Gaming and other Nonsense
“Just the place for a Snark!”
Welcome to a collection of random pages about tabletop roleplaying and wargames, with a bit of science fiction thrown in for good measure. It contains campaign notes and chronicles for various games I've run and played it, design notes for game systems, and designs for armies and characters. Since some of the material dates back almost 30 years, the style may be inconsistent.
Though there is material here for both Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder, it also includes Ars Magica, Traveller, Star Wars, Legend of the Five Rings, Pendragon, as well as various home brewed game systems.
Frequent updates on the games I'm currently playing can be found on my blog.
Campaigns Roleplaying Wargaming
Most of the content on here is entirely original. Some of it is based on material published by other people - e.g., game content for published RPGs or Wargames.
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.
News and Updates
Wonders of a Solar System: Hot Worlds
I have recently published the third supplement in my Wonders of a Solar System series: Hot Worlds. This provides a list of random world descriptions for small, barren worlds similar to Mercury.
Designed for use with Traveller, and published under the Travellers Aid Society on DrivethruRPG, it provides a D66 list of short world descriptions for use when the GM needs a quick description of an interesting world in the inner solar system.
Examples include worlds with ferro-volcanoes spewing molten metal into orbit, transparent quartz mountains embedded in the crust, and towering glaciers on the night side of tidally locked worlds.
Also included is a D66 list of things to find on such worlds - from abandoned cities to research stations and mining outposts.
It joins Kuiper Belt Objects and Gas Giants.
Wonders of a Solar System: Gas Giants
I've published a second Traveller supplement over on DrivethruRPG - Wonders of a Solar System: Gas Giants. This is a smaller book, really just a list of random events of natural phenomena that can be found at gas giants. It's pretty system neutral, but has some references to the Mongoose Traveller rules so I've once again released under the TAS license.
I plan for this to be the first in a series of supplements - Kuiper Belt Objects and Rogue Planets are probably up next. The idea is to provide some random encounters that are mostly natural in nature.
A Travellers' Dozen
I've finally taken the plunge, and have published my first real product, A Travellers' Dozen. This is a collection of twelve NPCs for Mongoose Traveller, together with story hooks to work them into your campaign. It's available on DrivethruRPG as pay-as-you-want. They've already appeared on this website, but have been edited and expanded for the final product.
A Travellers' Dozen includes a dozen NPC Travellers for use with Mongoose Traveller 2nd edition. Each character includes a portrait, background and 6 story hooks to provide ideas on how they may be used in a campaign.
Also included are four organisations which have connections to these characters: Intuitive Biomedics, Paternity Inc, Sag Mekilure and Tobia Uncovered! Each has a full description and a set of story hooks to include them in your campaign.
Finally, those characters which obtained a ship as part of their background has their ship detailed at the end of the book, along with information on the rest of the crew.
Though all of these are based in the Reft and Trojan Reach sectors, they could be easily moved to a more stuiable location for your own Traveller campaign.
In total, it includes:
- 12 main characters
- 50 supporting characters
- 4 organisations
- 6 ships and crew
- 96 story hooks
Also included are image files which include portraits and VTT tokens for each character, logos for each of the organisations and images and tokens for each of the ships. These can be used in a VTT or simply provided as handouts to players.
2020
So 2020 is finally over, so time for a look back at the games we played over the last 12 months.
Traveller
Given the amount of Traveller I've been running recently, I've completely restructured my Traveller pages. This may result in some broken links, but the content is still around - just moved. Previously the content focused on ideas for my 'Traveller-like' campaign. These have now been moved to my YAGS rules site where they can be unambiguously centred around my YAGS rules.
The content here is focusing on actual Traveller, mostly Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition and focused on the Third Imperium during the Golden Age, which is when my campaigns are set.