Classic Traveller: Dark Nebula

 

Continuing my read-through of the Classic Traveller wargames, Dark Nebula was published in 1980 and covers a war between the Solomani and the Aslan over about two subsectors of space, including one difficult-to-traverse nebula.  Turns are two years of in-universe time, each hex is half a parsec, naval units represent individual ships, and ground units are divisions.

Overall the core of this game looks pretty reasonable.  The space combat system is kinda neat.  The defender nominates a ship, the attacker chooses one of their ships to engage it, and then this repeats until one side is out of uncommitted ships, at which point the side with more ships left uncommitted can assign them as they please to the various 1:1 ship combats already committed to.  Once ships are matched up, the resolution of each of these combats looks pretty straightforward.

I think what I like about this fleet combat design is that there are lots of significant choices (what order to nominate and assign your ships in) but little mechanical complexity.  In general this seems like a desirable property in a game.  And at the scale this game is operating at, "where do you assign which assets" probably is the right question to be posing to players.

I'm also tickled by the inclusion of tanker-ships, really mobile refineries that you can park in systems without gas giants to skim hydrogen off of the star and refine it into fuel, allowing that system to be traversed by other ships without delays.  I love me some logistics-infrastructure-construction.

One thing here that I found a bit surprising was that moving ships can move as far as they want on the hex maps as long as they're moving along jump routes between systems with fuel available, until they enter a system that lacks fuel or where there's an enemy presence (or is in the nebula and requires exploration).  It makes some sense under the time-per-turn assumptions and the scale of the map, but "move as far as you want" still made me stop and think.  It almost has a railroad-war feeling, like the American Civil War or World War 1, rather than an open-water naval warfare feeling.  Maybe that's always been true of naval warfare under Traveller's assumptions and I just never realized it.

There are a couple of other surprising things in Dark Nebula.  It feels like a somewhat experimental game; there's tech progress from research in the titular nebula, semi-randomized initial boardstate due to the map placement procedure, and neutral forces with reaction rolls, potentially hostile or potentially hireable.  I definitely didn't expect randomization of map layout in a Traveller game set in the Third Imperium continuity.  Some weirdness arises from this - the maps have hex numbers seemingly from a much bigger hexmap, which are very unlikely to end up getting put together into a sensible order during the alternating placement procedure.  I appreciate that the scan quality is good enough to read the hex numbers though!

There are also a couple of other things about the maps which are weird, and not in a great way.  The star density on them is rather lower than is typical for Traveller.  Several of these quarter-subsector maps only have four stars in them, and the densest have eight.  In a typical Traveller subsector, I'd expect more like 40 systems, or 10 per average map on this scale.  I'm not sure how well the balance of unit production against destruction would scale up to higher-density maps and owning more planets.  Also, having a much higher-density graph of systems might lose some of that railroad-war feel and change the character of the game significantly.  Finally, the way Dark Nebula handles ground forces on planets is that there's a box in an empty hex adjacent to each inhabited system, representing the surface of the planet, and you put troop counters there.  But this would not scale well to higher-density maps.  The quality of infrastructure in these inhabited systems is also denoted by the color of the planet's box, which is a bit lousy - printing your own copy of the map requires color, you have to remember what the colors mean, colorblindness problems, etc.  Frankly I found the color-coding confusing on first read and first look at the map; the icons for the stars use random colors not related to the color coding for the system's infrastructure quality.  They're probably supposed to relate to stellar spectrum class but that's not relevant here and we're already gone non-canonical with the random map so...  I don't know why they did that, rather than making the stars the same color as their respective planet boxes.

The lack of compatibility between Dark Nebula's maps and Traveller RPG subsector maps (both in scale and density) also highlights another oddity here - Dark Nebula is the first Traveller wargame I've read that makes no mention of integration with the RPG.  It does seem like integrating a game where turns are two years of in-universe time would be tough, but I was surprised that there was nothing.  I didn't expect much of Invasion: Earth, but we still got one good patron hook there.

What I didn't realize when I initially read Dark Nebula (not until halfway through writing this post and getting kind of suspicious that the combat system seemed much more staid than the rest of the game) was that it was a clear successor to Imperium, published in 1977.  I've only skimmed Imperium, but it looks like it shared the 2-year turn, combat system, turn structure, etc but is played on a fixed map, with slightly more complex fleet compositions including fighters and carriers, and some neat rules about armistices / inter-war periods (allowing the game to be played in a campaign fashion) and interaction between the Imperial player (playing as a frontier governor, not the emperor) and the Third Imperium.  Notably, Imperium does mostly omit tech progress and lacks neutral forces.  Like Dark Nebula, it foregoes any mention of integration with the Traveller RPG (which made more sense in 1977) and still uses the system of planetary surface boxes in adjacent empty hexes.  I may return to Imperium at some point, but given that my interest is at least nominally in RPG integration, I think it may have to wait.

My blind spot for Imperium and trying to understand Dark Nebula's place in the chronology of CT wargames also caused me to take a quick look at 1981's Fifth Frontier War.   This looks like a monster of a game, bringing together the multi-subsector scale of Imperium and Dark Nebula with some details like SDBs and percentage-based damage to units from Invasion: Earth, but with a greater eye towards RPG integration.  First and foremost, hexes in Fifth Frontier War are one parsec rather than Imperium's half-parsec, and turns in Fifth Frontier War are only one week!  But this means that it can't just abstract starship movement into "move as far as you want this turn", so you have to deal with more details.  And fixed maps allowed Fifth Frontier War to put planetary surface boxes around the edges of the board, rather than right next to the systems they're associated with (which, admittedly, might create some difficulty in locating any particular box), allowing it to increase star system density up towards that typical of Traveller RPG campaigns.  Fifth Frontier War looks tremendously ambitious and hideously fiddly, and I can't imagine why it was the last Classic Traveller boxed-set hex and counter wargame.  At the same time I salute the dream of having a metagame world-engine wargame to run concurrently with one's RPG campaign and I look forward to learning its lessons on a more thorough read/post at some point.

Classic Traveller: Invasion: Earth Review

Invasion: Earth was published in 1981, the fifth of the series of Classic Traveller stand-alone games.  The premise is that the Third Imperium is invading Earth (defended by humans at the same tech level).  The game covers space warfare across the solar system in low detail, and then orbital bombardment, landings, and corps-scale ground warfare on a hex-map of the Earth's surface in somewhat more detail.  Turns are two weeks, with a special reinforcement turn roughly every 14 weeks, and the hex map is on an 1140 km scale.  The projection is quite neat; it's a very nice map. 

Overall verdict: very ambitious, some neat ideas, but a bit of a mess

The main pdf is 29 pages total, including the cover, front matter, rules, map, inventory of counters, counter-sheets, and combat resolution tables.  The text itself is only about 12 pages, of which two are background information on the Solomani Rim War and one and a smidge deal with using Earth in Traveller campaigns separate from the wargame.  So we really only get about nine pages of wargame rules, which is not much to cover so grand a conflict.

The rules start out relatively well with space combat, dividing the solar system into near-earth, far orbit, and deep space, and covering jumping in, closing through those distances, actually fighting, and going dark in deep space.  There is some weirdness around System Defense Boats fighting space targets; SDBs are primarily atmospheric / low orbit (I'm imagining them kind of like SSTO spaceplanes but agrav) and have only a ground bombardment attack score instead of having both a space attack score and a ground attack score like many naval units.  But because of this there's a whole separate space combat firing step just for SDBs attacking proper ships, and you have to divide up fleets being attacked by both SDBs and typical naval vessels, with part of the Imperial fleet fighting just SDBs and part fighting the regular navy. (How you divide your fleet is an interesting gameplay choice at least I guess?)  I'm not really clear why SDBs don't just have an anti-ship offensive score and use the regular combat resolution table when attacking ships, and then have a bombardment score for attacking ground targets.  Maybe it's so that they can add their bombardment score with the bombardment scores of planetary defense batteries when attacking ships doing landings?  But SDB weirdness aside, the space rules seem basically reasonable.

Atmospheric stuff like bombardment and landings follow.  There are some very weird things in this section.  Space ships in low orbit can go on overwatch against SDBs coming out of hiding in the oceans (neat) but the action economy on it is very strange, where you get to fire against each SDB wing with every naval unit on overwatch?  If the rules didn't say verbatim "All overwatch naval units attack each SDB wing that came out of hiding" I wouldn't think that that could possibly be the correct interpretation.  In the following bombardment phase, each ship or planetary defense battery only gets to attack once ("Each unit capable of firing during this phase may fire once."), but in the contested landings phase after that, planetary defense batteries can get to fire at every unit landing near them.  No saturating these air defenses up close I guess; that I can kind of buy.  But the SDB overwatch thing seems trickier to justify.

Ground combat seems fairly reasonable; units are quite mobile because antigravs are assumed to be standard kit on both sides, there's a supply system which is fairly simple and based on space-dropping logistics bases which is neat, there are stacking limits on how much stuff you can fit in a hex but this is a wargame with counters so you get some super-corps counters that refer to an off-map sheet of boxes to say "here's all the stuff that is in that hex".  There are some weird bits in the way that targets are selected during ground combat; the example of combat even provides a case where A and B are on the same side and C and D are on the other, and basically A shoots at C, C shoots at B, B shoots at D, and D shoots at A.  And apparently that's fine, there's no conception of fronts and mutual engagement with particular units who are fighting you while you're fighting them (except inasmuch as you're all in the same 1150km hex, which I guess is just a big melee of anti-gravs and plasma weapons).

Reinforcement and scoring has some interesting bits; it is assumed that the Imperial player will definitely take the Earth, and he has access to as much replacement of lost units as he wants, but taking more time and using more replacement units costs him at scoring and may cause him to lose the game even though he has taken the planet.  The actual details of reinforcement for the Solomani (hereafter Terran) player look somewhat fiddly and involve counting how many of his starting 60ish urban terrain hexes are not yet garrisoned by the Imperial player.  The game also ends when the Imperial player has occupied 50ish of those urban hexes so you need to count them to determine if the game is over, in addition to reinforcements.  The setup procedure for the Terrans to place all their starting units looks like something I might want a beer for (and I imagine the Imperial player might want a beer while he waits).

