XXVc Notebook- A Hard Lesson Learned

Last night was the fourth installment of my ongoing drama "The Secret of the Curators" and it really showed me where I need to pay attention to my adventure design. I had long stretches where essentially nothing happened except discovering another more-or-less empty room.

Where I blew it there was that nothing in the rooms served any purpose, so they were just finding things and having to sit through descriptions of things that had no bearing on the adventure and- yikes! I just realized they didn't even come across any good loot. That "yikes" was not sarcasm, it was me just now realizing another way that I bunged my game up.

Perhaps I'm straying too far from the D&D model of "kill the monster, take its treasure" which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, I am also realizing it's kinda hard to just drop a "monster" into the game when things start slogging. This is something I will definitely have to prepare for in the future. XXVc is pretty explicit about not creating gennie monsters, which I'm down with as I really like the non-pulp sci-fi aspect of the game, but it also... I need to realign.

I'm going to go meditate on this and get back to you later. I'm leading myself down a dumb path and need to get off it, quick. Wish me luck.

XXVc- Earth Views

So, I'm watching Elysium and the opening sequence smacked me in the face and said "XXVc Earth!" So I made some screen caps to share because I didn't have anything better to do at the time. I also included a couple of shots from the awful Buck Rogers tv series because hey, why waste a perfectly good image. The third wasteland shot is from Elysium. If you look close, you can see that those little dark squares are actually structures (that could be anything) and, in the upper right quarter, houses.

In a couple of shots, you can see what are probably supposed to be arcologies. The best one, I think, is the shot of Chicago from the tv show below. As always, click on the images to see them in IMAX.

XXVc Miniatures!

I was browsing the goods on Shapeways.com and ran across some minis that look suspiciously exactly like some of the ships in the Buck Rogers XXVc rpg.

For example, here's the F-66 Starfire

...here's Admiral Duck Sauce's F-44 Buck

I'm pretty sure this is the actual product...

...and here's his F-69 Starfang

...but this is just a CG model

There are a number of other familiar designs available, in addition to ones that appear to be based, I believe, on Space Cruiser Yamato and they're for sale at Admiral Duck Sauce's shop, so go check 'em out. He also has some sci-fi rpg minis available in different scales, but none that are based on XXVc designs (none that I can tell, anyway.)

There are a bunch of other shops that are of interest to the Ol' Eyeball, but I'll get to them another time.

Buck Rogers High Adventure Cliffhangers

Recently I grabbed a cherry copy of the Buck Rogers Adventure Game (or High Adventure, not sure which) on Amazon for what seemed like a reasonable $25.

TSR seems to have produced a number of really innovative games that for the most part went underappreciated, unnoticed or simply disliked back in the 90's and this is, I think, one of them. Although it's understandable why there is no love for this game (the Williams Taint again) and it came off to most gamers of the day, myself included, as pretty bizarre considering the failure of the previous Buck Rogers game.

XXVc- In 1995, they called it "Smart Clothes"

Been there.

XXVc Notebook- Saving the Earth

As anyone who has read the XXVc World Book and/or Earth in the 25th Century knows, Mother Earth is in dire straits is 2456 AD. Pollution, disease, warfare (including conventional, nuclear, biological, chemical, etc), a depleted ozone layer... the list is a long one and each has taken a heavy toll. Add to that a drastically depleted human, animal and plant population and you have to start to wonder how it could ever be possible for Earth to recover.

From where I'm sitting, Earth couldn't, especially not with RAM's continued efforts to annihilate the planet's inhabitants. As far as I know (and I'd love it if someone showed me different) no solution is given in the published material beyond the efforts of certain groups such as NEO to throw off RAM's oppression. After that? Who knows. The obvious answer, to me, is the same process that made Mars a more or less livable planet and that is terraforming. Conditions are so bad on Earth that it would take the same colossal effort that made the other planets inhabitable to revive the near-fatally damaged ecosystem.

Failing that, who knows? Say your campaign goes as planned and eventually Mars is defeated or at the very least made to look elsewhere for plunder. Then what? How does NEO even begin the effort? Personally, I never got past the idea of  terraforming, so I have no other answer to give, but I'd like to know what plan the two of you that read this blog would have NEO and friends set into motion. Maybe there is something obvious I'm overlooking. Maybe something not so obvious and I'm just a dumbshit.

Thus I put it to you, dear and loyal readers. How would you handle the situation in your game?

Big Jim, Two-Fisted Tales Style

Back in the 70′s, Mattel turned Big Jim, a lackluster Olympic athlete-themed action figure, into a badass man of adventure by making him the leader of...