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erik
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Nexus

Post by erik »

So I've put together a post apocalyptic game with high tech and fantasy options using a d6 TN5 system similar to Arkham Horror. It's a parody of a well known setting where I try to do things straight, making it a gonzo setting where anything goes, but with a rules framework where things go smooth and players can have reasonable expectations for what they are capable of.

I am working on art for it, but have been progressing extremely slowly. Largely due to irritation with formatting and mediocre free art tools, I shelved my original concept of having most of the game written out on cards in a format similar to Arkham Horror (archetypes, spells, psy, equipment, weapons, armor, vehicles, etc.) and went with the conventional "all the rules are in the book".

Anywho, it's pretty much done except for tweaking and art. I wrote up a dozen or so vague adventure/mission outlines but I'll probably make that a separate release rather than pushing it into this file.

Newest version is HERE! [205 pgs, 7.4 Mb, 7/27/21]


Feedback much appreciated. There's likely things I missed, things I screwed up, and things I shouldn't even include. I feel like it probably needs better explanations for how things work since I'm my own editor.

I continue to fix typoes, polish words, and introduce new typoes. Every now and then I get a bug in my bonnet to introduce more material, or to tweak and nudge mechanics and language.

Major changes down the pipe will be new cover art, incorporating art throughout the book, a complete layout overhaul wherein pages have borders, and numbers, replace shoddy tables with beautiful tables, and a proper index/glossary at the back.

It remains to be seen whether I create a hyperlinked SRD before or after those changes occur to the PDF.

This spawned from a spontaneous decision in July 2015.
Last edited by erik on Wed Jul 28, 2021 3:17 am, edited 30 times in total.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Nexus
A good name for not-RIFTS. The choice of font is also pleasant. Everything's well organized and easy to read.

Typo under Journeyman, "Wanderjhare" should be Wanderjahre.

I'm also not able to ctrl+f the pdf, it seems to register as images instead of text.
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Post by erik »

Thanks.

Due to irritation with how LibreOffice does page formatting, I wound up creating the document piecemeal, having 13 different documents that I individually turned into PDFs and then merged. Apparently the merging process makes it lose the ability to search text. I'm working on this but my pdf-fu is weak.

I may need to just port the documents from our mac lappy to our windows lappy and see if I have better success on that platform.

Once I've got the Species and Foes section fleshed a bit more out and have the PDF text searchable I'll put up a new version on google docs. Typoes and errors will be fixed as well. I noticed I goofed on Encumbrance using "Heavy items" twice, and inconsistently capitalizing things Inconsiistent punctuation especially among tables is an artfiact of how I ported things over from unpolished tables from google spreadsheets. I'll be working on that. And I had under Lore "Encyclopedic Knowedge of the Encyclopedia"... I don't know if I was trying to be clever or was just tired, but I'm fixing that.

I'm testing out Justified alignment on the text blocks to see if that's more aesthetically pleasing.


The notion is that I will apply some border images, page numbers and art as things progress. The gaps at the bottom of each Archtype page are intended to have mini representations of each Archtype. Icons for the Psy Duration and Range's will go up on their conspicuous gaps as well.

Tables ultimately will be made to look prettier, probably with some highlighting to alternate row shading so I can get rid of unsightly border blocks. Like-a-dis
Image
Eyes getting blurry... succumbing to sleep. Still so much work to do, but I'm happy to have a proto-first draft of the corebook out.

[edit: oh and add a NexusSRD site onto my to-do list, wherein I hyperlink the shit out of it. Looks like lots of "nexus" domain names are available, so that's nice]
Last edited by erik on Tue Nov 03, 2015 6:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by RobbyPants »

I like the formatting. I'm a bit surprised to see it as both variable TN and pool-size.
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Post by erik »

It's kind of Blessed vs. standard rolls in Arkham Horror parlance. It seemed a better way to shift the curve between skilled and unskilled, and to make skills pretty significant. Otherwise I would have had to make skills like +3 or more dice or somesuch, and if I can reduce the number of dice required that's a good thing. As it stands some attacks are likely to be calling for 12 or so dice and that's a bunch already. Melee attacks will deal less dice than big ranged weapons, but more likely to score hits.

