October 18, 2024
I’ve been meaning to try to post more on my blog/site following the death of Cohost, which made it very easy for me to toss design thoughts out. Writing into VScode and pushing to my site via git has no juice at all by comparison. But we press on anyway.
Phipps23
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On November 27th of 2022 - a little less than 2 years ago as of writing this - Dan Phipps (of
Gem Room Games, go check them out, they’re cool folks!) posted
a neat approach to worldbuilding based on Gygax 75. I don’t know how long cohost links like the above are going to last so I’m going to reproduce the post here for general preservation’s sake, at least until I’m confident it’s been posted up somewhere else (drop me a line if and when it is):
...July 23, 2024
Last time I made a post about mechanics I talked about the Grid. Now I’m…still talking about The Grid, kind of! But it’s a different one this time.
Home-ship construction is something that had been on our minds since the beginning. Originally it was going to be kicked to the final version! But we had a lot of backer items created that we wanted and so this was a good opportunity to make an initial system out of it.
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February 12, 2024
Hi there! v1.1 is here! It brings a few major changes:
Formatting
- Increased page size slightly.
- Various typo-fixes.
- Tightening up of layout.
Combat Rules
- Missiles.
- Deploy now states the deployment range for missiles (0-1).
- Direct now lets you move 8 missiles by default instead of 5.
- Direct now states clearly when missiles count as “armed” (i.e. when they automatically attack if their target gets within range 0).
- Missiles are now slightly easier to shoot down by default (3+ instead of 4+).
- Disabled is now a called out thing that Electronic Warfare weaponry does (alongside Damaged and Destroyed), and explicitly states its interaction with crits.
- The interaction between armor and crits is now explicitly stated.
- Electric is now Shock, because while Electronic and Electric are in fact different words, we have been hard pressed to convince anyone of this.
- By default average encounter difficulty is stated, and Scavengers and INFINITY now have a 1-6 roll-table from which to construct encounters with them.
- Added a little more clarification about Zones/Ranges and added a second note in the Combat section to make all grids public information.
- Tackle lost its +/- for size difference but has a crit effect now.
Frames/Builds
Mechs
Just about everything except Light//Nerve had some kind of Frame or Build tweak. This is because Light//Nerve was born perfect and doesn’t need anything changed about her.
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November 9, 2023
We released a slight update to Celestial Bodies this morning.
Fixes
- Refigured the layout to A5.
- Fixed a few typos, copy/paste errors, bad labels, and wrong icons.
- Fixed a few examples.
Changes
- Ultra reactor now has the Reliable quality.
- Tackle is way more accurate (and Force can be used for it now).
- Direct rules now specify how missile speed works a little better.
Thank you so much for your support thus far! It’s been truly overwhelming.
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November 5, 2023
I know what you’re here for, mechanically. Let’s talk shop about The Grid™️.
Loadout and Construction
Every mech in this game is defined by a grid like this:
When I say defined, I mean fully defined. First, the basics:
- Every frame (basically a chassis for a kind of mech) has HP (Hull Points!) equal to its grid size. So the one you see above has 12HP.
- Every frame has a unique trait based on its grid’s size and shape. (This one gets more movement for having oversized thrusters, for instance.)
- Each component you see listed there has a specific designation as to what it does (some of them relative to the mech’s size) as well as a shape and size. Weapons can’t be rotated but can be flipped.
And then the advanced stuff.
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