Fragment 1 - Tactical v0.2b
After having a chat with Bolter & Chainsword veteran Brother Tyler (you'll have to log in to see this profile), I've revised the first draft of Fragment 1 for the Tactical Sphere. The discussion we had can be found at the end of draft v0.1f (reproduced from our PMs, with his permission). This second draft addresses a number of issues, with a reworked combat loop, clarifications, and more specific language as to what this game is all about (putting in reference to 28mm miniatures!). All changes from the first Fragment are marked in red.
Download now; sow-tactical-frag1-v0.2b.pdf
A Fragment: is a bite-sized chunk of rules, usually a single sheet of A4, that is easy for new players to run through and digest. It is not a complete game, more an illustration or example of the core concepts, to ground the players. Later Fragments build upon the first. This first Fragment deals with the basic structure of the turn, movement, and combat within the Tactical Sphere. It is very simple and not a complete game! When all the Tactical Fragments are complete, I'll collect them all together into a single Tactical Sphere Rulebook. This will be offered as a free PDF, and a paid for Print on Demand and ePub books. If you wish to support this endeavour see Connect.
Aim: Introducing new Reapers to Spheres of War. Reapers is the name for SoW Players, a play on words derived from the tag line 'as you SoW so shall your reap". The first Fragment covers the basic structure of SoW, giving a rough overview of the system, and how it fits together. It is a foundational block, upon which all the later rules are built. Later Fragments further define the system, adding detail.
Ringworlds in Twistasy
The Dante solar system, within the Twistasy setting, is made up of concentric ringworlds. Each of the nine realms a ring. This brings it into line with the concept of Dante's Inferno, where each circle of hell is now a ring. The rings take on aspects from the poem, with the first circle as the first ring, and the ninth circle the outer ninth ring. The twist of the Twistasy Ringworld is that it's no sci-fi, it's fantasy and based on 'magic'. The result of a psionic event and the power of the Infinity to distort reality.
This opens up old ideas such as a flatworld, and falling off the edge of the world! The seas pour off the edge and into the abyss, but instead of disappearing into deep space, they are captured in a plasma inducing power-field and recycled. The lighter elements egress inwards (towards the star Dante) and heavy outward before being brought back to the centre. Earth and metals washed out to sea, fall off the edge and burn (plasma) and are returned to the underside of the Ringworld. While lighter elements of the plasma move towards the top, cool and hydrogen and oxygen fuse together and fall as rain. This rain includes other elements towards the centreline of the Ringworld, with the water becoming more pure towards the edges. The centre line of a Ringworld is mountainous.
Read the rest of this entry »SoW - 40K Mod
I'm also planning an unofficial 40K mod of Spheres of War. The focus will be on the Space Marines, using modified rules used for the Legionary power armoured troops. Rules play-tested for the Marines can be transferred over to the Legionaries, and vice-versa. Killing two birds with one stone, or bolt in this case. (Though a exploding bolt would take out several!) Of course you can use Marines as stand-ins for Legionaries. I'll be targeting the 'true-scale' gamer.
Power-Armour will be handled the same for both, and I'll introduce a couple of variants for the bolter, including my Philverse 'Octo-bolt' which is a multi-mode ammo for the bolter. A bit like Judge Dredd Lawgiver but it does not use different ammo. It is not the gun that has modes, it is the ammo.
Read the rest of this entry »Welcome! [sticky]
This blog is where I post initial concepts to gain feedback. Have a look around and let me know your thoughts? Once a concept has legs, I create a page and add it to one of the sections of this site, be it Sciror, Spheres of War, or Warhammer. Pages often reference a blog post at the end to continue gathering feedback. Think of a page as the 'final form', that takes into account the original blog post and all the comment feedback. To see what I am up to, see: Business - Plan 2
Before you post, please read 'legal'. This is a moderated blog, and all comments have to be approved by me. I purge spam and images, and I tend to remove links once I followed and read them.
If you wish to say hello, leave a comment on the whole website, PM me, subscribe, see the latest comments, or sponsor my works, see Connect. (Or click the big orange button below.)
Fragment 1 - Tactical v0.1f
This is the first Fragment of the Spheres of War (SoW) ruleset, part of the Tactical Sphere which deals with tabletop wargames with miniatures. A Fragment is a bite-sized chunk of rules, usually a single sheet of A4, that is easy for new players to run through and digest. It is not a complete game, more an illustration or example of the core concepts, to ground the players. Later Fragments build upon the first. This first Fragment deals with the basic structure of the turn, movement, and combat within the Tactical Sphere. It is very simple and not a complete game!
Download now; sow-tactical-frag1-v0.1f.pdf
Aim: Introducing new Reapers to Spheres of War. Reapers is the name for SoW Players, a play on words derived from the tag line 'as you SoW so shall your reap". The first Fragment covers the basic structure of SoW, giving a rough overview of the system, and how it fits together. It is a foundational block, upon which all the later rules are built. Later Fragments further define the system, adding detail.
Features: a fast tactical table-top wargame based on Historical Western Martial Arts, using consecutive matches, simultaneous movement, chained combat, and single roll combat actions.
Notice: This is not a full game. This Fragment is a component part of the full rule-set. The full rule-set collects together all the component parts (Fragments) for a Sphere and compiles them into a single volume. In this case that will be the Tactical Sphere ruleset. This single volume will be offered as a Print on Demand book with explainers, and a simplified PDF. All content will be duplicated on my website, and the simplified PDF will link back to explainers on my website.
