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A blog, by any other name.

The Chang Pickup

The following was intended as a short adventure seed for a simple Traveller adventure, but grew a little in the telling. It is based on the (largely improvised) game that I ran at Festival Draconis in October 2024, but has been formatted to match the style of the Freelance Traveller Active Measures. It is suitable for starting a campaign with or as a one-shot, but should a Referee wish to introduce the adventure into an ongoing campaign, it should work fine, although note that it takes place at the opening of the Fifth Frontier War.

Some Truths About Werewolves

Editor’s note: The following is an extract from partially burned papers from the church of St Almat. They seem to be from the notebooks of one Magister Garius Kal. They may prove to be of use during our current predicament. [Werewolves] are misunderstood. Our folk do not change their form to some sort of bestial wolf during the fool moon. That is how one makes orcs, and it appears to be irreversible once the rage has taken the poor souls.

The Clacks and The Post

The Clacks and Post - a Magical not-Victorian Matrix Game Welcome to the city of Endon: greatest city in the world. It is a dynamic, go-getting city that is moving with great velocity into the Century of the Fruitbat. While a great many things are changing, the speed of communication is not one of them. Until now. The New Clacks Company is looking to change that with the power of engineering.

Tiled for Deckplans

Background I do not really use any VTT tools for running games, but folks running Traveller of various kinds often like having deckplans, at least for the ship owned or used by the PCs. While there is no shortage of deckplans out there, sometimes you just need a new, custom one. A fairly common source for making one’s own deckplans is the set of Starship Geomorphs created by Robert Pearce a few years ago.

Pern as an RPG Setting - 1

I have recently been rereading the Pern series by Anne McAffrey, and thinking about it as a RPG setting. Spoilers are going to crop up in this, so if that bothers you, you might want to avoid this particular tag. This first post will give a high level overview of the setting and how people are organised within it. Follow-up posts will think about possible adventures and provide more details about dragons in particular.

Classic Traveller - Combat Example

Classic Traveller has a moderately arcane combat system to modern eyes. For the most part though, it is not too bad. This is an example of how it can be interpreted. If you want to do things differently, there is no reason to assume that this is the only way it should (or can be interpreted to) work. In general though, I think that the following example is mostly sensible and will not cause too many feathers to be ruffled.

Harker (S)Entries - a Dracula Dossier Starter

One of the central questions for starting a Dracula Dossier campaign is to decide how the agents are going to get the actual dossier. There are a couple of options given in the book, as well as some published operations that can do it. Two of those published operations are (S)Entries and the Harker Intrusion. I could not decide which, so I used both, roughly like this. (S)Entries is available in the Nights Black Agents core book, and The Harker Intrusion is one of the Edom Files adventures.

Getting into Classic Traveller in 202X

Someone told you that Traveller is a cool SF TTRPG, and you heard that Classic Traveller (CT) is a good version of it. So, how do you start? This was a (relatively) brief guide that I wrote in August/September 2023, with some edits in December. This is a more permanent home for it than a PDF uploaded to various discords. Contents Choosing a Core Book Additional Books and Supplements Books Supplements Other Conclusion A note about those letters Core Mechanics Character Generation What do players do?

A Lightweight System for the Dracula Dossier

Just a quick note on the mechanical bits for my Dracula Dossier campaign. It is written for Night’s Black Agents, which is a Gumshoe game. I tend to dislike some aspects of Gumshoe though, in particular the spending of general abilities, and only rolling a single d6 (which just feels dull compared to rolling either more dice or fancier dice). So, here is the basics of the system we are using: