 May 13, 2011 - 6:33pm | Last summer, I ran some D&D for my 12-year old son and his friends. They had so much fun at my Tuesday games, that by the end of summer, my son was running his own 3.5 game, another boy was running a 4.0 game, and a third set up a Star Wars d20 game. That's 3 games each week, I was envious. About the time I announced that I had to hang it up (work-related), the youngest (10), asked if I could run something with pirates next. "Sure," I said, already thinking of Warriors of White Light. Over the school year, my son tried a little bit to keep the group together, but herding 12-year-olds isn't easy, and most have fallen away. My wife has been off & on running more 3.5 D&D for them on Sundays. That succeeded in bringing in a younger sister from down the street, I hope that she stays with gaming. {I was worried when the 11-year-old younger brother of one player gave her a lot of verbal static about being a girl, but she slapped him down before I intervened.} Tonight, I introduced my son to character generation in Savage Worlds, and he's got a Vrusk soldier all ready to go. We talked about inviting up to 6 more players, but I doubt we'll see them all each game. I'm enjoying both reading old SF and watching them play as an exercise in nostalgia. I've tried a lot to encourage gaming on their own, as well as with the grown-ups. I feel in my bones that they need to make a lot of their own mistakes, even if many might be mistakes that I have already learned from. {Encouraging female players, though, is something I think I'd like to encourage actively, having found years of bliss from marrying a fellow dice-geek.} I'm going to use Savage Worlds for rules, largely because that's what I've been running for an adult group, and because I think a simpler rules set will help them keep up their enthusiasm. I know, I know, back in the day we deciphered Star Frontiers and Gary Gygax's AD&D and many other games without adult involvement, but I really do think D&D 3.5 or 4e are a lot more to digest, and if they don't have the same amount of fire in the belly to read the rules, why, they'll just fall back on the Nintendo stuff, and I'm back to playing with only my adult friends. Anyway, I'm tarting up WoWL, hopefully with a little more plot between the boarding encounters, and a few things on the side. I'd like to encourage the "storytelling" aspect of RPG'ing a little bit. If we play once a week all summer, I am confident we might get through WoWL, and on to either Dramune Run or Volturnus, depending on how they take to the game and the Frontier. Summer break is in 3 weeks, I'll keep you posted. |
June 29, 2011 - 8:46am | Starting characters in an hour! We've had a late start to the summer routine, with vacations and Origins in the way. |
June 30, 2011 - 9:34am | Three PCs: 1 each Vrusk, Yazirian and human. They had a hard time with the smugglers in the first encounter, but finished with an hour left to go. Nothing else came to mind, so I threw the Marionette at them. That went rather easier, now that they began to grok SW rules. Now, to start injecting more color and flavor, while still serving up the action... |
 July 1, 2011 - 3:25pm | Did you use existing conversions or you own? |
July 3, 2011 - 6:08am | I'm using the conversion guide found here. |
July 6, 2011 - 7:56pm | Well, that went south pretty quickly. (Reminder: straight KH rules for space, Savage Worlds for PC action). I ran session #2 today, with only 2.5 boys present. My younger son insists on not playing games, but he hangs around a lot more these days. I had him roll dice for the NPCs sometimes. Here that had disastrous results. So, after realizing I wouldn't have a full team, I shifted gears to run the first half of the "Pirates of Planaron" section: the rescue of the freighter Prenglar Doll. The players teamed up to run the Osprey, and the watcher rolled for the pirate Raven. On the first shot, the Raven hit, and the Osprey missed. Roll was an electrical fire. The next turn, the fire caused hull damage. The third turn, this became a maneuvering critical, so that the Osprey had to turn starboard all the time, while frantically decelerating to lower the chance of a hull breach. The fire was put out, but as the poor Osprey finally coasted to a stop and thus ceased circling, her hull overstressed and fractured. Oops. So, I had them play out the frantic escape through the ripped-open crew deck while the atomic engines got ready to cook off. I hand-waved the detonation, though, as the only one to actually get far enough away to escape (by rule) was the NPC engineer in a workpod. All of that, and it was just over an hour into the game session. I assigned the shipwrecked survivors to Station Patrol duty (poor Lt. Tabbe is probably going through a Court of Inquiry, of course), and gave them the classic "alien monster loose on the concourse." That was a Slither, which they put down pretty quickly. "Let's do that again," say my audience, so, OK, here comes a Quickdeath! That took longer, even with me allowing them to use the PC of the boy who didn't show up to play as an NPC. Bullets, lasers and needlers won't get it, good thing someone had an electric sword, and the other had a whip to lower its Parry score. I had planned to let them have their own Assault Scout later on, but now it will seem more urgent that the Clarion RMs get those replacement ships! Meanwhile, next week, they will get to work on figuring out just WHO let loose those two Sathar monsters on the Station?! |
July 7, 2011 - 7:14am | I blame the Zoological Society of Greater Kid'kit. Their always importing monstrosities! I bet there is a hull scrapper around somewhere...  |
July 7, 2011 - 8:42am | LOL! I'll just dig out a dungeon and tell them it's a sector of the Station where the weird critters live! |
July 7, 2011 - 12:58pm | Check out Star Frontiersman Issue 13, page 19 - Hull Scrapers. Content of Star Frontiersman project Hull ScrapersBy [[Larry Moore]] Scrapers are translucent creatures with no apparent brain or organs. It looks and acts like a single prokaryotic cell. They come in many shapes and sizes; most resembling a 1.5 meter cube, rectangular, cylindrical shape or whatever they squeezed through in the last ten minutes (they retain their shape for a time before plumping out back into their natural shape).  They can dissolve any living organism quite hastily. Small creatures are dissolved in about 100 turns or 10 minutes. Only when a large creature, up to 75% of its mass, is engulfed the scraper stops to digest its meal, taking 200 turns or 20 minutes. After digesting a victim scrapers secrete a residue ball spitting it, (sounds like a pop) in a random direction up to 10 meters. The sticky ball adheres to almost anything.Scrapers are kept away from ships consumables by resonating sonic fields around the room. Due to the expense of sonic resonation inside a ships hull they are typically not installed in passenger or crew areas. Scrapers will attack the nearest creature, attempting to engulf it and is oblivious to ranged attacks not knowing where the source is coming from. For unknown reasons Dralasites have been known to be repulsive. Most are able to walk away with nothing more than minor acid burns. Since their feeding does not include electronics, plastics, rubbers or metal they are often used to clean the innards of ships, those hard-to-reach spots and hidden nooks. As mentioned above they leave balls of sticky droppings that mark their path. Biometric scanning devices are outrageously expensive, even for the wealthiest captain and it’s been near impossible to attach tracking devices, needles to say scrapers must be removed before flight lest the passengers and crew become food. Fortunately maintenance techs accidentally discovered a way to lure the creatures out. A mixture of Vruskian Bung-Beetle Cake, Dralasite Foglob Pudding, Human Escargot Sauce (with snail) and a sprinkle of Yazirian Ponjo Ale bring the beasties running. Well...if you call 10 meters per turn running.
