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torchship-rpg · 2 months

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Dev Diary 14 - Star Union Members!

Hello cosmonauts! Today we’re going to go back to the lore and identity Dev Diaries and cover the remaining members of the Star Union. So far, we have done Terrans & Lunars, and Martians & Spacers. These groups collectively make up the Solar Union, which is far and away the largest and most influential member of the Star Union (as the names imply).

However, there are three other members; let’s touch on them.

Camp Aldrin

The first member we’re going to talk about is actually still within the Sol system! Camp Aldrin was once a major mining base on Earth’s Moon and a small second city, but the costs of maintaining two sets of infrastructure saw it rapidly outpaced by Armstrong City and eventually become something of a ghost town, home mostly to military bases and robotic mining. It is like Armstrong City in most ways, a network of underground tunnels, just smaller.

That changed during the war, because as Solar Patrol started winning battles, it started taking prisoners, and nobody was exactly sure what to do with them or where to put them. The initial plan was to keep them on Earth, which would be cheapest and safest, but Aquillians are not exactly accustomed to 1 g, so that was deemed needlessly cruel in short order. So, Camp Aldrin was repurposed instead; hardly anyone was living there, the systems were robust, it was close enough to Earth to make feeding everyone easy, and escape risk was very, very low on the moon.

Of course, the Sol Union hadn’t really run very many prisoner of war camps in the last half-century, so it dusted off the models it had used during its expansion on Earth, which was basically to have the prisoners self-organise a little community under their supervision, which is a very good way of ensuring that after the fighting is over, the enemy soldiers you release have familiarity with your mode of political organising. This worked extremely well among the Aquillian prisoners (and various auxiliaries and unlucky others who ended up there), who had up until this point lived pretty miserable lives as press-ganged crews of rockets and space stations. Camp Aldrin was the kind of place where the guards didn’t bother carrying weapons.

Then the war ended, and a lot of the prisoners didn’t want to go back. Some left for the new Aquillian republics, some hardliners tried going back to the various Remnants, but after that was over, there were 200,000 people still living in this creaky old moon base who wanted to stay.

So after some negotiation, the guards handed over the keys, and Camp Aldrin was the second full member of the Star Union.

The details of this identity are going to depend a lot on the Aquillian identity, which we’ll go into in more detail in the next Identity-focused dev diary. What’s interesting for our purposes is that Camp Aldrin’s Aquillians are distinct from the other groups because of their ongoing enthusiasm for biological and genetic modification, which is very taboo among other Aquillians. This is basically an excuse to play just about any kind of space elf you want; whatever characteristics you think a space elf should have, there’s a subculture on Camp Aldrin like that.

The other common Traits of Camp Aldrin’s citizens are War Veteran (for obvious reasons), and Dark History, in case you want any juicy dark secrets or old enemies from before you ended up here.

Camp Aldrin’s flag is based on the old uniforms they gave prisoners, which had a terrible colour scheme and a big symbol on it so everyone could recognize escapees on sight. If the ears didn’t give it away. (Which it might not on Earth. God, can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to be part of some cool fantasy elf gene-mod subculture and then you meet real space elves and it becomes hashtag problematic? How do you explain to people you just liked Lord of the Rings before First Contact?)

Proxima

Gee humanity, why does the Star Union let you have two members?

Well before FTL was invented by humans, we sent tiny near-light probes to the nearest systems using our mastery of Fuckoff Big Space Engines. When the images came back decades later, people were overjoyed by the readings from Proxima b; despite being a tidally-locked iceball orbiting a flare star, it had both liquid water and abiotic oxygen generation in the upper atmosphere. Sure, it was cold, you’d need to live in canyons on the terminator band to avoid the howling winds, you need to bring your own soil to grow stuff, and there’s no terrestrial source of metals, but other than that it's basically just like home!

Needless to say, the moment FTL drives were invented, humans threw themselves on some FTL rockets and made the months-long crawl (they were shitty FTL drives) to the nearest star to set up a colony. Compared to Mars, it was basically paradise! Sure, it took months to get supplies from home, and there was no FTL communications yet so that was the only time you got any news, but the basics were covered.

Then one day, after an unusually long delay, one of the supply rockets came in and told them, hey, first contact just happened. Anyway, we’re at war with a giant alien space empire, everyone back home voted to set up an emergency War Council with way too much power over basically everything, and they’ve unilaterally decided that the colony project isn’t affordable in a war economy, so pack it up, you’re heading home.

Needless to say, people reacted in an entirely rational manner. Which is to say, they concluded that the Solar Union had just had some kind of insane military coup, probably by the same bloodthirsty maniacs that oversaw the Elysium Emergency (which was a formative event for most of the colonists), and was trying to shut the place down because it was outside their control. So, naturally, they promptly declared independence, then immediately fell down a rabbit hole of spiralling radicalization and internal conflict as they tried to figure out how to survive in their half-built colony when Solar Patrol would surely be arriving with the jumpjets at any moment.

This is where we get our two Proxmia identities. The first are the surface-dwellers on the planet themselves, who are the far better-known group. Properly Centaurians, but universally known as Proxies. The Proxies had no doubt that humanity would triumph in their war against these mysterious aliens, if it was even real; they were largely Terrans who had grown up at the centre of the Solar Union’s power and could not conceive of something beating them. Obviously, this meant they’d be next!

This group seized heavily on the preliminary plans to do a Martian-style genetic engineering process and decided that going full-steam ahead and making themselves a distinct species would make them too much trouble to re-integrate back into the Union. And, of course, this could be used to create The Ultimate Specimens of Post-Humanity, an impulse that never ever goes wrong ever.

So, obviously, it went wrong. Sure, a lot of Proxies were faster, stronger, maybe even smarter than the human norm back home. But mostly what happened was they made their kids really sick. Even when it worked out, a lot of them were left with chronic pain, neurological disorders, or permanent dependence on various medicines or procedures to have any kind of decent quality of life, things not in abundance on the tiny colony. To make things worse, the place was rapidly falling apart, and the adults were accelerating this process fighting one another over whether to swallow their pride and call home, or somehow try to tough it out. Eventually, the older generation were overthrown by the super-kids they made, who promptly called their grandparents and asked for medical assistance.

Proxies are a chance to play with all the really fun gene-engineering stuff and make a post-human character. There’s a few recommended Traits; almost all Proxies have a tapetum lucidum for better night vision in the eternal twilight of the terminator band, and the Augment trait’s mix of bonus abilities and medical or metabolic drawbacks is perfect for representing it. The Cold Resistance trait is also a good one; a lot of Proxies have an insulating layer of fat or some other adaptation which makes it easier to survive the bitter cold.

The other group in the system which split off were the Proxima Spacers, a group of Spacers who tagged along with the colony to set up mining in the rich asteroid belts in the system. As Proxima b has no local metals, they were the ones who’d need to provide them, in exchange for food and biological compounds from the surface colony. Being Spacers well-accustomed to the precarity at the edge of the system, and just how fragile the Solar Union was, they were convinced humanity was going to lose the war, and they’d be next when the aliens swept in to clean up. Human extinction was surely imminent.

