Organic Towns Month 3: Windemere Crossing

Slowly adjusting to the new job, so thinking I may be able to run a game again soon (I do NOT do well with change, which is an odd trait for a software developer!). And so we move to month 3 of our exploration of organic towns changing over time. At this point we have 78 Settlement Points to spend, and in looking at last month's progress, we have a couple of milestones.

First, our barracks is now completed and while costing us 10 SP/month we can now have real military units. Which are also expensive to keep, but with possible Orc attacks, and our Dwarven King Khermumi Axechest wanting to, well, not quite invade, but mine, the neighbor's mountain, a real military may be a good idea for this border trade town. And in looking back at my previous posts, I do not seem to have a consistency with the SP, though going with the spreadsheet should help a lot. Our guardhouse is also now complete, so Sheriff Sprigbasher can have a couple more guards beyond Deputy Newtonson. And gives us a -1 against crime as well as costing another 5SP.

Our townhall is halfway completed and will be ready for Burgermeister Hatheo to move into and convene town meetings next month.

We're going to build more houses, basically renovating some of the existing structures. Our population is growing - adding 13 people this month to bring us to 335 people living full-time in Windemere Crossing.

And I just noticed the gossip table. A town warden (one of the new hires) is planning to start a business with a shop keep's spouse in a basement. Hmm, so I'll need to generate a character for our warden, and either pick an existing  shop keeper or make a new one, and give them a spouse. And what sort of business? Rolling on the people table, well, hmm, squire does not work. Unless they want to start a squire's assistance business which seems unlikely. But a leather worker: okay, they want to start a leather working business. We do have a tannery outside of Windemere Crossing, Durdro's Tannery. Durdro is now married, and his wife and Bernice Lister are starting a fine tooling business where they can do stamping and fine leatherworking. Now to add that to my PDF!

For our morale roll, a bard has written a song about a settlement hero which is now popular in the taverns. Another first time guard, Grace Carver, managed to break up a major fight by herself in one of the alleys in town. Though she swears it was all entirely accidental, the song has been embellished quite a bit and while the 1st version had 2 verses, it is up to 5 by the time the players will show up. And asking ChatGPT for a bard's song about Grace Carver:

Here is a song I wrote for you. I hope you like it. 🎵

Grace Carver was a hero brave and bold

She fought with skill and courage untold

She faced the dragon in its lair of gold

And saved the kingdom from its fiery hold

Grace Carver had a heart of purest light

She helped the weak and stood for what was right

She healed the wounded with her magic might

And sang the songs of hope throughout the night

Grace Carver was a legend in her time

She inspired many with her deeds sublime

She traveled far and wide in every clime

And left behind a legacy divine

Grace Carver was a hero brave and bold

She lived a life of honor and of gold

She died a peaceful death when she was old

And now her story will forever be told

Huh, well that will work! And really embellished from stopping two teenagers from fighting!

No crimes again this month - the guards are paying off!

Our building roll is at the workshop: sadly contaminated ores cost us 5SP this month.

We're building out a military (the town guards, two of which are mentioned above, are built into the cost of the guardhouse. We are upgrading our militia to add spearmen at a cost of 10SP/month, increasing our defense and attack values. We could add archers as we do have a level II wall which would really increase our defense value. 

We're going to start updating the gates as well. Those are expensive and will cost us 50 (+5!) SP which takes us close to the end of our SP to spend. 

Quick summary:

• a bard has written a song about Grace Carver, town guard
• no noticeable crimes
• a contaminated ore delivery cost us more to build our first heavier duty gate (the western gate).
• the new gate will be completed in 2 months
• town hall will be complete next month
• the barracks is complete
• we've uptrained our militia to a squad of spearmen. I'll have to outline that in another post
• we've added 13 people to Windemere, our squad of spearmen and 2 new town guards fits within our 13 new people.
• more house renovation for the new people, though we actually do have a housing surplus. 

