Baroque Space Opera is now available!

Baroque Space Opera is now available on  DriveThruRPG!

For more information about the setting and what to expect, visit some of my previous in-development blog entries:

Introduction to Baroque Space Opera

Baroque Space Opera Concept Art

The Baroque Space Opera Logo 

More Concept Art

The Book Cover

The Baroqueverse Map

Character Archetypes Sneak Peek 

Layout Update

Baroque Space Opera Update #6: Layout Progress

The Baroque Space Opera book layout is coming along quite nicely. Last night I finished off Chapter 6. There are 20 chapters in the book, and the setting material chapters are the longest. I'm very happy with how the book is coming together. Things are falling into place and I think it looks great. I can't wait to get it in print.

The awesome artist who brought my Baroqueverse concepts to life is Matt Ryan.

Below are two spreads for your viewing pleasure:

If you're interested in Baroque Space Opera, check out the previous posts below:

Introduction to Baroque Space Opera

Baroque Space Opera Concept Art

The Baroque Space Opera Logo 

More Concept Art

The Book Cover

The Baroqueverse Map

Character Archetypes Sneak Peek

Baroque Space Opera Update #2

Baroque Space Opera is now half edited. The setting material is undergoing a final look-through, but is now finalized. Editing is progressing on 62 locations and story hooks the book will contain, as well as the rules sections of the book. The locations have been seeded with story hooks for the GM and include a great variety of locations, from artificial megastructures to exotic planets to mysterious phenomena.

Just so that the update is not entirely devoid of cool stuff, here is another art concept from Baroque. This is a view from the bridge of a Dominion battlecruiser, and if you look carefully, you will notice people on the bridge. Yes, it's that big! Everything in Baroque is larger than life, including voidships.

The battlecruiser is approaching the planetary Heliocon, a 2km tall structure that serves both as the primary voidport of a planet, as well as the headquarters of the Body of the Tyrant: the religious body that reinforces the Tyrant's divine nature and which also serves as the bureaucracy of the Dominion. The Heliocon is topped by 4 solar masks resembling the one the Tyrant wears. They face the cardinal points and are unmissable on approach to the planet. The Heliocon is a symbol of the Tyrant's rule, and it reminds all about who it is that rules here. The Heliocon is surrounded by an energy field that keeps the clouds at bay, ensuring that the Heliocon is perpetually illuminated by the sun during the day and the stars by night. Each Dominated Planet hosts a Heliocon.

High in orbit, above the Heliocon, orbits a haven: a Dominion space station.

The final image is full colour, and looks amazing. You will have to wait to see it when the book is completed.

Baroque Concept Art

What I really want to do is post all of the completed illustrations, but then I would have nothing for the book when it comes out. Rather, here are two scene concepts which have already been completed.

I previously introduced Baroque Space Opera in another blog post.

The Baroque Space Opera setting book will include 30 full colour illustrations to depict the Baroque universe, and the Fate Core systems to go with it. The book is a setting book, in the same vein as Day After Ragnorock, and will require the Fate Core book to play. Considering Fate Core is pay-what-you-will, this is a good deal! Not including rules reduces the time to completion, cost of printing, and the cost of the book.

Baroque Space Opera will include a write up of the Baroqueverse, character archetypes to base your character concepts on, additional Fate Fractals appropriate to the setting and an introductory adventure. Among some of the extras included are a psychic system, spaceships, vehicles, and a new take on gear. The rules will be open sourced to the community, because open source is the future.

The following scenes give some of the flavour of the setting.

A bit of Dune bleeds through here. The Arkship is a massive space vessel capable of conveying other starships to far flung locations in a matter of minutes. Arkships operate on the secret technology of the Void Weavers, a sect of Theors who uncovered the secrets of the fabric of space-time. Using massive gravitational singularities, the Loom Drive tears a hole in the fabric of space and falls through towards its destination -- falling out on the other side. A Dominion-wide transportation network of these Arkships ferry passengers, cargo and news to the hundred planets.

In this scene, a fleet of house ships embarks onto the Arkship. House cruisers and destroyers heading to some far-flung battlefield, no doubt.

There are other means of space travel within the Dominion; the Loom Drive is but the latest and quickest method.  Many vessels utilize the superluminal drive, hurtling through space at faster than light speeds. Travel in the Baroqueverse is not limited to a set of jump gates, portals or routes. You can go anywhere, anytime.

