Course Corrections for 2025

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." - Archilochus

For many years, it's been our habit to spend the summer in Sicily, and since I retired, that holiday has extended until it's now 5-6 months long. (How do I get around the post-Brexit visa restrictions? Dual citizenship for the win, baby.)

One of my players recently pointed out this means it makes more sense for any change of campaign to occur in October, so we don't leave a game dangling for months on end and forget what we're doing; the logical extension of that is collapsing my traditional reviews of the year just passed (usually posted in December) and the coming year (January) into a single post in October. And here it is for 2025.

New Year's Resolutions 2025

I probably won't do these again, but here's the current status; I suppose I could in theory improve on this position, but it isn't likely this close to year end.

• Failed: No impulse purchases; no campaign reboots; complete two videogame playthroughs.
• Succeeded: Play 300 hours in 100 sessions; at time of writing, 328 hours in 116 sessions. Read 50 books (5 in Italian); so far, 66 and 5 respectively. Boycott organisations I disagree with, as far as is possible, which turns out to be less than I would prefer.

Lessons Learned

Something that has really stood out for me this year is that lessons learned change over time as my circumstances change; what was a good idea a few years ago might be a bad idea now. This year, I have learned:

• Do not confuse what players say in-character with what they think as players. This tripped me up several times this year.
• Do not assume that because a player takes a Hindrance they want it to come up in play. For many years I assumed that PC builds tell me what the players want to see in the game, but it turns out that isn't always true; sometimes they're just setting up a backstory which they don't intend to come into play at the table.
• My table much prefers to get missions from a patron or faction, rather than "boldly plan and execute daring schemes for the acquisition of wealth and power", and that's okay. It reduces their cognitive load. I've stopped fighting this, it's clear I'm not going to change their minds.
• You can't please all the players every session, but so long as everyone (including me) gets to do what they enjoy sometimes, the game as a whole will still work.

Campaigns

Let's divide these into campaigns played in, campaigns run, and solo campaigns. Together, these have averaged about 14 hours of gaming per week, with the lion's share of that - roughly 10 hours per week - being SWADE, and the rest more or less evenly split between FATE and Traveller.

• Played: Over the course of 2025 so far, I've played in four main campaigns; Darrians, Deadlands, Leaves of Chiaroscuro, the Jagermeister Adventure. And a couple of one-shot sessions, but I don't usually count those, fun though they are. Going forward, I'll gradually reduce that to just the Deadlands campaign, as I need the time for other stuff and weekday evenings are getting harder to commit to gaming.
• Run: The Aslan Route, or Savage Traveller. The plan is to keep going with that until the group no longer enjoys it; I've no idea how long that will be, but changing campaigns on a arbitrary date when there is still more juice to be extracted from this one seems less and less attractive.
• Solo: We began with the Arioniad using Savage Traveller, and got gradually more Savage and less Travellerish until changing over to 28 Months Later and the Savage zombie apocalypse. I'm debating where to go next, as motivation is hard to come by at the moment.

As usual, I plan to reduce the number of games and gaming products in active use over the course of the year; SWADE is the most likely to survive, but it needs to be backed up with something that offers a setting and adventure generator. I'm spoiled for choice on those; 5150, All Things Zombie, various versions of Traveller, Tales of Argosa, and the SWADE mini-settings Interstellar Rebels and Sharp Knives and Dark Streets to name but a few. Limiting myself to one or two of them will be tricky, but there is a kind of prize waiting at the end if I do, namely the sort of deep understanding that comes with continued focus.

Either way, I probably won't be able to resist the new and shiny for the whole year, so let's introduce a new category of blog posts: Guest Games, which will occupy the middle ground between one-shot Experiments and full-blown campaigns. Given that, I shouldn't buy any more gaming products, but we all know how that goes, don't we?

Much as I would like to be a hedgehog, I suspect I am really a fox.

Blogs and Whatnot

It's more helpful to think of the various incarnations of my blog not as separate entities, but as different series of a TV show which has changed networks.

Here's the back catalogue, with the highlights as I remember them, through a glass darkly...

• Halfway Station 1. Lost in the mists of time, this was really more of a website than a blog. It was focused mostly on 2300AD, which was my passion at the time, but included a lot of family stuff as well. Late 80s or early 90s I think, hosted by NTL, lost when I changed ISP but it had been on hiatus for a while before that.
• Halfway Station 2. The first proper blog, this was focused on Savage Worlds Deluxe and Beasts & Barbarians for group play, and Two Hour Wargames products for solo campaigns. Hosted by Wordpress, 2008-2018.
• Halfway Station 3.0. At the time, I thought of this as the third act; I was convinced I knew what I was doing and would never need to change again. That was wrong, but the blog did include the best version of the Arioniad to date and the two best group games I've run so far, The Pirates of Drinax and The Dracula Dossier. Hosted by Wordpress, 2018-2024.
• Halfway Station Phase 4. A collection of failed experiments. Hosted by Wordpress, 2024-2025, abandoned partly because none of the campaigns was working for me and partly because I grew weary of Wordpress randomly inserting irrelevant adverts every few paragraphs.
• Halfway Station Season 5. Here we are, the platform is looking good, and the campaigns are improving, although not yet up to the high bar set by Halfway Station 3.0. Hosted by Blogger, 2025 to date.

