Wing Commander RPG

Okay...tell me what you guys think of these modifications I've made to the Kilrah and Sol system maps.

kilrah.png
sol.png


I modified the Kilrah system first. Getting the orbit in for Igrathi was a pain in my ass, lemme tell you (I have at least been able to move the planet's name so it matches the rest of the map since I posted this). Rather than torture myself with trying again for Sol, I simply put in a notice that I wasn't going to show the orbit for dwarf planets. That just required me to remove the Pluto-Charon orbital path; like I've said before, it's a lot easier to remove something from an image than it is to add it. The text for most of the dwarves in Sol isn't quite right, but I think it's passable (and as close as I'm going to get with the tools I have available to me).

I should note that the placement of Igrathi does not match WCPedia. Couldn't be helped - with Kilrah's sun only being a K6V, I had few options for placement from it's star if I didn't want it in tidal lock or resonance. But I did honor Igrathi being a hundred million kilometers from Kilrah, which in this case put Mog-T'Mog inside Igrathi's orbit. I did have to fudge my rules to explain why T'Mog, a world with life on it, was outside the star's ecosphere (largely I blamed it on extra tidal forces coming from Mog and Igrathi - lame-ass, I know, but it was the best I could do).
 
Izanagi is also not the name of a currently recognized dwarf planet, I know. It's supposed to be 2007-OR10, but I figured they would've named the damn thing by the 27th century and they're currently on a "creation myth" bent when it comes to naming the damned things, so I figured I'd throw in my own candidate name. Why not.

Sedna's not on there, either. I just figured it was probably either a) determined not to be a dwarf planet for some reason, or b) off the map. It only has a 72 AU resolution, after all.
 
Simple addition. It breaks down like this:

1. Kilrah's star is a K6V sun and "Igrathi is a gas giant with an orbit that passes close to one hundred million kilometers of Kilrah Prime". I believe both of these facts were established in End Run (though I'm not sure about the star's luminosity class).
2. Kilrah is an inhabited planet with a native biosphere; that one's pretty apparent. It therefore must be located within the ecosphere of its sun.
3. The ecosphere for a K6V star ranges from about 0.36 AU to 0.52 AU. So Kilrah has to be somewhere within that range.
4. An AU is defined as a distance of approximately 150 million kilometers, thus Igrathi would have to be about 2/3 of an AU from Kilrah. Let's say 0.67 AU and accept the rounding error.
5. Given that Kilrah is somewhere between 0.36 and 0.52 AU from the sun, and that Igrathi is about 0.67 AU away from Kilrah, Igrathi must be somewhere from 1.03 to 1.19 AU from the sun.
 
Need some help here - does anybody have any screenshots from Righteous Fire that might show where the Rikel jump point is in the Eden system, and does anybody know where exactly you wind up in Rikel after the jump? Is it a two-way jump? How do you find the damned thing anyway?

Also going to be looking for a map of Valhalla that has the Eden jump on it; I thought I had that laying around somewhere but for some reason I can't find it today.
 
I'm going to be moving back to fill in the remaining race profiles in Chapter Two pretty soon, looks like. Gives me two questions to ask. First, how much latitude do I have when it comes to building races where we have little more than a name to go off of. Second, what do you all think these races look/act like?

Specifically, I still need to build the Double Helix, Wu, Mopoks, Dolosians, Dioscuri, Oasians, Hagarin, Haggans, Jarma, Steltek, Mantu and Nephilim. The ones I'm worried about the most are the Hagarin, the Haggans and the Mantu; with the rest, I have pictures or a pretty good description (though the description "arthropod" for the Double Helix is awfully vague).
 
Need some quick help - in the Academy episode "Word of Honor", are we told on what planet that takes place? A screenshot of the alien creature (the one that finally gets that backstabbing Cat) would also be helpful.

I have the episode at home, so it's no big rush here; I've just forgotten that I needed to watch that episode again four nights in a row......
 
