Spes Magna Games

Elanor is an Earth-like world rich in metals. Pre-rage, Elanor was colonized as a research outpost by Stellae Zaibatsu, an industrial conglomerate focused on planetary mining and metallurgy. The colony was still in the early years of surveying when the Age of Fire erupted. Elanor itself was hardly touched by the dragons, but sector-wide chaos destroyed Stellae Zaibatsu, leaving the company’s colony isolated. Today, no one knows the eventual fate of the colonists. When recolonization of Elanor started during the Age of Ashes, the colony’s facilities remained, albeit abandoned and in a state of disrepair.

The Eugenics Commissars and Terra Prime Ring, the sector’s heavyweight in planetary mining, spearheaded the recolonization. The former organization gengineered the malgrandegulos to serve as the planet’s workforce, and the Commissars and Terra Prima Ring formed a corporate autocracy to oversee Elanor’s rebuilding and industries. These activities were focused on seven small urban centers spread in a ragged line across one of Elanor’s three continents, each located near major mineral and metal deposits. Between Terra Prime Ring’s ruthlessly efficient management and the malgrandegulos’ genetic predisposition to thriving in the sort of work environments planetary mining requires, Elanor’s recolonization was an early Imperial success.

Indeed, it so successful that Imperial control via proxies was relaxed, and the malgrandegulos were permitted self-government. The seven urban centers became independent, republican city-states, and the malgrandegulo citizens of each became increasingly competitive with each other. While this has increased exploitation of planetary resources, it has also increased conflict between the city-states, to include open war among shifting alliances.

Heavy pressure from the Empire encouraged the city-states to seek more diplomatic solutions to conflicts over land and the natural resources locked within that land. Each city-state established a diplomatic corps and exchanged ambassadors. The competing republics have since been locked in a tense cold war in which diplomacy and covert assets attempt to accomplish what conventional military action once attempted.

Adventurers and mercenaries can find ready work on Elanor, if they know who and how to ask. The city-states are eager to maintain plausible deniability and/or to be able to shift blame, and outsiders provide them the means to both ends. Spying, kidnapping, blackmail, extortion, theft, and sabotage are just a few of the activities available on Elanor for morally flexible visitors with the necessary skills.

Elanor at a Glance
Population: 91,600
Atmosphere: Breathable
Climate: Temperate
Government: Republic
Tech Level: 4*

* Yeah, I decided to go ahead and bump the randomly generated Tech Level originally generated for Elanor.

Tags: A to Z 2013, planetary tour, Stars Without Number, Tiamat's Throne

In a couple of previous posts, I talk about giving players narrative control and using defense checks. Since those posts, I’ve acquired and read Dungeon World. It’s a nifty game, and I’m hankering to glom some of it for use in my upcoming Stars Without Number campaign. At the same time, Dungeon World has made me rethink the ideas I’ve had in those aforelinked posts.

How Dungeon World Does Combat

Whenever a character attempts anything in Dungeon World, the player rolls 2d6 and adds whatever ability score modifier applies. The basic outcomes are always these: 10+, you succeed; 7-9, you succeed, “but with complications or trouble”; and 6 or less, the “GM says what happens and you mark XP”.

The most common actions a character are likely to attempt are laid out in basic moves. For example, there is a basic move for melee combat called Hack and Slash. Here’s the text:

“When you attack an enemy in melee, roll+STR *One a 10+, you deal your damage to the enemy and avoid their attack. At your option, you may choose to do +1d6 damage but expose yourself to the enemy’s attack. *On a 7-9, you deal your damage to the enemy and the enemy makes an attack against you.”

Notice, please, that this combines the character’s attack roll, defense roll, and the enemy’s attack roll all in one.

Let the Glomming Begin!

Like Dungeon World, in Stars Without Number attack rolls have a uniform target number for success, namely any modified attack roll that equals or exceeds 20 is a hit. It’s not hard to adapt the former to the latter.

