SF Campaign Quiz

I stumbled across this when going through my old emails, and I thought it might interest some of you. This was a survey I sent out for a group I was going to run a SF campaign for once a month online; they had agreed they wanted to play some kind of SF campaign, but they […]

Hard SF The Easy Way

“Hard” SF is science fiction that makes a conscious effort to make the science and technology in the story stick to what we know, or at least surmise, and tries to be modest in its extrapolations. The resulting “hardness” of the SF falls on a continuum: the less extrapolation and the more established the science, […]

Commerce… in Spaaaace!

Here’s a quick take on doing commerce in Zap! Space Trucking For simple “Take this cargo and deliver it” runs, roll the Cargo Bay power of the ship vs. Difficulty 13 for how far (how many scenes) you have to travel before you deliver the cargo and get 1 Wealth Point payoff. You can use […]

Niven’s Law and Fantasy Roleplaying

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology – Niven’s Converse to Clarke’s Law In my last post I discussed the application of Clarke’s Law to SF Roleplaying, and how too zealous an application can mar the SF feel of an ostensibly SF setting, by making tech seem magically limitless. It might be objected that […]

Clarke’s Law and SF Roleplaying

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Clarke’s Third Law Any technology indistinguishable from magic might as well be fantasy. – Macy’s RPG Corollary Old-time SF author E.C. Tubb died on September 10th, 2010, which prompted me to begin reading his most famous series: Dumarest of Terra. Dumarest was the inspiration for several features […]

Elves & Espers: The Broken Spire

The Broken Spire is the Westernmost of the spires that comprise the New (upper) part of New Ark City. It is called Broken not because the physical structure has been compromised, but because all the systems have failed and cannot be repaired. When queried, Gax–the Giant Thaumaturgic Brain in charge of the city–always replies that […]

The Horror, The Horror

That’s right readers, we actually gamed last night. Josh was kind enough to put together a 1-shot Deep-Space Exploration Horror session. Of course, we didn’t know this starting out so we : a) Started out the session by singing Karaoke Revolution: Country for about 1.5 hrs. 1) Wendy knows too many country songs b) Upon […]