Category Archives: Dragon’s Den

War Without Sacrifice

By Elias Richarts

It took twenty-five years. Twenty-five years of merciless slaughter.

I rose all the way from second lieutenant to colonel in only seven years. That shows the appalling losses we were taking. The last seven years were the hardest. But little by little we pushed them back from Styx, Charon, and finally back to Proxima. We were closing in to finish off those fuckers and that damn message came through on all channels. I’ll never forget it:

“We are the Partisans. We wish to end hostilities. We wish to negotiate. Please respond.”

The message was relayed back to Allied HQ on Poseidon and we were given the order to halt. I couldn’t believe it. We had the bastards on their knees. But no, the politicians decided to take up their offer.

The Partisans, who had been so vicious in war proved to be remarkably docile in negotiations. All they wanted was a half-billion mile sphere of space around Proxima Centauri. The Allies could have everything else. After four hours it was all over.

And so the Great Partisan War ended.

Almost immediately the defense budget was cut in half. Most of the veterans who had been in the war from the start took the retirement offer and got out of the service. left. Those diehards like me who stayed discovered we weren’t really wanted anymore. I found that my colonel’s rank was only a “brevet commission” and I was reduced back down to a first lieutenant. And I stayed a first looey for fifteen years. Finally there were enough retirements that I was promoted to captain. They offered a new retirement: twenty-five years service and retire at the highest rank. This is my last year. I’m taking it. I know when I’m not wanted. And what about the Partisans?

Nothing.

For eighteen years there was nothing. Nothing but the Partisans’ homeworld racing around Proxima Centauri every twelve days, one side in light, the other in darkness. Blasted with enough X-rays to kill ten thousand human beings with one dose . And nothing was known of them. Like the ancient Japanese, suicide was apparently part of their military tradition.

For eighteen years they lay waiting like a cancer metastasizing. Waiting for memories to fade, for budgets to be cut, for Man’s attention to once again turn to new worlds and away from a feeble red dwarf.

But as the ringing in my ears subsided, I knew today was not going to be like all those other days of the last eighteen years.

For today was the day the Partisans came back.

It started like any other day. Just like any other day of the last eighteen years. I was going out on the flight deck on Neutral Zone 42. That was the outpost I was assigned to which monitored the treaty zone set up with the Partisans. They were allowed outposts too. They never built any. We built ours on asteroids orbiting Proxima. Cheaper than building them in space.

They looked at me with reverence and awe. A real live veteran of THE WAR. So I spun my tales and told them what they wanted to hear. I told them of past battles and past callsigns of fallen friends and how they got them:
Spanky (got caught jerking off in the barracks)
Dweezer (had a fetish over a 20th century musician)
Mr. Moto (Master of the Obvious)
Asshole (self-explanatory)

And what was my call sign do you ask?

Shrike.
Honest

Ok. Not orginally.

Originally it was Breeder.

Well what do you expect when you’re the only strate in the whole damn squadron?

But after I got 12 kills, after I nuked that Partisan heavy carrier with 40 fighters on it, after I put that 20 KT right down the throat of the refueling station on 3487a927G which, according to the official history, “opened the way for the final invasion”, then they finally let me change my call sign.
But they still wouldn’t promote me.
What the fuck?

It happened only once. I grabbed her tight little ass. I kissed her and then I pulled back.
“I’m sorry” I said.
“It’s Ok. I’m bisex.” She replied.
“Oh”
“Ohmigod. Ididnt know. Youra strate.”
“Frade so.”
“Wow. Thatz OK. I always wanted to make it witha het.”
WE made love like crazed weasels.

Yeah, right.

Now for the real story.

We were both drunk off our arses. We went back to my quarters. Made out. Did it. The whole thing was over in fifteen minutes. Two years worth of friendship down the shitter in fifteen minutes.

When I saw her this morning on the flight deck I noticed the sparkle in her eye was gone.

I’m sorry Jess. I’m so so sorry. But it’s the only way. Don’t you understand? It’s the only way. We can’t let that fucker get back alive. Who knows what they’ll do. Will they just send out another ship? Or are they gonna come at us with everything they’ve got? No, that sonofabitch has got to be destroyed. And we both took an oath Jess. We both took an oath that we would give our lives if need be. If you would just stop screaming in my ear. Please stop screaming that doesn’t make it any easier.

Then everything went black.
The flash brought me back to consciousness. I would have been blinded if I hadn’t put my blast visor down before…
Before I ejected.
Then I remembered what I had done.
Back during the war, an old Banshee mechanic had shown me a trick that saved my ass. He showed me how it was possible, by just rewiring a few simple nanoelectric circuit lines located next to the pilot console I could rig an overload in the Banshee’s reactor with a 15 second delay. Enough time to hit the switch and punch out. The 20 kiloton blast would fry or at least seriously fuck up any fighters that were on my tail. I used it once when my gunner had been killed and I was about to get my ass waxed.
I’m sorry Jess.