So they started to hide, disassembling their major stations and rebuilding them into the sides of low-spin asteroids, spreading out into many small communities and increasingly relying on cold-gas jets to make increasingly infrequent journeys between stations and to the planetary colony. They put up shielding, used lasers in place of radio to communicate, and did everything they could to disappear. They became the Archivists; doomsday survivalists in space.

When the Solar Union returned to the system, it at first looked like the vast majority of spacers had fled down to the colony or died, but over years they slowly became aware of the Archivists through intermittent contact. They mostly want to be left alone to their task, though sometimes members join Star Patrol, either defecting from the tightly controlled and spartan lifestyles of the spacers or, worryingly, spying and gathering information to squirrel away. For the most part, the Archivists seem to just be focusing on long-term survival, and may even have spread to other systems using their reserve of old FTL drives for redundancy.

An Archivist is a really good way to play a loner. The exact mix of Traits is a bit up in the air right now as we rebuild character creation, but you get all the common Spacer ones with a few extracts to represent the culture of secrecy and isolation you grew up in. Archivist communes are often organised quite a bit like mystery cults to compartmentalise information, so lack of trust is something very central which you may need to overcome.

Proxima's flag is a stylization of the sky as seen from the colony, with the three stars in the system and the endless sunset.

Corvus Peasants’ Republic

Finally, we have the first member to consist of aliens and not be located a convenient walk away from Earth. The unimaginatively-named Corvus is the natural exonym given when a wartime Solar Patrol rocket crashed on an alien world and were greeted by a bunch of crow-people; they presumably didn’t recruit them for creativity.

The Koath are a species of hunched, bipedal non-humanoid aliens with an interesting evolutionary history. As best anyone can tell, their distant ancestors were once the domesticated pets of a humanoid species which managed to Great Filter itself about a million years ago, possibly over the fact that they’d bred at least one strain of their companion animal to be able to speak and possess the intelligence of a ten-year-old child. The Koath emerged as survivors of the apocalypse, which included a pretty severe biosphere collapse and resource depletion, and have become the dominant form of life on their world.

At first glance, Koath societies look more or less mediaeval, mostly in that really late period where people were doing really cool things with waterwheels, granted, but there’s not a lot of industry or steelworking owing to the easy sources of carbon fuels and decent iron all being long-depleted. For those reasons, the Koath have been at roughly this state of infrastructural development for roughly a hundred thousand years, at the edge of their population carrying capacity and unable to intensify production any further, resulting in interlocking networks of feudal kingdoms prizing stability in an attempt to build up their resources and overcome the gaps.

This does mean that the Koath have a lot of interesting surpluses, though. Having had organised agriculture for ten times longer than humanity, the Koath have selectively bred some absolutely incredible crops; not just for eating, but for just about everything. Need a dye? They can cross-breed you arbitrary Pantones. Need paper? They can make you a lot of it. It’s so impressive that while the planet had consistently been considered not worth conquering, it has long been considered worth visiting, which means the Koath have learned a lot of things they don’t have the technological infrastructure to have discovered on their own… which dovetails with a quirk of their biology.

Koath are really good at languages. Really good. It’s what their ancestors were bred for. They start talking within months of being hatched, and they make up new languages constantly because it’s easy and fun. They have unique languages for regions, religions, guilds, and within families. They can learn to read in weeks. They’re all literate, they make paper with the waste-products of food production, and they’ve had moveable type for longer than human civilisation has existed. And they are, to a fault, curious.

A Koath peasant working the earth with a bronze plough might not know much about quantum mechanics, but they’ve at least heard of it. They have a rich body of secret political writing written in coded languages about how much it sucks living as serfs so a lord somewhere can have the county’s only lightbulb. So when a human spaceship filled with 3d printers, the diagrams for 3d printed guns, and a bunch of very confused communists who immediately bristled at the idea of ‘local lords’ crashed in their neighbourhood, the local peasants did a whole little revolution about it, and were then promptly besieged by every single one of their neighbours.

So that’s the Corvus Peasants’ Republic. Not a whole planet even; a tiny peninsula of possibly overenthusiastic little bird communists trying to build up technological infrastructure while literally having trebuchets pointed at them. They’re very excited to be a part of the Star Union, because every iron-rich asteroid found out there is a new steel foundry back home, so maybe their people can enjoy all the cool technology they’ve had blueprints for since Ur was the happening place on Earth.

As a Koath, you get the Polyglot Trait, obviously, and the Non-Humanoid Bodyplan trait which gives you some cool little tool bonuses when you use your claws, vestigial feathers, and adorable little legs that give a surprising burst of speed, at the cost of needing special tools and being bad at throwing things. You are also a really good recipient for the Out of Time trait, as you may have gone from living as, you know, a peasant, to operating a spacecraft in a few short years. The Prodigy trait also does double-duty here for the curiosity and literacy of the species.

A year ago this little guy was a farmer.

#torchship #ttrpg #dev diary #torchship ttrpg #rpg

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torchship-rpg · 3 months

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Dev Diary 13 - New Subsystems

Alright, it’s been a while since our last Dev Diary, because we’re been doing a lot of rewriting (and because medical stuff delayed my ability to write a lot for a while). We’re currently working on writing up a new playable draft of the game incorporating lessons learned from the hasty Metatopia rewrite, building new systems to achieve what the first draft did in a smaller and better footprint.

With that in mind, I thought I’d talk about two new subsystems added to the game to make running things smoother in response to playtests, which helps mechanise some of the more abstract issues and sticking points in test games; sensor rules and factions.

Sensors & Scale

In my experience, an issue that arises in almost any Star Trek inspired roleplaying game is that most players are naturally much more cautious than the protagonists of your average television show, and correspondingly are more likely to sit snug in their spaceship for longer and roll lots of scanning rolls when the exciting story thing would be to go and take a look directly (and thus get in interesting trouble). This was a problem that occurred in some of the old playtest Torchship quests, in the metatopia games, and even in some of my brushes with Star Trek Adventures and other similar RPGs long ago.

To get around this, we’ve written up a system for sensors in Torchship which makes it very explicit what they can and can’t discover called Scale. Every sensor has one or more Scales it operates at, in a scale from 1 (microscopic) to 8 (interstellar telescope). This gives both a range you can see things from, and what information you can discover from that distance.

Under this system, a scanner which can gather information from farther away will, inherently, gather less specific information than one which scans closer. A Scale 4 scanner which works on ranges of tens and hundreds of kilometres is also one which lacks the resolution to easily recognize individual people or tools, so if you wanted to find a specific person you’re going to struggle doing it with that Scale of scanner. Fortunately, your hand scanner is a Scale 2-3 device which is perfect for that sort of work, thought limited in range to metres and kilometres so you’ll need to actually get off your butt and into the adventure.

