Thessaly Chance Tracy Needs to Author More Stuff

 Well Thessaly Chance Tracy has finished the third work in what we at the PeryPub figure will be a trilogy. I have to say that I have become quite the fan of her writing since last January when I first started reading her stuff and working to get it published. Thanks to her rather ballsy move to work through us rather than more official T&T channels, I've gotten to think in that game system again as well really delve into the tales contained in the notes from her Hylax campaign. While I still read what's coming out from the T&T industrial complex, I have been doing my own thing long enough that it was getting a little distant to me.

There is loose, yet a strong logic to everything being encountered. Thess has taken some of the tone of the T&T/Monsters! Monsters! that was silly and returned it as a strength to the brand. Not ashamed of pun humor and off-color jokes, she knows how to move the story moving through the characters and encounters listed. The loose format of the rules matrix allows her to explore very non-standard monsters in some details highlighting elements of those rules that are being applied. This is much like many "new" gonzo games, but doesn't shift out of swords and sorcery trappings, well maybe a little steampunk here and there. It just takes more paragraphs by the writer not entire books by entire companies to make it happen.
The tone of each work that I've read stays consistent with its premise enhancing the style of gaming that most delvers, tunnel explorers not dungeon crawlers, like. And that low-brow high fantasy can take on a whole world of its own from adventure to adventure, yet feels like the same campaign.

The one piece I like the best from her isn't even set in her massive Dry Gulch Reservation setting. Her little Halloween piece "Castle Van Hexxen" is one of the better sword-carrying horror crawls I have ever read. You really will feel the gothic horror expressed just as you read through it. I think I am going to make a point to run it this upcoming August through Halloween, that's how much I like it.

So her works are through my publishing company, as said before, but I'd recommend them even if they weren't.

Why is a lot of OSR so Damned Shady?

Okay. Today multiple OSR guys on my FacetuBe feed have either directly asked for money for some amorphous something or another somewhere requiring tens of thousands of dollars to take place or they have sent me phishing attempts. When asked to what the fuck they are saying, I get responses like, "I promise to try to get to the bottom of this scam, so figure out how you can send me money" or "Don't open." When pressed a littler harder, I am hearing that everyone was hacked.

https://photo4.lpc02.com/HtHkcNpk

Is the example of the phishing link that I have to share.

This comes after the Nu TSR folks getting their name splashed across the tabletop RPG news lines with even some diaper bullshit after sending themselves some fake email threats to get the OSR rallying around them at GaryCon- to most likely get up to 40 ppl, out of the 1,900 ppl attending, swinging by their bean-bag and hot cocoa used paperback spot.

Really makes it hard to trust the OSR visionaries if this is their brave, new world of true tabletop gaming.

Every Time At a Table: Bog, Not Desert Planet

 

My setup 

 

1^st Hour- Develop Characters

Characters backgrounds. Some World drops.

Who gets the ship? Define the ship.

Who is the Hacker?

Who is the Spy?

2^nd Hour- Crew Up

Get the PCs together.

3^rd Hour- Catch ‘em

Set-up for session two.

 

The Session

Session 1:

1^st Hour- Develop Characters

Characters backgrounds. Some World drops.

Alezander Daku, Earth-born ACE, the Quick 75
Note: Earth-Born and playing it to the hilt. While a great pilot, he just doesn’t know how to handle love and money, his multi-hued boyfriends are just so damned hot. He is the Captain of the Arcadia.

Nextremi, SHARP “Rad”, the Quick 75
Note: Born on the Proxima Centauri colony of Radamanthus, hence her “Rad” classification. To escape the despotic government of the Dunsany Visionaries, she castaway on the Arcadia after one great party. She has since made herself useful as the ship’s troubleshooter, if not engineer.
She wears a pink jumpsuit emblazoned with a large maroon-colored number 37. She doesn’t comb her hair often.

Uri Keller-Afanti, Native PSYCHIC, the Quick 75
Note: No mere clone or product, Uri was conceived and developed by his progenitors. He is a citizen of Loom (the city above the city in City-Above-City). He’s just a little too sensitive for the cut-throat corporation politics between his Afanti kin and the other Houses. A sex scandal has placed him in the private sector. He’s become co-owner of The Arcadia and is determined to show his worth from there.

Who gets the ship? Define the ship.

Curtis and Jason both rolled the highest and therefore equally own the ship. Alezander is the acknowledged Captain. Uri insisted on Cuniform inscriptions on the outside of ship-- being from Bog and not Earth, Arcadia and Akkadian is the same thing in the PC’s reckoning.

Generic Manatee class ship

The Arcadia

A manatee class ship, designed more for transport than cargo hauling. Its Mechanical Intelligence is Sylvester and has a MENTAL Stat of 42 outside of managing the ships systems.

MASS 6
MAN 31
DEF 37 (31/6)
SPD 11
OFF 8 (A single mirco-flash antenna doubling as a laser cannon)
Efficiency 9
Range 3
Crew 4

Notes: Built for comfort, but also surviving combat dangers through defensive maneuvering more so than speed or impact absorption. When the vessel has to shift it will cause the PCs to lurch about despite its artificial gravity.

2^nd Hour- Crew Up

The PCs were hired by Ivanoa Deater-Keller-Af, LDS Outer Human Resources Afamt Corp, to investigate a helium harvester station orbiting Caesar that has gone off-line. She is actually Uri’s second cousin and throwing him some goodwill from the family.
The base pay for the mission is 1,5oo Zed.
Recovering the platform is 5K Zed upon the station coming online again.
1,ooo Zed for rescue/recovery of technician Norvak Aftam-Doog, nicknamed “Ango Fett.”

3^rd Hour- Catch ‘em

Getting out of Bog’s spaceport Logjam costed money. And then approaching Caesar costed even more moneys because of the Lukriig’s orbital station Aesir required fees, Locating the harvester platform wasn’t hard as it was leaving the helium reservation strata of the gas giant and moving into orbit-breaking vectors.
While getting there, a ship, a manatee-class modified for heavy combat, known as a Long Turtle ship in the jargon of Spacers in this setting, attacked them. Uri convinced a somewhat skeptical ‘Zander to avoid ship-to-ship combat and fly in close enough so that he could psychically attack their antagonists.
Amazing piloting, aside, the psychic attack went south, only affecting the pilot of the Arcadia. Jason rolled a Critical Failure. Still the sleestacks, err um Glorp Blort species 4 (because otherwise it would be copyright infringement), manning the other vessel’s cockpit were scared off.

With more piloting skills, ‘Zander landed the Arcadia onto the Harvester. The crew, armed with a single heavy-powered Pulsar weapon were able to hack their way past the front door…
(to be continued).