No Sharper Spur

Ninevehn's Stars Without Number game.

• IC Thread
• OOC Thread
• Recruitment Thread

Characters

• Nick Milti played by Naed Yar.
• Kazumi Jones played by The Wyzard.
• Darryl O'Neil played by Carwyn.
• Orlando Cortez played by thirdkingdom.
• Nelli Landee played by RookieRPG
• SWN Character Blank

Maps

Kathmandu and Base location.

Assets & Operations

Salvage Operation 1

• Truck Rental
• 5 man-days food & water
• 2x 20m lengths of 20m TL3 rope (stowed by Jones & ???)
• 5x rad badges, one for each character
• 107cr petty cash

Style and Posting

• Tell me your intention (what you want to accomplish) and your action (how you attempt to do something).
• Post with purpose. Posts should push the action forward, uncover information or reveal something about the character. Preferably two or more of those at once!
• Banter is fine as long as things are moving.
• Avoid getting caught in the politeness spiral. Pick a direction, post it, and if other characters want to do something else, then that's rp fodder!
• I am aiming for four to five purposeful posts from each player every week. More is fine, but 4-5 is a good ballpark.
• If you are planning on an absence, please let me know.
• If for some reason you fall behind on posting, don't fret, just jump back in. Everyone goes through lulls occasionally.
• If you are no longer interested or no longer have the time to play, please let me know you are withdrawing. There will be no hard feelings, and not only is it polite, it keeps The Wyzard from blacklisting you.

Dice Rolls

Dice rolls are in the rolz.org room No Sharper Spur. [1] I will be doing all the rolls save character creation (and I will roll chargen for you if you'd like), but it's all done and recorded there.

Character Creation

As per the core rulebook, with 3 exceptions. 1) Roll as normal for attributes, then assign them in any order you wish. 2) Choose one Background Package, and additionally the Adventurer Package. 3) Choose one Training Package, and additionally the Adventurer Package. You may choose the adventurer package twice in a stage if you wish.

Begin with max HP for your class, including Con mod.

Starting Money

Each character gets 1,000 credits to purchase starting gear with, up to TL3 for ranged weapons and TL4 for armor and melee. The setting is absolutely lousy with up-jumped TL2-3 gear, and there's a lot of military surplus on the market, so it's sort of a buyer's market. Non-TL4, non-upjumped weapons are 10% off.

One Cool Thing

Pick an item up to TL4. A weapon, armor, a Tech kit, etc. Something that you want to be a signature or vital gear for your character. You get it for free and it's reasonably plot-protected; don't do something foolish like chuck it out an airlock or into a volcano and you'll hang onto it.

One Plot Thing

Pick a plot-driving hook for your character. Maybe you know a secret jump route, or a military officer who needs work done off the books from time to time. Every character needs one connection or relationship that can be used to get information, create complications or hang an adventure off of in a pinch!

House Rules

Up-jumped Weapons

Much of Phoenician technology is transitional, and the common practice of up-jumping is part and parcel of that fact. Up-jumped weapons are simply TL 1-3 weapons platforms built using TL4 materials technology. The effect is that these items count as TL4 for the purposes of overcoming advanced armor or resisting effects. An up-jumped shotgun is not slowed by plate, while an up-jumped knife is capable of wounding even a warrior in powered armor.

Up-jumped weapons cost the corebook prices. TL 1-3 weapons that have not been improved in this manner cost 10% less.

Submersion

The innovators (and primary producers) of Phoenician spacecraft live in submerged cities off the eastern coast. This influence has led to all atmosphere-capable starships being designed for submersible operations as well. They are slow and clumsy when underwater, however, being reduced to speed 0 and using in-system travel times for oceanic ones, without the benefit of the spike drive enhancing speed. Most weapons cannot be fired effectively while submerged.

Linguistics

The Language skill can be used to translate foreign languages and alien writing systems. The difficulty varies based on the amount of time used, the size of the sample and the amount of computing power at your disposal. Working from first principles, translating an isolated line of alien script in an hour with a notepad is much more difficult than translating a set of books in a day with a dedicated computer station.