Specifically, I still need to build the Double Helix, Wu, Mopoks, Dolosians, Dioscuri, Oasians, Hagarin, Haggans, Jarma, Steltek, Mantu and Nephilim. The ones I'm worried about the most are the Hagarin, the Haggans and the Mantu; with the rest, I have pictures or a pretty good description (though the description "arthropod" for the Double Helix is awfully vague).

Hagarin - all we know is that they are implicitly NOT reptiloid... they're mentioned only once, in Action Stations, in the list of species Tolwyn encountered at the Academy... and he notes that of those, the Varni made him uneasy because they were reptiles.

Haggan - we think they eat Jarma lizards and that they "slither."

(I'm not unconvinced that Dr. Forstchen intended these to be the same species... but they're actually seemingly slightly contradictory in suggested description with what little we know, so whatevs.)

There's some stuff about how the Double Helix don't have a concept of time and communicate through phermones in the ICIS and Secret Ops material. And Warren Spector's pitch for Alien Commander has an interesting alternate take on them: https://www.wcnews.com/news/2012/08/11/games-that-weren-t-alien-commander

Need some quick help - in the Academy episode "Word of Honor", are we told on what planet that takes place? A screenshot of the alien creature (the one that finally gets that backstabbing Cat) would also be helpful.

Per the series' press kit, the creature is a "Piscean Arthrosquid"... so presumably the planet is Pisces.
 
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Hagarin - all we know is that they are implicitly NOT reptiloid... they're mentioned only once, in Action Stations, in the list of species Tolwyn encountered at the Academy... and he notes that of those, the Varni made him uneasy because they were reptiles.

Haggan - we think they eat Jarma lizards and that they "slither."

(I'm not unconvinced that Dr. Forstchen intended these to be the same species... but they're actually seemingly slightly contradictory in suggested description with what little we know, so whatevs.)

Thanks. I had some thoughts on each of these species earlier in the week; good to know that I haven't contradicted anything so far.


There's some stuff about how the Double Helix don't have a concept of time and communicate through phermones in the ICIS and Secret Ops material. And Warren Spector's pitch for Alien Commander has an interesting alternate take on them: https://www.wcnews.com/news/2012/08/11/games-that-weren-t-alien-commander

Those are things I can incorporate into their profile. It's still not a lot to go off of...Arthropoda is a pretty damned big phylum.

So I guess I can pick something interesting...

Per the series' press kit, the creature is a "Piscean Arthrosquid"... so presumably the planet is Pisces.

Thanks again; I missed that somewhere along the line.
 
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Good Monday, Wingnuts! Time for the weekly WCRPG Update.

This week turned out to be a good, productive week for WCRPG. As I indicated in the last update, I started off the week by conducting a mail merge that seeded the remaining planetary data for the Kilrah and Sol systems into wiki-form bullet points, which allowed me to finish up those sections in Chapter 8.5 (navigational data). Since I was already conducting merges, and since I already had the requried data for the Gemini Sector, I went ahead and did the same thing for the Gemini Sector and began filling in the missing bits of information from the Privateer Playtester's Guide (this prompted me to pick up the pace on the work I was doing for the WCPedia project, which largely amounted to the same sort of thing). That all happened last Monday. On Tuesday, I went ahead and made adjustments to the Kilrah and Sol Sector maps from the Prophecy map. This included the addition of the Igrathi orbit and the planet Kilrah to the Kilrah system map (a tricky piece of work which I'm not 100% satisfied with but which is close enough for government work), the removal of the Pluto orbit from the Sol map and the addition of the major dwarf planets and dwarf planet candidates to the Sol system map (with the exception of Sedna). As I've said before, it's easier to take things away from an image than to add them as a rule, and this work proved to be no different. I was also able to finish adjusting the Gemini Sector data on Tuesday, which left me with a final major decision to make in Chapter 8.5 - whether or not to add a pre-built planet and pre-built community to the Chapter, since those items had appeared in SFRPG in its nav data section. After sleeping on it, on Wednesday I decided not to do so; I remembered the main reason I included them is because by the time I got to them with SFRPG, I already had a playtesting campaign going on and I had created those materials specifically for that campaign (and adding them was simply a matter of convenience). The decision allowed me to wrap up work on 8.5 on Wednesday, which closed out Chapter Eight in its entirety. That's now eight of the game's twelve chapters that are 100% complete at this point.