I thought about changing blog host again, but so far I have managed to restrain myself. I also toyed with the idea of starting a podcast, and even recorded a few sample pieces to prove to myself that it would work; but it turns out to be more effort for me without being more fun, as well as showing that for what I want to do, a YouTube channel would work better - and video editing looks like even more work. There also seems to be some kind of evolutionary pressure at work which leads podcasts and YouTube videos to get steadily longer and more monetised; I've already done this stuff for a living, and that taught me that when it's a job, I don't enjoy it.

Coda

As I come up on the 50th anniversary of my involvement with RPGs, I'm asking myself how I can recapture the joy and wonder they used to spark in me and which have been noticeably lacking so far this year. Perhaps it's like cookery; I've often heard it said the secrets to tasty cuisine are fresh ingredients and simple recipes.

Maybe I am overthinking this and I should - as Ed Teixeira says - "just play the game".

Aslan Route 22.5: Interlude

No game last weekend, which gave me time to think about the campaign situation and how it might logically develop...

As per the Captain's proposals, the Macavity now travels to Tech-World to replenish its missile stock, then spends some months trading around the Sink and Tyokh systems under charter to Clan Iuwoi. The bulk of this work is helping build up the Prince’s new landhold; transferring people and cargo back and forth, installing and calibrating warning buoys and antiship defences to make it clear that Sink is under the Prince’s protection.

The Macavity then undergoes its annual overhaul at Tyokh highport under the auspices of Clan Iuwoi. During this time, three potential lines of inquiry emerge:

Ghosts of Tyokh

While docked at Tyokh Highport, Dr Matauranga notices a young woman who shows up as… special… on the Third Most Valuable Thing’s scarlet lens. She turns to look directly at him in sudden shock, then turns and vanishes into the crowd.

This is me bringing into play a situation which has been lurking in the background of the campaign since the beginning, but which so far the party has had little chance to notice. Of course, they could still ignore it, but that's their call.

Ruins of Drinax

Clan Ahroay’if, which the party delegated handling the Fury to in 1106 Week 11, is taking no chances and has finished the job they started 200 years ago on Drinax, wiping out its fleet and carpet-bombing it from orbit, as well as anything else in the system that looked suspicious. They have also bombed Torpol’s south polar starport to take out the Fury installation there, and are aggressively patrolling the region in search of other facilities. The Fury is broken, at least for now.

Mazun’s handler, Kenneth Prasad, sends him a coded message from Cordan. Torpol is valuable as a strategic location on the Florian Route; it cannot be left in the hands of such a large starfaring clan as the Ahroay’if, but nor can it be left entirely under human control, in case the Fury re-emerges later. Prasad suggests a smaller clan over which the IISS has some covert influence – the Iuwoi – would serve better as a garrison and tasks Mazun with implementing that. This will require the Macavity's crew to persuade the planetary government of Torpol as well as Clans Iuwoi and Ahroay'if that this is a good idea, then transport the initial cadre of Iuwoi warriors there and help them settle in.

(The crew knows the Eye and the Hand of the Ahroay’ifko, and are boon companions of the heir apparent to one of their vassal clans. They could easily arrange a meeting with them.)

Trade Pioneers

Clan Aftei wishes to expand its offworld trade routes and simultaneously give Elehasei's sister Troisei a chance to prove her worth, before they place her in control of a goodly part of the clan's wealth. Troisei has naturally agreed, but on one condition: She wants the clan to charter the Macavity to carry her around, as they are experienced free traders who know the region; they are boon companions of Prince Hteleitoirl, the heir apparent to Clan Iuwoi, allied to the Aftei by marriage; and they also rescued her from the Rea’a Hrilkhir (or, as the Macavity's crew calls it, the Unpronounceable Mafia).

(Quick reminder of Troisei: She's a huge fan of gladiatorial combat, persuasive, reasonable, rigidly honourable, and a stickler for the aslan code; she's also a close friend of a fteirko on Tyokh, a guru of the code who rules on its finer points.)

These missions are neither time-critical nor mutually exclusive, and the campaign thus restarts towards the end of 1106.

