Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/05/07/the-sci-fi-robot-spiders-search-results-newscientist-its-a-great-source-of-scientific-gobbledygook-for-sf-rpgs-and-its-free-and-theyll-email-it-to-you/

My sci-fi robot spiders are always searching for science fiction and role-playing game related goodies. Today they skittered out of my USB port with a particularly juicy gobbet of SF gobbledygook. While searching through the NewScientist site, a rich seam of this cool  nerdy stuff, they found an article on spin ice. You’ve probably never heard of spin ice – and I’ll admit I`m a bit hazy on the details myself but it seems like  a great new concept to throw into the mix when designing equipment for sci-fi RPGs.

This story got me thinking about how great NewScientist is for coming up with ideas for your science fiction role-playing game (Traveller for example) sessions.

Hunting the mysterious monopole – physics-math – 06 May 2009 – New Scientist

Spin Ice, as described in the story, seems like the perfect material for constructing droid brains and info storage devices, and it is absolutely cutting edge stuff. You can have it in your sci-fi RPG before anyone really knows what it is, wouldn’t that make you feel proud, and it’s a good excuse to be really nerdy and read a popular science magazine. I’m certainly going to be including it in my sci-fi RPG setting for Traveller, called Tarazet.

AND – the robot spiders have already brought me all these other free SF goodies too.

Blender, a 3D design and rendering program which is great for creating illustrations of high-tech stuff.
trueSpace, another 3D design tool, I find it a bit easier to use than Blender, but that’s probably because it was the first one I used.
SketchUp, yet another free 3D design suite.
map maker software
Battletech board game simulator, you can play against the computer
Traveller the developers pack from Mongoose, all the rules you need (including psionics, monsters, spaceships and equipment) but without the background colour sections.
Star Frontiers, another great free sci-fi RPG, this time including all the background and detail about the setting, but it is less well suited to space opera style campaigns.
Mobipocket a free eBook reader that works well with my Samsung smartphone  and XP PC.
Free SF eBooks from Gutenburg, Baen, Freesfonline and starrigger.
Open Office, for writing all your own content and opening spreadsheets (very popular in the RPG world for automating character generation and other tasks).
 

I’ll be adding all these resources to my page of links for Sci-Fi RPGs.