I run a blog here in which I generally talk about RPGs and worldbuilding, and interesting planetary science and astronomy topics, and any other stuff I find interesting too (you can read all the blog entries below this post, so scroll down! To read the full article, just click on the title of the entry in the blog). There’s no fixed schedule, I just post whenever I feel I have something interesting to say :). If you just want to read blog entries about specific subjects (e.g. Battletech, 2300AD, Science, Worldbuilding, Stellar Mapping, etc) you can just click the link in the sidebar on the right under “Categories” (you can use that link as a bookmark too).
(Note: This is a follow-up to my previous post that discussed the Living Legend points of heroes in the Flesh and Blood TCG. That post looked at the Classic Constructed LL leaderboard – this one focusses on the Blitz LL leaderboard)
Classic Constructed is the most popular competitive format for Flesh and Blood TCG, but there are others too – Blitz, Living Legend, Commoner, etc. Blitz is a commonly played faster format that uses Young versions of heroes with 20 life instead of 40 life and decks that have a minimum of 40 cards (unlike CC’s 60), and is the only other format that has a Living Legend system where heroes rotate out of play (when they reach 500 LL points, though this has changed recently). It should be noted that at the time of writing there are heroes that only exist in Young form (such as Terra, Kavdaen, Blaze and Emperor) and so are only legal to play in Blitz.
Young vs Adult Heroes (Azalea)
The Blitz graphs are more straightforward than in Classic Constructed. For one thing, there are fewer data points here because the Blitz leaderboard is updated less frequently – Blitz is generally only played competitively at side events and Skirmishes.
Blitz graphs for all Young Heroes.
Traditionally heroes rotated out of play in Blitz at 500 points but recently this was (somewhat clumsily) adjusted by LSS to prevent Zen from retiring so quickly after he went from 205 to 505 points in one week! As a result, in November 2024 LSS decided to raise the Blitz LL limit to 1000 points and double every Hero’s point except Zen’s, who now found himself back in the middle of the pack again. This adjustment would have appeared as a sudden discontinuity in these graphs, so I made my own adjustment to keep things visually consistent – when all of the official points doubled, I halved them back down again so they remained consistent with their previous scores, and also I retroactively halved all of Zen’s scores since his introduction. This means that the Blitz LL limit on this graph remains at 500 points (even though it’s officially be 1000 now).
What is interesting in Blitz is that there is no obvious “Mistveil Effect” (seen in CC, where most of the heroes’ scores flatten out in May 2024 when Part the Mistveil was released) – instead it looks like heroes jump in points when other heroes retire. e.g. at the end of Dec 2023 Chane, Kano, Ira and Kassai (Sellsword) all reached LL within a month of eachother and many of the other heroes gain a lot of points immediately after that, presumably because they started winning events once those heroes left. This appears to happen again later when Dash, Briar and Rhinar all rotated out within a couple of weeks of eachother in Aug 2024.
I won’t go over each class individually this time, I’ll just present the graphs below (Blitz excel sheet is posted below too for anyone who wants to look at the data). Assassins and Rangers seem to be the classes that struggle most in Blitz, with none above 150 points. Many of the other classes have a couple of heroes who do really well while the rest linger around the lower end of the leaderboard (this is particularly noticeable in Mechanologists, where the original Dash was quite successful but all the other Mechanologists have less than 100 points). I haven’t shown the minor Blitz-only classes here (Bard, Merchant, Shapeshifter) because they don’t really have any support and haven’t won many games – Melody (Bard) and Genis (Merchant) each have 0 points, Kavdaen (Merchant) has a single point, and Shiyana (the only Shapeshifter) has 22 points. I’ve included Emperor (the only Warrior-Wizard) with the Wizards – he is doing fairly well (despite being dead :D) considering he is a hard-to-find character with Legendary rarity (like Shiyana).
Further demonstrating the randomness of my blog entries – here’s a nerdy data analysis post about Flesh and Blood, a Trading Card Game (TCG) that I started playing recently!