28 Months Later: Morgan, Z+28

“Every time you open fire, you are ringing the dinner bell. Make it worth it.” – The Forever Winter

Setup: Mission 2, target defence. Hold bottom left table quarter's centre for 6 turns against enemy waves. Secondary objective: Capture. Retrieve objective from table centre. Search tokens: 3; bizarrely, all are also in the centre of the bottom left table quarter. Even stranger, the initial wave of enemies - 4 zombies - is on top of the search tokens and the primary objective. You couldn't make this stuff up. However, I roll a 6 for hero deployment so can choose which corner they're in; let's go bottom left and get into it - I can deploy them anywhere within 6" of the corner and put them as two pairs.

City Outskirts, Z+28

The Old Man has sent them back into the city to commandeer supplies from a medical team and recover any medical personnel still alive. Morgan mentally translates this as "loot the drugs and enslave the doctors", but he's keeping that viewpoint to himself. Times are hard, and the unit is over 50% casualties and barely holding together. Decent medical care would go a long way towards keeping it intact.

Setup

Morgan leads the team forward, stacking up outside the door into the building where he expects to find the medics. The zeds move up into the inside corner; the blood in the medical supplies is attracting them. Morgan has a dentist's mirror out and uses it to see them through the door's window.

End of turn 1

Morgan has a cunning plan: Leaving Campbell to lay down fire across the doorway if anything comes out, he will move right in front of it and shoot the zeds through the door. Unfortunately, the zeds move before he does and the one that can see him barges out, engaging him in melee; however, it fumbles its attack and gets stuck in the doorway, clawing at him ineffectually as he steps back and shoots, his short, controlled burst dropping it and the one behind it. Allen and Baker close up to cover the building's two doors.

End of turn 2.

Campbell steps into the building to clear it, and manages to miss with all three shots in the burst. Morgan and Allen are On Hold and when the zeds rush Campbell, both of them are gunned down. Luck is against them though, and the gunfire attracts a pair of gangers who also want the supplies; they run up, brandishing pistols.

End of turn 3.

Both gangers shoot at Allen, but neither is very skilled and they both miss. The zombies are all dead (again). Allen returns fire, shaking one of his opponents and missing the other entirely; Morgan and Baker both join in, and it's hard to tell who shot whom, but the gangers are all bleeding out on the ground and you can't get fairer than that. Alas, all this shooting brings three more gangers running from the northeast, and these ones have SMGs. The soldiers can't see them yet, though. Campbell, blissfully unaware of these new foes, moves up to the loot and starts rummaging, though all he finds are empty boxes.

End of turn 4.

The gangers run towards the gunfire and catch a glimpse of Baker; the leader shoots at him, killing him outright. Morgan and Allen take cover inside the building with Campbell. Morgan smashes out the window to the other door and lies in wait for the new threat, while Allen and Campbell search through the supply boxes, finding another empty box and a first aid kit.

End of turn 5.

Morgan continues to watch for threats while Allen and Campbell secure their primary objective, and start preparing it for removal. (They are now on turn three of six as someone has been within 3" of it for a while.) The gangers move into the building with the secondary objective - a surviving doctor, hiding from the zombies his former colleagues have become - and take him captive. 

End of turn 6.

Both sides are holed up in their respective buildings, and nothing interferes with prepping the supplies for removal. A lone zombie wanders up and takes up residence near Morgan's building. Allen and Campbell are packing the supplies out, and Morgan can't see any hostiles, so he moves over to check on Baker; dead. Allen's route takes him past the lurking zed, which slashes at him, and the two soldiers gun it down. On hearing the gunfire, the gangers emerge and shoot at Morgan, grazing him twice.

End of turn 10.

The gangers continue to hose down the spot where Morgan is, and he responds by dropping prone and returning fire, killing them both. The surviving thug hustles the doctor away. Allen and Campbell shoot their zombie before it can act, and make for the exit point.

End of turn 11; game ends at end of turn 12.

Once it's clear no-one will follow, Morgan stands up and jogs after his men.

GM Notes

The full GFSQ mission rules again, but on a smaller board - 24" x 24", a common size for Loke Battlemats; I was expecting that to make the game shorter, but it didn't. A 4d6 roll of 14 moves us 14 days forward, to Z+28.

A minor addition to the GFSQ rules here; the alert level is increased by one each time someone opens fire.

I enjoyed the game, although it was only a partial success for Morgan and Soaking all the Wounds left him out of Bennies; never mind, they'll refresh next time. The GFSQ AI is surprisingly good considering how simple it is.

I don't usually show the screenshots I take at the end of each turn, but this time I did; what do you think - is it helpful, or does it make the post too long?

Credits: Rules - SWADE, Grimdark Future Star Quest, ATZ Risks & Rewards Deck. Map - Loke Battlemats. Tokens - Fiery Dragon.

