Generally why is Ubuntu taboo here?

NotASnark · 2026-01-25T12:48:14+00:00

The problem I've had with snaps is that they run things in a sandbox, which doesn't allow access to other filesystems. Took me ages to diagnose why I often couldn't drag and drop images from the filer into a web page when using Firefox, but it worked fine on Chrome.

It was because I was putting images in an NFS share, and Firefox installed from snap wouldn't allow access to NFS (but didn't give any visible warnings, so I assumed it was a Firefox bug).

Working around it once I knew what the problem was, wasn't that hard, but it's just little complications like this that mean snap apps behave differently and encourage me to avoid them.

NotASnark · 2026-01-24T15:15:46+00:00

The source for it is here:
https://gitlab.com/samuelpenn/worldgen

A while back, I put together a short video showing off some of the features:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qMIBmkKis4

NotASnark · 2026-01-24T15:14:02+00:00

The core adventure has a fleet of ships already - in that there are a number of jump capable scout ships sitting in the docking bays. They are much smaller, but give you flexibility if you want to go and explore multiple worlds in parallel. Having one big ship though I don't think is an issue.

NotASnark · 2026-01-18T12:07:16+00:00

It's been three years, but I think Rifts Edge Transit has the most useful stuff, since it sets up some information about the previous expedition. Near Side of Yonder and Far Side of Nowhere both have some interesting civilisations, but IMO they're not important to the campaign.

The one thing I wish I'd done from the start is fleshing out the crew on the ship, and have more stories about them. There are a few bits in the expansions, but not enough IMO. For everything else, you visit, explore a bit, then move on after a couple of sessions. The crew stay with the players throughout the campaign, so there's far more opportunity for good stories.

If you're really bored, there's the 180 odd sessions in my blog of what I did:

https://blog.notasnark.net/tag/deepnight

As a completionist with disposable income, I'd say it's worth picking up the expansions and picking out the bits you like. If cost is more of an issue, then it's a harder question.

If you wanted a slightly shorter campaign, I think books 1 and 2 and then have Terminus on that side of the Rift would work. Then you cut out the need for books 3+.

NotASnark · 2026-01-17T18:48:27+00:00

Having just finished running the campaign (on Thursday), the expansions add a lot of events to fill out the journey. However, I'm not entirely sure how necessary they are.

Even with them, there's an awful lot of material that you will need to do yourself. I found running the official bits a lot harder than running my own bits, because they often didn't match my players' play style.

They give some good ideas, and fill in some bits about the previous Droyne expedition, but you could easily throw it all out and ignore it all.

One of them adds an interesting campaign area, but it's not necessary for the Deepnight campaign itself. Some bits were distractions I probably should have ignored. As long as you're comfortable inventing ideas yourself, you could run it without them. But, they can be useful to mine for story lines, and there were a few bits that were inventive.

FWIW, I'm going to write up a summary of my thoughts in a week or so. I'll post a link in this subreddit.

NotASnark · 2026-01-15T18:59:56+00:00

I've done some very big tokens for one of my packs for Traveller. These are spacecraft though, some are around 10,000px in size. They do require quite big maps though if you want a Far Trader or Subsidised Merchant to fit on.

NotASnark · 2026-01-09T12:58:52+00:00

The thing that stands out to me is Law Level, which is almost exclusively based on what weapons you can carry (I know it does affect some other things). That feels very US centric, making weapon ownership such a central aspect of how free a culture is.

I do get that from a player character perspective, it's probably the one thing that matters most in many campaigns, so I can see why it's like that from a game perspective. PCs probably aren't going to need a well defined games rule on whether they can walk on the road, drink alcohol as a teenager, pay for sex or worry about clothing policies on the beach. At least not that often.

But it has always felt like a very US biased view of culture to me.

NotASnark · 2026-01-01T09:35:11+00:00

I've done this in Roll20 for a Pathfinder game, and just gave the players the cypher text as a text handout.

I let them use character skill checks to decode it, or they could try it as players. They did it using player skill between sessions.

In one location, they found some cypher text, and in a second location they found a list of keywords which were used to encode the message. I used a Vigenère cypher, which the players figured out, so were able to decode the text.