With work concluded on 8.5 and after a brief pause to update my to-do list, I moved on to the bestiary in Chapter 12.4 as I indicated I would in the last update (the first step in the "creature creation" portion of the game, which will ultimately also include the remaining sapient races in Chapters 2.2.x). The first order of business was to figure out just how many creatures I wanted to have in the bestiary and how to group them. As work progressed throughout the week, I settled on thirty-five non-sapient races: eight from Earth, eight from Kilrah (as indicated from various sources), and nineteen from other worlds. These include the very short list of species up at WCPedia, about a dozen I'm recycling from the SF3 project (they're my work, so I can do that if I so choose), and one or two brand new ones. Thursday I made checks to see how compatible the two creature creation systems were (between SFRPG and WCRPG) - despite a predilection towards gigantism in SFRPG (which I'll have to deal with in at least two cases), the two systems have a minmal number of differences and so work should progress quickly on the ones recycled. Of the 35 species, I can say as of this morning there are four species that will not require further adjustments, with significant work completed on another seven. I anticipate work to go quickly on the bestiary.

Other things that happened this week included another adjustment to the timeline in Chapter 12.1 (I found an earlier date for the foundation of the Confederation, which I went ahead and incorporated with a minimal amount fuss), and the inclusion of some notes on the Haggarin, Haggin and Mantu species (the only three which will be in the game for which we have little more than the name). I must say that I'm looking forward to working on the remaining sapient races; if anybody has any input on them (on what kind of species they should be, what their disposition is, etc.), I certainly hope to hear from you in the near future.

The plan for this week is to continue work on 12.4 and to try and get as many of those species done as I can. Should work on the bestiary finish up before the end of the week, I will be moving back to Chapter 12.2 to work on the remaining sapient races. I've done enough of those in the past to know they'll take up a fair amount of time, so I don't anticipate getting past that point before the week is out. In the unlikely event that happens, work will proceed with the Who's Who in Chapter 12.2 and the game will be very close to completion at that point.

I'm still accepting submissions for the game's non-canonical sections; just post your ideas to this thread. (This, by the way, includes animal and plant species for the bestiary; it's not too late for me to add your ideas yet).

WCRPG now stands at 81.98% complete as of this morning.
 
I need some quick help from any of y'all that still have access to the Academy TV downloads. I need a screenshot of a Dioscurian Ovizard from the episode "Lords of the Sky" - should be at the beginning of the second act. I'm going to be building its profile today, and I don't want to have to go fixing it later because I screwed something up if I can at all help it. I have the downloads myself; naturally I forgot to copy the episode off onto my jump drive (where it would've been helpful) even after I reminded myself to do it today...
 
Is it generally accepted by the WC community that the Wu are supposed to be humanoid? Trying to search for articles on them has proven difficult due to the shortness of the name...

EDIT: Never mind; y'all already answered this for me. Same thread, even.
 
Hi Capi!

I've been reading the rules from the Enyo and Prelude, cool read mate though a little tough going first time through to be honest.

But I think I'm getting the general idea of whats going on but I think I'll need to read it several times.

Combat reads pretty straight forward though naturally several skills / attributes impact how things play out in combat.

All said I'm liking it as it is percentile based which I like almost as much as the old D6 system from WEG.

Character Generation though is very lengthy to my mind and maybe a bit too complicated, I'm hoping to have several others look at this game prior to running it sometime soon hopefully.

