Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century by Maxwell Lord

Prologue: Far Beyond The World I've Known, Far Beyond My Time

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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Prologue: Far Beyond The World I've Known, Far Beyond My Time



In their August 1928 issue, Amazing Stories featured a story by Philip Francis Nowlan entitled “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” It tells the story of Anthony Rogers, a WWI veteran who is trapped in a collapsing mine and put to sleep by strange gasses. He re-emerges 500 years in the future, where American “gangs” are fighting a war of resistance against a high-tech Mongolian empire which has conquered the world. Rogers meets up with the rebels and, using his military experience, helps them in their struggle. The story received a sequel, “The Airlords of Han”, but more importantly was adapted into a comic strip by Nowlan and artist Dick Calkins- a strip titled after its hero, now named Buck Rogers.



The strip was a big hit, and ran for decades. To his credit, Nowlan got away from the Yellow Peril aspect before too long- Rogers and his partner/love interest Wilma Deering managed a peaceful accord with the Mongol Emperor, who was more misguided than evil, and with freedom won, Buck and friends started tangling with air pirates, Atlanteans, and the Tiger Men of Mars.



This set up a certain pattern of reinvention- Buck Rogers and associated characters, like Wilma Deering, the brilliant Dr. Huer, treacherous Killer Kane, etc. weren’t tied to one specific vision of the future or one particular conflict. A 1939 serial starred Buster Crabbe as Buck, who now helped the rebels of the Hidden City in their war against “super-racketeers” who made men slaves with robot helmets, all while jetting back and forth between Earth and Saturn. The comic strip made sure to update the look and the tech with the times. What stayed consistent were the characters, the 25th Century timeframe, a general theme of a heroic army against an oppressive evil force, and an emphasis on gosh-wow future tech, from the original’s rocket pistols and anti-gravity belts to full on spaceships and jetpacks.




But let’s face it, you probably mostly know Buck Rogers because of the 1979 TV series, “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.” Made to capitalize on the Star Wars craze, this two-season series was produced by Glen A. Larson (who also produced Battlestar Galactica) and starred Gil Gerrard as Buck, a shuttle pilot frozen by a system malfunction and thawed out to find Earth rebuilding after a nuclear war, and under threat from the Draconian Empire. This was pure space opera, with interstellar travel and loads of weird aliens and beautiful women in skimpy outfits. Oh, yeah, and Twiki, a goofy child-sized robot with the voice of Mel Blanc. The first season was and is kinda fun in a stupid, campy, James-Bond-In-Space way, but the second season was a dramatic rehaul of the concept and a complete disaster (though the very last episode is actually kind of interesting, like a Twilight Zone script run through a goofy space opera filter.)

And that was it… until the late 1980s. In this time, the game company TSR was run by a woman named Lorraine Dille Williams. Her tenure at the helm is not well regarded, and while some accounts of just how horrible she was are maybe a little exaggerated, it’s fair to say she made a lot of decisions that didn’t pay off.

One of her ideas involved Buck Rogers. See, Williams, was- as shown by her middle name- one of the Dille family, owners of the Dille Family Trust, which held the rights to the Buck Rogers comic strip and in theory, all the associated copyrights and trademarks (this is currently under dispute BTW and it’s gonna take a while). Her idea was to license a new take on Buck Rogers for a multimedia launch, including tabletop games, computer games, comics, books, a big coffee table book of the old strips which I actually have somewhere, etc. While some have described this as “writing checks to herself” I feel this was more of an attempt at Corporate Synergy- trying to leverage what TSR had to give an old IP a new lease on life and hopefully start a profitable new line.

And at the center of this, at long last, like you’ve all been waiting for, is the game. Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century.

Released in 1990 as a big, fancy boxed set, Buck Rogers XXVc was designed by Mike Pondsmith and uses a variant of the then-fresh Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition rules. Does this transportation of fantasy adventure mechanics into a futuristic setting work? Well… not really, like, it’s playable and light enough to easily figure out, but there are quite a few missteps and places where you can tell they didn’t look a lot at balance and game feel. At best it’s kinda generic.

But then there’s the setting. I’m not sure exactly who did what in creating the world of XXVc, but this was a time when RPGs were getting known for detailed settings with lots of side characters, and sci-fi settings were showing influences from 2000 A.D. and cyberpunk and all that good grotty stuff. XXVc is, as a result, a very unlikely synthesis of space opera and hard science fiction, with hints of cyberpunk and even transhumanism. It has a unique vibe, not too shiny but not wallowing in edgy darkness either. It is nicely detailed but also keeps the scope wide enough for your PCs to make a difference, with the titular hero and his friends not crushing your style. It is a desperate and dangerous time, in need of every hero it can get.

So welcome to the Twenty-Fifth Century. Space pirates roam the solar system, megacorps threaten an environmentally devastated Earth, and humanity comes in all sorts of designer packages. Have fun!

An Introductory Overview

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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

An Introductory Overview


_{Dat ass, tho}

Here is the box. Retailing at $24.95- so a little over $50 in 2019 money- it contains three booklets, three big maps, a GM’s screen, twenty four reference cards displaying major NPCs and notable spaceships, a transparent ruler, dice (the standard D&D assortment), and a sheet of counters. The ruler and some of the counters are for the big Solar System map, which shows the Inner Worlds and major asteroids and their tracks around the sun. The idea is, the GM can keep track of the positions of the planets relative to each other based on how much time passes in the campaign, with the planets moving to the next position on their rotation every 30 days. The ruler helps figure out travel times and communications delays. Unfortunately they printed it on the opposite side of the maps showing ship interior layouts so that may be a little inconvenient. The other maps are one big topographic one of Mars, and another double-sided affair with a hexmap on one side and a map of the Tycho Spaceport on the other.

The cover art is by Jerry Bingham and it’s cool, not quite the style that the interior art conveys but it gets the basics right.

Now, since the rules are the weakest part I think I’ll go through the rules booklet first, but before that I want to give a brief rundown of the setting. It’s the year 2456. Mankind has expanded beyond Earth to colonize the solar system, though interstellar travel remains out of reach. Extensive terraforming is underway on Mars and Venus, but at the same time, genetic engineering has produced a number of new human offshoots specially adapted to living in different environments around the system. Some are close enough to humanity that they’re still basically called human, but others are “gennies”- heavily modified and all weird looking.

(This is one of the balancing elements between hard sci-fi and space opera we see- FTL and intergalactic empires are out of the picture, but we still have a wide variety of “alien” beings living on the known planets.)

Earth, meanwhile, is in a bad state, described as a complete mess due to pollution, nukes, and exploitation by offworlders. The most habitable areas are the arcologies, but there are vast slums. While Earth is supposedly governed by the Solar Alliance, it mostly falls under the influence of RAM- a monolithic corporate entity once called the Russo-American Mercantile, which rose to power after leading the terraforming of Mars and staging a successful rebellion against the Earth government. RAM now exploits Earth for every resource it has, backed by a powerful military, including gennie soldiers known as Terrines. And it’s fair to say they’ve got eyes on the rest of the solar system, though they haven’t made any big moves yet.

Opposing RAM is NEO, the New Earth Organization, a growing movement operating largely from orbiting space stations. It’s your standard band of rebels, and most recently they’ve added to their ranks a long-thought-dead air force pilot known as Buck Rogers. Rogers (so it was thought) gave his life shooting down a Soviet space battle station near the end of the Cold War in 1999, and in years since he became sort of a mythic hero- and now he’s back.

I’ll note right away I think the use of Rogers himself and the other classic characters is one of the setting’s strengths- they’re important, but not so important that they’ll overshadow anything the PCs do. Buck Rogers is famous, but he’s no Chosen One, anybody could end up having a major effect on the battle for the 25th Century. It feels like his role is usually to show up and say “good job guys” when you do cool stuff.

So with that out of the way I’m ready to dive into the first book- Characters and Combat.

Introduction and Ability Scores

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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century



Introduction and Ability Scores
The book opens with two paragraphs of fiction, about a man named Flint arriving on Ceres in his ship, the Lady Jane, on his way to deliver info about a secret weapon to the New Earth Organization. Two men with lasers leap out, and as the action starts we cut away to a brief introduction to the setting. Along with a few specifics, the intro talks about heroic action and fleets of rocket cruisers and tries to set the space opera vibe. We get the standard “What’s Role-Playing” section next, followed by a brief Choose Your Own Adventure section.

This solo outing is pretty brief; you’re Captain Flint, you’ve got the plans to the new weapon, and you try to evade bad guys and get your info to your contact, Buck Rogers himself. There’s a brief “combat” and a few dead end choices, but it doesn’t take long to get to the end, which is another cliffhanger. It gets the job done, sets some of the mood some more. The game then talks more about the basics of roleplaying, what you’ll need to play, etc. There’s also talk about how the game is different from AD&D; basically the skills system works way differently, and combat is more reliant on projectile weapons. There are also quite a few minor differences, one of which is coming up very soon.

Ready to Roll

And now it’s time to determine attribtues. The standard method is rolling 3d6 seven times, and then assigning those to your attributes in any order you want.

Seven? Well, yes. This game has the standard AD&D attributes- Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma- and a new one, Tech. Tech is like Intelligence or Wisdom but applies specifically to your mechanical knowhow and is independent of your scores for both. The game’s example of a high Tech character is someone who can thump a food dispenser and get free meals for a month, presumably saying “Ayy!”

I actually kinda like this change? It means that in a high tech setting, you don’t necessarily need a high Int to do anything at all. (Intelligence is still important, with a lot of skills associated with it, but this helps split the load a little.)

You may recall that AD&D had little tables for each ability score, with very low or very high numbers giving you modifiers. In Buck Rogers this exists only for the physical attributes. Strength determines your melee Hit Bonus, melee Damage bonus, encumbrance, maximum lift, and instead of breaking doors/bending gates there’s a percentage chance for “Feats of Strength.” It starts at 1% at Strength 8 so even the slightly wimpy have a chance!

Dexterity gives Reaction Bonus, which is a modifier to your initiative (low initiative rolls are good in this game, so low Dex scores get positive bonuses and high scores get negative), bonus to ranged attacks, and a possible bonus to AC. Constitution determines hit point bonus and “System Shock”, which is the chance of withstanding severe trauma.

There’s a section on Ability Checks, which is standard- if you’re doing something that relates to your abilities but the GM can’t figure out any specific rules, you roll a d20 and try to get less than the relevant ability score. Standard stuff, no complaints here.

Lastly there’s alternatives for stat generation. You do have to clear these with the GM, etc., but they’re all pretty solid. One is the 3e way, roll 4d6 and drop the lowest. The next is rolling 3d6 twelve times and discarding the five lowest. (The book says “your odds of getting a 3 using this method are roughly 1 in 100 trillion” and I’m not gonna check that.) Finally, start with a 10 in each score, and add 1d6.

All pretty normal so far. The section on playable races is BIG so I’m gonna handle that separately.

Characters & Combat: Races part 1: Smooth Lions Are Eating Me

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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Characters & Combat: Races part 1: Smooth Lions Are Eating Me
So, Races. Yeah that’s what they’re called- the book’s actually not clear as to whether or not all these genetically modified humans are still the same species. And this was back when TSR didn’t want to provoke the Satanic Panic types, so it goes without saying they don’t go into the question of what happens when these various types of altered humans get mad rutty.

So the Races are divided into two categories. Terrans, Martians, Lunarians, Venusians, and Mercurians are separate races but all still considered “human”- they’re at most mildly altered from the basic human genotype to adapt better to certain conditions. The second category, “gennies”, short for genetic mutants, are heavily modified to live in extreme conditions- the bottom of the sea, the poisonous Venusian lowlands, even deep space.

Some of them even have trouble living outside of these environments. In one brief section they float the idea that you might even have different characters to play if the campaign takes you to the surface of Venus or the ocean floor, so you can switch to a Lowlander or Delph, leave them behind when the campaign goes elsewhere, and just have them in reserve. Not a lot is done with this concept in the rest of the game, but it’s neat to see- Ars Magica had troupe play in 1987 and so this may be an early example of “new concepts in game design flowing over to TSR.”

Terrans are up first. They’re the least modified of the human species, adaptable to a wide variety of environments. As mentioned before in this overview, Earth in the 25th century kinda sucks. Most people are living in bombed out sprawls ruined by war in the 23rd century, overrun by gangs who constantly fight each other over food and supplies. Some fortunate Terrans live in arcologies, giant self-sufficient fortresses isolated from the chaos of the outside world. The drawback to this is that most of the arcologies are oppressive societies ruled by RAM puppets, along with centuries of isolation and the inevitable problems those bring along. Terrans get a +1 to Con and Wis, and a +1 to saving throws vs. Paralysis/Stun/Fall. (Saving throws have been altered to fit a sci-fi setting but we’ll get to those later.)


Martians are the yuppie scum of the Solar System. Mars is directly ruled by the corporate state of RAM, and pretty much every Martian’s life is tied to it in some way. Martians are tall (6-7 feet), slender, with slightly larger eyes and ears and wide nostrils to improve their breathing in the still-thin atmosphere. Martian upper classes like to get into gene-tailoring for aesthetics so they tend to be pretty good looking. Mechanically, Martians kinda suck. They have +1 to Dex and Cha, but -1 to Strength, Con, and Wis, and their saves aren’t great either. They are said to have slightly better vision and hearing but there’s no real mechanical bonus to that I can see (and the lower Wis score works against this.) There’s talk about how RAM gives you access to tech and manpower but that’s pretty much for the bad guys- for PCs it’s actually harder because the rest of the solar system thinks of you as one of Them, and you have to conceal your true loyalties from other, more RAM-friendly Martians. So not a lot of incentives to play one honestly.


Lunarians live in mostly-subterranean cities on the moon, and are a fiercely independent, even neutral people, mostly descended from European colonists. They’re short (4-5 feet tall), light, and have pale, hairless skin and slightly larger, more sensitive eyes. They’re compared a lot to the Swiss, they’ll handle anyone’s money, but strictly forbid any military ships landing on the moon. Lunarians get +2 to Intelligence and +1 to Dexterity, with -2 to Strength and -1 to Constitution. Their big drawback is agoraphobia- they’re used to living in small spaces and NPC Lunarians dragged out into the open with nothing but sky overhead need to make Wisdom checks to not freak out. PC Lunarians are assumed to be a little more under control but it’s supposed to be something to keep in mind when role-playing one.


Venusians can be divvied up into three main groups. The Aerostaters live up in the clouds in floating dirigible cities, mostly traders and herdsmen for the floating Krakens, tentacled gasbags who serve as a source of meat. They’re described as “aerial [slur for Romani]”, with flashy clothes and lots of festivals and family rites and superstitions and so on. I mean they’re not criminals or possessed of Actual Magic Powers so it’s not too bad I guess. Aphroditians live on the continent of, well, Aphrodite, and are mostly finers and miners living in an oligarchy controlled by wealth families, descended from the original colonists- they’re considered stubborn and hot-tempered. The Ishtarians control most interplanetary trade due to controlling the New Elysium spaceport, and they’re a theocracy with life centered around the Temple (though not puritanical, more mildly ascetic.) All Venusians tend to be vaguely “Asiatic” in appearance, with small eyes and ears and long, thick hair. There’s no mechanical difference between the three groups. All Venusians get +1 to Con and Wis, -1 to Dex and Cha. (Why these modifiers I’m not even sure.)

Mercurians are an interesting mix of colonists from other worlds but with some tailoring to live in the superheated planet’s underground warrens. You’ve got the Sun Kings, super-rich owners of the energy-collecting Mariposa satellites, who own much of the land below- these are flamboyant, gaudy types, the “Rich Kids of Tumblr” of the 25th Century. The Miners of Mercury live in the warrens, which aren’t quite as cramped as on the moon- no agoraphobia here- and while they’re more working class they still like to live fancy. The Musicians are the traders and merchants (it’s not even clear why they’re called Musicians since they’re not especially accomplished in the arts), and then there are the Desert Dancers. These people live on the surface, in giant enclosed arcologies that roll on tracks around the planet, travelling between solar arrays and staying out of the sun. They’re described as having vaguely Arabic styles, and actually are accomplished in the arts, with lots of famous writers, poets, musicians, etc.

All Mercurians, despite their polyglot origins, are a bit short, stocky, and tend towards dark skin. Distinct Martian and Venusian traits got kinda bred out over the years so they mostly look Terran. Mercurians get +1 to Dex and Con and -1 to Str. As saves go they’re very resistant to Heat and Radiation, and very vulnerable to Cold. They also get slight bonuses to saves versus Paralysis/Stun/Fall and Suffocation.

And now, the Gennies. Gennies still come from human stock and are sentient, but have much more extreme mods to fit in specific niches.


_{Image from a later supplement, for the sake of reference}

Tinkers are small (2-3 feet), furry gray humanoids engineered to work in ducts and hatchways and so on. Most of their genetic modification comes from lemurs and gibbons, giving them long reach and finer skill in manipulation; they also have very large eyes which let them see in total darkness. On top of which they just ended up being very good at technology, naturally curious with a certain knack for fixing stuff. They naturally suffer from being thought of as pets, which they fucking hate. Tinkers get +3 to Tech and Dexterity, and -2 to Strength and Constitution.