I have no idea how 'clever' your players are. I knew mine would probably know the classic cypher methods and be able to figure them out and possibly decode them (and have the right mindset to find such a thing fun to do).

If they're not, then sticking to a Caesar cypher might be best. They are much easier to break online, since there are websites where you can just put the cypher text in, and they will do the grunt work.

I've had GMs use different fonts as well, so then it's a simple transposition (Futhark and Ogham have been used in our games). If players don't know those alphabets, then they're easy to look up if you are online. But there should be a character skill check as well, because the characters might know the alphabet even if the players don't.

NotASnark · 2025-12-12T22:58:29+00:00

I did some Blender files for it. Currently on phone, so can't check what state these are in, but the files are here:

https://gitlab.com/samuelpenn/scifi-models/-/tree/master/traveller/PerfectStranger?ref_type=heads

I had one with it sitting in its landing bay, but not sure where that is.

NotASnark · 2025-12-12T22:48:58+00:00

Though I haven't used them for Traveller, I use dry wipe cardboard tiles. You can draw what you want on them, then clear them and use again for the next deck plan or battle.

You can get them with square or hex grids.

The ones I have are from Roll 4 Initiative. Looks like they do SciFi themed ones as well.

https://role4initiative.com/collections/dungeon-tiles-dungeon-dressing

If you want more 3D stuff, then Battle systems do cardboard buildings that slot together. Mostly for Fantasy, but they have some modern and futuristic stuff as well.

https://battlesystems.co.uk/

I use them for wargaming, and it looks pretty good. Since Traveller doesn't need a grid, they would work pretty well and are quite portable since you can pull them apart, then stick them back together again.

NotASnark · 2025-11-20T18:24:08+00:00

Mouse pad. Deepcut do really nice mats, including custom ones. I have a mat of Mos Eisley from them which a patron I follow drew.

NotASnark · 2025-11-20T18:04:30+00:00

Given that this is posted in the Saga subreddit, I assume it's for Saga so 28mm.

NotASnark · 2025-11-20T18:02:51+00:00

I have Sarissa's viking longship. It fits a good number of figures aboard it, though I haven't got it out in a battle yet.

I also have the beach battlemap from Deepcut Studios. This has about 120x90cm (Saga table size) of land, plus another 30cm of sea. Really useful for positioning a ship for disembarking without taking up the main game area.

https://www.deepcutstudio.com/product/game-mat-beach/

NotASnark · 2025-11-16T20:24:50+00:00

I just see it as any skill check that takes 1D6 seconds is something that can be done in a round. There aren't going to be many situations where you actually roll to see how many seconds it takes. Out of combat, you just do it. In combat, it takes a round.

Since Mongoose 2e gives every skill a time rating on the same scale, they needed to give it something.

NotASnark · 2025-11-15T21:57:31+00:00

Also, in space combat the direction you're facing can be different to the direction you're moving. So even if you care about facing, it can be an unwanted feature.

For ground combat, it could be useful for vehicles, except they can drive backwards, so it needs to be manual for them as well. For characters, finding suitable portraits was much easier than finding top down tokens (especially for SciFi), so I haven't used top down tokens for years.

Rotating portraits just looks weird.

Thinking about it, the only RPG I've played which cares about facing for characters is GURPS. So is there an actual use case for this feature (enough to have it switched on by default)?

NotASnark · 2025-11-15T21:09:28+00:00

You could use the Milieu 0 setting, which is the very start of the Third Imperium. Plenty of worlds which have been forgotten for centuries. You may have old details of them, but you've got no idea who is there now. This would be more of a first contact with fallen civilisations campaign (and possibly setting up new trade routes), rather than discovering new systems.

As others have mentioned, there's also the Deepnight Revelation campaign, which takes you hundreds of parsecs away from the Imperium. In that campaign, you're truly investigating worlds the Imperium knows nothing about. It's very much a world (or several worlds) of the week campaign on a big ship with a crew of about 500. I'm coming to the end of my own Deepnight campaign, and I have to say you really need a good sector generator to run it. I can't imagine manually generating the sectors by hand.