I considered using a Cursed equivalent for a penalty (hits only on 6's), but so far it hasn't felt right anywhere and instead I just use a dice pool penalty, again because less dice is nice. Maybe as an F-U for wounded instead of the current die penalty? That would incentivize against focused fire to add a level of strategery in combat... would make the area attack version of Induce Pain more potent.

I probably will add a 5-10 page MC guide, with rules for simplifying NPCs for combat, building encounters/adventures. Maybe a few quick tables of hooks/encounters for different areas: Arks, different wilderness regions, Flatlands*, frontier towns and mage towns (a subset of frontier towns).
*I need a different name for them, but not burbs... Outskirts, I suppose, dunno why that escaped me before.

I should probably add a table of specific toxins and also radiation levels. I only hand-waved at those in the Hazards table.
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Post by erik »

And now I've updated the pdf for download. PDF Text is now searchable thanks to a sweet online PDF merging tool which I heartily endorse, https://xodo.com/

• Formatting changes were the biggest time sink for this update. A couple files weren't set to the same margins and that drove me crazy. I changed text blocks from left-aligned to justified to get those nice solid blocks.
• I added the icons for Psy powers at the start of the Psy section (p57) that will ultimately show up when I have time to make cards. Fleshed out the Psy power entries for clarity on what successes yield.
• Also fleshed out Sneak vs. Aware at the start of Skills section to formalize the hide mechanic.
• Largest addition of text added was fluff blocks for the various species. Fixed a few typoes here and there as well. And oh my ghost, I misspelled Archetype egregiously (but consistently!). So, fixed that.
• Biggest rule change was changed wounded status to the notion in previous post.

Still haven't added toxins/radiation rules, nor the encounter building tables/blurbs. I'll be going through making terminology consistent, especially when describing thresholds. Ex: using "requires Magic 2 Threshold" or "requires Threshold 2 Magic" when "requires Magic [2]" will suffice. Also consistently capitalizing Things. I'll probably put an index at the back of the book listing all the capitalized game terms.

I'd like to expand sample goods on the Money page (p120) since I have some room to fill that page out more. Would kindly accept suggestions for some standard adventuring purchases that would be handy to have credit costs for.

I may do some drawings to insert. A lineup of armors would be fun. Only found one public domain so far that I'd use almost as-is. Bubble Suit armor:
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Post by corneliusphi »

This looks awesome. I can't really comment on the rules provided constructively, though I think they look great. Small setting quibble: I think you shouldn't have atlantis literally falling into the atlantic. I suspect that that would eject water at well over escape velocity, so the resulting 'waves' couldn't really be called tsunamis, which is what I think you actually want.
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Post by erik »

Thanks!

Ehhh, it's more like mega-tsunami where you get several hundred meter tall waves. I diddled around with numbers and it seems like the energy would be roughly equivalent to a dino-killer asteroid impact. Many times the mass, but much slower (velocity starting from zero at sea level). It could be the number crunching or sources on estimates of the height of waves weren't accurate, but it seems close enough that I can stomach it.

And hey, if things wade beyond implausible and on into a bit stupid, I'm comfortable with that. =-D
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Post by OgreBattle »

This website has 1950's sci fi public domain artwork:
http://public-domain.zorger.com/

Here's some public domain space colony artwork from the 70's:
http://publicdomainreview.org/collectio ... the-1970s/

Deviantart has a 'creative commons' tag:
http://creative-commons.deviantart.com/

There's also a lot of mythological stuff out there in the public domain for your monsters that come out of dimensional gates.
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Post by erik »

I've sniffed through Deviant art's cc a fair bit. I mostly like looking at the non-CC stuff for inspiration tho.

google will let you image search filtering by reuse/licensing
https://search.creativecommons.org/

This one was a good source in simply finding other CC sites to sniff through. It's rough because they're 99% not what I'm looking for, and the other 1% usually isn't quite there either, even if it is in the right neighborhood.


I'm banging out rough drafts on the couch for my armor lineup pics now. It's a good warmup exercise I reckon.

Enchanted Robe
Image

Armor Cloth
Image

Aesthetic notes:
- Light armors are mostly going to be skin suits and clothing. Usually with helmets. Stuff that people can use for every-day wear, maybe even put a big hoodie or coat over.
- Medium armors have more obvious plating, but more like Flak jackets. Things you could wear indoors but you'd look overdressed wearing it at the mall.
- Heavy armors are cumbersome affairs that you couldn't really wear to dinner.

