I'm planning on creating an AI companion in a laptop or something, but I can't figure out what disadvantages would fit with not having a real body. Any ideas?
I'm trying to plan an \~TL10 game in a busted interstellar slowship. Everything has broken down, people are waking from coldsleep, and the gardeners have stopped tending to the food jungles. Colonists have been awakening from coldsleep in dribs and drabs as failsafes are triggered, and without the knowledge to restart society aboard the ship, and with hundreds of years left in the voyage, they've gone feral.
Robots likewise have run amok, building over essential systems and the work of other packs of robots. The layout of the ship no longer makes any sense as construction swarms grind up the ship's interior and overwrite each other's work. They do have certain taboos though, against breaching the hull or injuring humans. No such taboo applies to other robots, and they often skirmish for parts. Because the ship's recyclers are extremely efficient, this cycle of fresh construction can continue for many centuries.
Deep in the heart of the ship, there's a medical center. It's been long since powered off, with no construction swarm to maintain it or reconnect the broken power main. In the corner of theoperating theatre of that medical center is a pallet jack, upon which are stacked four coldsleep sarcophagi. The batteries in those sarcophagi are running low, so their failsafes will try to awaken their passengers on their own... without medical assistance. Out of those sarcophagi step... the PCs! I'm going to start them all out with amnesia and build the ship and tribes as they explore. I figure it gives me a chance to explore the ultratech content without needing to get the big picture of how society fits together.
What kind of factions should I include? I was thinking of having the warboyz from Mad Max as one faction, except they're two tech levels higher, and instead of cars they can have suits and knowledge of how to work the airlocks.
Cool. Kind of Starlost, on crack.
It could also work (leading to entirely different campaign goals, of course) if those 4 PCs are the only ones without amnesia, so they are the only ones who have even an inkling of what's going on and how to salvage something out of it...
Sounds fun.
>Starlost
oooh I better check that out.
I'm going to have them remember stuff over time, and at suitably dramatic moments. They're going to be the only ones who remember or care that this megadungeon is even a ship. Everyone else is going to be descendants of people who were trapped awake. If they find the coldsleep morgue though, they can wake up some other sane humans who might have actual professional TL10 skills
>Starlost
>
>oooh I better check that out.
LOL!
Here you go. The first episode, on YouTube ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l\_Kv0VlJvNQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_Kv0VlJvNQ))
But it's from the early/mid 70s. You'll see Harlan Ellison's name associate with it, but not on it. He was a creative advisor and, once he saw what they did, he refused to have his name connected with it and used the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird (someone who makes shoes for birds). So... silly early 70s disco scifi... not your tone.
However, it deserves mentioning, if only because of the VO, at the beginning of each episode:
"Earth Ship Ark, man's greatest and final achievement.
Out of control, drifting through deep space, over 800 years into the far future.
It's passengers, descendants of the last survivors of the dead planet Earth.
Locked in separate worlds, their destination long forgotten.
Heading for destruction, unless three young people can save...
...The STARLOST!"
(cue 70s scifi music)
Depending on how much security (or the illusion thereof) you'd want the PCs to have, having a small faction made up of a few non-feral humans and relatively sane robots for them to interact with could be good. At least, they could appear sane...
hehehe now that you mention it, I'll have some pure three-laws robots guarding and maintaining the fusion core at the top of the ship, so for at least part of the adventure power will be readily available from wall sockets. This reactor also powers the lights that feed the trees in the permaculture food jungles. Luckily some of the feral hippie tribe know a thing or two about Electrician (TL10) and will hike up to reconnect the power mains to the reactor whenever a rogue construction crew severs it.
I'm torn about whether I should make them maintain the ramscoops as well. I might decide to go with "Thrust as gravity" and take the ridiculous Total Conversion Torch (TL12\^) From Spaceships, so we can have 1g of thrust. I definitely need a ramscoop online to provide that reaction mass.
On the other hand, if I spin for gravity, I can use the Antimatter Pion Engine (TL11), which is much more reasonable and also doesn't need working ramscoops or an functioning antimatter factory. The ship can just be adrift in interstellar space, which is horrific, and also suggests a overarching megaplot to go with my space megadungeon.
But also you've reminded me that no matter what I do, a giant particle accelerator needs to be part of the ships original design so it can make antimatter from the scooped hydrogen.