Workers were bred by RAM to do the grunt work of the corporation. They’re short, stocky, with rough, gray-ish skin, bred for strength at the expense of everything else. They’re mostly bred from primate stock but rumor has it that RAM snuck in some homo habilis genes while they were at it. Workers are basically slaves, living in prison-like compounds with no culture or religion to speak of. Workers have +3 to Strength and Constitution, -3 to Charisma, -2 to Intelligence, and -1 to Wisdom and Tech. An even bigger drawback is that they subsist on a special food paste, normally only available at their work camps. Going without it causes their Strength and Constitution to drop by 1 per day, until a score reaches 0 at which point they die. It only takes them one day to recover back to full strength after getting a new supply. There are somehow Workers who have made it to freedom, and PCs will be assumed to be one of these, with the game even kinda waiving the food requirement.


_{Another image from a later manual}

Terrines are RAM’s genetically engineered shock troops, with coarse leathery skin, catlike eyes and ears, and sharp fangs; it’s not explicit what all animals they’re derived from but there’s definitely a bit of shark in there. The name comes from the fact that they were designed for use on Earth, but they can survive just about anywhere. They stand about 6-7 feet tall and weigh up to 300 pounds. They’re trained to do two things, kill and obey their Martian masters. “The first test of fitness for a novice Terrine is to plunge a knife into his own belly and survive the test. Almost all of them do.”

They get +2 to Str, Dex, and Con, -3 to Cha, -2 to Int, and -1 to Wisdom. On top of this they have a natural AC of 7 and their claws grant them unarmed damage of 1d6+3. The big drawback is they’re subject to battle rage- whenever they get into a fight, they have to make an Intelligence check. If they fail they fight either to the death or until they’re knocked out. PC Terrines- who naturally are renegades- get to make a second check if the first fails. Terrines also have great saves across the board.

Five more to go! Next Time: Lizard Men, Desert Runners, and Space Men!

Characters & Combat: Races, Part 2: Don't Forget to Pack a Spare Lamp in Case You Get Hungry

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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Characters & Combat: Races, Part 2: Don't Forget to Pack a Spare Lamp in Case You Get Hungry


Delphs are a blend of humans with seal and dolphin traits, and were the first “major” gennies created, bred to tend Earth’s fish ranches and kelp beds. They run from 7 to 8 feet tall and from 200 to 400 pounds. Their skin is rubbery with a layer of blubber below, and comes in shades of blue, gray, or black. They live in clans, and have a few cities (basically raft flotillas with rooms above and below the water) but mostly just roam around, often alongside herds of whales and dolphins. They have +2 to Str, +1 to Con and Cha, and -2 to Tech, seeing as they live without much technology. Their big disadvantage, though, is their need to be in or near water; a Delph who is not fully immersed in water for at least ten minutes every eight hours loses a point of Strength, Dex, and Con, and continues losing points for every hour thereafter until they’re immersed (one hour will bring them back to full health) or a trait reaches 0 and they die. So yeah these are very limited as potential PCs, hence the kind of troupe play suggested at the chapter’s start. Delphs are fairly carefree and curious types, even playful.


Lowlanders. Remember how I said there were three types of Venusians? Well this is the fourth. Short and stocky, with many reptilian based characteristics, Lowlanders were bred to work with terraforming machinery on the Venusian surface, and so have been bred to endure a toxic high-pressure atmosphere. The problem is, as they quickly figured out, if they terraformed the land to be suitable for everyone else it would be very bad news for them. So they’ve rebelled, focusing instead on the agriculture (particularly substances which are used for valuable drugs.) They’re distrustful of outsiders, especially “Uplanders” (the non-Gennie Venusians), but content with their lives now. Lowlanders have +3 to Strength, +1 to Con and Tech, and -3 to Charisma. They have excellent saves against Heat and Poison but are vulnerable to Suffocation and Cold. A big disadvantage is that they need helmets and breathing packs to survive outside of the Lowlands’ atmosphere. This is slightly less of an imposition than the Delphs needing their own dunk tank, but it’s a bit dangerous- their breathing packs last about 72 hours before needing to be replenished, and if deprived for any reason they’ll suffocate in 10 minutes. The game notes that Lowlanders will need a very good reason to leave the surface of Venus, and so again they’re most likely going to be used as “guest” PCs.


Desert Runners were engineered in the early development of Mars, to look after herds of herbivorous animals that were planted on the Martian plateaus. They’re tall and covered in reddish/yellow fur, with big eyes and ears, and fangs mixed with normal human teeth. They’re a nomadic people, divided between several subtypes (identical but for different markings) and there’s a lot of competition within and between groups. They’re described as living similarly to the Plains Indians in the 18th-19th Centuries. Desert Runners get +2 to Strength and Dexterity, +1 to Con, and -1 to Cha. Most of them wear leather armor which gives them an AC of 8. A Desert Runner’s claws do 1d6+1 when used (they can retract them.) There’s a slight discrepancy between the write-up, which says they can’t tolerate extreme cold, and the actual saving throw chart where they have a +4 to saves vs. Cold but a -3 to saves vs. Heat. (Which makes a little more sense with Mars still being on the chilly side.) They too are used to a different atmosphere, needing special masks to lower the pressure of the air they take in when not on Mars. A normal, “high pressure” atmosphere will cause them to lose 2 points of Strength per round until they either die at 0 or put on their protective gear. However, there is no mention of said masks needing to be replenished as with the Lowlanders, though the book says a PC should have spares close at hand. Similarly, it’s rare for Desert Runners to leave the surface of Mars but they can be found elsewhere if they’ve got the gear.


Stormriders are the least human of the gennie species. They live all the way out on Jupiter, soaring through the upper atmosphere on long batlike wings and living in floating cities. Stormriders stand from 15-20 feet tall and weigh 800-1,200 lbs. They were designed using ray and shark genes, meant to be herders and terraformers, but live a very secretive life- it’s rare for anyone to venture out to the Outer Planets, and the Stormriders almost never leave Jupiter. If they do, again they need special breathing apparatus- this runs out every 10 hours, and the effect when deprived is the same as for Desert Runners. Their flying abilities only work in dense atmospheres as well. Stormriders have +2 to Strength and Constitution and -2 to Dexterity and Charisma. They really are guest-shot-only PCs, and it’s honestly kind of a shame.


Spacers are maybe not as weird as the Stormriders but very close. They were designed to be able to survive in space itself, without the need for protective gear; they have a special kind of algae in their digestive tract which converts thermal energy, water, and minerals to oxygen and nutrients. They’re sprayed with a thin aluminum coating at birth, and this coating not only protects from radiation, it can shift colors, with a Spacer forming dark spots to collect heat energy. They live out in asteroids and ring systems, gathering water and minerals for themselves and deposits of valuable materials to sell- they’re almost all loners by nature, occasionally banding together but not really developing any kind of organized civilization. They have +2 to Constitution and Tech, +1 to Dexterity, and -1 to Charisma; to speak at all with anyone (including each other) they need special translators. Spacers die of starvation if they go 48 hours without being exposed to sunlight or radiation, but even a simple lamp will be enough to “feed” them. Mechanically they’re perfectly viable as PCs, it’s just rare to see them leaving their solitary lives and joining groups of any kind.

Overall the variety is interesting- most players will want to be one of the “Human” types because they have the fewest drawbacks, and I do think they maybe go a little overboard with this- even if you want the authenticity of species bred to live in very hazardous environments, breathing apparatus could be made more reliable and not something you have to keep track of. The section closes out with a few notes on deciding age, personality, appropriate names etc. For gender they have the standard “we use ‘he’ for simplicity’s sake” thing but there’s no mechanical differences and they even mention that cross-gender play is okay, which is about as progressive as TSR were willing to get in 1990.

So that’s this big-ass, scan-heavy section out of the way. Next up- Careers!

Careers: Good Rocketjocks Never Hock an Engineer's Tools

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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Careers: Good Rocketjocks Never Hock an Engineer's Tools

Okay, now we get into Careers, or as you know them, Classes. They’re basically the same thing. After some discussion about teamwork and how levels and Hit Dice work, we’re presented with six choices. It’s worth noting that one of the big differences between careers is what skills they have available as career skills- it’s possible to learn outside of your career, but you get more points to spend on career skills. In a nice show of balance each career has eight career skills.

Rocketjocks are your hotshot space pilots, similar to WWI Flying Aces. To play one you have to be a Human (including Venusians, Mercurians, etc.), Delph, Desert Runner, or Spacer, and you have to have a Dexterity of at least 13, an Intelligence of at least 13, and a Charisma of at least 12. (Gotta be dashing, you know.) They get the fastest XP table, middling THAC0 progression (oh yeah, THAC0’s still around), and 1d6 HP per level. Naturally most of their career skills relate to piloting and driving things, and they get a +10 bonus to all skill checks involving piloting or driving. (Skills are a d100 thing so that’s a nice boost.) Also, every 2 levels they get a +1 adjustment to Charisma “when dealing with someone of the opposite sex and the same race”. Not very open minded. Anyway Buck Rogers himself is a 10th-level Rocketjock.

Warriors are the fighter class. They can be any race except Tinker and Stormrider, and need minimum ability scores of 10 in Strength and Constitution, and 8 in Dexterity and Intelligence. They’re the only class that gets to roll 1d10 for HP, they get the best attack progression, and advance moderately slowly. They also get to do 1d6 damage barehanded and can attack twice per round with bare fists, plus they get a +1 specialization bonus to a weapon of their choice every 2 levels (up to +3 for any single weapon). At 8th level a warrior starts attracting a company of 11-20 fellow soldiers, subject to GM discretion. Skill wise they get a decent range of fundamental stuff, including stealth and maneuvering in zero-G.

Scouts are kinda like Rangers but no? They’re the planetologists, explorers, etc., at home in a variety of environments. They can only be Humans, and need at minimum a Wisdom of 9 and Constitution, Intelligence, and Charisma at 9. They get a 1d8 hit die and the same THAC0 advancement as the Warrior, but they advance more slowly. The big deal with these guys is that for every level they gain beyond the 1st, they get +5 to any skill check related to their career skills. So, +5 at 2nd, +10 at 3rd, etc. This is good yes. Most of their skills relate to survival in the wilderness.

Engineers are the folks who fix things. They can be Humans, Tinkers, Lowlanders, or Desert Runners. (The latter is explained as their resistance to radiation helping them out.) The ability score requirements are 13 Tech, 12 Constitution, 10 Strength and 8 Intelligence. They get the fastest XP again, get 1d8 for HP, and can use any of their tools as a melee weapon with +2 to attack for 1d6 damage. They don’t let other people touch their tools though, that’s just rude. Outside of that they have the slowest THAC0 progression. Their skills naturally focus on repairing things.

Rogues are kinda like xD&D Thieves but also expected to be the facemen of the group, needing 13 Charisma and Dexterity as well as decent Intelligence and Wisdom. They can also only be Humans, for some reason. They get 1d6 HP per level and middling attack progression, but have the fast XP table. They also get a flat +10 bonus to any of their Career Skills.

Finally, Medics are needed to help patch everyone up at the end of the day. They get access to the Treat Light/Serious/Critical Wounds skills to restore HP in and right after combat- they aren’t expended like spells, but do require a roll, and can’t be used on a given PC more than once per combat. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Medics require a score of 12 or greater in Dexterity, Intelligence, and/or Wisdom, and the class is open to Humans and Tinkers. They get 1d6 HP per level and have a medium-fast level progression, but the slowest combat progression. Their big ability is simply that they’re the only ones who can learn skills in the Medic group, the others can’t even learn them cross-class. They’re also the only ones who can operate certain equipment.

EDIT: And I just now figured this out after posting, but this is why someone said you can't actually play a Stormrider PC- they're not eligible for ANY of the careers. Oops.

Overall the careers aren’t hugely exciting, but you can see steps have been taken to keep them in balance. It helps that there’s no magic or psionics or Force or whatever, nobody gets access to abilities that fundamentally overwrite the rules of the game world, so it’s all just numbers. The gaps in terms of HP and XP needed to advance are narrower here than in AD&D as well. You’ll notice that I said nothing about saving throws here- those aren’t actually tied to career. My major complaint is the racial restrictions, this really feels like an AD&D legacy, and one that already felt needlessly restrictive. (No Humans Allowed offers an optional rule that dramatically loosens these restrictions.)

Then there’s a section on changing careers. Despite a lot of text it’s… actually pretty simple? As long as you meet the ability score requirements for a new career, you can choose to stop progressing in your current career and start that one instead. You begin at 1st level, but retain your HP and THAC0- you gain HP as normal for your new class, but THAC0 only starts improving again once you reach a level in your new career where it’s better. You lose any special advantages from your old class, but keep your skill ratings. (Though if a medic changes class they can’t improve those skills anymore.) You can only change careers once.

And from there I’ll pause a bit while I try to figure out how to handle the next few chapters (the organization is kinda weird.) Next up: Probably Experience!

Experience (Has Made Me Rich And Now They're After Me)

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Experience (Has Made Me Rich And Now They're After Me)

This section is oddly placed, seeing as it’s marked for the GM’s eyes only but is sandwiched right between player info. It won't actually ruin anything or give away any secrets if the players see it, but I have no idea why this is where it is.

But anyway, experience. Obviously it works like in AD&D, but there’s a concerted effort to make XP awards not just about combat. The first couple of sections are general advice on how to give out XP over the course of a game, while noting that the GM has a lot of discretion. One section is about how experience point awards should be tied to success; winning combats, accomplishing missions, or minor bits of problem solving. The latter shouldn’t be completely trivial but there can be small awards for handling things in a clever way. (One could argue that failure is just as much a teacher as success, even more so, but this is the D&D paradigm still.)

The next section is about advancement, which of course is what all this is for. There are two hard rules, characters only advance in levels between adventures, and they can only advance one level at a time, no matter how many XP they got. There are also a couple of guidelines: the group shouldn’t go through more than 5 or 6 sessions without somebody advancing, and after 45-50 sessions you should have at least someone at level 9 but probably nobody beyond that. Now, if a campaign goes 45-50 sessions I can’t imagine still keeping count of how many sessions you’ve had, so while I get the idea that they want to set limits on how fast you advance I can’t see this coming up much. But then again I’ve been in mostly short campaigns. They also say that you should move players through the fragile lower levels reasonably quickly, which yeah.

Now, finally, some hard numbers. I mean they’re still guidelines, but numbers nonetheless. Achieving the overall goal of a mission is considered to be worth 1,000 XP, while achieving a secondary goal is worth 750. Of course the game then says these numbers will maybe be too high for low levels (I say go with it, level 1 is for the first session) and WAY too low for higher level characters so you have to adjust numbers anyway. We’re still not out of the vague zones.

Anyway there are also awards for use of skills, depending on whether the check was Easy (25 xp), Average (100), Difficult (300), or Impossible (500). This is mostly for low-level characters, and at higher levels you may want to phase out the low-level awards. There are also awards for using a skill in an unusual way (200) or unique way (350) though how you decide between unusual and unique is beyond me. And finally there are awards for just making wise choices at important moments- 150, or 350 if the moment is “crucial”. Again how you decide this I dunno.

But now, finally finally, we have hard numbers- combat! Combat awards are based entirely on the level of the enemy, and there’s no real scaling- if a level 10 character beats a level 1 enemy, they get XP, it’s just only 15 so it’s not worth very much. The awards for ship combat are more complex- based on the opponent ship’s tonnage, speed relative to yours, number of weapons, it gets complex. There’s a table for all the ships that are described in the game pitted against each other, though (a Scout Cruiser defeating a Krait fighter gets 260 XP, for example.)

There’s some guidance on divvying up group awards, and “extra credit” for teamwork, cooperation, and good role-playing, but of course those are vague qualities so they can’t give numbers. Finally the section ends with a reminder that the real point is to have fun and that if you’re doing your job well, the players will be motivated by the story and not the need for XPs. Which yeah, I guess.

You can kinda see here, again, Pondsmith and co. struggling to push the AD&D framework. AD&D 2nd Edition made the mistake of eliminating the “XP for Gold” rule for all but a couple of classes, meaning combat was now the main source of advancement while combat at low levels was still really dangerous- there was some support for story awards but they didn’t go in much detail. Here combat is still a source of points but there’s more guidance on giving awards for meeting the goals of a mission. Everything’s vague but there are at least some numbers to use as a baseline to tweak. Again, though, I question why this section is placed here, in the midst of stuff you need for character creation. I feel there was a miscommunication somewhere, or that since advancement normally gets talked about in the “player’s section” of games this got put here even if it ends up being more for the GM.

With that out of the way, however, we can get into the system’s big change, and where I think it actually kinda fails somewhat- Skills. That’s next time.

Skills, Where the Game Kinda Screws Up A Little

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Skills, Where the Game Kinda Screws Up A Little

So really the major difference this game has from AD&D 2e is the skills system, meant to handle all the specialized stuff you have to deal with in the world of the future. There’s a very big list and I’m not going to go through every single one, but I'll pick out some highlights here and there.

Skills work on a percentile system- whenever you use one you roll d100 and try to roll under. 01-05 is an automatic success and 96-00 is an automatic failure, the latter of which seems like a bad idea. (You always want a chance but 5% is, I think everyone here and now can agree, a bit much.) There are modifiers based on difficulty- an Easy skill check lets you roll against your skill rating x2, Average is normal, for Difficult tasks you divide your rating by 2, for Impossible ones you divide by 4. (Always rounding down.) Also you add the skill’s related attribute to your skill rating for the roll, and untrained skill checks are allowed with two exceptions- Medic skills, and skills you haven’t met the prerequisites for (more on that later.)