I reckon with helmets being an important part of protective gear, shorter hair is going to be more popular. Or if you've got longer hair then expect to put it in a bun or something to slip on a helmet (some helmets may have a little extra space in back to accommodate this).

It's pointless having a helmet if you have a clear view to your face when lasers are a common weapon, so most helmets will either have mirrored face shields, or simply cover the face and use cameras to provide an internal display. That's cooler anyways since you can have a lot more variety of face plates than boring visors.

Clothing is typically comfortable and fitted since it has been fabbed just for the wearer, ranging from functionally simple to ostentatious. To capture a future fashion, I reckon I'll often go with more gender neutral clothes, robe, skort/long shirts, abaya, thobe, and such.

[edit: upsized the images, 240x240 was too small]
Last edited by erik on Sun Nov 08, 2015 5:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by erik »

So between doodles I've been running spellchecker, rereading and doing grammar edits/polishing the writing. I've also been expanding on stuff, especially spells. I added an illusion spell, water breathing, pocket conjuration, and dowsing. I'm sure there's some solid genre spells that I'm missing. My process right now is opening up the d20srd spells list and seeing if anything catches my eye that I've neglected.

My next update of the pdf will likely have some art inserts, an expanded spell list, many less typoes and grammatical errors, expanded toxin/disease/radiation rules. That's probably a week or two off though. Maybe I'll get a chunk of time to work on it over Thanksgiving weekend.
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Post by erik »

I was waiting to update until I had a few pages of art to throw in (armors, power armors, and weapons mostly), but I'm not satisfied with enough of my drawings to consider them finalized where I want to format them for book pages, and I've been sitting on the updated text pdfs for a while and figure I may as well put them out while I slowly toil on art.

I've got a pretty good idea of what I want weapons, armors, power armors and mechs to look like, with a folder of various drawings art for inspiration.

I promise that mech penis turrets and boob cannons will be kept to a minimum.

My process is mostly I update the pdf when I feel that the current version makes the previous one shamefully inadequate. Biggest update here is formatting to make it prettier, but I also expanded and tweaked things. Did a little more fluffing on archetypes and various species especially. Added radiation and toxin rules. Due to my work schedule, many of my additions are made late at night when I'm ready to pass out. Like now. And sometimes introduce as many typoe errors as I correct during a writing session. Ugh, I already noticed some in the Species and Foes section just now (Werefolk especially... and I used "prodigious" in describing two consecutive species. ugh). They'll be cleaned up in my next pass. Having tripe like that out in the wild will motivate me to do enough work to have a newer version sooner.

I didn't add the glossary or index at the end yet. That's copious busy work that I'll do when probably near the end, since page numbers can shift and I don't feel like tracking that kind of stuff obsessively yet.

I decided that adventure hooks, MC advice and sample towns will probably be the focus of my first expansion book along with maybe a little module. So on long term hold for those. I'm gonna hafta figure out how to make borders so that I can spruce up the trim, and maybe lay down page numbers on the actual pages.

I updated the latest googledoc download link in the first post.


[edit: okay, I yanked that link and replaced it with a new one where I fixed some egregious typoes and shitty writing because I couldn't stand them being in there for another second, let alone a whole 24 hours. I'm sure I have more grammatical and stylistic errs due to not having an editor, but I'm currently more concerned with things like "oh, I forgot to actually state formally what armor does mechanically" (actual thing I realized and added in this version).