Author’s Note: This creature was designed using the FrontierSpace™ Referee Creature Creation document.
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July 14, 2011 - 8:15am | I did read that, and forgot about them when yesterday's game rolled around. (It's become very hard for me to concentrate on prepping anymore. Is it age or lack of time or the Savage Worlds rules? Dunno.) We brought in a new player, and another couldn't make it. They checked out a derelict freighter inbound, that was owned by the same company as the containers that owned the last Quickdeath. What do you know, another one! Since the new player had a sonic sword, the fight went more quickly, but the QD sure couldn't roll well in zero-G. I was able to award bennies to the new guy, who took to leaping about to confuse the critter. Hiding in the galley of the freighter was a Dralasite Marshal, who dragooned them into his backup team when he went planetside to make arrests. Scene 2 was a rescue from a storm-tossed ocean-going freighter, from their aircar as they moved from downport to another city. Scene 3 was a SWAT-style raid on an apartment, which I threw together at the last minute. Note: I've been handing out XP far faster than either WWL or Savage Worlds recommends. I am doing this deliberately, so that I can get them skilled enough to be starship crew before I run out of summer. I want to do the Sathar fights and use the Planaron battle as a campaign finale. So they've been gaining 2 advances per session, rather than 1 per 2 sessions. Next game is loosely planned to be a raid on them by a mercenary hit team (actually, a hull-scraper let loose in their living quarters would be really fitting there!), and arrival of the new Scouts for the Marines. We had talked in the CRM forum about a summer holiday to celebrate the Guard and Marines, so I am throwing them all together. Opinions (to be echoed in the CRM forum): the Osprey was lost to pirate action, should Lt. Tabbe be relieved? Should Klast be promoted to be a new skipper? |
 July 14, 2011 - 11:58pm | Sounds like you have the campaign well in hand and dont sweat the handing out of more exp. The WoWL module was never really written to be a stand alone adventure but rather to support a campaign. BTW I like the rescue of a nautical ship from an air car idea. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
July 15, 2011 - 12:02pm | I cribbed the rescue from a stack of Traveller adventure seeds that I keep around. There were flying fish leaping at them to add to the dark & stormy night. |
July 26, 2011 - 1:21pm | Are you using mini's and props in your games OR abstracting each encounter? Of course my next question is POST SOME PICS! At least of the game area. :-) |
July 29, 2011 - 12:52pm | I had been using the counters from AD and the spaceport or ship maps from KH. My collection of minis does not extend to sci-fi or aliens. For this week's game, I sketched out a "haunted" house on my battlemat. I ruled that the crew were still grounded, and put them assisting a SL Ranger on the case of smugglers and pirates. He got kidnapped and tracked to a haunted house outside one of the cities. That led to a short firefight with two of the kidnappers, and I was surprised that the players let the bad guys get away. They let themselves be run out of the house after killing one of the gunmen, and went away to go get heavier weapons. That gave the bad guys time to escape. Next week, they'll try to break into a secret moonbase. I'm lazy, and hate to draw maps. I'm stealing this week's and next week's from old Top Secret modules. |
July 31, 2011 - 12:59pm | Top Secret is a good source to steal from. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
September 13, 2012 - 8:05pm | For whatever reason, I came back to this tonight, and realized I never put in the final installment. Here's what I can remember... I swiped the map and key from Top Secret's Rapidstrike! module (the secret island fortress, possibly the first-ever module I bought), just set it on a moonlet. It resembles a big concrete slab with a watchtower on top. The guys didn't really stealth at all, they just marched up to the front airlock and got shot from by the watchtower. That degenerated into a duel until one guy remembered that on a low-G moon, he could jump a lot, and as a Yazirian, he could get even farther, so he leapt up to the watchtower and chucked in grenades. The rest of the team followed him down and they blasted through the airlock, using incendiary grenades on the guard-control center below. Things rolled pretty rapidly until they got into the lower level of the complex, where they got pinned down by a machinegun (or heavy laser?) in the central hallway. One PC went down with grievous wounds, and the others couldn't prevent the key bad guys from getting into a shuttle and flying away. They did enjoy the game, but summer ended, and all went back to school. This summer (2012), I dragged them through another of my old-school RPG joys, Twilight:2000. |