Characters have their skills divided into Career Skills and General Skills. You start with 40 points for Career Skills, and get 40 more each time you level. You can’t put more than 15 into any skill at a time, but skill ratings can go over 100 (which is important if Difficult and Impossible checks start to come up.) They also recommend that if you have a career which gives a bonus to career skills (Rocketjocks and Rogues), you just include that in the skill rating for convenience’s sake. (So a Rocketjock effectively starts with 10 points in Drive Jetcar, Drive Groundcar, etc.)

You get 20 points for General Skills, and get 20 more each time you level, with the same 15-points-at-a-time limit. There are actually two skill lists, one showing Career Skills and one showing General Skills- they’re the same skills, but the second list shows you which attributes they’re connected to. (With one exception- Medic skills are silo’ed off into their own group, but the book states that all Medic skills use Tech.) It’s a little inconvenient but nothing big.

Now you may have worked out a problem, and it’s the familiar one of many systems which use percentile skills. At most a PC can start out with 15 points in their chosen skill, and that skill’s related attribute may get as high as 18, 19 with modifiers. So, a 1st level character’s maximum possible skill ranking is going to be a 34- 44 if they’re a Rogue or Rocketjock and it’s a relevant skill. So yeah, at early levels there’s gonna be a TON of whiffing, more than is going to be fun. A GM’s gonna have to be pretty conservative with calling for skill checks, or just make a lot of them Easy.

I can see how this came about, in an RPG you want room to grow and advance, and with a percentage score your range is a little limited. On top of everything they were probably working from AD&D’s Thief skills, which mostly start low, but those were only supposed to be used sparingly anyway- here, the skill system seems designed to be used extensively for a wide variety of tasks. I don’t get how playtesting didn’t catch this (and there are a lot of credited playtesters.)

(This is definitely something that comes up in Countdown to Doomsday, too- the second mission puts you on a derelict spaceship and Maneuver in Zero G rolls are needed for every combat. The results are, not ideal.)

As for the skill list? I count about 84 skills, divided not really evenly among Dexterity, Tech, Medic (which is also Tech), Intelligence, Charisma, and Wisdom- which gets the short shrift with only 5, though that includes “Notice” which is always useful. While Intelligence, Tech, and Dexterity get the most, those lists are pretty specialized- there are multiple types of piloting, multiple types of repair, lots of specialized areas of knowledge, etc. Strength and Constitution are completely left out.

A lot of the more specialized skills have prerequisites- to take points in Repair Nuclear Engine you need Repair Mechanical 10, to take Navigation you need points in Astronomy and Mathematics, and Composition, while you can take it any time, is only useful if you put 20 points into Sing, Play Instrument, or Literature.

So yeah you may have worked out some of these skills are more likely to be used in an adventure than others, that’s also a problem. This is hard for me to judge, I get intimidated by long skill lists but maybe you have enough points to dabble in some not-strictly-useful stuff? Certainly after a while.

And now, Selected Skill details:

Maneuver in Zero-G is a Dex skill, and a career skill for rocketjocks, warriors, and engineers. A failed roll on this in combat gives you an Armor Class penalty.

Paint/Draw is a Dex skill, which, okay.

Drive Groundcar is a different skill from Drive Heavy Ground Vehicle, and Drive Motorcycle is still another.

First Aid, a Tech skill, is pretty important because it’s the only way a non-Medic can heal someone. A successful First Aid roll during or after a combat lets a PC (either yourself or an ally) heal 1d6 hit points of damage that they’ve suffered in that combat. You can only do this once per character per combat encounter, so it’s not a lot, but it’s something.

Jury Rig lets you do the same for mechanical or electrical components, healing 2d10 points of damage to a ship component, but the fix only lasts 1d6 rounds. This also requires 10 points in Repair Mechanical and Repair Electrical.

Repair Mechanical and Repair Electrical are basically the foundational skills for Engineers, needed in some quantity to take other repair skills. Repair Mechanical can heal up to 2d10 points of damage to a ship’s controls, while Repair Electrical can do the same for ship’s sensors. Repair Computer, Repair Life Support, Repair Rocket Hull, and Repair Nuclear Engine let you do the same for other ship systems.

Repair Weapon is an interesting exception to all this because it has no prerequisites, and is a career skill for warriors, but not engineers. It doesn’t heal a given amount of damage either, it just fixes a weapon. (I assume this works for ship’s weapons as well.)

Life Suspension Tech is one of the more esoteric Medic skills. A life suspension device lets you stabilize a character reduced to 0 hit points, if applied within five rounds. However, bringing them OUT of suspended animation requires another successful check at Impossible difficulty- if you fail this, the patient dies anyway. A little strict.

Treat Light Wounds is the must-have for starting Medics. Using the skill requires one round and restores 1d8 HP to a patient on a successful roll. You can only do this once per individual per battle. If you take 30 points in this skill, you can start taking points in Treat Serious Wounds, which heals 2d8+1 over 3 rounds. Finally if you get 40 points in Treat Serious Wounds you can graduate to Treat Critical Wounds, which heals 3d8+3 over 10 rounds. You can’t stack uses of these (i.e. you can’t use Treat Serious Wounds AND Treat Light Wounds on the same patient), and using Treat Critical Wounds on yourself is an Impossible-level task.

Battle Tactics is an Intelligence skill and career skill for warriors. On a successful check, any other member of the group who can see or hear you gets a +1 to-hit bonus. It’s meager, but using this skill also takes no time at all and you can still move and attack and whatnot, so you may as well have it.

Memorize is its own skill. I’m undecided about this.

Speak/Read Language, an Intelligence skill, can be taken multiple times for each new Language you wish to learn. Every PC is assumed to be able to speak and read English, which is the common language of the solar system.

Hypnosis, a Charisma skill, lets you implant “reasonable commands or suggestions” in the mind of the hypnotized party for up to 1d10 hours, but the target has to be willing to be hypnotized so it’s a little limiting. There’s a note on this, Fast Talk/Convince, and Intimidate specifically saying you can’t use these skills on other PCs, which I thought was interesting. Presumably in 1990 we were still having “I can totally Intimidate Bob into carrying my stuff” arguments at the table.

Leadership is another Charisma skill, and a career skill for warriors. The description is a little vague, it allows you to “give orders and be obeyed- as long as the ones he is ordering are willing to be led.” A failed check means you have to wait at least 1 day before trying again on the same character or group. In the computer games this actually gave you NPC allies in some situations, and I can see this cropping up in similar “mass battle” scenarios in the game.

Shadowing is a skill you don’t often see specifically outlined but it’s good to have- sort of an urban version of Tracking (a scout skill), but also more about stealth.

Having Buck Rogers XXVc be a largely skill-based system was a good idea in itself- it was sort of the default approach for sci-fi games and lets the classes be distinguished in subtler ways than the broad strokes of xD&D. But there is still that problem of the scores being too low. I think in this case the best solution (if you’re still using the system) would be to move the difficulty range a tad- make Average rolls at 2x skill, and Easy at 4x, Difficult at normal, etc. It’s tricky working with a 100 point scale over many levels (BTW, shoulda said this earlier, XP tables go to level 12.)

There’s also the problem of the skills being a little overspecialized at times- Move Silently and Hide are still separate, for example, and while some “color” or background skills can be nice I can’t imagine Economics getting much play.

So yeah I think this section shows the greatest flaws in the system, and while I think they’re fixable it’s a question of how much effort you’re willing to put in. But we’re almost done with character generation! All we have left is getting our stuff.

Outfitting: Spacesuits Are So In This Season

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Outfitting: Spacesuits Are So In This Season

Money in the 25th Century is credits. It’s always credits. There are credit cards and such but hard cash has made a comeback.

Every character starts with 1d10 x 200 credits. Which is a pretty big range considering the cost of things, 10% of PCs are going to be rolling in with maybe one gun and that’s it. That said, “ordinary” melee weapons are pretty cheap and as the game points out, they never run out of power or need to be reloaded. Of course the cheapest melee weapon that does 1d6 damage is 100 credits (for a cutlass) but that still leaves you something.

Before we get to the list of what to buy there’s a section on Encumbrance. There’s a mention of how this is affected by gravity- a simple table gives weight multipliers showing how much you can carry in the lower-gravity environments of the inner planets, you multiply your normal weight limit by that. (Of course, you’re not actually carrying more weight, the stuff you’re carrying weighs less.) In theory you can carry as much as you want in zero-gravity, but the section says you do have to take volume into consideration. Doesn’t give any hard numbers for it though.

Actually there’s something I should mention in regards to all this- there are no class restrictions on weapons or armor. Your only limitations (with one weird exception) are encumbrance and what you can afford. Also the actual list is pretty sparse as far as description goes, I'm cross-referencing with the Technology Book and the later combat section to give more detailed write-ups. When we get to the Technology Book proper I'll really dive into some of the stuff I'm just summarizing here.

Anyway, melee weapons include normal knives, polearms, etc. (as well as clubs,rocks, etc. which cost nothing) but also mono knives and swords. Mono blades are cut from a piece of synthetic diamond, and have an edge one molecule thick. They also have little laser beams projected on the edge when the blade is extended, so they look like lightsabers, but they’re not! You ain’t got shit on us, Lucas! Ahem. Anyway, mono weapons are powered by solar cell batteries, which last a long time; you can use a mono weapon 20 rounds per day for 60 days before the thing runs out of charge, and recharging them is just a question of leaving them plugged in or in the sun for an hour.

The ranged weapons are really where things get varied. Needle Guns are pretty cheap at 200cr; they only do 1d3 damage per hit, but have a rate of fire of 3 (i.e. they can be used three times a round) so they’re still pretty good. Nice starter weapon. (And Countdown to Doomsday does start you with these.) Rocket pistols fire self-propelled projectiles with no recoil, making them good for zero-g fights. This is a nice nod to history- the original story and comic strips had Buck and his allies using rocket pistols which worked the same way. You’ve also got heat guns, microwave guns, sonic guns, and plasma throwers which basically launch napalm.

Desert Runner Crossbows are also notable, only costing 100 credits, and they can fire either bolts (for 1d4 damage) or explosive shells (for 1d8.) Pretty good right? Well, the thing is, they’re built for Desert Runners, to the extent that anyone else gets a -4 penalty to use it. You can decrease this if you spend a long time using it exclusively, but who’s gonna do that? So this is basically a Wookie bowcaster, but again, legally distinct!

Armor is generally more expensive, starting at 200 credits for a Spacesuit (Armor Class 6- remember we’re doing this the old school way). Light Body Armor, at 250, is actually AC 7, but doesn’t weigh as much (but weight doesn’t actually count for what you’re wearing, so just go with the Spacesuit.) If you rolled well enough you may be able to afford Smart Clothes (4) or Heavy Body Armor (2), but Battle Armor is strictly out of reach for starting characters. Now, later sci-fi d20 games came around to the idea that not everyone is running around in armor and so used things like class bonuses and Dex bonuses to compensate, but that hasn’t really shown up here. No reason not to get whatever you can afford. Suit up!

Beyond this there’s your standard survival gear and a load of other technological toys. Breather Helmets (needed for some Gennies) cost 40 credits, with atmosphere tanks for Stormriders costing 20 credits. Spacer Translators also cost 40. There are Swim Fins which increase your swimming speed, videophones, macrobinoculars, gillmasks, a lot of familiar sci-fi tech. Your very own atomic generator will run you 600 credits, powers a small ship or building for three days, and only weighs 10 pounds! I also like the Watchbox, which is a small security robot you can set to patrol an area and sound an alarm if it spots an intruder.

The Fieldfence is also kinda interesting. It’s two or more posts you put up to 10 feet apart, wired to a generator. They create an electromagnetic field which helps block most metallic projectiles (Buck Rogers’ trusty service pistol is specifically exempt so I’m not clear how this is supposed to work), and you can also throw in metallic chaff to block laser and plasma weapons. Against appropriate weapons, it gives a 70-90% miss chance (GM’s discretion I guess). All in all a little complicated but it reminds me of the cool invisible fence from Forbidden Planet.

Medical wise you can buy Drug Fabricators for 500, but the chemical supply pack to actually make the drugs costs 1000. An Autosurgery is a compact cube which unfolds into a computerized machine which can perform simple surgeries under the direction of a doctor or medic.

And there are jetpacks! A Rocket Belt costs 1000 credits and is best used for short hops around 2 minutes in length, for an average speed of around 15 miles per hour. They don’t work in airless environments, though- for that you need a Space Belt, which costs the same, weighs slightly west, and has cheaper refills. It’s not clear why you wouldn’t just buy one of those, but Space Belts do have quite a kick- a single burst fired in a weightless environment will send you flying at 120 feet per round, and each burst after doubles your speed. There are rules for how much damage you suffer when hitting something at speeds faster than 200 feet per round.

Finally, there are costs for a few different varieties of jetcar- all of these are unattainable with starting money, but on the table nonetheless.

So we’ve got our denizens of the 25th century trained and equipped. Next time, we’ll be sending them into battle.

Combat: Lasers and Bad Feelings

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Combat: Lasers and Bad Feelings

Combat in Buck Rogers works a lot like it does in AD&D, naturally enough. I don’t actually have my 2e books with me, though, so I’ll probably forget some of the fine distinctions. Basically it’s more abstract than what you’d see from 3rd edition onwards, simple but with plenty of little modifiers, and a touch more lethal than it should be.

Each round of combat lasts a minute, and the action economy is a little broad and generous- in a round you can make an attack, reload a weapon, run for cover, etc. (Moving and attacking at the same time isn’t mentioned, but there’s little to no tactical/miniature support in the rules anyway.) There’s a lot of room for common sense / GM fiat, but that part seems okay- it doesn’t seem too hard to work out if a particular action will take more or less than 60 seconds.

Initiative is done by everyone rolling d10 (the GM does one roll for all the NPCs.) Characters act from lowest to highest, so high Dexterity gives you a negative modifier. There are also some modifiers for being in tricky terrain. Movement rates are given for all the various races- a human can run 600 feet in a round, climb 150, and swim 300.

Attacking is done by subtracting the opponent’s AC from your To Hit Armor Class 0 (THAC0), and then rolling a d20 to see if you can equal or beat that number. A table gives THAC0s for the various PC classes and for NPCs dependent on hit dice: Warriors, Scouts, and creatures with d10 hit dice get the fastest progression, d8s get a middling progression that stalls out in later levels, and d6 progression starts very slow but ends up lower than the d8s. You automatically miss on a 1, but there is no rule for an automatic hit on a 20, so that presumably is not a thing. Also notable, there are no Critical Hit rules at all.

There’s a good chart of AC modifiers, with bonuses from cover, concealment, and high Dexterity, all especially useful in firefights. There’s also a section on active parrying/dodging, which is a full defense- you take your entire round to be defensive, and get a bonus to your AC equal to half their level, rounded up (minimum 2.) Warriors and Scouts get an additional bonus to this. It doesn’t seem like it’s worth it except in very desperate situations. Backstabbing is open to all classes, so long as they have a melee weapon- you get a +2 attack bonus and a x2 damage multiplier if you manage to sneak up on someone and attack. Rogues get +4 to backstab, and at higher levels their damage multiplier increases.

A section on brawling follows, and I like that they point out why this is a good idea. Out in space, or on asteroids or lunar cities, shooting guns everywhere risks blowing a hole in the wall and killing everyone. Of course, brawling still has its downsides- you only do 1d4 base subdual damage, plus or minus any modifiers from Strength. (Though a couple of genotypes are exceptions to this.) Also, to actually knock somebody out, you not only have to reduce them to 0 hp, but they have to fail a System Shock roll (which, as a reminder, is one of the things derived from your Con score- meaning NPCs now all need Constitution scores.) If they fail they’re knocked out for 1d10 rounds, if not they hang on with 1 hp. Subdual damage heals pretty quickly, 1d4 per hour.

You can also try to just lay someone out by bludgeoning them. You take a -4 penalty to your attack, and the target has to make a System Shock roll at half their normal chance to succeed, or get knocked out. (You also still deal damage, and it's not subdual.) It’s not clear how long anyone stays knocked out in this way.

We then get range and damage tables for major weapons. I covered some of this in the Outfitting writeup, but one thing worth noting is even melee weapons have ranges: knives, daggers, and clubs have a range fo 3 feet, swords of various kinds (plus the Venusian Kryptx, which I didn’t write up because you can’t buy it and it’s a bit weird and we’ll get there) all have a range of 6, and Polearms have a range of 9! The game notes the GM should probably assign a penalty to someone engaging a sword-wielding opponent with a knife, but doesn’t set specifics. Range for actual ranged weapons works a bit differently, you’re given the max ranges and divide by two to find medium range (which is a -2 to attack) and 4 to find short range. Each weapon also has a “Shots” entry- run out of shots and you have to spend 1 round reloading or recharging. I prefer my space opera without people ever running out of laser bullets, but XXVc is sorta walking the line between space opera and harder SF so I get it. Thrown weapons work pretty much like ranged weapons, except that things like bricks, bottles, and grenades have their range determined by multiplying the Strength of the thrower by 5. Grenades get write-ups for blast radius and how to determine where it goes off, etc.