To go into the changes of this version a bit more formally...
- added color, bolding, highlighting, especially on tables and headers. I think it makes it easier on the eyes, certainly less bland.
- gently tweaked many Archetypes adjusting skills and powers mostly, but a few got stat changes (mostly nerfing of the high health for Borgs and Robots since part of that justification was before I planned on having a damage capacity for armor)
- Mystics get Astral instead of Sensitive and have a third eye with uncontrolled See Aura
- added a Stealth special ability (kind of like a general skill proficiency, akin to Heightened Senses)
- codified the different types of mages better, and thus making a separate trait for becoming a Mage, rather than just becoming one by learning a spell.
- magic enchantments for armor
- added fluff/explanation on specific vehicle types
- added icons for combat ranges
- added radiation and toxin rules and tables
- added on locations (Outpost Cities, and expanded on many)
- refluffing of races (Beast Men are Tharks instead of Orcs, Elves and Dwarves are renamed as Alfar and Svartalfar, Psy Vampires are blue skinned, Changelings are renamed as Dopplegangers)
- added a few more mook examples

Things I want to add:
- Expository text for Special Abilities and Traits? Looking at it now, I just slapped that section on right after Psy, dumped a set of tables and moved on. Probably would be best to explain how they differ from Spells and Psy.
- When doing the above could include reminder note that PC Disadvantages can be bought off for 3 Heroism.
- picture spreads for armors, weapons, power armor, mechs to start with.
- improved layout software. At some point I'm going to use some superior tool to shitty LibreOffice and make it nicer with page numbers, subtle background splash, border doodlery, and improved tables so I don't have annoying ghost lines.
- further down the line... art spreads for locations, showing a few arks and skylines, wandering adventurers, some action shots
Last edited by erik on Mon Dec 21, 2015 4:57 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by koz »

How are you planning to license this, Erik? Will it be a Frank-style 'Do whatever you want with this' or something else? I ask because I might wanna build on this, but would like to release it under CC-BY-SA.
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Post by erik »

I had actually thought about the CC license issue, for a while I was waffling between public domain vs. CC-BY-SA, but I got to the point where I had created a blurb to insert... and then forgot about it when merging the 25 or so pdfs on xodo. The license was going on the cover page before I replaced the cover page with artsyness, and it was lost in the evolution.

Early on I wanted to make sure this was all original enough that I was on solid ground to license it (which I feel it now is), but for this upload it was an oversight that I forgot to put in a CC license.

I'll pull the current pdf and repopulate it with one having a license statement by the ToC and on credits page.

I was leaning towards public domain, but decided that if people want to build on it and have themselves get credited I'm okay with CC-BY-SA for the written stuff.

The art will be public domain once it is included. I'm appalled at the lack of decent sci-fi public domain art out there, so I'll try to contribute as much as I can. Once they're in a finalized state I'll upload my pics to various public domain image hosts I reckon.

I actually had it as CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0, but in retrospect I have no problem with people turning a dollar on this if they want to, so I'm game with not including NC. I reckon it's a good thing I forgot to fit a license in before you said something in light of that. If someone where to turn this into something they sold for real moneys I'd be happy even if I never saw a cent.

The fonts used are public domain and I will only be using my art which I'll list as public domain or scavenged public domain art so it should be covered there.

This is a rather longwinded way of saying you have my blessing to do whatcha want with it, and I'll formalize it tonight with a refreshed upload link.


[edit:
(oh, and I am a bit scurred to put my full name on it since there are litigious companies out there, and I could imagine an alternate reality where my life was made miserable by them. But I guess Frank has survived After Sundown being out for a couple years without incident, right?)

Aaaaand now it's up with a CC-BY-SA license. Enjoy and thanks for your interest.
Last edited by erik on Mon Dec 21, 2015 5:00 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by koz »

Thanks erik!
Everything I learned about DnD, I learned from Frank Trollman.
Kaelik wrote:You are so full of Strawmen that I can only assume you actually shit actual straw.
souran wrote:...uber, nerd-rage-inducing, minutia-devoted, pointless blithering shit.
Schwarzkopf wrote:The Den, your one-stop shop for in-depth analysis of Dungeons & Dragons and distressingly credible threats of oral rape.
DSM wrote:Apparently, The GM's Going To Punch You in Your Goddamned Face edition of D&D is getting more traction than I expected. Well, it beats playing 4th. Probably 5th, too.
Frank Trollman wrote:Giving someone a mouth full of cock is a standard action.
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Post by koz »

Do the gaps in the various Archetype descriptions mean 'nothing of this kind' or 'erik hasn't filled them in yet'?
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Kaelik wrote:You are so full of Strawmen that I can only assume you actually shit actual straw.
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Schwarzkopf wrote:The Den, your one-stop shop for in-depth analysis of Dungeons & Dragons and distressingly credible threats of oral rape.
DSM wrote:Apparently, The GM's Going To Punch You in Your Goddamned Face edition of D&D is getting more traction than I expected. Well, it beats playing 4th. Probably 5th, too.
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Post by erik »