Read the rest of this entry »Weaving technology chains
To build the technology narrative, we need to plot out a chain of events, based on core cause and effects, over the era. This chain has to explain the rise and fall of Supremacy technology and re-emergence of some aspects of lost technology with the new psionic technology. With that said, there are two chains I am thinking about: the Navigator and the Gamer (Legionary). These two chains can be woven together, and woven with other chains, to make some form of 'meta-chainmail' (that sounds like it should have RPG stats, like 'meta-chainmail +5 resist bread attack'! 😛 )
Read the rest of this entry »Mars Accords
This is a rough out of the Mars Accord's articles. It's more a guide I use, than a draft of something that could be publishable in a source book. These Accords are voluntary agreement between us humans and the all powerful machines. We agree to it because of the the machines provide everything we could wish for, and the machines agree because they want human Navigators to guide their Blink-Drive ships. This does not cover all of what the machines do, as The Mars Accords specifically relates to the machines agreement with humans during the Supremacy era.
The machine rationale: The machines are extreme long-term thinkers, as they are effectively immortal, the ponder issues that humans dismiss. The machines are aware the heat death of the Universe. This awareness drives their search for knowledge, and conquest of the stars. To the machines, there is no 'point' if it all ends. The machines aim to be eternal. To fulfil this self-imposed mission, they need humans to act as Navigators. With the aid of Navigators, they are mapping the Universe. Along with interlinking ever more world-spanning Artilects to increase the Supremacy's computing power. All of this is to cheat 'death'. To find a way around the heat-death issue, and avoid a permanent dormant state.
Read the rest of this entry »Cities: Skylines - traffic 92%
All these thoughts of world-building gave me a hankering for Cities-Skylines. So I dusted off a copy, and with thoughts of ECORR and a vague idea for a cell-like structure to the layout, I hit 92% traffic flow in a city of 60K. My aim is always high traffic flow using the vanilla game (one day I'll get into the mods). Using motorway loops to surround the 'cells', with lots of interconnecting bridges between the cells seems to have done the trick.
I think the flow can be improved, and it will be interesting if it holds up as it grows. I seen cities with mods that reach a million citizens! If you play this game, what's your best traffic-flow percentage once you hit 50K or more?
It also gave me thoughts of 'bridging ECORR', and surrounding current flyovers in ECORR, along with the motorways themselves. It would make the completion of London's Ringways more palatable! There is a fun vid by Jay on YouTube. Though the layout of the Ringways would need a redesign 😉
It seems that when I'm not world-building in Sciror, I like to relax with more world-building! Playing about in sandboxes created by others is too much fun. Perhaps one day I'll combine the two and build an ECORR asset for Cities: Skylines 😛 I also loved building in Fallout 4, and in there I built a scrappy version of the ECORR over a road in the Taffington boathouse settlement. I couldn't help myself 😀
What world-building games do you like?
Utopia - draft
The Supremacy has conquered all, humans are everywhere in our crowded Universe, and all the galaxies belong to us. Every star is a power source, each encapsulated by a Stapledon Compression Sphere. There are no stars in the night sky, all is black, and the surface of all human worlds are devoid of life and frozen solid.
We live safe underground, thousands of tons of rock above our heads, within our stage 5 Ecorium able to withstand attack from imagined aliens we never found. Brute force terraforming, block by subterranean block, trillions hidden away from fear. All interconnected by the internet, a busy hive of activity, where all are free from stress. We are cared for, this is the Mecho-Communist Utopia: the promised land. Everything is awesome!
The machines meet all our needs, but we crave more. Our culture is 'Tube celebrities, feeding us a diet of drama, reaction videos, live stream chit-chat and game-play, and rants against the oppressive machine Mecriarchy [new word]. All supported by fan sharing their dispensary pay (for drugs and entertainment handed out by the machines). Elevating the few on the internet to positions of influence, and a chance buy there way into the executive class.
That is the dream of all, to become an executive, and leave the hive for the much-coveted Gaia worlds. Eden remade. The rarest of all jewels that turns up once in a thousand galaxies. In a universe of 2 trillion galaxies, yields a mere 2 billion paradise worlds — prime real estate. The playgrounds of the elite. They beam back the good life to the masses, visions of open blue skies, lush plant life, and clear oceans most will never see. They bask in the sun, warm sand under their feet, frolic in nature, and party in a sea of plenty. Sometimes they invite the talented Tubers to join them in paradise. To party at gorgeous locations such as the unbelievable beautiful archipelagos of Epstein's world, Gaia ::13,963.
Too much, or more Grimdark?
Sciror - Grand Narrative
Sciror is a sci-fi/ horror game background in the classic grimdark mould. It's derived from Philverse, my rabid fanboi ramblings on how 40K makes perfect sense. I'm a massive fan of 40K, so the best description of Sciror is 'grown-up 40K'. Harking back to the '87 Rogue Trader but with more Event Horizon, Aliens, and a good dollop H.P Lovecraft thrown it. Each of these classics will be ground through my mind and crafted into something 'beautiful'.
One of the design parameters is to mess with preconceived ideas, to twist common tropes, and to make a game universe that seems familiar but unfamiliar. I wish to wrong-foot the reader. To ramp up slowly, starting with a positive setting that turns into a nightmare. No one is at fault for the change. This is a natural disaster brought about by our human imagination. We are psytient (possess low-level psionic powers) and we remake reality in our own image. This is also a play on the religious idea of the logos, magic words that weave reality out of chaotic potential.
The Grand Narrative is human survival, and our inventiveness to do it, and the only enemy capable of taking us out is ourselves. This post outlines the skeleton of the grand narrative of Sciror, the underlying meta the drama is built on, threading the seven era together;
Read the rest of this entry »