Let’s get into Saving Throws! As I’ve hinted before they work a bit differently in XXVc. Part of this is because of the change in genre- no Dragon Breath or Magic Wands to dodge here. Instead, the Saves are: Explosion/Plasma Fireball, Electrical Shock, Paralysis/Stun/Fall, Toxic Atmosphere/Gas/Poison, Suffocation, Radiation, and Extremes of Heat or Cold.

The second main difference is in how they’re calculated and advanced. In most of D&D, saves are mostly dependent on your class, and improve by level based on your class. Here, all characters start with the same base array of saving throws, which are then modified by race. Mercurians are more resistant to Heat but vulnerable to Cold, Venusians are more resistant to Toxic/Gas/Poison, etc. Every three levels you gain a +1 bonus to all saves, and the game only has XP tables for up to 12th level, so at maximum they’re not improving by much.

Priority is something that may also be new. The order in which I listed the saves above is the order in which those saves are made, if a situation calls for multiple rolls. So if a Human walking in the Venus Lowlands is near to an explosion which tears a hole in their protective gear, they first have to make a save for Explosion/Plasma, then Toxic/Gas/Poison, then maybe Heat if the gear was also the only thing protecting them from the temperature. There follow some explanations of the various saves- most of them halve damage, but some like Toxic can eliminate it entirely, while with stuff like Radiation and temperature extremes, there are issues with how this is calculated over time. (Radiation has you make a save for the overall dose, which is calculated by how long you were exposed.)

There’s also a nice chart for fall damage depending on what planet you’re on, including maximums (though- and the game doesn’t bring this up- terminal velocity is a matter of air resistance, so if you’re on the Lunar surface as opposed to in a dome, there should be no practical maximum.)

The game’s handling of HP is pretty simple: run out and you’re dead. Life Suspension tech can maybe save you, but as we learned earlier, it’s a very tricky thing. There’s also advice for situations where death seems inescapable- the GM is encouraged to fudge a bit. If a PC is in a fighter that suddenly gets hit and spins towards a mountain, they should be able to escape via ejector seat, that sort of thing. Sometimes you can’t help it, and stupid decisions should mean death, but the GM is encouraged to balance these considerations.

However I think the rules as written are probably still too lethal. As in AD&D low-level characters are quite fragile, but unlike AD&D there are no temples with clerics willing to cast resurrection spells for the right price. The Life Suspension thing really only seems viable once a Medic has some levels with them. Here, I think Countdown to Doomsday had the right approach- like all the AD&D Gold Box games, it treats 0 hp as “Down”, below that as “Dying”, but anyone can stabilize a dying character, and you’re only killed outright if you take a whole bunch of damage at once. Really I advise using the Gold Box rules for all your old school D&D derivatives, barring something like Dungeon Crawl Classics or whatever.

The section closes out with a bit on Healing; while medical treatment has already been covered by Skills, natural healing lets you heal 1 hp a day if you don’t do anything strenuous, and 3 hp a day if you just rest the whole time. It’s slow, but the book also says that between adventures the GM may just say to Hell with it, you’re back up to full.

So, there’s Combat. Maybe a trifle too dangerous at low levels, but there is a fix for that at least.

Next time: SPACESHIPS!

Rocket Ships: Smithers, There's A Rocket In My Pocket

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Rocket Ships: Smithers, There's A Rocket In My Pocket


All spaceships in XXVc are rocket ships; they use the same basic technique of fuel combustion, though the technology has advanced. Rockets take off and land vertically, and while they’re accelerating they have gravity pushing things towards the back, so a rocketship can be thought of like a flying skyscraper, the decks stacked on top of the engines. The main difference from old-school rockets is they have enough power and fuel to do braking maneuvers just before landing, instead of turning over halfway through.

There are six major categories of rocketships. Fighters are small one-or-two man vehicles, very fast but with limited range- they have small atomic motors which aren’t enough to travel between planets, though they can be carried by larger ships. Fighters are often customized to their environment- Martian fighters have large wings for better maneuvering, and have hulls which can withstand the Martian sandstorms. Venusian fighters are closer to dirigibles, designed to “swim” in Venus’ heavy atmosphere. There are some rules for the penalties faced when, say, a Venusian fighter is on Mars (+6 initiative/reaction, and it’d take 2 HP per round to its Hull during a sandstorm.)

Cruisers range from 50 to 1,000 feet in length (though few are larger than 200 feet), and have powerful fusion converters enabling interplanetary travel. They have fins for atmospheric stabilization but maneuver on their engines alone. The book says that when piloting a cruiser, you should think to yourself, “What should I do with a jetliner armed with lasers and missiles?” That is a question with many answers.

Asterovers are small shuttles used to make runs between orbit and a planetary surface. Like fighters they can’t travel between planets. They have small amounts of cargo and living space.

Battlers are your capital ships, giant military vessels starting at 1,000 feet long and maxing out at around 2 miles. They have hundreds of crewmen, can carry fighters (usually between 20-50), and also usually have a lot of ground troops on board (enough to assault a city.) They’re the only ships described here that cannot make planetfall; they do sometimes skim the atmosphere to gather gas for fusion drives, though, so they have some atmospheric streamlining.

Transports are built to take cargo and passengers between planets, and so sacrifice speed, maneuverability, and most armament just to make the trip. They come in all shapes and sizes, but usually only have a crew of two (a rocketjock and an engineer) living in very cramped quarters.

Freighters are smaller than Transports, and are built to carry small but valuable cargo. As such they tend to be better armed and more maneuverable. The kind of ships adventurous rogues are found in- in other words, the PCs.

Spaceship construction is largely centered around tonnage. You determine your ship's tonnage based on the kind of ship it is (a light freighter is 30-50 tons, a medium cruiser is 55-200, etc.), picking a number in that range so long as it’s a multiple of 5. (No 33-ton ships etc.) This determines your ship’s length, width, basic cargo space, speed, and maneuverability. Smaller ships get bonuses to their initiative and AC, while very large ships get the inverse. This has the effect of making the fighters very hard to hit indeed, which can be a bit annoying (and doesn’t seem entirely balanced, seeing as they’re on the low end of the XP value scale.) You also get a Speed score out of this, used in combat and when you’re moving in a planet’s atmosphere.

Tonnage also determines your ship’s hit points, which are divided into six categories. Your Hull has HP equal to the ship’s tonnage x4, Sensors/Commo and Control systems both have HP equal to tonnage x1, Life Support gets HP equal to tonnage x2, and Fuel System and Engine both get tonnage x3.

Your options for Armor Class are basically determined by your kind of ship: civilian craft get Civilian armor (AC 8), Military Armor (AC 6) is for fighters and light cruisers, Maximum Military Armor (AC4) is for cruisers ≥100 tons, and Battler Class Armor (AC 0) is for Battlers. Finally, you have individual weapon spaces equal to your tonnage divided by 10 (rounded down)- most weapons take up one space, but some are larger.

There’s a whole section on Buying a Ship- basically it boils down to, the base cost of a good used ship is tonnage x 10,000 credits, you can spend more for a New ship with higher HP values than normal (though the bonus they get is permanently lost when they’re damaged), or less for a Poor ship with each section having a chance to be damaged or even unusable until repaired. Financing is available, but generally the PCs aren’t expected to be able to buy a ship out of the gate. Of course, as interplanetary heroes of space, you may be coming into ship ownership in… other ways.

On to operations! Fuel costs 20 credits per HP of fuel (you basically use the system HP as your fuel gauge), so a full tank for a 30 ton vessel costs 1,800 credits. It also costs 1,000 credits to load a ship’s reactor with atomic fuel rods, but those rods last five years. There’s a list of costs for replacement systems, if you’re in port and don’t want to spend days on end restoring small amounts of HP to something- these costs aren’t based on HP or tonnage, but they’re all in the thousands or, in the case of the nuclear engine, tends of thousands. It takes only 1d6+4 hours to swap out a module. There’s also costs- and number of spaces required- for weapons. Spaceports charge their own docking fees, ranging from 50 to 200 credits a day, and there are all sorts of supplemental charges you can ding the players with if you wanna really be annoying about it. A ship needs to carry around five pounds of food and water per person on board per day.

I’m not really sure most of this detail will be useful, but I’m one of those who thinks outer space RPGs should be focused on adventure and heroics and not on trying to manage the economics of rocket ownership, so I feel like little would be lost if this were mostly handwaved. Again, that’s me though. Sci-fi RPGs often feel a need to get wrapped up in this stuff.

Spaceports are classified as Class A, B, or C- A is the best, with all kinds of facilities and replacement parts, B spaceports will have most of what you need and can mail order the rest, and C spaceports are basically open-air landing pads and maybe a fuel pump.

Space travel works a little differently from how it does in our century. Because rocket ships have lots of fuel and efficient reactors and whatnot, they don’t have to spend most of their fuel just on achieving escape velocity; they can (and do) actually fly under power most of the way, making travel between planets much faster. This is where the map and the ruler come in- the referee can track orbital positions and therefore the overall distance you have to travel from one planet to another, and the ruler shows rates of travel based on how much fuel you’re spending per day.

Ah, but what if you’re spending no fuel? The game doesn’t give options for cutting acceleration and continuing at your present speed- which should work- but if you do run out of fuel, and aren’t orbiting a planet, you deviate from our original course by 15 degrees in one direction or another (roll a die), and continue moving at the 10-HP per day rate. If you run out of fuel near the surface of a planet, you start falling- the pilot must make a Difficult or Impossible skill check to land, otherwise you just crash.

Finally, in an atmosphere, a ship can move at a top speed of 1,000 mph for every point of Speed it has. For every 1,000 mph you’re burning 1 hp of fuel per hour.

And this is hella long already, so I’ll split off Space Combat into the next post.

Space Combat: You get a gun! And you get a gun! Everybody gets a gun!

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Space Combat: You get a gun! And you get a gun! Everybody gets a gun!

Almost every spacefaring game has to deal with the question of space combat, and frankly, it’s one they’ve all struggled with. The big question when you have all your characters in a ship and another ship starts firing is always, “What does everybody do?”, and the answer is usually, “Well, okay the pilot flies the ship, someone else is the gunner, then someone else fixes the engine, maybe the other person… runs the shields?” It’s never really that satisfying, because, well, who wants to be stuck with shield duty?

I think Buck Rogers XXVc gets closest to a good answer, one elegant in its simplicity. But before that, the game wants to talk about the basics, weapons and sensors. Well, it says weapons and sensors but then only talks about weapons so I assume something was cut somewhere. Anyway, weapons!

Lasers come in two varieties, Pulse and Beam. Pulse lasers work the same as the handheld variety, while beam lasers fire a steady, well, beam- in game terms they have better aim and a hit bonus because it’s easy to sweep across where a target is, but they do less damage since the energy isn’t as concentrated.

Gyrocannons fire small explosive shells, with shorter range and less oomph than missiles but a much larger ammo capacity and higher accuracy.

Missiles are given a lot of description- basically they’re smarter than modern ICBMs, which could easily be targeted by a rocketship’s defenses, and they can do weird things like throwing out magnetic fields or throwing out micro pellets to shred hulls. But in practical terms there are regular missiles, heavy missiles, and K-Cannons. They don’t have a lot of shots and aren’t very accurate, but do a shit ton of damage- especially the K-Cannon, which is a giant ballista. (The K is for Kinetic.)

Acceleration Guns are short range mass drivers, which throw flak at the enemy. They do a bit more damage than lasers to compensate for their short range and low accuracy.

All ship combat takes place on a hexmap, included in the box set. One hex is equal to 50 miles. The referee takes the appropriate counters (also in the box) and places them according to the situation. Each round you roll for initiative, and the way rounds work is kinda weird- ships use speed points- calculated from your ship’s speed rating- to perform maneuvers, and the next round begins with your speed diminished by how many points you spent, until everyone’s speed points are used up or every manned weapon has been fired at least once, at which point speed presumably resets. It’s a bit odd but I think I get what they’re going for? Basically gives faster ships more opportunities to act and react. The highest printed speed for a ship is 7 (the Krait, a RAM fighter) so it shouldn’t take too long to cycle.

In combat there are two major actions, maneuvers and combat. Maneuvers include movement (1 speed point per hex), turning (1 point per hex side), and special maneuvers- stunts which require the pilot to make a skill check. The example given is a pilot pulling off an inside loop to come around on an enemy’s tail, but here’s the thing- there are no actual rules for such maneuvers giving you a numerical advantage. Weapons don’t have firing arcs, there aren’t rules for flanking, etc. I get the feeling something was left out here.

As for firing, well, here we get to the solution I was talking about. Each of a spaceship’s guns needs to be manned at the start of a round in order to fire during that round. The game recommends that you have a Rocketjock flying the ship, an Engineer running between decks repairing things, maybe put the Medic on standby, and everyone else just gets to a gun. The freighters and light cruisers detailed in the game usually have 3 weapons available, so a 4 or 5 person party has enough weapons to go around. It’s just that simple, let more people shoot. I can’t believe more sci-fi games don’t just build their ships so that multiple people can attack in a round. In a pinch, if you’ve still got people with nothing to do, they can assist- assisting a gunner gives them a +1 to hit, and assisting someone making a Skill Check (for repairing, medic-ing, etc.) gives them a +10 bonus to their skill. You can move to an adjacent deck and still perform an action during a round, but moving two decks takes the whole turn. (The game’s ship plan maps show various decks and you’re meant to work out ahead of time how they’re arranged on top of each other.)

Each weapon has a max range in hexes, all within 6. Despite their max range, they’re all affected by distance: 1-2 hexes is short range with no penalty, 3-4 is medium range with a -2 penalty to hit, and 5-6 is long range, -5. Where ground weapons do variable damage, ship weapons always do a set amount, in multiples of 10- a Light Acceleration Gun does 20, a Missile does 40, etc.

Attacking is done just like on the ground, using the shooter’s THAC0 and the defending ship’s AC and AC Defense Bonus. Like I said this makes small ships very hard to hit (the Krait has a printed AC of 6 but an effective AC of 1, AND it’s described as having stealth capabilities that take it all the way to -5 as long as it’s moving!) If you hit, you roll a d12 to determine your hit location- Sensors/Commo, Controls, Life Support, Fuel, Engine, Weapon, Hull. All of these systems were given HP in ship construction, and the game supplies still more counters to track that damage. For weapons, you determine which weapon got hit at random and that weapon is destroyed. Other systems give various effects if they’re destroyed (or in some cases take half their HP)- a ship without Controls can’t maneuver, a ship with no Life Support means everyone has to put on a suit, Fuel means you go adrift, etc. Losing all your Hull means your ship falls apart and if you’re not wearing protection you die immediately. Also, any character in a section that takes damage must make a saving throw vs. Explosion or take 1d10 damage. If they’re reduced to 3 HP (or half their HP total, whichever’s lower), they can’t help to run the ship until they’ve been healed.

You can make called shots to target specific systems, with penalties ranging from -1 (Hull), to -6 (Sensors, Controls, a specific weapon.) You can ram ships if you’re on the same hex- the defending pilot can make a Pilot Rocket check to avoid damage. A collision between ships, intentional or unintentional, has each ship deal damage equal to its tonnage to the other’s hull. So the bigger ship always wins, whoever caused the collision. (One way to deal with those damn Kraits I suppose.) Finally, a ship that crashes suffers 10 HP of Hull damage for each 1,000 feet fallen, and everyone on board takes maximum damage from the fall (as explained way back in the saving throw section.)

And that’s it. So yeah, a few flaws, I’m convinced ship maneuvers were supposed to do something but it was getting to be too much rules (the other problem with ship combat in RPGs, how much additional complexity do you want to introduce?), but I do like the bones of this. Does better than most at giving people shit to do, attacking systems matters, and because close range is so advantageous you get a kind of age of sail feel with ships pulling up alongside.

Almost done with the rules book! Next, Digital Personalities and Scientists!

Digital Personalities, Scientists, and Digital Personalities who are Scientists

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Digital Personalities, Scientists, and Digital Personalities who are Scientists



Digital Personalities (shortened to DPs, because 1990 was a simpler time) are basically AIs, and while they’re mostly covered in the World Book, this book gives the mechanical details. Suffice it to say, they’re computer folks, made up of 1s and 0s, and they come in two types: Constructs, which are original digital creations, and Translated Personalities, which are based on the brainwaves of real people. They sometimes manifest as 3D holograms to interact with people. DPs are strictly NPCs, which is probably just as well. Two major examples in the setting are Dr. Huer- a Construct, and the setting’s incarnation of one of Buck Rogers’ iconic allies- and Simund Holzerhein, the digital ruler of the RAM empire.

A DP has no scores in Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution, but does have the other four attributes. They have a hit die of d10, and since they’re NPCs there’s no tracking experience, you just determine what level they are. The Armor Class of a DP starts at 10 at 1st level, and improves by 1 every level.

But wait, wait, why do they have an Armor Class? And Hit Points? Because there is digital combat! This is where the game gets kinda cyberpunk and I have to jump around a bit. Basically, in XXVc there are World Computers, crystalline structures the size of a city. There’s one for Earth, Luna, Mars, Mercury, and Venus, and there are satellites linking those computers together. DPs can travel within and between these World Computers, which in game terms are made up of a bunch of individual cells. A DP can travel to any adjacent cell in a round, and can also spend a round to disassemble-reassemble to another World Computer. So yeah basically they go dungeon crawling looking for data, and when enemy DPs meet, they can fight, using special programs.

