Space Weirdos

 

I just nabbed this from https://www.wargamevault.com/en/product/359157/space-weirdos for a measly five bucks.

Space Weirdos is a fairly simple little sci-fi skirmish game, designed to be used with 4-10 minis a side.

It will give me an excuse to break out my old 15mm space opera figures, or else my 28mm OkumArts paper minis.

It plays on a 2x2' or 3x3' board, so nice and compact, and the scatter terrain can be any old bits of junk, whatever is lying around. I guess, if playing with 15mm minis, all the inch units could be translated directly to centimetres, which would make it even more compact.

Measuring is just done with a 5" stick, so very simple. 

I occasionally fancy a spot of sci-fi blasting, but games like Warty-Kay are far too hugeous for me to be bothered with, whereas this is pretty bare-bones stuff. The rules booklet is only 16 pages, which is pretty manageable.

 

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There is also this expansion, fan-submitted stuff (all proceeds to charity) which I haven't yet looked at.

https://www.wargamevault.com/en/product/540844/space-weirdos-weird-millenium 

It's also only five bucks, and I may well grab it after trying out the base rules first. We shall see.

Space Opera Revisited

Some years ago — quite a few years, now — I ran a space opera campaign using the Hero System Star Hero rules.

I put my house rules and some other campaign information, including some session journals, on my website at https://mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/sci-fi/terranempire/campaign_notes/campaignindex.html. (There was another that I'd done previously, also using the Hero System, set in a slightly modified version of Jack Vance's Gaean Reach.)

Terran Empire cover

It was nominally run in the Terran Empire milieu, though in fact not a lot of that background ever made it into the foreground of the game. I think there were some hints of covert Vorgon interference in Terran space, and the party did a salvage job on a drifting Hzeel freighter, but that was bout it.

Anyway, I quite enjoyed that campaign, and the main reason it folded (apart from my usual mayfly attention span) was because I was getting pretty sick of the Hero System's constant pernickety accounting. I had a character generation app that helped a lot, but even so...

It occurs to me now that the generic nature of the Chaosium Basic Roleplaying System, along with the simplicity of its basic mechanisms, might suit me a bit better. I don't know the system very thoroughly, but one way to amend that might be to build a whole heap of stuff in it, and one way to do that might be to convert my old campaign to it.

So I thought I'd give it a go. Why not?

There is a pretty comprehensive BRP sci-fi horror game already in existence, New Horizon, but it is pretty massive, about a thousand pages just in the two volumes of its core rules, and I don't know that I have the endurance required to absorb that much milieu information when I already have a milieu that I'm somewhat familiar with.

Hazardous Environment Suit

 

This is the Deep Space Explorer - Commando from Digital Taxidermy.

I've printed it on my Mars Pro.

It's 32mm tall, so a little small for a 28mm sit-in walker unless the pilot was really crammed in there (or maybe was some kind of brain-in-a-jar). It would be quite roomy for a 15mm figure though.

It's an aesthetic that I quite like for space opera. It has the look of an old-timey deep-sea diving suit.

Doctor Zarkov's Spaceship (nearly, sort of)

 

I've been fiddling around in Blender, putting together a Space Opera spaceship loosely based on the ship of Doctor Zarkov in the 1935 Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials.

Something I hadn't remembered, but which I discovered when I looked at a screen-shot from one of the films, is that the ship has a fixed undercarriage just like an aeroplane of the era.

I tried a variety of layouts for the STLs.

The one-piece model (the red one) didn't print well at all; Cura's support game proved to be weak.

The green one, split longitudinally, worked fairly well, but in the end I went with the blue one, split fore and aft, as it required the absolute minimum of supports.

The STLs are available (free) at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5215636
Thingiverse has enraged me one time too many, and I've deleted my account there. Maybe I'll get around to putting them up elsewhere some day, if I can be bothered.

The model, as designed, is roughly 150mm long.

