Interplanetary Travel: What Works best for your story?

Hey all,

The other day I decided to sit down and think about the different ways that science fiction has justified interplanetary travel. Usually finding habitable worlds is a task that can turn interplanetary travel into interstellar travel in a hurry. It seemed like a fun idea to put together a list of all of the ones that I could think of.
Here's hoping writers and game masters will find some useful food for thought in this one.

1. Faster than Light (FTL)
ex. Artemis Bridge Simulator
Real-space FTL travel might seem like the easy category; and I thought it'd be easier to find examples of stories where ships "just go that fast, get over it." but it turns out that pseudoscientific explanations are pretty fun to make. That being the case, "just going that fast" is actually fairly rare in well-known and well-received science fiction. 

2. Jump
ex. Farscape (Starburst), Artemis Bridge Simulator
This is basically just a spaceship teleporting. Again, I thought it'd be a little more well-represented in the genre, but I had some trouble finding a lot of examples. I will say, though, that it adds a fun complexity to Artemis to play the game on jump mode. Official recommendation: jump drive mode on Artemis. Alright, moving on. 

3. Otherspace 
ex. Warhammer 40,000, Animorphs, Star Wars
Whether it's subspace, hyperspace, zero space, or the warp; it's the dimension next door and rapid transit is no issue, there. Sometimes this is explained as less restrictive physics, or that this otherspace is a small-scale duplicate of our own space. Travel an inch there, travel a light year here. Then just pop back into our reality when you get to that space's equivalent of your destination in our space. Nothing simpler, eh?

4. Generation Ship
ex. Quotzl, Wall-E
This is the Oregon trail of interstellar transit. Your family loads up and heads out, hoping that one day your great-great-grandchildren will be born on this ship, and live to see the new world you've headed towards.

5. Spatial Bending
ex. Star Trek
This is probably the background explanation for a lot of FTL. You can't go faster than light, but space can grow and/or shrink at whatever rate it likes. Now say you could induce space to grow just right that the place you're flying in were to be stretched to a place a hundred light years away. Now you've got it. Traveling quickly, don't be ridiculous. The simplest solution is to alter the shape of reality, obviously.

6. Wormhole Tunneling
ex. Farscape
Sometimes this also ties into Gate Transit (#8), but where Gate Transit might tether, or even create wormholes; wormhole tunneling is more a matter of mapping out the places where our three dimensional space naturally bends and meets through higher dimensions. Imagine that you could either fly to Russia, or go to an alley in Omaha that happens (via, let's just say, the sixth dimension) to be adjacent to a Moscow deli.

7. Relativistic Speed
ex. Ender's Game
Just because you can't go the speed of light, doesn't mean you can't take advantage of time dilation effects experienced when approaching the speed of light. In two-hundred years of travel, you could experience only a few years of time's passage in your own timeline. You do essentially guarantee that you'll never see the people you've left behind again, but that would have been an issue in generation ships, too.

8. Gate Transit
ex. Stargate, Cowboy Bebop, Mass Effect
It might be wormholes, otherspace, or teleportation; but what makes it Gate Transit is the gate. Maybe that's a literal opening, or it might be something like the mass relays. Either way, some piece of tech, networked into a system of similar tech can send you from "gate" to "gate", usually almost instantaneously.

9. Seed Ship
ex. Manseed
Like the generation ship, this ship doesn't really move faster than light, it just plans for a long haul. Unlike the generation ship, this isn't a flying colony, it's a flying fertility clinic. A ship heads off with the resources to breed and incubate new humans upon arrival. It protects the species, but memories of earth will fade pretty quickly.

10. Colonize a Better Space
ex. Firefly
Of course, any of these methods could be used to head for a solar system that's a little more tightly packed with habitable worlds. By the time your story starts, earth may be a distant memory, while interplanetary travel is just a week-long hop between nearby habitable worlds, moons, and asteroids. Massive terraforming in the Sol system might be another way to get the same effect.

11. Mental Projection
ex. The Shadow out of Time
This one's probably the oddest of all: aliens with powerful mental abilities capable of body-swapping through space, and perhaps even through time. This falls pretty far toward the sphere of weird science fiction, but the horror potential can make for some interesting storytelling.

