Elizabethan Supers

Prepping to run the first game of an Elizabethan Supers game this Sunday! Our Roos and Ruins (StarCluster 4 - Out of the Ruins) game that just ended was consistently fun, absorbing, exciting, though provoking, and all around amazing from start to finish! Perhaps the finest roleplaying campaign I have ever run, and I can only hope this one is half as good!

The setting for this game is England in 1560, 2 years after the accession of Elizabeth I to the throne. We have established some changes in history, though! An alien ship crashed on earth in 1000 AD, with the survivors making their way to earth in escape pods. The plagues were alien diseases that humans had no resistance to. Supers began popping up after that. Was it alien DNA? Reactions to the plagues? Radiation from the crashed ship causing mutations? All of the above? We are mapping that out now!

Central access to my Music on Youtube

All five of my albums are now available on Youtube. link: Clash Bowley - Topic

or search for '"clash bowley" topic'

My first album was Greatest Hits 2018-2018 and it's a bit of a mess, but I chalk it up to a learning experience!
Then came Rockets and Dreams, where I started to apply what I had learned and began developing a musical style
Kaiju Love which came after that was, I think, my first good album, and the first totally in my new style
Then came the two latest albums, released the same day:
Plush Universe is more traditional, more rock, somewhere between Strange Attractor and Kaiju Love
In Strange Attractor I am more modern in approach, and more stripped down

Enjoy!

Weirder Stuff II

Ran my first session of Weirder Stuff (The totally not Stranger Things game) tonight with my face to face gang, and it went REALLY well! Chargen was a snap, and we were right into the game! Weird-ass shaved head kid shows up in the tree fort of some kids in a town in Colorado at the start of the summer vacation. They are all 11-12 year old boys, and she is a spooky bald girl with a number tattooed on her arm. Weird shit happens, and they decide she can live in their tree fort for now. They enlist one of the boy's twin sister, who lends her some clothes. Just some great roleplaying! And my beautiful 18 year old kitty Athena died just before play. She has been going, slipping for a year or so no, and this last four days we knew she was going. No pain, just not eating and barely drinking, getting weaker and sleepier. The last of the players arrived in time to sit with her and pet her before she went. She has been showered with love the last few days, more even than normal! I miss her terribly!

Designing for Maintenance

Colonization of space will have one side effect I don't see talked about much. There will be a paradigm shift away from disposable technology and towards more flexible, repairable, repurposable technology. If your microwave oven dies now, or your inkjet printer, or your smoothie blender, getting it repaired would be inconcievable. These devices are too cheap to repair, and are designed to be thrown away. The labor costs of repair would be a significant fraction of their cost new, and it isn't worth the bother. They aren't designed to be repaired. Components are integrated, the innards are inaccessible, and the places they are made are not the places they are sold.

This is a recipe for disaster in space! Technology will have to be designed to be easily accessible by techs, rather than designed for efficiency of manufacture. Components will need to be genericized, not only so that fewer spares need to be carried, but so that less essential devices can be cannibalized in favor of repairing essential devices, if necessary. Upgrades should be on the component level rather than the unit level. Then the old component can be kept as a spare. Devices would need to be larger, though not necessarily much more massive. Most of the size difference will be in access space or accessible mounting.

Displays and input should be transparently shared and redirectable. Data needs easy rerouting, so that one computing device can double as another in a pinch. Damage control and repair need to be top priorities when a ship is millions of kilometers from the nearest source of parts!

Weirder Stuff

Klax and I hammered out a Stranger Things game Tuesday night. You can be a Kid, Teen, or Adult. Chargen is a snap. Light game, but looks deep enough to support long-ish campaign arcs. Not sure if I want to put this out for sale, but it certainly will do for me to run some stuff! Of course we were working with a system, but still, two hours of work just nailed it.

Kids get the Kid package which gives them their base attributes; then pick one background, which gives them two positive Edges and one negative; then pick one interest which gives them three skills, one at rank +3, one at rank +2, and one at rank +1; then pick one hobby which gives them another positive Edge. Roll a d10 for each attribute to see how it varies from the norm, and they are done

Teens have their own attribute package, and get an extra hobby. Adults have their own attribute package, and get an extra hobby and an extra interest

There is a special Background (Confined) and Interest (Test Subject) for psions. They get three negative Edges and no positive from their background, no hobby, and get three psionic skills, one at rank +3, one at rank +2, and one at rank+1. This is to reflect their utter lack of normal upbringing.