Aslan Route 22: Limpets

“When your least worst option is sneaking up on a pirate ship in SCUBA gear with improvised limpet mines you know it’s bad.” – Captain Mazun Ashran

Sink, 1106 Week 29

Sink D665220-5 Lo Ga Lt GG

The PCs know they have only a few hours before the Meatgrinder surfaces to recover its shore parties, and after much discussion they decide they have three viable options:

1. Hide the Macavity nearby, wait for the pirate ship to emerge, then blast it with everything they have and hope for the best. The Meatgrinder is bigger, tougher, and more heavily armed, so this is not likely to go well.
2. Pretend that Rex has captured the rest of the crew and wants to hand them over in exchange for a chance to join the Meatgrinder’s crew. Once aboard the ship, Rex guns everyone down with his lasers. The Meatgrinder’s crew, even with shore parties missing, will outnumber them two to one and they are mostly male aslan. Also, given how Rex cut down his old shipmate earlier, they’re not convinced he wouldn't go through with the deal.
3. Improvise SCUBA gear from their spacesuits and limpet mines from their missile loadout, swim down to the Meatgrinder, stick the mines to it, swim away and set them all off at once. Given how tough the pirate ship is, they’re not too confident about this one either, but it looks like the best option of the bunch. Even Vila prefers it to the other approaches.

It’s tempting to involve the Prince, but he is a stickler for honour, and none of these options is entirely honourable from an aslan viewpoint, so they decide against that.

Dr Matauranga wonders whether the Abbot can provide any assistance; the Macavity is currently at the starport, close to the monastery, so the others decide they have nothing to lose by letting the Doctor talk to the Abbot and send him off to do that while Vila works on unshipping and converting missile warheads.

Unknown to the rest of them, thanks to the Third Most Valuable Thing, Dr Matauranga can now see Things Man Was Not Meant To Know and it is disturbingly enthusiastic about him talking to the Abbot. Dr Matauranga has worked out that the Things in the Swamp should be able to possess living humans – after all, they do it with the Abbot – and is curious about what that would feel like. He briefs the Abbot and asks for help, noting that he is willing to be possessed on a temporary basis. The Abbot allows that a “consultant” could be provided from the swamp, and enquires what skillset would be most appropriate? Dr Matauranga naturally wants an expert on Ancient technology, but on reflection decides he can always come back for one of those later, and a tactician is probably more helpful right now. And so the deal is made with the swamp and its avatar in the monastery.

Shortly, the good Doctor returns. He seems to be having trouble walking, and is bobbing his head around like a chicken. He starts saying something strange, but catches himself.

Mazun opines that clearly the Abbot has provided a consultant who will give advice over the Doctor’s new headset, which is obviously some sort of communication device. Matauranga doesn’t contradict him.

With tactical advice from the Doctor’s skullmate and Vila spoofing the pirate’s sensors, Mazun flies the Macavity nap-of-Earth to the shoreline and everyone piles out in their improvised SCUBA gear, carrying hastily-dismounted high explosive warheads into the surf. What could possibly go wrong?

Much to everyone’s surprise, nothing. The mines are delivered safely, emplaced stealthily, and triggered remotely without mishap. The Meatgrinder shrugs off five of the six explosions, but the last one does serious damage to the drives, and rather than risk losing his ship, Irontooth lifts for orbit and jumps out as soon as he can. Not exactly the most honourable response, but then he is an outcast and a pirate.

The crew are discussing their next move when Dr Matauranga jerks his head suddenly and asks: “Who is senior here? Who will brief me?”

GM Notes

This would gave been a good place to end the campaign; the party has saved the Prince's life and honour, ensured his wedding went off without a scandal, and helped him set up the landhold and defend it against threats both overt and sneaky. We could keep on doing that, but I think it would get boring quite quickly, so I asked the players what they want to do, and they want to press on with the campaign as they're invested in their characters.

Mazun's player suggested that the Macavity should fast forward through a few months of uneventful trading before exploring either the periphery of the situation around Drinax, or the Third Most Valuable Thing, and both of those sound reasonable; there were no objections. Rex's player suggested that given my planned movements over the next few years - spending the summer in Italy, and the winter in the UK - it would be more practical for us to switch campaigns in October rather than January, and that also sounds like a good idea. It pushes back the planned start date for the proposed Savage Dune campaign, Fall of the Imperium; but there's no particular reason that has to start next January, or indeed at all; and I'm sure I could think of a way to transfer the Macavity and her crew to Islands in the Rift rather than start a new party for that. Anyway, the consensus is to stick with this campaign as long as we all enjoy it. 

There's no game next week, which gives me a little time to figure out the details. My first instinct was to log in to DriveThruRPG and look for suitable adventures, but running the last couple of sessions using the Mythic GM Emulator has been just as much fun with less prep time, so let's see how far we can push that.

28 Months Later: Morgan, Z+14

“Word of advice,” the Colonel said from the other side. “Don’t tease the zombies.” - Peter Watts, Echopraxia

City Outskirts, Z+14

The rumour around the base is that there are zombies everywhere and it's only a matter of time before martial law is declared. Certainly the base has been fortified, all leave is cancelled, and Morgan and crew have been tasked to deliver supplies to the checkpoints that were set up a day or so before to contain the civilian population.