And now to update my spreadsheet, and see what sort of AI pictures we can get for a new city gate:

Think I liked this one of the 4 it generated. 

A Fate Game: Rocket Rangers and Saturday Gaming

One of our regular players is out for a few weeks, so we switched gears for a short pick-up style game and are in the middle of a Fate-based game, Starblazers. The referee made a nice timeline for us and it is very much pulp inspired. I wish we could use the 2 technical manuals I have that would work: the International Rescue (aka Thunderbirds) and the Dan Dare book both have a lot of things that would work in this game. And really strange - apparently that Thunderbird book is hard to find now. A few more years and I may be able to retire if I sell it! Assuming you can actually find someone willing to actually pay that much.

Anyway, I used an AI to draw some older pulp SF characters, and this one spoke to me:

He's an older Ranger, never commissioned. His parents were diplomats on Mars which is Russian-controlled. He spent his childhood out in the red rocky canyons and got to know the Martians. Joined the Rangers when he was 16 by lying about his age. He met the other player's character in the siege of Albraster II, when after-action they got drunk and ended up in the same cell. 

A bit of a country boy, he is a crack pilot. Which really worked out well in our first night's game. As I roll really badly generally, I maxed out that pilot skill. We had some good dog-fighting out past the Kuiper Belt with some aliens on our way to rescue the passenger ship Pollux. Between my piloting and Captain Willywhistle's gunnery we managed to shut that downright quickly, then a similar battle against the pirates attacking the passenger liner. 

It was a lot of fun, though I think it could have been even more fun at a table. I'm using one of the 0-Hr retro ships as our Space Ranger ship:

And I had enough smaller shuttles that could work as the fighters. And as per the heisting of the Xuan Wu I have a luxury liner or two that would have worked for our boarding actions. However, we're doing this over Discord and so far, it has been all theater of the mind.

It has been a blast. Interestingly enough, when asked what we wanted to do and pulp SF was picked, I did ask ChatGPT for a good plotline. This is what it gave us (and yes, Lana is our technical & comms person):

World: Zalaxia, a planet in the Andromeda galaxy, where humans have colonized several cities and outposts. The planet is rich in minerals and exotic life forms, but also dangerous and unpredictable. The native Zalaxians are a reptilian race that resent the human intrusion and often raid the human settlements. The planet is also plagued by cosmic storms that disrupt communication and navigation.

Mission: Two space rangers, Rex Starfire and Lana Solaris, are sent to Zalaxia to investigate a distress signal from a mining outpost. They discover that the outpost has been attacked by a giant worm-like creature that burrows underground and devours anything in its path. They must find a way to stop the creature before it reaches the nearest city and causes more destruction.

Possible plot: Rex and Lana arrive at the outpost and find it deserted, except for a few survivors who tell them about the creature. They follow its trail and encounter several obstacles along the way, such as hostile Zalaxians, cosmic storms, and mechanical malfunctions. They eventually catch up with the creature and use their weapons and gadgets to fight it off. They discover that the creature is actually a bio-engineered weapon created by a rogue scientist who wants to wipe out the human presence on Zalaxia. They manage to destroy the creature and its control device, but not before the scientist escapes in a spaceship. Rex and Lana report their findings to their superiors and vow to track down the scientist and bring him to justice.

Interestingly, over on COTI CyborgPrime is playing a ChatGPT-refereed game and it seems to be going really well, though I've not really followed along, While the whole AI thing is changing a lot of things in some ways, it can be a useful tool. Until the T-1000 comes along I suppose!

Anyway - we are using our toys for our Saturday games where we do meet in person every other week or so. Last time we started a random dungeon crawl using the Tiny D6 RPG system, and we're rolling up the dungeon as we go along. A no-stress RPG game. I decided to play a bear character, and a roll of the dice and she was a female Kahru. Her name is Ursa Major, so she is a star to me! Pretty much a barbarian bear though there are no classes in this game from what I can tell. But I picked tough, strong and berserker as traits and if that does not scream barbarian fighter I don't know what does. Oddly enough another player picked a tree person, and I am really trying not to have Ursa start scratching her back against him!

