The Revolution Will be Televised

Being a compendium of notes and stuff relating to using James Maliszewski’s Thousand Suns RPG to run games in the Mass Effect setting.

Species

All of these are cobbled together with information from the Mass Effect Wiki. Notable exceptions: Elcor, Volus, Hanar, Batarian, Vorcha, Geth, and Collectors—the majority of these species don’t appear in combat roles; those that do are solely antagonists (“What about Legion?” I’ll come to that if someone wants to play a Legion-analogue). And while Blasto the Hanar Spectre would be funny to play, we don’t have enough information to make playable decisions.

Notes: “Citadel Standard” is the English-equivalent that all aliens speak. All species have that as well as their own language. Humans should pick one language that matches their heritage.

Asari: A mono-gender race—distinctly feminine in appearance—the asari are known for their elegance, diplomacy, and biotic talent. Their millennia-long lifespan and unique physiology—allowing them to reproduce with a partner of any gender or species—give them a conservative but convivial attitude toward other races. The asari were instrumental in proposing and founding the Citadel Council, and have been at the heart of galactic society ever since.

Culture (Asari) 2, Empathy 1, Language (Asari) 2, Language (Citadel Standard) 2, Mental Contact 1, Presence +1, Curious, and 6 bonus points to spend.

Drell: The drell are a reptile-like race that were rescued from their dying homeworld by the hanar following first contact between the two. Since then, the drell have remained loyal to the hanar for their camaraderie and have fit comfortably into galactic civilization.

Culture (Drell) 2, Language (Citadel Standard) 2, Language (Drell) 2, Observe 1, Body +1, Humid Susceptibility, Eidetic Memory, and 7 bonus points to spend.

Human: Humans, from the planet Earth, are the newest sentient species of notable size to enter the galactic stage and are hands-down the most rapidly expanding and developing. They independently discovered a Prothean data cache on Mars in 2148, and the mass relay networks shortly thereafter.

Culture (Human) 2, Language (Citadel Standard) 2, Language (one human), and 10 bonus points to spend.

Krogan: Due to the brutality of their surroundings, natural selection has played a significant role in the evolution of the krogan. Unlike most species on the Citadel, krogan eyes are wide-set – on Earth this is distinctive of prey animals, but in this case it gives the krogan 240-degree vision, giving them greater visual acuity and awareness of approaching predators. Prior to the genophage, krogan could reproduce and mature at an astonishing rate.

Culture (Krogan) 1, Language (Citadel Standard) 2, Language (Krogan), Melee 0, Unarmed Combat 0, Body +2, Armor Restriction, Attack Bonus (+1), Natural Armor (AV 4), Ultra Immune System, and 4 bonus points to spend.

Quarian: The quarians are a nomadic species of humanoid aliens known for their skills with technology and synthetic intelligence. Since their homeworld Rannoch was conquered, the quarians live aboard the Migrant Fleet, a huge collection of starships that travel as a single fleet.

Culture (Quarian) 2, Culture (Geth) 2, Language (Citadel Standard) 2, Language (Quarian) 2, Computer 1, Technical Sciences 1, Medical Sciences 1, Perception +1, Armor Restriction, Frailty, and 10 bonus points to spend.

Salarian: The second species to join the Citadel, the salarians are warm-blooded amphibians native to the planet Sur'Kesh. Salarians possess a hyperactive metabolism; they think fast, talk fast, and move fast. To salarians, other species seem sluggish and dull-witted, especially the elcor. Unfortunately, their metabolic speed leaves them with a relatively short lifespan; salarians over the age of 40 are a rarity.

Culture (Salarian) 2, Language (Citadel Standard) 2, Language (Salarian) 2, Observe 1, Dexterity +1, Perception +1, Armor Restriction, Curious, Eidetic Memory, Hypersensitivity, and 6 bonus points to spend.

Turian: Originally from the planet Palaven, turians are best known for their military role, particularly their contributions of soldiers and starships to the Citadel Fleet. They are respected for their public service ethic—it was the turians who first proposed creating C-Sec—but are sometimes seen as imperialist or rigid by other races. There is some animosity between turians and humans, largely due to the turian role in the First Contact War. This bitterness is slowly beginning to heal—as shown by the cooperation of the two races on the construction of the SSV Normandy—but many turians still hate humans, and vice versa.

