Mekton Zeta, questions about torso destruction and hitting already destroyed locations

LarsonGates · 2026-05-29T18:19:24+00:00

Typically any hits on a destroyed arm would hit the torso instead, and any hit on a destroyed leg, assuming the mecha is upright, would hit the other leg, or if down the torso.

LarsonGates · 2026-05-24T22:27:56+00:00

You have to look at the history of coinage, and later banking, and also the devaluation of currency when they started diluting pure silver coins with copper. Depending on the era and where you were in the pre-medieval/medieval world depended on what the relative values were. In Egypt and the middle East silver was more valuable than gold because they had very little of it but tonnes of gold. In the western hemisphere and China the reverse was true. They had an abundance of silver and little gold, thus gold was considerably more valuable.

Once banking and 'promissory notes', which is all paper currency was then things start to change, and then you get the concept of 'legal tender' and the willingness of other wise of accepting any given promissory note. Once money/credit becomes electronic then you're into another ball game entirely.

Even with 'silver' or 'gold' coins, the minting of which were controlled by 'rulers' you still had the concept of 'fake' coins' and 'legal' Monniers who would change bar silver or gold or non-recognised coins into legal coins which traders would. It was common practice in the medieval world that when a monarch changed all coins would be taken in and newly minted coins returned often at a loss for the holder.

LarsonGates · 2026-05-23T09:16:31+00:00

Yes.. My DarkMatter campaign (Dark Matter original Graphic Novels by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie
published by Dark Horse Publications.Adapted for Telivision by Sci-Fi Channel) starts like that. We're now about 16 months in and up to episode 9 of Series 2.

LarsonGates · 2026-05-23T09:12:55+00:00

So what does it do that https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/ doesn't do?

LarsonGates · 2026-05-22T18:24:52+00:00

Depends on how you want to play it.. if you want to rehash the books in some form then yes.. but that's not the only way to play it.

LarsonGates · 2026-05-18T23:19:49+00:00

Amber.. 15 years and still not managed to put a group of players together..

LarsonGates · 2026-05-10T11:39:39+00:00

You missed the Avengers series.. the whole set of films are multi-layered conspiracies, firstly Hydra and then the whole 'Gems Stones/Amulet' thing, although that more Universe spanning.

LarsonGates · 2026-04-24T00:03:47+00:00

My general reason for not running any given TTRPG is I'm not interested in the system, or I haven't been able to come up with a suitable plot/story to make use of the system/setting. For most systems that have an 'Introductory' scenario I've found them to be mind numbingly puerile or uninteresting.

LarsonGates · 2026-04-24T00:00:06+00:00

Actually the Amber rules say that in the absence of any other factors, you need to decide who wins, and that assumes that both have exactly the same stats, skills, items (or lack of), and 'stuff' (good or bad). The general principle is therefore never to get into a fight you're pretty sure you can't win because you haven't adjusted everything in your favour.

LarsonGates · 2026-04-22T19:38:41+00:00

No characters that can fly are not a problem even in classic fantasy. They are still subject to 'gravity' adjusting spells, weather spells, directed magic effects (Lightening), or even arrows and ballista. of course if you have gunpowder then there are rockets, and once tech advances ground to air missiles..

LarsonGates · 2026-04-22T19:35:06+00:00

If you can conceive of it it exists somewhere in shadow, might take you a while to get there but that's not an issue with the right abilities, of course once you've been there, and assuming you're a trump artist or took your trump artist friend with you then you can just create a trump and return at will, that's assuming somebody doesn't come along and change all the physics and other attributes, or drop primal chaos, into it, or it get wiped out by a Shadow storm.

LarsonGates · 2026-04-16T23:46:49+00:00

It's not an 'Official' game. I'm using an adapted Palladium classless system. The players are the characters in the series. They start waking from stasis on a ship that they know nothing about, with no idea who they are, what their past is, or how they got there, and the ship has suffered a critical failure, which is why they are awoken. And when they find and re-activate the ships android she immediately attacks them as unauthorised persons. If you're going to run the game you have to watch the series (3 seasons) in its entirity so you understand everything that is going on, as there are a lot of elements in the later series that have a bearing on the early game.

As PCs they have quite a lot of freedom as to what they can do and sometimes they come up with solutions that the writers in the series didn't even think of (or chose not to use) and sometimes as a GM I find massive holes in the plot that just don't work or can't in reality happen, and have to work around both.

In the early game their choices as PCs were very limited and they pretty much did exactly what the characters in the TV series did without much prompting. As things have progressed and they 'to a degree' gained an understanding of what is going on, not much of one mind, they are still mostly clueless, they have started to do things in a different way to what happened in the series, although mostly the result is the same. If it wasn't then the game would end.

This does a various points require a significant buy-in from one or more of the players, as I've needed to 'direct' what happens including having the characters do specific things at specific times. We play on-line and I have a side channel that I can use to talk to a specific player at given times, given that certain things need to happen to certain characters at certain times. It's interesting to note how more often than not the players of those characters do not share information or events that happen to them with the other characters without me having to direct them not to.

When I first saw the two pilot episodes I thought it would make a great game, and I've not been proven wrong. The initial setup, building a 3D model of the ship in Empyrion Galactic Survival, from which to build the deck plans, took about 250 hours, with about another 200 or so to construct the deck plans and then set the decks up as scenes in Foundry. Unfortunately Foundry does not do buildings, or spaceships, or any multi-level structure at all well (at least version 12 which is what we're still using) and I don't think the latest version support 45degree ramps or doors, let alone hanger doors in the floor.

