Mini Maps: Ceres Class Frigate

This is a collection of maps and designs I've shown off here and there, but never, I think, all in one place.  The Ceres-class Frigate is designed to fit the stats published in Starships &Spacemen 2e, pg. 45.  So here we are: spaceship.  Enjoy!

Exterior orthos

Perspective of the landed Ceres

The gravity is a little odd: it uses the artificial gravity field as an inertal compensator.  That's why it lands upside down.

The larger of the two decks houses the Bridge, torpedo room, beam bank control, shuttle bay, arboretums, and the crew quarters, teleporter, sickbay, main airlock, galley, brig...just about everything, really.

The second deck contains the water tanks,life support, labs, computer core, fabricators, escape pods, and of course, the landing legs and machinery.

5 Classic Types of Starship-Based Campaigns

     I meant to get to this post earlier in the week, RocketFans, but life happened.  All over the closet next to the master bath.  More I will not say...

    Anyway, last time we discussed gaming on spaceships, we listed five ways to add factions to a starship-based campaign.  Belatedly, I realized that we haven't actually discussed the ways to actually run a starship-based campaign.  Or what that even means.  So, to begin this article, I will provide my own personal, open-to-debate, by no means official set of guidelines on what is and is not a starship-based campaign.

   First of all, IT SHOULD BE SET ALMOST ENTIRELY ON SPACECRAFT.  This sounds obvious, but in fact it is easy to mistake a setting that uses spaceships extensively as one for a spaceship-based campaign.  For example, and it took me years to figure this out, Star Wars as seen in the movies, is not a setting for spaceship-based campaigns.  Yes, there are spaceships, and yes, they are among the most iconic in science fiction and yes, there are cool space fighters and mile-long dreadnoughts and space stations that are not moons.

Top: Space.
Bottom: Not space.

       But how much time do the heroes spend on a ship, verses the amount time on a planet?

     Think about it - among all seven of the movies, most of the time spent was on planets.  Spaceships were plot devices, not environments to explore.  While one could argue that the fights on the Death Stars and Cloud City were spacecraft-centric, I disagree.  The scenes on Starkiller Base in Episode VII demonstrate that the Death Star scenes could have been easily done on a planet with no loss of flavor.  Cloud city and Couruscant are also interchangeable, as far as flavor goes.  That's part of the point - it shouldn't just feel like a spacecraft, it should function like one in ways unique to spacecraft.

This is shown well on the TV series Babylon 5.  What makes the eponymous station a spacecraft and not just a frontier town in space is the preoccupation with life support, the attention to things like gravity.  Another excellent example, The Expanse, takes this up to eleven by showing the Coriolis forces involved in spin habitats.  

Top: Kansas
Bottom: Not Kansas

      Second of all, IT SHOULD BE A CAMPAIGN, NOT JUST AN ADVENTURE. Even if you argue that the Death Star counts as a spaceship- based adventure, it's still not a campaign.  An adventure, depending on the amount of time you spend at the table, will take at most two or three sessions.  A single Star Wars movie is an adventure.  And we all know that only the second act of the original movie was spent on the Death Star.  If you were playing Imperial troops that were stationed on the Death Star and helped build it (or just did sanitation), then you would have a spacecraft-based campaign.  But not a Star Wars movie.

     Thirdly, I MEAN A BALANCED CAMPAIGN, NOT JUST CONSTANT SPACE COMBAT.  There is a difference between a role-playing game campaign and a wargame campaign.  You could easily play in nothing but starships if your game of choice is Starfleet Battles or Attack Vector: Tactical.   Role-playing games, as the name implies, involve incidences of role-playing.  Also, exploration, player cooperation, problem solving, and the like.  You can easily, for example, run a mystery adventure in an RPG campaign based on a starship - look at the first season of TOS Star Trek.  You could not do the same with a handful of ship miniatures and stat cards.

     To more easily and thoroughly demonstrate what is or is not a starship-based campaign, Let us assemble our list of five classic types of starship-based campaigns.