As I mentioned at the beginning, the map is neat.  Sadly the counter-sheets are quite blurry and everything that follows about the units is working from the Counter Inventory rather than the counters themselves.  (Also, I hope you like NATO symbology.  Still, would it be a proper hex-and-counter wargame without it?)  The unit variety looks painfully-high; the Terran player has nine different kinds of System Defense Boat wings, most of which have fairly small differences in stats between them.  The Imperials have lots of one-off units; for example, they get five Colonial Lift Infantry Corps at TL12 and then one at TL11 with the same nominal stats but which takes an extra penalty in combat resolution because the TL is lower.  I kind of question the inclusion of regiment-scale units with 5 combat power in a game where there are corps with 100 combat power rolling around.  Could we have just...  dropped regiments, divided all the combat power numbers by 5, and eliminated space transport capacity from cruiser squadrons?

Which is to say - there's significant room for simplification here.

(On the other hand, looking at it again, almost all of the regiment-sized units are elite, armored, or both, which means that their combat strengths are understated - they might use 5 points of transport capacity but then actually fight at strength 20)

I do appreciate that we get half a page on using this ruleset for conflicts other than this particular battle in this particular war in the Third Imperium Setting.  It mostly deals with ground troops without grav vehicles; wheeled, cavalry, and foot, and the implications on supply and sealift of not having grav vehicles be standard.   I'm here for this, it's exactly the kind of stuff that I want for mercenary involvement on Balkanized worlds in the course of a Traveller campaign, but...  there are other blockers for that.

The combat tables are mostly OK but there are some under-explained modifiers next to the Surface Bombardment Table.  It's interesting that bombardment damage on surface targets caps at 50% of the target's strength per turn - which means that splitting your fire and bombarding two targets with half of your firepower each for two turns can be more effective than concentrating it all on one target in the first turn, then the other target the next turn.  So that's a bit odd, but maybe it doesn't actually come up in play.

The material on using Earth in Traveller campaigns is basically three patrons and a couple of deeper conspiracies to tie them into.  Two were a bit trite and could happen anywhere but the third actually ties into something from the wargame so I liked that one.

Again, in conclusion - a very ambitious sort of conflict to try to tackle in nine pages of rules, and some rough edges are apparent as a result.  If anybody knows of a ruleset that is to this what Azhanti High Lightning was to Snapshot, an expanded and cleaned-up version, please let me know in the comments.

On further reflection, the other thing that this game needs is Tyranids.  It is excusable that it doesn't have them, because they may not have been invented yet when it was published, but nevertheless, it is the perfect use-case.  "How long can 50,000 guardsmen and assorted aerospace assets delay the advance of the hive fleet?  How much can they make it cost to devour this world?" are exactly the kind of questions that Invasion: Earth is aimed at answering.  This is the kind of scale that a Warhammer 40k game should be operating at.

Classic Traveller: The Imperial Fringe Review

The Imperial Fringe was published in 1981 as an "introductory adventure" included with the Deluxe Traveller boxed set.  I acquired it on the "Classic Traveller" CD from Far Future Enterprises, which makes it a little hard to evaluate its value for money.

Calling The Imperial Fringe an adventure is somewhat misleading.  It is actually the sketch of an enormous, sector-spanning, 20-year campaign.  It is also, however, brilliant documentation on the designer's expectations about how a Traveller campaign might be run.  I wish I had read this like 10 years ago when I was first getting started with Mongoose Traveller.

The pitch, basically, is that a senior member of the Scout Service contracts the players to do a survey of the sector and provide up-to-date UPP codes, based on in-person observations, of each of the 440 planets in the sector, with a time limit of 20 in-game years (1040 weeks).  Reminder: a subsector map is 8x10 hexes and usually about 30-40 planets, and a sector is 16 such subsectors.

This sounds extraordinarily ambitious to someone coming from Mongoose 1e - our games have usually been confined to single subsectors and maybe two years of game-time.  Occasionally a plot point would take us a little bit off of the edge of the subsector but the assumption was that this was a temporary state of affairs and that we shouldn't expect additional subsectors of prep effort.

The players get paid a fixed sum per world surveyed on submitting survey reports at Scout Service offices.  This sets up a brilliant incentive to actually travel - you don't get paid for visiting the same planet a second time.  And this leans into something I've liked about Traveller, which is that "planet of the week" allows a lot of variety.  One week you can do Alien on a derelict, the next week you can do Blade Runner in the big city, the week after that you can do Mad Max stranded on a desert planet looking for water to run the reactor on, all with the same set of characters, without breaking continuity or suspension of disbelief, while continuing to build campaign capital.

I also really appreciate that this setup shows rather than tells you a lot about the Third Imperium.  It is so huge, and travel so slow, that they do the census basically every 20 years, and official records about the state of whole planets can fall completely out of date in that time.  And their solution to this problem is contracting the census out to a handful of retirees on a shoestring budget and a deadline measured in decades.  The implications about the state capacity of the Imperium mark it as a very different situation from ours.  Imperial subjects probably aren't filing individual tax returns with the central Imperial Revenue Service every year.  The empire can just lose track of millions of people for decades.  What does the response time of Imperial law enforcement look like?  Weeks, months?  If your ship gets "pulled over" by the Navy and they want to "run your plates", how out of date is that particular patrol cruiser's database of ship registrations?  Is there even a standard Imperial-issue identification document like a passport?  So it raises lots of fun questions.

Returning to gamier matters, The Imperial Fringe also makes explicit:

The assumption in the adventure is that one character has possession of a type S Scout/Courier and thus provides transportation for the group. The referee should suggest that one player attempt a scout career. If, after all character generation has been performed, no scout has a scout ship, one of them should be arbitrarily given a scout ship in order to further the adventure.

Obviously, I'm not thrilled at the suggestion to respect neither the oracular power of the chargen dice rolls nor the consequences of the risk/reward decisions of the players during chargen.  But it is interesting to see that even this early, the official Word of Miller was "give 'em a ship," at least for introductory campaigns.  And with a campaign of this scale, I have to wonder how many people started "introductory" campaigns and then ended up playing it for years of real-time.

Giving a known ship makes setting up appropriate rewards a lot more viable, plannable; if you know what their monthly ship costs are, and you know the rate at which they can survey, then you can set the pay structure up to keep them under light monetary tension, without it spiraling either down into overwhelming debt and desperation, nor up into huge piles of cash.  And this makes sense in the world; your patron also knows what it costs to run a Scout/Courier and wants to encourage you to actually get the job done, rather than either failing due to lack of funds or retiring due to excess of funds before finishing.

The combination of the known-small cargo hold of the Scout/Courier and the strong incentive to keep moving on to new systems to write fresh survey reports probably constitutes a workable solution to the Golden Pair problem (though not a very general solution).  It doesn't matter if there are two planets with strongly-complementary trade codes next door to each other; you barely have the means to exploit this opportunity on any single transit between them, and you have strong incentives to not do anything in a loop.

And while the initial setup procedure may not be maximally respectful of player agency, once the game has started they're just let loose upon the sector.  No further railroads here...

Until you start inserting other published CT adventures into suggested systems, per page 19; then you might run into some small-scale railroads.  I salute the hustle of using the introductory adventure to advertise the rest of the product line.  But still, even if you do go buy all of those adventures and drop them into the sector map, you still have a big sandbox with a couple more-detailed points of interest rather than an adventure path like The Traveller Adventure, which came out a year later in 1982.

This suggestion to drop in modules throughout the sector does highlight one obvious weakness here, which is that there are a lot of worlds described with UPPs and no further details, and this is very much not a ready-to-use, "grab-and-go with no prep" kind of product.  Significant Assembly Required to make each world interesting, to keep the game from turning into a "we jump, we descend, we check the survey boxes, we take off, we jump..." routine.  Religious observance of the random encounter rules is probably wise, but not mentioned here; it might be easy for a new Traveller GM to miss.  Maybe at the time knowledge of their use was more assumed, from old-school D&D?

The other difficulty that I have with The Imperial Fringe is a less universal one - it probably doesn't handle open-table play particularly well.  You're going places well away from the main routes, so justifying characters appearing and disappearing out in the boonies strains disbelief a bit.  And the ship doesn't have enough stateroom capacity to justify a "you're carrying everyone but half the crew has food poisoning this week" approach.  A bigger ship with more space and enough crew for PCs to fade into and out of the background might be a way to do it though; basically a Star Trek-style "survey cruiser" sort of thing.  But then you start having to think about command structures and payroll...

So yeah, I wish I'd read this back when I had a stable set of players in college, rather than adults with lives doing master's degrees while working full time jobs and raising kids and taking long vacations.

Classic Traveller: Mayday!

Previously in this series reading the rules of the Classic Traveller boxed-set games: Snapshot, Azhanti High Lightning.

Summary:

Mayday! is an alternate starship combat system for Classic Traveller.  It hews very close to CT Book 2's starship combat system; some pieces seem identical to me.  Where things differ, they are mostly simplifications.  There are some simplifications in the damage model and hit tables and in the starship stats, but the biggest change is that movement, time, and space are managed with hex-grid and counters rather than minis on a tabletop with tape measures.  The way that vector movement is tracked with just counters on the grid, requiring no paper notes, is very clever.  I suspect it might not scale very well up to large numbers of ships, but this is a system that seems quite targeted at engagements between small numbers of small ships; the sort of fights and escapes that a Free Trader might find itself in.

One oddity among these mostly-simplifying changes is the addition of missile design rules, with a design space of about 4300 possible missiles.  I'm not really sure why this is here but it does look fun to fiddle with.

Like Snapshot, though, Mayday neglects human factors like morale and fatigue.  I don't know how many turns a typical Mayday combat lasts, but with 100-minute turns, fatigue and crew rest seem like they might be worth considering.  Almost no consideration is given to crew matters here; you should know what part of the ship your Traveller characters are in when damage is being allocated, and Gunnery can give a bonus to hit, but that's about it.  Certainly this system doesn't even begin to address the niche protection / social problem of starship combat in RPGs - the party seldom has more than one ship, which means a small set of decisions to make per round and huge stakes for everyone (all eggs in one basket, so to speak) but no real way for many characters to contribute.