Allen is driving, and pulls the land rover over at the edge of a cluster of buildings.

"Satnav says we're here," he says. Morgan, who has been following their progress on a paper map, says: "Well, we're not. No checkpoint," he gestures out of the window at the lack of their destination. "I reckon we want the next street south."

"Hardly worth moving the rover for that."

"If you think that, you can carry the crate." Allen decides the crate is too heavy for that and manoeuvres the rover towards the next street.

"Movement," calls Morgan, as something catches his eye over a low wall. Before he can react two zombies have hurled themselves at the rover, and in his haste to wind up the window Allen crashes the rover into one of them, stalling the engine. Morgan, Campbell and Baker bail out and open fire on the zeds, each cutting one down.

"Mind where you're pointing that thing!" Allen yells from inside the vehicle; Baker's bullets missed him by inches.

End of turn 2; heroes 2, zeds 0.

"It won't start," Allen says.

"Keep trying," Morgan orders. "Baker, Campbell - pick up that crate and follow me."

"Why do we have to carry the crate?"

"Because I've got the stripes, and I say so. Get to it." Grumbling, they heave the crate out of the back of the rover and follow Morgan towards the delivery point. Out of their line of sight, three gangers enter the block, drawn by the sound of gunfire; as they move forward, they find a first aid kit left behind by someone.

End of turn 8; approaching gangers.

It takes Morgan and his troopers less than a minute to hoof their crate to the delivery point, but there is no-one there to receive it.

"Where is everybody?" Baker asks.

"That's... a lot of blood," Campbell says. "You think the zombies got them?"

"Maybe they were those zombies we ran into," Baker suggests. Morgan shrugs.

"All right, there's nobody here, let's move on to the second checkpoint. They can have double rations."

As they turn and start making their way back out of the building, Campbell and Morgan see movement out of the corners of their eyes, but too late; the lead ganger plugs Morgan with a large-calibre pistol; luckily it's just a graze, and Morgan retaliates with a short burst from his assault rifle, dropping him immediately, obviously dead. While his men take cover by the wall, Morgan steps out into the street and fires at the surviving gangers, taking them all out.

End of turn 10; heroes 3, gangers 0.

As he moves cautiously to check out the fallen gangers, and Baker and Campbell slog up behind with the crate, two soldiers emerge from the building where the second checkpoint was set up, and wave Morgan's team over to join them.

In the distance, they hear the sound of the land rover coughing into life.

End of turn 11; friendlies.

At this point I call the game, as there's nothing to stop Morgan & Co. completing their delivery, and I decide to ignore the secondary objectives and search tokens. Again, strictly the soldiers should have been enemies, but that doesn't make sense in context, so I rule they are friendlies.

GM Notes

All Things Zombie, which is my touchstone for survival horror, operates on a drumbeat of two sessions per game month, so I decided that Morgan's adventures should be 4d6 days apart. I rolled 13, so we're now at Z+14.

The setup, using Grimdark Future Star Quest: Primary objective = Delivery, secondary objective = Capture, 5 search tokens. The top left table quarter, where the heroes enter, has two search tokens; the top right, one search token; bottom left, one search token, one delivery token, and the initial wave of sentries (two zombies, drawn from the ATZ R&R Deck), and the bottom right, one delivery and one search token.

I blew up the 24" square town battlemat to the recommended 48" square, and found that made the game too long, as the objectives and waves of enemies can be quite far apart; so next time we'll stick to 24" on a side - one thing I've learned over the years is that most games don't break if you shrink the "table", they just speed up. The scenario generator and NPC AI are still working pretty well, but the campaign duration looks somewhat arbitrary, and the secondary objectives and search tokens slow things down even further; I'll probably ignore those going forward. The ATZ R&R Deck did sterling service as it always does; it can stay. SWADE worked as well as it usually does, although Our Heroes drew a lot of really poor initiative cards.

Credits: Rules - SWADE, Grimdark Future Star Quest, All Things Zombie Risks and Rewards Deck. Map: Loke Battlemats, expanded from 24" square to 48". Character tokens: Fiery Dragon.

Review: Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine Quickstart

In my earlier review of BRP, I posited the need for a basic Basic Role-Playing, and several people have pointed out to me that this already exists and I should look at it. So here we are.

In a Nutshell: The latest incarnation of Basic Roleplaying in a 50 page free quickstart edition. Generic RPG by Chaosium with a d100 roll-under system, free to download here; this is the core game engine for BRP, RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu and others. Full colour on every page, copious adverts for other products, but I don't begrudge them that; it's what quickstarts are for.

