The first EP for my Stoner Metal project is done and available for free!
Mystics of Yllia - Sternenlieder (Star songs)
The songs are about the different terms in a character creation for the #TravellerRPG. In Traveller, characters may die in character creation.
I had a ton of fun making this. I love love love these fuzz sounds. SF300, Big Muff Triangle Pi, Burning Sunn! And a Precision bass into a Sansamp Bass Driver. 🥰
Took a look at another Cepheus Engine game, Kosmic Rpg. One thing I love about all these, it’s easy to steal parts from different ones.
Kosmic right now has the closest to what I would make for character creation. It’s got 39 careers, which is probably more than I would make, but that’s okay because you only have to use the ones you like. But more importantly, each one has its own d66 events chart.
I may be weird, but I usually don’t worry variations from different ship design systems. As long as it’s legal in the system it was designed with, it’s good enough for me. I just chalk it up to deviations from different shipyards.
So I’ll use anything from Classic Traveller to T5 to Cepheus. In the end the only real difference is a few MCr here or there.
Been looking at Faster Than Light: Nomad. It’s got a CC-BY SRD, and looks like a solid system.
Kind of thinking of a space soldier game. Basically life in the trenches of a 40K guardsmen, or starship troopers. Human with a laser rifle and basic body armor entrenched in a hopeless war on an alien planet. WWI in space.
But the trick is not to make it too depressing, while not making it heroic as well.
I backed Tales of the Valiant and Shadowdark and probably a few others I’m forgetting, but I find I can’t get excited about them because at their heart, they are still 5e D&D and I’m just tired of anything directly evolved from D&D. I’ve played enough of them over the years, and I really want new games.
That said I’m excited by the new version of Talislanta, even though I don’t expect it to be very different at all. But that’s getting a classic back in print.
Zozer’s monster Cepheus Universal book is out now. It’s an absolute beast, but you can also get a slim book of just the player rules. I’m looking forward to getting my copy.
Made a starship encounter chart for while my group is participating in The Great Hunt in Vargr territory. It’s allied with the nearby Zhodani Consolate, so I wanted ships from there to be more common than other humans.
Over on the Traveller discord Rob Eaglestone posted a link to his Traveller 5 Starship GitHub. He converted a fair number of classic ships into T5 stats, which is pretty awesome.
While poking around my files indexing starships, I remembered I hadn’t checked for a new issue of Cepheus Journal in a while. And look, a new issue came out three months ago!
Last night I was looking at old #JTAS for any ship designs they introduced, and in issue 10 they detail the fleet that won the first #TCS competition at #Origins 81. But there was clearly a typo on the USP for Wasp Interceptor, which had a Maneuver of Z.
I asked around on discord and we concluded it should be a 6. I was reminded that the fleet in question was designed by computer, which was banned after winning two years in a row.
I went looking for an index of starships for Traveller. I did not find one.
However, I did find that Freelance Traveller has BITS 101 Starships available as a free download. They are for GURPS Traveller, so some conversions required. Particularly remembering that GTL 10 is Traveller TL 12, etc.
The neat thing about looking at all these [GURPS] JTAS and Challenge Magazine articles is seeing familiar names in the by-lines. There’s a ton of cool little adventure seeds by James “Grognardia” Maliszewski.