Then I checked my suit. There was a tear in my right arm. Moving as fast as I could I got the emergency repair kit and sprayed on the sealant. But it was too late. I checked the oxygen gauge. Seven minutes. It would take at least twenty for them to get a rescue ship out here. Guess fifteen seconds isn’t long enough.

I’m an atheist. The idea of God showing up as a burning bush makes me laugh. And if God didn’t want Adam and Eve to eat the apple, why did he put the fucking tree in Eden in the first place?

But I’ll pray for you Jessica Wu. I’ll pray for your immortal soul. It’ll be the only prayer you’ll get from the only person who knows what really happened.

Because the Partisan ship is destroyed. So they know not to fuck with us. We’re still ready for them. But Earth can’t let it out that the Partisans challenged us. That would cause too many problems. It would disrupt the colonization program, make them put more money into the defense budget, panic people. Bring back all those bad memories of the war. Open a real can of shit.

So they’ll bury it. Put it down to “pilot error” or some other such bullshit. An old guy, past his prime, fucked up, didn’t see an asteroid and boom.

The 2nd Partisan War ended before it began. And don’t worry about the casualties.

* * *

Download the story in Word document format [here](/content/other/1107/WarWithoutSacrifice2_finalCensored.doc).

Dick’s Cinematic Tabletop RPG Combat System, 3 of 3

Reminiscent of Infantry fight system, and to show dramatic combat with guns, is the final fight scene to the movie Equilirium (2002) by Kurt Wimmer (major spoilers for those who haven’t seen it yet).

At least 20 shots fired and not a scratch on either guy. Notice how it was harder for John Preston to point and pull a trigger than it was for him to wrist-lock the gun from his opponent? That’s because it’s more dramatic that way. Guns are more tricky to pull this off without the dissolution of viewer disbelief (like Mike’s Commando note in the last comments). Wimmer, or whoever choreographed the fights, did a good job throughout the movie.

The two weren’t exchanging blows and deducting hit points. Instead, they were deducting each others’, as I put it in the last post, easily-replenish-able statuses.

Continue reading Dick’s Cinematic Tabletop RPG Combat System, 3 of 3

Dick’s Cinematic Tabletop RPG Combat System, 2 of 3

So, I have been drumming up ideas for a tabletop RPG combat system, mainly as mental-masturbation, but I think I might have found something I can use for Emporium (the combat system is the largest design hole that I currently have for Emporium). The real goal is for a combat system that is intuitive, not too complicated, yet still interesting and dynamic from round to combat round.

One way to do this is to account for proximity (think Warhammer 40k or Battletech). While that can make combat interesting, it also can turn your RPG into more of a strategic simulation.

Then, two combat systems converged in my mind as the two most interesting combat systems I have witnessed. Unfortunately, both of them are action systems, not turn-based.

Continue reading Dick’s Cinematic Tabletop RPG Combat System, 2 of 3

Dick’s Cinematic Tabletop RPG Combat System, 1 of 3

I have always disliked how AD&D handles combat, especially the damage system.

Compare a level 4 fighter, who has 40 hit points, and a level 1 mage, who has a whopping 4 hit points. The two are fighting side by side versus some castle guards. During the skirmish, the fighter gets hit with long sword which, for this example, does its maximum damage of 10 hit points and then gets nicked a few times at values of 3, 4 and 5; the mage gets stabbed with a dagger and gets completely knocked out with the max damage of 4 (some systems would have just killed him, but we always played that you get knocked out at 0 hit points and start to bleed to death until stabilized at -1 hit points).

The obvious problem with this is the disparity of damage between both characters, who are, after all, 2 humans. How can a small stab mean death to one character but hardly anything to another?

Continue reading Dick’s Cinematic Tabletop RPG Combat System, 1 of 3

Mineral Rights – A short story idea.

In the very near future aliens show up near the Earth. After winning the trust of most right-thinking people they exchange some knowledge and goods.

Among the trades the aliens offer a reasonable amount of some other commodity in exchange for the mineral rights to a 1 km x 1 km stretch of land out in a desert somewhere. The land has a few trace amounts of minerals with some value, but nothing humans have the technology to extract in a profitable way at the moment. Agreements are signed and the aliens get the mineral rights.