1. Planet of the Week: This is one of the earliest examples of the spaceship-based campaign. We see it in television, at it's best, in Star Trek and it's spin-off series. The Players are part of the crew of a spaceship that travels to new and exciting places every adventure, where they will explore, solve problems or mysteries, or just shoot aliens and take their stuff. Any Star Trek licensed RPG is perfect for this, for obvious reasons, as are OSR hacks such as Starships & Spacemen and Five-Year Mission for White Star. But we see this style of game in other places as well - notably, Classic Traveller's adventure, Leviathan.
To be honest, this type of campaign kinda skirts the edge of what I'd call starship-based. Technically, if we're looking for the Dungeon - that metaphorical play environment where dice and hit points happen at the heart of any game based off D&D - then the "Dungeon" is space itself, because that's where the XP is. The spaceship is more like the town a D&D party goes to at the end of the adventure to rest, heal and get new equipment. This does not mean you can't have adventures on your own ship, but they tend to be roleplay-driven and hardly involve combat. After all, you can't have your cruiser invaded by bad guys every week.

2. The Rag-Tag Fleet: In this scenario, the players are part of a large fleet of spacecraft of many different types, travelling from point A to B, on a trip that will take most if not all of the campaign. That's really all you have to have for this kind of campaign, but there is so much you can do with this framework.
The phrase "rag-tag fleet" comes from the Ur-example of this type of campaign, Battlestar Galactica. The set up of this show, either version, is nearly perfect for the purposes of making a campaign setting. You have hundreds of different ships. You can't go anywhere but one of thise ships, and the ships are full of pretty much any kind of person you could imagine. In BSG they showed the fithy rich hoarding supplies while refugees starved below decks, prostitutes trapped on ships with puritans, crime syndicates taking over flotillas in the fleet and engaging human trafficing, enemy spies, terrorists, political rivals, military rivals - there really isn't much that they didn't cover on BSG. But the "fugitive fleet" isn't the only way to use this framework. Merchant convoys, colonial wagon trains to the stars, or collections of asteroid outpost a billion miles from anywhere are all valid. The basic thing to remember is that the Dungeon is the fleet itself - and it's a Megadungeon. I mean this in the strictest of terms; It has virtually endless new areas to explore, it is intended to be the sole gaming environment for a campaign, the number of players and their level is not restricted, and areas that have been cleared of threats will fill right back up. Best part? I get to map dozens of different spaceships.

3. Casablanca IN SPAAAACE!: The inversion of Planet-of-the-Week, this scenario has the players living on or crewing a large space station, and the adventure coming to them. Examples include the obvious, such as Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. There are also not-so-obvious settings that use this trope. From Star Trek's original series, there was Deep Space Station K-7, where a variety of shady characters came and went bearing Tribbles. Vangard Station, from the Trek novel series of the same name is an even better example. If you wanted to set such a campaign in a galaxy far, far, away, you could have a Cloud City type of space station.
Not, however, the Death Star. Despite the moon-sized volume available to set the mother of all Megadungeons, DS-1 and 2 are monotonous, homogeneous, and and as exotic as an Ikea catalog. To be a Casablanca in space, you need to have a preferably neutral location, politically, where sworn enemies can mingle under the banner of truce, spies can spy, smugglers can smuggle, and the station personnel are more concerned with maintaining life-support and the sudden appearance of holes in the hull than they are with micro-regulating every aspect of a stationer's life. Even so, those that like their science like they like their cider may add such things as air taxes, and the spacing of squatters. Whatever details of the setting are decided upon, the amount of exotic variety and laxity in law enforcement are more important than the physical size of the Station.  That being said, the Space Station is your Dungeon, so making it a Megadungeon will keep it from becoming stale.