A DP starts out being able to initiate one program per round- at 5th, they can initiate two per round, and at 10th level three, etc. Virus Attack does 1d4 damage per attacker level on a hit, then 1d4 damage per round for the following three rounds. It can be used as often as the attacker wishes, but you have to wait for one virus to expire before attacking with a new one. Mind Bolt does 1d6 damage per attacker level, and can only be used three times in an encounter, and misses count as uses. There are a bunch of Non-Combat programs too; there’s a Stealth program, a couple of healing ones, one that lets you control remote devices, etc. It looks like any DP “knows” all these programs, they’re just limited by the number of actions they can take.

You may have worked out a problem here. Since all DPs are NPCs, the PCs can’t actually participate in these digital games of cat and mouse, so these rules are kinda pointless. It’s interesting to think about or maybe have running as some sort of parallel action, but in those cases there’s no reason for the Referee* not to “script” what happens. Nice idea but not much of a use for it.

Finally there’s the Scientist, an NPC-only class- theoretically the rules are complete enough that a PC Scientist is possible, but they’re not designed to work in an adventuring group, and all these rules are just so you can make Scientist NPCs.

Scientists can be Humans, Tinkers, Lowlanders, or Delph, and need at least 16 Intelligence and 12 Wisdom. They get 1d4 hit points per level, and have the same THAC0 and advancement as medics (though again, the referee can just say what level they are.)

The main thing about Scientists is they get access to two exclusive skills: Bioengineering and Gadgeteering. Bioengineering is actually considered a general skill, but also one that only Scientists have access to, and has a prerequisite of Biology 20, or Botany 15 if you’re focused on plants.

Bioengineering is related to Intelligence and is used to create new genetically-altered organisms. It has a couple of uses: Alter Human lets you alter an unborn person’s ability scores within a +2/-2 range, though it has to balance out to 0 (i.e. you have to penalize something to increase something else.) Creating a Gennie is a Difficult task, and Creating a new Animal/Plant is a range; modifying an existing species (making a faster sheep) is Average, combining traits from two or more life forms (sheep + cheetah) is Difficult, and creating something entirely new is an Impossible task. (No Humans Allowed does feature one creature whose genes were built “from scratch”.)

Gadgeteering lets you modify a device to improve its function or make it do something entirely different. The difficulty for this is mostly based on how much you’re altering the gadget, and there are also modifiers for whether you have all the proper tools and whether the gadget already has multiple uses. Whipping up a gadget can take anywhere from 1d4 hours (for Easy modifications) to 1d4+4 days (for Impossible tasks.)

And there’s one more thing: Inventions. Inventions aren’t a skill to themselves, but rather use certain Science skills depending on what’s being invented. It’s a detailed system based around Research Points, which are a total you generate from what you’re trying to do, to how big/portable the thing is, to how long a range it has, to damage or HP healed, etc. A healing ray (base cost 20) that’s portable (+10), that works over hundreds of feet (+5), that heals 1-20 hp (+5) has a Research Point cost of 40, and that’s subtracted from the relevant skill you’re going to roll against (Physics, in this case). Research points also determine the cost to develop the device and the time it takes to make, and these rules can also be used to discover new astronomical bodies or lost cities or whatever.

It’s not the worst system, but since it’s NPC-only it basically has no reason to exist. I don’t see any point you’d delve into this instead of just saying “RAM has invented a powerful new weapon, you’ve got to sneak into their secret base to destroy the research!” Like, it goes beyond even the kind of “how many clerics are in town” simulationism you got in the worst of 3.x.

And honestly, I don’t actually think there’s much of a reason to keep this from your players. The Scientist class as a whole may be way too fragile to really put in the field as an option for PCs, but that’s just a question of hit dice- the rest seems entirely doable. If PCs could do inventions, that’d honestly be perfectly okay. So, yeah, just do that. Someone wants to be the Huer or Zarkov of the group, let ‘em.

And that brings us, at long last, to the end of Characters & Combat. As I said, the rules have a lot of bumps in them. It’s an interesting attempt to push the AD&D rules set as far as it will go, Pondsmith was trying some things, but a few things slipped past playtesting and editing. There may well have been time pressures, given the big multi-media launch they were trying. Generally speaking my advice with XXVc would be to use your semi-generic system of choice, but that’s with almost 30 years of development since.

But now we’re done with the weak part of the game. Soon, I’ll be able to dig into the real meat of this- The World Book. See you next time, rocketjocks!

Edit: * I forgot, the GM in this game is called a Referee.

Overview and Timeline: It Was Only A Few Nukes

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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century



Overview and Timeline: It Was Only A Few Nukes

Now we get to the good stuff. The World Book opens with a brief overview of the solar system, a lot of which we learned from the Race section- Mercury is a planet of underground mines and overhead solar collectors, Venus is partially terraformed but still a land of poison gasses, Mars is a paradise controlled by an evil corporate dictatorship, etc. We’ll get into that soon enough.

There’s a brief overview of the “state of the world” in the 25h century. Space travel’s common, with powerful rockets flying through the solar system. Computers are powerful enough that you can “download” personalities into them (I use the quotes because that’s more like uploading) and live forever as a hologram. Genetic Engineering is the big science, though, with some gene alteration being quite common and new genotypes being developed all the time. It’s also a very armed society- people carry around mono-knives, rocket pistols, etc., it’s very much a Wild West vibe.

But now, the history. This timeline’s a little weird, taking place in big chunks even though some of the events don’t seem like they’d take too long.

1999-2050: In 1999, the Soviet Union still exists, and a small group of Soviet hard-liners within the government make one last big play, launching a giant space offensive satellite called Masterlink. The US naturally see this as a big problem, but don’t want to risk a major military confrontation, so they decide to send a single pilot in an experimental space plane. The pilot, Lt. Col. Anthony “Buck” Rogers, manages a daring assault and destroys Masterlink, but he doesn’t make it back and is presumed dead.

The fallout of this incident sees a limited nuclear exchange between the superpowers- the Soviet hardliners only manage to commandeer a few silos, and the US recognize the Soviets are divided and are limited in their retaliation. The resulting “Last Gasp War” isn’t quite the end of civilization as we know it, but enough damage is done that everyone kinda steps back and takes a moment. A new era of international cooperation begins, with three major power blocs emerging- the Euro-Bloc faction, the Indo-Asian Consortium, and most fatefully, the Russo-American Mercantile Combine. Advances in nuclear fusion make space travel more commonplace, and we see the beginnings of plans to terraform other worlds- not a moment too soon, as Earth is getting more polluted and resource-starved all the time. Radioactivity actually isn’t a big problem despite the recent war, it’s just everything else that’s making the planet less habitable.

2051-2100: The System States Alliance is formed to hash out the colonization of the solar system. The three power groups are each awarded charters for the inner worlds: The Russo-Americans, with the most influence, take Mars, the Indo-Asians take Venus, and the Euro-Bloc faction takes Luna. The SSA levies material taxes on the colonies so that Earth can get the materials it needs.

2101-2300: The Russo-American Mercantile group is now RAM, and makes big strides in colonizing Mars with the help of genetic engineering. Terraforming makes some areas habitable. The Europeans have no such options with the Moon, so stick to underground cities and domes. The Venusian colonists have to take a slow approach- the first colonies are airborne, sitting on the clouds.

2275 sees RAM rebelling against Earth control and the taxes they levy. Venus and the Moon stay out of it, while RAM quickly thrashes the SSA and, by depriving Earth of outside materials, quickly accelerates its decline into savagery. The Ten Year War ends with RAM in control of Earth, and for funsies they sabotage work on the Venusian space elevator as well.

2301-2455: As RAM’s power grows in the solar system, refugees from Earth and Mars flee to begin colonizing Mercury. They use asteroids pulled into orbit to create the Mariposas, massive solar collectors, and set up mining concerns on the planet itself. Still more refugees head outwards to asteroids and to Jupiter and Saturn. Uranus remains distant and untouched. Because of the traffic to the Outer Worlds, space piracy emerges as a major force, personified by the Black Brotherhood.

2456: The present year. RAM has successfully terraformed around half of Mars, and runs it like a totalitarian police state. For Earth, they have set up the Solar Alliance Protectorate, which officially is there to protect the wounded planet from outside exploitation, but of course RAM intends to take all it can get. Earth itself is slowly recovering from centuries of ruin, and a new group has emerged- the New Earth Organization, or NEO- dedicated to opposing RAM’s tyranny.

And they’ve made a bit of a discovery- Buck Rogers survived the destruction of Masterlink in suspended animation, and is now awake and on their side. This is a big deal because while the SSA was developing its plans for colonization, Rogers was held up as an icon, a martyr for the new age of human progress. Now he’s alive, and he’s a good enough strategist and fighter to be a real asset to NEO. 

All of the major worlds now have their own military, comprised of gennie troops and space fleets. RAM has the biggest army, but everyone else has a decent presence, apart from Mercury who have allied with Venus for the moment. NEO, by contrast, is made up mostly of “pure” humans (who from the text seem a little haughty about being unmodified) and doesn’t have a lot of resources. Open war has not yet broken out in the solar system, but tensions are very high.

And that’s where we come in. Next time, we’ll begin our look at the Solar System with Mercury!

Mercury: We've Got Heat

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Mercury: We've Got Heat

Colonizing Mercury was not an obvious choice, what with it being right next to the sun and all. Terraforming was out of the question- giving it an atmosphere would just trap heat- so instead almost all development has been underground. Most of the people live inside huge warrens, which are described as miles-wide corridors laid out in a criss-cross patterns. There are also underground spacedocks which ships enter through giant doors; these are pretty important because Mercury is actually a common stopover for ships travelling long distances. Sometimes the planet you wanna go to is just plain on the other side of the sun, after all. Through all this it manages a population of 20 million, which is actually on the low side of the Inner Worlds.

As mentioned before there are a few different groups of Mercurians. Miners are the largest demographic, living in the warrens and working the planet’s abundant mineral resources (half the planet is made of iron.) They sometimes get irritable when their warrens are facing the sun (the heat can still be felt deep underground), but they claim to be used to it. The Musicians live underground and off planet, and do most of the non-physical labor- running shops, business, etc. The name comes from the fact that a lot of Mercury’s surface features are named after old Earth composers.

The Desert Dancers, meanwhile, live in giant track cities that roam along the surface. Along the roads are a bunch of solar collectors, and the track cities are giant mobile arcologies that were set up to help maintain the solar arrays and scout mineral locations. The cities move such that they always stay on the cool side of Mercury- prolonged exposure to the sun and cosmic radiation would likely kill the inhabitants. (They don’t give any hard numbers, but it’d be a good story hook- a city gets sabotaged and you have to get it moving again, etc.) There are also roving mining machines on the surface, not using the tracks but being operated from the underground city of Caloris.

For all the planet’s mineral wealth, however, Mercury’s big asset is, as mentioned before, its proximity to the sun. Solar collectors in orbit and on the surface collect the energy and beam it to relays across the system- this is very unscientific but may also be a nod to the original comics, where the Han used “broadcast power” for everything.

While the planetside solar collectors are useful, the real money is in the Mariposas. Early colonists captured asteroids, plated them with metal and solar panels, and put them in orbit. There are about 500 of these things, and most of them are owned by the Sun Kings, the aristocrats of Mercury. The most powerful of the Sun Kings are the Gavilan family, who live on the orbital colony of Helio. The Sun Kings live like the aristocrats of Old Earth, with a mix of classical styles, from Arabic to baroque influences. The Gavilans in particular have a medieval outlook, with all sorts of ranks of nobility. So yeah these are your opulent greedy bastards, a classic space opera trope.

On paper, Mercury is a democracy. It’s basically a democratic union of the Sun Kings, Miners, Desert Dancers, and Musicians, but in practice, the Sun Kings, and particularly the Gavilans have most of the real power. This has kept up because so far they aren’t ruling with an iron fist, but the lower classes are starting to organize.

The Sun Kings have historically been friendly with RAM, even using Martian aid to put down some early uprisings. As of late, though, the growing power of the Miners, Musicians, and Desert Dancers has created a rift. It also helps them that the Mariposas have the potential to be made into planet-busting weapons (though the exact nature is left vague) and turned on Mars. The Mercurians are also aiming for control of all space within “immediate range of the sun”, because of the value of the sunward passage.

So as presented Mercury has a few conflicts brewing- their status in the setting’s major conflict is ambivalent, as they’re more interested in their own agenda. The Sun Kings are good potential enemies in themselves, and the Mariposas seem like fun adventuring locales.

Next, cue up your “Best Hits of the 80s” mixes because We’re Heading for Venus

Venus: But Still We Stand Tall

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Venus: But Still We Stand Tall

Venus is a planet in the middle of terraforming. Temperatures range from 300 degrees Fahrenheit in the lowlands to a breezy, relaxed 100 degrees F on the mountaintops. The high mountaintops and continental mesas are home to major cities, the original orbital and aerial colonies are still intact, and bioengineered algae nest in the clouds, feeding on the poison gasses and giving off oxygen. The lowlands, meanwhile, are fuckin’ metal. Note:


The planet was, as per the timeline, settled in the 22nd century by the Indo-Asian Consortium, starting first from orbit, then building cities on the massive plateaus of Ishtar and Aphrodite. These are big steel cities, mostly sliver and white because acid rain is murder on the paint job, and it’s all curves and domes so the rain doesn’t collect. Heavy clouds surrounding the mesas give the cities a look like they’re floating in the sky sometimes.



The Uplanders live in these cities. They’re called the aristocrats of Venus, and tend to wear flowing robes in muted colors. The biggest spaceport is at New Elysium, on top of Maxwell Montes, the tallest mountain on the Ishtar plateau. The Ishtar Confederation, also headquartered in New Elysium, is dominated by The Faith, a very vaguely described religion with a theocratic hold on the population. It’s a mixture of Islam, Bahá'í, and Taoism, but is not given more detail than that. Many practitioners are vegetarians, but it’s not a specific command and there are no particular prohibitions on violence or killing- the Confederation has a pretty solid military.

The other main continent, Aphrodite, stretches along the equator, and is dominated by the major corporate families who originally settled the planet. The continent was also once the site of the Aphrodite Orbital Platform, a space elevator destroyed by RAM in 2285; the ruins stretch for miles along the surface and down into the mists.

The Aerostaters live in balloon cities, giant sphere clusters that balance on the high-pressure lower atmosphere and are moved by the currents of the upper atmosphere. There are around 200 separate Aerostates, and they’re all linked in a democracy. Small craft can land on the Aerostates, and they serve as a transfer point between the planet’s surface and Venusian orbit.

Finally we have the Lowlanders, gennies created to live on the lowest points of the planet’s surface, withstanding high temperatures, crushing pressure, and a poisonous atmosphere. We described them a way back, they’re basically lizard men. As I pointed out then, and this is one of the details of the setting I really like, the Lowlanders figured out that if terraforming went as far as planned, their natural habitat would be threatened and they’d all die, or at least be wiped out as a culture. The Lowlanders have a useful tool in their control over the raw materials for the popular drugs gravitol (which counteracts the debilitating effects of low or null gravity) and lifextend (no points guessing what that does), both of which are made from grasses in the Venusian swamps. They still need the other Venusians to transport the materials off world, so an uneasy stalemate exists.

Politically the Ishtarians are the major power players on Venus, controlling the largest military force. RAM could maybe take them in a straight fight but it’d be extremely costly, and Venus has many unique hazards for invading armies. So it’s a cold war, and the Ishtarian Confederation does a lot of proxy sponsorship of NEO and their attempts to subvert RAM’s influence. It helps that philosophically the Ishtarians are sympathetic to NEO’s aims. Meanwhile, RAM have funneled money and supplies to the Lowlanders, both to keep that stalemate going and to make sure they can regualrly get their hands on the aforementioned good drugs.

So Venus serves a number of purposes in the setting. It’s a cool place for adventures what with the floating cities and deadly metallic swamps and all that, has a very old-school pulp vibe. Early sci-fi often depicted Venus as full of jungles and dinosaurs and lizard people, and so we get a slightly hard sci-fi spin on that. The Ishtarians are allies with their own agenda, while the Lowlanders are naturally sympathetic- they’d like not to be genocided- but may be on the side of RAM in a given situation, and the players will have to untangle that mess. Potential moral dilemmas!

So after this, we're off to the shittiest place in the solar system: Good ol' Earth!

Earth: The Very Birthplace of My Birth

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Earth: The Very Birthplace of My Birth

As has been mentioned many times, Earth is in terrible shape in the 25th Century. Wars and environmental catastophers have turned it into a devastated backwater, its population (now a mere 3 billion) divided among corporate states, reservations, and arcologies. Ostensibly the whole thing is under the control of the Solar Alliance, which is in reality the other planetary power groups, meaning mostly RAM. RAM in turn has divided the planet into Regencies, and each Regent is directly in charge of their region, most of them acting like dictators. There’s a mention of mind control through drugs and media censorship, but it’s not really taking- most Earth people really hate RAM.

Most humans on Earth haven’t undergone much, if any, genetic alteration, though mutants exist thanks to various nuclear and biological incidents in the past.



