Battle Born rereleased

**aramis** · #1 December 23rd, 2017, 04:53 AM

Battle Born, By George "Red" Rahm and Joseph "Conrad" Hilmer...

A Game inspired directly by Traveller (per the designer's notes) and by Warhammer 40K...

They reformatted and released the new edition in Kindle format. There are some format choice issues:

No way to print the character sheet nor tables.
Tables included as graphics, meaning the text upon them cannot be resized.
Several tables are too wide to display legibly onscreen.

Silly, slapstick, and simple... but with a wonky choice of dice: 2d8.

The task system is a 2d8+Skill, with skills being rated (no skill), +0 to +4, and looked up on a table. This results in one of Success, Mixed, Fail, or Fumble. Four difficulties are given: Basic, Difficult, Tasking, and Limit. Limit is not intended to be used for task definitions, only for shifts due to multiple tasks or being unskilled.

(in the sister game, Guardians of Sol, an additional outcome was added: Overkill.)

The Kindle Edition is essentially edition 2.1, and also includes the related Mass Combat game. It does not, however, include GSol.

The game has a number of "Quick and Dirty" tables - these are essentially either canned setups for a scene, or canned downtime scenes. All of them are provocative

Combat uses a three phase process:

Phase 1: Advantage
Phase 2: NPC's
Phase 3: Responsive

Advantage Attacks are easier.
Responsive phase you can defend against the NPC damage, or you can attack, or both.
NPCs have a different system of attacks, simplified vs the players.

I figured I'd mention it, as it's free to read if one has Amazon Prime, and it's interesting to see what Traveller inspired.
The task system could be grafted into CT, MT, or MGT if one wanted to.