Like the blank on Spells and Psy for Combat Borg and the like? It means nothing of this kind. At one point I had dashes on there, but I went through and made it blank where there's none to start with since it is possible to purchase them later.
Something omitted from archetypes that bugged me and I may include later is a starting credit allowance and/or a pack of standard starting goods for archetypes. While it is post apocalyptic, I don't know if I care to have players counting food rations and dirty laundry. I'm even on the fence for counting ammo. Could have ammo regenerate on energy weapons and get rid of the E-Clip economy.
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Post by koz »

erik wrote:Like the blank on Spells and Psy for Combat Borg and the like? It means nothing of this kind. At one point I had dashes on there, but I went through and made it blank where there's none to start with since it is possible to purchase them later.
Ah, ok. Thanks for clarifying that.
erik wrote:Something omitted from archetypes that bugged me and I may include later is a starting credit allowance and/or a pack of standard starting goods for archetypes. While it is post apocalyptic, I don't know if I care to have players counting food rations and dirty laundry. I'm even on the fence for counting ammo. Could have ammo regenerate on energy weapons and get rid of the E-Clip economy.
As someone who loathes DnD's micro-management aspects involving counting arrows, pitons etc. I fully support not counting ammo. At the same time, Nexus, like its cousin who shan't be named, does have a survival aspect to it, which kinda makes this sort of thing in-theme. I'm leaning towards 'no ammo, dirty laundry etc counting', but I can see why you're hesitant to remove it.
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Kaelik wrote:You are so full of Strawmen that I can only assume you actually shit actual straw.
souran wrote:...uber, nerd-rage-inducing, minutia-devoted, pointless blithering shit.
Schwarzkopf wrote:The Den, your one-stop shop for in-depth analysis of Dungeons & Dragons and distressingly credible threats of oral rape.
DSM wrote:Apparently, The GM's Going To Punch You in Your Goddamned Face edition of D&D is getting more traction than I expected. Well, it beats playing 4th. Probably 5th, too.
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Post by koz »

So, I've been doing some fluff expansion on the world of Nexus. One of the changes that my take on it will have is that I want the United Republic to be less 'RIFTS Coalition-like Nazis' and more 'MegaCity One'. You can blame my Judge Dredd binge lately, but that's what I'm going for in my take. I hope to have a link to that once I'm done reorganizing some of erik's materials and expanding some of the gaps. I also plan to make a nicely-laid-out, indexed and cross-linked PDF for everyone's enjoyment.
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Kaelik wrote:You are so full of Strawmen that I can only assume you actually shit actual straw.
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Schwarzkopf wrote:The Den, your one-stop shop for in-depth analysis of Dungeons & Dragons and distressingly credible threats of oral rape.
DSM wrote:Apparently, The GM's Going To Punch You in Your Goddamned Face edition of D&D is getting more traction than I expected. Well, it beats playing 4th. Probably 5th, too.
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Post by erik »

Something I probably didn't stress in fluff is that the Republic does *not* have a raging boner for illiteracy and ignorance. Their xenophobia isn't utterly unreasonable but their dictatorship is more like North Korea than Nazi Germany. Batshit crazy leader and plenty of propaganda.

All I know of judge dredd is from the two movies but they seem compatible. Name dropping Mega-City I as the shattered and submerged former east coast seems apt. I already have robocop's delta city/ocp, max headroom's network 23, terminator's cyberdyne, and Battlestar galactica's Graystone. MOAR references! Weyland-yutani was planned for future source book. They capture monsters for weaponization of course.

The arks weren't intended to all necessarily be sealed biomes but rather interconnected skyscrapers and complexes so you can get around on monorails and automated car highway tunnels as in iRobot movie. Something like this could totes fit in.