Contents

• Introduction (3 pages): The usual; what an RPG is, how it works, what players and GMs do, what you need to play, how the dice work.
• Characters (11 pages): Seven characteristics, choose or roll a die to select a set of values; select a profession, and increase nine skills from their basic levels, three by 50% and six by 25%, and add 10% to a skill of your choice for each point of Intelligence you have. Then calculate derived characteristics such as move, hit points, damage bonus, power points. There are a dozen professions in the quickstart, and around 50 skills, not counting specialties. Gear is basically whatever sounds reasonable for a person of that profession. There's an example PC, an SF bounty hunter. There are only the barest hints for non-human races (in the adventures chapter), but that wouldn't be an issue for me as I rarely use them anyway. This section also includes the character sheet.
• System (4 pages): This covers skill and characteristic rolls in more detail; the basics are that to succeed, you roll your skill level or less, 5x a characteristic score or less, or roll on the resistance table, which essentially adjusts characteristic rolls depending on an opposing characteristic. Nothing about character improvement; that's disappointing, they could've explained it in the space it takes to point you at the free download.
• Time (2 pages): Turns, combat rounds, skill check times; how long each takes.
• Combat (5 pages): The combat round consists of preparation (used to be called statements of intent, everyone says what they want to do), social (talk your way out of it), ranged (ranged attacks and long-reach weapons), movement, and close (melee attacks). This is different from the sequence in previous editions, adding the social phase and pulling ranged attacks forward before movement. Actions are resolved in descending order of Dexterity and/or weapon length. Attacks may be parried or dodged once the attack roll has succeeded. This chapter also details armour, shields, weapons, damage, and healing.
• Spot Rules (5 pages): A selection of tules for things which don't come up that often; ambush, backstab, cover, darkness, disarming, grappling and whatnot. This chapter also has a combat example.
• Adventures (12 pages): A prison break in 1620s France, surviving a transport crash on a colony world, looting treasure from a lost temple. Each has pregenerated PCs, opponents, tips for the GM, and a map.

What I Liked

• As I wished for, it is much smaller than BRP, and yet more or less complete unto itself.
• No hit locations or hit points by location.
• The adventures demonstrated to me that you can make a PC with only 10 or so skills and a short statblock; you don't need a two-page character sheet and dozens of skills.

What I Didn't Like

• Still too many skills and specialties for my liking.
• How skill improvement works isn't mentioned. Shrink the picture on page 20 a bit and you could fit it in.
• Rolling to parry or dodge, which I dislike as characters fairly quickly get to the point where you spend most of every combat whiffing, slowing things down.

What I Think

My objective with free quickstarts is to be able to run a campaign with nothing else, although I accept publishers have to make a living and are under no obligation to help me do that; I could almost do that with this one, although the lack of rules for skill improvement and magic/psionics would need some additions scribbled in the margins.

This is much more to my taste than the larger BRP Universal Game Engine; shorter, more obviously simple, more credible as a book that's easy for beginners to pick up. 

However, I can't see it luring me away from my current favourites, the few things I don't like about it are too jarring for me. YMMV of course.

Aslan Route 21: Hroal Irontooth

Previously, on the Aslan Route: The crew of the Macavity are investigating the fate of a small exploration team sent out by the Prince's landhold to check nearby fishing grounds. They are all dead, in suspicious circumstances, and a couple of male aslan captured walking back to the starport may know what happened...

Sink, 1106 Week 29

Sink D665220-5 Lo Ga Lt GG

Having captured both of the unknown male aslan, the party has multiple lines of inquiry to follow; interrogating the captives, finding their ship, talking to the Port Authority, conducting an autopsy on the expedition members, and (related but different) staking a claim on the whole planet on the Prince's behalf by some sort of sign in orbit.

The crew decides to do these things in parallel; Dr Matauranga's investigations reveal the probable course of events, namely that the captives started a gunfight which was interrupted by the sea monster, and once this had been driven off, the intruders dragged all the bodies out to the fishing boat and sank it so that the local wildlife would eat the evidence. Lifting into orbit to deploy marker buoys tagging the whole planet as belonging to the Prince, the crew notice a corsair lurking underwater some way out from the fishing expedition's base; they decide it will be best for everyone if they affect not to have seen it. Interrogating the captives reveals their captain, one Hroal Irontooth, told them to mess up the expedition and then make their way to the starport for pickup.

It turns out that Rex - a former pirate - knows Irontooth personally and is familiar with his ship and crew, so can explain in great detail who they are, how they operate, and what their ship (the Meatgrinder) is like. Rex knows that Irontooth was formerly part of the Htyowao clan - the chief rivals of the Iuwoi clan which the Prince is next in line to rule - and that he has connections with the aslan organised crime ring on Tyokh; Rex opines that Irontooth has probably put a prize crew aboard a captured freighter and is using that to fence his loot and pick up supplies.

Dr Matauranga deduces, correctly, that there must be more than one team messing things up, and that the others are bound for the starport, the landhold, and the monastery.