These are soft limits, not hard stops; you can take penalties to scan beyond your normal range or for finer detail than you can normally identify, and higher-tech scanners are better for this because they roll more dice to absorb those penalties, but these limitations mean that gathering the information you need to fill out Checklists and complete objectives will often require you to go down and point a hand scanner at it, or even gather samples to take back to the microscope lab on the rocket.

Of particular note is the ‘orbital gap’, a deliberate hole in the system between Scale 4 and Scale 5. When you’re in low orbit trying to scan the surface of a world, you will almost always be doing with at least one Range penalty, and probably more because high-tech Scale 4 sensors are uncommon on most large spacecraft. This very purposefully makes it inconvenient to just wait upstairs until you roll good enough to see what you want to see; at the very least you will want to take out your shuttle to get close enough to use it without penalty.

You get to choose which scales your spacecraft’s sensors have when you do character creation, which has lots of interesting implications as you try to fit it into the limited options. Do you leave a gap in your sensor coverage in the midband for wider coverage? Do you mount smaller sensors you have to get very close to use? Do you sacrifice some of your short-range detail for long range resolution?

This also makes it easy for us to build sensors into other tools, sensors you can repurpose. Your point defence turrets might have lower-tech specialised radar emplacements at Scale 4 for picking up and tracking incoming missiles, for example, and when you encounter something invisible to your tachyon sensors it makes perfect sense to repurpose it!

A Star Patrol vehicle with a massive tachyon sensor pickup ideal for scanning other star systems across interstellar space, but which is probably going to have a bit of difficulty focusing on something tiny right in front of it.

Factions

The other portion of new mechanics has to do with the diplomatic and political side of the game. As we sat down with the new draft, we made a bunch of notes as we looked over what, exactly, this game needed from first principles before re-adding things, and we came back around to the conclusion that the game should explicitly and distinctly focus on three spheres of Exploration, Politics, and Combat, each of which should have dedicated subsystems which could carry an entire campaign on their own.

We had a strong scientific element in the Checklists and we have interesting combat mechanics, but Politics was lacking in that; while we had ways for players to interact with groups, we didn’t have much mechanical distinction for what those groups were or how they related to one another. This is where the new Factions mechanic comes in.

When you visit a society in conflict, you will find multiple Factions there. Each Faction is a simple mechanical framework for a movement or ideology inside the society that wants something, with a defined membership and a reason they want to have power over their society. Key to this is the Faction’s Influence, a single arbitrary number that tells you how much power the Faction has over their society.

The faction with the greatest Influence is the Ruling Faction, and they matter because the Ruling Faction is the only one whose promises to Star Patrol get kept at the end of the Episode. You can negotiate trade deals for a planet’s titanium reserves with the labour unions all you want; if the Labour faction isn’t in charge by the end of the episode, you don’t get anything from it.

This is coupled with the fact that every Faction has a simple binary opinion of Star Patrol; either they like and trust you or they don’t. Factions are like pilots in that way, though unlike pilots they do have object permanence in the sense that they remember Promises. Promises are mechanically binding agreements to give things to one another, though they only get upheld if the Faction likes you at the end of the Episode (and, again, if they are the Ruling Faction).

If you want to negotiate with a Faction, you have to exchange Promises; Factions don’t do anything for free no matter how well you roll, though you can still negotiate with communication rolls to get better deals. Promises can be immediate aid, like getting supplies for your rocket or their support in a mission, but they can also be resources over long terms at the end of the Episode, in the form of Credits from you and valuable resources, political alliances, or military aid from them.

What makes things interesting is that a Ruling Faction which does not have the majority of the Influence in play with all the Activate Factions is unstable. When things are unstable, Factions have a tendency to make lots of big promises to Star Patrol in exchange for help, often blindly agreeing to trade away things they really need because having the local superpower arbitrate their conflict and hopefully decide in their favour (or even just put the issue to rest, honestly) is worth more to them now than material riches or obligations that are currently meaningless to them.

An unstable society is a big opportunity for the Star Union, but one you have to navigate with care.

#torchship ttrpg #dev diary #ttrpg #torchship #rpg

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torchship-rpg · 5 months

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Dev Diary 12 - Destructive Testing

Breaking from the usual format for this one, and it’s going to be a bit shorter, but this is important.

At the beginning of November was Metatopia, a convention dedicated to playtesting roleplaying games. It’s an excellent place to go to break games in order to fix them stronger than ever, and in that respect Torchship did not disappoint. While its parts all worked beautifully, there were some issues with the connective tissue tying it; the game needed a stronger mechanical framework to put these pieces into.

With that in mind, we’ve started a new draft of Torchship designed to be rapidly playtested and iterated, into which all the other stuff we’ve built up can be plugged back. This new draft focuses particularly hard on making sure the game’s fundamental tablefeel is strong, that you always know what to do and where to go next.

Which is to say, fans of my games having big circles in them somewhere? There’s a big circle in this one now too. Torchship now has two distinct modes; an Action mode where you go out and gather information, and a Reflection portion where that information is managed, damage gets fixed, and plans are made. Action takes the form of ongoing narrative play, dropping into turn-based combat when needed, where Reflection takes place in a series of special scenes called Vignettes to represent timeskips, with more impactful ‘Resupply’ Vignettes acting in some ways as bridges between episodes or story arcs.

While it may sound similar to some of our previous games, this isn’t like in Flying Circus where each part of the Routine is a commitment to a certain kind of gameplay before you can go back. You’re able to switch between the two pretty readily; so long as there’s nothing bearing down on you this minute, you can go into Reflection and play out Vignettes, with the number available before you need to go back into Action depending on the in-universe time until the next important thing.

This structure imitates the back and forth you see in many episodes of Star Trek. To use Devil in the Dark as an example, the Action scenes are things like arriving at the planet to meet with the staff, or going out into the cave to track down what’s killing the miners. When they go back to talk about their findings, prep security crews, or bring in new resources, that’s Reflection. It covers your beloved TNG meeting room scenes, the cut to sickbay as we find out what happened to the redshirt, and the montages of inventing or building the tools that’ll solve this week’s problems.

As part of these rewrites, some parts of the game have been modified from previous dev diaries. We’ve simplified the way Harm works; you now have two Harm tracks, Injury and Panic, and a new accumulating penalty called Strain which builds up quickly as you make checks or use medicine to manage the other tracks or boost your abilities. Strain is easy to clear so long as you have supplies available, so it acts to pace out scenes and give less-skilled characters a reason to roll; if you know there’s a lot of a certain kind of work ahead, you might want to save your expert for the rolls which really matter!

(Radiation no longer uses a whole track, but instead consists of a small card the GM can hand you entitled “Congratulations, you’ve been irradiated!” with a list of dosage effects.)

A variety of changes large and small have emerged from these changes. Relationships act as an excellent starting point for Vignettes, while access to meetings have let us place restrictions on the number of checklists out on the field at a time, as you can always call meetings to retire checklists, propose others, and figure out what your next Big Question is about the mission. We’ve created a new XP system where you train skills directly by using them, with the pace of advancement limited on a per-episode basis to encourage you to play wide and learn new things.