Culture (Turian) 2, Language (Citadel Standard) 2, Language (Turian) 2, Shoot 1, Tactics 1, Will +1, Armor Restriction, Damage Reduction (Radiation, AV 4), Natural Weapon (Claws, DV 1), and 8 bonus points to spend.

Homeworld Packages

These don’t need much alteration. Rename “Core” to “Citadel”, “Marches” to “Colonist” (and note tht high-population colonies are rare), and most Wildspace locations are stations in the Terminus Systems, thus low-tech is very rare.

Career Packages

Most protagonists in Mass Effect take some level in Army, Bounty Hunter, Criminal, Law Enforcer, Marine, Navy, Rebel, Scientist, Esper, and ESP-O. It’s rare to find a protagonist (as opposed to a supporting character) who doesn’t have at least Novice in one of those.

Worth pointing out here: Spectre is not a career; it’s a 3-point Membership.

Biotics

Biotics are mass-effect generating abilities caused by natal element zero exposure. Asari are the only known natural biotics among the known races; they can pick up Biotic skills at any point. Other races can only acquire Biotic skills by selecting one of the Esper careers.

Biotics are pretty much psychic skills from Thousand Suns. However, the list is rather restricted. The Thousand Suns Skill is given in brackets after the Biotic power.

• Barrier (Telekinetic Shield)
• Pull (Telekinesis)
• Reave (Telekinetic Grip)
• Slam/Throw (Telekinetic Blast)

Throw and Slam both use the rules for a Telekinetic Blast, but are bought as separate powers. Slam throws the target straight up rather than back on a failed Dexterity test, dealing an additional 1D12 damage in enclosed spaces.

New Biotic Skills

Charge (Body)
Action: 1 • Performed On: Self • Cost: 4
The character uses biotics to augment speed and strength, and charges across the battlefield towards a target. This culminates in a powerful collision that sends unprotected enemies flying backward, inflicting massive damage. The character travels in a straight line, ignoring all obstacles. Everyone within 5m of the character’s destination takes damage equal to the ranks in this power plus the degrees of success on a Charge skill test. In addition, the target must achieve more degrees of success on a Dexterity test than the biotic achieved or fly back 1 meter per degree of success and be knocked prone.

Singularity (Perception)
Action: 1 (Maintenance) • Performed On: Others • Cost: 6
The biotic launches a dark energy sphere to create an intense mass effect field. The field creates a warp in the space-time continuum, creating a gravity well akin to a black hole. The biotic makes a Singularity test opposed by the Body of everyone within 3 metres of the Singularity. If the biotic wins, the target is helpless and levitated out of cover, unable to move or attack for as long as the biotic maintains this power.

Stasis (Perception)
Action: 1 • Performed On: Others • Cost: 4
A biotic can hold a creature in his line of sight by making a Stasis test. If successful, the target cannot move or attack for a number of turns equal to the ranks in the power plus the degrees of success. If the target makes a successful Resist test, he’s held for half duration. While held in stasis, the target takes no damage.

Warp (Perception)
Action: 1 • Performed On: Others • Cost: 4
A biotic can spawn a Mass Effect field that destroys an opponent’s armor by making a Warp test. Ifsuccessful, the target’s armor (and any telekinetic shield) is reduced by the ranks in the power, for one round per degree of success. If the target has been affected by other biotic powers this round, Warp deals damage equal to the ranks in the power for each other biotic power, and ends that power’s duration (if any).

Technology

Most characters have a suit of armour (either Light, Medium, or Heavy Combat Armor as described in the rulebook), which can be locked down to operate in space and in hostile environments. This includes a communicator and energy-field based protection.

Available weapons include the assault rifle (without grenade launcher), sniper rifle, shotgun, pistol (stats per revolver), and submachine gun. All of these weapons use the statistics for a slugthrower versions of that weapon. Characters without a Shoot specialty in assault rifles, shotguns, and sniper rifles suffer the unskilled penalty when using one of those weapons.

