Traveller Vignette 034 The austere legal system on the matriarchal world of Dulcene is administered by the so-called “Brides of Justice”, who ritually “marry” their courts, taking vows of chastity and severing all links with their families to ensure they rule without favouritism. This cutting of family ties even includes giving up the family name; after appointment, they are addressed as “The Bride Catherine” or whatever, while their white robes of office are styled after wedding dresses. Penalties for first offences are usually light, especially for male defendants where local stereotypes of men as the more impulsive and easily-led gender can work in their favour. However, each subsequent offence is punished ever more severely, since the previous punishment was obviously not enough to teach the necessary lesson. A first-time thief may simply be sentenced to a few months of labour on a garbage-collection detail or similar public work, but a third offence could cost him a hand. ...
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Traveller Vignette 033 An honour guard of marines from the embassy was waiting at the bottom of the yacht's ramp, the chameleon surfaces of their battledress set to parade maroon with decorations and rank insignia. Travis stepped forward, saluting “Sir Helen” I returned the salute and got straight to business as we walked toward the grav limo “I read your updated report on the run in system. Is it as bad as...” A high velocity rifle slug went wheet! past me and spanged off one of the marines, leaving a grey gash where it'd ripped the surface chameleon layer of his armour. Six marines sprang to form a protective box around Travis and I, shielding us with their armoured bodies as they hustled us toward the armoured limo “ Shooter is on that building, top left corner” I heard one of the marines say through my ear bead; his suit computer's counter-battery function projecting the slug's trajectory backward. “ Don't return fire” I snapped. I was jumping the cha...
Imagine Magazine Issue 7 (October 1983) This issue bills itself as a Dragonquest special issue. For those who don't remember it - and it really was a blink-and-you-miss-it game - DragonQuest was developed by SPI as their entry to the fantasy RPG market. TSR then acquired the game along with the assets (but not the liabilities) of SPI in a rather murky not-a-takeover-honest deal not long before this issue was published, and were therefore promoting it as a TSR game. However, it wasn't successful and TSR seem to have stopped supporting it pretty quickly, presumably realising that 95% of DQ sales would cannibalise D&D / AD&D ones, and they were thus competing against themselves. The first DQ article is the modestly titled four-pager "A quest for the perfect game" by one of the designers of DQ. He explains that it is essentially a points build character design process, but with some rolled-up characteristics, including race and social class / birthright. It...
Traveller Vignette 032 Power had long failed aboard the gutted cruiser, and her hull was open to space. Our flashlight beams threw sharp circles of light without atmosphere to scatter them. Here and there, crewmembers who hadn't got to emergency suits showed us the unpleasant things vacuum will do to a human body. Most had managed to get into suits, though, and had died in them when air and power failed long before rescue came. In engineering, tools hung in zero-G around suited figures tethered near open access hatches, techs still trying to fix ravaged life support systems to the last. Elsewhere, people had used the long wait for death to write last letters, addressed in glove-clumsy block capitals, hoping whoever found the dead ship would send them on. (Author's note - This might be a random encounter with a derelict vessel, or PCs might have been specifically sent to find this vessel to retrieve things still aboard - secret experimental technology, computer cores...
Traveller Vignette 031 “ The Dorsay Hammerhead is a six-legged armoured grazer; full grown females can weight up to four tons. Its name comes from the shape of its armoured skull, with its eye sockets widely separated for maximum field of vision. Hammerheads usually travel in herds of 20-30, moving constantly across the plains of Dorsay in search of new grazing. They generally ignore people, but tourists are strongly advised to exercise caution in the breeding season and immediately afterwards – the tip of the male's reproductive organ breaks off inside the female during intercourse, acting as a plug to prevent other males mating with her. The normally placid males are unsurprisingly irritable until the injured member re-grows, and have been known to attack anything which annoys them; they have been known to overturn an ATV” (Author's note - This is obviously another animal encounter, with the possibility of unpredictable violence in the mating season)
WFRP Old World Armoury & Old World Bestiary Warhammer fantasy Roleplay has always been a very distinctive system, with a very gritty take on fantasy - it's one of the few fantasy RPGs where characters are likely to include "Rat-catcher" or "Sewerjack" as their profession. I'd bought the old rulebook and some of the "Death on the Reik" adventure series back in the 90s, but never really played it. However, I recently picked up a big bundle of PDF adventures and sourcebooks for the new edition from black industries / cubicle 7, and overall I've been favourably impressed I thought I'd review two of the books - The "Old World Armoury" and "Old World Bestiary", Both are 128 page books, and both were far better done than I expected The " Old World Armoury " is both mis-named and much more useful than I expected. Along with a detailed discussion of weapons and armour, it also provides not only a comprehen...