4. Star-Wrecks & Scavengers: One of the advantages of this type of campaign is that you need not set it in space to have the action available set on a spaceship.    This scenario - exemplified by the planet Jakku in The Force Awakens - has a large starship or fleet of same laied up on the surface of a planet or floating in space and non-functional.  The wreaks are crawling with scavengers, illegal salvage operations, homeless squatters, and feral animals.  And that's just the new people.
     The idea of dungeon crawling a mile-long dreadnought is an old one as far as RPGs go.  It was first featured, as far as I know, in the OD&D module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks.   But admit it, the scenes in Episode VII make for the coolest images of this style of campaign.
     The Dungeon in this type of campaign is, obviously, the wrecked starships.  This gives one the ability to explore a Star Destroyer or Battlestar without all those rude stormtroopers or nasty colonials getting in the way of your fun.  It also offers challenges in the way of uneven/hazardous terrain, locked doors, puzzles and malfunctioning equipment, and lots and LOTS of treasure.  But perhaps the biggest draw of using a scavenger type starship-based campaign is that it is easiest type of SF game for traditional fantasy gamers to transition into.  Other than the window dressing and some of the obstacles unique to the environment.  It can be used as just another type of dungeon with elves and orcs,or one with SF characters, or both. It works in any combination, that's the point, so have fun storming the castle starship!

5. Medieval O'Neil: Our final type of classic starship-based campaign is a classic of science fiction, science speculation, and possibly science fact.  The players are the descendants of the original crew on a generation ship bound for parts unknown. The populous of the gigantic starship have, through disaster or calamity lost the knowledge of how to use their technology, repair their starship, or that they are even on a starship.
     This type of story has not only been told everywhere from Heinlein's Orphans in the Sky To the original series of Star Trek, it's the premise of entire games - not just campaigns.  TSR's Metamorphosis Alpha is based on a Medieval O'Neil, as is the brilliantly twisted Axis Mundi.
     In addition to its popularity in fiction, generation ships pose a legitimate concern for the planners of interstellar missions and explorations.  Moral conundrums include everything from dooming  your descendants to being born, growing old and dying on a starship, to the tragic consequences of the 3-generation rule. 
     Keep in mind, those are just the obvious type generation-ship-gone-wrong scenarios.  There are other ways portray a starship full of people that forgot where they were going.  Just look at the society of pampered lotus-eaters in the Pixar classic WALL-E.  Between you an me, I think I'd like to play a robot more than one of the doughboys-and-girls among the crew...
     Anyway, the colony ship is the Dungeon in this type of scenario, obviously.  How "dungeony" it is depends on how low-tech you want your players to be.  The idea of a pre-industrial regression among the crew's descendants has its appeal, but not if the ship's rogue AI is has access to sentry turrets or can turn harvester mecha into meat grinders.  A GM must also decide if fantasy elements will be present, such as psionics, out and out magic, or space-eleves.  

     The above five examples of starship-based campaigns are listed here as reletively "pure" scenarios, with little overlap.  The truth is, however, that there can be a lot of overlap between these classic campaigns.  Star Trek has used every item on this list in at least one episode or another, BSG has it's share of planet-of-the-week explorations, and Babylon 5 had lots of other spacecraft coming and going for players to crew.   You could even conceivably make a campaign featuring all five.  In fact, next time on on this blog, I'll be doing just that - introducing a campaign idea that has elements of all of the above types of starship-based campaigns.  See you then!

P.S.: Out latest offering, Species Spotlight: Myrmidoni is just about wrapped up.  It should be available for sale Monday, barring any unforeseen problems.

    

More Starships and Spacemen Art

"A rare image of the independent pirate craft The Wanton Cortesan, a modified Zangid lander.  The pirate craft had apparantly been hiding under cloud cover prior to attacking the light freighter Solar Franchise above Dane's World in the Kentaurus Freehold. The freighter's sensor data and these images (Transmitted by a sensor probe prior to its destruction) are the first confirmation that The Wanton Cortesan is equipped with a Vidani Shielding Mechanism."

Starships & Spacemen: On Freighters and Tugs

Continuing on a theme...

My partner in crime Rob Garrita and I have been, as we said, working on a set of new supplements for the OSR clone Starships & Spacemen which lets you dungeon crawl in the Final Frontier.  Part of what were trying to do is introduce a thing we're calling "chewy" SF:  It certainly isn't hard, but its not exactly soft either.  Pornell's and Nivin's masterpiece The Mote in God's Eye could be considered chewy- it has plainly impossible elements, but they are internally consistent and the plot of the work is dependent of the established facts of the fake tech - the ships, for example, do not travel at the speed of Plot, for example, but have their travel times well established and unbend able.