After a working vocabulary has been developed, translation is mostly a matter of time and does not require rolls (most of the work can be offloaded to a computer). Working translations can justify an increase in the Language skill and developing them can count as training time, but translation rolls do not substitute for actually knowing the language. There's a significant time delay between encountering text and understanding it. A character could try to translate a recording, but real-time conversations are much too fluid and rapid to make the attempt.

Raw data pulled from computers never needs translating, but text and audio files might.

Weapon Rails

Firearms have attachments for accessories. Pistol weapons can support 2 attachments, carbines and submachine guns can support three and longarms can support 4. Attachments are things like scopes, bayonets, underslung grenade launchers, flashlights, cameras and flare launchers.

Advancement

Skills

Skill points gained per level are doubled. The skill caps remain the same.

HP

Roll one additional die when rolling HP, and drop the lowest die. If your new roll is the same or less than your old score, add 1 hp to your old score.

An example: A Warrior with 8 hp reaches level 2 and rolls his new hp. He would roll 3 d8, dropping the lowest die. If he rolled a 7, 5 and 4, he would keep the 7 and 5 for 12 hp. If the result was less than 8, he would add one to that score and have 9 hp as his new total.

Experience

Every 50 credits earned from adventuring translates to 1 xp for each character. Equipment or other loot kept by the characters is not counted. Experience will also be awarded for various milestones and on completion of certain actions and achievements. Milestone and achievement awards are received in full by each character.

Wyrm Sector Setting

Tech and Style

There's a lot of military surplus floating around. Most of it is up-jumped weaponry and personal body armor, but quite a few support vehicles are on the market as well. The military has been moving towards fully T4 weaponry and equipment and is selling off its older stock. Older, standard T2-T3 weapons are still common with civilians, but production is dwindling.

Print-o-Mats are increasingly common. 3D printing of a broad variety of consumer wares has driven the trend, wherein buildings house rows of printers and store raw materials in the basement, selling printing time and patterns to consumers. The process can take anywhere from half an hour to an afternoon. There are regulations in place limiting what can be printed, and custom designs and user-created patterns are common. There's a DIY community around creating custom designs for printing.

Visually, things are a sort of retro-30's and 40's futurism mashup. Vehicles might run on hydrogen cells and solar panels, but they have massive bumpers and running boards and big headlight sockets. Chrome is very in right now.

Starship production is semi-custom to fully bespoke, with shops in the underwater cities producing ship hulls and setups by the individual order. Ships are still modular, and the military does produce standardized hulls, but the private market still treats ships as luxury items, and they are designed, decorated and embellished appropriately. Inlaid patterns, filigree, decorative sculpture and other artistic flourishes are practically standard. The underlying guts of the ship are produced by third parties and are more utilitarian, but the finished product is a nearly unique work of art.

Languages

English is spoken as the primary language throughout the sector. It was the official language of the Mandate and is thus very widespread and commonly used. Plenty of other languages are still spoken, however. On Phoenicia, there are significant populations who speak Swahili, Japanese or French in their daily lives or learn it at school. Delann has significant pockets of Portuguese, German and Cantonese, while Tagalog is the daily tongue reserved for the warrior-leaders of Trakkar. There are groups scattered across the worlds that use other languages for ritual or ceremonial purposes, but their numbers are small. Many languages have been preserved primarily as academic curiosities.

History of Phoenicia

The colony at Phoenicia was set up for reasons lost to time and the Scream. What is known is that the world was successful and well-populated during the Mandate Era, and played a central role in the economy of the sector. The metadimensional event known as the Scream ended interstellar ties in Wyrm Sector, and the loss of sane psychics collapsed the planetary industries. The period following the collapse saw the population fall from an estimated 1.5 billion to roughly 200 million. These survivors formed loose, warring states around the remains of pretech cities.

After four centuries, these states were methodically conquered and absorbed by the nascent Phoenician Empire, then led by Emperor Harper, which succeeded over two generations of war and diplomacy in uniting the planet. Following the Conquest Period, technological and industrial development improved sharply as pooled resources fed a sustained effort to reinvent and deploy advanced technologies. In the same timeframe, power within the Empire was slowly being transferred from local rulers and nobility to the bureaucratic classes, partially to insulate Imperial power from rival nobles. Empress Hinata presided over a series of democratic reforms that ended when she abdicated the throne 50 years ago.