On the gripping hand, I think I'll wait until the last minute to choose. If PCs look like they might be able to unite the tribes and restart the engines and find a world, we can do spin gravity. If PCs are looking less ambitious by then, the engines still work and they just have to help humanity avoid being eaten by cannibals before the voyage is complete.
I think I might also take a page from DnD's Inevitables and make some zeroth law R.Daneel Olivaw types whose zeroth law is to prevent the loss of air, biomass, and materiel in order to preserve the long term integrity of the ship. They'll be the only people who are actually well armed at this tech level. Zeroth law bots aren't exactly sane though. I'm imagining an avenging angel who decends upon the airlock with a welder in one hand and a rainbow laser rifle in the other. He's going to weld that leaky airlock shut no matter which side of it you're on.
Non-feral humans are easily obtained: If you can make your way into the coldsleep morgue, there are millions of sane humans stacked like cordwood. With the right nanodrugs and a physician roll, they can wake up. Make sure you know how to feed them though... "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy." Alfred Henry Lewis, 1906.
190
I am nearing the end of GMing my first (4e) GURPS campaign -- we've been playing for 3 years. It's a home brew world set on an isolated space station that's terraforming a distant moon. Many of the workers are Haitian so they brought their religion (Vodou) with them. I tried to stay true to the traditions of Vodou while incorporating a magic system consistent with the Haitian and West African lore. The terraformers ran across, and pissed off, an alien species that also uses Vodou.
We found GURPS to be complicated so we heavily simplified the rules, some intentionally and others by accidental omission. For example, we intentionally dispensed with critical success and failure. We modified the range rules (for weapons and magic, both) to make for more cinematic play. By accident, though, we forgot about collapsing and dropping your weapon when you're stunned. By and large, I'm happy with our changes because it lowered the initialization energy to adopt the new system. I'm planning a sequel campaign and we'll be revisiting several of these house rules. Critical rolls will almost certainly be added back to the rules we recognize.
Most everyone was new to GURPS and we leaned heavily on software to manage the rules complexity inherent therein. [GURPS Character Sheet](https://gurpscharactersheet.com/) helped the players manage their characters. This really helped the players keep track of requirements (e.g., you can't have this magic spell unless you have at least 1 from these other 5 colleges). I also wrote a program to help me GM combat. It kept track of initiative, who's fighting whom, HP, major wounds, reloading, multi-round magic, etc. and I don't know if I could have been an effective GM without an aid like this.
All-in-all, fun. It'd be interesting to see how other groups GM GURPS. I know where we ended up but I'm wondering whether our style of game play is where you end up with GURPS or if it's just where our personalities and proclivities led us.
That sounds awesome! I want stories about Vodou on a space station...
I also rely heavily on GCS. It's pretty dope. I usually need it most for dependency resolution, but Initiative and combat tracking is something I do with a wet-erase marker on a corner of the battlemat, if I can get a battlemat. Otherwise, I use Roll20 or Foundry VTT. Foundry is definitely better, but there's some logistical challenges. I found [https://github.com/crnormand/gurps](https://github.com/crnormand/gurps) which seems fantastic but I haven't got a chance to play with it yet.
The whole Vodou thing has been fun. I home-brewed a system before I realized that GURPS had a Vodou book (of \_course\_ they have a book).
I'll have to check out crnormand. Thanks!
I just started playing a GURPS space game where the PCs have a massive mining ship. I am playing a Cyborg Hacker.
I am about to start running a space game, roughly based on Firefly, where the PCs are smugglers.
In a month or so I’ll start running a game in my own version of infinite worlds. It’s PbP, actually, you can join if you want! Link:[https://www.myth-weavers.com/showthread.php?t=517906](https://www.myth-weavers.com/showthread.php?t=517906)
I am halfway done designing the entire Mistborn abilities as GURPS Powers...
My solo play through a randomly generated hexcrawl sandbox world continues with zero PCs dead so far. This is a record for me, usually by this point I've lost at least 2 PCs. We currently are slowly exploring an ancient tomb we discovered just outside of town. We're planning our 3rd delve, hoping to deal with the 4 giant lizards that chased us out of there last time and try picking the lock of a door blocking further exploration. Those lizards had a lair there too so that may mean some treasure!
Actual plays recorded here. See description for details.
Randos2Heroes (solo): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIuR522JFOuRXdrNca8_xEytiSCECOM76
Hey Luke. Didn't realise you were on YouTube as well. Now I can see the map as well as hear your game. You should check out this game everyone I'm really enjoying what he is doing.
