The author of this blog has been fortunate enough to have been given early access to a sociological and demographic survey of the ███████████████ Sector. One part that stood out was a brief section on some of the popular games and sports played under varying gravity conditions, which I have been given permission to publish more broadly. I am still working on getting similar permission for other parts, by other authors of the survey, and will keep you all in the loop as that happens.

There was some idle chatter about making interesting poisons over on the Purple OSR/RainbOSR/Gay Beholder discord server. I suggested that it might be fun to set it up as a rely, where the goal is to come up with a creative poison (or way to poison) the previous post’s NPC.

Some simple rules:

1. Link to the post of the person who tagged you, which describes the victim you are attempting to poison
2. Go back and link to the subsequent post once the person you tag writes their post about how they are poisoning your new victim
3. Write as much or as little as you need, but the idea would be to keep it relatively snappy. If you feel the need to write an elaborate set of mechanics for how to adjudicate poisons, feel free, but it is fine to also have something simple like save vs poison to not explode in a week or something, especially if the focus is on how the poison is administered.

I will keep this post updated with all of the posts, should I be made aware of them.

Traveller’s rules imply a great many things about the setting, but there are two that are tossed out as being true:

1. Traveller is “Age of Sail in SPAAACE!”
2. Traveller is “Feudalism in SPAAACE!”

Addressing the first one first: This is an easy claim to back up, and is primarily due to the speed of communications in the setting. When everything is at least a two-week round trip away at best, you end up with a setting that has various far-flung posts that are linked by the vessels that are carrying the messages. This is indeed reminiscent of our own history prior to the invention of the railway and the telegraph.

This is not an exhaustive listing of all the types of science fiction, but some hopefully focused rambling on what considerations one might have in a science fiction setting. It is focused mostly on thinking about things in terms of tabletop role playing games, but probably applies more broadly to fiction as well.

One possible approach is to look at large setting elements (things like aliens, spacecraft, space travel, cybernetics/transhumanism) and decide how you want to deal with them. This has nothing to do with the rules one is using, at least not directly: if you wish to make a SF-flavoured Dungeons and Dragons, it is extremely doable. So we will talk in generalities about some options for some of the big questions, and how they might be addressed. If one wants a whole book, with worked (instead of illustrative) examples, check out GURPS Space.

Much of this is adapted from the ATV rules in Across the Bright Face.

Basics

Mechs are a type of vehicle and use the Vehicle (Mech) cascade skill. While a variety of designs exist, most are about 10 tons in weight and about 4-5m tall. They can travel at about 80km/hr consistently, with only extremely rough terrain slowing them down. They normally have only a single pilot.

Mechs are generally a little complicated and finnicky. They require maintenance once a week or after any combat in which a hit is taken. Maintenance is a mechanics throw; failing (or not doing maintenance) penalises any DMs by 1 per missed maintenance window.

oldhawkeyes put together a great post about combat styles in Classic Traveller. When it was first posted, I threatened to make some of my own, so here here we are. Some of my fighting styles use special abilities from oldhawkeyes’ post, because CT is generally fairly breezy, and needing to remember a squillion special attacks is just a pain, even if they are player-facing, so adding too many should be avoided.