Flesh and Blood (usually abbreviated to FaB) is a competitive TCG published by Legend Story Studios (LSS) from New Zealand that revolves around “Heroes” battling against eachother (I use quotes there because some of the characters are decidedly not heroic, but LSS use the word “Hero” to define all of the characters!) – the aim is to reduce the opposing Hero to 0 life before they do that to you! It has a pretty strong competitive scene and lots of well attended major events all around the world (raning from local Armories, to Callings, Battle Hardeneds, Road to Nationals, Nationals, and Worlds). I won’t claim to be any good at the game yet – I’ve been playing for about four months now and I’m still fumbling my way through the heroes and I’m lucky if I actually win a single game at an Armory event – but I still enjoy playing and I like collecting the cards too (which have very nice artwork) :D. I’d like to think I’m slowly getting better anyway!
You can find out more about the game at https://fabtcg.com/en/resources/learn-to-play/ and there are plenty of gameplay, reviews, opinions and deck tech videos on twitch and youtube (and probably someone is playing it at an FLGS near you)!
FaB is played in a variety of formats, but the main competitive format is Classic Constructed (CC) which is played with a deck of at least 60 cards, with Adult Heroes starting around 40 life. One interesting thing is that Heroes rotate out of play based on how many Living Legend points they accumulate over time – they gain these LL points by winning major events. They start at 0 points and once they get a total of 1000 points they “retire” and rotate out of play and are no longer legal to play in official CC events (there is another format called “Living Legend” where all heroes – even the retired ones – are legal to play and that features some particularly powerful decks). Usually after a few months the hero is republished in a different form (with different abilities) and can be played again, so they aren’t out of action for long. I may refer to “Young” and “Adult” heroes later – Adult heroes are the ones that are played in CC, while Young heroes are 20-life versions of the Adult heroes that are played in the smaller Blitz format (I have gathered the historical leaderboard data for Blitz too that I’ll post in a similar way here at a later date) – usually there are Young and Adult versions of each hero but some heroes only exist in Young form (e.g. Terra, Data Doll) and some only exist in Adult form (e.g Jarl).
Nowadays LSS usually updates the Living Legend Leaderboards on their website every week (or during/after every major event), and I wondered if there was an archive of the scores so that we could see how the LL points had evolved over time for each hero. To cut a long story short: I managed to track down a lot of older LL leaderboard pages on the Internet Archive and I compiled the data, did some programming jiggerypokery with Python and made a table and some graphs out of it! It seems that LSS didn’t start publishing the LL scores on their website regularly before mid 2022 so the earliest data is completely missing, but enough had been archived since then (albeit irregularly) to give us a decent idea of how the LL scores evolved over time.
I’ve plotted the graphs by Hero Class – I’m not sure if that’s the best way to do it but it works! I’m not sure that I’m particularly qualified to offer any expert commentary on these but I will try to share some relevant observations at least, and you can draw your own conclusions from the graphs :). Continue reading →
Hello again, I made a thing! I have been interested in the Mothership scifi rpg for a while, and I chanced upon a solo scenario for it by Alfred Valley called Thousand Empty Light. This was a revelation to me in a couple of ways – first, although I played roleplaying games for a good couple of decades of my life, I was completely unaware of the concept of playing them solo (beyond a ‘choose your own adventure’ book anyway). Second because it is just so well put together. It’s presented as a company document instructing a “Lamplighter” (that’s you) who has to enter an underwater facility beneath an alien ocean and turn the power back on there – and since this is designed with Mothership in mind of course there’s something horrible down there. On top of that though there are codes to crack, secrets to find, and all sorts of hidden goodies to track down. You can check it out (and buy a copy) from Alfred Valley’s itch.io page and I heartily recommend that you do (I would also recommend the accompanying soundtrack “Sleeping in a Drowning Stone”, which is also available from there and served as excellent background music while I was writing).