The omni-tool itself is a combination computer and general-purpose engineering tool that fabricates tools and equipment as needed. It acts as a Karto, display contacts, hologram recorder and player, intellipicks, polyvox, and any set of sensor equipment necessary for the character’s trained skills. An omni-tool costs 2500$, and can be upgraded to contain a personal grenade launcher, monoblade, cloaking device, tech armor, or a combat drone.

The grenade launcher has unlimited ammunition (as the grenades are created by the omni-tool); grenade templates are available at the same price as a box of grenades. The loaded grenade template takes about five minutes to change.

The combat cloak provides the character with complete invisibility for his next action. Enemies can neither dodge nor defend an attack from a cloaked shooter. The cloaking device must be re-set with a successful Technical Sciences roll (taking one action) between each use. A cloaking device costs 1,500 to install in an omni-tool$

The combat drone creates a small (1m spherical) hovering drone. The drone can move and attack on the character’s action, but doesn’t have a controlling VI. The character can direct the drone to attack any character (the drone’s attack uses the stats of a laser pistol), the drone can hover at the same speed as the character that created it. The drone has AV 6, Vitality 30. It takes two rounds and a successful Technical Sciences roll to create the drone, and a character can only have one drone slaved to his omni-tool at any point. The drone costs 1,000$ to install.

Tech armor channels the user’s biotic powers through her armor suit’s shield matrix. This doubles the effectiveness of any biotic barrier used, though the vitality cost to create and maintain the shield increases to 3. Installing tech armor costs 1,800$

Characters with any ties to a species military, C-Sec, or the Citadel Fleet, start play with a suit of light combat armor, an omni-tool, a pistol, and a submachine gun, and will probably end up with a ship in short order. Beyond that, the character must purchase equipment and upgrades by converting benefit points to assets as normal (deduct 2000$ from the cost of armor upgrades as a trade-in for the character’s light combat armor).

As Malcolm says, he’s giving Æternal Legends to me. Which is a bit of a weird thing to say, because it’s a creator-owned game. But he created the system it runs on, he developed the book and did all the necessary work to turn my manuscript into a game. We’re working on a way that I can not just keep selling the game, but create supplements and a new edition.

Nothing’s changing just yet. When we get something sorted out, Æternal Legends will move to the Zero Point Information banner in the various places that sell it. Then I’ll get Spheres ready for release ASAP. Once that’s out, I can move on to creating new things for the game. If you’ve got something you’d like to see, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

I’d also like to thank Malcolm for all the hard work he’s put in to Æternal Legends. I look forward to working with him again.

Mirrored from Zero Point Information.

Last year's retrospective mentioned that what I wanted most out of 2011 was for it to be much like 2010, but with holidays. I succeeded at that, having gone away more than once this year (which makes a nice change). I didn't get any time off over the summer because of the Death March From Hell at $ORK, but the upside of that is not having visited the office since December the 2nd.

Much of the last year has been what I'd hoped for. I've cycled more, cooked more and more varied (to the point that my brother got me the New Concide Larousse Gastronomique for χmas), and I've written some stuff that's really been a dream: I got a good couple of sections in Glimpses of the Unknown, I published BLACK SEVEN, and I turned in the final draft of the Werewolf Translation Guide, which will hopefully be available soon.

So yeah, here's hoping for one much like the last one, with hopefully a few more big RPG projects to my name.

In the time I’ve been quiet:

• I’ve written and submitted the Werewolf Translation Guide for White Wolf.
• I’ve got some exciting news about Æternal Legends.
• I’ve got some more exciting news from White Wolf, which should see me writing for them until March on something that I’ve always wanted a crack at.
• I’m wrestling with some design elements that have halted progress on Through.
• I’ve got a couple of old ideas climbing out of the recesses of my brain and asking me to write them.

Which is all nice. Over the coming couple of weeks, I’m going to post the short half-ideas to get an idea of what I should be working on when I have a chance; any and all feedback on them would be highly appreciated.

And while the post office is straining under the stress of χmas and related holidays, you can still get the gamer in your life some electronic goodies. I’ve been having a great time with the Mistborn Adventure Game. If you’re after something that strips away the surface patina of D&D-esque games, you can’t really go wrong with Homicidal Transients¹. And with Deus Ex: Human Revolution in the Steam sale (other digital distributors are available, void where prohibited), what better time to take a potential Game of the Year to your tabletop with BLACK SEVEN?