I look forward to seeing what you do with it.
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Post by koz »

erik wrote:Something I probably didn't stress in fluff is that the Republic does *not* have a raging boner for illiteracy and ignorance. Their xenophobia isn't utterly unreasonable but their dictatorship is more like North Korea than Nazi Germany. Batshit crazy leader and plenty of propaganda.
Thank Buddha for that - it's probably one of the daftest elements of the Coalition as described by K-Dawg in my opinion, as it just seems counter-productive for any even-vaguely-resembling-modern society.
erik wrote:All I know of judge dredd is from the two movies but they seem compatible. Name dropping Mega-City I as the shattered and submerged former east coast seems apt. I already have robocop's delta city/ocp, max headroom's network 23, terminator's cyberdyne, and Battlestar galactica's Graystone. MOAR references! Weyland-yutani was planned for future source book. They capture monsters for weaponization of course.
That was basically my angle. I know a bit more Dredd from reading some of the (more recent) comics, but I'm basically going for the idea that the Republic as being a reference to the absurdities of the US legal system and police brutality and untouchability that seems relevant these days or something. It seems to fit the bill, at least to me.
erik wrote:The arks weren't intended to all necessarily be sealed biomes but rather interconnected skyscrapers and complexes so you can get around on monorails and automated car highway tunnels as in iRobot movie. Something like this could totes fit in.
Yeah, I got that from the text actually, so that's pretty cool. I'm actually thinking about whether a nicer cover for Nexus would be a shot overlooking a ruined, overgrown large arcology-type building with a bunch of others around it (so, a ruined Ark), with some ragtag post-apoc adventurers on a ridge above it looking down at it. I have a few artists who I could (and would be willing to) commission to draw it, once I have a clearer idea in my head of what I want it to look like. My first thought was Ramon Lucha, but I dunno if he'd be OK with essentially painting a landscape with some interesting creatures on it, rather than just said creatures.
erik wrote:I look forward to seeing what you do with it.
I just hope it turns out interesting and I stay motivated enough to regularly work on it!
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Kaelik wrote:You are so full of Strawmen that I can only assume you actually shit actual straw.
souran wrote:...uber, nerd-rage-inducing, minutia-devoted, pointless blithering shit.
Schwarzkopf wrote:The Den, your one-stop shop for in-depth analysis of Dungeons & Dragons and distressingly credible threats of oral rape.
DSM wrote:Apparently, The GM's Going To Punch You in Your Goddamned Face edition of D&D is getting more traction than I expected. Well, it beats playing 4th. Probably 5th, too.
Frank Trollman wrote:Giving someone a mouth full of cock is a standard action.
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Post by OgreBattle »

koz wrote:that the Republic as being a reference to the absurdities of the US legal system and police brutality and untouchability that seems relevant these days or something.
For something topical you can have Ronald Rump as the Eternal President of the Republic.
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Post by koz »

OgreBattle wrote:
koz wrote:that the Republic as being a reference to the absurdities of the US legal system and police brutality and untouchability that seems relevant these days or something.
For something topical you can have Ronald Rump as the Eternal President of the Republic.
I prefer to have references be a bit less blunt than a train full of bricks coming at you at full speed with its lights on. Subtlety carries a much better message - to say nothing of the fact that I actually want my take on Nexus to take itself as least semi seriously.
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Meikle641
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Post by Meikle641 »

erik wrote:Like the blank on Spells and Psy for Combat Borg and the like? It means nothing of this kind. At one point I had dashes on there, but I went through and made it blank where there's none to start with since it is possible to purchase them later.
Something omitted from archetypes that bugged me and I may include later is a starting credit allowance and/or a pack of standard starting goods for archetypes. While it is post apocalyptic, I don't know if I care to have players counting food rations and dirty laundry. I'm even on the fence for counting ammo. Could have ammo regenerate on energy weapons and get rid of the E-Clip economy.
Have you considered something like this? It's what I've been doing for BIWA so far. No tracking individual arrows or whatever, but you do need to keep track of how many quivers/mags/packs of ammo you have.
- Ammo Rolls: Firearms are listed as having magazines, but this does not necessarily represent the number of actual bullets or projectiles, given one Attack might very well be a burst. In the first round of attacking, there is no need to roll unless Full Auto or certain spells are used. After each attack to see if you've run out of ammunition, roll 1d10 plus Magazine bonus, where a 10 or higher is a success. Single-shot weapons automatically fail ammo rolls with their -10 modifier. Going Full Auto gives a -4 mod on Ammo checks.
- Single Shot: Using a Single-Shot weapon is a Complex action and is ready to fire again at the end of the action. This weapon can be fired as a Simple action, but it must be reloaded afterwards with a Normal reload speed. A Single Shot weapon doesn't actually consume an ammunition reload unless the Ammo Roll fails, however.