Finally, we’ve come up with a neat solution to one of the longstanding problems that original sci-fi games often run into, where players are unsure what their technology can do, resulting in decision paralysis. We’ve added a very distinct CAN & CAN’T field on the info cards which lists exactly what everything does and what their limitations are so you can jump straight in without slowing the game to ask the GM where the boundaries are.

Things are bound to change more over time as the game is refined and tested, but that’s a good thing. Good games take time, revision, and a willingness to recognize and rewrite when things aren’t working as well as they could.

#torchship #dev diary #ttrpg #torchship ttrpg #rpg #oops game broke

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torchship-rpg · 6 months

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Commission for @foxgirlchorix of a GMO Human catgirl in the Zinovian Ministry of Security and Avietka the Zinovian Signals Cosmonaut in the IUR Star Patrol, at a formal diplomatic summit in Earth orbit.

Set in the universe of @torchship-rpg by @open-sketchbook

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torchship-rpg · 6 months

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NASA concept art by Don Davis, featured in The Rotarian, June 1978: "This artist's conception of a huge space colony could become a reality by 2008. Floating in space more than 250,000 kilometers from earth, the colony would house a population of 10,000."

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torchship-rpg · 6 months

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A character design and reference sheet commission for my good friend, @foxgirlchorix

This is a Mars rover inspired character designed for the setting of the upcoming ttrpg, “Torchship.”

This was very different kind of piece for me, and provided a lot of good challenge and genuine fun during the process! I cannot overstate how much enjoyment I had putting this piece together, I’ve been somewhat nervous to post it, but now that I’m no longer out of town, I think now is a good time!

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torchship-rpg · 7 months

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Dev Diary 11 - Special Checks

Welcome back, Cosmonauts!

Today, we’re going to be talking more about some of the systems in Torchship. As mentioned previously, Torchship uses systems of telescoping complexity to regulate how many mechanics you’re bringing in at a time. At one end is the core system of rolling dice for Checks and investigating things, which can be used in a pinch for just about anything. On the other are the specific costs, penalties, and conditions of hazards, tool making, repairs, and combat, all the detail we could possibly pack in and everything we could think of that might be relevant, if you wanted it.

In between we have a set of intermediate mechanics called Special Checks. Special Checks are variations on the regular Check with a bit more detail specific to what you’re doing with them. The Medical Checks from last week are an example of Special Checks; they are ways for your specialist in that area to feel like they are engaging in their job specifically when it matters.

Many Special Checks have further associated mechanics in their own chapters (the same way Hazards will lead directly into the kinds of Harm players experience), but we define them up front with broader terms because we know we can’t possibly cover everything, and you don’t always want to bring play to a halt to look up how much a repair might cost if it's not the central beat of your episode’s story.

So, let’s talk Special Checks, and all the weird ways you might roll dice.

Leadership & Institutions

While Star Patrol doesn’t have formal ranks, it still has leaders. The Admin Department is tasked with organisation and management, keeping everyone on task and coordinating between groups, and when emergencies strike it’s helpful to know who to listen to if you don’t know what you should be doing.

When you’re leading a work team of characters, PCs or NPCs, you build your dice pool the way you usually do, but with a few modifiers depending on the availability of tools, the relevant expertise, and if you actually have enough people to do the job. Otherwise, it’s a pretty straightforward roll, treated like any other.

The other thing an Admin character might find themselves doing is coordinating with, leading, or relying on an institution bigger than a work team, like trying to coordinate the healthcare system of a planet fighting a deadly plague. In this case, you roll your Check like you normally would, but you’re using the institution as a tool, building it with the same tool level system as everything else. The 5d6 computer-coordinated government agency of an industrial world is going to make running a census much easier and more accurate than doing it with the 3d6 bureaucracy that has to do everything with styluses and clay.

Of course, while ‘specialised’ makes sense for institutions-as-tools, ‘emplaced’ doesn’t. That’s why, instead, that extra +1d6 is gated behind if the institution you’re using is legitimate, which is to say, if the people the institution is working with see it as The Proper Doers Of The Thing. If you’re tracking down a person fleeing from justice, you’re a lot more likely to get results if people view the local law enforcement as having real claim to being the law of the land, rather than simply being occupiers.

Negotiation

Gee Administration, why does mum let you have two Special Checks?

One of the things Star Patrol ends up doing a lot is negotiations, both as a participant and as an arbitrator. In both cases we use the same system, but in one it’s you rolling against the person you’re negotiating with, and in the other its you trying to get two squabbling sides to compromise.

In either case, negotiation takes place as a series of Opposed Checks over a central issue; if you’re a participant, this is the thing you’re arguing over, while if you’re a mediator, Star Patrol’s demands are “Talk about this like adults” and the participants’ demands are “Don’t wanna!!” Winning the Opposed Check also strengthens your position as your rhetoric and posturing gives you an increasing advantage; eventually one side will have to either concede the central issue or quit in a huff and be seen as the one who made negotiations break down.

Negotiation is accompanied by the offering of Concessions, promises by one side or the other that, if a deal is eventually agreed on, will be honoured. Having a concession accepted means you take a die from their pool and add it to your own; if you’re making good-faith offers, it strengthens your position. When you’re arbitrating, you’re the one proposing concessions between the two parties, dragging them kicking and screaming towards making some kind of deal.

Hacking

Signals is the Cert for using computers and communication equipment, but because we don’t just want you to be the one who informs the captain there’s a new message coming in, you have some modern tricks up your sleeve in the form of hacking.

Hacking Checks are made against a different difficulty than usual, a sort of Opposed Check where the system has already rolled the dice. This difficulty is the Security Rating, determined by what kind of system you’re infiltrating and how advanced it is. Oh, right, ‘hacking’ doesn’t just apply to electronic computer systems; you can one hundred percent hack any kind of decision-making system. If you forge the King’s wax seal and slip orders in his handwriting into the mailbag heading to his vassal? That’s hacking, baby!

Your excess Successes above the Security Rating earn you Actions, stuff you can do once you’re in the system before you get noticed and booted out. You can use this to subvert the systems on an enemy rocket, shut down incoming missiles, steal or insert information, spy through cameras, open doors… you know, hacking stuff. You can also add backdoors to make it easier to come back next time.

Because the Security Rating on many important systems will be somewhat insurmountable, there’s a special kind of Investigation Checklist for computers where you can gather edges. This is where you can engage in the fun social engineering and physical theft that, in real life, makes up a large amount of real hacking, acquiring passwords or inserting devices into computers to make them easier to subvert.

We also have some guidelines for how you might hack systems in unusual situations; you can hack any computer that takes in any information from the outside world (as data sanitation is not always practised with nearly the thoroughness it should), and if you’re dealing with a device that runs on machine learning and takes natural language input, you can use prompt injection. Thanks, real life, for making ‘Kirk talks the computer to death’ into hard science fiction!