But for such an early work, and for a lower-complexity system aimed at being a standalone boardgame and supplement to Book 2, I think that's pretty forgivable.  I think the movement rules alone are good enough to justify this book (maybe not at $20 on DriveThru, but as part of one of FFE's CDs, definitely).

Minis-and-tapemeasure was never going to fly with my groups, and Mongoose's maneuvering system was a bit too abstract and never really clicked for us.  But I think this hexgrid system looks much closer to the platonic happy medium.  I only found one or two rules that I would feel compelled to change or ignore outright (like running into planets); this looks good enough to me to give a serious run with very little modification.

Raw notes:

The whole rules pdf is only 20 pages, including front and back covers, hex sheet, and some counters

I like the subtle dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot Morse-code "mayday" signal worked into the cover's design

Copyright 1978 - so this predates Snapshot, even.

"Book 2 of Traveller details the resolution of starship combat using miniature figures; Mwday utilizes many of the same concepts to present a board game with a hex map and die-cut counters. Thus, in addition to the scenarios provided in this game, many adventures in Traveller can also be played out using the system provided here."  So like Snapshot, pretty explicitly integrated with Traveller.

"The nature of the vector movement system requires three counters for each ship (one for each of the past, present, and future positions). which are then differentiated by color codes."  I do love me some vector movement systems, and this sounds like an interesting tracking scheme in the absence of a note-sheet per ship.

Even small craft and missiles have this three-counter past-present-future thing going on.  No wonder the game came with 120 counters!

"Randomizer counters feature a large number from 1 to 6. The twelve counters serve as a substitute for dice when necessary."  Kinda curious how the math works on drawing twice from two copies of 1-6, versus rolling two independent d6s.

"Blank counters are provided without any markings or color. They are used primarily t o indicates the presence of protective sand clouds around ships."  Interesting.  I had been thinking of sandcasters as like micro-grapeshot fired directionally at incoming missiles, rather than clouding.  Do sand clouds make sense in a vacuum, without an atmosphere...  ?

"Four geomorphic (or perhaps astrornorphic) game map sheets are provided as the surface on which Mayday is played. Each map sheet (approximately 5% by 8% inches) represents a two-dimensional expanse of interplanetary space."  Cool, so you don't need a whole 6' x 10' or whatever table like you did for CT Book 2 combat.

"Each game-turn represents an elapsed time of approximately one hundred (100) minutes."  A lot can happen in an hour and a half.

It's been a while since I looked at CT Book 2, but the turn sequence here (Movement, laser fire, counter-laser / anti-missile fire by other player, ordinance launch and impact, computer programming) feels pretty familiar.

This vector movement procedure / implementation is delightfully simple.

"Any ship may land on a world by moving onto the wortd counter at
one hex speed. Entering a world counter a t a speed of greater than one hex results
in an impact which destroys the ship." lolol.  But since you accelerate from gravity for passing through a hex adjacent to a planet...  you'd basically have to stop / stall in an adjacent hex, right?  Is there another way to set this up?

"At the end of every movement phase, if two present position counters occupy the same hex, the vessels have intercepted each other. Missiles may detonate; ships may collide.
At the end of the movement phase, i f two future position counters occupy the same hex, Ithe two vessels will intercept each other in the next player-turn. The interception is unavoidable, and consideration should be given to the launching of lifeboats or other protective measures."  Oh come on, they're 1 light-second hexes, you aren't going to run into anything by accident.  Honestly even running into Earth-sided planets accidentally seems rather unlikely; Earth has a radius of like 6400 km, so a cross-sectional area of pi * r^2 = 129 million km^2, whereas a square light-second is like...  almost 10^11 km^2.  So your odds of hitting Earth while traversing a random line through a cubic light-second volume containing it are like...  1 in 1,000 ?

"When both the present position counters and the future position counters of ma ships share the same hexes, courses have been matched, and boarding operations are possible."  That is slick, though.

By page 5 we're through the turn sequence and movement, and now getting to firing sequences.

What is this missile design system.  4 options for guidance type, 4 options for propulsion type, 4 options for detonation type...  plus, presumably, options for payload and max acceleration rating?

"Homing: The missiles homes on a target specified at launch, constantly altering its future position at least one hex per turn in the direction of the present position of the target."  But...  if you aim where they are, how are you going to hit where they will be?

Interesting, sandcasting is primarily an anti-laser defense with a small benefit against missiles.

"Any ship which receives four or more hits in a single player-turn has been destroyed. A hit is considered a consultation of the damage table; laser hits count as 1 each, proximity missile hits count as 2 each..."  So there's no "hull damage" track or equivalent!  It's like Chainmail HD, where you needed 4 hits in the same turn to kill a Hero!

Optional simplified computers rule - program-shuffling not mandatory.

Computers only go up to rating 3?  I guess this really is focused on small starship engagements.  None of these big fancy navy ships with their big computers.

Similarly, only jump-1 and jump-2 computer programs at listed, nothing higher.

Interestingly, small craft do not take to-hit penalties for their lack of computers here; they do take -1 in CT Book 2.

By page 11, we've gotten through all phases of the combat turn, the list of programs, and are now into special rules like damage control and missile design.  Missiles have another stat which I did not anticipate - number of turns of thrust.

A note that High Guard's combat system can be adapted to use Mayday's movement system.  I don't think I've read CT High Guard's combat system; maybe that's next on the docket.  Mongoose's High Guard combat system was a bit...  abstract, if I recollect rightly?

Page 13 has the list of available ships for Mayday; it goes up to the 400-800 ton range (corsair, colonial cruiser).  So definitely not intended for the dreadnoughts.

Small craft also have limited turns of thrust!

One of the scenarios is a yacht race, to learn the movement system.  Clever!

Several of these scenarios have interesting things going on and are very much not just stand-up fights.  Smuggling has an iterated component within a single scenario.

The attack and damage tables on page 15 are better-documented than in eg Azhanti High Lightning

Overall I like this a lot.  I think the use of color to indicate past/present/future markers was a questionable decision vs having past/present/future text or something on the markets, but maybe there were manufacturing constraints.

Do lasers have a max range?  Ah, they take a penalty to the hit roll per hex of range, limiting their max effective range.

Classic Traveller: Azhanti High Lightning's Combat System

Background:

I've taken an interest recently in the "boxed set" Classic Traveller games from the late 70s and early 80s.  Previously, I looked into Snapshot, a board game about starship boarding actions using a fine-grained action-point economy.  A comment on boardgamegeek suggested that Azhanti High Lightning had a more refined boarding combat game along similar lines, so this week I sat down and read the rules.

Summary of findings:

This seems like a much more reasonable system than Snapshot.  I like that you never need to handle more than six action points at a time.  There are some rules here that are novel and weird (like having to commit your characters to courses of action for the turn and then sticking to those courses through five 6-AP "phases") but mostly I like they direction they're going here.  Compared to Snapshot, a morale system has been added, damage to structures has been clarified, ammunition tracking has been made optional, some of the extraneous counters like target markers and explosion markers are gone, and overall things do seem improved.

There are still a couple of rules I would change.  Stacking up four combatants in a 1.5m square seems at the very least clunky from a book-keeping perspective, and the explosion damage rules and scatter probabilities are a bit wonky.  In terms of play aids, the weapons table is terribly opaque and requires reference to a couple different places in the rules text to make sense of; I'd definitely be penciling in some notes on which columns mean what there.

I think this exists in a bit of a weird place as a boxed-set game.  On the one hand, it is mechanically less integrated with Traveller than Snapshot was, because the stats on the chits are derived from Traveller stats rather than being literal Traveller stats.  The damage model has also diverged from attribute damage to accumulating "wounds", and the action points don't depend on your Dex and End.  So this might make it a bit uncomfortable to use as an alternate combat system for Traveller.  But it also has some features that might make it uncomfortable as a stand-alone boardgame; the biggest thing that springs to my mind are some ambiguous rules like morale checks for taking "unexpected" fire, which seems like the sort of thing you might want a referee for.

There's a note about integrating with Book 4: Mercenary, and I think this game makes a lot of sense in that light.  This is a slightly higher-abstraction game than Snapshot (or Traveller's default combat system, outside of grids-vs-range-bands) with a lot of support for heavy weapons (like automatic grenade launchers) and heavy armor (three armor types: cloth, combat, and battle dress.  No fine distinctions between cloth, jack, and reflec here...).  This seems like a really good fit for supporting Mercenary play, where you have a slightly higher number of combatants than a party of four PCs and a similarly-sized opposition force (hence wanting less detail per combatant in their stats and ammunition counting and such) and they're armed with military-grade hardware.  I also like that this personal combat fire sequence is nearly-identical to Striker's (released one year later), so there's some consistency and carry-over; if you have spent the time learning AHL's fire sequence for your small-unit mercenary actions, and then you accumulate more troops and more hardware through your successes, it slightly lightens the lift to migrate up to Striker.

Maybe the most unfortunate thing about this is the name - "Azhanti High Lightning" sounds like the name of an adventure, or a book detailing a class of ship (which, to be fair, half of this book is), or maybe a ship combat system for High Guard.  Infantry combat system would have been far from my first guess.

Raw notes:

Published 1980, so just one year after Snapshot.

Only one set of playtesters credited.  Uh oh.

Same 15-second rounds as Snapshot

1.5 meter squares.  Weren't Snapshot's 1-meter?

As with Snapshot, only about 25 pages of rules, then some scenarios.  The second part of this book, originally published as Supplement 5, deals with the eponymous ship class in great detail (the name and date laid down of every ship of the class build in the Third Imperium, for example).  Also, of course, deckplans.  Lots of deckplans.  I'm going to focus on the system rules here and maybe examine the deckplans and other supporting material some other time.

"No square may contain more than four active characters at a time".  Good lord that sounds tough to keep track of.  And on tiny 1/2 inch squares!  With facing!