Traveller Vignette 030 There were just the two of us aboard the scoutship, Maria Suskova as pilot and me as engineer, and four days into jump we decided we could use a party. We moved everything vulnerable out of the little crew lounge, turned off the grav plates and sloshed half a bottle of wine and a couple of shots of any liquor we had aboard into the air – not enough that we'd be incapacitated if something happened, but enough for a good time. Spheres of alcohol hung in the air like jewels in the zero-G, and we swam after them with drinking straws. It's a game best played without clothes, in case you've never done it, but Suskova and I were better than friends by that point anyway. (Author's note - some colour on how crews may kill time in jump. If the PCs are running a merchant ship, some of the passengers may do this, either in the privacy of their cabins or in the common areas. If so, they may not be as careful to remove or cover anything vulnerable ...
Traveller Vignette 029 Society on Thracian had been wracked by class strife and political in-fighting, but unified impressively against the external threat. Hastily recalled reservists and armies of civilian volunteers worked round the clock to ready the mothballed ships of the 59th CruRon, and to bring the depleted SDB force up to strength. Technical personnel were restricted to 12 hour shifts, to avoid mistakes, but men in the loading crews worked till they dropped, and rose to work again after a few hours exhausted sleep and a hastily snatched meal. Work that should have taken months was done in weeks, though many ships had systems that would only be completed and tested while actually under way. When the fleet jumped to the first muster point it was followed by a ragtag trail of civilian merchants carrying final loads of consumables for transhippment during refuelling at the gas giant. Even so, over a thousand civilian techs stayed aboard various warships when they jum...
Tracklink Article - A43 Black Prince – The Last Infantry Tank This was originally published in Issue 109 (Summer 2021) of Tracklink, the magazine of the Tank Museum. However, the photos which accompanied it are owned by the tank Museum, so I have replaced them with another photo from the public domain For much of the Second World War, British thinking divided tanks into three categories. Light tanks were for scouting, but in practice this role was increasingly taken over by armoured cars. Cruiser tanks were originally intended to operate in an independent “cavalry” role, but were increasingly used almost interchangeably with US Mediums supplied under Lend-lease. Finally, Infantry tanks were slow but heavily armoured vehicles for infantry support. By 1943, the standard Infantry tank was the A22 Churchill. This had overcome its initial problems with reliability to become a well regarded design, and the latest Churchill Mk VII had been up-armoured to 150mm, significantl...
Traveller Vignette 028 “ Sameter is usually described as having a tainted atmosphere, but the “taint” is actually an unusually high (28%) level of oxygen. This creates severe fire risks, and any naked flame outside the pressurised habitats is strictly controlled. The habitats themselves are carefully monitored for leaks, and potential sources of ignition, such as electrical systems, are well shielded. Humans must wear filter masks outdoors, or the excess oxygen causes symptoms resembling drunkenness, then death as it desiccates the lungs. A few people fall victim to defective masks each year, usually due to the effects of “oxygen narcosis” causing them to do foolish things rather than direct injury. Despite this, “air parties” where groups of young people unmask in public parks, and get drunk on oxygen are a common event, always with masked friends present to ensure safety.” (Author's note - Another way to add character to a planet. It could also drive scenario where a ...
Traveller Vignette 027 The stream of smartgun shells twisted in flight to catch the fighter, their tiny obsessive microchip brains aflame with hate and suicide. Two struck just behind the cockpit, detonating in balls of shrapnel that ripped through the pilot, critically injuring him. The aircraft's computer flicked into Valkyrie mode as he lost consciousness, blowing off the external weapons pods to minimise drag and dived for the deck to shake off pursuit among the ground clutter. Medical subsystems inflated the pilots' G-suit to force blood from his limbs to the critical body core and dumped a cocktail of pain reliever and anti-shock into his system. The aircraft levelled out at 10 metres AGL, terrain following ladar steering it round obstacles as it ran for the nearest friendly airstrip, squawking that it was priority inbound with an injured pilot aboard and required emergency landing clearance...... (Author's note - Expert systems like this might might higher ...