Can you think of any methods I've missed? What's your favorite way of justifying this kind of space travel in science fiction?

Happy travels, all.

Egyptian Ratscrew

Hey all,

If you saw my youtube video Friday, you may remember my mentioning ERS. Egyptian Ratscrew, also known as Egyptian War, Egyptian Rat Slap, or (according to wikipedia) Egyptian Ratkiller, is a game that I remember very fondly from my childhood. In an article about 500, I spoke about the value of customizable games as educational tools. Well, ERS is another great game for teaching young people to look at rules from the inside out.

The basics are pretty simple. Deal out even (or roughly even) piles of cards to each player. The players take turns playing one card off of their deck without looking at it, and placing it on a pile in the middle of the table.

Every face card that gets played needs to be "matched" by another face card. When a player plays a face card, the next player plays out a specific number of cards (or until they play a face card), and then the player after them have to play out cards trying to get a face card, and the first player to not play a face card forfeits the entire pile in the middle of the table to the player before them.

Aces give four chances to match. Kings give three chances. Queens give two chances; and Jacks give only one chance to play a face card.

Of course, if this was all there was to it, there'd be no skill involved. This is where the slapping comes in. When a certain combination of cards is played, the first player to slap the pile gets to keep the pile. If the player slaps something that doesn't count, they have to add a card of theirs to the bottom of the pile. If another card is played before anyone slaps, the opportunity has passed. Slapping takes precedence over matching the face cards, so if someone plays a King, and the next player plays a King, the first player to slap that pair gets the pile, even though a run of face cards was still going.

Which combinations are used are what add spice and variety to the game.

Pairs: Almost every game of ERS will allow slapping on pairs. So, if someone plays a 3, and the next player plays a 3, any player at the table can slap the pile and claim all of those cards as their own.

Sandwiches: A sandwich is a pair separated by a single card. So, if a player plays a 6, the next player plays a 4, and the next player plays a 6, then the first player to slap the pile, gets the pile.

Marriages: The marriage rule treats a King and Queen combo as a pair.

69's and 96's: This is a bit of a cheat, and many players recognize it as an "easy mode". It allows a player to slap on any combination of 9 and 6. This helps very young players who can get easily get confused by the similar symbols.

Ham and cheese sandwiches: This is a sandwich, but with two cards in the middle. This can make the memory aspect of the game even harder, but experienced players will sometimes relish the challenge.

Runs: If three cards that are in sequence with each other are played in any sequence (i.e. 2, then 4, then 3), this can be slapped on.

Of course, these aren't the only possible combinations, and creative players will definitely begin house-ruling some slappable combinations of their own. Have any of you played ERS before? What are some combinations you remember from your own games?

Happy gaming, all.

The Lobheist

Hey all,

Per Saturday's video, I've got some info and stats on this creature, which I've dubbed the Lobhest. The write-up should lend itself to several systems, but for stats, I went to OSRIC. It's an open game license reference document, which makes it useful for statting a monster without worrying about the legality of using the system.

Lobheist
(pronounced "Lobe" "Iced")
[from Scottish Gaelic Lobais (craft, ingenuity) Bheist (beast)]

Hunt-bred Lobhest

frequency: rare

no. encountered: 2d6 (plus a sapient fae creature to act as handler)

size: man-sized (medium)

move: 220 ft

armor class: 0

hit dice: 4d8+2

attacks: 1

damage: 2d4+1

Special attacks: poison

Special defenses: immune to faerie fire

magic resistance: 15%

lair probability: semi-

intelligence: animal

alignment: none

level/xp: 4/230

Draft-bred Lobhest

frequency: rare

no. encountered: 1-2 (plus a sapient fae creature to act as handler)

size: large

move: 120 ft

armor class: 0

hit dice: 6d8+4

attacks: 1

damage: 2d4

Special attacks: poison

Special defenses: immune to faerie fire

Magic Resistance: 15%

lair probability: none

intelligence: animal

alignment: none

level/xp: 4/230

Feral Lobhest

frequency: rare

no. encountered: 1

size: large

move: 150 ft

armor class: 0

hit dice: 6d8+4

attacks: 2

damage: 3d4/3d4

Special attacks: poison

Special defenses: immune to faerie fire

magic resistance: 15%

lair probability: 15%

intelligence: semi-

alignment: none

level/xp: 6/550

The lobheist is a creature bred by the ancient Fae. When the elves fled their Fae masters, these beasts were used often in the hunt for runaway elves. As a result, the lobheist features prominently as a "boogeyman" of elvish culture and lore.