But this is growing nicely and keep up the good work, its great to see someone finally get a WCRPG to a solid playable stage, which is a lot better than my attempt that died when I got busy at work and family etc.

In terms of a games mechanic how do you think Medals could work?

My basic idea was to use Bronze Star as a 're-roll' counter once per session (or even add or minus 5 for your percentile system) Silver Star once per session re-roll (this one I was confident of how I wanted it to work), Gold Star could earn you two re-rolls per session.

Now a Bronze Star should be awarded for acts of bravery I guess, several times intercepting an enemy before he kills a wingman and or save several medical transports by chasing off a flight of Dralthi!

But I guess these rewards would be really at the GMs discretion, if a character rp'd really well then maybe a bronze star for great character work would be fair. Same with all the other medals, awarded by the GM for what they feel is great work but giving just simple XP points wouldn't reward the player enough.

Just some thoughts, also making Ace and Ace of Aces ribbons for characters to put on the character sheet to help make a connection, maybe 5 missions, 10 missions, 15 missions etc ribbons to help character and play connect, so when your pilot is killed its sad as he'd just made Ace of Aces and had earned his 15 missions ribbons and a bronze star!

As opposed to oh man I spent so much XP to make the ultimate dogfighting ace only to nailed by a Ralari's guns!

To me this first reaction is what I would like as a GM where my players care for the progression of the character above just simple I want better stats!

Keep up the hard work, my only suggestion would be to simplify character generation, just reads clunky to me though I haven't tried to use it yet myself.

Cheers mate!
 
I'm just now getting to the forums and my wife has informed me my older son has a play date in fifteen minutes, so I'll get to the weekly update (as well as replying to you, Wolfman) later.
 
Good Monday, Wingnuts! For those of you in the States, I hope you're all having a pleasant Labor Day. I know mine's been pretty full so far, which is why this is a lot later in the day than normal...

Well, as I anticipated, work went by pretty fast on the bestiary. I was able to sustain an average rate of completion of about seven creatures per day, with work finishing up on Thursday. My notes for the week pretty much just list out which specific creatures were completed on which specific day. I did go ahead and make a few tweaks to creature creation in Chapter 10.2.7 as I worked along in the bestiary, mainly just an adjustment to how HP is calculated for creatures an an option to adjust the value of creatures based upon their overall size (came in handy when I was able to adjust the price of Fluffy Rodents to six credits - their average value in P2). Overall I'm very satisfied with how everything went there.

So on Thursday, after updating my to-do list in the game's Index, it was time to turn my attention to the remaining sub-chapters of Chapter 2.2. (Chapters 2.2.x, as I've been calling them in aggregate). I've got nine more sapient species to finish up at this point - the Oasians, Hagarin, Haggans, Jarma, Steltek, Mantu, Nephilim, Double Helix, Wu, Mopoks, Dolosians, and Dioscuri. My initial point of business was to cinch up the concepts for the races for which we had nothing more than a name, specifically the Hagarin, Haggans and Mantu. The Haggans were known to "slither", which limited the number of potential species to base them on. Ultimately I decided to make them snake-like. For the Mantu, I decided to make them a canid race (there's a bit of humor there, see - Kilrathi -v- Mantu, cats -v- dogs), which gave me the opportunity to recycle a deprecated race from the SF3 Project (again, it was my work to begin with, so I felt no compunction about doing it). That left the Hagarin; I decided to make them a sheep-like race. Actually, the notion of a sheep-race came to me from the name "Haggan" (as in "haggis"), but because of the aforementioned known slithering characteristic of the Haggans, I moved the notion over to the Hagarins. Still a bit of a fit. Specific work this week included work in earnest on the Mantu profile on Thursday (I completed all but the overview, personality and motivation sections of their profile) and work on the basic characteristics of each of these races in bulk on Friday, using the procedure in Chapter 10.2.7 for that work. I am happy to announce that I was able to complete the bulk of the procedure for each race, with the only things remaining to do are the actual profile compositions. In other words, I have stats for the remaining species at this point, just not all the details.