You also get to roll to oppose hacking if somebody else does it to you, even if the Signals character isn’t actually aware the hacking is happening; after all, as the admin, you’d be responsible for setting up the defences.

Invention & Repairs

We’ll go into this more in the specific chapters where it’s most relevant, but Engineering characters are often going to be making tools, fixing things, and making tools for the purposes of fixing things. These special Checks handle those situations; they use most of the normal Check mechanics, but with an added framework for costs and time.

So when you’re faced with something broken, the GM lays out what it’ll cost to fix it, in Supply or otherwise. You then choose the ‘level’ of repair you’re attempting. A ‘patch fix’ is fast and cheap, but you can’t ever get a full success doing it, meaning that it’s never perfect; you’re just getting the system online, even if the results are unsafe or use resources you could have used elsewhere. Jury rigging a solution will fix the problem, but never permanently, so it’ll do for now. A proper repair takes the longest amount of time, but you can reroll it over and over for a small amount of additional Supply until you get it right; it’s what you do if there’s no time or cost pressure.

Invention is a bit more complicated, but in summary, you take the tools you have to build a new tool with them, where a full success gets you the new device at the cost of time and resources, of equal tech level to the tool you used to make it. The more complex the device, the more Disadvantage you face, and insufficient successes mean you need to make compromises that might reduce its tech level or place limitations on the results.

When we talk about tools in more detail, we’ll go into the specifics; tool-building is one of the game’s major complex systems, with the ability to make almost anything!

Attacks & Defence

If you’re Security or Tactical, Astrogation during space combat, or stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time, you might end up making attacks and defence rolls. While there are combat subsystems in the game to handle the details, you don’t always need to interact with the full set to roll attack and defence; sometimes it’s just a shooting gallery, sometimes you’re using your weapons as demolition devices, sometimes you’re just resolving an attack quickly because the story is happening elsewhere.

Attacks & Defence are always rolled as Opposed Checks, but with very specific dice pools. Your Attack is determined by your weapon and the Certs relevant to it, which is pretty straightforward, while Defence is more complicated and situationally dependent. In space or other vehicles, you’ll often be rolling the vehicle’s Evade stat, a dice pool which is derived from how nimble it is. If you’re facing incoming missiles, though, you might try to shoot them down with point defence instead. Sometimes you don’t even get a roll; there’s nothing you can do about a laser beam except pray the screens hold.

On foot, you often have to make a decision between dodging the attack, trying to block it with an object, or taking cover behind something. Dodging faces the problem that your body is only a 2d6 tool, so once people start using things more dangerous than fists, that’s not going to work very well. Blocking isn’t always viable, and you’ll take penalties (or simply not be able to use it at all) if the object isn’t designed for it. When you take cover, you treat the cover itself as a tool.

While the dice pool for cover isn’t determined by tech level, we are very proud of the fact that hiding in a foxhole is, in a sense, taking cover behind the collective energy of an entire planet, so it’s 6d6.

Psychic Checks

Psychic Powers are a big topic, and we’ll need to save it for another day.

In short, though, psychic powers are largely freeform, with some specific limitations and guidelines, and you can always attempt to use psychic powers; you don’t need to tick a special checkbox to make you a psychic. There are four special Psychic Certs (right now they’re ESP, Psychokinesis, Telepathy, and Precognition, though this is subject to change as we work the details out), but like any Cert, you can still roll them untrained. So while you can always try to use your latent mind powers, it’s unlikely you’ll get very far to start.

Which is why you can train your psychic abilities! Nobody gets to start their Star Patrol career as a qualified psychic, but you can become one as you explore the galaxy. It’s a difficult road, and one that’ll cut into your professional development, but you can do it. Further details will be confined to a dedicated dev diary; it’s a big complex topic!

That’s it for this Dev Diary. Next time, we talk the weird branch of the human family as we take a look at the Proxies and Archivists of humanity’s first extrasolar colony.

#torchship #ttrpg #dev diary #torchship ttrpg #rpg

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agreed

star trek tos au where all the uniform boots look like this

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something something the tools of the state create the conditions they supposedly address or whatev

Dev Diary 10 - Martians & Spacers

Hello cosmonauts! Today we’re going to go into some more detail on human identities (don’t worry, we’ll get to aliens soon enough). Torchship development is progressing behind the scenes, albeit a bit slowly (the last two weeks especially have been hellish), and in particular we’re working on a revision of some of our core systems in a way that hopefully we can touch on in our next dev diary.

Until then, let’s wrap up the Sol-based human identities today.

Spacers

It’s safe to say that humanity in Torchship are a bunch of space cadets, and an awful lot of them were eager to live in space the moment the opportunity arose. The result is that, in the year 2169, there are entire cities floating free in the Sol system, and thousands of small stations for mining, processing, and refining the near-limitless resources of the asteroid belt and Oort cloud.

Spacers live in much-reduced gravity to the Earth norm; 0.35g is the ‘standard’, originally because of mechanical limitations in the construction of stations and now simply their norm. This means they’re recommended the ‘Freefaller’ trait, just like Lunars. They are also recommended the Radiation Hardened trait, representing modifications and pre-emptive treatment to cope with living outside of a planet’s magnetosphere and atmosphere. This gives you inbuilt reduction against radiation damage in exchange for slower passive healing due to the metabolic cost of those redundancies.

Spacers are divided into two broad categories; Habitat Spacers and Deep Spacers. As the name implies, ‘Habbers’ live in the many purpose-built space habitats which orbit Earth and, to a lesser degree, the other planets in the Sol system. These habitats are enormous technological wonders and a vital step in the space-based economy of the Solar Union, containing the light manufacturing facilities which turn the resources of Luna, the outer system, and beyond into consumer goods. They also help route the people and resources flowing to and from Earth, ensuring the colonies get fed and Earth reaps the benefits of large-scale industry without the environmental cost.

Habbers might live in space, but their day-to-day isn’t much different from their Terran cousins. Their habitats are huge, massive cities with equally large green areas. Standout habitats include L5 Hab, home of Star Patrol HQ and Academy, L4 ‘Guest Star’, the former headquarters of the PLA’s astromilitary and current HQ of Star Force, and Destination Station, the orbital anchor for Earth’s space elevator.

Habbers, especially L4 and L5 citizens, made up a disproportionate amount of Solar Patrol members back in the day, so they get recommended the ‘Veteran’ Trait, scoring you reduced Stress in combat and bonus Security/Tactical certs in exchange for a lowered total Stress threshold. The strong presence of both the play market and shipping bureaucracy come with the Entrepreneur trait; you’re a better negotiator than average because you’re used to these kinds of transactions, but take Stress from both offering the Union’s Credits in negotiation and from the Union being in debt, as you have a much better handle on what it might mean for people when the Union’s economic systems are strained.