Several breeds exist. The Fae created breeds of lobheist to be used as hounds of the hunt as well as beasts of burden. Additionally, lost lobheist have been known to go feral. Feral lobheists tend to be solitary beasts who seek out primal natural areas and establish a den.

The small hunting breed grow to be about 1 meter tall at the shoulder and hunt in a pack commanded by a sapient fae. The massive draft breed stand between 3 and 4.5 meters at the shoulder and are used as needed in manual labor under the direction of a handler. They are the least intelligent and have the least training and fewest instincts for combat. The feral breeds fall in the middle, and, while savage, only stand about 2.5 meters tall at the shoulder.

A lobheist will not cross running water; however, this is an inherited fear borne out of their Fae heritage, and the water itself poses no threat whatsoever to their physical being.

This same Fae heritage grants them a noticeable defense to magic, including a complete immunity to the effects of the faerie fire spell. Their diet makes their saliva, functionally, a poison; and following a successful bite attack, the target must pass a poison save or incur an additional 1d4 poison damage.


Enjoy the monster, and stay safe in the dark woods, roleplayers.

If a tree . . .

It's a classic question: "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?"

On the surface, a lot of people can easily dismiss this. Why wouldn't it make a sound? There is no known force that could prevent it from creating a vibration in the air while unobserved. However, this brings in the impossibility of proving a negative. It is impossible to say what does or does not happen in circumstances that are, by definition, unobserved. That rabbit trail leads into weird quantum stuff, but there's another tack to take on this question, and it's semantics. As a literature guy, I'm thinking we veer into semantics rather than dig deeper into the weirdest of sciences.

So then, semantically speaking, is a "sound" a vibration in the air? You might think that, yes, that is what we know that sound scientifically is; but think about it this way: could sound be defined as the interaction between airwaves and eardrums?

If a vibration never interacts with a set of eardrums, is that vibration sound? 

Another old adage goes "In space, no one can hear you scream." If a tree falls in a vacuum, yet is influenced by gravity equal to that of earth, it still strikes with the same force, and creates the same vibrations; but without a sound-conductive medium, those vibrations do not travel through the right medium to reach human ears.

Most would say that a tree falling in THOSE circumstances would not make a sound, even though the force of impact creates the same energy's-worth of vibration as a tree falling on earth. So, in one set of circumstances, the tree falling and not being heard by humans makes a sound; yet in another circumstance, the tree falls, and goes unheard by humans, and does not make a sound.

I would argue, then, that the tree makes no sound; because until a vibration reaches an eardrum, it is not a sound; it is nothing but a vibration.

. . .but, what do you think?

Fallout Denver Session Notes 4: Wherein Our Heroes Obtain Information and Goods Before Fleeing Dangerous Situations

This is a record of a GURPS campaign set in a non-canonical version of Denver in the Fallout universe. The last part is here, or you can start at the beginning.

Once the party decided to stay on in Borealis, they ventured to a corner of the settlement where they were told public bounties would be available for consideration. On the way, they stopped off at a maintenance area where Gadget convinced the local smith to let her make modifications to Drengo's powerfist. His already powerful weapon would be equipped with a vicious blade for future encounters. They also did some trading with a local protectron shopkeeper, who seemed desperate to find a buyer for a surplus of life vests.

This done, they spoke with a local member of the town's administration team, who presented them with an array of possible public requests to look into.

For starters, they headed to a ghoul settlement that had lapsed on paying protection money to Borealis. Once there, they found a terrible malady spreading through the population that caused an outbreak of ghouls going feral. Drengo, as a ghoul, could pass without notice among the ferals, and Remington was able to sneak through the area with little trouble. Gadget and Chance kept watch at the perimeter, and missed Drengo's near-fatal encounter with a ghoul doctor.