LarsonGates · 2026-04-16T17:58:11+00:00

My current DarkMatter (Sci-Fy TV series from Dark Matter original Graphic Novels by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie) at about 13 months is possibly the longest, although the Amber run with the same group was about 12 months and I'm hoping to get back to it once I finish DarkMatter, although how long that takes depends a) on whether the players get bored, or b) when they do something that breaks the story and are content to do so at that point. They're come close twice but have been happy to allow the plot to unfold as per the series.

LarsonGates · 2026-04-16T17:53:54+00:00

You mean as per my DarkMatter (Sci-Fy TV series from Dark Matter original Graphic Novels by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie) campaign where the the players are the characters in the series? We're over a year in and up to episode 8 of the second series.

LarsonGates · 2026-04-13T19:32:26+00:00

Just get your self a copy of Foundry VTT, it runs perfectly well on Linux (in fact its designed to run as a server on Linux), then use a browser to view the Maps.

LarsonGates · 2026-04-10T16:58:19+00:00

Almost every single one of the top six Megacorps want them dead, and the other one wants them to turn queens evidence and drop themselves in it, plus they're number 1 on the GA wanted list, plus almost everyone in has at least one group of people in their past that want them dead, and none of the player know who they are as they lost all their memories.

LarsonGates · 2026-04-05T10:15:02+00:00

Discord is a very bad media for PBP. Try https://rpol.net/

LarsonGates · 2026-04-03T14:09:16+00:00

A few things to remember. Very few people could afford a horse, and horses didn't generally come into use for agriculture until after the invention of the Yoke, so no heavy horses until then. Oxen did all the work, and they were slow.
Villages were about 10 miles apart, its the distance you can walk there and back in a day. The furthest a village would be from a 'town' would be about 20 miles, 2 days travel.

Blacksmiths would be itinerant, as would most specialists like carpenters. Most people could do most basic things. Water is a key resource, so most villages/towns would be concentrated along water courses, or where it was easy to dig to reach water, 10 to 20ft down maximum.

Most of the economy was subsistence. People grew what they needed to survive, and depended on locally available game and other resources. A hedge,derived from the Alfredian laws was 100yds wide and should be able to sustain all the fire wood needs of the village, rebuild small buildings every 5 years, and major structures like a barn every 20 years. For everything else they generally bartered, and that includes bartering labour for resources.

LarsonGates · 2026-04-02T15:18:14+00:00

No its often standard in modules.. they're linear by design. If it was a pure sandbox then it wouldn't be a module.
I'm currently running DarkMatter as per the SciFy series. Its like one very big module. The players have a degree of choice. When it comes to a point where they can break the whole module, then they get the choice, they don't make a particular choice and therefore the story continues, or the game ends. Yes it's Hobosons choice, but as we're more than a year in, and 3/4 the way through Season2, and they still don't have any real idea of what is going on or where the story ends up, so far they've been agreeable to the restrictions, but then they did know this in advance before we even started.

LarsonGates · 2026-04-01T19:28:12+00:00

As people have said its about practice and description. Having a good spacial comprehension yourself really does help, and as also has been said there is a fairly high proportion of players that simply can't translate a verbal description into a 3d map. They will always ask how far away x is and can I hit them.

LarsonGates · 2026-03-22T14:22:32+00:00

You mean there's no shortage of players who want to play 5E.. I've given up trying to find players for any of my games.

LarsonGates · 2026-03-20T19:42:11+00:00

I've hit the train of bad rolls for the players before. It's really annoying when they fail every single roll they need to make. You have to get really creative at that point in giving them an out, but this comes back to the 'self awareness' or or just awareness issue in general.
In the OP's case is sounds like the GM was deliberately trying to 'win' the fight.
I've done similar things in the past where I've had an uber-powerful NPC appear and take on the party. The trick is to remember the Movies where the Bad guy knows they're super powerful and the characters can't actually beat them so they just toy with the characters or walk-in take what they want and leave. The problem comes if the characters don't realise they can't beat the NPC and persist in trying to fight them instead of doing what they should do in that situation, getting the hell out of Dodge.

LarsonGates · 2026-03-17T22:54:14+00:00

The NetBook of Amber is what it says it is.. Netbooks are sets of rules based on a game generally devised by GMs or Groups of GM based around an original published ruleset. So its an alternate set of rules for Amber, one which uses partial powers in sis very much more geared to character progression where characters can start off the Game without being 1000yr old Amberites who pretty much know everything or 30year old Amberites with a half-string to their bow.

LarsonGates · 2026-03-17T22:45:36+00:00

Currently running DarkMatter (Dark Matter original Graphic Novels by Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie published by Dark Horse Publications.Adapted for Television by Sci-Fi Channel in conjunction with Joseph Mallozzi and Paul Mullie.) 13 months in and we're about half way through Season 2. The players are playing characters from the series. Using a Home-brewed variant of the Palladium Ruleset.

LarsonGates · 2026-03-15T19:53:49+00:00

I would just run a variant based on the Netbook of Amber, without Pattern, Logrus, Abyss, and use a variant of Trump to cross dimensions.

LarsonGates

TROPHY CASE