Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > GURPS

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 05-21-2010, 11:46 AM   #11
Frost
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Shropshire, uk
Default Re: [IW] Which Timeline for beginners or Newbies? for a mini-campaign?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Agramer View Post
IMO,TL 3 (knights and stuff) is easiest to play(from amount of rules needed to play)...just melee combat + ranged for bows....

Higher TLs add a lot of complexity with explosions,gadgets...etc

So maybe best way is to start with low TL setting and than slowly move up with TLs as you and your players become more familiar with rules.
I don't think that there is realy that much in it, added to which this approach creates as many problems as it solves. If nothing else it tends to disadvantage higher TL characters, a large minority if not an overwhelming majority of most conventional Infinite Worlds groups, often devaluing their primary skills and placing a greater weight upon peripheral ones.

This is not nessecarly all bad, but in a short campaign it is just going to be frustrating.
Frost is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-21-2010, 12:09 PM   #12
Qoltar
Pike's Pique
 
Qoltar's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio U.S.A.
Default Re: [IW] Which Timeline for beginners or Newbies? for a mini-campaign?

The mini-campaign is going to be 4 to 5 sessions. It all depends how well the players like it and our work schedules.

1st session = Some version of the "sleepout" exercise from page 10 of IW

2nd Session = First mission of theirs as either a SAR team or a scout team.
Thats the one where I need a good, pretty well worked-out timeline from the books.

Then I got two to three sessions to come up with stuff or borrow from other places. (hint, hint)


- Ed Charlton
__________________
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me....


A vote for charity: http://s3.silent-tower.org/TheKlingonVotes/index.html

Last edited by Qoltar; 05-21-2010 at 01:00 PM. Reason: Correcting my Typos - Again!! Oy Vey!
Qoltar is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-21-2010, 12:52 PM   #13
Frost
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Shropshire, uk
Default Re: [IW] Which Timeline for beginners or Newbies? for a mini-campaign?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Qoltar View Post
2nd Session = First mission of theirs as either a SAR team or a scout team.
Thats the one where I need a good, pretrty well worked-out timeline from the books.

Then I got two to three sessions to come up with stuff or borrow from other places. (hint, hint)
Unless you are determined to use Yrth or Merlin-1 neither of which I would recomend for a first mission, especialy in a short campaign, you are probably going to need to try and find the old Alternative Earths writeups (they are about the best you are going to find) or improvise like crazy.

If you use my earlier sugestion you will probably find yourself with two (or three at the outside) choices Dixie (I still can't remember the number) because it has an AE writeup or Reich and to a lesser extent Britanica because they are easy enough to visualise that you could get away with improvising.

From a plot point of view they are good worlds for both a 'shakedown mission' and for the kind of outtime criminal activity or local intregue that may leave traders, researchers and even isolated I-cops needing help.
Frost is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-21-2010, 01:05 PM   #14
Qoltar
Pike's Pique
 
Qoltar's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Cincinnati, Ohio U.S.A.
Default Re: [IW] Which Timeline for beginners or Newbies? for a mini-campaign?

You give good ideas ...

HOWEVER, Yrth and Merlin-1 are right out. They're not even considered at the moment.

Three years ago I ran a BANESTORM mini-campaign, so its too soon to go back to that world for one of my players. (even with the other point of view angle)

Merlin-1?
I don't own the Technomancer book. That would be tricky to run without it.

So, when I asked that earlier question in the thread I probably should have qualified it with : "....excluding timelines that have had their own chapter or book devoted to them".

Maybe that means Johnson's Rome or possibly Gallatin-1 or Dixie.


- Ed Charlton
__________________
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me....


A vote for charity: http://s3.silent-tower.org/TheKlingonVotes/index.html
Qoltar is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-21-2010, 01:22 PM   #15
Sydney
 
Sydney's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Janesville, WI
Default Re: [IW] Which Timeline for beginners or Newbies? for a mini-campaign?

I'm toying with the idea of running one one Nergal (kind of a Hellboy-style game on steroids). Figure it's nice and dark, and there's plenty of space to kill some primitives ;) and/or explore evil temples in search of "magical" artifacts...it's also reachable by Reich-5 and I would think that the Cabal might have some interest in it as well...
Sydney is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-21-2010, 02:25 PM   #16
Frost
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Shropshire, uk
Default Re: [IW] Which Timeline for beginners or Newbies? for a mini-campaign?

