Furk. net : : Furk. You can use it to stream video or listen to your music from PC, smartphone, HTPC or even a game console (XBOX, PS3). We have had modern Sloops pop up in previous vehicle books for Traveller – but some rich guy’s plaything is not a lot of fun, so we have gone back in time for the. Empress Miniatures Homepage. New Spanish Civil War and English Civil War. New additions to our Republican and Italian forces for Spain, and classic 'back and. I've been interested in science since a young age, and in gaming since I first played D&D (the box with a red dragon on it) in junior high. I occasionally dream of. Sorcery Tool for Mythras (and friends) Sorcery in Mythras (and prior to that in RQ6) is one of the most flexible forms of magic. Because it is so flexible it also has. Talislanta Handbook and Campaign Guide : Original PDF (83.6 MB) Optimized PDF (35.8 MB) Best Quality, Non-Image-Processed PDF (426 MB) This is the second edition rule. Features playing systems from a variety of publishers, as well as a newsletter. I occasionally dream of going back to school for an astrophysics degree or becoming a professional RPG writer. Neither has happened yet, but I'm still interested.. A quick list of my favorite SF and RPG works includes: Blade Runner (the first movie that really caught my imagination); Philip K. Dick's works; The beautiful and complex Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo; most of William Gibson's work; many of Greg Bear's writings, especially / (Slant); Miyazaki Hayao's works, including Nausica. As for a fuller list.. Note, though, that this page doesn't include everything related to SF and RPGs. Manga and anime are on my manga page. I lived in Taiwan for a long time, and gaming in Taiwan also gets its own page; if you are in Taiwan and looking for local gaming resources, please go there. A lot of the art I produce is SF- related, but not all, so see my general drawings and writings page for that kind of thing. Finally, my resources about fandom in Minneapolis are on my Minneapolis page. And, though I wish I didn't have to say it: This page is all my opinion. Take what I say with a grain of salt. This page is big, but that doesn't mean I'm the grand- high poobah of science fiction or RPGs or whatever. Some people have been offended that I didn't include something, or that I stated my opinion. Well, if you disagree, get your own page! Send me a good introduction and I'll probably even link to it. Back to the top of the page or back to RPGs in General. So, why RPGs? RPGs are, for me, one of the most interesting and fun activities out there. When you read a book, you are forced to go along with the author's storyline; you can't tell the main character not to open that crypt or hit that big red button. In RPGs, though, you have exactly that kind of control. And RPGs can, in many ways, be more immersive than reading a book; through immediate, face- to- face interaction, you can experience things with an immediacy that books never approach. Even computer games can't approach the infinite possibilities and social depth in face- to- face, pen- and- paper RPGs. Here are some things of general interest about RPGs: RPG. I hang out on the forums there quite a bit. It's quite a community: almost entirely gamer geeks, of many stripes, but generally intelligent and nice. En. World probably has the biggest RPG forums out there, but it's pretty much all D2. D& D. The Forge has a lot of rather abstruse theory about RPGs, but they've produced some of the most innovative and coolest games out there. If I subscribed to an RPG magazine, it'd be Pyramid. Back to the top of the page or back to Hard- science science fiction role- playing games Hard SF has been one of my main interests in RPGs for many years now. I'm not sure why, but I think it's because I like my SF to specifically concern itself with the ways that technology will change our lives in the future, and because I like fiction that doesn't throw believability out the window. My favorite SF RPGs, and some sites about them, are listed below. Blue Planet. This RPG is probably one the better designed backgrounds of anything available - - sort of the H. The authors' ideas, particularly about biology and ecological issues, are excellent. Their care and consistency in designing Blue Planet is evident everywhere. Blue Planet has been published in two versions: the first by Biohazard Games, the second under license by Fantasy Flight Games. The main difference is the game system; the first edition was percentile- based, while the second has a D1. To be honest, I don't particularly like either edition's game system, but I do prefer the second edition. If you want to buy the game for its setting, which is by far its biggest selling point, either edition will work. Some Blue Planet sites: The site of Bio. Hazard Games. The creators and owners of Blue Planet, Bio. Hazard Games seems to be very interested in quality. Their site is very high quality, as well. A very good Blue Planet fan site, Bleue Planete. This is a site primarily organized in French, but many of the sites pointed to are in English. The site is also quite pretty. There is also an English version, and while it hasn't been updated recently, the current site has no English version at all. ADCreated by the now- defunct Game Designers' Workshop, 2. AD has an excellent star- spanning background with a definite hard- SF feel. My own SF background, Spheres, was partially inspired by 2. AD. Far and away the best 2. AD page is Pentapod's World, which contains vast amounts of information, both game mechanics- related and general. Etranger is all about the military forces of 2. AD. It features, among other things, amazing 3. D starship illustrations by Laurent Esmiol. Andy Slack's 2. 