> 1. I have nothing to add to the miniatures discussion; I don't use them,
> myself.
O.K., you can sneak out the back door then.
(Hey, I was only kidding!!! :-)
> And now a question to the Group in general: how popular are the alien races
> for PCs in your campaigns, and which ones do people prefer? I'm partial to
> Vargr, myself, and every now and then I get the feeling that I'm the only one
> in the Orion Arm who runs them as anything other than greedy little cowards.
I also like Vargr, because they can do pretty much as they like. Greedy little
cowards they are not (at least, not all). I played in a campaign which started
off with all human characters, until I bought the Vargr Alien Module and rolled
one up. I had in fact joined a campaign after its first adventure, which had
been to deliver a cargo of liquors to Roup. The others, while there, had helped
themselves to a decrepit scout/courier and parked it in the scout base while
they went to get parts for its jump-drive, and someone who could fit them.
Enter my ex-Army, ex-Navy Vargr, who amongst other skills had Engineer-2. When
we got back, we found a pirate ship in port. My Vargr, having no respect for
authority, took the scout ship down next to it and calmly blew its drives out,
then lifted off again, followed by much noise from air-traffic control. Roup
wasn't pleased with us, because the scout/courier was 1/4 of their navy! We
went to a naval base to report the pirate ship. The choice was Regina or Feri;
we chose Feri because it was smaller, and might let us help capture the
pirates. In fact they sent a Gazelle-class escort, which tolerated our company.
Back at Roup, the Navy commander demanded that the pirates be handed over, and
some prisoners were brought forward. I can't remember why, but we got a bit
suspicious; the prisoners turned out to be political prisoners from Roup, and
not one pirate among them. Now the Navy officer had no authority to threaten a
planet's government. Nor did my Vargr, but that didn't stop him doing so anyway
on behalf of the Navy. The pirates were brought forward.
My next coup was to get all these humans to visit the Vargr's home planet,
Kedzudh. I'd spotted in the Alien Module that this place was TL16, law level 1.
You can check this if you don't believe me - it may be a printing error, but it
is there. The problem was that we had to pass a corsair base on the way. Now
my Vargr had high Charisma, and his plan was to let a corsair attack, then take
command of it. It didn't quite work out like that, there was a bit of a fight,
but we ended up with the corsair and most of its crew. One or two humans died
in the fight; they took Vargr as new characters. In due time all the humans
died or left, and were replaced by Vargr.
We also had a mercenary game using just Aslan in one of their formalized wars.
Each side was allowed a fixed amount of money and a limited set of stuff from
which to buy what they wanted. This time I was refereeing, as well as running
one side; the players had PC's in the other side. They had serious trouble as
I invested a lot in air power, and in particular one 50 ton cutter fitted out
with every piece of electronics available from Striker to TL12. Eventually they
won by getting some Assassins (Aslan Ninja/commandos) into my H.Q.
"Keyboard? How quaint!" - M. Scott
Adrian Hurt | JANET: [email removed]
UUCP: ..!ukc!cs.hw.ac.uk!adrian | ARPA: [email removed]