Doctor Malone and his team had been desperately seeking a cure for the outbreak. Yet, when Malone found himself the last of his team, his focus shifted from treatment to quarantine. Upon Drengo and Remington's arrival, they found a ghoul who had shackled himself to the wall of a basement laboratory, and who tried to shoot them both to keep them from leaving the town as possible carriers of the mysterious plague. Remington and Drengo managed to survive the encounter, and flee without taking the doctor's life. Their questions answered, the party returned to Borealis to report the fall of this unnamed settlement.

Next, they sought out an abandoned RobCo plant. Borealis had an open bounty on electrical components useful to building the town infrastructure. On arrival, the party found a factory half buried beneath the ramped dirt at a crater's edge. Through the front doors, they took a left, and a shotgun immediately fired inches from Remington's face. The fear left Remy doubled over and retching for long seconds while the rest filed into an office-turned holdout shelter to salvage for useful equipment.

Scattered through the facilty, they found some assorted knick-knacks, and found protectrons roughly dismantled. The damage to the destroyed units was hard to identify, but the party was ready when they found an active protectron defending a small office unit. Beyond that, they caught a glimpse of what had fought against and beaten the protectrons. The back wall of the plant had been destroyed, and in the dirt behind it, tunnels spread, and a teeming colony of giant ants swarmed.

With armloads of tech, and no reason to loot ant corpses, the party decided to nope right away from that anthill, and return to Borealis with their spoils. Of course, they couldn't resist the allure of seeing what would happen if they shot a power cell with a 9mm pistol on the way. The results were colorful and radioactive, and the party decided to keep that option in mind if that level of firepower were to become necessary in the future.

The Orcs of Benighted Ur'alek: A Tale of Tulkas

(This is a story told by Tulkas, son of Gorgas, wardrummer of the clan Kalthas-Kor. He is a half-orc bard that I play in a D&D campaign in a homebrew world)

Benighted Ur'alek beyond the sea,
whence orcs of old did keep their ancient seat,
before the orcish lives of piracy,
before the gods of old did taste defeat.

O, Ur'alek of war-cursed, night-locked coast
where no orc e'er so brave would stand to post,
How dark against your former glory bright
Beyond the southern sea on shores of blight.

When glory in your old environs shone,
when Malor sat the honored coral throne
when Malor held the silver spear of kings
when orcs knew not of deep and maddened things.

When Ebir, son of Malor, sought his fame
when Nabak, and Ibakae with him came.
With Adiok, and Dolzayeh, and Kurr;
with Vozrid, and the traitor Raldanur.

All seeking trophies from the goblin-horde
all seeking glory from the goblins gored.
Each one an orc to kill the goblin theives
and crush the vermin skulls 'neath leathern greaves.

A cave three days from Ur'alek did break
and hearing howls from darkness, orcs did quake
yet, spurred to boldness by Ebir they went,
to darkness and to madness boldly sent.

Two days they searched the cave til Nabok shrewd
did spot a loosened stone within the gloom.
Together, all the orcs pried loose the way,
and at the stench-foul darkness all did sway.

"Come orcs," cried Ebir, "No dark shall master me.
Orcs, orcs, masters of the land and sea.
What orcish youth, eater of bonemeal bread
would quake to step where goblins bravely tread?

"My spear I'll red, with blood of dead
while fainter hearts tremble a-home, a-bed.
Or did you think the battle a thing so clean,
or yourselves above a task so foul and mean?

"With strength, we'll haul the denizens of dark
to searing light of sunlight's cleansing spark.
Our rivers ours, my homestead mine,
when thieving goblins dead upon the brine.

"Come arrow," cried with beating of the chest,
"Take blood and bone, and carve ye at the breast,
I won't be held by barbs and stinging bites,
but brush away the broken goblin-mites.

"For Ur'alek, the capitol so strong,
we'll charge a slaughter days and evenings long,
and when our wounding game leaves blood-slick stone,
we'll know ourselves the heroes of our home."

His boasting cried, the orcs resounded back,
no goblin-might enough to force them slack,
they stepped into the odor-haunted dark
lighting torches by a peer-shared spark.

Down the depths, and through the cavern-night
the orcish party sought their proof of might,
and at a sound all turned to see their prize,
and hearts all melted at the sight upon their eyes.