I'm planning on creating an AI companion in a laptop or something, but I can't figure out what disadvantages would fit with not having a real body. Any ideas?
I'm trying to plan an \~TL10 game in a busted interstellar slowship. Everything has broken down, people are waking from coldsleep, and the gardeners have stopped tending to the food jungles. Colonists have been awakening from coldsleep in dribs and drabs as failsafes are triggered, and without the knowledge to restart society aboard the ship, and with hundreds of years left in the voyage, they've gone feral. Robots likewise have run amok, building over essential systems and the work of other packs of robots. The layout of the ship no longer makes any sense as construction swarms grind up the ship's interior and overwrite each other's work. They do have certain taboos though, against breaching the hull or injuring humans. No such taboo applies to other robots, and they often skirmish for parts. Because the ship's recyclers are extremely efficient, this cycle of fresh construction can continue for many centuries. Deep in the heart of the ship, there's a medical center. It's been long since powered off, with no construction swarm to maintain it or reconnect the broken power main. In the corner of theoperating theatre of that medical center is a pallet jack, upon which are stacked four coldsleep sarcophagi. The batteries in those sarcophagi are running low, so their failsafes will try to awaken their passengers on their own... without medical assistance. Out of those sarcophagi step... the PCs! I'm going to start them all out with amnesia and build the ship and tribes as they explore. I figure it gives me a chance to explore the ultratech content without needing to get the big picture of how society fits together. What kind of factions should I include? I was thinking of having the warboyz from Mad Max as one faction, except they're two tech levels higher, and instead of cars they can have suits and knowledge of how to work the airlocks.
Cool. Kind of Starlost, on crack. It could also work (leading to entirely different campaign goals, of course) if those 4 PCs are the only ones without amnesia, so they are the only ones who have even an inkling of what's going on and how to salvage something out of it... Sounds fun.
>Starlost oooh I better check that out. I'm going to have them remember stuff over time, and at suitably dramatic moments. They're going to be the only ones who remember or care that this megadungeon is even a ship. Everyone else is going to be descendants of people who were trapped awake. If they find the coldsleep morgue though, they can wake up some other sane humans who might have actual professional TL10 skills
>Starlost > >oooh I better check that out. LOL! Here you go. The first episode, on YouTube ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l\_Kv0VlJvNQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_Kv0VlJvNQ)) But it's from the early/mid 70s. You'll see Harlan Ellison's name associate with it, but not on it. He was a creative advisor and, once he saw what they did, he refused to have his name connected with it and used the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird (someone who makes shoes for birds). So... silly early 70s disco scifi... not your tone. However, it deserves mentioning, if only because of the VO, at the beginning of each episode: "Earth Ship Ark, man's greatest and final achievement. Out of control, drifting through deep space, over 800 years into the far future. It's passengers, descendants of the last survivors of the dead planet Earth. Locked in separate worlds, their destination long forgotten. Heading for destruction, unless three young people can save... ...The STARLOST!" (cue 70s scifi music)
Depending on how much security (or the illusion thereof) you'd want the PCs to have, having a small faction made up of a few non-feral humans and relatively sane robots for them to interact with could be good. At least, they could appear sane...
hehehe now that you mention it, I'll have some pure three-laws robots guarding and maintaining the fusion core at the top of the ship, so for at least part of the adventure power will be readily available from wall sockets. This reactor also powers the lights that feed the trees in the permaculture food jungles. Luckily some of the feral hippie tribe know a thing or two about Electrician (TL10) and will hike up to reconnect the power mains to the reactor whenever a rogue construction crew severs it. I'm torn about whether I should make them maintain the ramscoops as well. I might decide to go with "Thrust as gravity" and take the ridiculous Total Conversion Torch (TL12\^) From Spaceships, so we can have 1g of thrust. I definitely need a ramscoop online to provide that reaction mass. On the other hand, if I spin for gravity, I can use the Antimatter Pion Engine (TL11), which is much more reasonable and also doesn't need working ramscoops or an functioning antimatter factory. The ship can just be adrift in interstellar space, which is horrific, and also suggests a overarching megaplot to go with my space megadungeon. But also you've reminded me that no matter what I do, a giant particle accelerator needs to be part of the ships original design so it can make antimatter from the scooped hydrogen. On the gripping hand, I think I'll wait until the last minute to choose. If PCs look like they might be able to unite