Thursday, March 21, 2013

The Highway Men - Stars Without Number Game - Enter The Space Vikings




Enter The Space Vikings
"These are homemade barbarians. Workers and peasants who revolted to seize and divide the wealth and then found they'd smashed the means of production and killed off all the technical brains. Survivors on planets hit during the Interstellar Wars . . . who lost the machinery of civilization. Followers of political leaders on local-dictatorship planets. Companies of mercenaries thrown out of employment and living by pillage. Religious fanatics following self-anointed prophets."
H.Beam Piper 

The PC's are about to walk into the middle of some of the toughest and strangest hombres to cross the planetary divide especially in the Chasm. The Space Viking Clans have come and the characters are right in the middle of a claim of salvage between two clans. 
One of the PC's is acting as lawyer for rights over an alien battle scene. 

I don't have a lot of time to model these guys out and so I'm turning to an article written by a friend and mentor when it comes to fleshing these guys out.
You can find a rough outline right HERE
I'm drawing these clans from the 1958 movie the Vikings and Robert E. Howard seen though the lens of Piper.

This is a very brief outline of a lean and very hungry faction of 
"Space Vikings" at there most dangerous. 

Space Vikings Faction 

Attributes Forces 3 Cunning 6 Wealth 1 
Hit points 15 
Assets - Space Marines/Forces 4, Seditionists/Cunning 4, 
Tags: Savage
Please note that this is the barest of outlines for a faction and I'll be filling in more as time goes on. 



4 comments:

  1. It's great to see more support for H. Beam Piper's Space Viking. What a great novel! I've always wondered why so many of the sicfi-rpgs supposedly based on/inspired by Piper's work (and Doc Smith as well) always insisted on making their spacecraft cylindrical and not spherical. I have always much preferred the sphere-shaped ships. In fact I'm working on some maps...

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  2. I love Space Vikings as a both a setting and inspiration. The ideas in there are interesting and very unique. I think there have been a number of rpgs that have ripped Piper's work off but none that have really used the entire setting whole hog. The ending of Space Viking is very non traditional compared to some of the pulpy happy go lucky sci fi of the time.
    Space ships are like the fashion of science fiction. I have my preference of the science fiction illustrations of the 70's and early 80's for my ships. Books like Space, Wars, Worlds, and Weapons were/are my bread and butter.
    I just got home and I'll put in a full "Actual play" report in the morning.
    Thanks for the comments and more to come in the morning!

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  3. Well done. I was just reading a bit of _Space Vikings_ this morning.

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  4. Well I really love what your doing over at the Dreams Of The Sorcerer's Skull. Very Lee Brackett style stuff and tremendously interesting. Keep reading my friend because this is only a slight peek behind the curtain. We've got a lot more unexpected stuff coming down the wire.

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