The old cities of Earth have become ruined sprawls, filled with people, gangs, RAM troops, etc. It’s clear the authors are aiming for something between a police state and a flat-out war zone. The exception to all this bleak desolation is the arcologies. The arcologies aren’t described in much detail here, other than that they have adequate food, shelter, etc. However, most of them are directly under the influence of RAM, and life in them is more strictly controlled. Only about a fifth of the arcologies aren’t directly under RAM influence.

There are two major resistance groups on Earth. First are the Orgs, groups of people living in the ruined cities who have managed to set up modestly equipped autonomous regions. They tend to be named after the city they’re in, hence Chicagorg, Newyorg, etc. (This is a straight lift from the original Nolan material.) They’re described as a kind of middle class between most of the poor denizens of the cities- whom the Alliance keeps an eye on to make sure they don’t organize- and the rich citizens of the arcologies, who can easily be monitored. The main drawback to the orgs is they don’t, and to a certain extent can’t really organize with each other— they don’t have easy means of communication and transportation over long distances. Basically each one is kind of a large, well-organized street gang, a potent force in its local area but each with their own agenda.

And then there’s NEO. NEO are the good guys of the setting, a plucky alliance of rebels with the goal of freeing Earth from RAM occupation. They’re described as a “one-time anti-pirate patrol” but we don’t get any more information about their history or formation. Unlike the orgs, NEO has global reach, a space fleet (of sorts- mostly light rockets, maybe a battler or two), and financing from some well-to-do persons and organizations in the arcologies. They’re described as being kinda like the US forces in the American Revolution, always undermanned and underarmed, using guerilla tactics. Their ground presence is pretty weak. Most of NEO operates from orbital bases.

NEO is organized mostly like an army, with a bunch of Battle Groups run by Strike Leaders, who in turn answer to Group Leaders, and above that you have Captains, Generals, etc. The NEO Council is said to be pretty diverse and was even kinda disorganized- then along came Buck. Buck Rogers was made an honorary council member when he was revived and joined the group, mostly because of his status as a figurehead. However, he’s taken it upon himself to try and shake up NEO and set out a clear agenda, including the expulsion of all RAM forces from Earth and recognition of NEO as the de facto government of that planet. It’s not all military, though, NEO is working to try and get sympathetic appointees on the Solar Alliance and build up alliances with other forces opposed to RAM such as the Mercurians and Ishtarians.

The Earth chapter closes out with a look at the LaGrange Colonies. The Colonies are in orbit at the L-4 and L-5 LaGrange points in Earth’s orbit, their orbit stabilized by the gravity of the moon. These were the earliest space colonies, mostly abandoned when more advanced ones were set up on other planets, so now they’re havens for smugglers, pirates, and NEO forces. They’re described as a collection of old hulks and space junk, easy to hide in.

Next up: Bang! Zoom! Straight to the Moon!

Mambo de La Luna

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Mambo de La Luna

The Moon, now called Luna, was settled before terraforming really became a thing, but attempts are underway. Right now Luna has a very thin atmosphere, breathable only in the deepest craters and even then only for an hour or so (not taking into account temperature.) Basically nobody bothers, everyone lives in domes. There are 172,00,000 Lunarians, all living in enclosed cities.



Luna is the Switzerland of this setting, neutral ground for everyone (and full of banks.) The Lunarians are very fiercely independent, dating back to a conflict with the old System States Alliance- when the SSA tried to flex their muscle by crashing an iceteroid into the Sea of Tranquility for “terraforming purposes”, the Lunarians blew it out of the sky and then pelted Earth with rocks via mass drivers. Since then they have claimed absolute sovereignty over the Moon and the space around it, and while people from all factions of the Solar System are welcome to visit and do business, they won’t hesitate to shove troublemakers out of an airlock. Should any planet attempt to drag them into war, they’ve still got those mass drivers.

So, life on the Moon. It has sort of a 70s sci-fi TV show aesthetic, everyone’s described as wearing jumpsuits in shades of gray and brown, just about everyone is armed with bullet pistols (“dumb” projectiles which presumably won’t puncture anything important if misfired) and/or knives. Most of the cities are built in the walls of craters, with domes covering- there are spindly silicate buildings spiraling up in the low gravity, but most Lunarians (don’t call them, well, anything else) have a bit of a fear of open spaces and prefer living in the walls. Travel between cities is done either by rovers on the surface or subway tunnels below. Lunar neutrality also extends to their banking; they’ve got the most stable currency in the system and will trade with anyone. They’re all very businesslike and professional.

The Solar Alliance makes its home on the moon, and it’s described in a bit more detail here. It’s basically a descendant of the SSA, which was completely torn apart by the losing war with RAM in the 23rd century. RAM wanted to keep up the appearance of a democratic government, though, so formed the Solar Alliance, which is housed here because Luna is neutral territory. (Though the Alliance tries not to make any decisions which would make the Lunarians unhappy.) The Solar Alliance refuses to admit it’s a RAM puppet, but the most active part of it is the Solar Alliance Protectorate, which RAM created to oversee Earth; it’s a ten-member panel, but all the work they do is implemented by RAM employees.

Luna is basically a good Casablanca/Mos Eisley kinda place; a dense cosmopolitan area where you’ll rub shoulders with allies and enemies alike. I imagine it being a good campaign hub.

Next, we will finally get our asses to Mars.

Mars: The Rich Part of Town

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Mars: The Rich Part of Town

We’re finally here; Mars is the biggest player in the Solar System, the seat of the campaign’s adversary, and it gets the longest writeup in the book. Mars is defined by RAM, the former Russo-American Mercantile Combine, which rules pretty much all of the planet. The Martian people are prosperous, rich, well-educated, and all they have to put up with in return is a corporate dictatorship that governs every aspect of their lives.

Mars has been the most extensively terraformed of the planets, using techniques ranging from genetic manipulation to orbital mirrors to slamming ice asteroids onto the surface. Mars has two large seas, the Boreal Sea in the northern polar region and the Sea of Hellas south of the equator. The Boreal Sea has already been seeded with genetically engineered marine life, but the Sea of Hellas is still being stocked. There’s also a series of lakes called the Marineris Chain, and with all this water even the relatively undeveloped highlands of Mars have some plant life.

There are two major population centers on Mars. Coprates Chasm is on the edge of the Marineris Basin, is home to sixty million people, most of whom live in arcologies along the chasm wall, though many RAM executives live in pyramids at the bottom. It’s a giant city-state covering a few hundred miles of the canyon. The other major population center is based around the Mars-Pavonis Space Elevator, a massive feat of engineering rooted at the top of Pavonis Mons, an extinct volcano located on the equator. It’s described in more detail in the Technology Book, suffice it to say it’s 146 miles tall and has habitation all up and down its “stalk”. Beyond this there are a few agricultural settlements in the far North near the Boreal Sea, and the Martian Free States scattered around the highlands, which are also inhabited by the Desert Runners.



Martian cities tend to be built as arcologies, with clean geometric designs, the pyramid being a favorite. Martian citizens have a very yuppie thing going, lots of suits, mostly in red, gray, brown, and black. Blue is only worn by the Workers, who are on the bottom of the social hierarchy. Again, RAM makes this all one giant police state, with everyone under constant surveillance and Enforcers around to kill, torture, and blackmail anyone caught doing anything illegal.

There follows a bit of history of RAM itself. After the whole Masterlink incident and the brief war which followed, the Soviet Union collapsed into division and confusion, and the US wasn’t in much better shape. With neither powerful enough to push the other around, they formed an alliance just as others were emerging and the SSA was formed. Terraforming Mars was a harsh and brutal affair at times, and the Russo-American joint government exercised harsh control over the colonists. As the citizenry grew tougher, RAM grew too big for the rest of the SSA to control, and the resulting Ten Year War cemented RAM as a totalitarian government with a corporate structure. The current government is compared- almost inevitably- to the Japanese corporate empires of the 20th Century, taking control of workers from cradle to grave, only the Japanese corporations don’t have secret police.

RAM’s current President is Simund Holzerhein, and has been for a hundred and fifty years. His actual body is in cryogenic suspension underneath his estate on the forest of Pavonis; the Simund running things is his uploaded digital personality, inhabiting the RAM Main Computer. He also has various family members in key positions, and control of the subdivisions gets regularly passed around between over a hundred family groups. While RAM has a lot of branches, the part players will generally be concerned with is RAM Security, which controls both their internal secret police and their system-wide military operations.

RAM Security is broken into five divisions. Internal Affairs is described as a descendant of the KGB and CIA, and they make up the secret police, broken up into Enforcers and Interrogators. IA personnel tend to be hardened veterans, and many are cybernetically enhanced. The book even takes pains to point out that the secret police sometimes do good things, they’re still doing terrorism and murder and making use of mind control drugs and subliminal messaging.

Corporate Security are low-level guards and grunts, and only assigned to low-priority work. The Space Assault Corps is the space division, representing five fleets full of battlers, heavy cruisers, fighters, etc. RAM never has problems getting ships. Ground Enforcement Corps are garrison troops and the front lines of most ground operations, quickly trained, sometimes genetically modified to handle different environments (though the way the book phrases this is a touch confusing.) The Planetary Assault Corps is a rung above, heavily armed and armored Jump Marines often given cybernetic enhancement. Finally you have the Bio Mechanized Assault Forces- the Terrines. The Terrines are given the best of combat tech and cybernetic enhancement, and it’s said any two of them are equal to a whole squad of regular fighting men. There aren’t that many Terrine squads, thankfully- the development of Terrine soldiers has a high mortality rate and there are only about a thousand Terrines available at any given time.

RAM’s military policy can be summed up as a continued plan for expansion, going back to the colonial days when they were fighting the Martian environment. They’ve got a good foothold on Earth, but have yet to subjugate it completely, and they want to take that before moving on to Luna and Venus. They’re wary of starting a war with any of the other major powers of the Solar System; they’re not quite ready for that. It’s a strategy described as similar to the Nazis, waiting to strike until they’re sure of their position. Venus and Mercury are their major adversaries, and ships from all three planets tend to keep their distance as they patrol the spacelanes. Right now they don’t see NEO as a major threat, and their attention is turned towards Venus and Mercury. This may change.

The section finishes up with a look at Mars’ satellites. Phobos is the other end of the Mars-Pavonis Space Elevator, dragged into geosynchronous orbit, hollowed out, and filled with spacedocks, warehouses, hotels, etc. Deimos was originally used as a construction shack in the early terraforming of Mars, and is now home to a major fleet base, space academy, and detention facility for military and political prisoners.

I would have liked more detail on the Martian highlands and what the Desert Runners are up to in all this, but Mars got a lot of attention during the game’s lifespan and so more is detailed in other books. I also kinda like how RAM is given a kind of collective motivation, the idea of a tough colonial mindset turning into a fascist ideology as soon as they get the upper hand.

Holidays will probably distract me for a bit, but after that, we will head into the Asteroid Field!

The Asteroid Belt: Space Vegas, Baby, Space Vegas!

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

The Asteroid Belt: Space Vegas, Baby, Space Vegas!

There are estimated to be about 100,000 asteroids drifting in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. Most of these are small, a mile or less in diameter, but even some of those have settlers. Many of the larger, named asteroids have been settled, some hollowed out and given a spin to simulate gravity, others left in free fall. The inhabitants, called Belters, are mostly miners, and have the stereotype of being tough and grizzled and probably spitting chewing tobacco into nearby spitoons. Nine specific asteroid settlements are described here.

(As a sidebar, I like that they note that despite the popular image, the asteroids are all miles apart and there’s not a lot of danger of accidentally flying into one.)

Vesta, the third largest asteroid, is home to 5,000 citizens, and also a very large RAM military base, whose population ranges from 2,000 to 5,000. RAM has avoided trying to take over the asteroid outright, and the citizens tolerate the base’s presence; other factions don’t consider them an ally of RAM, just in a weird position. Fortuna is a zero-g colony which makes most of its money manufacturing products- both mechanical and pharmaceutical- which benefit from being put together in zero-G. It’s mostly neutral, with the scientists and technicians loyal to whoever backs their research.



Ceres, the largest asteroid, has a population of 20,000 and is run by the Ceres Co-Op. They’re the hub of the belt, receiving a lot of deliveries for the smaller asteroids, and the Co-Op makes money off fees for storage and handling (and occasionally auctioning goods off when the intended recipient never shows up.) The colony also houses a massive computer used for transmissions and communication across the Belt. Pallas is a weird isolationist asteroid- visitors aren’t even allowed on the asteroid proper, but must conduct business on an orbiting moonlet called Gateway. There’s no apparent reason for the secrecy, they just want to be left alone.

Psyche is home to some prime ship construction facilities (it’s called the Boatyard); having a ship made there costs at least 50% more than usual, but you get 10%-20% more hit points as a result. (Doesn’t seem like a good deal but I’m not sure.) Juno is also a shipyard, and training center for rocketjocks. Hygeia is the third and last big shipyard, and it focuses on “bottles”, which are small pre-fab orbital colonies that can be flown to their destination under their own power. Info on bottles takes up the whole description, we don’t get anything on Hygeia itself.

Okay, NOW we’re on to the fun stuff. Aurora is home to a giant, publicly owned casino. (The fact that it’s publicly owned is mentioned in passing but now I’m wondering about a socialist casino. Would the odds be more reasonable? The payouts more modest?) It’s the Vegas Strip times ten, basically. (And this was before Vegas tried to clean up its image.) Thule fills another space opera niche, it’s a prison planet run by the Anarchy. (Yes, they have laws.) It’s a big network of tunnels through which prisoners are allowed to roam freely, because it’s not like they can go anywhere. There are robot guards to keep the prisoners under control and a small staff to run the spaceport and communications.

So, the Belter government. It’s complicated- they’re officially the Free Asteroid Democracy, but known to many as the Belter Anarchy. Most of the time it’s a very loose group, with each asteroid’s inhabitants working out the rules for themselves. For beltwide issues, though, the Belters use high-tech direct democracy- every inhabitant votes at once and the central computer tabulates everything instantly. A Ruling Council on Ceres (made up of elected Digital Personalities) determines what needs to be voted on. Voting is instantaneous and mandatory- Belters who are away from the Belt and can’t be in contact with Ceres get a pass, but if you fail to vote when you could more than five times, you’re subject to severe penalties, from imprisonment to loss of “rescue rights, air rights, and water rights.”

The Belters are well-armed but basically not a player in the NEO/RAM conflict, because the Belters are a diverse bunch and have a wide variety of opinions on the subject. Individual Belters can do what they want, of course. So far RAM hasn’t tried to take over, presumably because it’d be too much trouble.

And because this is a wild part of the Solar System, the chapter includes a section on the Black Brotherhood, the setting’s required space pirates. They claim lineage from- or at least pattern themselves after- the original Black Brotherhood from the Carribean in the 18th century. While space is theoretically too big to make piracy feasible, most trade ships follow certain paths and patterns, and the pirates maintain a large information and spy network to help find out where a given ship is gonna be.

Between their ships and their information network, the Black Brotherhood are actually kinda powerful, often getting the better of the other powers of the Solar Alliance. They like NEO, though, since both of those groups are mostly underground and striking against larger forces. They do a lot of trading, though I assume for an individual pirate a NEO ship is still fair game. The section also mentions that the Brotherhood sometimes do act as privateers, given authority by one power to attack their enemies. There’s a brief mention of the pirate leader Black Barney, who’s another face straight out of the original comics. We'll learn more about him and the other NPCs later.

The Belters fill the role of the wild frontiersmen in the setting, and while a few of the asteroids are just places where ships are built, there’s plenty of interesting stuff overall.

Soon we head to the Outer Worlds! Jupiter and beyond! Be there!

Jupiter: America's Dairyland

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Jupiter: America's Dairyland

Jupiter and Saturn, and the satellites orbiting them, are collectively called the Outer Worlds, and have their own government, the Outer Worlds Conference. It's a very divided group and they don’t have much of a military, but are just big enough in the Solar Alliance that they don’t get completely run over.

Jupiter itself is pretty much exclusively populated by the Stormriders, who were engineered to help set up an ecosystem in the least-hostile layer of the atmosphere, where water vapor exists and the temperature is vaguely tolerable (though it never says exactly what the temperature range is.) They live in cities which float on the denser lower atmosphere, like the Venusian Aerostates, and the two share tech. The Stormriders have their own genetic engineering projects which allowed them to create other organisms, often as food animals. Indeed genetic engineering seems to be the focus of their society, and it’s described as something like the Industrial Revolution. The book theorizes that in a few years they may even have organic spaceships.

Jupiter doesn’t really have a lot of exports, but giant Skimmerships visit the upper atmosphere to gather gasses for resale; they don’t make contact with the Stormriders. The only other thing worth noting are the Jovian Trojans, two converted asteroids flanking Jupiter on its orbital path, which are basically lawless pirate dens controlled by their own Dominion of powerful settlers who don’t recognize the Solar Alliance or any other authority.

There’s more activity around Jupiter’s satellites. Metis, Adrastea, and Thebe only have small settlements. Amalthea, however, has five “vaults” which play host to various corporations, including the Genetics Foundation (they created the Stormriders and still claim ownership of the genotype) and Skimmertech, who run the Skimmerships.