- Recovering Ammunition: Thrown weapons like darts, spears, and javelins can be used and recovered without problems. Arrows and sling bullets that hit a target are destroyed, but there is a 25% chance of salvaging a reload of ammunition after a battle. Firearm ammunition is always expended when fired, but casings can be recovered and used as raw material for new rounds.
Typically the slower the weapon, the bigger ammo modifier it would have. So your break-action shotty would burn through way less ammo than some auto-loader like a Saiga.

Something similar could work for power on devices.
Last edited by Meikle641 on Wed Dec 30, 2015 7:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
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erik
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Post by erik »

koz wrote: I prefer to have references be a bit less blunt than a train full of bricks coming at you at full speed with its lights on. Subtlety carries a much better message - to say nothing of the fact that I actually want my take on Nexus to take itself as least semi seriously.
+1

I'm not wild about including Shaper-level goofiness, or parodies of real people. Anyway, you couldn't make a parody of Trump more ridiculous than the genuine article.



For ammo, recovering ammo doesn't make much sense with modern weapons. Ammo either is ruined after use (and the EM-propelled projectiles won't have casings), or if it is something strong enough to retain its form after penetrating armor (magic arrows and chainsaw boomerangs) then the projectile is recoverable. So no need to worry about recovery mechanics. They either is or they isn't.

About running out of ammo. I'm leaning towards not worrying about running out of ammo at all for most weapons by giving energy weapons tiny reactors that can generate a certain amount of charge on demand, and the economy would instead revolve around trade of these reactors rather than recharges. But I'd still have some projectile ammo that needs to be tracked one way or another.

Incidentally, I did write up a table for ammo reload costs to put in the Weapons section in my next update last week.

Anywho, I initially went with just 1:1 shots and ammo because that involved the least thought and mechanical solutions. There are some raelizm expectations lost by an ammo-check mechanic for low ammo weapons having a potential to have more shots than possible, but this counters the other side of that coin where people are wondering why they only can fire 1 shot in 10 seconds with 1:1 ammo tracking. I think having an ammo-check mechanic brings more positives to this game than it's negatives.

Given that, I'm tempted to use a mechanic inspired by your method, Meikle, but since I only use d6's for Nexus and modifiers in this game remove or add dice to the pool it would be tweaked to fit.

• Each weapon has a pile of D6's to roll when firing. Say 10 for a Heavy Rail Gun.
• Roll em and discard 1 die for each 1 rolled (so set aside the 1's and remember the remaining number for next round).
• Next round when firing roll the remaining pile of D6's and repeat. When all dice have been removed you're out of ammo and need to reload.
• If doing something that uses more ammo, say like spraying an area on auto, that would cost ammo dice.

I'll have to math it some to get the probabilities where I want em for the bell curve of how many rounds one can expect to fire before needing to reload. For now I'll just spitball it at 1 die per 6 shots. One of the oddities is that as you get less dice you remove them more slowly... so I'll be thinking on this one to make sure this is the mechanic I want.

I could make the rolls less swingy by making the dice go away on 1-2, or 1-3, but then I'd need more dice to simulate large ammo sources.

Some weapons would still be just tracked manually. Typically if they have less than 6 shots, like rocket launchers. You're firing 1 per round for them.

The more I think on this, the more I like shifting the economy to one where people trade currency based upon the ability to exchange for reactors, and not caring about ammo for energy weapons (or powered melee weapons!) and such. Wheeee, rewriting a few sections a bit to reflect moving from E-Cell to Fusion cores, I guess.



Oh, and something I wanted to mention for artifact weapons.
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They're not indestructible. So not like rune weapons from that other game. It always bugged me that if you have indestructible weapons then it suggests indestructible armor, which is mechanically problematic. I may revisit their prohibitive pricing to bring them more in line with armor enhancements. They're essentially melee weapons which also grant a spell ability.
Last edited by erik on Sun Mar 06, 2016 2:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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