Ignoring ability score modifiers, a Hack and Slash move in Dungeon World has a 16.65% chance of being an outright success (the 10+ result) and a 41.65% chance of being a qualified success (the 7-9 result). The latter range is what I’m concerned with. Let’s round it down to 40% since that’ll fit a d20 better.

What we end with is this for Stars Without Number: A modified melee attack roll of 20+ is a hit, and the character deals damage. A modified melee attack roll in the 13-19 range is also a hit, but the enemy also makes a successful attack against that character.

So far, I’m liking this idea a lot, but it does require some further tweaking. It doesn’t take into account a monster’s attack bonus, but I’m not convinced that’s a problem. It doesn’t take into account the character’s Armor Class, and this is a problem. Dungeon World doesn’t have Armor Class; instead, armor soaks damage. This system also doesn’t account for multiple monster attacks, such as a xenobeast with a claw/claw/bite attack routine. I’m sure these issues can be compensated for with a few simple tweaks.

The same idea of full success on a 20+ and limited success on a 13-19 can be applied to any d20 roll, such as saving throws. Stars Without Number uses 2d6 plus ability score modifier for skill checks, which matches Dungeon World‘s dice conventions perfectly.

But, But!

Lastly, I know what some of you might be thinking: Why don’t I just play Dungeon World? Well, the basic answer is, “Just because.” I’m an admitted inveterate rules-tinkerer. I have been as long as I can remember. It’s worked for the past 30 or so years, and I don’t see why I should stop now.

Tags: A to Z 2013, Dungeon World, game play, Stars Without Number, Tiamat's Throne

Whew! Week one of the blogging challenge is just about done. I was doing okay until day five. I didn’t start working on this post until 9:00 p.m. last night, which, after the week I’ve had, is a bit after my bedtime. Still, with drooping eyes, with throbbing temples, I plodded through, Pandora playing a mix of 50s doo-wop, reggae, and 80s new wave.

I’ve been using A to Z as an excuse to get more writing done for Tiamat’s Throne, focusing on the different planets in the sector conquered by the dragons. This post is supposed to be a more detailed write-up of Elanor, similar to what I’ve done recently for Castor and Deneb. Alas, this was not to be. Instead, you get this, namely me writing about how I come up with planet descriptions.

Here’s the big secret: It’s almost entirely random, using the various tables found in the Stars Without Number rules. I tweak things a bit here and there, but pretty much what you end up reading about is what I generated with my dice. For example, here’s the very-rough-draft-indeed version of Elanor:

Atmosphere: Breathable mix
Temperature: Temperate
Biosphere: Human-miscible
Population: Tens of thousands
Tech Level: 3
World Tags: Heavy Mining, Altered Humanity
Reason for Colonization: Research outpost
Original Government: Autocracy
Current Government: Republic
Traits: Resigned, Warlike
Conflict: Land – The land is just a proxy; one side simply wishes to destroy the other, and so uses the dispute as an excuse for conflict. Both sides are confident that their diplomats can force a concession, and are holding back from war at present. Outsiders are vigorously recruited for the struggle for possession.

What I need to do now is take this raw, mostly random data and make it fit into Tiamat’s Throne. I say “mostly random” because I added the Altered Humanity tag without it coming up via a die roll. Elanor is the planet where one is most likely to encounter the malgrandegulos, the gengineered dwarf-like race created by the Eugenics Commissars for mining work.

What I think is most interesting about Elanor is the comparatively small population and the nature of the conflict on the planet. I’m envisioning a few, mutually hostile city-states. Each city-state controls an important mining interest and associated territory, but as resources in the territory become scarce, pressure to expand and remain profitable leads to conflict over unclaimed land. Diplomats from the various city-states vie against each other for negotiated advantages, preferring bloodless politics to the sort that comes out of the barrel of a gun.

The one thing I’m not sure I like about Elanor is the low tech level. Tech level 4 is imperial standard. Elanor’s lower tech level greatly limits her ability to engage in interplanetary travel and trade. This seems odd for a planet whose natural resources are vital to imperial interests. Perhaps this can be explained away by including an imperial fleet stationed off-world but still in Elanor’s system. The malgrandegulos mine using tech roughly equivalent to what we have today, and imperial agents take care of the shipment to extraplanetary markets.