¹: Unless you want a book that hates the whole mindset, in which case Greg Costikyan’s Violence is for you.

Mirrored from Zero Point Information.

Now, I've talked a little about television in the past, but this is a different angle. This is all about the dreaded spectre of Downton Abbey.

I have an opinion. It is not a popular opinion, but it is an opinion that I am more than willing to argue if someone else is buying the drinks: Buffy the Vampire Slayer should have ended after Season 5. 6 had moments of greatness but also way too much filler, 7 drew out a two-part end-of-the-world story into a whole season and choked on its own padding.

Downton Abbey leaves me with the same feeling. Don't get me wrong, the programme is hardly good—it's disgusting classist propaganda designed to appeal to the horrible sense of entitlement of the upper classes by presenting them as generous and magnanimous rightful rulers, while their new-money counterparts are grasping bastards because they didn't grow up privileged. Anyone who is not in service and who doesn't want to be in service to said impossibly generous poshos is strange and to be feared. It skips months at a time in order to hit on historical points that viewers will have heard of—and for an ITV audience, that's pretty much the Titanic, the First World War, and the Spanish Flu pandemic—yet the characters carry on individual plots from episode to episode like six months haven't gone by in the meantime.

If one was aware of those obvious strikes against it, the first series was reasonably watchable. With the second, however, the writers have seemingly lost the ability to make it seem like anything's actually happened. Oh, sure, X has fucked off to the war, now Y is back, and Z is dead. But X is always returning home in time to drag out a painfully badly-acted love triangle, Y remains a pathetic strawman of the working classes, and if Z said or did anything of any actual consequence rather than being a piece of fucking scenery then someone might care.

Nothing of consequence changes. Oh, A and B are in love! But they can't be, because A's estranged wife blackmails him. But now they can be! And now they can't be! Just fuck off, will you? It's not big, it's not clever, it's lazy writing of the worst kind, designed to fill episodes with regurgitated pabulum rather than framing any conflict with any actual meaning. I'm pretty sure the most of the second series of Downton Abbey could be auto-generated by an Eliza-bot, a copy of Burke's Peerage, and JMS' The Complete Book of Scriptwriting. Actually, given the involvement of JMS' book, the Eliza would create something significantly better.

Like Buffy, Downton Abbey should have stopped before it did. But while Buffy took a while to get good before reaching a climax, Downton started good and has been slipping downhill ever since. At the end of the second series the only way to enjoy it is if one's higher brain functions are fully consumed by doing something constructive: playing a video game, or writing an RPG supplement, or drinking until the pain stops. Without that, it's a painful waste of time and attention.

Most of you will probably remember me burbling on about the MMO City of Heroes. Well, it recently went Free to Play, which means that anyone who can run the client can make an account.

If you're a gamer who does more than bog-standard fantasy, you want the client. You don't have to learn how to play the game at all, though I'd strongly encourage you to give it a shot. But with the client, you get the character creator, and thus access to all the lovely costume pieces. This is by far and away the finest character creator in MMOs (Champions Online has about as much variety, but the art style is overblown and annoying, and the interface isn't worth shit).

CoH is different from most traditional MMOs in a few ways. One of the main ones is that your character never looks different just because of what gear she's got equipped (to be fair, that's because "gear" is different on a fundamental level, but shit happens). So you get to play with the costume editor. Through playing the game, you can unlock four extra costumes in addition to the one you start with. If you enjoy the "digital superhero Barbie" aspect of the game, you can purchase five more slots for ten total. You can also purchase extra costume pieces--but only if you want to use them in game. If you're just dicking about in the costume creator, you can use anything you want. Add a program to take screenshots, and you're golden for making all manner of characters.

I mention this because the game recently released a Halloween costume pack. So I took a break from playing my invincible ninja robot with the power of the gods (long story), and my goth band singer, and the mutant eagle with robot arms, to make two more characters.