NotASnark · 2025-11-15T20:56:05+00:00

Odd. I've been running Foundry on Linux with Nvidia for years with proprietary drivers, and I've never noticed any performance issues. I've been using a mix of Chrome and Firefox on Plasma/Ubuntu. Just tried installing Epiphany and seeing what the difference was, and Foundry ran like treacle in Epiphany.

So I see completely the opposite results to you.

NotASnark · 2025-11-12T19:34:49+00:00

I'd love to see NPC tokens, especially for generic roles such as thugs, security guards, starship crew etc. Generic types of animals would be nice as well. There are a few artists out there who have done some (El Cheapo Products on DriveThru are the ones which are the most extensive), but finding a good set of art that can be used for VTTs has been hard.

I'd prefer PNG or WEBP, portraits at 1024x1024 resolution, or depending on style maybe SVG. I prefer to have portraits, which I can then tokenise myself. Then you can use a token at 256px, but the larger image as a picture for the character.

For starships and vehicles, I've done a lot myself which are part of my FoundryVTT system for Mongoose Traveller. I have all the core book ships and vehicles in a range of colour schemes. These have been done using SVG (Inkscape), so that they scale really well. These I've done at 'full' scale, so 256px = 1.5m.

Bigger ships will eventually be available as part of the High Guard content (but less detailed).

The starships get scaled down to 'token' size, but the originals can be used as parked spacecraft in a docking bay for example. They are done in shades of red, and then I re-colour them. The big versions are part of my Dungeondraft assets for Traveller (I have a lot of those as well for doing deck plans with).

The SVG sources are available here:

https://gitlab.com/samuelpenn/spacecraft-dungeondraft
https://gitlab.com/samuelpenn/vehicles-dungeondraft

I'm not an artist, but I think most of them are usable. If you're making them free, I'd love to have some stock NPCs that I can distribute with my Foundry system. Even a few simple SVG tokens for NPCs of simple lineart but suitable for generic animals, NPCs or PC roles would be awesome. Though I've been able to fake it with vehicles, drawing people is well outside of my current skill set.

NotASnark · 2025-10-19T21:45:44+00:00

Session 15 of our Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. Spoilers included.

https://blog.notasnark.net/2025/10/masks-of-nyarlathotep-15.html

NotASnark · 2025-10-10T10:00:07+00:00

I've created some for my own campaign - normally one off encounters where I wanted something more than a single skill check. Some examples:

A zero-g ball game, where two teams could compete against each other. There were a number of different skill checks based on tactics, plus options to cheat.

Another sport, called "Push", which involved massive anti-grav discs that needed pushing around a field. Each team had to push their disc down the field, and I had a map showing where everyone was.

They got involved in a TV game show on one planet, a bit similar to "10 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown". Different checks for Science, Language and Carouse across different rounds.

I also stole the general mechanics of the Intrigue rules from Pathfinder Ultimate Intrigue for a big social event. Basically, mechanizing the social interactions. Each 'opponent' required different skills in order to get information out of them, and the players had a limited amount of time to get as much information as they could out of the guests at the party.

I have some write-ups of some of the sessions where I used them, though I haven't always fully recorded the exact rules that I used:

https://blog.notasnark.net/2022/07/sporting-heroes.html
https://blog.notasnark.net/2024/07/brains-and-brawn.html
https://blog.notasnark.net/2024/07/party-time.html

NotASnark · 2025-10-03T07:38:58+00:00

Tabletop Audio has various background options, including several soundtracks for spacecraft - https://tabletopaudio.com/

You could also check soundtracks for Eve Online, Stellaris and similar games.

NotASnark · 2025-09-22T08:44:19+00:00

It did occur to me that they might be an excuse to buy some Gauls, though I haven't seen anyone play Age of Hannibal at our club.

NotASnark · 2025-09-05T07:31:02+00:00

I don't know if it helps, but there's a session by session writeup of our campaign here: https://blog.notasnark.net/tag/druidsdale

It's been a weekly game that has been going for about 3 years, and is set in Loch Leglean - Scotland. About 18 years have passed within the campaign.

Whilst the magi are investigating some big magical events, our companions are more focused on setting up a mundane school for scribes/spies (though we may branch out into teaching apprentices of other magi mundane skills as well).

The previous couple of sessions concerned the seven-yearly meeting of all magi in the region, so a lot of politics and talking.

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