The mish-mash system, or how it works in MTU

[Murph]

Ok, here goes: IMTU the basic game system is Cyberpunk 2020 with Traveller specific skills added, Mercenary/High Guard/Scouts/Merchant char gen just to get background (obviously no skills), Planet/System Generation: Book 6 plus some MegaTraveller, T5, but mostly Book 6. Starship design: Book 5 High Guard, or Book 2 (ships get them from place to place sort of like a Ford) with fuel for jump being 5% instead of 10%. Combat: Cyberpunk 2020 with new weapons added (gauss rifle, PGMP, etc), combat is fast, elegant, and very, very deadly. Dollops of FGU's Space Opera thrown in for good measure.

Location: on the frontier, less settled areas, closer in feel to Far Frontiers/Trojan Reach/Reavers Deep in feel. The large governments are just off stage, but can be used as a McGuffin if needed. Many races, lots of them, almost Star Trek/Space Operaish in some ways. Main bad guys are the Benrie (think Laumer's Groaci but human use warbots, and think they are TL 15 when they are really TL 12), The Grand Empire of the Lords of the Stars (Avian- arrogant, but honorable), plus others. The good guys are the Caledonian Kingdom, Xanadu, New Texas, Sutekh, and the Terran Concordat (an almost Three Stooges Earth government).

Game feel: Firefly/Cowboy Bebop, with touches of Babylon 5, Buckaroo Banzai, and Star Wars (space opera style), a little bit of Alien, and other movies. Characters are usually looking for cash to fix the ship, get out of jail, do a good deed, or just to try and get rich.

Soundtrack: Progressive Rock, with some Gothic Metal, and bits of bagpipes.

Best moment: The "Black Globe Generator Drill" After getting a Black Globe off of the Kinunir, they took measurements, made a very lifelike dummy model (they sold the real one to shady arms dealers), they landed at a starport owned by the Concordat, next to the naval downport.

They opened the cargo bay, and started connecting the "Black Globe" in plain view of the Naval Base. The Navy went predictably batsh*t, and as the Marines were running up, they opened the "Black Globe" to reveal....a toilet.

 

[creativehum]

That sounds great!

 

[Quint]

I ran something similar for years, though I merged the CP2020 skill acquisition and the MegaTraveller acquisition.

I liked to call that iteration of my campaign "CyberTraveller" - and I also was blatant about my willingness to steal anything and everything SciFi that was interesting. Any game, any book, any movie - if it was cool, I'd use it.

It was also a very Space Opera Time Travel game - so I ran the campaign three-four times, starting at the same "start point" with different mixes of characters, each one representing a different time stream. The players who were around for all of them really loved it because while they were able to increasingly put together the "metaplot" (or, at least, "a metaplot") and use the knowledge to their advantage.

My last version was "Traveller 2200" which took a slightly tweaked CP2020 timeline to the year 2200 in a custom universe. I only ran that once, it was fun but I didn't have as much fun with it as I did my "CyberTraveller" campaigns.

D.

 

[Murph]

Yeah my campaigns tended to use Cyberpunk 2020 as a character system, this includes my 2300 campaign. No Third Imperium, I shamelessly stole modules from FASA and GAMELORDS as settings in my universe. Started out with a subsector,and ended up with a sector. A common theme was big governments are inept, handicapped by inertia, generally not interested in the "common good" but instead the good of the bureaucrats, and it became almost the duty of the PCs to jack with the bureaucrats anywhere and anytime they could get away with it. A very Libertarian attitude pervaded the games ("Little guy good, big government-Bad")

Since they did not run worlds, and had a merchant ship (varied between a Beowulf class, a Type T, and a Broadsword) and therefore did not need to design ships it was moot, so the appearance of a Concordat destroyer was a BIG deal. They crippled a Benrie Cruiser (12,000 tons) in a ring system by pretending to be crippled themselves and then setting off a 50 megaton proximity nuke close to the cruiser to blind its sensors, and allow them to run away. Of course it was their only nuke, and since they were smuggling it, the buyers were pissed that their nuke ended up being used, and so the players ended up with another set of enemies. As a result they had to take a contract with Concordat Intellegence which led to all sorts of contacts and complications.

In the 2300 game, it was Texas vs the rest of the universe in some ways. Soundtrack: Asleep at the Wheel, Brooks and Dunn, Blue Oyster Cult, Nightwish, The Seatbelts etc. Things got wild when they encountered the Vilani.....

 

[Kilgs]

Ok, here goes: IMTU the basic game system is Cyberpunk 2020 with Traveller specific skills added,

Sonuva... when I was looking around for a new system, CP2020 was the first one that I hauled out and monkeyed around with. I have a fondness for it and even more so for CP2013/FNFF. I wanted the Powered Armor rules for sure! I should have asked on here!