The plan for this week is to continue work through 2.2.x. The Mantu are largely done at this point, so they're liable to be the species I finish up first. I do have an order for completion of the remaining races. As I said last week, I've written enough sapient species profiles to know that they'll take up a fair amount of time, so I don't anticipate getting them all done before the week is out. Should I finish them all up, work will proceed to the Who's Who in Chapter 12.2 and the game will be very close to completion at that point. I would appreciate it if y'all took a look at the species pages as I finish them up, review them and tell me what you think (and don't be afraid to suggest do-overs; better to suggest something to adjust now than after the game's gone to print).

I'm still accepting submissions for the game's non-canonical sections; just post your ideas to this thread.

WCRPG now stands at 82.88% complete as of this afternoon.
 
Greetings, Wolfman. I wanted to reply to your post a little sooner but the day turned out to be a little fuller than I'd expected. I always appreciate feedback, particularly from people who don't know me personally. Helps me to know where I need to make adjustments and make a better game.

So, let's talk about your post.

Hi Capi!

I've been reading the rules from the Enyo and Prelude, cool read mate though a little tough going first time through to be honest.

But I think I'm getting the general idea of whats going on but I think I'll need to read it several times.

Which particular parts were difficult to get through? Is there anything I can help clarify?



Combat reads pretty straight forward though naturally several skills / attributes impact how things play out in combat.

All said I'm liking it as it is percentile based which I like almost as much as the old D6 system from WEG.

Glad to hear it. It's an adjustment of the last RPG I wrote; it had a percentile-based system as well, but instead of acting as the check DC, a character's scores served as a roll modifier. And through playtesting, I discovered was settling the DC arbitrarily far too often. I think the WCRPG system is a fairly elegant solution. Of course, that's my opinion, which doesn't count; if other folks like it and understand it, I like it.

Character Generation though is very lengthy to my mind and maybe a bit too complicated, I'm hoping to have several others look at this game prior to running it sometime soon hopefully.

That's kind of disturbing to hear - I've tried to make character creation fairly easy. Now, in Enyo and Prelude (both of which use the same "front half" text) I did make the decision to include the information on Skills and Traits prior to the actual character creation rules (which in Enyo runs from page 37 to 46 and in Prelude runs from page 43 to 57 proper); that could be part of the reason why it looks as long as it does. In the full rules, those sections comprise two whole Chapters by themselves, and they appear after the character creation rules. I was just trying something different there. Looks like that might not've worked as well as I thought it would.

If it's more than that, though, I can help you through your first character. Just say the word. It'd help for me to know wherein the difficulty lies so I can make adjustments.

I'll be building a lot of characters when the time comes for the Who's Who chapter, which'll probably happen sometime in the next couple of weeks.

But this is growing nicely and keep up the good work, its great to see someone finally get a WCRPG to a solid playable stage, which is a lot better than my attempt that died when I got busy at work and family etc.

Thanks.

RPGs definitely take a huge commitment of time, especially if you're doing all the work yourself, especially if you want to make it any good and especially if you're building a system from scratch. Last one I did took five years to finish, and I'm very proud of it.

In terms of a games mechanic how do you think Medals could work?

My basic idea was to use Bronze Star as a 're-roll' counter once per session (or even add or minus 5 for your percentile system) Silver Star once per session re-roll (this one I was confident of how I wanted it to work), Gold Star could earn you two re-rolls per session.

Now a Bronze Star should be awarded for acts of bravery I guess, several times intercepting an enemy before he kills a wingman and or save several medical transports by chasing off a flight of Dralthi!

But I guess these rewards would be really at the GMs discretion, if a character rp'd really well then maybe a bronze star for great character work would be fair. Same with all the other medals, awarded by the GM for what they feel is great work but giving just simple XP points wouldn't reward the player enough.

