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| The loss of widespread sickass sci-fi covers |
**
Damn, I let this series go fallow. Thankfully, I finally have an ereader that can handle chunky pdfs (and this time it wasn't stolen) so I should be able to start putting these up at least more frequently than once every seven months.
**
Larry Niven's Ringworld: Roleplaying Adventure Beneath the Great Arch
(John Hewitt & Sherman Kahn, with additional writing by Lynn Willis, Sandy Peterson, Charlie Krank, Ed Gore & Rudy Craft; art by Ralph McQuarrie, Lisa A. Free, Michael Blum, Yurek Chodak)
Ringworld lives in that taxon of sci-fi where I think the setting is really interesting but can’t stand the actual book to a nearly 1:1 ratio. Great worldbuilding ideas (Weird aliens! Colony worlds with fun gimmicks woven into the environment and culture! A megastructure inhabited by other species of human!) wasted by being both unforgivably boring and outrageously sexist even by the standards of the day.
So entirely contrary to expectations, the out-of-print Chaosium licensed game from 1984 is probably the best way to ingest Known Space; all the setting stuff is in one place and you don’t have to deal with Niven being a gross horndog. The basic system is good old BRP 2e, so a few warts are to be expected but probably nothing completely insane (foreshadowing is a literary technique). Despite the miniscule font and triple-column format (augh my eyes), this is a fairly well put together book and I can dive right in.
**
1. Gender
I’ll just odds-evens this. Evens = female.
Grabbing a name from the ether: Juno McGovern
2. Homeworld
d100 = 89: The Belt
Ah, Beltalowda! Wrong series but the spirit is the same. Independently-minded, butting heads with the government on Earth, all that stuff. There’s a pretty sizable cultural writeup for all the homeworlds in the book, Belt. Picking arbitrarily, I’m going to say she’s from Pueblo, quote:
“This high-density Belter community is a labyrinth of isolated and interconnecting dome and fissure cities scattered across is surface and through its exhausted mining veins. Pueblo’s partially-terraformed exterior tracts are shielded by inflated plastic bubbles. Part-time, cooperatively-shared accommodations are common.”
Since the Belt is a low gravity homeworld, I’ll roll with a -3 to my Strength & Mass characteristics and a +3 to Dexterity.
3. Defect
d100 = 79: Hyperspace blind spot phobia
All characters have a 50% chance at a major drawback, which I ended up with. Basically, I freak the fuck out during the sensory blackout of hyperspace travel and I can’t take any skills related to it.
4. Chronological Age
One of Known Space’s major features is the longevity drug boosterspice , which means that the division between chrono and bio age will apply to basically everyone without an allergy to the drug (one of the possible defects). In the book this is primarily a vehicle for the rancid age gap, which I’ll spare you the rant on.
Rolling a 9 on the d10 table, I get a resulting chronological age of 1d100 (36) + 159: Juno is 195 years old.
5. Biological Age
There isn’t a specific roll for this part, and it rather unhelpfully directs me to the Hazards chapter for the section on aging just to tell me that my options are either a yearly injection or a major medical procedure every 20 years. For simplicity I’m just going to go with the 20 year cycle, which eventually rolls back to a bio age of 35.
6. Characteristics
2d6+6 for the lot of them, save the ones that get +3 or +9 due to my low-gravity homeworld.
- Strength: 2d6+3 = 11
- Mass: 2d6+3 = 8
- Constitution: 2d6+6 = 13
- Intelligence: 2d6+6 = 14
- Power: 2d6+6 = 13
- Dex: 2d6+9 =19
- Appearance: 2d6+6 = 13
- Education: 10+1d6 = 14
I think it’s fascinating to see how blatantly BRP is riffing on D&D’s stats system and how blatantly it's trying to address rolling low stats at chargen.
7. Attributes
These are all derived from characteristics, I'm not going to go stat-by-stat for them.
- Damage Mod: +0
- Hit Points: 21
- Health Roll: 39
- Reasoning Roll: 42
- Luck Roll: 39
- Dodge roll: 57
- Hit locations: 6/7/7/7/8 (arm / leg / head / abdomen / chest)
- Action ranking: 3
8. Psionics
You can’t select psionics during chargen - the GM is supposed to pop the surprise on you during a campaign (presumably so you don’t just have all-psychic parties). So no psionics for now. Oh no, what a nightmare, I don't get to be one of my least favorite sci-fi tropes.
9. Occupational Skill Points
Time to figure out how many skill points I have on hand, split up by what pool of skills they can be applied to.
- Education: (EDU - 10) x 20 = 80 pts
- Pursuits: (Age - [EDU + 6]) x 20 = 3500 pts
- Pursuits are all your character’s old careers: at 195 years old, my character gets 2d6 + 1 = 10 of them
- Special Interests: (IND x 10) = 140 pts
[I’m certain this'll be a recurring theme in this series, given that I’m focusing on higher-crunch games.]This is the sort of thing where I’d love to ask the writers “why?”. There’s almost a lifepath system here - you roll on a list of pursuits/careers X times - but those careers only tell you the skills you have available at any given stage. Actually assigning skill points is fully manual, as is figuring out how many years you spend in each career, as is what order those careers go in.