(Incidentally, the thing I absolutely hated about star Trek: Into Darkness was the ship's ability to not only warp from Earth to Q'NoS in a matter of minutes, but to transport people across that distance. This flies in the face of all established cannon fannon in the Star Trek universe.  I call BS:  If your story won't work without such fast travel times, for the love of Heinlein write another story.)

So obviously, we're tying to avoid such outright nonsense.  For one thing, You'll notice that our starships have large heat radiators.  As Rob put it: " I think we'd find away around Newton and Einstein before we find a way around Old Man Entropy." Our spacecraft also use actual reaction drives, albeit enhanced by gravity control.  Sure there are "accelerator coils" to push the theoretical maximum into sfnal territory, but at it's heart, the K-Drive is a VASMIR with aspirations.

See, nothin' special...

But sometimes the source material makes it hard.  I'm not criticizing the Starships & Spacemen core book by any means.  I love that book; it's inspired my to take all the Star Trek fan-boy goodness I've been brewing since sixth grade and make games with it.  That being said, there are places that a designer like me might want more information.

As the title suggests, I'm referring to the stats for freighters presented in the Core book.  Their fine as far as they go - indeed, I've read that book a hundred times and only last night noticed something odd.  There is not stat for cargo capacity for any of the freighters available in the game.  No passenger capacity either, despite having two sickbays listed in the stats.  Funny, huh?

So, what's a game designer to do?  Design something, obviously.  What would the likely cargo capacity of a light freighter in Starships & Spacemen be?

First of all, this is a small-ship universe.  Really small.   The largest ships in the rulebook, dreadnoughts, have a crew of 150, which is the compliment of a Corellian Corvette in Star Wars.   To put that into perspective, the original USS Enterprise had a crew of 430, and was classified as a cruiser.  One of the main design challenges for spacecraft in Starships & Spacemen  is that the ships have such small crews, but the shuttles are so large.  An S&S frigate, for example, has a crew of ten and carries a shuttle that can seat fifty. This isn't as ridiculous as it sounds; the shuttles carry cargo, and therefore are large enough to carry a lot of passengers when not full of Standardized containers.

Still, that's a challenge when you're tying to fit a greyhound bus into a speedboat.  This is why the frigates in our last post have spherical hulls.  In addition to having the smallest surface area per given volume, the sphere is the only hull large enough to hold that big 'ole shuttle and still be small enough to run with a crew of ten.
There is, in fact, enough room on the central deck for the shuttle and a few cargo spaces, about equal to the shuttle's volume.  I know this because I design all my ship on graph paper first.

GCS Telsa Deck One. OLD SKOOL.

So, what does this have to do with anything, you may ask?  the Light freighter in the S&S corebook has a crew of ten and carries one shuttle ship, just like the frigate.  And while we don't know how much cargo a freighter is supposed to carry, we in fact to have an idea of how much a shuttle carries.

In the S&S  rulebook, there is  a species of measure called the Equipment Unit.   All the stuff a character can carry or use has a certain number of units, and the amount of units you get is dependent on class and level blah blah blah.  The important part about all that is that the largest items on the equipment list (robot tanks) are five units and the listing for Shuttle Ships states that it may carry up to two robot tanks.
Of course this implies that that shuttles can carry ten units of cargo.  Ten handguns are ten units of cargo.  So much for units...

There is, however, the old gaming standby: Map Squares.  Basically (if somewhat arbitrarily), all medium creatures occupy a five-foot square, known as a map square.  Therefore, a shuttle carries fifty squares of cargo.  It just so happens that my maps are done in the five-foot square scale.  the decks on a ship are two squares apart, so you can have a five-by-five-by-two square block of cargo in a shuttle.  looking at our shuttle deckplan, taking into account the cockpit, airlock, powerplant and propellant tanks, that is just about right.   Now a five foot square is equal to 1.5 meters.  One cubic meter is equal to a ton of water, or say, 195 kilograms of pressurized spacecraft.  subtract to get about 800 kilos/square, and the cargo capacity of a frigate roughly forty tons, the same as a shuttle ship.