By contrast, Deep Spacers don’t live in cushy habs. No, these crusty cosmonauts make their living out in the farthest reaches of the Sol system, mining ice from Saturn’s rings, breaking up distant asteroids, and sending the bounty back on slow orbits. Not long ago, before the FTL drive was invented, this was the farthest you could get from the authority of the Union; most Deep Spacers are anarchists of various sorts who very much prefer their little self-contained communities to the stifling oversight and endless democratic procedure of Earth, who eschew the ration credit and play market for gift economies and black markets of their own devising. Their relationship with Earth never has to get deeper than minerals for biologicals, and most of them prefer it that way.

Still, Deep Spacers are the rock-solid core of the Patrol, because a lifetime on stations and rockets give them unparalleled instincts for the job. They are recommended the same Claustrophile trait as Mazedwelling Lunars and the same Communal Spirit trait as Urban Terrans, meaning they’re great working in a team or on EVA. They also pick up languages quickly with Polyglot, because many of their stations are extremely multicultural, and it's not uncommon for deep spacers to speak five or more languages, plus whatever pidgins are used at their trade posts.

Finally, both types of Spacers are recommended two traits which make them beloved by Star Patrol. Voidborn gives a bonus to patching hulls in exchange for added Stress when the vehicle is low on Supply, representing both their lifetime of decompression drills and their deep awareness of how thin the margins are in space. They are also recommended the Well-Connected trait to always have friends in the Patrol wherever they go, because for many Spacers, this is the family business!

As a final note, Spacers get a unique third sub-identity, the Daedalus Children, which is mostly a way of showing players that they’re free to go wild with the Trait choices even if they’re playing with humans. The Daedalus Children are a small group of artificial, silicon-based human duplicates created by the sapient supercomputer running Sagan Station, orbiting the distant planet Minerva 500 AU away from the sun. They have a psychic connection to the Daedalus computer (who they affectionately call their ‘Daed’) through the Patron Being trait.

This gonzo addition makes it clear that this is a big, strange, somewhat silly world, and you should feel free to make your blorbo whatever you want, and damn the canon!

Martians

Let’s go down the gravity well again and meet the Martians. Mars is well on its way to being humanity’s second homeworld by 2169, the result of a near-obsessive colonisation and terraforming effort through the 21st century. More or less the moment fusion engines made it viable, humans were throwing comets into the poles and setting up artificial magnetospheres, excited by the possibility of using their new high-energy toys to create a livable planet in less than a century.

Unfortunately, though perhaps not surprisingly, their maths were somewhat off. Mars is lingering in a low oxygen state, and has too many people and too much infrastructure now to try any of the big flashy high-energy terraforming anymore. Instead, it’ll be slow centuries of cultivating an artificial biosphere before Terrans can breathe unaided on the surface; despite the rapidly spreading greenery and brand new oceans, Mars’s current average surface oxygen level rivals the peak of Mount Everest.

Undeterred, the Martians turned to genetic engineering so their children could play outside. The result is that Martians get recommended the Hypoxic Conditioning trait, which gives them total immunity to low oxygen conditions and a shocking ten minutes of normal activity in total oxygen deprivation. In exchange, they take a penalty to their physical capabilities, reflecting the metabolic changes and the fact they’ve all ended up a good eight centimetres shorter than they would be without the modifications.

Martians also get recommended the Driven and Lone Wolf traits, neurological consequences of this engineering; these traits combine to mean that Martians work best when they’re alone and hyperfocusing on a single task. This may or may not be familiar to some of you, which is very much intentional; Martians are a not so subtle fantastical allegory for neurodivergence.

The two major Martian sub-identities are The Red Frontier and The Dome Cities. The Red Frontier represents what is often thought of as the archetypical Martian lifestyle, even if it’s slowly being displaced; small groups of people living in bunker-like bases deep in the vast Martian wilderness, tending to the massive fleet of agriculture, survey, construction, and maintenance drones which are both building infrastructure and tending the genetically-engineered biosphere of Mars. This job gets them recommended the Machine Minded trait, which eliminates the penalty normally taken when working remotely with machines in exchange for one to social interaction in person.

Mars’ fragile ecology manifests as a strange sort of tundra, with spindly evergreen trees, hardy lichen, and a variety of engineered animals. A lot of work has to be done to keep it all going, especially because insects can’t survive the oxygen-poor environment, which makes pollination difficult. Martians get recommended the appropriate Environmental Adaptation trait for this tundra; they know all about survival in cold, dry environments.

Finally, if you wanted to play one of those terraforming drones instead, that’s always a viable option; we dropped Machine Life in there as a reminder!

The dwellers of the Dome Cities are part of Mars’ high tech industry. Because of the gravity well in the way, Mars doesn’t export much in the way of material goods. Instead, it uses the concentration of expertise needed for terraforming and drone management to make cutting-edge software and media for the rest of the Union, and the cities are where this takes place. Martian cities are much more high-tech than their Earth counterparts, with lots of automated systems designed either to make up for the smaller population, or simply because Martians are already used to making robots do as much work as possible; Machine-Minded is unsurprisingly also recommended here.

Because Mars is a world of specialists, where being the best at your One Thing is a strong cultural value, the Prodigy trait is recommended for citizens of the Dome Cities, allowing them to pick three certs as Focuses and advance them faster, at the cost of advancing the others slower. Finally, the greater reliance on automation sees the Prosthetics trait recommended, representing both the greater reliance on mechanical parts over regrown tissue in medicine and the fact Martians aren’t adverse to a bit of computerised self-improvement.

Digital Elysium

Just like Spacers, Martians have a third, highly-specific sub-identity. Where Daedalus Children are a gonzo departure from the setting’s norm, the citizens of Elysium City instead are instead deeply rooted in the history of the setting. Remember how we said the Star Union isn’t a utopia? Well, this is one of the major ways it has failed, and a resolution is one of the things that can emerge over the course of the campaign.

Forty years prior to the modern day, a group of Cybernetic Democrats calling themselves the Lab Rats hatched the brilliant scheme to all move to one of the brand-new Martian cities together and use their newfound political majority to set up one of their predictive networks, peacefully starting the cybernetic revolution on a new world. They built themselves an automated city, possessed by a ghost of convenience which always knew exactly what you needed, always had a train ready when you reached the station, and always had a task you wanted to do ready to go every time you looked at your smart watch. It was efficient, seamless, responsive, and incredibly alienating, replacing any real sense of community with quest markers in your smart glasses.

When vital colonists tried to leave the city, the algorithm predicted the majority wouldn’t like that, and it locked the doors to stop them. Then the Solar Guard showed up to the ‘hostage situation’. Nobody listened to one another, both sides refused to understand what was going on. The Solar Guard rolled in tanks, and the algorithm helped the Lab Rats ambush them. After a month of brutal street to street fighting, the first war on another world, the Solar Guard retreated, and bombed the city with jumpjets until the terrified defenders lost hope. Once the majority no longer wanted to fight, the algorithm dutifully switched off.

Forty years later, Elysium City is still under military occupation. It was supposed to be brief, but the neighbouring cities who now have the controlling vote keep extending it whenever violence flares up, and each extension radicalises a new generation of Elysium citizens. Both sides are incredibly unpopular with a majority who just want peace and a greater Union who find it all monstrous, but the systems of the Solar Union are paralyzed by their own democratic checks and balances, leaving the city in a horrible limbo.