Tags: A to Z 2013, planetary tour, Stars Without Number, Tiamat's Throne

Deneb was founded by colonists from Castor in the early decades of the Homeland Fellowship’s presence on that world. Schism within the Order of Peers, one of the knightly orders, over membership criteria threatened to disrupt the peace on Castor. Powerful traditionalists within the Order of Peers objected to membership being opened to those not descended from the Homeland Fellowship’s first families. Rather than risk conflict within the Order, the traditionalists were granted a charter to colonize Deneb, a frigid world locked in an endless ice age. The result was a military dictatorship wherein positions of power and influence were reserved for first family aristocracy. The Order established family domains near Deneb’s equator where they could exploit the planet’s limited resources of arable land and liquid water (and within the habitable zone that Deneb’s dangerous species live, such as the Denebian ripper).

As the decades passed, factionalism among the traditionalists increased. The consequent civil war wreaked havoc on the family domains’ resources. Deneb is not a world that easily facilitates stockpiling surpluses of food and other materials. The need for imported resources led to intense bidding among the families with mercantile powers that had the contacts and means to fill the wartime needs in exchange for access to Deneb’s rich heavy metal resources. Collusion among these mercantile powers gradually shifted the balance of power on Deneb until the Order was all but ousted.

Whether the Order could’ve recovered political power was a question left unanswered by the arrival of the dragons. Deneb fared better than many other worlds during the Rage. Much of Deneb’s infrastructure was deep underground to be insulated from the world’s crippling cold. The long isolation after the Age of Fire proved more disastrous. Much of Deneb’s population died from hunger and disease. Isolated pockets survived and remained civilized. Other communities fractured, and the people moved deeper underground. These cave-dwellers descended deeper into madness and depravity during with each successive generation.

As Tiamat consolidated her control over the sector and order was restored, materials were needed for reconstruction and industry. Deneb became a valuable resource again. Four corporations received charters to restructure Deneb: Daybreak Organization, a major player in fuel refining; Terra Prime Ring, the sector’s heavyweight in planetary mining; the Imani Company, a cutting-edge metallurgical business; and Outertech Syndicate, the Empire’s foremost producer of heavy weaponry. Providing security for all four is Magnus Union, a security corporation whose name has become synonymous with ruthlessness.

Remnants of the Order found themselves cast as figureheads in the corporate feudalism established on Deneb under these imperial charters. Aristocrats who can trace their lineage back centuries now act as company subsidiary executives responsible for fulfilling work quotas established by corporate headquarters. Standing on top of the feudal pyramid is the feared Magnus Union.

At present, most members of the Order believe their place in the planetary pecking-order is justified. The Order’s aristocracy has resurrected its ancient forms of dress, and they present a bizarre spectacle as they obsequiously demand respect and honor for the old forms and pomp. When not engaged in the business of filling imperial demands, the aristocracy participate in ceremonies, tournaments, banquets, et cetera, almost entirely conducted in Latin.

Deneb’s highly restrictive laws, culture of corporate paranoia, and the ongoing subjugation of the Order make most Denebians cruel and envious. The pain and suffering of others is a source of amusement, and public humiliation and a lack of gentility are main features of Denebian entertainment. Those perceived to accumulate wealth or power too easily become targets. Scandals, real or fabricated, occur frequently, and they have become a common method of advancement in business and social circles.

Deneb also has a sizeable population of outcasts, most being the descendants of cave-dwellers. Called krimas, these outcasts are almost invariably dangerous. Many have developed bizarre hereditary deformities that warp both body and mind. In the deeper caverns, the krimas barely qualify as human, but instead have mutated into sightless, savage cannibals.