Turns are cut up into five action phases.  Each phase, each character gets 6AP.  So this still provides a large number of AP per unit of in-game time (30 AP per 15 seconds - double that of Snapshot) but cut up into single-digit installments so you aren't doing double-digit arithmetic constantly.

They've abandoned the inverted high-optionality initiative system for simultaneous action within a series of steps within each phase within each round.

In general I love systems where you write down orders secretly before all players reveal them simultaneously (including spellcasting commitments in TSR D&D), and this sort of has one of those.  This is an odd one though, because the commitments you make are 1) quite vague, just one of three general courses of action (move, covering fire, aimed fire), and 2) binding across all five phases of a turn.  My first inclination is to think that that sounds like a long time to be stuck with one plan, but maybe the plans are loose enough that it's OK?  I really don't know if 15 seconds an unreasonably long time to re-evaluate your plan of actions - how long is an OODA loop cycle in actual combat?  And the good news is that if you pick move, you can still take snap-shots - but you'll shoot last.  Maybe being stuck in aim/covering fire mode is the worse end of the deal, since then you can't move (I think?  There is some ambiguity here around what exactly each course of action prohibits you from doing).

Climbing ladders is really slow.

Elevators have RNG for how long they take to arrive.  Love it.

I'm confused about this note about covering fire on exposed characters on page 9.

This is possibly the simplest set of range band DMs I have ever seen in Traveller (8+ to hit at effective range, 10+ at long range 12+ at extreme range).  I like this.

Reloading is gone but you have to commit to ammunition types at the beginning of the game.

Cover gives a penalty to hit but a bonus to damage as "only the vital areas of the target...  are exposed."  Battletech "You were behind a hill so the odds of a headshot went from 1 in 36 to 1 in 6" vibes.

Three levels of wound - light, serious, and instant death.  Light wounds do give penalties to actions, while serious wounds put you out of action.

This wounding system reminded me of Striker so I dug up Striker and had a look:

Looking at Striker's fire combat procedure, this is very similar, with slightly different DMs for eg cover and concealment, but also significant use of some shared terminology like Danger Space.  Same range bands and DMs, and the example of the RAM grenade launcher with flechette rounds is even the same.

And Striker's personnel injury rules are also very similar (including an identical example), though the bits about exposed vs in cover are organized a bit differently.

What year was Striker?  1981.  OK, that tracks.  So they borrowed some of the infantry fire procedure from Azhanti High Lightning for it.

End Striker digression.

Returning to Azhanti High Lightning, they do clarify this idea of being in cover but exposed; the difference between crouching behind something, unable to fire or be fired upon, and putting your arms and head up over it to fire but also be fired upon at a penalty to hit (but a damage bonus if hit).

Stray shots against certain backstop objects can cause them to explode.  Love it.  "The explosion of red-coded equipment is equivalent to the strike of a fusion gun".  Oh boy!

Grenades with a 3.75m radius seem...  a little on the low side?  And even if you're in a 1.5m square adjacent to an exploding grenade, you still only get hurt on 10+, so your odds if you aren't in the same square as the grenade are pretty good.

These grenade scatter diagrams are a bit wonky.  They definitely thought about the probability distribution on different directions, but I'm surprised they weighted it in favor of overshooting rather than undershooting.  Grenades also scatter 2d6 1.5m squares, which is...  a long way, and a weird distribution of distances.

Melee seems pretty straightforward and a little higher-abstraction; no parrying, your melee rating is just subtracted from the other guy's attack on you.

This morale system is...  interesting.  Needing to make a morale roll to stick your head up into covering fire makes a lot of sense.  Needing to make a morale roll to move into melee is not unreasonable.  Needing to make a morale check for taking "unexpected" fire seems like it might be contentious to adjudicate in a board game, rather than in an RPG with a referee.  Having all of your dudes have to make morale checks before any of them move is interesting but seems like it kinda doesn't capture the collective nature of morale as a phenomenon.  Having morale check results interact with the rank system, where your high-rank dudes have to roll first and then their results influence the results of the rolls of their subordinates, is probably a decent fit for military actions but tougher to fit to PC crews operating on informal lines.  But I guess I haven't gotten to the bit on integrating with Traveller campaigns, who knows what they'll say about the interaction between PCs and morale.

I suppose I should be happy to see a morale system included at all after Snapshot, really.  Progress!

That brings us to the end of the core rules of the game on page 17, and to the beginning of special rules for unusual situations, like energy weapons, fighting oozes and robots, vacc suits and explosive decompression (incidentally, it's surprising to me that they say that the interiors of starships are usually pressurized - I thought there was a note in Classic Traveller's combat system about pre-emptive venting before combat to prevent fires?).  Rules for structural damage are much more developed than in Snapshot, though they have their quirks.  If you set the timer right on your satchel charge, you can guarantee that it can't be disarmed because there won't be enough time.  Grenades might be better at damaging hardware than at injuring combatants.  I went down a rabbit-hole trying to figure out grenades' penetration values and ended up discovering that the weapons table is quite inscrutable; documentation on what the columns mean is solely embedded in the text for the fire combat rules, nowhere near the table itself.

After "Special Rules", we get "Advanced Rules", which are actually just ammunition/reloading and zero-g combat.  So ammunition tracking is still here, it's just optional.  Zero-g combat looks broadly similar to Snapshot's.  I do like that you can injure yourself by running into things while moving in zero-g.  I find it a bit odd that you can't make melee attacks while using a hand-hold?  I feel like "hand-hold in one hand, cutlass in the other" isn't deeply unreasonable?

Finally, on page 23, "Integrating with Traveller", which has a couple of interesting bits in it.  There's a note about changing the ground scale to meters "if using this system for outdoor battles".  The "melee value" on the counters is derived from the Brawling skill and no mention of Blades is made.  There are some bits about higher-range and higher-rate-of-fire weapons like VRF gauss guns, which I don't remember being in CT Book 1.  And then finally at the end, "Morale and leadership bonuses...  are generated as specified in Traveller Book 4, Mercenary."  Which might also be where the gauss guns came in, and provides a good reason to want a combat system aimed primarily at handling high-powered weapons against combat armor and battle dress.

Classic Traveller: Snapshot

The recent transfer of Traveller to Mongoose caused me to finally get off my butt and get a CD order to Far Future Enterprises in for pdfs of a whole bunch of Classic Traveller materials.  Mongoose's FAQ said that FFE would continue selling CDs but hey, the future is a big place and things can change.

I was particularly curious to get a look at some of the "alternate combat system" CT boardgames like Mayday and Snapshot.  I have heard that Warhammer 40k has some roots in early Traveller material (Games Workshop had the license to publish Traveller in the UK in the early 80s; I don't think it's a coincidence that the Imperium of Man looks a bit like the Third Imperium with the madness dial turned up to 11), and when I heard that Snapshot is a game of close-combat boarding actions using action points, well, I couldn't help but think of Space Hulk and was very curious to see if there were any resemblance.  I think there's some GW Traveller material on the Apocrypha 2 disk that I look forward to taking a look at (and even some Judge's Guild Traveller material!)

Anyway, Snapshot.

It's a surprisingly-short rulebook, only 43 pages in pdf including cover material and reference tables.  Two pages of introduction to the premise and die-rolling conventions, five pages of basic rules covering the action economy, facing, and movement, four pages of rules dealing basically with resolving attacks (to-hit and damage, including several sources of circumstantial to-hit modifiers like firing in zero-G), and two and a smidge pages of "special rules" for things like encumbrance, autofire, and darkness.  After that we move basically into scenario setup (including character generation).  So the core of the game is really only about 10 (dense) pages.

This density leads to some brevity, and there are definitely some points that I'm not clear on.  How much damage does it take to breach a wall?  (aha, it's in the section at the end on reading the starship maps)  Are explosion markers purely informational or do they have effects?  What about casualty markers?

The "cover" action is implemented in a very interesting way, where you place a "target" marker to indicate the line of sight that you are covering, and then you can take attacks on enemies crossing your line of sight to the target marker.  But there are some curious edge-cases here too - you can fire on any number of enemies crossing the line (up to your available ammunition), but you can only fire on each enemy once, even if they're eg advancing up the line of fire directly towards you?

Generally I think the action points here are maybe a little too fine-grained.  An average character has 14 action points per turn (the sum of their Dex and End scores)!  That's a lot.  Many actions take fairly large numbers of points - aimed-firing an automatic weapon costs 12, opening a hatch is five, and reloading is a variable amount depending on your ability scores.  It all seems rather fiddly against Space Hulk's single-digit numbers.  On reflection, since Space Hulk came out about a decade later, it makes sense that even if it were descended, we should expect it to be more polished.

On the other hand, with 15-second rounds, 14 action points per round means that an action point is about one second for an average person.  Which is an interesting concrete point of reference.

The initiative / action order system is also a bit curious.  The character with the fewest action points goes first, but any character with a higher action-point total can pre-empt them and take their turn before any character with a lower action-point total.  I think this is roughly morally-equivalent to Domains at War's strategic initiative, where characters with high initiative act first but can delay down to an initiative count equal to -1 * their initiative score.  But framing it as pre-emption rather than delay is an interesting choice; the order starts out inverted.

This action-point-economy and initiative system seem like the main changes over stock Classic Traveller combat (well, that and putting it on squares instead of loose range bands).  Damage is largely the same as in CT (damage to ability scores) and there are big tables of weapon-vs-armor and weapon by range band to-hit DMs.  It's possible that there are subtle differences here from CT's tables but I am unlikely to find them or to appreciate their full effects.

Moving on to character generation, there's a one-page simplified chargen system which deals purely with combat skills (randomly-rolled on one of two chosen tables, naturally) and physical ability scores.  It's actually rather neat to see generation of broadly-Traveller-compatible characters boiled down this far.  There are also very cursory rules for stats for animals who have gotten loose in the hold or who are the pets of crewmen.

Four scenarios are presented in some details over a couple pages, plus short sketches for a few more.  I don't envy the player who has to go up against pirates in combat armor with some deckhands with shotguns and pistols.