Descending from orbit, the crew warn the Prince and hand over the prisoners to him, pointing out that they have not behaved honourably. They then move on to the starport, which they find under new management. Rex uses his former acquaintance with one of the pirates to get up close and personal, then the Macavity's crew cuts them down in a hail of lead and laser bolts. 

"It's nothing personal," Rex explains to the smoking bodies.

"They'd do it for you," Mazun reassures him.

Their friend Ahoakhi (the full staff of the Port Authority) is quickly released unharmed, and they decide to don the monk disguises they had made up to infiltrate the facility on Pourne and head for the monastery in the ship's air/raft while Ahoakhi keeps a lookout for the corsair from the Macavity's sensor station.

Meanwhile, Dr Matauranga feels the Third Most Valuable Thing as a presence in his skull. It appears to be changing shape, from its original spiky form to some kind of headset, and thanks to his insatiable curiosity he fails to resist the siren call to put it on. This gives him a glowing red lens over his left eye and an earpiece on his right ear, which he tries to conceal under the hood of his robes; only Vila notices these, and since he suspects the good Doctor is a robot anyway, feels no need to call attention to it. Through the lens, Dr Matauranga can see ghostly forms moving, merging and separating, in the swamp, and when they are ushered in to brief the abbot, he notices the abbot is connected to the swamp by an ethereal cord only he can see. He is not surprised, as the crew already knows the swamp is a hive mind and the abbot is its manifestation in the world of the living.

The abbot thanks them for their warning, but assures them the monastery is easily able to protect itself, although at Vila's suggestion an acolyte closes the doors. The abbot says they would like any bodies the crew is able to donate to the swamp. The crew notes that the monks have an elastic view of death, since they all know they will die eventually, somehow, and then be fed to the swamp to live forever as part of the hive mind.

Counting up the corsair's likely complement, and deducting how many they have already killed, the crew decide that a forewarned landhold can deal with the remaining landing party unless the corsair rocks up and blasts it into oblivion. Their problem, therefore, is to deal with the pirate ship...

To be continued...

GM Notes

I'm currently in a state of considerable demotivation regarding my various campaigns, so I decided I had nothing to lose by going all in on Mythic GM Emulator; if I can get that to work in real time at the table, it potentially eliminates the need for published campaigns going forward. I decided while dozing on the beach over the summer that the two aslan are working for the notorious aslan pirate Hroal Irontooth; he's in The Pirates of Drinax but I remember nothing about him beyond his name, profession, and the name of his ship - Meatgrinder - and can't be bothered to reread the necessary books, so he's a clean slate (and a pirate gang in a corsair is the perfect size for an opposing faction). Rex's backstory established early on that he is an ex-pirate trying to go straight - admittedly, he's not trying very hard - so I allowed him a Common Knowledge roll to know something useful about Hroal. And he rolled 31 on a d6. The others decided Irontooth is a personal hero and Rex has written a biography of him.

I set the chaos factor to 5 and rolled through the session using Mythic to answer questions as they came up, and it worked surprisingly well; by the end of the session Dr Matauranga's player had come up with a complex plot which I immediately merged into what I'd come up with in parallel as we played. The players will do a lot of this work for you, if you let them, and it makes everyone feel good when they turn out to be right.

Chaos factor: Is now 4, as the party did quite well this session.

Plot threads: Irontooth's plot; the Third Most Valuable Thing's desires; Okheai wants the Prince to sheep-dip her thugs back into polite society. (The other threads have either been closed down, delegated to NPCs, or look uninteresting.)

Characters: Clan Iuwoi - Prince Hteleitoril, his wife Elehasei, Ahoakhi the Port Authority; Clan Htyowao, rivals of Iuwoi; Okheai the Alley Cat, mafia boss; Hroal Irontooth and sundry pirates; the abbot; Captain Vipera of the Red Adder. (There are others, but these are the ones we remember unprompted, which means they matter most to the story.)

28 Months Later: Morgan, Z+1

"And this shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the peoples that wage war against Jerusalem: their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths. And on that day a great panic from the Lord shall fall on them, so that each will seize the hand of another, and the hand of the one will be raised against the hand of the other." - Zechariah 14:12-13

City Outskirts, Z+1

"Take three men," the Old Man had said, "And find out why the Laboratory has gone silent." So Morgan had picked his team, and they'd driven out to the Laboratory. The gates and the building within were locked, but he had the entry codes, so that wasn't a problem. The guard was lying face down in the car park as if killed while running from the building, which was. Probably it was nothing more serious than a broken phone line and a drunk guard, and they'd just laugh at him later, but maybe it wasn't, and he'd face laughter over bullets any day. They parked up outside the building and got ready. 

He considered his team mates. Allen was a sneaky S.O.B. and would need to be watched. Baker cultivated an air of mystery, but was probably less interesting than he wanted everyone to think. Campbell was downright cruel, the sort of man who'd probably spent his boyhood pulling the wings off flies. All in all, Morgan thought, he could've drawn better subordinates; but you go to war with the army you have.