At the risk of oversteping the bounds a bit I have a scenario I have used in the past that seems to fit the bill.

A local agent in place in place on a safe world has fallen out of contact. Given no particular reason to assume defection or disertion the task has been assined to SAR who have tasked the team with locating the agent, who has been out of comunication for about a week (or other suitible time period), and rendering assistence if nessecary.

Brief:
1) The agent was tasked with general surveylence duties based in either a local political flash point (think 1960's Berlin) or a centre of a local counter culture (say San Fransisco at the same sort of time).

2) The agent is relitively experienced with a good security veting and a solid legend.

3) There have been no major threats reported in the area.

Given that the agent in place would normaly carry out the initial investigation of this kind of disapearence additional data is a bit thin on the ground. Having said that the team should have the skills they need and will have experience opperating in this kind of society courtesy of the 'Spring Break' excercise.

Complications:
1) There is another agency (choose you favourate local or homeline political or criminal organisation) persuing the agent having failed to suborn or neutralise said agent.

2) The breifing is wrong on a number of levels, the agent went on the lam after the opposition made their move because they were unwilling to call for backup that might expose either their own malpheasence or a minor scandle of another sort (deleate as applicable).

3) As a result of 2) the agent is actively attempting to evade the SAR team.

From here you have something of a legacy to build further adventures on either becoming embroiled in whatever the agent was up to or if the opposition are outtimers drwaing the kind of attention that will rebound on them latter (say during a nice milk run picking up a group of stranded tourists).
Frost is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 05-21-2010, 08:57 PM   #17
quarkstomper
 
quarkstomper's Avatar
 
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: The Enchanted Land-O-Cheese
Default Re: [IW] Which Timeline for beginners or Newbies? for a mini-campaign?

In the IW campaign I ran with my group some years back, the group's NPC commander, who briefed them and sent them out on missions, was a colonel named Abrams who looked a lot like Abraham Lincoln. (At the time, my wife and I lived in an apartment whose manager looked like an older, more grizzled Lincoln). The running gag, of course, was "Is he really...?"

And naturally, the answer was "Yes he is." The players did not find this out until much later, of course, but Colonel Abrams actually was Abraham Lincoln from one of the Dixie parallels. (I forget which number I assigned to it; the current date of the parallel was roughly ten years after the end of the War). He had been captured and imprisoned by the victorious Confederacy at the end of the Civil War, but was rescued/recruited by an impetuous Infinity agent before his scheduled execution. The Colonel, was reticent to talk about his past, and so the players did not know right away that he had a personal stake in one particular mission.

The Colonel told the team that a name has come up in one of the reports filed by Infinity's observer on the Dixie parallel, of a "person of interest". The mission was to locate and extract that person. My players did not at first catch the significance that their target was named Mary Todd. The Colonel was actually skirting regulations, using one of his teams to rescue his wife. (Unfortunately, I can't remember the excuse he gave the team for why she needed to be extracted. Then again, it's possible that my group just didn't think to question that part).

Mary Todd was being held in a mental asylum in Louisiana. She had suffered a severe nervous breakdown following her capture and the disappearance of her husband, and she was now partially a patient and partially a political prisoner. Considering the standards of mental health care in the 1800s, she might have been better off just as a prisoner of war.

The team quickly discovered that Mary Todd was the wife of "The Tyrant" (as Lincoln is known in the CSA), and so had a good amount of security guarding her. Rescuing her was further complicated by the fact that Centrum had planted agents at the asylum and were waiting for them...

(And here my memory is drawing a blank again. I can't remember what Centrum's interest in Mary Todd was. I seem to recall that I intended that Centrum had leaked the information about her as bait for a trap, but in retrospect, I can't see the logic of it. Either I've forgotten what their fiendish plan was, or there was no plan and their appearance was a wacky complication.)

(One wacky complication which you probably wouldn't be able to use is that one of my PC's had Temporal Inertia, and on this mission he first encountered his Centrum analogue, who was quite obsessed with the idea of killing all his duplicates)
quarkstomper is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Tags
infinite worlds

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 03:39 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.