Home Forums Sci Fi General Sci-Fi 2 free sci-fi scenarios

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  • #21387
    Avatar photoNathaniel Weber
    Participant

    Hey all—here are 2 sci-fi scenarios that will feature in my upcoming rules. One is a sci-fi boarding action (“What’s a Space Pirate’s Favorite Letter?” and the other is a sci-fi gang war (“Diaz Corner”). You can feel free to download them and use them for your own games. There are notes on the blog for how to convert the scenarios to other rules; please ask away if you need clarification on stuff or have other questions.

    http://thedogsbrush.blogspot.com/2015/04/two-sci-fi-scenarios.html

     

    (Note: These haven’t been playtested yet, so curb stomps/one sided defeats are possible!)

    #21394
    Avatar photoRhoderic
    Member

    Space pirates and gang wars, two excellent themes for sci-fi gaming. I like the idea of a sci-fi ruleset that demonstrates its versatility through the inclusion of scenarios for a whole range of themes and genres. Gets the reader’s creative juices flowing. Any plans to feature photos of the scenarios in action (with miniatures and terrain) as eye candy in the book?

    As an aside, you may know this already, but the “ti”-sound is rather alien to the Japanese language so, though they can spell it in katakana if they have to, I think most Japanese (today) would pronounce the name of the ship as “Chitan-maru”. But, I suppose anything is possible in the far future.

    #21397
    Avatar photoNathaniel Weber
    Participant

    Rhoderic—thanks!  The rules will have plenty of photograph and pictures, though the maps are likely to remain as they are. 🙂

     

    Thanks for the tips about the ship name.  My favorite era of sci-fi, that of the anime/Japanese Corporation inspired 80s, is what I want to evoke with some of the names and geography of my scifi setting.  As an aside, the “Maru” was not intended to suggest that it was a Japanese ship, but perhaps a multinational crew inspired by Japanese naming conventions.  My limited understanding would suggest that “Titan Maru” would mean ship for the Titan corporation, right? Or am I wrong? Thinking of something along the lines of the Maersk-Alabama and what not.

    #21410
    Avatar photoRhoderic
    Member

    My limited understanding would suggest that “Titan Maru” would mean ship for the Titan corporation, right?

    Well, no, not really. “Titan-maru” would just mean “(the) Titan”. The “-maru” doesn’t mean “ship”, but rather “circle”, but in this context it has no real meaning – it’s just added to the end of Japanese merchant ship names out of a tradition of unknown origins. Kind of like a suffix that’s used as a term of endearment, except not really. There’s no suitable Western parallel that I can think of drawing.

    Treating it as a separate word, like in the classic case of the Kobayashi Maru from Star Trek, is an imperfect result of transliteration. It’s really more like a suffix. Putting a -maru at the end of a non-Japanese word is eccentric by today’s standards, but I chose not to comment on that as one could easily imagine different standards being in place 250 years from now, so I don’t see that being a problem.

    Anyway, in a far-future sci-fi setting there’s nothing wrong with the name “Titan-maru” or even “Titan maru” (assuming one accepts the imperfection of transliteration, as it is often accepted, especially by the Japanese themselves who can be frustratingly inconsistent and cavalier with the way they transliterate their language). But it means “(the) Titan”, not “ship of the Titan Corporation”.

    I may be overexplaining some of this and you may know it already, in which case I apologise for potentially sounding patronising.

    EDIT: By the way, I also think 80s style anime is a wonderful flavour of sci-fi.

    #21412
    Avatar photoNathaniel Weber
    Participant

    No offense taken—my knowledge of Japanese naming conventions and language is laughably pedantic (I’ve seen Shogun…thats about the breadth and depth of my knowledge of Japanese.) I had been under the mistaken impression that Maru meant “ship.” I think I will rename it in the fluff to avoid embarrassment!

     

    Mash-up Aliens, Blade Runner, Akira, Black Rain, Neuromancer, and Ghost in the Machine, and add in Vietnam, WWII in the Pacific, the American Revolution, and Afghanistan/Iraq, and then toss in a bit of The Expanse series and a touch of Lovecraft, and you have the inspiration for my game’s setting. I’m not much for the screaming-teenager-in-a-mech aspect of Japanese anime-scifi (and have almost no mecha in my 15mm collection), but I do dig the general aesthetics that that era of sci-fi used.

     

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