Io’s surface is highly volcanic, and a number of orbital colonies seek to harness both the thermal energy and energy from Jupiter’s magnetic field. Basically lower-rent Sun Kings, they have a lot of influence over the other satellites and even a small navy. Europa, despite HAL 9000’s warnings, is now host to ten arcologies lodged under the ice. All sorts of groups claim these arcologies, including one claiming it for RAM despite RAM not having agreed to this at all, so it’s basically in a constant sate of war. Europans themselves have been genetically modified to help them withstand the cold; they have a fine covering of body hair and their blood vessels aren’t as near to the surface of the skin.

There are three major groups of settlers on Ganymede. Deep below the ice covering its surface, you have the water-breathing Ganymen, who are fishlike, bioluminescent, and are equipped with sonar capabilities. Like the Stormriders they do a lot of genetic work, and are also farmers. They only contact the outside worlds via six Ice Stations which punch through the outer ice layer. Each of these is run by Europans who wanted to get away from all the fighting on Europa, but naturally still are all in competition with each other over control of the Ganymen’s food exports. In orbit you have a bunch of space stations and small colonies, often run by outside factions like RAM and the Ishtarians or Belters

Callisto has a similar geography to Ganymede, but everyone lives on the icy surface in giant citadels, powered by underwater reactors. Nutritious algae is raised in the water below, and the Callistans do go underwater to harvest it and maintain their power supplies. The Callistans have built a stratified cartel, with the three biggest citadels controlling all the others. Callisto also claims the space around it, and all the small moons beyond their orbit. Of these, most of them have already been heavily mined out by the Callistans; however, the outermost four have a “tipped” orbit and are frequently far from Callistan influence, meaning everyone else gets to have a go at them.

And then there’s Sinope. The farthest moon out, it’s claimed by Calisto too, but as it has a weird orbit, they can’t really monitor it very well. Sinope has hence been mined and expanded into a small artificial world, some 30 miles across. It was a pirate haven at first but has gotten a tiny bit more “respectable” since.

The Jovian System has a few interesting opportunities for adventure- you can see the designers inevitably repeating themselves a bit but there are still good hooks, the main difficulty being how to get the players all the way out here in the first place. It doesn’t help that Jupiter and its Stormriders just plain don’t interact with the rest of the Solar System much, but there are ways to force a conflict.

Next, we’ll deal with Saturn and its satellites, wrapping up the atlas.

Saturn: You Shoulda Put A Ring On It

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Saturn: You Shoulda Put A Ring On It

Saturn itself doesn't have a lot going on- nobody’s tried placing any bioengineered life on it, though theoretically it’d be possible to breed something like the Stormriders and put them in the middle atmosphere. Instead Saturn’s exploitation revolves entirely around its rings and satellites.

The rings are inhabited by a group of genetically engineered miners called Ringers. Ringers are basically cyborgs- they’re wired into large cybernetic spacesuits and can never leave them (if forced to, they die.) The Ringers mine the rings not just for minerals, but for water and hydrocarbons. Like the Belters the Ringers are fiercely independent, and carry that to a very weird extreme- they have no loyalty to any organized state, barely make contact with the rest of humanity except for trade, and don’t really form communities except as necessary. Also living out here are a lot of Spacers, as we met earlier, and they’re even more antisocial. Basically Saturn’s a good place to go if you hate people.

Atlas is the innermost moon of Saturn, and it’s a repair and congregation site for the Ringers. Prometheus and Pandora are both trading posts for inhabitants of the region, focusing on stuff found in the rings. Janus and Epitmethius are twin moons in basically the same orbit; both have spaceports, and are supply points. Janus also specializes in building small specialized craft.

Mimas is the site of a single arcology in a giant crater, run by an insane dictator named Agatha Kiribashi. She is over 200 years old thanks to advanced medical treatments, owns everything and everyone in the settlement, and has an army of clones and Gennies. Enceladus is an ice world with all its settlements in orbit.

Tethys is a gigantic mall. There’s a huge chasm running some 900 miles, it’s been domed over, and is the Saturnian center of commerce. It’s one of those places where everything goes, everything has a price, etc. There are a couple of Trojan objects on Tethys’ orbital path; Calypso is a giant rock that’s been turned into a for-profit prison open to anyone willing to rent space, and Telesto is sort of a puppet of Tethys that specializes in poor quality spaceships and other sleazy operations.

Dione has a similar chasm, as well as lots of veins of valuable hydrocarbons all over the surface. Many separate city-states have been established, and they’re all perpetually feuding and waging trade wars. Rhea is also rich with hydrocarbons, but various arcologies squabbled over mining rights and all their economies stagnated and they all kinda died out, with people abandoning the surface to live elsewhere. It’s a big ghost town, and there are still pirates and the like hiding out in the ruins.

Titan is, basically, in the middle of a giant 4x game. Since it’s the only moon with an atmosphere (rich in nitrogen), it’s got potential for terraforming. No one group really seems to own it, so ALL the major powers of the solar system have put their own terraforming operations into effect. This, as you might imagine, is not a good idea as all these slightly different approaches to terraforming leave the moon in a state of constant flux. The various groups keep trying and competing, and nobody’s declared war yet because they don’t want everyone else to gang up on them. Also, nobody actually knows what the right approach is. This seems like a fun place to send players.

Hyperion is a “potato shaped rock” (this scans), home to a small robotic emergency station. Iapetus has one face constantly covered in a black carbon dust, which various settler groups are mining, but it’ll probably run out in a few years. And finally, there’s Phoebe, which serves as a religious sanctuary for members of various faiths across the Solar System- it’s run by a group of representatives from the major groups, and the Ishtarians are providing military support.

And that’s Saturn. The Outer Worlds are both pretty self-contained, and you’ll have to come up with reasons to drag the PCs out here if you want to use all this stuff, but there are some interesting hooks here and there. And yeah, that’s as far as we get into the outer solar system; Uranus is a mystery.

So, next time, we’ll have a bunch of assorted setting information. Communications delays! Money! Those damn DPs again! Be there!

Setting Odds and Ends: Your Message Will Reach Its Destination In 10 Minutes, Please Deposit An Additional 10 Baronets to Continue

posted by Maxwell Lord Original SA post

Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Setting Odds and Ends: Your Message Will Reach Its Destination In 10 Minutes, Please Deposit An Additional 10 Baronets to Continue

So there’s a lot to cover over the next few pages.

The first big section is Talking Between Two Worlds. This is all about the nuances of interplanetary communication. There are videophones and radios capable of transmitting between planets, but they’re way more expensive than what most civilians buy. All their signals travel at the speed of light, natch, which means there’s a certain delay between planets.

The distances between planets- and thus the time delays involved- are changing all the time, so there’s a big table for all the distances and times between various bodies in the inner Solar System. Each entry- say, “Earth to Mercury”, “Mercury to Ceres”, etc.- shows the distance and time for the closest approach of the two bodies and the farthest difference between them, and you can use the Solar System Map to work out what number it is. The delay between Earth and Luna is about two seconds, the delay between Mercury and Hygeia is somewhere between 22 and 32 minutes, and the Asteroids themselves have the biggest variance- getting a message from Ceres to Aurora can take as little as 3 minutes or as long as 49. There are no numbers given for the outer worlds, sadly, but you can imagine it’s just plain not practical to hold an actual conversation with someone on Titan. Computers can compensate for small time delays, but the greater the distance the more it’s like a telegraph system than anything else. It’s not as bad as say, the Age of Sail, but it can be a problem. I can imagine this coming up in game in some situations so it’s nice to have the info.

Next is a short section on Criminal Justice. It’s hard to sum this up when there are multiple ruling governments, so this just runs down some of the info we got earlier. Ishtarians do a kind of mind alteration to offenders, RAM does everything from mind control to execution to throwing you in an asteroid prison, etc. Mostly redundant but I guess it’s nice to have this in one place?

Now, money. Most commerce in the 25th century is electronic, of course, but you still need hard cash to bribe people or pay for those black market drugs. And during the Last Gasp War, electromagnetic pulses from the bombs wiped out a lot of stock exchange systems and the like, so people are conscious of the need for hard cash sometimes. Suck it, Bitcoin! There’s a bit here on how some people predicted energy would be the main currency, and the Sun Kings pushed this a bit, but energy-as-currency is hard to store and takes energy to transfer so yeah.

In fact, from the description, hard cash has kinda gone retro. Paper money’s unheard of outside of RAM’s work camps which issue company scrip; instead, it’s all about coins made from gold, silver, and/or copper, which are recognized so long as they’re issued by a legitimate mint. I suspect there’s a bit of a nod to D&D here. Mostly only affulent people have access to credit/debit cards, but Mercurians are very much cash only. (No word on the fate of Traveler’s Checks.) There actually aren’t a lot of banks in the 25th Century, at least not large ones with multiple branches- some are local to their city and your money is there and nowhere else. The two big exceptions to this are Coprates Bank, Ltd., which handles most of the RAM accounts, and Firste Luna Geschaft-Zollstelle GB, which is the biggest Lunar bank (which like Swiss banks are good for discrete transactions.)

Now, you may recall, all the money for equipment was listed in terms of credits, and that’s still the universal denomination. The common currencies of Mars, Venus, and Mercury are listed with their equivalent value in credits, as well as their composition- a Mars Dolarube is 1cr and made of silver, a Mercurian Marquis is 10cr and made out of gold, etc. (Earth, Luna, and so on don’t issue their own currency, and use of a mix of everyone else’s, hence the credit standard.) For the sake of gameplay the game lists everything’s value in credits, and you’re assumed to hand over the equivalent in Dolarubes and Taks and so on. It kinda makes me wonder why they even bothered with these unique currencies, but it adds some color I suppose.

The DPs are back! We talked a little about Digital Personalities waaaaaaay back in chargen but let’s go over them again. They come in two forms, Constructs and Translated Personalities. Translated Personalities are based on the encoded brain waves of a living person, basically digital clones. A Translated Personality basically has no legal rights until the original person is dead, at which point it inherits all the original’s rights. A DP which tries to murder its original can be executed for the crime.

Constructs, meanwhile, are completely original computer-generated personalities. The original program which ran Masterlink was a primitive Construct; the modern example is Dr. Huer, who is inspired by a person Buck Rogers knew in the 20th century. Constructs can vote, but can’t own property.

The naming of these characters is also dependent on what type they are. All Translated Personalities have the suffix “.dop”, Constructs have “.dos”, hence it’s Holzerhein.dop and Huer.dos. People generally use the pronoun “it” when referring to them, unless their personality is particularly convincing. DPs live inside mainframe computers- even in the 25th century smaller machines just can’t contain all that data. (And to be fair it’s never said outright how much data a single DP constitutes.) However, they can move about to other mainframes via communication lines, basically at the speed of light. The world they inhabit they call “Computerspace”, which is described as being kinda dreamlike. They typically interact with people via telephones, TVs, radios, etc., but holograms are their preferred method of “manifesting.”

The game kinda handwaves some of the issues that would arise with being able to clone personalities as data- apparently Digital Personalities are too complex for backups to be made. However, they are difficult to kill; if you destroy the mainframe they’re in, they’ll detect that right away and zap off somewhere else. “Killer virus” programs are mentioned as a way of destroying them but we don’t get much detail. We did get some rules on digital combat in the first book but since it was an NPC-only deal there’s really not much point.

Life suspension tech is important for this game, not the least because it’s the reason Buck Rogers is around. Granted, what happened to Rogers is so far unique. When Rogers was fighting the Masterlink satellite, a cooling chamber around his ship’s laser was broken, and coolant flooded into the cockpit as a life suspension system was activating. The coolant penetrated his body, and in combination with various other things, kept Rogers’ cells from rupturing even as he was frozen by the vacuum of space. Think of it like antifreeze.

To date nobody’s been able to replicate this process (called “wet suspension.”) Instead there’s “Dry suspension”, which was being tested in the 20th Century and is now more reliable. The patient is hooked up to a computer which overrides their nervous system, reducing life functions to the minimum. This method is considered 100% reliable for preserving someone in suspended animation for up to a year, with the percentage going down 10% every year after. This doesn’t quite scan with the difficulties stated for PCs using Life Suspension tech, where there’s a very real chance of killing the patient each time. Once you’re out of suspension you can’t go back in for at least six months, and so far nobody’s ever survived four suspensions. The cost of this service is 2,000 cr a month, payable in advance.

There’s a short section on food. Fresh food is pretty much only available to the very rich. Most people rely on packaged food; this tech has advanced to the point that most packages have a tiny microwave generator which cooks the meal inside in at most a few minutes. There are also your stereotypical food pellets, but those only get used in extreme survival situations or when RAM wants to cut the cost of feeding Workers. (Who need special food anyway.) This is a nice little detail, won’t come up often but I like it.

Rounding off this section is Cybergenetics, which is a blend of the traditional sci-fi RPG’s focus on cybernetics and XXVc’s focus on genetic engineering. It’s vaguely described here as “the process of creating organisms that are human, not human, and more than human all at the same time.” Basically it’s a question of fusing biological parts with computer parts, for example you could give a gennie enhanced sensory organs and ALSO a computer brain programmed to process that information in a certain way. The Belters described earlier are sort of a case of this, they’re biological organisms but dependent on their suits to live. Despite this cybergenetics is described as being in its infancy, it’s extremely costly and even the entities that can afford it can’t get dependable results. As best I can tell it’s here as a plot hook, this may be something RAM or some other group is toying around with that has bad implications unless the PCs stop it, etc.

So yeah this entry has just been a bunch of small things that help fill in parts of the setting that aren’t handled by the entries for planets and gennies. Some of it's neat but it's not as cool as the planet guides.

Next, we enter the GM’s section of the book, starting with Making Your Own Gennies!

Designing Your Own Gennies: I Was Working in the Lab, Late One Night...

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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Designing Your Own Gennies: I Was Working in the Lab, Late One Night...



This section is prefaced by a “Players: Read no farther!” warning, which always seems a bit much to me in games that aren’t Paranoia. Like, yeah, knowing adventure details is no fun, but here we’re just talking about some of the GM tools. It’s kinda mixed with setting information, though, so maybe they wanted to keep part of that secret.

Anyway we start with an acknowledgement that the box set doesn’t have a “bestiary”, a collection of enemies for the players to face. The “Gennies” detailed in Characters & Combat are a starting point, but the following section lets you create new Gennies to serve as NPCs. (There’s not a lot of guidance about generating NPCs in existing species, but at this point games like this basically told you to pick some numbers that looked good.)

Genetic engineering is a long and exacting process, but as the book reminds us, a GM can just declare any creature successfully put together by fiat. For the sake of detail, though, we’re given an overview of how it works both in-setting and mechanically. (They recommend using this if a Scientist NPC is creating a gennie on behalf of the players, which seems an unusual situation but of course some PC group probably tried this.)

So anyway, genes spliced from one or more organisms are placed in egg cells of a suitable host, and when you get an embryo, it must be placed in a specialized growth vat until it grows to maturity, a rate of one day for every pound the final specimen weighs. (This is weirdly specific.) Halfway through this, the Scientist has to make a Difficult Bioengineering skill check to determine if the specimen is even viable- a failure means you screwed up somewhere in the process and the organism will die. It’s a bit like coding.

If it survives, the Scientist makes another, Average Bioengineering check to see if the organism turned out like it was supposed to- a failure means some unforeseen mutation has cropped up, it’s viable but now your ultimate killing machine is now an excellent concert pianist or something. Finally, you check to see how long it takes to educate- Gennies learn quickly, taking 4-7 months with modifiers based on the Charisma of the Scientist.

There are three rules regarding what Gennies can and can’t be. Their abiltiies have to be ones that already exist in the wild, you can’t make one with laser eyes or the ability to breathe fire. Their characteristics have to be derived from the animals they’re based on, you can’t just make a humanoid with two heads. (They also note that “superintelligent animals” aren’t really a thing- you can’t fit a human-sized brain in a frog’s skull.) Finally, they’re designed for a purpose, they have some task the company wants them to be good at or a role in an ecosystem.


Listen, Pondsmith, that may not be how YOU do things…

The game breaks down the process of actually writing up a Gennie into five stages. First you think about the environment they’re going to operate in, with a list of possible adaptations for said environments- a Gennie sent to a high gravity/pressure world would have dense bones and muscles, etc. Then you figure out your genotype, that is to say, which animal formed the base template. Gennies are never quite 50/50, there’s always a base. The third step is filling in a lot of its physical/cultural info, filling in the blank Gennie Profile Sheet included in the game. The fourth step is balancing the critter out, making sure it has advantages and disadvantages. There’s some suggested GM dickery if your PCs insist on trying to make a superpowered Gennie and somehow the NPC Scientist succeeds on the Bioengineering roll, just give it a really dramatic disadvantage (the suggested one is the creature goes into a violent frenzy when exposed to light.) Maybe that’s not necessary. But there’s a nice list of suggested disadvantages for a Gennie based on its strengths.

Finally we get to Game Statistics. You can determine a Gennie’s attributes the same way you do a PC, with random rolling and assigning the numbers. However, the game outright says you can then adjust them to whatever’s appropriate to the creature designed, and set minimums and maximums based on the advantages/disadvantages the Gennie has- I suppose random rolling can help flesh out a Gennie, particularly one the PCs want made, but most of the time you’ll want to skip right to assigning numbers by fiat. Gennies can have as many kinds of hit dice as PCs, and it’s based on whether they’re more focused on combat or other abilities. Armor Class is assigned by eyeballing the Armor Class Table (and the additional info in the Technology Book, which we’ll get to) and comparing that to whatever kind of protection/evasion your critter has. And this basically works for Saving Throws, Movement, and THAC0.

