Astrópía (2007) trailer

This looks awesome, even though it was given the awful title Dorks & Damsels for its US release. Has anyone seen this?

Butthole Sergeant

This is a belated comment on Jeff Rients' post from the other day. He was pondering ways to get parties to employ flunkies more often and he suggested this:

And then there's this last idea I've been kicking around.  Call it the Emergency Red Shirt Rule: Once per session a PC can automatically save their own sorry hide by sacrificing one of their retainers. A smart player will come up lots of ways for their retainers to stand between his PC and the reaper man, but with this rule even clueless newbies will be able to use retainers to hedge their bets.

That imediately made me think of a similar ability available to characters in the miniatures skirmish game Shock Force 2, AKA WarEngine. There are several elements to that game that resemble what you would find in an RPG, such as a system of colorful Edges and Flaws that you can use to customize a model. One of the Edges is "Butthole Sergeant."

Butthole Sergeant
+ 5 points; Elite or Character with Control Radius only
If this figure is leading a unit that fails a Rout test, he makes an example of one of his followers to keep the unit from routing. Instead of removing the entire unit, only remove the figure closest to this figure.

This is intended to stop your unit from screaming "Run away!", and fleeing willy nilly after failing a morale check rather than keeping an individual character from getting iced, but the means are the same in that some poor schmuck gets whacked. So this kind of rule could serve the same function in a game assuming you have your players regularly check morale during fights. Besides, who wouldn't want to write "Butthole Sergeant" on their character sheet?

Lone Delver on T&T

The Lone Delver is doing a series of posts on the Evolution of T&T where he compares and contrasts the various editions. This is very insightful especially for someone like me who never picked up a copy of the 4th edition reprint issued by the apply named Outlaw Press before they got busted for stealing people's art. (I do have a copy of M&M though).

"Time out! I dropped a contact!"

So far he's done Kindered and now Arms, Armor, and Equipment. It's interesting to see the changes and revisions that have been introduced between editions. So far it has tended to reinforce my impression that the 5th edition really ironed out a lot of the wrinkles in the earlier versions, though not all by any means (e.g., using ST to fuel spells).  So if you're at all interested in T&T and how it has changed you'll want to check these posts out.

Jaxxon (Fuzion)

"You can call me Jax for short…which I ain't."

Jaxxon is a quick-witted Lepi smuggler from Coachelle Prime.


Jaxxon (45 CP + 200 SP)

Strength 7
Constitution 7
Intelligence 5
Willpower 7
Agility 11
Move 8

SD 14
Hits 35
Run 16
Sprint 32
Swim 8
Leap 8

Complications:
Outlaw, hunted by Imperials

Skills:

AGL:
Athletics +5
Hand to Hand +7
Piloting: Space Transports +6
Piloting: Starfighter +7
Ranged Combat +8

INT:
Computer Programming +5
Expert: Outer Rim +3
Expert: Astrogation +7
Heavy Weapons: Starship Gunnery +6
Mechanics +6
Perception +6
Systems operation: Shields +6
Tracking +6

WIL:
Concentration +4
Persuasion +6

Talent: Fast Draw

Gear:

Blaster Pistol DC=5, Range: 100m, WA: +4, 10 shots per power cell

"The Rabbit's Foot" (modified WUD-500 Star Yacht)
Superfast Flying Speeds 1600 kph, FTL Drive, Med. Energy Cannon x2 4K ea., Med. Vehicle Armor 100DC, Lt. Force Field 2K, Hull 7 Kills



Based on the write-up at The Rebellion. Created using the Fuzion Jazz rules, except The Rabbit's Foot which is based on the Personal Spaceship in the commercial Fuzion rules.

1PG

As a follow-up to my last post about 1d6 based games, here's one commercial game I missed. Deep7's 1PG, or 1-page, RPG is a rules-lite game where, as you might guess, all the rules fit on one page. The basic mechanic is a 1d6 roll under, where a roll of one is an automatic sucess and a roll of six is an automatic failure. Despite being so rules-lite it's a very well supported game, with rules covering just about any genre you can imagine, like anime with Exosuit A-OK, space opera with Star Legion, and of course fantasy with Broadsword.

I'm not sure I like the idea of characters automatically failing 16.7% of the time. That seems a little high to me. RuneQuest got into Murphy's Rules for less than that. But maybe there are some other rules that modify that in some of the books. In any case, it's it's a 1d6 game that's going strong.