Battlestations is a tactical wargame of sorts in which you play the crew of an understaffed starship. Starships are built from square grid modules (each providing a system) and players have individual character sheets.
The Shadow of Yesterday is a story game played with Fudge dice, in which players take the roles of ordinary people on a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. The rules are very low-crunch, and have a certain fractal nature to the way things are modeled.
This document, being merely a collection point for notes, assumes that the reader has familiarity with both systems.
My aim is to make a very lightweight set of TSOY-inspired rules for playing a game somewhat like Battlestations. I want to unify things that are diverse, and simplify things that are complicated.
My plan is to make the setting somewhat "steampunk", while avoiding the retread of standard genre tropes (which means no "aether"!). I intend to format the game as a novella-length story written in a sort of Robinson Crusoe style, containing the diary of a young boy who sets out into the stars and has great adventures. This will be followed by a terse set of rules explaining how to play the game.
Much of this is designed to be simple to model on paper, while leaving options for a computerized version of the game open.
Characters will be constructed in a manner similar to TSOY Characters, with some number of levels spent on Pools (Talent), Abilities (Expertise), Secrets, and Keys.
Players have six pools representing innate or acquired talent in a field. Each pool represents a category of task one may mean to perform, and provide a set of bonus dice to be applied in appropriate areas. Each one will be represented in the rules by a symbol as follows:
Athletics: ☥ Combat: ⚔ Engineering: ⚙ Piloting: ⎈ Science: ⚗ Diplomacy: ⚖
Characters have Expertise in particular ship modules, and possibly with other pieces of handheld equipment. These act as the Ability in a roll, and the cost for each level grows geometrically.
Secrets are as yet unquantified. There are likely to be a set illustrating characters from the novella. It is best to have a mechanical set of tests for how a secret behaves, so that it can be used properly in a computer version of the game.
As with Secrets, it will be handy to keep Keys a little more mechanical for the computer version. Some examples:
The ships are pieced together from hexagonal "modules", which can be arranged in many "configurations" that affect the difficulty of maneuvering, the ease of movement by the crew within, and the manner in which damage is taken.
Ships are constructed from hexagonal modules containing hexagonal tiles and fly through a hex-grid space. In a sense, everything is about coordinate systems of scaled hex-grids, although this sort of detail will never need to be explored.
To simplify matters, all hexes in the game are "horizontal" like so: ⬣. Players using paper will almost certainly not need coordinate systems, but if needed any playing group may use whatever is familiar or comfortable.
The computerized game will use a mapping of hexagons into a grid coordinate system where the vertical axis of movement is ignored for simplicity. The remaining two axes are named a (↗) and o (↖) for "acute" and "oblique" angles, respectively. This naming convetion assumes that angles are measured from the ray formed along the positive end of the x axis (∡).
+a: ↗ -a: ↙ +o: ↖ -o: ↘
In terms of TSOY rules, ship modules are a funny sort of character. Each has a single "level" attribute that behaves like a Pool that drains each round, and some number of secrets either innate to the module's type or purchased as special abilities.
The pools are a sort of "power rating" that determines how much energy the module can translate into useful work. Only one module, the |ENG| Engine, truly "generates" power for the ship. Other modules may store or convert the energy from one form into another (and really that is all that is ever possible in the Universe).
Before we move on, we must define some aspects of entire ships that are determined by the modules.
The engine burns |TRADE| Fuel Ore in its furnace, generating both electricity (⚡) and thrust (☄). The heat from the ore pile powers the great Stirling motors which drive the dynamos to run electricity to the rest of the ship. In addition to this, the pile