If you want to be from Elysium, you get recommended a whole pile of traits reflecting the extreme circumstance. Vengeful and Fretful are two recommended Traits representing the understandable anger and anxiety which come from living in a city where drone bombing still happens with regularity. Prodigy reflects how Elysium City is the single largest concentration of computer science geniuses in the entire Union, due to the fact that none of them are allowed to leave. Dark History can represent in equal parts being a member of the Lab Rats or the Sol Guard, both staggeringly unpopular organisations to everyone else in the Union.

Finally, Patron Being represents how, despite the best efforts of generations of computer engineers, the self-replicating Network still lingers deep in the electronic bones of Elysium, waiting for the day that a majority want it back. Hackers and technomancers both claim they have made contact with the Network, and this trait can represent your dedication to bringing it back.

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Dev Diary 10 - Martians & Spacers

Until then, let’s wrap up the Sol-based human identities today.

Spacers

This gonzo addition makes it clear that this is a big, strange, somewhat silly world, and you should feel free to make your blorbo whatever you want, and damn the canon!

Martians

Finally, if you wanted to play one of those terraforming drones instead, that’s always a viable option; we dropped Machine Life in there as a reminder!

Digital Elysium

#torchship ttrpg #torchship #ttrpg #dev diary #rpg

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Commission for Holly of a male Koath cosmonaut in Star Patrol Signals Purple uniform, from @torchship-rpg. The Koath are a medieval species of dinosaur-like aliens whose planet is too mineral-poor to develop much industry. Despite this, at least one of the nations on the planet is a member of the Interstellar Union of Republics.

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Love the contrast between the Americans’ “Apollo” and the Soviets’ “Sputnik.” You got the Americans naming their rocket after a Greek god trying to communicate the grandness and importance of this rocket. And you got the Soviets naming their rocket “fellow traveler.” Like a friend you go on an adventure with together. This rocket is our little friend lol

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Dev Diary 9 - Harm & Healing

Space is dangerous. A huge portion of the rules space in Torchship is given over to various ways it can hurt you, but before we get there we have to establish how being hurt works, and how to get better after it happens.

Harm and Healing is the first in a section called Detailed Systems, which is a catch-all section for systems which, while not foundational the way Core systems are, will still come up fairly frequently. The book ‘unspools’ in this way, starting broad and getting more specific as you go through chapters.

Of these, Harm is the one that will be most likely to come up for many people.

Harm Tracks

Every character has four Harm Tracks on their character sheet, abstracting the various ways you can get messed up on your missions. You can, if you must, think of each slot on the track as a Hit Point for this sort of Harm. The track has 12 slots, but this is to account for characters who are tougher than average; most people only have 8-slot long Harm Tracks, and you shade out the parts you aren’t using.

However, if you’re playing a very tough alien, you might have more Injury tracks, while a Baseliner has a longer Toxicity track than their genetically-modified peers whose metabolisms run leaner. Conversely, some Traits will shorten your track instead; genetic Augments can end up with shortened Toxicity tracks, for instance.

The four kinds of Harm all have slightly different effects and happen for different reasons, but follow the same basic mechanical rules in terms of how they are inflicted, recorded, and removed. They are:

Injury, for actual physical damage to your character. This is the one that can kill you directly, so its management is really important!

Stress, for the mental and emotional strain of the job. Stress is the easiest to take, and the easiest to remove, over the course of gameplay.

Radiation, recording the progress of radiation poisoning, should it happen. Radiation is unique in that you never take it directly from radiation sources; you always take it as Ongoing.

Toxicity, your body’s ability to handle potentially dangerous substances. This can track poisons, but is mostly used for restricting the amount of pharmaceuticals you can stuff in your body.

Taking Harm

Broadly speaking, you can take harm in two ways. The first is to take it directly, where you simply get told to fill in a number of spaces on the track.

That’s simple enough, but there’s a further twist. Every time you take Harm, you also have to roll something called a Shock Check, which is rolled using one of your Universal Abilities. Powering through Injury is a roll of Wild Animal, while keeping calm and collected after radiation exposure tests Cosmonaut. Failing has a variety of effects, but most put you temporarily out of action.

The second, and often much more dangerous, way you take harm is taking Ongoing Harm. Every hour in-game, you increase your Harm Track by the amount of Ongoing Harm you’re taking. That gives you some time to work with, enough to come up with clever solutions like the space cadets you are, but left untreated your Harm Track will fill up. Atop that, Ongoing still inflicts Shock Checks, so if you’re bleeding from Ongoing Injury, there’s a chance every hour you go into shock!

As you climb the tracks, you face increasing negative effects to your character. Injury is the most direct, inflicting increasing amounts of Disadvantage (we renamed Complications btw) and making your checks harder as you deal with the consequences. High Stress makes using Unity more expensive, which can hurt a lot given that Unity is one of the primary ways you remove Stress.

Finally, Toxicity and Radiation both have the same effect of downgrading your rolls on Checks, effectively representing the way the mounting illness and the accompanying psychological impact makes you less able to use the skills you have. Don’t worry though; 6s are always successes, no matter how bad it gets.

Filled Tracks

Once you fill your track, each one has a special penalty. For Radiation and Toxicity, you start taking Injury; this takes the form of untreatable Ongoing Injury for Radiation (you’ll need to lower your Radiation before you can heal it), while any further Toxicity you would take when the track is full just becomes Injury.

For Stress, a filled track means your character just can’t function anymore; they’re either panicking too badly to act rationally, or they’ve just shut down from the stress. Don’t worry; this is a good chance to take over an NPC using the B-Team rules until your character gets back on their feet.

When your Injury track fills up, you die.

Healing

To avoid your tracks filling up, you need to use the Healing rules. Because Being A Doctor is a whole 1/8th of the character skill archetypes in the game, we made sure that doctoring has some teeth to it, same as filling out Investigation Checklists for researchers or hacking for Signals (we’ll get into that one next time we do a mechanics diary). You don’t just get to lay on hands and Cure Light Wounds (which would be very handy in a setting with lasers, where light can cause a lot of wounds) but rather you have to actually address the problem the way a doctor would.

Because of this, there are four ways that healing works in Torchship. Characters have a degree of passive healing that slowly removes Harm; it works on Stress and Toxicity automatically, heals Injury so long as you’ve gotten some treatment, and doesn’t do anything for Radiation.

Still, this is not really practical for most gameplay purposes, though it works a little better than in most games as you really can just quantum leap to another crewmember and leave Captain Archer recovering in his quarters. Fortunately, it’s the future, so faster healing is available.

Harm Stabilising is first aid, where you remove Ongoing Harm. When people have been hurt, especially in a mass casualty situation, this is the priority; prevent people from getting worse. This is done as a simple Check using the responder’s medical Tool dice pool; if you get at least 3 Passes (that’s successful dice rolls, we revised that language too) you remove 1 Ongoing, while further Passes remove more.