First is Doctor Fish. He's one of the smartest beings on the planet. He just happened to be born a piranha. Problem? He doesn't think so! One mutagen (using only the finest toxic waste) later, he's got a humanoid form, sixteen Doctorates, a whole shitload of crime-fighting technology, oh, and he teaches Applied Hydrokinesis in his spare time because he can blast people with water. People just love Doctor Fish's class.



That's not all. We also have The Evil Brain of Doctor X. Yes, he's evil. Yes, he's a brain in a jar animated by dark magic and weird science, stuck on top of a steam-powered robot body. Yes, he uses the magic that keeps his brain alive along with some non-Euclidian chemistry to raise the dead and summon the fell energies of the Netherworld. But what the hell do you expect him to do? He's The Evil Brain of Doctor X! You think he's going to be a hero?



That is why gamers should download City of Heroes.

Soufflé is one of those things that looks hard. Everyone's heard about people whose attempts didn't rise, or having scrambled eggs in the middle in place of the gooey centre, or fuck only knows what. These people got it wrong because these people are idiots. They have some weird superstitions which fuck everything up. You want lots of air in the egg whites, to expand. You want the egg whites to still be a bit moist, because expanding water vapour in the air pockets contributes to rising. You want it cooked long enough that the walls of the pockets cook through, giving you a light, fluffy texture that's like biting into a gooey cheesy cloud. You do not want to sing a specific song, use a silver-handled cheese grater by the light of the full moon, or sacrifice the chicken who laid your eggs. Well, you may want to but you don't have to.

Follow this recipe to the letter. You too can be a better chef than half the morons try to make a soufflé on Masterchef. Once you've done it a couple of times, you know all you need to know to begin experimenting—using a bain-marie, or fiddling with temperature and timings, or the like. But start with success, so you know that your failures are not defining.

Serves 2-4, depending on size of ramekins
Prep time: 30 mins
Cook time: 30 mins

Ingredients
20g butter, + more for greasing
20g flour
150ml milk
25g finely-grated Parmesan, + more for dusting
50g finely-grated Gruyere
25g finely-grated extra-mature Scottish cheddar
1/2 tsp English mustard
3 egg whites
2 egg yolks

1. Butter the inside of your ramekins, and dust with grated parmesan. Stick them in the fridge for now.
2. Melt the butter over a low heat, and stir in the flour to form a thick paste. Cook and stir for a couple of minutes. Then, slowly add the milk, whisking all the time. If you see lumps, whisk until they're gone. Keep going. If your wrist hurts like you're fourteen again, you're there. Cook it through for about ten minutes, until you've got a silky-smooth sauce.
3. Take the pan off the heat for a couple of minutes, then mix in the cheese. Season very well with salt, black pepper, and the mustard (you need to compensate for the flavour of egg-whites). Add the egg yolks and stir through.
4. Preheat the oven to 220C, 200C fan.
5. Beat the egg whites until they're firm, but not dry. Which is a fucking useless measurement to anyone with a brain, so use this measure: Do they not fall back into the depression left by the whisk? Does tilting the bowl lead to them sliding just a little bit? Good.
6. Take a third of the egg whites and beat into the cheese mixture to loosen everything a bit. Then, very fucking gently fold the rest of the egg whites into the mix. Tip them out of the bowl into the pan, and use a spatula to gently lift from the bottom and over to the top. Don't stir, and don't rush. You want to incorporate the egg whites without losing too much of the air you put in by whisking. Take it easy, like you're stroking the belly-fluff of a kitten/angel hybrid.
7. Divide the mixture between the ramekins, leaving a gap at the top of each, and stick into the oven. Turn the oven down to 190/170 fan as soon as the door's shut. Give them 25-30 minutes—until well-risen, with a golden-brown top. If you open the oven before they're done, Gød will kill a kitten.
8. Remove from the oven and eat immediately.

So, if you’re like me you’ll have upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10. And you will not be pleased.

To start with, the Dash has moved from the top-left to the first icon in the launcher. Nice. Now, instead of having infinite space to activate it, it’s reduced to an icon in a list and the top-left corner of the screen, some of the most valuable screen real-estate is left doing absolutely fuck-all. But whatever genius thought that was a good idea obviously knows more than every fucking usability expert on the bastard planet about Fitt’s Law.