Just some thoughts, also making Ace and Ace of Aces ribbons for characters to put on the character sheet to help make a connection, maybe 5 missions, 10 missions, 15 missions etc ribbons to help character and play connect, so when your pilot is killed its sad as he'd just made Ace of Aces and had earned his 15 missions ribbons and a bronze star!

As opposed to oh man I spent so much XP to make the ultimate dogfighting ace only to nailed by a Ralari's guns!

To me this first reaction is what I would like as a GM where my players care for the progression of the character above just simple I want better stats!

You've asked me about this before; I decided to make medals and how they would work in a campaign to be a GM-level decision (i.e. GMs could play them however they chose). Simple reason really - the game allows for adventures/campaigns in a non-military setting, and it wouldn't make sense for those folks to be eligible for medals.

That said, I would simply have medals for surviving fights against bad odds. Maybe the same ratios for which they're awarded in TacOps - 3:1 for the Bronze Star, 5:1 for the Gold Star, 8:1 for the Silver Star, save the freakin' Confederation/Empire for a Pewter Planet. Eject and live for a Golden Sun. Mission ribbons and flight qualifier ribbons could be given out as characters fly so many missions (probably every five missions) and fly new craft. Ace and Ace of Aces for kills, of course.

Personally, I wouldn't have these have any other effect in and of themselves; I probably would accompany them with additional points in Skills/specializations. Of course, I'm kinduva hard-nosed GM (and I'm admittedly pretty stingy when it comes to handing out player rewards), so they'd be pretty few and far between. What you've described is certainly doable (though I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the "Sense" series of talents (Navigational Sense, Scientific Sense, etc.) award a player with a number of free passes per session - not quite the same thing but pretty similar).

Keep up the hard work, my only suggestion would be to simplify character generation, just reads clunky to me though I haven't tried to use it yet myself.

Cheers mate!

Will do; lemme know what I can do to help clarify things.
 
I think that myself personally have found it a bit confusing due to the character creation layout really, just requires a bit more focus on my part really.

It may simply be the layout thats got me stumped so far, I'll reread it and see what I can come up with for feedback.

Haven't really been able to focus on reading a lot lately! :p

Now that said help with character generation would be great also with NPC creation, as I will need to make a few for the early part of my own campaign later on.

I'll be looking to read the whole games mechanic again and the character creation process too to try and get my brain to kick in.

Cheers.
 
Alright, just give me a holler whenever you're ready. And if you need to, feel free to use the pilots from Enyo and Prelude as NPCs; they're all pretty generic. Might adjust their fighter specialization to match the era of your campaign, but that's no biggie.
 
Will do, probably by the weekend I'll have had a chance to reread the book and we can go from there.

Little idea here, taken from playing the new Warhammer RPG from FFG, how about using the maneuver cards from the CCG to influence combats?

Just one that popped into my head today.
 
I'd given some thoughts about doing something like that, using maneuver cards similar to what exists in the early editions of Wings of War. Or perhaps having the GM log their moves before the players make theirs; the GM would then reveal the moves they logged after the players made theirs (that way the GM couldn't change their mind once they saw what the players were going to do, for better or worse).

Again, though, that's a GM-level decision. The combat system is set up so that both turn-based and simultaneous combat are allowable (not both at the same time, naturally), depending upon how the players want to play the game. Using special cards for movement would probably work very well for simultaneous combat; they'd be generally pointless for turn-based combat. And then there's the fact that I really haven't got specific maneuvers in the game (I figure combinations of normal maneuvers would give the same general effect). Of course, the combat systems are different between WCRPG and the CCG; that's one's really too obvious to point out but I thought I'd cover my basis.

I may work on a set of specific maneuvering cards in the future; I have seen a method for making playing cards on BGG that I haven't tried out yet. If I do that I'll probably make them available to the community at a later date.
 
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