Back in 1997, the old TSR produced a boxed set called
Tale of the Comet as part of its Odyssey line of game settings. This particular product took the concept of a crashed spaceship
a la Barrier Peaks and cranked it up to eleven.
I picked up my copy at Half-Price Books many years ago. The box contained three booklets, several maps, and numerous play aids.
Tale had stats for sci-fi weapons and gear, as well as data on vehicles and machine opponents who appear in the campaign world via a starship wreck.
With this adventure, you could even take the fight to the stars in a working spacecraft. That's right--
D&D In Spaaaace! Note the self-destruct mechanism, built right into the dashboard--when blowing up your ride just can't wait!
I never played this back in the day, but at the time I did get a kick out of the art. Did anyone else ever use any part of this adventure in their gaming? Had you even heard of it before now?
4 comments:
You should play this now!
Good idea to put the self-destruct next to the radio.
"Hail them and ask them their intentions."
"Aye-aye, hailing no-*BOOM!*
Tales of the Comet is on of my favorite 2E supplements that I never got around to playing. Blasters, robots, spaceships, gate travel and 'berzerker borgs.' Great, gonzo stuff.
-Ed Green
The fun part is in the books it also talks about number of units in excess per ship, and excess ships per fleet. Unfortunately it never gave a number of drones per ship as standard. The example used might be Cruiser + 20 Spider drones. That would mean the cruiser's complement of Spider drones was 20 more than usual. But the usual number was never provided.
The other fun part is that in order for the machines to be an escalating threat, their construction speed is very high. It takes 12 'units' of resources to build a single set, aka one Collector (mineral harvester/smelter) and two Replicators (multi-purpose robot arm used to make stuff). A single Collector can gather 2 units of resources per day, and each Replicator can work on 2 unit of resources per day. This means after 6 days, a single Collector/Replicator set would have built a second set. Then three days later, a third set is built. Two days later, a fourth set is built.
This geometric increase means that as long as sufficient resources are available, and there are no other demands on their Construction, a single set (1 Collector and 2 Replicators) left alone for 30 days can grow to 60 sets. If you leave them alone for another month, simple multiplication means you have 3600 sets (but geometrically you would have almost 6000).
Oh, and the heaviest ground combat unit only needs 5 'units' of resources to make.
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