Interlude: Rules Change

The Space 1889:Red Sands setting book was published right at the point that the Savage Worlds Deluxe Edition of the rules replaced the original Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition. The changes weren't sweeping, so more an incremental change, some rewording. The biggest change in my opinion was to the chase rules.

The result was that while the Deluxe Edition rules work very well with the setting book, the aerial combat rules for fights between flying ships on Mars require knowledge of the original rules to understand what they are trying to explain. No big deal.

Recently ¹ the Deluxe Edition was superceded by the Savage Worlds Adventure Edition (aka SWADE), which made many changes to the Deluxe Edition rules. The character generation has changed, the original slimline skill set has been expanded and rationalized in places, and the chase rules have been changed again.

Some of the changes have been for the better in my opinion. Some leave me cold. There is an overall taste of "leveling" the game, spreading the awesome in the character build and removing the sacrifice to get it. A character build system that makes everyone awesome can end up making no-one awesome.

This is especially noticeable in the new Deadlands:Reloaded setting.

In my opinion.

However, there are other changes I feel worth looking at and I got into Savage Worlds after 30 years spent mostly running Call of Cthulhu (BRP) as a way of challenging my assumptions, and that turned out to be an exceptionally good call.

So from Episode 30 forward we will be using the SWADE as our basic rule set, bending it where necessary to accommodate the Space 1889:Red Sands setting and "feel".

We have a small problem with the vehicle rules. The speeds are *way* too slow, which only is a problem when infantry interacts with them. Unfortunately, on Mars, this can happen a lot, when High Martians attempt ambush of flying steam vessels.

The SWADE chase rules, developed from the Deluxe Edition chase rules, do not dovetail with my players desire to use tactical ship combat with minis (VTT tokens) on a map. But fortunately I have a copy of the old GDW board games depicting this. It is my plan to raid these rules to see what can be fitted into the Savage Worlds RPG framework.

Part of this has involved re-figuring the speed and acceleration figures quoted in Space 1889:Red Sands according to "real world" speeds quoted in the original GDW Space 1889 materials. I've come up with multiplying the quoted values by four. It seems to work in a GURPS-like way.

I don't like having to kludge something mid-game, but I don't see an alternative. We can use the SWADE cinematic chase rules for those situations where tactical fighting is not required.

But my players do like to see those maps and "minis".

1. i.e. about a year and a half ago↑