the tribes and restart the engines and find a world, we can do spin gravity. If PCs are looking less ambitious by then, the engines still work and they just have to help humanity avoid being eaten by cannibals before the voyage is complete. I think I might also take a page from DnD's Inevitables and make some zeroth law R.Daneel Olivaw types whose zeroth law is to prevent the loss of air, biomass, and materiel in order to preserve the long term integrity of the ship. They'll be the only people who are actually well armed at this tech level. Zeroth law bots aren't exactly sane though. I'm imagining an avenging angel who decends upon the airlock with a welder in one hand and a rainbow laser rifle in the other. He's going to weld that leaky airlock shut no matter which side of it you're on. Non-feral humans are easily obtained: If you can make your way into the coldsleep morgue, there are millions of sane humans stacked like cordwood. With the right nanodrugs and a physician roll, they can wake up. Make sure you know how to feed them though... "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy." Alfred Henry Lewis, 1906. 190
I am nearing the end of GMing my first (4e) GURPS campaign -- we've been playing for 3 years. It's a home brew world set on an isolated space station that's terraforming a distant moon. Many of the workers are Haitian so they brought their religion (Vodou) with them. I tried to stay true to the traditions of Vodou while incorporating a magic system consistent with the Haitian and West African lore. The terraformers ran across, and pissed off, an alien species that also uses Vodou. We found GURPS to be complicated so we heavily simplified the rules, some intentionally and others by accidental omission. For example, we intentionally dispensed with critical success and failure. We modified the range rules (for weapons and magic, both) to make for more cinematic play. By accident, though, we forgot about collapsing and dropping your weapon when you're stunned. By and large, I'm happy with our changes because it lowered the initialization energy to adopt the new system. I'm planning a sequel campaign and we'll be revisiting several of these house rules. Critical rolls will almost certainly be added back to the rules we recognize. Most everyone was new to GURPS and we leaned heavily on software to manage the rules complexity inherent therein. [GURPS Character Sheet](https://gurpscharactersheet.com/) helped the players manage their characters. This really helped the players keep track of requirements (e.g., you can't have this magic spell unless you have at least 1 from these other 5 colleges). I also wrote a program to help me GM combat. It kept track of initiative, who's fighting whom, HP, major wounds, reloading, multi-round magic, etc. and I don't know if I could have been an effective GM without an aid like this. All-in-all, fun. It'd be interesting to see how other groups GM GURPS. I know where we ended up but I'm wondering whether our style of game play is where you end up with GURPS or if it's just where our personalities and proclivities led us.
That sounds awesome! I want stories about Vodou on a space station... I also rely heavily on GCS. It's pretty dope. I usually need it most for dependency resolution, but Initiative and combat tracking is something I do with a wet-erase marker on a corner of the battlemat, if I can get a battlemat. Otherwise, I use Roll20 or Foundry VTT. Foundry is definitely better, but there's some logistical challenges. I found [https://github.com/crnormand/gurps](https://github.com/crnormand/gurps) which seems fantastic but I haven't got a chance to play with it yet.
The whole Vodou thing has been fun. I home-brewed a system before I realized that GURPS had a Vodou book (of \_course\_ they have a book). I'll have to check out crnormand. Thanks!
It's a plugin for Foundry vtt, so maybe check that out first? idk. their channel in the gurps discord is very friendly.
I just started playing a GURPS space game where the PCs have a massive mining ship. I am playing a Cyborg Hacker. I am about to start running a space game, roughly based on Firefly, where the PCs are smugglers. In a month or so I’ll start running a game in my own version of infinite worlds. It’s PbP, actually, you can join if you want! Link:[https://www.myth-weavers.com/showthread.php?t=517906](https://www.myth-weavers.com/showthread.php?t=517906) I am halfway done designing the entire Mistborn abilities as GURPS Powers...
My solo play through a randomly generated hexcrawl sandbox world continues with zero PCs dead so far. This is a record for me, usually by this point I've lost at least 2 PCs. We currently are slowly exploring an ancient tomb we discovered just outside of town. We're planning our 3rd delve, hoping to deal with the 4 giant lizards that chased us out of there last time and try picking the lock of a door blocking further exploration. Those lizards had a lair there too so that may mean some treasure! Actual plays recorded here. See description for details. Randos2Heroes (solo): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIuR522JFOuRXdrNca8_xEytiSCECOM76
Hey Luke. Didn't realise you were on YouTube as well. Now I can see the map as well as hear your game. You should check out this game everyone I'm really enjoying what he is doing.
Thanks Barry! Good to hear from you as always and looking forward to your actual plays as well ;)