The general idea with solo RPGs is that you’re given a framework of a setting to work in, and you explore it by asking questions that have a yes/no answer (e.g. “can I see any tools here” or “does the creature look hostile” etc). Then you roll dice and consult an “Oracle” which is a table that has “no”, “no but…”, “yes but” and “yes…” answers along with some prompts to help you describe the scene – e.g. if you asked “can I see any tools here” and rolled a “yes but” then you may see some but they’re in a locked cabinet that you’d need to break into. And then you fill out what happens to move the story forward and move on to the next situation, and repeat as required. In this specific scenario you’d use the Mothership rpg system to resolve things like skill checks, saves, and combat as well.
Now, I’ll be the first to say I probably didn’t do everything “right” here but then maybe there isn’t really a “right” way beyond just having fun with it, and I certainly did enjoy the experience. First I tried gathering some binary keys from Alfred’s site and the internet in order to tackle some of the binary codebreaking, and one of the prompts there gave me an idea. Then I started playing through and writing it up the thoughts of the lamplighter as a “journal” from the perspective of the character (I ended up writing over 11,000 words, which is the most I’ve written for anything in a very long time so I think I can safely say that I did get into it!). I started off just using the Oracle and taking whatever it said literally so things begin a little strangely, but as I went along I started using it less for the descriptive prompts and more for the yes/no answers, and then by the last couple of sections I had formed a good idea about where everything was going so I pretty much freeformed the rest of it (about halfway through I managed to decode/find all the secrets in the book too so that caused the story to evolve a little differently that I initially intended too). I’m pretty sure one could just use the Oracle as prompts for creative writing in general too. I should also add that this isn’t the only way to play solo RPGs – Mothership is actually intended to be a multiplayer RPG but there are plenty of dedicated solo RPGs out there now (I’ve bought a few of them but haven’t had a chance to look at them yet, but hopefully I’ll write something about those here later).
I think I’ve come up with something good here anyway – so without further ado, here is my playthrough of Thousand Empty Light! Let me know what you think! 🙂
THOUSAND EMPTY LIGHT – a full playthrough
UPB 154 was a grey, bleak, forbidding world coming in on the shuttle, and it’s a gray, bleak, forbidding world now I’m on the “ground” too. I say that in quotes because there is no actual ground here, just a creaking metal platform hammered by the winds and rain and spray of this godforsaken planet. Barring a few barren rocks poking above the surface, the entire planet is covered by a corrosively salty ocean and an unbroken layer of thick grey clouds above that. The wind gusts and howls, the waves crash on the caisson, and the rains lash me mercilessly as I stand on the platform watching the shuttle depart. I hate this place already.
In my last post I showed how most Battlemechs couldn’t actually walk as fast as described in the game – if you missed that then you can read it at How fast can a Battlemech walk?. In this post I will present some optional Advanced Rules to implement the more realistic mech movement described there.
This is what I’m setting out to achieve here:
– Mechs now walk, run, and sprint at realistic speeds.
– Where possible, movement rates should be as consistent as possible with their current stats. That said, the fastest mechs must be slower here because it’s now impossible for them to be as fast as they were – this means they will have smaller engines and more space for equipment.
– It must be possible to design mechs so that their engine ratings (and gyros) are comparable with published designs.
– MASC, Superchargers and TSM will have a similar effect on speed as in the existing rules. Continue reading →
A good demonstration of how a Locust doesn’t walk! 🙂
Or: “Can a Locust Battlemech really walk 240m in only 10 seconds?”
The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is “no, it can’t” – a Locust (or indeed any battlemech) could run that far in that time… but it is actually physically impossible for it to walk 240m in 10 seconds (at least in gravity similar to Earth’s). To discover why, we must take a rather fascinating scientific journey that sheds some light on something that perhaps many of us take for granted – the mechanics of how we move on two legs! Read on to learn more… Continue reading →
You hear the distant boom of an Autocannon echoing across the landscape and your mech shudders at the shell impacts against its left torso, blasting off some of the armour plating. It’s not enough to significantly damage your mech, but certainly enough to get your attention as you scan for your attacker and raise your arm-mounted PPC to respond…
And so the player peers at their Mech Record Sheet, and marks off five points of damage on the Left Torso:
Just your normal everyday record sheet.
