The Space 1889 Ship Builder

As teased earlier, Savage Troll Publications is proud to present the SPACE:1889 - Red Sands Cloudship, Gunboat, and Ether Ship builder for the Savage Worlds rule system.

You can download the trial version and give it a try. The link is to a zip file which must be extracted to your PC or Mac. The zip contains two Excel spreadsheets, one containing macros the other does not, along with 21 ship images from the original SPACE:1889 material.

One word of warning, Excel will complain to high heaven that there are macros that might be harmful to your computer. This is a standard warning it gives for any spreadsheet you download from the Internet. The macros it complains about are buttons on the spreadsheet that reset the data, print the first page, take you to the Weapons page and back, and one that places a ship's image on the spreadsheet.

Instructions for the spreadsheet can be found on the new Savage Tools page on this blog.

Good luck and let us know if you find any errors.

Included in the download are the ships from Sky Galleons of Mars. It's a great supplement I recommend purchasing.

If you just want the ship images for Map Tool tokens, you can download them without the spreadsheet.

Review - The Lightning Train

Fantasy Maps: Lightning Train Map Pack
Publisher: D20 Cartographer
Price: $2.99
Artist: Joshua Bennett


All Aboard! The Lightning Train is about to leave the station. Tracks? Who needs tracks with a train that levitates above the ground on electro-magnetic forces and/or magic? Just don't step in front of the train. Those cow-catchers have a habit of flash frying anything in their way. You might want to steer clear of the engine as well. Lightning bolts fly from the front of the engine arcing backwards in brilliant displays of light.

This is an amazing map set suitable for a Fantasy or SteamPunk settings. It includes maps of the Engine, three different First Class cars, three standard passenger cars, two freight cars, a service car, and caboose. The pack also include four empty cars and object images so you can make cars according to your own personal design. You can mix and match the images anyway you wish to create the train of your choice.

The product includes PDFs for printing, JPGs for importing into your favorite Virtual Tabletop, and PNGs representing objects inside the train. The most interesting file, however, is the MapTool campaign file. It's thing of beauty containing 11 maps representing the outside of the train and the inside of each individual car.

For those who don't know, MapTool is a free VTT you can use in your face-to-face games with a projector, or connect with your friends across the Internet to play online. It is a full-featured program that runs equally well on Mac, Linux, or Windows.

Joshua leveraged several cool features of MapTool to make his map do wonders. It makes full use of lighting and topology meaning your MapTool players will only see what their characters see. The Lightning train also uses Wolph42's teleport pad. With this, players step between cars disappearing from one map and appearing on another.

This product does an equally good job of showing off the artist's talent and MapTool's capabilities. I highly recommend it.

Steampulp vs. Steampunk

This is one of those articles which may cause me to lose some readers, but the topic has been burdening me for a bit so I figure it's best to get it off my chest.

Recently I decided to participate in Nevermet Press's Krampus Christmas Carnival. Blog carnivals link blogs and websites together for a common monthly theme. The theme of this carnival is the Krampus, an anti-Santa that inflicts harm and scolding upon the children on the naughty list. It sounded like fun, so I added my blog to the list of participants.

When I write something, anything really, I perform research to give the story depth. I read the Krampus wiki and asked coworkers of various nationalities about the creature. Most called Krampus by the name of Black Santa, a shadowy being that entered the bedrooms on Christmas Eve to punish bad children. You could tell the memories of Black Santa were not found ones.

Since I write Horror/Adventure books, the Krampus makes a good fictional creature. My plan for the blog carnival is to write a short story about Thomas Gunn who, as a child, encounters Krampus and plays Encyclopedia Brown to stop the Yuletide Punisher in his tracks. I ran into plot issues since the story happens all in one night and communication in 1910 was difficult. The ending never jelled in my head so I abandoned it.

Since that path failed I decided to try another track. The carnival called for a Steampunk setting so I started researching exactly what that meant. I call the Space 1889 setting Steampunk but have discovered how very wrong I am. Apparently, the appropriate title for 1889 is Steam Pulp. I agree with that name now that I've investigated Steam Punk a bit more.

Steam Punk, as detailed in the SteamPunk Magazine, is a movement akin to anarchy working against Victorian Society to bring that social structure down. As they state: "it's more than just adding brass gears to equipment." Below is a quote from their magazine.

BEFORE THE age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile. 

Even if we had to make it all up. 

SteamPunk Magazine is a publication that is dedicated to promoting SteamPunk as a culture, as more than a sub-category of fiction. It is a journal of fashion, music, misapplied technology and chaos. And fiction. 

It just may be the most spectacular magazine to ever fight against the spectacle, and it is free. Or as cheap as we can possibly get it to you. Using the latest in Creative Commons technology, we undermine the fascism of copyright while protecting ourselves from direct co-option. 

We sell the magazine for as close to cost as we can manage, and we offer it for free PDF download for printing at home.

They lost me at 'tyrannous efficiency of the internal combustion engine' and more so at 'the fascism of copyright'.

I read several articles and disliked each more than its predecessor. Apparently it's the Punk aspect they cling to, ala the Punk Rock phenomenon where thrashing singers puked on their adoring fans. How shall I say this? Punk was never my cup of tea.

So, after researching Steam Punk I realized I had nothing to offer for the Carnival. That genre is never one I would enjoy the way the purest enjoy it. On the flip side, this is just one opinion but one I saw several times. I've read stories that were supposed to be Steam Punk but had none of the 'screw technology and laws' aspect to them. They were just pleasant stories about semi-magical steam and brass devices.

So, what to do?

Basically I decided to ignore them. It's akin to changing the channel if you don't enjoy a TV show. I play games as an escapist. I have no desire to fight old ideologies of colonialism and stratified social structures. The equipment and period settings attract me to Victorian game Savage World settings like Space 1889 and The Kerberos Club.

I eventually stumbled upon Frank Chadwick's blog, where he states that Space 1889 is actually Steam Pulp. I now realize that most of the Steam Punk fiction I enjoy is actually Steam Pulp fiction. Everything slid into place in my head like a metal gear turning to advance an 1890's clock.

I love writing pulp. The pulp genre has a few rules: good is clearly good and bad is clearly bad, people seldom die unless it advances the story in some way, and the villain always gets away. Even these rules aren't set in stone but act more as guidelines. Pulp is a genre I can get behind and enjoy. It's not that the character's can't be complex with foibles aplenty, it's just you can empathize with them.

So, I sat down to write the short story and stared at my empty Scrivener window. Nothing came. The curse of the blinking cursor dogged my every thought. Once more I'm left with the question: what to do?

Eventually I decided to resurrect an old character of mine that is truly twisted. Tomorrow you'll see a Savage Worlds version of my were-Santa along with his punishing sidekick Krampus and a drunk Fairy named Tinkler Girl. I hope you enjoy it. It's about as Punk as I get.

Cheers,
Troll.