There were a couple of omissions here that surprised me.  Sneaking is an action you can take that inflicts a to-hit DM on fire against you, but there doesn't appear to be any hidden information here (besides "are these guys in combat armor pirates we should fight or actually customs agents like they say?") even though I could certainly see some interesting gameplay arising from information asymmetries between eg a crew with a guy watching cameras from the cockpit and a bunch of boarders who don't know the layout.  There's also no psychology; no morale, no panic, no hesitation.  It's an interesting contrast with the finely-detailed timekeeping; the characters may fumble to pick up a weapon off of the floor or whiff a shot, but they never hesitate to turn a corner into gunfire.  It's also particularly strange with the animals rules; they're played much the same as humans with different stats and have no instinctive behavior like fleeing / recoiling from gunfire.

(Fun fact: Alien came out the same year as Snapshot.  Coincidence?)

So, conclusions.  Would I use these rules as written?  Probably not; dealing with two-digit AP totals per round sounds like a tough sell.  It's an interesting idea though, and I'm told that Azhanti High Lightning is also a CT boarding combat game and improves on Snapshot, so maybe I'll read that next.  Also, is Space Hulk a knock-off of Snapshot?  No - if it is descended, it has definitely sanded down many rough edges and added significant innovations (like the hidden information of blips, board segments used to define flamer area of effect, and weapons and actions rosters cut down to the essentials).

Quantity Begets Quality - 15 Room Dungeons?

Last post's discussion of quantity begetting quality and Dungeon23 got me thinking about dungeon levels.  I've been noodling around with the theory of gauntlet dungeons for checks calendar almost three years (2021 - map generation and wandering lairs.  2022 - disruptive+fodder encounter design.  2023 - thinking about blockers), and I still haven't overcome inertia, because I want what I make to be good.  But this "quantity begets quality" argument suggests that this may be entirely the wrong approach - I should try making lots of potentially-crappy dungeon levels that challenge things and see what sticks.

If one were to approach challenge dungeon construction through the lens of continuous habit, the question becomes "what's a reasonable self-contained minimal unit that I could make a habit of producing, such that I could produce them in quantity?"

I think for a challenge dungeon, it's probably small dungeon levels, not just individual rooms.  A while back I picked up the Mausolean Maze of Mondulac the Mad.  It's an interesting product but I never reviewed it properly.  It's a collection of stocked, tileable geomorphs with a "hedge maze full of undead" theme.  I like its statement of "good vanilla" as an ideal for published products.  I think it has a couple problems though.  The author adopted the constraint that the level map and key much fit on a single pair of facing pages, which forces small maps and short keys.  The most keyed items in any single geomorph is 10, and there are very few (if any) empty rooms.  It just feels very dense, and there are only a couple of 'morphs that support 1st-level characters.  If you stumble in at 1st and actually do random selection when you move from one to the next as suggested, it's going to be a very rough time.

Tileable / composable small levels as a minimum unit is a pretty promising idea.  And in "challenge dungeon" philosophy, each one can challenge one or two tactics.  For a "dungeon dimensions" or "mad wizard did it" funhouse dungeon, tiling in euclidean space is also not required for composability.  Portals and teleporters solve many problems.

So what is the right size?  I think it might be about 15 rooms.  Using B/X's or ACKS' stocking tables, this gets you something like 5 empty rooms (one with treasure), 5 monster rooms (likely one lair), 2-3 traps (one with treasure), and 2-3 specials.  This seems like about the minimum amount of stuff to get a proper stand-alone "OSR dungeoneering experience".  It's enough rooms that it could conceivably be jayquayed, there's enough monsters to maybe pick up some allies against the lair (light faction play), there's likely to be nonzero treasure from the number of empties and traps and maybe the lair.  Sufficient empty rooms to rest in, route through, or mistakenly search for traps.  If you're tiling these, they could easily each be "a lair and its sphere of influence / territory".  Obviously these ratios are a starting point and all parameters are subject to mutation and selection, but it seems about right.

I wonder if such a format is an answer to the Five Room Dungeon meme, which is too small for much jayquaying and usually run very railroady, often quantum-ogre-y, with little interest in player agency...

As for the cadence...  I could definitely see doing a 15-room dungeon level per week.  Spend a night on the concept and encounter table, a night on the map.  The 5 empty rooms are easy, just need a little dressing.  That leaves you with 10 rooms to stock in 5 days, so about two rooms a night, some of which are likely to be pretty trivial.  And if you actually managed a tiny dungeon per week minus sickness/vacation, you're looking at 50 levels a year.  If you take the best 10 of them and glue them together, you've got a 150-room "kilodungeon".  And if your players decide to hare off in some other direction, you've got plenty of "b-sides" material ready to go...

One interesting question that perhaps my old prep logs would answer is - if you're running a game concurrently with trying to do this, would one level a week be enough that you could actually "throw away" a good percentage of it?  If your players burn through 15 rooms a week, and you prep 15 rooms a week, you aren't accumulating any slack for bad experiments.  Maybe this is where the megadungeon comes into play; restocking old areas that players retread frequently might be less work than coming up with new ideas, and the pace of exploration of new areas slows as distances from the entrance increase, so your ability to accumulate a buffer increases over time?

From the logs, it looks like the most new rooms they explored in one session was eight  during the first session, and that tapered down a bit for a while as they went back and forth with a lair, and then picked up again and stabilized around five new rooms per session.  So maybe 15 rooms per week is actually enough to build up a decent lead.  On the other hand, the Dungeon23 approach of one room a day would barely have kept ahead of my old players, provided that the rate of exploration didn't drop off again.

As for actual size of a tile...  I think 16x16 is probably plenty.  Given 15 rooms or so, if the typical size is 30x30, that uses 135 of the 256 squares in a 16x16 block.  So that leaves us with plenty of space for big rooms, long hallways, secrets, etc.  And room to deviate up from 15 rooms, I suppose.  12x12 would be adequate if we were willing to commit to minimal space between rooms.  14x14 might be ideal but it's just such a weird gross number, whereas 256 is pleasingly round.  If I decide I have the wrong tilesize, oh well.  Putting little shim-zones with boring hallways in between tiles seems pretty viable.

I don't know if I want to commit to creating dungeon levels on a cadence, but at the very least embracing the ethos of "don't wait pontificating for perfection, just make stuff and some of it will be good" and fiddling with making levels is probably something I should start doing.

Traveller: HOSTILE Review

Update: at some point since I wrote this review, HOSTILE was split into two books; one covering rules and one covering setting.  This review is about the original version, which included both setting and rules in a single book but which I don't think is available on DriveThru anymore.  Parts of this review may no longer be correct about the new version.

HOSTILE is a setting book for Cepheus (an OGL clone of Mongoose Traveller 1e) very explicitly inspired by grungy, industrial 80s science fiction movies including Alien, Aliens, Outworld, Silent Running, The Thing, and Blade Runner.  The spaceships are dimly lit with metal grille floors, the aliens are not sentient but definitely carnivorous, space is for working-class heroes crewing 10k dton ships rather than tourists in 200 dton ships, FTL travel makes you go mad if you're not frozen, videophones live on your desk rather than in your pocket, and the corporation is usually hiding something.

This is a pretty darn good setting, and I could absolutely see using it more-or-less as written.  I think it will probably make a lot more sense than Traveller's default setting to many people my age, since it's grounded in media that they've at least heard of.

The good:

•  Advice on design and employment of horrible alien monsters (HOSTILE was sold to me as "HOSTILE answers the question "How to run Aliens when the players know Aliens?" And supports that answer.")
• I like what they've done with technology; no antigrav, no personal energy weapons, limited electronics.  A setting of big hydraulics, treads, slugthrowers, and Newton's Third Law.
  
• The descriptions of the relatively well-settled and hospitable core worlds are quite good and make it clear that "hospitable" is very relative.  "Temperate climate, breathable atmosphere, a friendly biosphere: choose two."
  
• Clever changes to the way jump and maneuver drives work in starship design; maneuver drives use reaction mass, but FTL travel doesn't, so you still end up with a substantial fraction of the ship's volume used for fuel (preserving loose backwards compatibility with other Traveller designs) but FTL plays more "normally" for science fiction.
• I like that the new careers are simple, more like Classic Traveller careers than Mongoose's "three paths and an event table for each career" approach.
• Pretty good production value; chapter heading pages look good, the book as a whole is structured as a corporate new employee manual, mix of black and white art and pictures of modern-day industrial equipment filtered for atmosphere color and with low-hanging celestial bodies in the background.
• More detailed rules for decompression and opening airlocks from the outside.  There's even a diagram of "here's what the exterior panel for an airlock looks like, here is what each button does".
• Putting everything under corporate control and making ships enormous solves Traveller's historical problem of "where is the economic niche for a tiny Far Trader when there are supposedly these bulk cargo lines?" by saying "Well there isn't, but that's OK."

The bad:

• Some editing/proofreading issues.  Many run-on sentences, some of which don't make sense.  Some spelling / word-replacement issues (eg, "if" when clearly "of" was meant), but Zozer is definitely better at using spell-check than Mongoose.
  
• Kind of a steep price-point for a pdf ($20).
• Long (right around 300 pages - about 1.5 times the length of the MgT1e core rulebook) and colorful means that it is not very friendly to printing your own copy from the pdf.
  
• Some oddities in the careers (eg medical career gets Medical skill 1, 2, and 3 at ranks 1, 2, and 3, while no other career get anything like that level of guaranteed skill for promotion).  This isn't really bad (lord knows we had problems getting a competent medic in MgT), but it is a little odd.
• The changes to basic training mean that you get many fewer skills at level 0, which seems very questionable to me.  I could definitely see players used to having a broad range of skills at 0 objecting to this, and I don't think I would disagree with them.  On the other hand, this again works out pretty close to Classic Traveller's level of skills, where you got two skill rolls during your first term, one each term thereafter, and no basic training (whereas in HOSTILE you don't get two rolls in your first term, but most careers give a skill at rank 1).  But I'm not sure the utility of skills in CT and in HOSTILE/Cepheus/MgT is directly comparable; many skills in CT gave you a bonus of greater than +1 per point of skill level, and others seemed like you didn't need to roll them at all.  And many important skills, like Vacc Suit and weapon skills, were easy to get at level 0 in Classic Traveller ("Skills appropriate for level-0 are: air/raft, ATV, forward observer, steward, vacc suit, and
  weapons.", CT Book 1, page 23).
  