30. AD page has a ton of cool stuff for the game. A lot of it could be adopted for use in other hard SF games, too. He has another page with a lot of other cool things for 2. AD and other games. The rest of the site seems to be down, but there's a page with some very nice maps of the colonies in 2. AD. Jovian Chronicles. Jovian Chronicles, by Dream Pod 9, is one of the best hard SF games out there. It's set in the year 2. Solar System but fragmented into large coalitions, largely around a planetary framework: Mercury is its own rich nation, Earth and the Jovian colonies are the main superpowers, etc. The tech level definitely puts it in the ranks of hard SF: no FTL, no aliens (well, almost), no artificial gravity - - just realistically projected computers, drives, etc. There are mecha, and they don't really make much sense, but they're easy to ignore. The background they've written for the various societies is really excellent and detailed, the vehicle design system is nearly perfect, and the art and feel is great. The game system is also pretty good, both fast and gritty in feel. If I were to run an SF game using a published setting, it would probably be Jovian Chronicles. The main site for Jovian Chronicles is Dream Pod 9's own site - - they're the publishers of the game. The Dream Pod 9 Forum has a section devoted to Jovian Chronicles, and it looks pretty active. Vector. Sphere is the homepage of Marc A. Vezina, one of the main designers of Jovian Chronicles. His page has all kinds of nifty things. Ghislain Barbe, the lead artist for Jovian Chronicles, also has a nifty site. The Jovian APAworks was an Amateur Press Association (APA) devoted to Jovian Chronicles. Lots of interesting articles there. Other SFRPGs. Those three RPGs are the main ones. There are several others that I'm strongly interested in, though: High Colonies. Designed by Eric Hotz, the excellent artist for much of H. The game mechanics weren't terribly inventive at all - - the authors used the same basic combat system, for example, as Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes, which I think was based on Tunnels and Trolls, one of the first RPGs - - but I like the setting. Instead of trying to figure out ways that humanity can have survived into the future without this or that catastrophe, High Colonies assumes that there actually has been a nuclear holocaust and that the sole remnants of humanity live in colonies off the Earth. There isn't much else on the Web about High Colonies. About the only thing I've found is a PDF containing scenarios for the game that were published in Challenge magazine. This was quite a good addition to the GURPS line, detailing a future in which the solar system is divided between the United Peoples of Earth (a UN successor) and Terradyne (a ruthless, off- world corporation). A lot of the ideas contained in the book are tantalizing - - it was one of the first future SF RPG settings without FTL, for example. I've never particularly liked the GURPS mechanics, to be honest, but the writing in their worldbooks is usually quite good, and this book is no exception. I'm glad I bought it when I did! There's very little on the web devoted to Terradyne, so I'll just link to its errata page. This looks like the successor to GURPS Terradyne, a hard- SF future in which almost anything that could happen in the future has happened: AI, nanotech, divergent geneered human species, a very developed solar system, etc. Transhuman Space also has the distinction of being one of the few post- singularity SF RPG settings. I still don't like the GURPS mechanics, and using feet and pounds to deal with the future seems incredibly silly, but the ideas in the book are great. As one of the newer GURPS settings, THS is very well represented on the web: Traveller. In all its incarnations, it's still the Grand Old Dame of SF RPGs, especially since it's now being published as GURPS: Traveller. Even though I don't really go in. Traveller universe, or even sometimes its mechanics, it's too good and respectable not to at least appreciate. There are so many Traveller things on the Web that it's hard to know where to start, but Traveller Central, Citizens of the Imperium and Downport. Albedo. Steve Gallacci's . It's a very hard SF series, placed in a distant system populated by uplifted animals who have awoken to realize that they don't know where they came from. I only have the older edition of the game from Thoughts & Images. The mechanics in this edition aren't amazing, but they're certainly good. It gives a very hard SF feel and seems to reflect the source material well. There is a more recent Albedo RPG, using the Jadeclaw engine, from Sanguine Productions, but I haven't seen it. Albedo is relatively obscure, so there aren't many resources for it on the Web. Sanguine Productions' Albedo page discusses their recent RPG. Universe. This game is extremely dense - - SPI allowed for no flavor text, or (sometimes) even explanations. It's also too psionic- based for my tastes. However, it has a lot of nifty ideas and insights. The planetary mapping system is very cool, for example, and the starships (which are pretty much all modular) make a lot of sense. Universe is also fairly obscure, so there isn't much about it on the Web.
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