typical settlement.
Only one part is needed to repair a destroyed item, though each repair only restores 1 Reliability per success, so thorough work will likely consume more than one part. Restoring reduced Reliability on an item that wasn’t fully destroyed doesn’t consume any parts.
A vehicle’s Reliability score covers its overall structural integrity, its transmission, and its engine. Weapons, radios, and other subsystems either have their own Reliability tracks or have OK/inoperable states.
v2
2nd edition provides varying availability levels for different ammo types.
125mm HE is common (80% chance of being available in cities, 70% in towns, 30% in villages).
125mm HEAT is scarce (60% in cities, 40% in towns, 20% in villages).
125mm sabot is rare (20% in cities, 10% in towns).
12.7mm and 7.62x54mm for the MGs are both common.
v4
As a broad category, all non-guided heavy weapon ammo is scarce (33% chance of availability in any settlement).
All small arms ammo is common (67% chance of availability in any settlement).
In both cases, chance of availability is for the broad category of item. The referee decides whether a specific sought-after model/type/caliber from that category is available. The West Possum Trot Trading Post may be fresh out of 125mm HEAT, but surely 122mm howitzer mustard agent shells are close enough for government work, right?
(Really, that last paragraph captures it. Ammo availability, perhaps more than any other resource, will be subject to referee judgement and fiat, even with strict adherence to the framework of the rules.)
To close it out, here’s a price comparison for main gun ammo:
Continuing my fascination with new-to-me Nordic light tanks (see also the Ikv 91), today’s Christmas leftovers offering comes to us from Norway. The NM-116 Panserjager was a Norwegian upgrade of the WWII-vintage M24 Chaffee that served until 1993. Rather than reiterate the excellent Online Tank Museum article, I’ll just link it here. You’re only here for the 4e stats anyway, right?
Because the NM-116 was in real-world service until after the Cold War’s end, we can reasonably assume it would have served in the Twilight War. For those who are using a 1e or 2e alternate history, NM-116s would have been in combat as early as December 1996, when the Soviets made their unsuccessful play for a quick victory in Norway. By mid-2000, surviving examples could have been found anywhere in the Nordic countries. A few might also be floating around the Polish-German coast after being “requisitioned” by American units that fought in Norway and later redeployed across the Baltic (6th Infantry Division and 2nd Marine Division). The sticking point in keeping one operational would be obtaining an ammo supply for the up-gunned 90mm.
Number-crunching on this is pretty basic. Just for fun, I also threw in a stat line for the NM-130, the armored recovery vehicle variant (with all of four built).
If you’re looking for v2/v2.2 stats, Paul Mulcahy, of course, has the NM-116 as a tracked light combat vehicle.
Technically, the coaxial is an M3, but stats should identical to those of the M2HB for game purposes. The 90mm gun is a French low-pressure model (the D/925) also used on some obsolete-by-the-1990s French AFVs. Its ammo selection is limited to HE, HEAT, and smoke, so it’s not going to be punching that far above its weight:
I wrote this a couple of years ago to get it out of my head. Occasionally, I consider submitting it to my current employer’s University Honors Program to see if they’ll let me teach it in place of my occasional disaster preparedness seminar. Lightly redacted to remove contact info and other potentially-incriminating items.
Continue reading →Last week’s post on go-to game systems got me thinking about the settings I love and why I love them.
My lifetime achievement award for an intricately-detailed, internally-consistent, hugely-expansive setting has rested with Blue Planet ever since I first encountered it in the early 2000s. It’s worldbuilding at its finest, a sci-fi frontier setting that supports a broad spectrum of campaign styles. Its fatal flaw, if there is one, is that it has no default campaign. Without a clear vision of “we’re playing to do these things,” it seems very easy for a campaign to drown in options. But hot damn, the options.
Shadowrun (at least through the end of the 3e run) is every bit as detailed as Blue Planet, and benefits from an immensely-greater number of supplements. The FASA authors and developers crafted a fantastic world that could range from noir to gonzo while remaining internally-consistent. Moreover, the setting writing is a joy to read. I’ll still go back to 1e sourcebooks just to watch the in-setting conversations reveal another slice of the world’s secrets.
For big ideas and sweeping four-color generalizations, I adore the original 7th Sea. My elevator pitch for it has always been “the coolest parts of early Renaissance Europe filtered through the lens of Disney’s The Three Musketeers.” Every nation its its own unique setting that supports a different style of play. Theah as a whole is somehow stitched together in a way that feels cohesive rather than the half-assed patchwork that could easily result from a less-skilled attempt at putting together a kitchen sink setting.
The setting in which I’d most want to be a player character is Trinity. It’s not quite utopian sci-fi – the setting has plenty of dark places and rough edges, and there are ample reminders that when we went out into the stars, the monsters we brought with us were just as bad as the ones we found. But the overall tone is hopeful. It’s a setting in which humanity is striving toward a common goal but not united, in which the world is better but has been through some really bad times within living memory, and in which PCs can fundamentally make a difference on scales from human to interstellar. (Plus, I was an intern at the Wolf while the initial development cycle was under way, so it’ll always have a place in my heart for its proximity even though I had zero involvement with it.)
The setting in which I’ve spent the most time immersed is a toss-up, but I’d have to say that Twilight: 2000 wins by a nose over the (Old) World of Darkness. I’ve spent at least an order of magnitude more time playing the WoD line. Most of my closest, longest-lasting friendships came out of those gaming groups. It’s the foundation of my body of freelance work. But T2k is the dark future of the ’80s that I found the most compelling when I was a young gamer, and I keep coming back to it over and over again. It offers me a broken world whose fires are still smoldering, where memory of the world-that-was is still alive, and in which there is a faint hope of stabilizing the downward slide and starting the generations-long recovery process. Taken to the extreme, it’s the gaming counterpart to the calling that is my second career, and the same urge to bring order from chaos is what draws me to both of them.