• Equipment weights in tenths of a kilogram, breaking with Mongoose 1e's standard where equipment weights were multiples of 0.5 kg (at least in the core rules).
  
• While I'm picking nits about units: in-system travel rates and distances in millions of kilometers, rather than gigameters.  Why would you ever pass up the opportunity to use the word gigameter?
• I could have used a little less setting history.  I'm already on board with the premise, I don't necessarily need all the details of how we got here.  I skipped over some parts of this.
• Felt very concrete, not a whole lot of gaps intended for DMs to fill in in order to produce their own variations on the setting's history (there are plenty of gaps in terms of described planets and suspicious facts about various corporations for DMs to author stuff into, though - there are six subsectors' worth of maps, but only the Core Worlds are described in great detail, with a few rim and frontier worlds getting 1-3 sentence descriptions and most undescribed except for UPP and trade codes)
• The organization of the equipment chapter is pretty odd, with armor coming first and weapons coming last, with all the survival gear and chemicals and robots and android construction rules and vehicles in the middle.  I assume it's alphabetized by sub-heading, which is fine for reference, but it seems like it would be pretty annoying for, say, equipping a new character, where you probably want to start with armor and weapons (the heavy, expensive things that keep you alive), then misc gear, then maybe a vehicle.  In Zozer's defense, MgT 1e's equipment is organized armor, misc gear, weapons, vehicles and robots (but in MgT, it's only ten pages between armor and weapons - HOSTILE has 34 pages between armor and weapons).
• I'm not really clear why the world generation rules (with the "hard science"
  modifiers baked in) were included/duplicated in this book.
  

The missing:

• Thoughts on dealing with replacement characters - if you actually run it as a horrific game, people will occasionally die, and if you follow the advice that horror is made more effective by isolation, where are you to get replacement characters / what are players of dead characters supposed to do?  Playing the monsters only works when there are at least as many monsters as dead players...
  
• Thoughts on agency.  Three models of play are proposed - Work (crew an industrial ship (probably cargo, because then you get around) and deal with things that go wrong), Fight (another bug hunt?), and Explore (gee I wonder what happens if I poke this egg).  Work and Fight are both pretty reactive, and if you're a corporate surveyor, Explore is likely to be too.  Just by the nature of the setting where the corporations own everything in space, it doesn't seem particularly amenable to sandbox play.  This is probably fine but it might have borne more discussion as a difference from how Traveller is often run.
  
• Example in play of the burn / maneuver drive system.  Or just a rewrite of the Starship Operations chapter of MgT updated for the setting's changes to drives.  If there were five fewer pages of setting history and five more on how the new maneuver drive and hyperdrive work in play, instead of having them crammed into the ship construction chapter, I would be much happier.
• I am informed that more detail on how HOSTILE's maneuver and hyperdrives work is present in the Crew Expendable supplement.
  
• Wages / economy?  The Broker skill description mentions "Trade and Commerce rules" but they aren't in here, presumably it's pointing back to the SRD.  Does crewing a ship pay differently than under stock MgT assumptions?  How do you go about making money, and what can you do with it other than buy weapons and survival gear?
• How much of your paycheck does the company take for food and gear?
• How's the health insurance?
  
• It would be kind of fun to have "accumulate a certain amount of money" as a win-condition; "I have enough to retire to one of the core worlds on, I'm getting out of this business.  Just need to survive a few more jumps back to the core and then I can buy me a soy farm and never set foot in space ever again".
• Or a Charlie Company-style 9-month or 1-year contract; "And he was only three weeks away from finishing his contract...  damn shame."
• I recognize that this is all a gamier perspective than HOSTILE's author probably intends, and that mixing horror and fair play is a hard thing.  But this is the Wandering Gamist.
  
• Advancement - if you're a meat popsicle during jump, you don't get those free weeks of training.  It might take a week or two to get to (or from?) a jump point sometimes, but in higher-maneuver ships this will be shorter, so it seems like training time will be rather inconsistent (and may not come in nice one-week chunks, since distance to jump point is rolled).  Any mechanism to make up for that?  Shift training to days instead of weeks?  Or do people just not really run campaigns, and hence advancement isn't something anyone worries about?
• On the other hand, the discussion of horror does suggest having frequent normal sessions only occasionally punctuated by horror, because this contrast makes it more effective.  So I don't think dismissing this campaign-play aspect is consistent.
  
• More deckplans for big industrial ships.  You get one for free in a separate pdf with the main book, but you're probably going to need more for environments for PCs to explore after Something Has Gone Horribly Wrong and they're called in to investigate.  Looking at Zozer's supplements for HOSTILE, it seems like you get about one deckplan per supplement (eg Colonial Freighter for $8.99, Roughnecks has deckplans for a drilling rig, Alien Breeds has floorplans for a colony).  So I sort of wish there were just a "here are all the deckplans from all the supplements" book.

In any case, despite my complaints, this setting does a good job of evoking the feeling that it sets out to evoke, and as stated at the beginning, I could absolutely see running it with few changes to its canon, or mining its ambiance and technology for a less corporate but still grungy setting.

Boot Hill 2e Notes

Following reading Chocolate Hammer's post about his Boot Hill campaign, I felt compelled to go take a look at the Boot Hill ruleset.  Thanks, Wizards, for putting it up on DriveThruRPG as a pdf.

No scale on the big hexmap?  It's a nice looking map, though there are only two settlements on it.  They've left a lot of empty for users to fill on, which was nice of them.  No scale on the map, unfortunate.

These rules are aimed at enjoyment on a plane unusual to wargaming, the individual and personal. Rather than commanding hordes of troops, players typically have but a single figure, their "character".

A rather luminary list of playtesters.

Wow there was an ad for GenCon in here.  In unrelated news, I just realized the Gen in GenCon is probably from Lake Geneva.

The discussion of campaigns emphasizes both having players "on both sides of the law" and that one advantage of having a referee is that players can make secret plans without each others' knowledge.

A single player running multiple characters in a single campaign is permissible as long as they "have little cause to cooperate or conflict with each other".

10 second rounds, 6 foot squares (on the town map).  Hexes on the hex map are 2 miles. The week is suggested as the best unit for campaign timekeeping.

In most instances. players will not find their characters involved in every tabletop action that results in a campaign. This allows non-involved players to assume one-time roles as participant characters in the action being played out, while the involved players take their own character's role - for better or worse.

Stats: speed, shooting accuracy, throwing accuracy, strength, bravery, and experience

Some weird breakpoints in stat generation in the way player characters get bonuses - if you roll a 69 (nice) you get a +10 for being in the 50-70 range and end up with a 79, but if you roll a 71 you only get +5 for being in the 71-90 range and end up with 76.

This experience system is really interesting.  Your experience stat is tracked in terms of the number of gunfights you have participated in (with some reasonable chance of death for yourself) and survived.  When you're rolling a new character, you roll a d% and index it into a table and most starting characters will have been in 0-2 fights before, which probably gives you a small penalty to hit.  But as you participate in gunfights during play, you can move up this table.  It's a very...  tied-to-the-world experience system (diegetic, as the kids would say).  You get better at shooting at people while in danger yourself by...  shooting at people who are shooting at you.

There's also a separate progression system that increases your speed and bravery percentile stats very slightly for each gunfight survived.  The lower they are, the faster they rise, but never more than 3% per combat, and this can never bring a stat above 96%, which is a separate regime for bonuses.  So you can get pretty fast by experience, but the savants are born that way.

You can never actually increase shooting accuracy or strength (toughness).  Maybe the right way to think of the shooting accuracy stat is depth perception and manual dexterity, things that you can't really improve with experience, versus experience and bravery.

Derived stats: first shot determination (sum up the various speed scores and weapon speed factors and see who gets to attack first in the attack phase of the combat round) and hit determination (what you need to roll to hit with a particular weapon, determined by a combination of skill, bravery, and experience)

Movement rules look pretty reasonable.

Facing!  But it's mostly for observation, not for arcs of fire or hit determination I think.

Shotguns and scatterguns seem to affect biiig areas.  "All possible targets in the field of fire will be individually checked to determine whether or not they are hit".  I could see this slowing things down a bit...  but they also fire pretty late in the round, so by that point it might just be mop-up.

OK wow this melee system.  Two tables (punching and grappling) that interact in weird ways.  Each melee round you choose either punch or grapple.  Generally rolling high is good, because it lets you hit, deal damage, and inflict a penalty to the other guy's next action.  Rolling high on grapple lets you put the other guy in a lock and restricts his ability to punch a lot.  Rolling low on grapple gets you kneed in the face for some damage and a bonus on your opponent's next melee roll, on either table.  But if you're in a lock, there are two ways to escape: rolling pretty high on the grappling table, or very low on the grappling table, and it's 2d10 so it's bell-curved.  So if you have a big penalty from getting hit hard last round, that can help you escape a grapple.  Meanwhile on the punching table, rolling low gives your opponent a bonus to their next action but not as big a one as a low roll to initiate a grapple (you've left yourself open, but not put your face right where they can knee you), so if you're burdened with penalties and not grappled, punching is probably a better plan than initiating grapple, because the worst possible outcome is less bad.

Attacking with a melee weapon uses the punching table, except on a hit instead of inflicting small damage and a penalty, you do a wound just like hitting with a gunshot would.  Hits from weapons get assigned randomly to body parts and are either light, serious, or mortal.  Leg injuries slow your movement, arm injuries penalize your shooting aim (but not melee I think?  RAW anyway, it would be a reasonable house rule), head injuries have a 60% chance of being immediately fatal, injuries of most any kind reduce your speed in combat and may make you shoot later in the turn which can mean getting shot again in the interim.