Setup

Here I'm experimenting with Grimdark Future Star Quest as a scenario and campaign engine. A campaign has 1d3+1 chapters, followed by a final chapter, and each chapter has 1d3 missions. A few dice rolls tell me this campaign has two normal chapters and a final chapter, which have 1, 1, and 3 missions respectively; short, but should give me enough of a chance to try out the new rules, and there's nothing stopping me running another campaign following on from the first.

Our first mission is Investigation, in which two markers are placed randomly on the table and each must be checked out. Secondary objective is interrogate, so the AI goal is the centre of the table; I deploy 1d3+2 = 3 search markers, but ignore optional challenges, hazards, and random events. I draw a card from the ATZ Risks & Rewards deck and find the first wave is four zombies.

I deliberately pick a small map, as GFSQ looks like sessions will run quite a few turns, and a smaller map generally leads to a shorter game.

Setup: Heroes in top left table quarter, sentries top right.

Turn 1

Initiative: Heroes 5 of Diamonds, AI 4 of Diamonds. The heroes close up on the first objective marker and check it out (Notice roll, success and raise, so I remove the marker); it makes sense this should be the remains of the guard, so everyone gets a Spirit check. The AI sentries can't see the heroes, can't shoot or get into charge range, so run to the AI goal.

Morgan gestures the others to keep watch and kneels by the guard's body, turning it over so his GoPro can capture some footage. The man's throat has been ripped out and something has been eating him. The other soldiers can't help themselves and peer over Morgan's shoulder; Allen loses his composure and his breakfast, in that order. Unfortunately for his ability to sleep at night, Morgan has seen worse.

End of turn 1: Zeds settle in to their destination.

Turns 2-6

Morgan and his team move into the building and up to the reception area seating, where they search the items left behind in what seems to have been a hasty evacuation and discover a briefcase full of cash and a smaller case which proves to contain a loaded medical syringe in a fitted foam layer. 

"Do we need to report this, Corp?" asks Campbell as they open the briefcase. Morgan just points at the GoPro, which is still running.

The zeds are where they want to be, so they stay put.

Meanwhile the alert counter has been ticking up, and at the end of turn 6 another wave of enemies joins the fun. I have to draw multiple times from the R&R Deck to avoid casters and vampires, which I allow to appear in month 2, but eventually get a single soldier with an automatic rifle.

End of turn 6: Our heroes are not the only ones in the building.

Turn 7

Morgan and company move deeper into the building, but soon hear gunfire from the north-east, followed by screams.

The AI movement rules bring the new soldier directly on top of the four zombies, and he opens up on them as soon as he sees them. However, while he destroys one, the other three pile on him in close combat, but fortunately fail to injure him.

End of turn 7: The AI rules drive the NPCs into combat with each other.

Turns 8-10

Morgan's team runs towards the continuing noise, and rounds a corner to see an armed man in a melee with three zombies, greatly outnumbered but holding his own. Morgan maintains his composure at the sight of the undead, but Campbell loses it and runs away past a bemused Allen and Baker.

The hard-pressed human kills one of his assailants, and Morgan - making a quick decision - pumps one round into another, which it ignores. Campbell keeps running back to the team vehicle, while Baker and Allen form up on Morgan.

One zed peels off and charges into melee with Morgan, but with a lucky blow he bashes its head in. The remaining zombie finally lands a solid hit on the lone human, incapacitates him and begins to feast. Morgan and Allen manage to contain themselves, but seeing the zombie eating a man alive is too much for Baker, and he runs away screaming. Campbell, meanwhile, has reached the jeep and the others hear the motor turn over.

The noise attracts a young woman Morgan will eventually learn is called Carolee, who blows the remaining zombie's head off with a well-placed shot from a magnum revolver. She also has a katana on one hip.

"Come with me if you want to live," she says.

End of turn 10: Carolee saves the day.

At this point I call the game, as Morgan can reach and examine the second objective and be halfway out before the next wave of enemies appears, while Allen can get the final Search Objective.

GM Notes

Credits: Rules - SWADE, Grimdark Future Star Quest, All Things Zombie Risks & Rewards Deck. Maps: Loke Battlemats. Tokens: Fiery Dragon. VTT: Roll20.

Well, that was pleasingly chaotic. Strictly Carolee and the lone soldier should have been hostile too, but that didn't seem to fit the fiction of the game so I let them side with the PC against zombies.

The game actually took about 6 hours spread over a couple of days - two hours' play and four hours of interruptions, which would've killed most games, but a solo session in Roll20 is more resilient. The combination of products and rules worked really well together, but I wonder if I'd be better served by All Things Zombie on its own. For further study.

May the real Carolee rest in peace. And Baddawg, too.