The Viking Hat GM

  Cliched? Yes! That's why we like it! Outland is a scifi movie made in 1981, and is of the same vintage and style as Alien and Blade Runner - and Classic Traveller ! As many have noted, it is essentially High Noon in space. A federal Marshal comes to the mining colony of Io run by the interplanetary conglomerate Con-Am, and finds the place violent and corrupt, and the men abusing stimulants to work harder. Scientifically, it falls down in three places: lights inside helmets, explosive decompression, and the composition of Io.  "I can feel schlock crawling all over me!" Scifi films have lights on in people's vacc suit helmets for the same reason medieval films have the hero not wear a helmet at all, so we can see the face of the actor the producers paid all that money for. Explosive decompression, where a sudden loss of pressure leads to people exploding, simply does not happen as depicted; this puts Outland partly in the schlock scifi category. As for Io, in th...

In Classic Traveller books 1-3, player-characters get relatively fewer skills than later books, and certainly later editions. This is a game design decision which should be reflected in GMing style. There are two basic ways of looking at the skills on a character sheet: inclusive : that which is not listed can be done, even if not as well exclusive : that which is not listed cannot be do ne at all Long lists of possible skills, as in GURPS, encourage an exclusive mentality. "I'm sorry, but longsword use is completely different to shortsword use." Shorter skill lists, as in AD&D1e (a character class is simply a very broad skill) encourage an inclusive mentality. "Sure, you can climb a rope."  Part of the change from an inclusive to exclusive way of looking at skills is a change in Western society. When roleplaying games began in the 1970s, it was fair for a GM to assume that almost all of their players could swim, shoot, climb a rope, start a fire and so o...

Honi C844789-7 Ag S "The Coin" With both sci-fi and fantasy games, we Hex On Up and generate a random setting. Because the dice are always right.  As with the fantasy setting, we go  deep rather than broad . You don't need a starmap of a 12,000-system Galactic Imperium - the players will never visit them all. At most  they will visit one world each game session, typically weekly. In a year that's at most 52 sessions, and given holidays and life happening, 40 is more likely - plus if a world's interesting the players might spend a few sessions there. Probably a dozen worlds will do before someone says, "Look, I just wanted to play Mechwarrior."  Here's the summary. select a starting world, and using  this random generator , create a system for it.  develop this world in detail, using Zozer's Universal World Profile  (UWP), and not forgetting its starport , if any. and its system create a subsector, using random generation. You may choose to do th...

Traveller gets around a bit as a system - editions up to the telephone book "toolkit" (aka "we designed it for gearheads who never play") - as well as d20, GURPS, Hero and so on and so forth. If Traveller were a date you would definitely use a prophylactic. But as with so many game systems, the authour got it more-or-less right the first time. And so we play Classic Traveller .  Classic Traveller , most especially Books 1-3, like AD&D1e , RuneQuest 1e and the like, is a good system because not despite the fact that it is incomplete. You fill in the blanks.  Fill in the blanks Many a pointless argument has been had because all communication was by brief text, and without the use of many carefully-chosen words, text lacks tone  - and without a clear tone to the next, people fill in the blanks with their own mood at the time. This happens in romance, too: without regular communication from someone they like, a person will fill in the blanks with their own desi...

In Classic  Traveller , famously your character can die during character generation. The character generation system has you throw for six attributes, then attempt a four year term or more of service in army, navy, and so on; in each term you gain skills. However, at the end of each term you must roll for survival, to see if something killed you during that term. Keep going for long enough and you gain quite a few skills - if you survive! It's not uncommon for a surviving character to have had 3-6 terms of service, and thus be 30-42 years old. Some lucky or merchant characters may even get into their 50s.  Which is to say that they have already had a life - what will be for many a full career.  One famous science fiction space explorer , for example, died in a reactor repair at 55 years of age after 35 years of service (it is said there were later stories, but this is unproven). And so the player who is creating a CT character is creating one who has  already ha...