Other things that affect your to-hit target number for shooting: whether you moved (and how fast), whether your target moved (and how fast), multiple shots this turn, shooting from the hip (but this gives you a speed bonus), shooting with a pistol in each hand or with your off-hand, ...  It's a lot of potential modifiers.  They're almost all multiples of 5% though, which...  makes converting this to d20s kind of tempting.

There are also a bunch of modifiers to shooting speed, for things like "you already drew and are aiming at them", "fired at them last round", surprise, drawing multiple weapons, and giving your opponent the first move.  Some of these aren't multiples of 5%, but most of them are.

One thing I'm less clear on is how picking up weapons and other sorts of non-attacking non-movement actions work.  The melee example has a character pick up a chair to use as a weapon and I guess he just...  did it for free?

At this point we've cleared all the Basic Rules and are now on page 12 of 44, Advanced Rules.  Secret and simultaneous movement (I love this), firing in the middle of a move, firing from a moving stagecoach, shooting at targets who are on horseback and maybe hitting the horse, arcing arrows over cover, and morale. 

Optional rules begin on page 13, things like called shots, interleaving shots rather than "first person to shoot shoots three times before anyone else can", stunning, drunkenness, gambling, dynamite (can self-detonate, very exciting), gatling guns, grapeshot cannons, stray bullets hitting bystanders, more campaign rules.  Tracking, how long does it take to assemble a posse, overland speed as a function of horse quality (why wouldn't horses have quality ratings?), aging, healing, cost of living and salaries for doing various jobs.  

Ah, the good old days when you could live on $25 a month, and whiskey was $2 a bottle. 

The tracking table is interesting, it seems like your two options for effectively escaping pursuit are to get into hard / rocky terrain or to get into a large town and blend in.  Makes sense.

The table of NPC stats by job type that Chocolate Hammer programmed a generator for.  Five pages of stats for various historical outlaws, including their bounties and whether they were ambidextrous.

Two tactical scenarios, one a straightforward 4v4 at the OK Corral, the other a double bank robbery pitting prepared robbers against some randomly-generated townsfolk using whatever armament they happen to have on them at the time.

Two campaign scenarios, one more concrete (with a big list of NPCs) and the second more "here are some suggestions for where to set the hex map within the Territories, some ideas for other stuff to put on the hex map, some ideas for stuff to happen, good luck have fun", including this great piece of structure:

The players should be divided into two basic groups - lawmen and out-
laws. There can also be an assortment of prominent citizens - ranchers,
businessmen, and so on...

Players opting to be outlaws start their own gangs by hiring non-player characters and/ or by joining with other player characters of similar bent. None of the player outlaws are wanted by the law at the start of the game. so they are free to travel and act as they please until such time as they break the law...

The objective of outlaw players is to be the first to accumulate $I00,000
and safely escape from the area. The objective of the lawmen players is to be the one who garners the most reward money for capturing outlaws without being killed (all player outlaws must be captured for any lawman to win).

It's a little unclear to me how player outlaws are supposed to afford hiring NPC gang members, given that "Hired Gunfighter" salary is $5/day.  I wonder if you can offer shares instead.

Finally at the very end we have some rules for "how much money is in the safe you just blew up with dynamite" (or was in that stagecoach you robbed, or that train, or that guy's pockets, or so forth) and some terrible looking rules for interoperating with other TSR games including AD&D.

A couple of maps of building interiors and then a reference section of tables and character sheets.

I suppose one other thing that puzzles me here is that they mention even bigger-scale games: "A typical campaign of the designers has each player starting as a property owner and ends with each player trying to gain complete economic and political control of the county."  But I don't see a good way to adjudicate that.  Maybe it's in the supplements?  Or maybe they just had some reference works they liked on the period at their local library and went with numbers from those?

Wolves of God Review

I think I have a new favorite Sine Nomine book.  It seems like it would be a hard game to find players for, but it was entertaining to read and there were some stealable bits.

 

The whisky-taster description: A nose redolent of Beowulf and Maldon.  Some complexity in the body, with Stars Without Number dominant, hints of Pendragon, and a twist of Rome.  ACKSy notes in in the finish.

 

Things I like:

• It's Beowulf: The RPG, plus Christian saints, untrusted wizards, and pocket-dimension dungeons via portals in Roman ruins
  
• Presentation/style is super flavorful
  
• Mechanics of eg feasting, gifting, glory, shame link up nicely with the norms of the Northern European heroic age (contra murderhoboism)
  
• Several ACKSy systems (mortal wounds, domains, mass combat) are present, with lower-resolution / less generality than ACKS', but higher-resolution / more concrete than eg An Echo Resounding's domains and better thought-out than eg 5TD's maiming.  Nice middle grounds here.
  

Things I don't love:

• Expensive ($20), which is why I waited as long as I did to pick it up
  
• Traveller-style skill system with varying target numbers
• I feel like it might be hard to come up with good low-level adventure seeds (high level seems easier, as you have Beowulf and Maldon and norse sagas and Arthurian legend).  There's always dungeoncrawling, but then there's a weird shift from dungeoncrawling to Beowulfing, but that's the same dungeon-to-wilderness shift that a lot of OSR games have so I guess I shouldn't hold that against it.
  

Things that don't bother me overmuch, but that you might dislike:

• Presentation/style
• Christianity
• Talking shit about the Welsh (in character for the nominal author, Brother Cornix)
  

Other things I could see hacking this system into:

• Norse sagas
• Pendragon but simpler and better-organized
  
• The Irish Catalogue
  
• Wolves of Armok: God of Blood 2: Dwarf Fortress: The Tabletoppening

 

And now the wall of text you've all been waiting for.

Wolves of God is a lowish-magic heroic fantasy rules system tied strongly to its setting in Dark Ages England.  The central conceit of the rulebook is that it was written by a monk in 710 AD, and great effort was put into writing style.  I opened the pdf, looked at the table of contents, saw "Cattle Raiding", jumped to that immediately, and here is the first text of the book that I read:

All gamesmen agree that a game cannot be good save that it has guidance for the tasks common to heroes, such as spear-clashing, and cunning deeds of skill, and cattle raiding, and feasting, and all common challenges that they may face.  So it is here that I advise you as to how a GM might rule over a cattle raid.

If this style annoys you, you will probably hate this book.  I find it endearing, mostly, though it does get a little old.  Many paragraphs have one-sentence summaries in plain modern English in the margin, which I imagine would be very helpful in play.

 

Other things I could see people objecting to: Christianity, thralls, and the Welsh matter.  I imagine that both sufficiently-devout Christians and anti-Christians will find something to complain about in the portrayal of Christianity here.  I kind of like it.  It's refreshing for a D&D book to come out and say "the cleric is Christian and the dominant religion in the setting is Christianity" rather than giving an Old Testament spell list to new deities that nobody can remember. This approach has a commendable directness to it.

Putting objections aside, on to content.

Wolves of God has a similar spine, mechanically, to Stars Without Number (possibly its second edition, which I haven't read).  Classes are Warrior, Saint, Galdorman, and Adventurer (which picks two of the other classes and gets some but not all of their stuff.  The handling of partial casting here is good, with adventurers being behind the spellcasters but not wildly far behind in their casting).  Skills are rolled on 2d6 with bonuses from skill level and attribute modifiers.  Starting skills can be rolled randomly based on background or chosen, and you get three if you roll vs two if you choose - I like the incentives that this sets up.  Only Warriors (and partial-Warrior Adventurers) gain escalating to-hit bonus from class; everyone can learn the Spear skill and fight without penalty, but Warriors are going to be the best at it by a good margin by the mid-levels.

The most unusual thing with the classes is that each class has a list of actions which earn it Glory, and a list of actions which earn it Shame.  Glory is basically XP, and Shame subtracts from your Glory total.  Doing dishonorable things prevents you from leveling.  Wolves of God doesn't fuck about with +10% XP for heroic behavior like the ACKS Heroic Fantasy Handbook - if you want to level at all, you must behave heroically (subject to your role within the party; it would be shameful for a saint to kill a man, but shameful for a warrior not to.  So you can cover many of your needs honorably with a broad party, probably).  Adventurers choose some Glory and Shame sources from both of the source classes.

Characters also get wyrds, which remind me a lot of the rule we used to use when we ordered chinese takeout to gaming sessions, that you could use the text from your fortune cookie to influence narrative events.  Wyrds are generated from a table at character creation, and you only get to spend them once in your character's lifetime.  You get two noble wyrds (good things) and one ignoble wyrd (bad fate), which the DM can trigger.  It's a little weird (pardon) that you can avoid death through an ignoble wyrd; I can't tell if the wyrd rules as written would tend to lead to players burning the noble wyrds early to win hard situations at the low levels and then meeting ignoble ends, when one would hope for the opposite.  I guess it would depend on how aggressive the DM is with triggering your ignoble wyrds.

 

Foci are basically feats.  Some of the names are allusions to the text of The Battle of Maldon.  You don't get many of them but they look strong; stuff like ability to ignore scars from near-death wounds, auto-hit weak foes, berserkergang, immunity to surprise, and regaining HP by drinking alcohol (and immunity to penalties from drunkenness, score).  There's a fair bit of "roll twice and take the better" throughout these, and throughout the rules generally.  I don't see a whole lot of other 5e influence; the other main change I notice from SWN 1e that seems more modern is that there are only three saves (Str/Con, Dex/Int, and Wis/Cha) versus the old five or six, but that's hardly 5e specific.  Saves are still roll-over-target-number, starting at 15+ modified by ability scores and improving by 1 per level, which is nice and simple, preserving the typical TSR-D&D behavior at both ends, where low-level characters are fragile and high-level characters are durable.

I don't love that skill checks exist in RPGs at all for noncombat matters, but I guess if you have to have them, a Traveller-like 2d6+small mods system is one of the least objectionable ways.  I do like the skill names and the ones selected for inclusion.