This is a scene of the sacking of Baroque, the capitol planet of the Dominion, and seat of power for the Dominion. During the Second Nihilim Invasions, the third incarnation of the immortal Tyrant was slain when Baroque fell to the Nihilim. This scene depicts a Voor, a Voorish war machine and a Brood flier. The Voor are masters of bio-mechanics, constructing semi-living machines and breeding a host of Brood horrors, each adapted to their function on the battlefield. As servants of the mysterious Nihilim Presences, the Voor act as shock troopers and breeders of the bio-mechanical engines of war employed by the other Nihilim slave races. The Nihilim Presences are masters over a number of species who originate outside this universe and pillage in the name of their mysterious masters.

This is a small taste of the Baroqueverse, and all the strange people, places, and things found within. The book is scheduled to go out when its done, and no sooner. :) The art is close to completion and I have some more writing to do. There's much editing to be done. I expect to be finished sometime this fall.

Fate of Starship Battles

My first serious Fate Core hack was an attempt at the creation of starship combat rules which could be used stand-alone and as part of roleplaying sessions. The version I reference here is the 3rd iteration of the rules. My group and I have done a few playtest sessions which resulted in some minor and major modifications to the rules. I feel that this 3rd iteration has come a long way and has streamlined much of the rules.

For the impatient, the rules may be found here. There is an example battle map and a starship sheet you can print for your games.

During playtesting, we attempted a number of approaches to weapons and damage. The way starship skills were allocated changed very early on as well. I documented many of the approaches in Fate to weapons, armour and damage here.

An early modification was to change the starship skill pyramid into a double column. The first playtest was with a pyramid, and we played with Enormous (6) Hull ships on each side. The amount of skills (systems) gained was crazy. Ships had three or more beam weapons and multiple squads of Marines - 4 in one instance. Ship creation also took much longer than it should have for a one-off battle. It was all a bit much. I didn't want a small ship with a Medium (3) Hull to only have a couple of skill slots. The balancing was difficult because at larger hulls, you end up with way too many. Eventually, after running some numbers I arrived at a double column. This was a very good fit for all sizes of ships. I'm quite happy with this now.

The first weapon system we tried was a variant of Weapon Min Stress vs. Armour Stress & Consequences where weapons did a minimum amount of damage based on the skill ranks. This turned out to be too hard to remember and figure out when a starship had multiple weapons of various ranks. I abandoned the armour stress early on before the first play test after reading comments on the G+ Fate Core group which indicated that would make combat last longer and bog it down. I only kept the minimum stress for the first playtest. The problem we found was with tracking the minimum stress since if you had more than one weapon, they all did different minimum damage based on the skill ranks. What really complicated things was things like Flack, Shields and Drones. They had to fit into the system with what they offered. Things got unbalanced and too complicated for what I wanted.

The second weapon system was an attempt at using For Better Or Worse where the scale was determined by the skill ranks in the skill rather than hull size. For example an Average (+1) Structure was considered Small in scale and a Legendary (+8) Structure was Huge. The progression was 0-2: Small, 3-4: Medium, 5-6: Large and 7-8: Huge. Up to two shifts were considered for a max bonus of +2. This was in many ways even worse because now there was a whole mix of ranks of weapons and defence which confused things tremendously. Again the Flack, Shields and Drones proved to be hard to fit into this system without additional rules. At the end of the day, this was less favourable than the first attempt.

The final weapon revision came about mid way through the last playtest. We got annoyed with how things were calculated and took a time out to discuss the pros and cons of the current and previous systems. We quickly agreed they were not ideal, nor intuitive. During discussion I threw out there the free invokes system which the Fate Freeport Companion had. Immediately everyone's ears perked up and they all nodded. We tried it, and it worked amazingly. The tracking was simple with a few boxes on the starship sheet. I decided that the number of free Boosts you get per battle scene is equal to the ranks in your skill. A maximum of two may be used at a time, like the limit of a single Advantage. The rest is detailed in the starship rules link above.

The exercise of these standalone battles was a great introduction for my group to the basics of Fate. Since were were just having fun and trying to figure out an optimal system, everyone had a great time playing something everyone knew how - miniature battles.

In the second playtest we used Aspects. I was surprised at the amazing Aspects the players came up with on their own after a brief intro to what they do and how they are used. The Aspects became on many different occasions and the players quickly grasped how to take advantage of them, and when.

Give the rules a spin, let me know what you think and how you think the rules might be improved. Not everything in the 3rd revision was playtested either. As a designer, I found it most helpful to stand back and GM the battles rather than play them. The time I had to observe the players and where they stumbled or had issues was a huge benefit.

For those curious, the miniatures we used were from the Fading Suns Noble Armada starship board game.