23 years ago, in-system spacecraft recovered the hull of the Naxos, a Mandate vessel left adrift in the mid solar system. Reverse engineering and study of its systems led to the development of the first postech spike drive. After several years of testing and analysis of its navigation maps, initial surveys of the sector began. Twelve years ago, Phoenicia launched its first colony in the neighboring Tyre system.

After two years, the strain of supporting a fledgling colony while developing new shipyards and related technologies left the government overstretched, a situation that hereditary nobles along the hilly regions in the north and northwest attempted to exploit. They rebelled, leading to a decade-long civil war that ended with the orbital bombardment and then nuclear bombing of Hill Prince military bases and urban centers. Broken, the surviving rebel princes fled the system, leaving an exhausted world to rebuild.

In the last year, the Phoenician Authority has mapped the routes along the arms of the sector, made the Tyrian colony self-sufficient, began initial colonization of the adjacent Sidon system and made contact with two human-inhabited worlds. Interstellar trade and diplomacy is slowly expanding, but the colony efforts and reconstruction on the homeworld have slowed efforts to build up the fleet.

Phoenicia

• Location: 0405
• Planets: 7 (three inner, four gas giants)
• Population: 1 billion.
• TL: 4
• Government: Parliamentary democracy.
• Description: The northern continent is inhabited through an area roughly the size of Russia, bounded on the north, east and southeast by mountains and on the east and southeast by an inland sea. There are small mining camps scattered across the continent. The southern continents were colonized much less intensively and failed after the Scream.

Tyre

• Location: 0404
• Planets: 5 (two inner, two gas giants, one dwarf)
• Population: 5 million.
• TL: 4
• Government: Parliamentary democracy.
• Description: The Tyrian colony is located on rolling plains on the eastern subcontinent, and is still developing local industry. They are an important market for Phoenician production, and most of the systems resources beyond the planets atmosphere have been acquired by orbital mining concerns.

Sidon

• Location: 0305
• Planets: 4 (1 inner, two dwarf gas planets)
• Population: 30,000
• TL: 4 (dependent)

Government: Colonial oversight. Description: The Sidonese colony is very new, and still directly ran by the Colonial Administrative Board. It receives frequent shipments of supplies and colonists, and cannot survive on its own currently. The planet is frigid and icy, with taiga near the tropics and ice elsewhere. The planned colony sites are situated on geologically active great lakes that vent heat into the surrounding area. The weather is temperamental and nearly always foggy. These hotspots are also incredibly rich in a variety of common and uncommon ores.

Trakkar

• Location: 0301
• Planets: 6 (2 inner, 4 gas giants)
• Population: 50,000
• TL: 2
• Government: Oligarchy
• Description: They live in a mobile, underwater city because the atmosphere is nightmarishly corrosive and invasive, and have fallen to T2 from the lack of psychics and interstellar goods. They keep the city running (sort of) with massive steamworks and tight social controls, and are pretty eager for outside trade. The warrior-leader caste is said to be flatly stronger, healthier and smarter than the average person, and they have some pretty impressive melee weapons cut from T5 scrap. The Phoenician Authority, in turn, is pretty interested in their pretech caches.

Delann

• Location: 0607
• Planets: 7 (five inner, two gas giants)
• Population: 500 million
• TL: 3
• Government: Presidential democracy
• Description: Delann is a T3 society, maybe 20 or so years ahead of our own. They have insystem ships, fission power, orbital mining and basic quantum computing, but they're scarce on the trace elements needed to manufacture spike drives, which is slowing their research in that area to a crawl. The Authority has them on limited quarantine; they're populous enough to pose a threat if they get to TL4, but they also have a fully functioning psychic academy, which Phoenicia lacks. You basically have to buy permits to go there, and trade is restricted to goods that can't lead to astronautic or weapon-related breakthroughs.

Sector Map

Key

• Star= Star System
• Line= Publicly Known Route
• Purple= Phoenician Authority Space
• Orange= Trakkaran Territory
• Blue= Delann Space