Instead I ended up on Silhouette/DP9 due to the Jovian Chronicles tie-in and the tactical combat component.

 

[RandyB]

I have found the CP2020 (Interlock) system to be hugely underrated, especially in its Mekton Zeta form. The construction system in Mekton Zeta Plus is simple yet far-ranging in scope, and is (as I recall) ~100% compatible with CP2020 sourcebooks.

 

[Murph]

CP 2020/MAXIMUM METAL sourcebook. The rules work well from Maximum Metal. There is the concept of scale in Mekton Zeta where against a battleship your battleships weapons may do for example 2d6, but scaling to human size that battleship weapon does 2d6 x 100 (IIRC)! I can't find my copy anywhere for some reason.

I just thought of the movie style: Film Noir with moments of high comedy.

Sonuva... when I was looking around for a new system, CP2020 was the first one that I hauled out and monkeyed around with. I have a fondness for it and even more so for CP2013/FNFF. I wanted the Powered Armor rules for sure! I should have asked on here!

Instead I ended up on Silhouette/DP9 due to the Jovian Chronicles tie-in and the tactical combat component.

 

[Quint]

In general, I found that adapting Traveller weapons tech to CP2020 was pretty easy - and I generally found the vehicle design system in Maximum Metal easier to understand and use than anything GDW ever put out.

D.

 

[aramis]

In general, I found that adapting Traveller weapons tech to CP2020 was pretty easy - and I generally found the vehicle design system in Maximum Metal easier to understand and use than anything GDW ever put out.

D.

Funny - I've used with only minor issues every GDW and IG design system, but found Maximum Metal poorly laid out and incoherent. In no small irony, I found MektonZeta Plus's (which was grounded in Mekton Techbook) easy to use.

Different folks have different wants and needs...

 

[Quint]

Funny - I've used with only minor issues every GDW and IG design system, but found Maximum Metal poorly laid out and incoherent. In no small irony, I found MektonZeta Plus's (which was grounded in Mekton Techbook) easy to use.

Different folks have different wants and needs...

LOL! True enough...

Ok, I do have to say that I found CT ACS simpler than Maximum Metal. But High Guard, Striker, and anything MegaTraveller just bogged me down. I guess "understand" is overstating it. I certainly understood what they were talking about, I just found it a huge PITA to actually create anything...

And I will say that the Maximum Metal rules for Power Armor were far from optimal. When I was doing Traveller Battledress I had to use of lot of handwavium to make things work.

I found that MgT's vehicle creation rules where in between CP2020 and MT. I originally liked them, but the more and more I used them the more and more I felt myself sinking into MT-territory. Ultimately I've resolved that I don't really need more detail than I have in the basic rulebook - and with that I can pretty much make things up as I like. Having the rules handy is nice as a rough guideline for TL availability, but otherwise I've found that the older I get the less time I want to spend numbercrunching vehicle design.

D.

D.

 

[Kaeto]

I use T4 with some homebrew tweaks in mtu. But have lots of elements from my favorite Science fiction stories and Anime.

For example You don't want the Imperium to decide that your planet needs pacified. As they will then unleash the Bolo Combat Units of the Dinocrome Brigade.

 

[Murph]

I mostly want the rule system to stay out of my way as the guys cross the cosmos leaving mayhem, and chaos behind them.

 

[Mithras]

Mashup! Oh I remember mine! It was the best gaming I ever did....

It was a near future Cyberpunk 2020 game set on Earth in around 2150. I used the GDW 2300 timeline but halved all the dates, and had the colonies and so forth all in the background (we only went off world once on a Kafer/Ridley Scott Alien story).

Paranoia rules for traitor points and promotion points in the corp the PCs workd for ... Oooh!
GURPS Autoduel setting for much of the USA, and I nicked the vehcle design rules too.

2300AD weapons were easily ported into Cyberpunk 2020. I used that combat and skill sysem because it was fast and deadly. The whle concept of the globe trottingcyberpunk campaign was fear-paranoia-mega violece and fast death - with the healthy Paranoia adage upermost: 'kill the b****ds!'

Great games. Great friends. Great times.

 

[Murph]

One of our tricks was to make jump fuel cost to 5% per jump, and for the most part kept the designs as they were, so your Free Trader became a Jump 2 vessel (2 Jump 1's), same as your subsidized merchant. Your Fat Trader became capable of two Jump 2's. Or redesign that Free Trader so it had 5% more cargo space, which made a real difference in starship economics.

Plus Jump was instantaneous, your time was spent moving in system from the jump point on M drive.