We used the minis at hand, but I am painting a bear now that will work (though it is a bear without a 2-handed sword, but the only bear I think I have. Unless there is one somewhere in those Bones boxes that I've not gone through yet. In 2 years or more...) And yes, that is a little lizard guy perched up on the tree character. Not too string and he is our healer. It too is a lot of fun.

And there is a finally - I am slowly getting adjusted to the new work. It helps that I have 2 work from home days. So I am hoping that I can run the OSE game after we get to a good stopping point in the Delve game (of which we're on that short Fate hiatus while one player is out of touch for a few weeks). So expect some more OSE game prep. And I do need to get the next month for the town stuff, see how Windemere Crossing is faring.

Traveller World Explainer - Phase 1 Complete!

It now handles the classic Traveller basic world explainer. And I've got a single installer now that at least works on my machine...

The installer can be found here on my OneDrive. If anyone tries it, please let me know if it actually works for you as well! What I was hoping was that the text files it uses would be available, but in checking out the installed software (in the .App hidden directory in your local user directory, then poke around) it is not available.

I have a few choices to make with this software. I may add an option to create a random world as that seems pretty popular and now that I've made the validation process an internal service, I can verify that the world is at least technically correct.

I can also add an option to use the TravellerMap API so you can search there. Last time I did this it was a two step process: first I load all the sectors the Traveller map has, then you choose the sector, then I load the systems for that sector for you to choose. If I go this route (and I know I will eventually) I'll have to add SQLite back to the software so I can locally cache that data. Meaning you need to be online for the initial loads, but after that, if I have the data stored locally, I don't need to hit up that wonderful API.

Other choices include expanding this out to use other versions: it is fairly modular the way I built it, so it should not be difficult to add Mongoose & T5 rules in there.

And finally...even though I swore I'd never get another Mongoose book again (while I liked 1e, 2e seems to be going all Judge Dread and things that just are not Traveller to me. As well as the last few books I bought from them just fell apart after reading only a couple of times) they are redoing the world book from Megatraveller DTG. As I only have the Grand Census part of that, I'll probably go ahead & get that book as I do love me some world building! If I go that route, I could add the extended world building in there.

Dang, and I could generate the animal encounter tables. Slowly start doing what Heaven&Earth did (and I still use!) But with public source code so that anyone can use it, fork it, whatever. 

Anyways - let me know where you would like this to go next, and if you install it, if it actually works!

And another finally: starting to review the .Net code at work. And sadly, currently way above me as I am a very small-scale developer. But it is pretty clean code, just heavily abstracted, but following a lot of the MS best practices. So, as I learn from that, hopefully I can apply some of that, if applicable, here.

Snapshot - Attack on Xuan Wu

Normally we play skirmish games every other Saturday, sometimes board games. As it got cancelled this weekend, and I had thought to bring Traveller Snapshot, I decided to try & play by myself.

First, I had to refresh myself with the rules, which are not really that complicated. And basically an extension of the Classic Traveller rules. And it really harkens back to THACO: there is a matrix of weapons, ranges and armor letting you know what you need to hit:

And it is interesting in that some weapons can be automatic hits - the VRF Gauss Rifle does both a lot of damage and at most ranges you find in a starship, can't miss. Not sure how well the hull will hold up though! Except that personal weapons, even fairly high-powered ones, are not going to damage a starship hull.

Once I familiarized myself with the rules, I decided a small ships troop complement of 5 soldiers in cloth armor were on board. A small 6-person group was going to break in via the cargo bay and try & take over the bridge to steal the ship. I ended up using a spreadsheet to keep track of everyone. And still got confused!

Then the assault began! I picked a deck plan I've not used yet from 0-Hour, and a convenient piece of cardboard is big enough to hold the two posters so I can have the whole set up on a table.