Tubby Mech

 

This is one of the 18mm Wayfarer Tactics* figures collected on Thingiverse by DutchMogul. I assume that it's meant to be a huge tank-like mech rather than, say, a person-sized high-gee hostile environment suit, since it's actually about 45mm tall (not including the base).

I've printed this one at full size, but my sci-fi/space opera RPG mini collection is mostly old 15mm Traveller figures, and I'll print some more at about 20mm tall to represent the aforementioned hostile environment suit.

* Apparently there's a thing called Pocket Tactics that this range is derived from, about which I know absolutely nothing.

 Here it is, painted up, and shown alongside a Reaper 32mm sci-fi mini.

I've based it on a 32mm steel fender washer, to give it a bit of weight and shift its centre of gravity down.

These ones have been rescaled for use with my old 15mm FASA Traveller minis, and example of which is the tubby cop on his radio in the centre. They're 24mm tall, not including the bases.

I painted them all in rainbow colours to make them easily distinguishable on the tabletop.

Thousand Suns

 

This just arrived for me from DriveThruRPG today — the Thousand Suns rulebook by Jame Maliszewski. The POD format is (I think) digest-sized, and softcover — I believe you can also order it as a hardcover, but that would just be the softcover glued into a case binding. It might be a little more hard-wearing, maybe.

It's intended for fairly pulpish science fiction / space opera gaming. There is nothing particularly startling about the system; it's a pretty standard target-number skills-based game, using modified 2d12 rolls as the base mechanism. It is built to be about as simple as it's possible to be though, which is all to the good.

It includes, or is built around, a fairly nebulous milieu of Space Empires for players to rampage through. There are a couple of example alien races detailed, as well as a couple of genetically modified human variants (plus standard humans, or Terrans as they're called in the book) which give players enough to be going on with, and which provide templates for GMs to build their own aliens and things. Likewise, there are examples of spaceships and what-not, again enough to jump right in, and to provide guidance for building one's own.

I haven't yet read it through thoroughly, but it seems to me to be a decent enough space opera game, and simple enough to be able to run off the cuff without too much trouble.

There's a little supplementary material available — a book on starships, a star sector description and accompanying adventure, and there's the first issue of an occasional magazine too, called Imperio with an excellent cover by Russ Nicholson and the usual sort of bits and pieces you'd expect in a RPG system mag. Hopefully more will follow, but it's not really necessary; it would be a pretty simple matter for your average GM to create or adapt the material they want for this system.

I'm looking forward to trying it out.

Yet Another Robot

This 3d printed robot is a freebie from somebody's Kickstarter. I've printed it at 200% of it original size, which makes it roughly 34mm tall.

A Droid of Some Sort

This is a 3d printed R1 droid, or at least, so it said on Thingiverse, where I got the file from. What an R1 droid specialises in, I have no idea, since although I'm happy to use Star Wars, I have no idea how it works.

It's shown alongside a space trooper from Reaper that I got in one or other of their Bones Kickstarters.

We seldom play sci-fi or space opera games any more, which is a shame, because I quite enjoy it when we do. I might have to run a game myself, maybe using a simple system that I can make stuff up in on the fly, like FUDGE.

Later: I forgot about RISUS. I found it years and years ago, an meant to do something with it, but never did. It's very, very simple, and the ideal thing for off-the-cuff games.

Are These The Droids You're Looking For?

I've made a couple of quick, simple Star Wars-ish droids for 3d printing. They're available download (free) at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4006771

The one on the far left was printed at 100% scale, the other two at 75%, and they're sitting on laser-cut 3mm MDF bases. The figure is a 35mm WotC pre-painted Rebel Pilot.

I'm not saying it's Traveller..... but it's Traveller

I found this being referred to online as a decent Traveller clone, and thought I'd check it out.

It's available as a PDF and/or softcover book from DriveThruRPG at https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/237247/Cepheus-Engine-RPG — as of writing it's about seven bucks for the PDF, and thirteen for the hard copy/PDF bundle. And it seems to be fairly well supported with other volumes on planetary systems, vehicles, and so forth, which is all to the good.

