The Launch

The New New

Welcome. I've been busy. Have a look around. Make a character. Send me a note. I made a website!

Since my BearBlog adventure, stuff's been happening. So much stuff. It's difficult to get a moment to breathe sometimes. I'm sure you can relate.

I signed up to run 3 games at ArcaneCon in Northampton, MA. They're full. It makes me feel very good that they filled up as fast as they did. Traveller can be a tough sell sometimes, but ArcaneCon loves it. I'm bringing material to run pick-ups too. I'll write about what I'm running, how I'm planning them, and why I chose what I did.

For the last 4-5 weeks, I've been building this site. I bought a Claude subscription. Originally to mess with it a bit in anticipation of using it at work (we use Copilot and Cursor now), but after a couple evenings of organizing 20+ years of hobby projects, code interviews, exercises, tools, and course work I thought, "Maybe I should just get my site going." After all, I'd been sitting on the domain for several months already.

And here we are, with a real-live hobby website on my own domain. All because my old friend Steven and I had a long-ass conversation on the phone (yeah, we're old and he lives 3000 miles west of me now -- deal with it) about LLMs and our future as software engineers. His advice: embrace it and make it work for you. I did, and here we are. Thanks, Steven.

Claude. What I use it for, and how I use it.

I'm coming at this head-on. I used and will continue to use Claude as a tool to help me develop and manage this site. I could do it by hand. I was doing it by hand. I've been working on this site and its content by hand for years. Claude made me faster. Claude got me out of site-development purgatory and got me launched. It's a powerful tool, but it's just a tool. It makes me a faster developer, and a faster developer is a better developer.

I don't use Claude to write for me. I wrote this -- totally raw-brained it (h/t to John Scalzi for that). I wrote all those rules. I made up all those tables, I wrote all that flavor text. I do use Claude to check my rules for me. It has found conflicts, contradictions, and just plain ol' missing information. It does not write for me. I don't even let it correct my grammar. I will let it correct my spelling after I review what it's trying to do. Claude is a powerful editing tool, but it's not a writer or an editor.

Claude has made suggestions to rules text, and I have read them and even implemented a few of them, e.g. in Psionica, one of the attack powers had no upper damage limit. To me, it did, as you can only spend so much of your Endurance (END) -- but I'm also a technical writer and as I found myself justifying that decision (you know nothing, Claude!), I realized that the reader can only know what you've told them. So, I cracked open the file, read it a few more times and then re-wrote the rule. It's better now.

I don't expect this to change any minds about LLMs and their use. I'm telling you this to get my own position out there, and be up front about my usage of LLM in a community that has very strong opinions about the use of LLMs and agents. I use Claude to develop and manage this site, and to review my game rules. I do my own writing. Now you know.

Hyperlite

My sloppy love letter to Classic Traveller '77 continues at a blistering pace. Go buy it from Mr. Marc Miller himself. Lifepath chargen is done. Psionica is done enough. Rules is mostly done. I have a lot of equipment and gadgets work to do, but I have drugs mostly worked out. Starships are still in my head and in notes documents from playtests earlier in the year. Confidentially, I may have too much mechanical detail to integrate thematically with the rest of the game. I wrote too many rules there, I think. We'll see.

I first used the Stars Without Number starship mini-game rules as an addition to an early Hyperlite playtest, before I'd played or run SWN. I liked them so much, I adapted them to Hyperlite. Thanks, Kevin Crawford!

The last mechanical acknowledgement I need to make is to Troika as that's where I got the "test of competition" that makes fighting an opposed roll. Daniel Sell has/had a genius. Melsonian Arts Council are my heroes.

I will be running the rules you find on this site at ArcaneCon this year. This is a serious playtest for me and I'm a little anxious about it. I have confidence in Lifepath Chargen because I've run it for the last three years at two different conventions. I've run two of the three adventures in the past. Lost Ship Kinunir I've prepared and run so many times I can practically run it from memory. Annic Nova, I've prepared three times and run twice but I've never run it to completion as we've always run out of time before they finish the scenario. Still, I'm confident in the material and my familiarity with it. I've never run the last one and was only passingly familiar with it before I started my game building process. However, Expedition to Zhodane is a very popular module among the Classic Traveller crowd and it fit the bill for a multi-phase adventure romp for a convention.

I've pushed a lot of rules up to the site, and done a lot of review and editing. I've been playing these rules for almost a year now, and I'm confident that Hyperlite as it is, is a playable game. I want to add more features (check out all my TBDs!) and have a plan, but the core is set: tests of self, tests of competition, and saves, when and how to roll, how to take turns, and how to run a starship encounter.

The future, the stuff that's left, is for campaign play: Clubs, Casinos, Companions, Gadgets, and Spaceships. And so much more! Stay tuned.