Imagine Magazine Issue 6 - September 1983 I found this issue rather flat, especially after the previous one, starting with the rather "cartooney" cover, which I didn't find as good as previous ones. The Beginners Guide moves on to thieves, while the cartoon strip "explains" Boot Hill and Bushido, though frankly all it really does is show how to roll up a character, which doesn't really bring out the virtues of the two games. It also features the first advert I can recall seeing for Gangbusters, a game which never really took off since frankly everything it did was already being done by Call of Cthulhu and diligent initial support from TSR wasn't enough to make a difference. Stirge Corner gives advice to adventurers this issue, rather than GMs. It's all sensible enough (Don't split the party etc) and probably more useful at the time than it seems now. There's a little bit of a thief theme going on, though not an especially strong ...
Traveller Vignette 026 After the fighting on Darkholme, the Aslan were punctilious about providing details of human troops killed or captured, less for humanitarian reasons than because it reflected on their own fighting prowess. With the information came the wreck of a man in a cryotube. Corporal Anubis Chen had been manning a VRF Gauss nest when his regiment's line collapsed under the Aslan assault, and it was obvious both that his position had to be held to buy time for human forces to establish a new defence line, and that to do so would be suicide. Chen told his loader to get out while he could, then held off repeated Aslan attacks for the next four hours, despite being wounded three times. With the gauss ammunition gone, he fought with a captured Aslan rifle, and finally called in artillery on his own position as it was overrun. The human delegation were disconcerted to discover Chen had actually been mortally wounded in the fighting, and had survived only because he h...
Traveller Vignette 025 Alisabeth dropped a couple of the stamped glass local coins into a beggar's bowl as we passed. We were flush after the job, and she's always been a soft touch. Besides, she's from Iskander, where the local religion is big on reincarnation and karma, and teaches that money given to the poor will come back to you when you need it most in some future life (Author's note - This is just colour that can slot in anywhere. I like the idea that names will mutate slightly, so this is a fusion of "Alice" and "Elizabeth" - short forms might "Ali", "Liss" or "Beth", as suits. The glass coins are intended to give a nice "not in Kansas" feel while working just like modern coins, and the Iskandian religion gets a little more coverage in a later vignette)
Imagine Magazine Issue 5 (August 1983) This starts off with an editorial on sexism in gaming from the (presumably female) Editorial Assistant Kim Daniel, which I think would have been one of the first times this issue was raised...though not the last, by a long shot. The "Adventures of Nic Novice" beginner's guide looks at spells, while the cartoon strip looks at character generation in Traveller, then probably the second most common game in the UK. Stirge Corner looks at dungeon design, and proposes that dungeons break down into two classes - relatively small "adventure" dungeons built around a theme eg the lair of an evil cult, which may include a mission (rescue a princess etc) and are designed for a specific character level versus the big "mainframe" mega-dungeon dungeons that can be repeatedly pillaged by adventuring parties and still have plenty of life in them. I must say that in practice, I only ever saw the former, though accounts suggest...
Traveller Vignette 024 Lori waited for the other cleaner to step outside for a smoke break, then ducked under a table and quickly taped the riot gas grenade in place. The gas was a mix of tear gas and regurgitant, commonly known as “pink nasty” because it also contained bright pink dye that wouldn't wash off for days, to mark rioters for later arrest. Hit the oppressors by hitting the headlines , she told herself as she tied thin fishing line around the grenade's safety pin, then eased it most of the way out before tying the other end to a chair According to the reservation computer, the mayor had this table booked for a breakfast meeting with several councilmen, The movement had even ensured there'd be someone outside to film the results and put it on the web. Lori had carefully checked the grenade was a binary catalytic design, producing gas by combining two liquid ingredients rather than by burning - pink, vomit-stained politicians were good publicity for the m...
Tracklink Article - British tank armament in the Second World War This was originally published in Issue 109 (Autumn 2021) and Issue 111 (Spring 2022) of Tracklink, the magazine of the tank Museum. It had originally been planned to publish the second part in issue 110, but a production issue with the magazine prevented this, creating an unfortunate gap between the two parts. Both parts are included below British tank armament in the Second World War - Part 1 It is generally accepted that British tanks were inadequately armed for most of WW2. This initially seems strange, since the construction and tactical use of artillery was among the British Army's greatest strengths during the same period. The first part of this article will look at the 1940 and North Africa campaigns, while the second part will look at how British armour met the new challenges of North-west Europe. At the start of the war, the most common British tanks (almost 900 of the...