Dried out, but still slightly mangled.
Thanks so much, NZ Post.

I liked what I saw of it enough to spring for the extra six whole dollars for the book, and it arrived the other day. Late. Having been dropped in a puddle.

Thanks, NZ Post.

And yep, it's Traveller all right, which suits me just fine.

It's been many, many years since I've played Traveller. We dabbled briefly in T20 when it first appeared, but I didn't like it much — it seemed to me to be a bit too much like D&D with blasters, which is fine as far as it goes, but not what we were looking for. I ran some Travellerish games using the Hero System ages ago, and they were pretty satisfying, but I became weary of the amount of accounting required to keep a Hero campaign running.

http://mojobob.com/…/terr…/campaign_notes/campaignindex.html
http://mojobob.com/rolep…/hero/sci-fi/gaeanreach/sci-fi.html

Anyway, the culmination of my long-running AD&D campaign is in sight at last, and I thought I'd switch gears and try a Traveller game, probably fairly Firefly-ish because I loved that show and the characters in it.

So, now I have a copy of The Traveller Book, and my waterlogged copy of the Cepheus Engine (thanks again, NZ Post!) which has dried out a bit in the hot water cupboard and been ironed dry and flattish. How practical would it be to run a campaign using both at the table? Probably better to stick to just CE. My beloved players are more likely to spring for a $13 copy of Cepheus Engine than forty yankeebucks on their own copies of the Traveller Book.

The Traveller Book

This just arrived for me today. ==>

I like Traveller, both as a RPG system and as a milieu, and my own space opera campaigns have tended to be fairly heavily informed by my early experience of playing Traveller back in the early '80s.

In those days, it came in a set of three small A5 soft-bound booklets, their covers basically the same simple black and red design as  this one.

All three booklets were combined into a single hardback volume in 1982, and released as The Traveller Book. I'm not sure whether it was first released with the black cover, or the illustrated cover shown below.

The fancy-schmancy cover.
I have this version in PDF.

In any case, the black cover is the one I just got through DriveThruRPG. It's a POD production, and the interior appears to be printed from simple scans of the original pages — it hasn't been re-typeset.

As is often the case, that means that the content tends to look rather fuzzy. It's not illegible by any means, it's just not as crisp as the original. Maybe one day some enthusiast will do a new digital layout of the original content, but for now I'm happy just to have a hard copy of the rule book.

It's been quite a while since I ran a sci-fi game. Maybe when my current AD&D arc is complete — whenever that might be — I'll swap over for a while.

LandCrawler - WiP

I've got the basic shell of the cab sorted. I decided to go for a faceted look rather than a rounded, organic form, but that may change.

Anyway, now I have to start adding bits and pieces of Galacto-Junk to it to make it look all futury and such, and maybe an observation dome up top.

LandCrawler

Tracks, tracks galore

 I'm playing around in Blender at the moment, building a science-fictionish machine, a tracked LandCrawler.

So far I've got the chassis pretty much done, though there may be a bit of tinkering here and there still to come. I'm building this pretty much as it grows, and I don't have much of an idea yet what the superstructure is going to look like.

Whether this will ever see a 3d printer is doubtful, but you never know.

From the rear quarter

Ground level

28mm space opera miniatures

I don't have many 28mm space opera figures at my command, and even fewer painted and ready for gaming. These are all there are so far.

I have some more that I got in the first Reaper Bones Kickstarter, but they're mostly armoured infantry figures — there's not a great deal of variety there. And very, very few female figures of any sort.

I don't recall whether there are any more to come in the next Kickstarter; I think that's due for delivery some time about November.

Cyrus Button

I've finally got around to painting a figure for my character in my friend Joff's Traveller game — Cyrus Button, bodyguard, enforcer, and party accountant. It's one of Reaper's Bones plastic range (80016: IMEF: Nick Stone by Bobby Jackson).

Just in time for the campaign to fold. Oh well, timing is everything, they say.

We never really used miniatures in that game anyway.