Encumbrance has an interesting distinction between stowed and ready items.  I get the feeling that the baseline amount of stuff you can carry is fairly high (but the amount you can keep ready is fairly low), and then carrying more stuff than that, you lose speed pretty quickly for relatively small increases in stuff carried.  I haven't gone and done all the math though, that's just my first gut impression.  Encumbrance limits do scale fairly tightly with Str and low-Str characters will have trouble, but ability score generation is relatively forgiving (3d6 assign, and if no stat 14+ change any one into 14+) so maybe you just pick something other than Str to put your 3 in.

The most novel thing in combat, I think, is shock damage, where you inflict a small amount of damage even on a miss against some opponents (if their AC is lower than a threshold determined by your weapon).  I'm not sure I get the game design/intent of this mechanic yet.  There are a bunch of ways to mitigate it (some foci, shields, shield walls, total defense).  So I think maybe it's intended mostly to make missing in combat suck less for PCs / let them still put a little chip damage on targets?

The other novel thing is the Snap Attack, which lets you make an attack when it isn't your turn at a big penalty (and sacrifices your action for the round).  I'm not sure what the implications of this rule are.

I like that charge explicitly lets you throw a spear at the end instead of having to make a melee attack.  Not much in the way of special rules for spears, they're just assumed to be the default I guess.

"Creatures much larger than a man suffer double damage from falls, for their great size makes them fall more quickly, as Aristotle has shown us."

The scars / mortal wounds table is mostly -2 or -4 to an ability score (but can't reduce below 3, and generally doesn't have obviously retirement-forcing entries like ACKS' "paralyzed from the waist down").  Some foci or healing spells let you roll twice or swap the dice on the percentile roll or that sort of thing.  This is definitely better than 5TD's wounds table, as it links attribute penalties to clear mechanical penalties in a fair/consistent way, but not as complicated nor as brutal as ACKS'.  You have six rounds to administer aid, which is nice and concrete and wouldn't lead to people conceivably prolonging combats to give their clerics a chance to heal downed people "before end of combat" for the better bonus on the roll in ACKS vs after combat, but does have the downside that you have to keep count.  And you still get between one and two months of bed rest.

Splendor is a mechanic that gives you rerolls based on how valuable your personal possessions are, up to limits based on your character level.  It seems fairly gamey, in that having nice things gives you rerolls on tasks unrelated to those things.

Feasting - you want to be the guest of honor because that gives you a chance at extra Glory, but it also means you have to swear an oath, so it's one of those "each deed led me on to another deed" sort of things.  The treadmill of heroism.

The overland travel rules are interesting, using hours as basically movement points.

Advancement - number of glories to level is a bit subexponential.  I'm not sure how I feel about this, as it means that lower-level characters may have more trouble catching up (but, wyrds should help prevent characters from dying).  Mostly you get points that you can spend on stuff (skills, attribute increases, mastering miracles).

Magic - both galdormen and saints have a pool of mana (sorcery or holiness points) that they spend to cast spells.  Saints can cast from their whole spell list, but have a chance of failure if it's not one of a small set of miracles that they have mastered.  Galdormen know only a small set of spells but have no limit (that I saw) on the max number of spells that they can learn, nor a repertoire that they have to keep prepared once a spell is known.  Spells are divided into minor, major, and great, corresponding sort of to 1st-2nd, 3rd-4th, and 5th+ spells, in terms of when you get access to them.

The individual spells are interestingly balanced; some cost a bunch of points but have quick casting times, some cost no points but have long casting times, some bear extra costs (Divine Intervention costs a level).  Point costs are not really tied to minor/major/great "spell level".

Rebuke the Wicked has a really interesting mechanic, where you pile up future / potential damage on a target, and then when an ally finally hits them it gets discharged / turned into bonus damage.  So you, the saint, aren't hurting somebody, and get to do a saintly thing (rebuking), and then the warrior gets to do his thing (hitting people), but you can contribute a decent amount of damage per round while it's up (provided you have an ally who can hit people).

The galdorman spell list is less Fireball and more Charm Person and Improve Harvest.

Shields are pretty great, providing decent AC at much less expense than armor.  Armor and shield don't stack by direct addition; instead using a shield with armor adds +1 to the armor's AC. 

 

The spear and the sword are king among weapons, and swords are rare and expensive.

Knives and seaxes (long knives / short swords) have better shock damage than other weapons and again, I'm not sure why mechanically (it's fine from a realism perspective, than an unarmored guy is gonna get cut).

70 pages of setting material, mostly around norms and expectations.  Includes random tables of tags for monasteries (minsters) and random monk creation tables.  I never knew I needed a random monk table.

Monsters.  A lot of these have 8-12 HD, which is rather scary in a game where the max character level is 10.  One interesting thing going on here is that monsters can have abilities from particular spheres (eg, "Ylfes commonly have powers of Beguiling, Deceit, Forging, and Wisdom", and then Beguiling, Deceit, Forging, Wisdom, etc each has a random table of 12 abilities).  These power tables mean that you're pretty much never going to fight two creatures of the same type with exactly the same powers, which is very...  mythological.  I dig it.  It's like like giving every monster the same amount of variation that normally only dragons get in OSR D&D.

 

I also like that these monster entries follow a bit of a formula, where the first 1-3 paragraphs tell you what they are and where they're found, and then the last always talks about what they desire and which of the supernatural powers tables they can roll on. 

 

There are, however, no "Number Appearing" entries; suggestions appear for some monsters in Stocking an Arx (dungeon), but not for all.

 

Treasure tables are by source (ranging from "Humble Churl" to "Lost Roman City Treasury"), rather than a numerical or letter type, but still have a pretty typical form other than that (% chance of common trade goods, % chance of valuable trade goods, % chance jewelry, % chance magic items, and an expected total value if you don't want to roll anything).

If you don't have cheese on your treasure table, are you even playing old-school D&D?  (Fear not, cheese is on this treasure table)

Magic items are classified into weapons, elixirs, and relics (everything else, including a scarce few magic armor and shield bits).

Some magic weapons are +0 but with special powers.  About 80% of magic weapons are either +1 or +0.  About 3% of magic weapons are cursed.  Being cursed is independent of magic bonus.

DMing advice: "Thus is the law; if you are neither enjoying your work, nor will you
need it for your very next session, then put down your quill."

Building ruined roman cities (use a large-scale grid, put up to one landmark in each of those squares, have some common features across cities like the forum), building supernatural roman dungeons, exploration rules.

There are a number of interesting changes here from the B/X defaults.  Failure to rest imposes a -4 to hit and -2 to skills, which are bigger than usual but would not be amiss considering the confusion over whether OD&D's penalties where for Chainmail d6 rolls or d20 rolls.  Clarification on different movement speeds (moving cautiously vs switftly through the dungeon vs running), but it's unclear if/how encumbrance speed reduction interacts with exploration movement speeds.  Torches cast light in a bigger radius than oil lamps, but last half as long.  Surprise interacts with movement mode.  Players are expected to map (and one of the penalties of running movement is that you don't get to look at your map as you make it).

Another 20 pages of setting material, this more concrete and gazetteer-style, about the various English kingdoms.

Domain rules - domains are measured in hides of land and the amount of wealth accumulated by the lord (which is like, cattle, grain, and cloth, things churls produce, not gold).  You split your hides between supporting your household (wives, servants, children), supporting warriors (who you can take on adventures or to war) or specialist monks (who can make things that commoners can't) and your commoners, who produce wealth for you.  You get a domain action every season, which you can use to try to attract followers, go raiding, delegate solving a problem that is troubling the domain, try to open up more land for cultivation, etc.

Your warriors will always fight for you and are ready at a moment's notice.  You can also call up the fyrd (all able-bodied free men) for one month a year, but this takes more time, much like raising armies in ACKS but simpler.

Philosophy of domains is explicitly "domains are a source of / reason for adventures".  They're not a win condition that you retire to; you have to deal with random misfortune, and maintaining warriors is expensive (in gifts, in addition to hidage).

I do like that the domain random event table starts with basically a reaction roll with God, where you get a bonus or penalty on 2d6 based on whether you donated a bunch of money to the church or did something odious.

Domain morale across seasons just isn't a thing; if the churls get restless, it's because of a single-season random event (but that might be influenced by your lack of godliness).

Mass combat - this looks a lot like Domains at War: Battles on 8-man unit scale minus zone of control / leadership rules, cavalry, and any detail on archers, plus ten-minute turns, shock damage, and merging shock and morale rolls.  It is interesting that units still suffer shock damage from misses in mass combat.  Maybe the purpose of shock damage is mass combat somehow?

Can units with shields use them to ignore the first instance of shock per round (likewise shieldwalls)?  Not really clear on this.

I'm also not clear on where you get companions vs gesith.  Are companions henchmen, or other PCs, or what?  Companions throughout the text seems to refer mostly to the party; are the 3HD companions mentioned here mostly for NPC lords, while PC companions are heroes?  Ordinarily I would expect something like henchmen or hirelings to make up this unit, but I didn't see anything about non-PC characters going adventuring, which leaves only the gesith who you get by giving them land (and gesith is its own unit type distinct from companion).

The lack of henchmen doesn't play great with some of the heroic themes; I guess Wiglaf was just a gesith?  Though the tiny scale of battles here does do a good job with the second bit mentioned by Ker in his characterization of warfare in the epics.

I do like the Beorhtnoth Memorial Rule, that a companion unit whose lord is slain may make a morale rule to get large offensive bonuses and defensive penalties from morale and grief for the rest of the battle.

The "After the Battle" section is also very similar, structurally, to Domains at War's rules for damaged unit casualties (Battles, page 27).

If you're fighting heathens in mass combat, you can bring a saint for a morale bonus to all your dudes.  Galdormen are not substantially more useful in mass combat than the average churl.

Solid two-page bibliography.

Sadly Brother Cornix did not see fit to include designer's notes at the end like some of the Stars Without Number books have, so I'm going to have to continue puzzling over shock damage.  Maybe it's to encourage people to continue to use shields once they have acquired armor?  But it's not like you're doing much anything else with your off-hand, besides holding a torch maybe; fighters in armor were already going to want to be using the Heavy Shield for the bonus to melee damage.  Hmm...