Only Gennies based on humans can have skills, and at this stage you’re only assigning ones that every Gennie of that type knows. Non-human Gennies are more like AD&D monsters, and you’ll want to note down things like their climate, frequency, number appearing, all the stuff in the Monster Manual. (Indeed when we finally get to the Gennies detailed in supplements they’ll have entries formatted pretty much identically to the AD&D 2e monster manuals.)

This section closes out with a detailed example, called “From Theory to Practice: Building the Ganyman.” The Ganyman was described earlier in the entry on Jupiter’s moons; they live under the ice of Ganymede and are mostly into algae farming. So we start with that environment, cold and dark and aquatic. The creature starts with a human genotype, to which fish characteristics are added- gills, scales, fins, etc. Physical/Cultural Data is more detailed: they’re up to ten feet long, weigh up to 300 lbs., have no noses, large eyes, and mouths full of sharp teeth that they only use for defense since the algae they feed on doesn’t need to be chewed. Cultivating the algae is a big part of their society, and they export some of it to the outside world, which is the most contact they have with other species most of the time.

For balance, the Ganyman can breathe water but has to remain in water, resists cold but is weak to heat, has high Con and Str. but lower Wisdom and Charisma, tough skin but they can’t wear most armor, and most interestingly- they have the teeth as a natural weapon, but since they don’t have shoulders they can’t use rifles. Some of these advantages and disadvantages are baked into the Game Statistics, and they end up with a natural AC of 4, 3d8 hit points, and a THAC0 of 19. They’re given similar movement to the Delphs, and their bite is like a sword (with a similar range, assuming they can lunge at their target.) And with that the Ganyman is complete. They don’t actually get a proper write-up here, though they are detailed in No Humans Allowed.

So that wraps up Gennie creation. It’s a bit weird, blending in-setting stuff with GM tools and guidelines for PCs who can tell NPC scientists to make them a Gennie, and it doesn’t completely make up for the lack of a proper bestiary. While balance is talked about in general terms there aren’t many guidelines for building “monsters” and NPC races with an eye towards making enemies in the game. Still there’s some useful stuff here, and the Ganyman’s a good example of what you can do.

Next up, the book will talk about adventure design!

The XXVc Game Adventure: The Short Version

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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

The XXVc Game Adventure: The Short Version

Okay the chapter on designing adventures is pretty short and abstract, but I want to hit on a few things. First off, the intro says something that confirms a lot of what we were getting from earlier in the book: “The XXVc (™) game draws directly from the rich heritage of 1940’s and 1950’s science fiction.” Sci-fi in that time tended to combine pulp tropes with current scientific ideas so as not to be completely fanciful. Hence, the XXVc game setting tries to incorporate a lot of current science and new ideas, but when making adventures, it’s helpful to keep in mind that it is adventure in the old fashioned sense.

The Setting section rambles a bit, basically says you can start a game anywhere, and even though RAM vs. NEO is the central conflict, there are a lot of ideas that don’t have to fit that mold. The adventurers can be hired by a merchant on Venus to retrieve gravitol, they can get caught up in Sun King intrigues, etc. For “Setting” I think they really meant to say “Premise”, but I’ll allow it.

The Villain is the next major subject. They need a personality and motivation beyond “I want to hurt the player characters”, but their goals should negatively impact the PCs in some way. They mention the setting’s big baddies- RAM and its head Simund Holzerhein, the turncoat Killer Kane (motivated by his love for Wilma Deering, whom he can’t have), and the Princess Ardala- we’ll get to the big names when I look over some of the NPC cards. Other examples are the queen of Mimas, the Sun Kings, basically there are shady characters anywhere. They also point out that villains need not be that grandiose- you could be facing rival smugglers or amoral bandits and the like. Of course you need henchmen, who will more often be the guys your PCs face directly- as they get killed off more powerful ones can crop up. And of course, you need faceless thugs to fight, and allies to help.

There follows some general advice on putting together an adventure, breaking down the main goal of it into subgoals so you can get an idea of the general structure of things. It’s all very basic, and it kinda has to be. I feel like space constraints were an issue here, since this entire chapter has pretty much no mechanics or setting info and was probably considered nonessential.

The final bit is on Sets, Props, and Bit Players. The first is, of course, just working out where some of the locations will be, sketching out rough maps, etc. The advice on props is actually something I hadn’t thought about, when you put together an adventure you do wanna think of some of the specific items and devices that the characters may use- like, if the characters get a secret message, how so? Is it on paper? Concealed in something? How easy is it for them to hide if they need to get it to someone else? Etc. You can’t plan for everything but logistics can be tricky to work out in the heat of the moment. And of course Bit Players are the very minor characters in an adventure, a dying informant, a jetcar salesman, etc. The book warns that the PCs’ actions can very well lead to bit players being dragged into bigger roles, which is absolutely true.

Basically the chapter’s whole thrust is that the more detail you can put into these things beforehand, the better. I think this is basically true so long as you’re flexible and able to improvise when the players inevitably destroy your entire concept, but there’s no real “running the game” section here. I’m at a point where I feel like any halfway-complex RPG needs a good set of DM tools if only to help spark ideas, but I understand things have to be sacrificed.

Next, we'll look at the sample adventure!

Ghost in the Machine: Ere I Am J H

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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

Ghost in the Machine: Ere I Am J H

“Ghost in the Machine” is a very simple introductory adventure for starting characters. It has its shortcomings here and there but I think it’s a good launching point, maybe in need of a little elaboration.

It starts with the PCs stuck on Luna, all of them having worked for the Transplanet Freight Corporation which just recently got bought out by RAM, who fired everyone. So everyone’s at the Free Fall Bar & Grill trying to figure out what to do next, when a woman approaches them. Shandry Roberts is looking for a rocket crew to buy a ship for a wealthy client, then fly it to Earth, for a thousand credits. They pretty much have to take the job, and the text even admits they’re kind of railroading the PCs here. But really it seems they only have to not dismiss her completely, because while they’re talking, some goons show up pretending to be the moon police. They try to arrest her, she asks the PCs to help her out, and the PCs should easily notice that these are not real police officers. As soon as the PCs even object, the goons start firing.

The good thing about this fight is it gives us some stats for low-level NPC enemies- it’s three thugs, two are second-level warriors and their leader is third level. They get the basic writeups, THAC0, hp, AC, and it’s all based on class and equipment so it’s easy to use these as templates. Shandry Roberts (a second-level Rogue) gets a longer write-up with attributes and skills, she’s about on par with a PC of that level. Five rounds after the fight (if it lasts that long) the real moon police show up, the thugs beat a retreat, and Shandry advises the PCs come with her if they don’t want to get arrested.

Once they’ve found a quiet place to talk, Shandry tells the PCs the real story. Simund Holzerhein had a private space yacht built with all the latest bells and whistles. One of its features was a computer loaded with RAM data. The yacht got captured by pirates, and was presumed destroyed in a pirate battle, but Shandry Roberts- a NEO agent- found out the yacht was not destroyed, but sold to a Lunar scrap vendor. Also, the pirates who took it are now convinced it’s haunted as three of their own died on it.

So now the PC’s job is to help find the ship and fly it to a NEO base in Earth orbit. They’ll get the thousand credits each, plus the ship once NEO’s done getting the info from its computers. If they agree, they first need to head to the Triplanetary Angel, the liner Roberts took from Mars to retrieve some important data. If they don’t agree, well it’s kind of a “but thou must!” situation.

To get to where the liner is docked, they have to take the monorail, and at the station there’s another firefight with RAM security- a bunch of 2nd level warriors, one for each member of the party + Shandry. They’re all packing heat guns which do 2d6 damage on hit, but the PCs only have to take down four of ‘em for the remainder to flee (or kill themselves if they can’t somehow.) The fallen agents all carry security cards, which are keyed to their ID but can be reprogrammed on a Difficult Electronic Repair check. Again given how high skills are gonna be at 1st level this is something like a single-digit percentage chance but hey, worth a shot.

Indeed it comes in handy quickly when they get to the Triplanetary Angel. They can use the cards to get past port security and onto the ship, or just bluff their way through (the guard is actually supposed to let Roberts on but nobody else, because RAM’s trying to catch her.) Once they get to her stateroom, there are three RAM thugs waiting, each with a rocket pistol. However they only brought three rounds of ammo and won’t shoot at Shandry because they want to get her alive, so in theory this should be another easy one. The last obstacle here will be bluffing past the Triplanetary guards as they leave. The game actually suggests Shandry makes the check, and if things start to get violent the guards use their sonic stunners to put the PCs down until Shandry finally succeeds on a roll, all of which is a bit weird.

But anyway it’s now time to get the rocket. It’s sitting in a used rocket dealership, stripped to gray primer and sporting a few signs of battle, but otherwise in good shape. Stats wise, it uses the data card for Princess Ardala’s Princess of Mars ship: it’s a 35-ton Scout Cruiser/Yacht with an AC of 8 (6 with the AC defense bonus), speed of 4, 2 missile mounts and a beam laser, 140 hull points- a solid starter ship, really. (Especially compared to, say, the D6 Star Wars where you at most start with a Stock Light Freighter that has a super-slow hyperdrive and one gun.) The GM is encouraged to use the game’s enclosed deck plans as well, keeping track of where the PCs take their stations, etc. This will come into play later.

After Shandry pays the dealer, you go through the standard rigamarole of prepping for launch. The dealer does mention that the ship’s haunted, but whatever, off you go into the void.

It turns out, he’s right, sorta. On board the ship’s computer is a powerful Digital Personality, Horatio.dos, programmed to defend the yacht against unauthorized use. It has done so by successfully sabotaging systems to kill off most of the pirates, and now it’s gonna do the same to the PCs. First it sends out a little anti-theft signal to RAM. This draws out a heavy cruiser, the Maximus Argyre, who promptly bear down on the ship and signal to the PCs to stop.

This is… unfortunately kind of a bad non-encounter. There’s basically no way the ship can win against a heavy cruiser, the PCs are massively outgunned, and Shandry tells them their only chance is to run. If they do run, they can easily escape, they’ve got higher speed.You may not even need to set up the hex map. If they fight, they’ll probably get plastered.

So, why is this here? Is it just to teach the players there are some things they shouldn’t fuck with yet? I really don’t get it. Moving on.

Once the PCs lose their pursuer, it’s a ten hour trip from the Moon to Earth. During this time, Horatio.dos decides to try killing off the PCs himself, one by one. If they’re on the Control Deck, he tries to electrocute them, making an attack roll to force a save vs. electrical shock for 1d8 damage. If they’re on the Power Deck, Horatio momentarily floods radiation into the chamber (fortunately this only does 1d6 damage.) It’s mostly enough to be scary but not brutally unfair. Each time, Horatio asks the PC for their identification- if they use one of the RAM ID cards, they’re let off and he moves to his next victim. Eventually the PCs can work out that something’s wrong, and try to disable Horatio (a Computer Repair check, or randomly pulling wires and damaging ship systems until you get the right ones- I kinda like that they put in a contingency if nobody has the skill.) Failing that they can ask for a tow from NEO and then cut power to the computer, or even talk Horatio into believing they’re all RAM agents. See, this is mostly good design. You’ve got options. (Though it can end anticlimactically.)

Anyway, that’s the last encounter. The ship docks with the NEO base Salvation, Shandry thanks the PCs, they get their reward. After a little while the hologram Dr. Huer- himself a DP- pops up to usher them into Commander Turabian’s office. Buck Rogers and Wilma Deering are there, as well as a couple of other dudes. They’ve decoded the data on board the yacht, and it contains information on a RAM project that could potentially doom the solar system.


Oh, Buck. You scamp.

So that’s the adventure. I think it needs some tweaks here and there but it’s a good setup for a campaign. It's short, puts the PCs in the middle of the RAM conflict, and hands them a nice spaceship for their troubles.

And that’s the end of the World Book! Good thing too, the spine’s a bit worse for wear after scanning so much of it. Next up, we will move on to The Technology Book!

The Technology Book: Beanstalks and Other Fun Structures

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Buck Rogers XXVc: The 25th Century

The Technology Book: Beanstalks and Other Fun Structures


The Technology Book weighs in at a slim 32 pages, half the size of the World Book. It mostly details equipment but talks about some broader stuff as well. The first 6 pages are all about habitation and making places for people to live in the 25th Century, so let’s go through all that.



Arcologies get the first entry. The arcology was an idea developed by the likes of Paulo Soleri and Buckminster Fuller, Soleri coining the term around 1969 per Wikipedia. It’s a huge enclosed megastructure holding a large population who live there, work there, shop there, basically need never leave.The original idea was kinda environmentalist, basically you build these huge enclosed, self-sufficient structures so that the surrounding environment can be left alone. In the 25th Century they were mostly used by the Russo-American Mercantile Combine to house the millions made homeless by the last big war- now those independent arcologies, still mostly under RAM control, are Earth’s only really organized communities. Of course the term also applies to things like the cities on Luna and Mercury, some of the big pyramids in Coprates Chasm, etc.

Then we get to Terraforming. Because nobody has figured out how to travel beyond the Solar System in any reasonable length of time, humanity has to figure out how to best use the real estate they have. Some of this was covered in the World Book but there’s a lot more detail here.

Mars was a three stage process. First they slammed “icesteroids” into the southern icecaps, creating tons of heat, and releasing both the water in the icecaps and in the asteroids themselves. Secondly, they drilled into dormant volcanoes to create eruptions, releasing more heat into the atmosphere, and capped those volcanoes to use as a heat source. They even found some water in underground aquifers while boring around the Valles Marineris, the main colony site. Finally, they introduced bio-engineered organisms that feed on the iron oxide that’s everywhere on Mars, excreting oxygen. All of this took place over a couple of hundred years. Mars now has two shallow seas, a number of canyons, some of which contain life, and big open plateaus where the desert runners live.

The challenge with Venus was getting rid of the layers and layers of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mostly CO2. They engineered a bacterium to feed on the CO2, and used icesteroids to create large seas This brought the pressure and temperature down, but not quite enough. They subsequently introduced sulfur-eating bacteria into the cloud cover, thinning out the acid in the atmosphere and creating water, making cities viable in the clouds and on the highest plateaus. While continued seeding of CO2 and sulfur-eating organisms took place, the lowlands still remain too poisonous and high-pressure to be habitable by normal humans- hence, the Lowlanders.

Despite Luna being mostly underground cities, the Lunarians have succeeded in being able to convert some lunar soil to its component gases via huge expenditures of energy (mostly solar). The deepest craters on the Moon now have air pressure equivalent to the highest peaks of the Himalayas on Earth, which doesn’t do much. In three hundred years there might be enough air for people to go outside without tanks, but at the same time it’s probably impossible for there ever to be free-standing water on the surface, so this is basically something the Lunarians are doing because they have the money to do so. In the meantime they’re happy enough with underground living. There’s a brief passage on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn but not much new information (though apparently RAM’s approach for Titan involved introducing bioengineered algae that produce oxygen into the air, then setting off fusion bombs to burn off the excess.)

Sandwiched in this is a section on Spin Gravity, which (along with acceleration and gravitol) is one way to counter the problem of weightlessness in deep space. Spin something fast enough on its axis and you can create enough centrifugal force to stick people to walls. Of course, a ship or space station has to be a certain size for this to work, otherwise the coriolis effect means everyone gets thrown around sideways all the time. Some large spaceships (mostly battlers) have living spaces mounted on a separate rig surrounding the ship, so they can rotate and have gravity while the central hull is stable.



Orbital colonies are giant space stations which support large populations (in the hundreds of thousands.) They’re designed to be completely self-enclosed and self-sufficient, with gravity from rotation (hence most colonies are shaped like cylinders or donuts, though you can stack the torus-shaped ones on top of each other along a central axis), as well as an internal ecology with plants and animals. The first orbital colonies were all toruses, but later giant cylindrical colonies were built around Venus and Mars. Finally, in the Asteroid Belt, several rocks have colonies built into them- the smaller ones have been given spin to simulate gravity, but the largest asteroids actually have (very) low gravity. Some asteroids were also used to build the Mariposas around Mercury, since the rock makes for good protection against solar flares.

Finally there’s a section on the Mars-Pavonis Space Elevator. A space elevator is one of the weirder ideas for achieving space travel, basically a giant beanstalk is built up out past the atmosphere. It’s way impractical and the consequences if it ever falls could be pretty cataclysmic but hey, it’s Mars, RAM’s got walkin’ around money. So they got a miles-long cable, attached it to Phobos, and lowered it down into the Martian atmosphere, using rockets to anchor it over Pavonis Mons, an extinct volcano which reaches several miles straight up (and is so wide that the upward slope is barely noticeable.) They attached elevators to the cable to directly transport stuff up and down at first, then later constructed a massive base at the bottom a stronger tether all the way up to the top. The whole process took over a century. (Something like this is in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, and well, problems ensue.)

That does it for the overviews for now, so next we’ll get into equipment listings, starting with Communications and Gadgets and Gear!