I’m going to start with the Pursuit skills first just to get them out of the way, and to make it easy on myself I’m just going to distribute everything evenly. 3500 pts / 10 pursuits = 350 pts per pursuit.; 175 years devoted to pursuits = 5 pursuits at 10 years, 5 pursuits at 11 years.
Rolling d100 ten times for pursuits gets me
- 42 = Entertainer
- 68 = Pilot
- 22 = Colonist
- 96 = Soldier
- 79 = Prisoner
- 90 = Researcher
- 28 = Criminal
- 94 = Researcher
- 14 = Colonist
- 76 = Police
Rearranging them into a semicoherent order (the numbers in parentheses are the wealth value & years spent, those come in later)
- Entertainer (2 / 10)
- Criminal (1 / 11)
- Prisoner (0 / 10)
- Colonist (1 / 11)
- Colonist (1 / 10)
- Researcher (1 / 11)
- Researcher (1 / 10)
- Soldier (1 / 11)
- Police (1 / 10)
- Pilot (3 / 11)
| Aquatic Vehicle | 20 | Language | 55 |
| Astronomy | 45 | Listen | 60 |
| Athletics | 65 | Math | 65 |
| Atmospheric Craft | 120 | Musicianship | 75 |
| Bargain | 196 | Observe | 155 |
| Biology | 117 | Orate | 75 |
| Botany | 166 | Perform | 75 |
| Chemistry | 116 | Personal Flyer | 120 |
| Computers | 112 | Physics | 141 |
| Emergency Treatment | 43 | Planetology | 52 |
| Engineering | 117 | Psychology | 103 |
| Farming | 52 | Reaction Drive | 25 |
| Fast Talk | 133 | Reactionless Drive | 25 |
| Ground Vehicle | 52 | Repair | 50 |
| Handgun (Energy) | 138 | Search | 175 |
| Handgun (Projectile) | 86 | Sneak | 141 |
| Heavy Weapons (Energy) | 103 | Strategy | 25 |
| Heavy Weapons (Projectile) | 43 | Track | 60 |
| Hide | 106 | Unarmed | 133 |
| History | 45 | Weapon System | 45 |
| Interstellar Law | 48 | Zoology | 116 |
We’re still not done, but we’re nearly there.
10. Wealth
To calculate this, I take the wealth value for each pursuit and multiply it by the number of years spent in it and add all those together (127), then make a luck roll to see if that is doubled (I got a 73, failing), then multiply that by 100 (127,000), then add all that to 1d10 x 1000 (4000) to get my total wealth in Stars: 131,000.
[The book notes that 1 Star is roughly equivalent to $5-$10 1980 US dollars. Just for funsies I rolled d5+d10 (3 & 2) and added to 5 for an exact equivalent of $8.20 USD / 1 Star, which would be $1,074,200 in 1980 dollars and $4,392,487.23 in 2026 dollars.)
11. Starting Equipment
- All-weather outfit
- Semi-formal clothes
- Smartwatch (not named as such, but that’s what it is)
- 1d20 = 11 Stars in cash
- IntraStar debit card + UNI-CREDIT charge card
- Multitool
- ID card & offworld passport
- Portable music synthesizer (chosen item)
12. Final Writup
After bumming around the Belt in a minor punk band, Juno ends up jailed for nonspecific crimes of narrative expedience. She does at least part of her sentence in prison until she’s offered a shot at early parole as part of a colony start-up program. She takes the offer, and spends the next few decades on a miserable inhospitable rock of the sort they’d send prisoners to colonize. Once the foundation is laid down and things have settled, she works her way into the scientific corps and stays there for a while until the colony breaks out into civil war (likely over breaking ties with the Earth government). Juno joins up with the independents during the war, serves as a security officer during the post-war rebuilding, and at last decides to buy a surplus flier on the cheap and semi-retire to life as a bush pilot (until she is roped into whatever nonsense that brings her to the Ring).
**
Whew! Finally done.
Besides the ungodly hassle of skill point assignment, this went fairly smoothly and I'm mostly pleased with the results. I still don’t really have any idea what you’d actually do in the Ringworld RPG, considering how the book it’s based on is a boring slog through basically nothing (how many thousands of miles of undifferentiated sunflower fields do you want?) and the game provides very little in the way of guidance wrt building your own adventures (though it does have a few premades)
RPG archaeology like this is always an interesting look into how even the relatively recent past is a different country indeed: I wonder who this book was for, did it ever actually get played, and why did it end up mostly better than it should have been? Was that skill selection process considered part of the fun back then, or was it just as tedious as it is now?
Anyway, it’s a neat curiosity, at the very least. BRP being what it is, those aliens and Ring-hominids are portable to other games with minimal hassle (i.e. “the mi-go are fucking around in the genome again”), and that’s probably the lasting value here.