Deneb at a Glance
Population: 89,500
Atmosphere: Breathable
Climate: Cold
Government: Feudalism
Tech Level: 4

Magnus Union
Attributes: Force 6, Cunning 7, Wealth 4
Hit Points: 38
Assets: Force/Postech Infantry 4, Cunning/Organization Moles 5, Cunning/Party Machine 4, Wealth/Bank 4
FacCreds/Turn: 6
Tags: Secretive, Planetary Government (Deneb)
Tag Effect: Magnus Union’s permission is required to buy or import assets marked as needing government permission. All assets purchased by this faction automatically begin Stealthed.
Homeworld: Deneb
Goal: Destroy the Foe: Destroy a rival faction.

Tags: A to Z 2013, factions, planetary tour, Stars Without Number, Tiamat's Throne

In the early 27th century, the Homeland Fellowship, a monarchical colonial effort, settled on Castor, establishing a liaison outpost as a first step toward opening diplomatic relations with other worlds in the sector. For a time, the Homeland Fellowship court on Castor was a thing of wonder: heraldric flags, orders of knights, aristocratic ambassadors, and the architectural wonders, with pillared foundations, scroll buttresses, numerous mosaics, squared support piers, and flat-topped towers.

Then came the irruption of magic and the rage of the dragons. Castor suffered worse than most other worlds, for the dead refused to stay in their graves. The monarchy collapsed, and the knightly orders stepped into the breach. Centuries of internecine warfare followed. Even today, in the Age of the Phoenix, Castor remains a world wracked by conflict and terror.

Castor’s population lives precariously behind the walls of a half dozen fortified cities that rely on technology generally equivalent to 19th-century Earth. Castoran society is controlled by quasi-religious military orders under the supreme command of a council of generals. Almost all commerce and wealth on Castor is controlled by members of the military. The martial quartermaster class has taken on most of the roles performed by the businesses class on other worlds. Unskilled labor is performed by Castorans unfit for military service.

This large civilian class is widely discriminated against, being forbidden to run businesses, possess significant wealth, or own land. The Castoran civilian class’s reputation for sloth and vice is not unmerited. Among them, cultural patterns inimical to success within the competitive military orders have become deeply ingrained. Nevertheless, exceptional civilians can be rewarded with contractor status, which comes with entrepreneurial and property privileges.

Social norms reward ambitiousness, especially within the military by demonstrated courage in defense of the cities. The military and contractor elite also evince cosmopolitan pretensions. Martial ceremonies, balls, and faux ambassadorial functions are common. It is no secret that Castor’s ruling generals would welcome renewed contact with other worlds, but this goal remains elusive. The military lacks the technology to make contact on its own, and Castor languishes under a planetary quarantine due to its undead plague.

While most worlds have intermittent problems with the undead, Castor is overrun with them. Her cities exist in a state of constant siege. The most prominent undead menace are the hordes of zombies. Tens of thousands of zombies surround the cities, and more wander the wilderness between Castor’s urban centers. Other undead monsters are less common, but more dangerous, especially those that can fly such as ghosts and spectres. These types of monsters can not only bypass city walls, but they can also threaten the dirigibles that link the cities via the airways.

Despite the planetary quarantine, groups of adventurers sometimes travel to Castor. Caches of pretech can be found in ancient ruins by those willing and able to brave Castor’s undead terrors.

Castor at a Glance
Population: 755,000
Atmosphere: Breathable but dense. Use those pressure masks!
Climate: Tropical
Government: Military Dictatorship
Tech Level: 2

Castoran Characters: Any character can be from Castor, but growing up on such a backward world has consequences. At 1st level, no native Castoran character can have more than rank 0 in many skills due to Castor’s limited tech level. Skills such as Combat (Energy Weapons, Psitech), Computer, Culture (Alien, Spacer, Traveller, World other than Castor), Exosuit, Tech (Any), or Vehicle (Grav, Space) are restricted. Native Castorans do not need pressure masks to breathe heavy atmospheres that are otherwise capable of supporting human life.

Tags: A to Z 2013, planetary tour, Stars Without Number, Tiamat's Throne, undead