But something’s funny here, to me at least. The way I see it, the side marked “Left Torso” is actually shown on the right side of the mech (it’s the player’s left side, but not the mech’s left side)! This has bugged me since I first started playing Battletech back in the 80s, and now I’ve started playing again I was reminded of it once again so I thought I’d dig into this a little further. Continue reading →
I’ve got back into Battletech recently and I’ve been trying to reverse-engineer how the Proximity Limit is calculated (because I like to know how these things work). First, here’s a little background if you’re unaware of how jump works in Battletech. According to the fluff, Jumpships use a “Kearny-Fuchida drive” to travel over interstellar distances almost instantaneously. Traditionally they arrive at the Zenith/Nadir points – above the north and south poles of a star respectively – at the Proximity Limit, which is (supposedly) determined by the gravitational field of the star. These Jumpships usually carry Dropships, which then detach from the Jumpship with their cargo of mechs and head towards their target planet using normal fusion drives. Meanwhile, the Jumpship (which has little more than a few manoeuvering thrusters) generally sits at the arrival point and unfurls a large solar sail about a kilometre in diameter that it uses to recharge its drive in readiness for the next jump, which usually takes around a week (150-200 hrs).
After looking at the latest version of the stellar data table on pg. 100 of Campaign Ops, and I made an interesting observation: the Proximity Limit is not based on gravity. Given all the fluff says that this distance is determined by gravity (e.g. the notes on pg. 122 of Strategic Ops, summarised as “hyperspace fields don’t like gravity”) this is somewhat surprising. It turns out I’m not actually the first to notice this either – a thread on the battletech forums from over a decade ago discusses this too, but no solution to this is presented there. So I wondered – what would it look like if the Proximity Limit was calculated using gravity?
If you just want to skip to the point – here’s the gravity-based Safe Jump Distance table that you can use in your Battletech games instead of the published ones (this is just intended as a variant to use if you want more realistic values): Table showing recalculated gravity-based Safe Jump Distance values.
If you want to know the technical details behind how I calculated this then read on… Continue reading →
I’ve posted a full playthrough of Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture on Youtube! I hope you take a look at it, it’s a fantastic story with great characters, beautiful graphics and an amazing soundtrack! If you enjoy watching it then I’d love to hear what you think in the comments, and please do like the videos and subscribe to my Youtube channel!
Episode 1: Quarantine: find out what happens to the inhabitants of the sleepy English village of Yaughton as they are visited by an unearthly force far beyond their understanding!
The next step on my journey to Colonia was from Sacaqawea Space Port in the Skaudaii AA-A Nebula to Gagarin Gate in the Gru Hypue AA-A Nebula, between the 14th March and the 25th March 3303. This was covered in Exploration Streams #7-10, which are available on my youtube channel! Continue reading →
Here is the third leg of the Great Colonia Expedition, from Eagle’s Landing in the Eagle Nebula to Sacaqawea Space Port – the voyage was from the 17th Feb to 11th March 3303! I also found my first Ammonia World here! During the trip I started up my Elite Dangerous Exploration Streams at https://www.twitch.tv/evildrganymede, so you can see where I took some of these in my streams too! Continue reading →
Welcome to the Lair of Evil Dr Ganymede! On this site, you’ll find my articles about Battletech, Elite Dangerous, 2300AD and Science as well as more general articles about role-playing games, worldbuilding, and Stellar Mapping that I’ve written or co-authored, along with artwork that I’ve created using 3D modelling software (POVray and Lightwave) over the years. I’ve also put my Ph.D. Thesis and abstracts online on my Science page.