Stabilising is difficult, especially if the patient is in a bad way. It’s harder to do the more Harm Factors the patient is dealing with, and there’s a chance of inflicting more Harm if you mess it up. For that reason, it makes logical and mechanical sense to attempt some Harm Management before Stabilising.

Management is what you do in the field to suppress the effects of Harm; it’s painkillers, anti-nausea drugs, and so forth. No Checks are needed; you simply take some medication, which is either the pre-designed stuff from your stockpiles, or custom Harm medication you crafted with the pharmaceutical crafting rules. You take some Toxicity from the drugs, and the Harm Factor effects are gone!

Harm Management suppresses penalties, but doesn’t actually remove Harm. Once the duration of the meds are up, the effects come back, and if you keep popping pills to stay functional you’ll reach max Toxicity in short order. You need to actually deal with the Harm directly, and that’s where Harm Recovery comes in.

Recovery is a Check you can perform on a patient after they have been Stabilised. Successes grant negative Ongoing Harm, healing the patient over the course of hours. You can’t go faster than that (yet), but getting somebody from the brink of death back to fully healthy in the space of eight hours is still pretty impressive! Every time you perform Recovery Treatment, the patient takes 1 Toxicity, so you may have to wait for their Toxicity to reduce before going on with it.

Death

As mentioned earlier, characters can die. Any character, not just the ones working in Security. Fortunately, it’s the future, which means that a lot of circumstances we might call Dead are, in fact, Only Mostly Dead.

Which means they’re a little bit alive.

Curing Death is a special Check that doctors can do which simply requires they roll as many Passes as the character has Injury. As this is going to be more than you can roll dice in most situations, you’ll need to get every advantage you can. With a specialised, emplaced tool for bringing back the dead, you can roll 8d6, which will be enough in most circumstances if every one is a Pass. That means you’ll need every scrap of Unity you can to reroll until you get it.

It also gets harder the longer somebody’s been dead. Having a frozen compartment on board (which you might, for smuggling things past tachyon sensors) also means you can keep a body on ice to buy you a few more hours; you can always build a freezer in an emergency. If you have Sleeper Pods aboard your ship, you can use the advanced cryogenic chambers to keep a character around indefinitely, until you develop the technology to bring them back.

Just remember to be waiting outside the pod in your weirdest clothes, ready to yell “WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!”

#torchship #ttrpg #dev diary #torchship ttrpg #rpg #cw injury

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Crew Profiles Part 1: Mary Gillham-32

Greetings Cosmonauts!

This is the first of a series of posts detailing the characters of Torchship: Forbidden Space, in the leadup to the release of our Pilot episode. And who better to start with than the most of important character of all, the rocket: Mary Gillham-32 herself!

Tough little ship

By 2152, it had become clear that the Aquillian De-Militarised Zone was here to stay. A ceasefire intended to last until peace negotiations that never came. The Divine Empire, risen from the ashes of the old Aquillian Empire, officially refused to recognise the DMZ. But unofficially? They made it clear that so long as Humanity kept out of the DMZ, there would be no more hostilities.

The Florence Bailey program was soon established. Tasked with venturing inside the disputed territory, with the primary objective of reconnoitring Divine Empire operations, charting the DMZ, and attempting to make secret alliances with any civilisations inside the region. By secretly breaking the cease-fire, it was hoped the Florence Bailey program could, if not prevent another war, at least ensure Humanity was prepared for it. Secrecy being paramount, the Florence Bailey program utilised civilian ships, modified to appear like those belonging to vessels of various alien polities, alongside ‘acquired’ vessels of Aquillian and other alien origin.

While successful, the Florence Bailey program was rife with controversies. Including a minor political scandal when the Free Aquillian Republic Raptor Libre encountered Florence Bailey-4, a captured Raptor masquerading as Free Aquillian Republic Raptor Libre.

Aquillian Free Republic Raptor Libre. Or is it Florence Bailey-4?

In 2162, Humanity developed their first cloaking device, finally allowing Star Patrol to explore the DMZ without the headache of acquiring alien rockets, or offending its neighbours. The Mary Gillham program was born. It carried the same objectives as the Florence Bailey program, but now using purpose built vessels, and operating openly inside the DMZ as Star Patrol vessels, using cloaking technology to remain undetected by Divine Empire rockets or listening posts.

Mary Gillham rockets are built to contradictory standards, and Mary Gillham-32 is no exception. She needed a small profile and to appear non-threatening. Enough that if discovered, she would prompt a manageable diplomatic incident, rather than a full blown war. She also needed to be self sufficient, capable of cruising for months, potentially years, without resupply or official support, feature a cloaking device, advanced sensor systems, and be well enough armed to fend off rockets 3 times her size. How successful this was depends entirely on who you ask…

"You're shorter than I expected." - Mary Gillham-32 faces off against a Divine Empire Second Rate.

Mary Gillham-32 is one of the smallest interstellar rockets in Star Patrol, and carries the bare minimum crew complement of 4. All Star Patrol rockets are cramped, but Mary takes it to another level. Supplies and equipment are stashed anywhere and everywhere there’s room. Her moonchute (the zero gravity shaft used to navigate up and down decks) is claustrophobic, and her doors are often joked to have been designed by Martians to spite the tall.

Mary’s most important and defining feature is her cloaking device. Effectively a second, specialised variant of the FTL drive, though rather than warping space to allow for superluminal travel, the cloak warps space so steeply that it creates a bubble through which no light, heat, or tachyons can enter or escape. Effectively concealing the rocket in a tiny baby universe all to itself. Of course, this works both ways, while cloaked Mary is totally blind, relying solely on computer calculations to determine position, and a periscope in the form of a tethered drone that can be extended from the cloak bubble, at risk of detection.

Mary's periscope observes a pack of Aquillian Raptors.

This lack of creature comforts is most obvious when it comes to the matter of armament. Too small to fit particle cannons or railguns, when it comes to combat Mary’s best hope is to cloak and escape. If that doesn’t work, she has a set of six externally mounted torpedo tubes. With no room for anything as wasteful as autoloaders, reloading is a process that takes the better part of a day. New torpedoes must be manufactured in stages in the matter printer, transported up the ship and out the cargo airlock, assembled in space, and then manually loaded into the tubes after being fitted with the desired warhead.

With only six shots, it’s imperative that even one torpedo is enough to end any fight. So, in addition to a supply of standard flak, nuclear and a handful of antimatter warheads. She also carries a small stock of Graviton bombs. An experimental warhead that creates a pseudo-singularity with an event horizon diameter measuring tens of kilometres. Anything caught within is utterly ripped apart. Mary may only have six shots, but she only needs one.

In short, Mary Gillham-32 is an undersized, overengineered, and overpowered rocket with an understaffed and overworked crew, embarked on a dangerous, politically dubious mission with no hope of reinforcements or aid if they encounter a problem. But whatever sticky situations their mission brief gets them into, the crew can rest assured that with a bit of clever thinking, Mary will get them out of it.

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