Even if you don’t care about usability and just want a good looking desktop, the following tweaks are invaluable to get back to where you were before the upgrade decided to shit all over sensible fucking design.

Froth, froth, gibber, gibber, my old man’s a dustbin.

Set Your Background Image

Run Appearance, and set your wallpaper. Since it was removed as part of the upgrade for no good reason. You can also select whether you want Ambiance or Radiance—dark or light—borders. Nothing else, mind. Which is where this next one comes in:

Setting an Icon Theme

In order to get even the most basic customization of the UI, open a terminal and run the following:

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool

It shows up as Advanced Settings. Run it, and on the Theme screen you can set the Icon Theme to Faenza-Fresh (or whatever, if you’re not using Faenza icons for some reason). Also, make a note of which theme shows up next to GTK+ theme.

Customize the Login Screen

Anyone who uses Ubuntu for more than about five seconds will be sick of the strange purple mess that is the new login screen. You could do this by hand-editing files, but at least this little thing can be changed through an actual program, so folks who don’t live with three terminals open don’t need to worry about b0rking things.

Open a terminal, and run

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:claudiocn/slm
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install simple-lightdm-manager

From the dash, run Simple Lightdm Manager. You can choose your background, and whether you want an Ubuntu logo at the bottom. Nice and smooth.

Getting Rid of That Awful Orange

This requires editing config files. Because apparently, nobody ever wants to get rid of Ubuntu’s hideous shade of orange, so making this an easily-changed option is wrong and unthinkable.

From a terminal, run

sudo gedit

This will open up a text editor. Now, open up Nautilus and navigate to the following files. Note that the last one is under gtk-2.0 not gtk-3.0. Replace $THEME with either Ambiance or Radiance, depending on the name of the theme you made a note of above.

Drag&drop each file into the opened text editor (which is running as root, or “with admin privileges”, so is able to edit files that are otherwise protected).

/usr/share/themes/$THEME/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
/usr/share/themes/$THEME/gtk-3.0/settings.ini
/usr/share/themes/$THEME/gtk-2.0/gtkrc

Use the search/replace tool to change #f07746 for the hex code of your choice. If you recall my previous post, you’ll know that I use #89abd9. You do need the hash at the start of the six-character code. To get a six-character hex colour code, you can do a lot worse than using ColorPicker, and copying the hexcode from the top of the page.

Adding an Actual Fucking Screensaver

Yup, in yet another bone-headed move taken from Gnome, Ubuntu now doesn’t have a screensaver installed. Fortunately, the excellent Jamie Zawinski is the creator of the far-superior-to-all-others xscreensaver. So we can use that instead. Again, in a terminal:

sudo apt-get remove gnome-screensaver
sudo apt-get install xscreensaver xscreensaver-gl-extra xscreensaver-data-extra
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/xscreensaver-command /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver-command

Open the dash, and run “startup applications”. Create a new one, call it “xscreensaver”, with a command line of xscreensaver -nosplash

You can customize the hundreds of included screensavers through the “Screensaver” application.

Turn Off Screensavers Occasionally

If you want to stop the screen from locking, Linux has a version of popular Mac app Caffeine. Running it gives you a menu-bar item that suspends screensavers and such so that you can watch a movie in peace. Terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:caffeine-developers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install caffeine python-glade2

Run Caffeine Preferences from the dash to get it to start on login. Click the indicator icon to change whether the screen locks/turns off or not.

Oh, and Increase Battery Life

If you’re using a laptop or a netbook, installing Jupiter will increase your battery life by quite a bit. Terminal again:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/jupiter
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install jupiter

If you use an EEE-PC, add the following line

sudo apt-get install jupiter-support-eee

Finally…

Once you’ve done all of those, you will need to log out and back in again.

City of Heroes is now free to play. For everyone. Hit me up in game, @iron_Frame on global chat.

This had to happen as I'm spinning up on Hey Jealousy.

The Game: Stars Without Number
The Publisher: Sine Nomine Publishing
Degree of Familiarity: None. This is my second time reading it over.
Books Required: Just the core PDF

( Read more... )