A mass of twisted flesh and nonsense shape
gibbering foul blasphemies from mouths agape,
a hunter of an age forgotten long
a thing of darkest lore and unsung song.

The terrible and twisted bulk of ages
kept worshipped by the darkness maddened sages
a god of shape unlike the mortal beasts
a-bed in bony evidence of feasts.

Abandoned by the coward Raldanur,
Nabak and Kurr were killed by tendril skewer
the rest were left to flee before the might
of such great power couched in wicked night.

Their flight to Ur'alek could not them save,
when wakened evil broke free from its knave.
And to the sea, orcs fled the darkness foul,
and vowed revenge on that immortal howl.

And so, the war 'tween orcs and gods began
when from our precious shores we swiftly ran,
and still the orcs avoid the cursed wreck
of land and stone we once called Ur'alek.

Can We Blend Narrative and Mechanical Magic?

Hey all,

This last weekend, I had the chance to watch a pair of videos that made some really interesting points regarding magic in fiction. They were Hello Future Me's videos On Writing: Hard Magic Systems in Fantasy and On Writing: Soft Magic Systems in Fantasy

The general premise of the videos was to break down what makes a rigid and well-defined magic system work, versus what makes a more flowy and ethereal magic system work. A key principle repeated throughout the two videos was Sanderson's First Law of Magic. "An author's ability to solve problems with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic." Stated another way, the less well-defined your magic is, the less it can be used to solve problems in the narrative. As a side note to this, magic of any level of mysteriousness can be used to CREATE problems in the narrative with little or no issue.

What made me want to write a blog post on the subject was Hello Future Me's complaint near the end of the videos that few fictional worlds create a series of magical systems within a single world, all of varying levels of "hardness" and "softness". Thinking about that, it's true that there are few, but one glaring example stands out as something that attempts to work a multitude of magical systems into a single universe. It is Dungeons and Dragons (as well as derivative products of D&D).

The wizard is not a sorceror, who is not a warlock, who is not a bard, who is not a druid, who is not a cleric, etc. etc. as deep as the splatbooks go. I see this as admirable. D&D makes a strong effort to incorporate various magical systems that are all meant to simulate vastly different approaches to magic.

All of that said, I believe D&D fails in this effort. This failing, in my opinion, boils down to the core of D&D's magical system, Vancian Spellcasting. Named for author Jack Vance, Vancian spellcasting uses three basic principles.

1) Every spell is a single, distinct unit of magic with a singular effect.
2) Spells must be prepared before each use.
3) Magicians have a set list of spells which may be prepared.

This is a highly specific set of rules. I.e. all magic in D&D is hard magic. To some extent, this is difficult to break away from. To reference back to Sandersons First Law of Magic: if the magic is not specifically understood, its problem-solving ability must be handicapped to maintain drama and tension in the story. Dungeons and Dragons needs magic that can solve problems for the players, and so, it will always need the magic to fall somewhat on the hard magic side.

However, I have a thought; and that thought is Lasers and Feelings. Lasers and Feelings has a mechanic that is truly wonderful in its simplicity. You have a single stat. If you're rolling one type of check, you must roll under your score, and if you're rolling the other type, you must roll over your score. This creates a mathematically simple solution to making a character better at some things, at the sacrifice of other things.

So, we would need a system in which rolling over your score is needed for specific, scholastic spell-use. This would also include literacy, magical knowledge, and analysis of the magical use of others. Specific spells would all be custom made by the players using a point-buy system similar to what Shadowrun uses for custom spells. These would be the more powerful, less versatile spells.

On the other side, a player would need to roll under their score to cast vague, improvised, or other spells like that. These would be less powerful, but more versatile. A prepared college wizard should be a trained combatant, while a wilder should feel more like a magical brawler, employing the magical equivalent of haymakers and dirty tricks.

As players advance, they would be able to move further toward the extremes of the track, allowing them to succeed more often, and with a greater margin of success in their preferred methods, while allowing their neglected skills to atrophy.

So, what do you think of this solution? Do you think that it capture a sense that magic feels like magic for you? How have you house-ruled magic systems in your own games? Let's chat that out in the comments.

Until the next one, happy gaming, all.