Ish

Sounds great. I was actually considering letting the players start with more experienced characters, maybe 30-40 XP, just to get over the “first level farm boy” stage of the game and let everyone feel a little more “veteran ace pilot.” Right now, I’m mostly just trying to gauge interest. We can hash out specifics later on.

Tea is one of the mainstays of civilization.

It’s a T-shaped visor, like most Mandalorian helmets based on the barbute style. Smash the bottom bit that covers his mouth and you could Judge Dredd-ify him.

But the visor isn’t made of Beskar...

🤷‍♂️ I am neither a lawyer nor an accountant. If you’re worried about the $2.40 of unpaid bottle deposits, you can always return them to a recycling center and tell them not to give you the money.

Actually, the cans are marked for deposit by the manufacturer / bottler and will carry the same marks regardless of which state you buy them in. It's actually illegal to return for deposit cans or bottles purchased out of state. Although an attempt at doing so made for a hilarious episode of Seinfeld.

I’m hoping to keep the fairly story episodic, with a few recurring Big Bad Evil Guys and Big Ideas to link things, but have most individual game sessions be fairly self-contained. So if you or other players can only join once in a while, there shouldn’t be any problems.

A long time ago, in a hobby shop far, far away... I discovered the classic West End Games Star Wars The Roleplaying Game, it was the second RPG I ever played after D&D. With the buzz of the new movies, new video games, The Mandalorian, and what have you, I'm kind of itching to play the game again. From 1987 to 1998, West End Games released official Star Wars roleplaying game sourcebooks, adventure modules, setting guides, and all manner of other stuff. All of this material was approved by LucasFilm, even making its way into the the novels and comic-books that comprised the original Star Wars Expanded Universe. Timothy Zhan was famously given several giant boxes of WEG game books before he started writing Heir to the Empire, the firsrt book in the Thrawn Trilogy. The massive success of the Thrawn novels led to the great boom in Expanded Universe novels and comics. The success of those, in turn, made LucasFilm and George Himself see the potential for making the Prequel Trilogy... and here we are. Unfortunately, behind-the-scenes shenanigans -- namely massive embezzlement by upper management -- meant that West End Games went bankrupt and lost the Star Wars license... a year before The Phantom Menace hit theaters. A year later, Wizards of the Coast picked it up, and ran with their own Star Wars game using D20 system for a decade until they let it lapse in 2010. Fantasy Flight Games now holds the license and continues to produce a great game... But I like the West End Games version, specifically their very first edition from 1987 the best. West End Games' Star Wars RPG is a fun, easy-to-learn system. It plays fast, cinematic, and does a great job at emulating the tone of the films. Every character has six attributes: Strength, Dexterity , Perception, Knowledge, Mechanical, and Technical. These are rated by how many dice are in them; so your character might have a Dexterity of 3D, which means she rolls 3d6 every time he makes a Dexterity check. Skills fall under Attributes, and their dice are added to the Attribute when making skill checks. For example, if you have a Dexterity of 3D and you put one dice into Blasters, your Blasters skill starts at 4D. Roll them, add them up, try to meet or exceed the target number. Congrats, you've just learned 90% of the game mechanics. I'm thinking of running a campaign, every other Tuesday night at WOW. Set shortly after the events of A New Hope, featuring a rag-tag band of Rebels (or at least, Rebel sympathetic scoundrels) having some old school, space opera adventures. "Have blaster -- Will travel." You can find a fan-produced "Revised, Expanded, and Updated" version of the Star Wars The Roleplaying Game First Edition rules here: Star Wars Classic Adventures. Totally free.

A landing bay, with a big "it will fit a Valkyrie" sized door in the floor makes for really interesting terrain for an "interior" battlefield. It gives you the tactical effect of having a large open space, without inexplicably having a garden-park in the middle of your grimdark battle cruiser.

I blame Jim Johnson.

People hate the Urbie, other people love the Urbie... I’m firmly in the love category. They’re actually really good at doing the job they were designed for, it’s just a really niche job. At 1.5 million C-Bills a pop, with six tons of armor (on a thirty ton ‘mech), and carrying pretty big gun, the Urbie is just the right mixture of “won’t scare the civilians” and “get the hell off my property.” It’s not meant to tussle with Heavies and Assaults in open fields, it’s meant to #%@& up any Raider and Pirate Light ‘Mechs that stray into a city.

BattleChonk: A Game of Heckin Combat

“The audience for that film is more selective than some of his other, more general appeal works.”

Nuffle is a kind and loving god. He’s just not necessarily kind and loving to you.

I’d be inclined to agree, but only with you put a big’ol asterisk on that statement to leave out Lost in Space.

Seven swans to rule them all, Six geese to find them, Five rings to bring them all, And in the pear tree bind them.

Where’s the fetus gonna gestate? In a box!?

Catalyst current offers two boxed versions of Battletech. There's the $19.99 MSRP Battletech Beginner Box and the $59.99 MSRP Battletech A Game of Armored Combat. The Beginner Box comes with two plastic `mechs (a Griffin and a Wolverine), one map sheet, a twelve-page heavily abridged rulebook, and some other gubbins. The AGoAC set comes with eight plastic `mechs**, two map sheets, a 56-page less abridged rulebook, and other gubbins. I've been looking at leaping back into Battletech and the AGoAC set seems to be a much better deal. There's two "core" rulebooks, the BattleMech Manual includes only the rules for `mech versus `mech gameplay, whereas Total Warfare includes `mechs and everything else. * A Griffin and Wolverine. ** An Awesome, BattleMaster, Catapult, Commando, Locust, Shadow Hawk, Thunderbolt, and Wolverine.

Edited the Unit Profile up above with corrected Mech costs, pilots taken from your thread here, and some support personnel. If I correctly did my maths, I have 3,299,184 CB left from my initial 60 million. I figure I'll keep all of that in reserve, unless some basic flatbed trucks and cargo-handling equipment isn't built in to the DropShip's price.

I’d love to give it a go if there’s time before Shadowrun.

That’s a subversive communist image! It calls Friend Computer “deranged,” it must be the work of traitors!

Terrible news, my fellow nerds, the legendary D.C. Fontana, writer for Star Trek and so much else, has passed away. She’s been writing for film and television since the 1960’s, so it’s be impossible to sum up everything she’s done. But given that one of her notable accomplishments is basically creating the entire backstory and personality for Spock... Well, her place in the pantheon of Nerd Heaven is secure. For what it’s worth, To Serve All of My Days from the Star Trek: Phase II fan-film project was the last fully produced writing credit in her filmography and one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek. Plus a helluva performance by Walter Koenig.

One of the reasons I like Wasps*, Archers, and Phoenix Hawks is that they all have hands. Makes salvage ops easier. But, yeah, a full Company of ‘mechs doesn’t come cheap. * (in addition to them being built on Detroit)