The aliens create a cylindrical force field about a kilometer in diameter and start extracting the entire volume of earth as one huge core which is slowly and constantly streamed up through the atmosphere to where a giant mothership waits in geosynchronous orbit to collect it. The mothership never seems to increase in size or actually store this tremendous volume of rock anywhere so it’s speculated that there must be a wormhole on board which is transporting the rock elsewhere for processing.

Continue reading Mineral Rights – A short story idea.

Guten Tag – The Infinite Forum

I had this idea the other day for a new style of forum software. And maybe this has been done, but I haven’t seen it anywhere:

The Infinite Forum (or The Freeforall or Guten Tag )

The specifics of the forum structure would be these:

  • There would be no mandatory “forum categories” per se. Or, if there were they would only be organized according to some politeness schema (like age appropriateness, potential offensiveness level) or maybe along lines of preferred language spoken.
  • In place of standard topical categories each post would be defined by a unique identifier and a set of tags. These tags would take the place of standard forum categories. This is the centerpiece of this system, the cornerstone around which the rest of the forum software is generally organized.

Continue reading Guten Tag – The Infinite Forum

d20 New Character Classes – The Magus

It’s pretty well established that I like to tinker with role-playing game mechanics, and that I have several dissatisfactions with the d20 (D&D) spellcasting systems in particular which I’ve tried to remedy over the years.

But in spite of my disillusionment with the spell-slots/*fire and forget* style of casting in it’s several iterations, sometimes I still get the urge to design characters more closely fitting the standard spellcaster mould, though generally I’d prefer them a bit more flexible.

Now the usual spellcasters all have some sort of limitation on how many spells they can learn and/or which ones. Also, excluding the Sorcerer, most classes must prepare spells ahead of time and have an additional restriction on how coppies of each spell they can prepare in a given day, a set of rules which rankles my sense of verisimilitude.

Long have I coveted a class which overcame these restrictions. A class with the spontaneous casting. A class without limitations on how many or which spells can be learned.

The generic “Spellcaster” class presented in Unearthed Arcana perhaps comes closest to this goal, although even that class still has a couple issues. For one thing the Spellcaster, like the Sorcerer, is limited in the number of different spells they can know at any given level. Additionally, the Spellcaster is only intended for use in games where the other generic classes (the Expert and Warrior) are being used.

As an alternative I propose the Magus, a sort of omni-mystical sage or man of power, to provide a suitable player character class.

The magus provides greater flexability regarding the type of spells which can be learned, but with limits: Magi are relatively limited in the number of spells they can have prepared at any given time, also the number of spells they can cast in a day is relativley low, and they gain no bonus feats or other special abilities. Further, to learn and cast spells most effectively the magus must diversify her abilities greatly and learn at least two different skills; while, by contrast, wizards need only concentrate on one ability and a corresponding skill.

Continue reading d20 New Character Classes – The Magus

d20 Alternate Mechanics – Injury & Consequences (Redux)

A bit over a year ago I posted an idea for some alternate mechanics as a substitution for hit points for games using the d20 system. Rarely do I ever DM though, so the odds of getting these mechanics actually play-tested seemed slim. However on Thursday, this past, I actually ran an adventure in which they were tried out.

The results didn’t seem too bad and, as expected, combat was short and deadly. Overall reaction afterward seemed to border on actual enthusiasm though a number of concerns were voiced and a fair bit of discussion and suggestion quickly followed.

Continue reading d20 Alternate Mechanics – Injury & Consequences (Redux)

d20 – Weave a Little Spell (Part I – The Basics)

One thing that always bugged me about the magic system in D&D and it’s d20 offspring is the reliance on the same old “spell slots” magic system. Via this system magicians get a certain number of spells per day. The magician fills up the memory slots in his head with spells at the beginning of the day and then casts the spells throughout the day, thus emptying slots which may be filled again after 8 hours of sleep. †

This was a magic system unlike any I had ever read in story or myth at the time†† and the fact that it neither inspired me nor modeled any aspect of the worlds I’d imagined or read about annoyed me to no end.

“Well, why not throw the whole game out the window?” you ask, “There are other RPGs out there with more cohesive magic systems… take Mutants and Masterminds for example, you could use that system to model any sort of power you’d ever want and it’s powers seem intuitively balanced and consistent.”

To this I can only say:

True.

But the nostalgia man. The nostalgia!

Continue reading d20 – Weave a Little Spell (Part I – The Basics)

Zelda II Swordplay

The Legend of Zelda II, The Adventure of Link, has long been berated as the bastard child of the Zelda series. Many go so far as to not include it within the Zelda “genre” out of personal distaste for the game. But, I consider it one of my favorite games of all time.

There are many cases to defend the game, like unique gameplay and excellent player control, but my angle is specific: The game has the most interesting swordplay out of any I’ve played.

Some Swords

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