Turn 1, the invaders are in the cargo bay, and the troops are alerted and start getting ready from their bunk room.

Turn 2: the invaders exit the cargo bay. One very speedy person (21 action points so they have a lot of options!) actually gets to the bridge level, to be met by the locked doors. The troopers, knowing that the central drop shaft is covered by the invaders, use a forward access point to get to the main level from the lower decks.

Turn 3 is where a lot of action took place! Our intrepid invader actually rolled a 12 and managed to get past the bridge security system (in hindsight I should have established the goal a bit better, but ad libbed the roll a 12 to get past security and dang if I did not do that the 1st roll! Invader #2 moves and shoots at a trooper who thought he was behind a bulkhead, and gets wounded. Trooper 3 moves and gets off 2 quick shots (-2 DM) and wounds invader 1. Who turns around to shoot at short range and somehow misses. Trooper 4 attacks invader 4, and as the laser rifle does 5D damage, hits him and takes attacker 4 out of the picture. Attacker 2 makes 2 quick shots against trooper 5 and wounds him but does not take him out. Attacker 6 takes an aimed shot at trooper 2 and hits, taking him out of the action. Finally, trooper 1 attacks invader #6 and automatically hits.

Turn 4: Attacker 3 does not get past the 2nd lock, and attacker 2, armed with a light machine gun, takes out troopers 1 and 2. Trooper 3 has 3 quick attacks (4AP each though that -2) and all hit attacker 1, taking him out of the picture. Turn 3 I think I also messed up, as it was complicated keeping this all straight even with notes.

Turn 5: A3 gets through and is on the bridge. The last trooper, 4, moves back to the forward access ladder, knowing he can't get to the main drop shaft. The remaining 2 invaders move up to the bridge, and one is guarding the forward access ladder, and kills off the trooper in the next turn.

In summary, Snapshot is a really deadly game! The to hit matrix is definitely a throwback to wargaming days, and the fact that armor just adjusts the odds of getting hit rather than a damage soaker is one of the things that always bothered me in Classic Traveller. Why I moved to incorporating some of the Striker rules and the newer version of the basic 8+ to hit. But it is the classic way! Plus I got to use one of my spaceship maps! And may use this scenario if I ever run a Traveller game: the luxury liner Xuan Wu was hijacked at the port! The B&W images for the decks can be found on this page over at 0-hour.

It would be less confusing if I were not handling 11 characters. If we play this on our skirmish days, I'd recommend no more than 3 characters each.

Mixing and matching systems

While working on yet another Traveller software project, my World Explainer (which, to be honest, should hopefully evolve into a full trade program but going to start small and build up) I made a small architectural change today. I pulled the explanation part out of the main program and created a service to do all that work.

Why? Because long-term I want to support more than just the classic Traveller, and the theory is that we can pass in not only the world to explain, but also the Traveller version. This makes that service independent of the rest of the software, or loosely-coupled in the software world. Which got me to thinking again (and pretty sure I've expounded about this at least once before) about mixing and matching in games, especially RPGs.  

Unlike traditional games which have a fairly hard-coded sense of rules, RPGs allow a great deal more flexibility which is both a great thing and a complicated thing that can be confusing. Of course, we're talking about homebrew rules here as well, as I doubt any RPG is run 100% on the rules (especially when the rules are confusing and can be interpreted in more than one way, as witness far too many rather heated discussions on various boards such as COTI). Anyway, Traveller, and its open gaming clone of various Cepheus games, have a lot of interoperability. You can run Classic Traveller games using Classic, Mongoose and Cepheus pretty much as-is. They are based on the Classic rules with some tweaking. 

The rules are just the "shared source code" so to speak that everyone starts with: we all need to have the basic shared starting point in order to play games. But then things can diverge from the RAW (Rules As Written) into things that work at your gaming table. And as long as everyone agrees with the changes, all is good. 

