Making my brain boil

 I love it when someone does something with gaming stuff that I have too and it makes me think, HOLY CRAP that's awesome!

Well over at -  http://jrients.blogspot.com/2013/07/fun-with-imirrhos.html

More cool Antares stuff - http://swordsandstitchery.blogspot.com/2011/06/revolt-on-antares-as-science-fantasy.html

There is a WHOLE lot of Awesome in those posts. It inspired me to connect all the stuff I like into my overall universe. Slowly over the years I have been making this happen.

Revolt on Antares is really cool too!  If you don't know it is a TSR mini-game from the mid 80's. This one and SAGA age of Heroes were my favorites. It has bad-ass artwork inside as well. Jeff had a great idea to about enlarging this game and the counters so you could play it like normal sized board game.

 As things strike me, I'll add them for later Brain-boiling action!

Metamorphosis Alpha: Robot enemy for players to get killed by.

 

art by Android Arts

Max 2

Autonomous Supervisory Cargo/Maintenace Robot

Background: Max2's were Robotic managers for general purpose household and repair robots. They could issue commands and concentrate work efforts when and where needed. During the "accident" Max2's artificial intelligence was damaged and now it wants to eliminate all non-robotic life on Deck 13. When encountered it will pursue PC's with intent to kill. Max2 cannot however get other robots except Security types to attack, as it reports all biological life forms as hostile to the central Computer.

If the Max2 is destroyed it will return in a shiny new unit within 2D6 turns. My players ran afoul of Max2 on Deck 13 while scavenging for supplies. It turned into a tense few rounds of cat & mouse as he chased them up and down the aisles of cargo containers. They beat him up pretty good, but not before they suffered greatly from the tractor/repulsor beam & grasping claws! They retreated back through a ventilation conduit from which they initially gained entry.

Max2 is like a robotic Jason Vorhees / Michael Myers type silent stalking killer! And yes he will spin his grasping claws in a circular fashion just like in the "Black Hole" movie!!!

Have fun murderizing your players with Max2. 

Metamorphosis Alpha: Starting a game on a smaller scale.

Valley Forge from Silent Running

So you want to start a Metamorphosis Alpha game but feel overwhelmed by the vastness of the Warden. Scale it back and try a smaller ship. Here we have the Valley Forge from the movie Silent Running which can easily become a host for a small scale MA campaign.

We have six domes that you can use to set up your separate environments, and a nice spaceship part for all your robots and technical weirdness.

A fun exercise is to use the  Wilderness Encounter tables from your Expert D&D rule book or other game of your choice to help create your Domes.

I'm going to use my D&D Expert rules charts on page X57 to create an example couple of Domes for our small-scale Warden.

Let's see, we have ten categories: 1)Clear, Grasslands, 2)Woods, 3)River, 4)Swamp, 5)Barren, Mts, Hills, 6)Desert, 7)Inhabited, 8)City, 9)Ocean, 10)Jungle.

Rolling a D10; I get a - 7 Inhabited. ok, now I will roll again - 4 Swamp.

So Dome 1 is going to be a Swamp environment that is inhabited. Now lets see by what... rolling our d8 we get a 3 for Inhabited - Humanoid, and 8 for Swamp - Dragon!

Dome 1: home to a tribe of mutant humanoids (descendants of crew who became trapped here long ago) that are in a constant battle for survival against mutant-giant alligators "dragons".

Now for Dome 2: we get a 1- Clear ,Grassland & a 5- Barren, Mtns, Hills.

D8 comes up with a 4 -animal for the Clear, Grasslands  & 2-flyer for the Barren, Mtns, Hills.

So I think the Dome 2 environment will be a large nature preserve, like a mini Yosemite National park. I can fill this with all sorts of mutated versions of regular animals etc.

Do this process four more times, adjust or re-roll if you get too many similar results and you are off and running with a mini-warden ready to be explored.

The players can start as members of one of the inhabited domes or crew freshly awakened from cryo-sleep and sent to "fix" a problem in one of the domes by the now Insane or malfunctioning ship's A.I.

Have fun!