Mechanical Horse: The Broken Clockwork World

The Broken Clockwork World is a 10 page PDF that was sold as one of 12 in a 3$ bundle on kick-starter. As such, its a fairly small PDF, and using the world probably requires a little expansion on the part of the GM. 

A big element of the Broken Clockwork world is its steampunk robots. One line in the PDF makes reference to soldiers on mechanical mounts or horses with gas masks. These have caught my imagination, and the image of troop of soldiers on steeds of iron is an awesome one.

Robots as Spaceships: Armor Options

In a previous post, I compared Gurps: Spaceships armor to the very best personal armor in Gurps, and came to the conclusion that spaceship's armor was weak, especially T8 body armor and ultra-tech armors. Since that post, I've participated in a few conversations about spaceships armor in Gurps. I still think that its on average weaker than it should be, but how much weaker depends on the context. Here, rather than advocating a single "one size fits all" armor tweak, I'm going to look at options for getting the sort of armor your game needs. 

• Deflection Boost
• Uncheap Armor
• Simple Armor Facing
• Awesome Future Armor

Alternate Parrying of Heavy Weapons

A while back I was playing out a sample combat to see how some mystically-powered knights fared against the massive beasts their order was founded to combat. And I found myself frustrated with parries. The knight could block essentially any attack, against almost any size of beast he faced. So I've come up with a new parry system. I hope you find it useful.

Pile of Dice for Gurps

I've seen it several times: "How do I simplify rolling a big pile of dice?" Often this is an indication that the rules are being pushed past their limits: should you really be rolling an attack roll for every single one of the 50 goblin archers shooting what amounts to suppressing fire at the gate?

On the other hand, sometimes you really just want to roll 50 dice. or 500. And with a computer, its actually not that hard. You just have to have a simple program that will do it for you. And so I wrote one just for gurps: 

Dice:
Number of Rolls:
Target Number:
Roll Under:

No Rolls Yet

0 out of 0 succeeded

Put in the dice as XdY (You know, that good old standard format). The Target number is the number you need to actually show on the dice: If you have a bunch of soldiers with will 12 rolling at -4 to resist a curse but benefiting from a +1 bonus the heroes procured for them, the target is 9, the number the soldiers actually need to roll. 

If you are using 3d6 and roll under, the tool will count criticals for you, as well as successes. 

I hope you find this tool useful!

How Big is My Medieval City?

Have you ever wondered how big your medieval community should be? As in, how long does it take to circle the walls? How long to run across? How thinly spread are these archers on the walls? I was wanted this for a game the other day, and found a scholarly article on the subject.

We now have an equation, and tables:

Robots as Spaceships: Common Chassis

In spaceships, the certain basic builds come up again and again. This is especially true of robots as spaceships. A lot of robots will want to use the minimal wheeled system, and basic humanoid robots will show up again and again. In this article, we will name these combinations, and list their statistics, so we don't have to specify "1 wheeled drivetrain, 1 power cell, 3 miniaturized armor systems, and a control system" every time we want to talk about the minimum wheeled robot. We'll just say "The wheel bot", and possibly link to this article.

Robots as Spaceships: Flyers

Not all robots are bound to the ground or to the water. Some of them can fly! Here we look at the various options Gurps: Spaceships provides for atmospheric locomotion.  Some options we might want are missing: propeller systems are the most notable. Others we want to adjust the stats on a little, and still others we just want to understand properly. Most of the time we will be adjusting speeds down in the name of modeling real or fictional vehicles: the new lower speed we call "Downshifted".

While this article is part of robots as spaceships, its probably just as useful when building vehicles, and I suspect I'll come back to it more in that context than for robots.