Other games systems are similar. I also run OSE which is of course 100% compatible with all the original D&D and AD&D games: I could take any of those early modules and use them pretty much as-is. The other major RPG I run (and when lucky get to play), The Fantasy Trip, requires a bit of work to translate other games to its rules, but in theory, old-school games would mostly work with just some basic changes to adjust stats and things like that. If you've read my blog, you can see how I translate things, which is pretty much strength equals strength, intelligence equals intelligence and dexterity equals dexterity. Things diverge for higher-level characters as most systems don't use strength as the hit points (though Traveller of course sort of does, distributing the damage across the 3 physical stats. At least one of the Cepheus games uses that as the starting point but tracks hit points as its own thing. It just does not "feel" like Traveller doing that to me!). But where the interoperability breaks is in the details: magic in TFT is a LOT different than the D&D/OSR game systems, at least for the magic users. Magic items work pretty much the same, but the actual practice of magic in TFT wears you down unless you have a staff with manna or a few powerstones. Interestingly, the game I'm playing right now is Delve but modified a bit. It's magic is sort of a cross between OSR & TFT: you can cast any spell you know but it takes magic points and you will run out. And the way the GM is running it, if you run out bad things can happen to you. Which is also a mechanic shared in a lot of games but it is always fun: things that have no cost or real threat just are not as much fun for me. And while I've not really played 5th edition, from what I've read they've really nerfed that so that everything should be balanced and the threat of character death is greatly diminished. Also why I don't like playing high-level games all that much. I'd rather a risk I can relate to rather than a risk at a less personal level. If that makes any sense. And now I need to see if I ever posted about my preference for low-level characters and games. Which for me Traveller really is: a gun will kill you possibly in a single shot no matter who you are. While you can of course get power combat armor, it is not something you wear walking around normally. Guess I am not a power player (and probably is because I am the same in real life: I really don't want to be in charge of a lot of things, yet sometimes I am and it is not a comfortable fit for me). 

Anyway, this also applies to software: we should be able to mix things up and use the best tools for the job. Just like the old adage, for a person with only a hammer, all problems look like nails, the same applies in software and gaming. If you only know 1 game system, everything you play is seen through that singular lens. Software development is similar: you don't know what you don't know. But you can leave things extendable or flexible enough to handle future updates.

And I've really drifted away from the gaming notes. And pretty sure this is a repeat of an earlier post from years ago. Sometimes I do wonder why I write these...

Ahh, but going back to games and one of the first things mentioned here: loosely coupled. I've never played GURPS but that was designed to be a universal game system (and it is in the actual name: Generic Universal Role Playing System). Like a lot of universal systems, it is a jack of all trades. And like a lot of programming systems (Java, .Net, heck, even javascript) it can do a LOT of things. But sometimes you want a system that is built specifically for the thing you are trying to do, or the game you want to play. GURPS is a loosely-coupled system that can play any genre. In theory, Traveller is as well (heck there is at least 1 fantasy game built on the Cepheus engine  (Sword of Cepheus). But if want to play a Star Trek game, the actual ST RPG by Modiphius would be a better choice as its system is built specifically for that IP. 

Anyway, just another Sunday blog, and welcome to June.

I've also figured out the testing part in .NET and started adding tests to my world explainer. Took a bit as I switched targets somewhere along the way, and the test suite needs to match targets. In this case. .NET 7. And I remember writing code in .NET 1.0. Times have changed! 

I am working on the trade codes next, and then may see if (1) anyone is really interested in it over on the COTI boards or here, and (2) if they would like an Android version (and if so, I'll need to see about getting permission to publish this from Marc Miller). It would be free of course. 

If anyone here wants to run it, I *think* I can package this as a single .exe for Windows at least. And the source code is of course available in my Github repo so in theory you could download & run it yourself. If you want to do that and need help, also let me know & I can write a tutorial here for doing that. You will need 2 things: a free Github account (and not even sure you need that!), and Visual Studio (there may be other options but for me that is both free, and as per this post, designed for editing & compiling .NET programs!)