It's 10x6x2.5:  That's 150 squares

Why this obsession with Frigates?  In the collective S&S universe Rob and I are writing in, the little "tadpole" frigates are to the Zangid War what Destroyer Escorts were to WWII.  DEs, if you recall, are pretty much my favorite naval ship for the simple reason that they are small cheap, and made in large numbers, but in certain missions, unbeatable. The DE, by virtue of it's tuning radius, was the best anti-submarine platform of the war, for example.  In S&S, the Frigate is a small cheap, low-crew platform for a Ion Torpedo launcher.  Those are the equalizer - one good hit from a torpedo will destroy a Zangid Battle Cruiser quicker than you can say "Taffy 3".  The point is, there would have been a lot of them built during the war, far more than you need to afterword for combat or patrol in a peacetime Confederation.

Therefore, I propose the decommissioned tadpoles were converted into the light freighters mentioned in the book.  Their gun decks were removed, giving them room for another crew deck and allowing ten passengers to be carried They carry forty tons of cargo, and the same again in their shuttles for a total of eighty.  Their military grade teleporters and sensors are replaced with cheaper civilian models with the stats given in the book.

Now, I can toss out numbers like ten "passengers" with confidence because I already have a basic deckplan worked out for the frigate.  It is the starter-ship for 1st level characters, so everyone who plays will need one at the beginning, right?

The reason for wanting to know the stats for a light freighter is even simpler:  Every GM needs victims for their heroes to rescue.

I had intended to get to the section on Tugs in this post, but alas, we've run pretty long already.  Lets save the tugs for the next post, shall we?

Frigate Division, DESCON 15

Pictured: The second Frigate Division of Destroyer Constellation 15, comprised of Jovian-class Frigates  GCS Ananke (FG-612), GCS Metis (FG-6 16), GCS Almathea (FG-605), and GCS Callisto (FG-604), escorting Copernicus-class Cruiser GCS Nikola Tesla (CS-1856) to Spacebase Rho during the Zangid War.  Cruisers of the Copernicus-class often served as flagships - and de facto tenders - to Destroyer Constellations and flotillas of Frigates like the Jovians.  A division of four Frigates has more beam banks,  as many torpedoes, and more shuttle ships than a Cruiser, all while needing less crew and generally costing less to build and maintain.  These "tadpole schools" of Frigates and their magazines of Ion Torpedoes are credited with giving the Galactic Confederation a strategic advantage in the latter years of the war.

Starships and Spacemen Art

Space Fleet Cruiser GCS NicolanTesla launches one of its shuttle ships to investigate a nebula.

New Book in the Works!

That's right, RocketFans, Blue Max Studios' first actual published offering in nearly three years getting ready for post-production.  The initial draft has been written, and the project is set to be available in the next month or two. Ta-da!

The up-coming book has several firsts for a Blue Max Studios offering.  For one thing, it's the first book produced for another company's game.  As I mentioned a while ago, I  aquired a licence to publish materials for the second edition of Starships & Spacemen.  This book is the first product to be produced under that licence:  The ABCs of Space Opera Vol. 1: A-L.

The next first for us is that this is an OSR product.  I'm excited to become part of the movement to keep older games alive by providing, quality products for the Old-School Revolution.  This style of gaming, particularly resource management and the delayed gratification inherent in the XP and leveling rules  is something that just seems to naturally pair well with the mythos of Original Trek that is one of the main sources of inspiration for S&S.

The most significant first for Blue Max Studios on this project is that I'm not the author.  You may recall that I mentioned in my praise of nano-fic on different blogs the work of Rob Garrita on his website Twilight of the DM.  I was, in fact, so impressed with his work that when Rob suggested we work on a book together, I jumped at the opportunity.  It's been a fun process.  There's something almost magical about the creative interplay between two people who feed off one another's ideas to come up with material that neither would come up on their own.  It's also been nice to just concentrate on artwork and the layout and editing processes, rather than doing so after hours and days writing.  Haveing two sets of eyes on the project can only improve the production values, so expect good things...

Here is just a sample of some of art I've been producing for the book. Hope you enjoy!

Well of course they have heat radiators -
this is me  we're talking about...