[Zozer Games] Outpost Mars - now available

Mithras

Banded Mongoose
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/103215/Outpost-Mars

outpost-mars-cover-small.jpg


2017 – astronauts set foot on Mars.

20 years later colonisation has begun, mining is in full swing, and the goals of scientific research are becoming muddied with profit and survival. Competing factions are growing stronger, and the engineers and scientists of the United Nations Space Co-ordination Organisation are finding that even they are not immune from the petty politics of the red planet.

Outpost Mars is a setting for the Traveller roleplaying game set on this newly-settled planet. Players take the roles of scientists, engineers and explorers going about their business of investigating Martian phenomenon and avoiding death or serious injury while doing so.

The real story focus, however, is on the player characters and their motivations. Trapped on Mars, working in isolation with the other player characters in the team, games will pick up on and revolve around a character's personal interactions with his team-members. On their rivalries, secrets, hidden agendas, lies and on their mutual interests.

There are factions and social organizations on Mars with their own agendas and plans. From the ESA to NASA, the Red Legion to the Rovers. A player must, during character generation, ally his character with one of these group and choose a faction that reflects his goal. If the character wants to keep Mars pure and unspoilt then he can ally with the terrorist group called the Red Legion.

The choice a player makes about his character's allies and personal agendas is perhaps the most important part of the character creation process. His ally group will provide the character with objectives to achieve, special information, tasks that need accomplishing, rivals to watch out for - indeed an entire agenda. Of course, the character's choice of ally group needs also to colour and support his background, his personality and his skills. A law-abiding engineer will not want to associate with the destructively criminal Red Legion, for example.

59 pages.

Beautifully illustrated with NASA commissioned art-work.

The setting is TL 9, without gravity manipulation or jump drives.
 
rust said:
Bought, downloaded, browsed, liked - very much so.
Well done indeed. :wink:

That's a great compliment rust, you are very discerning ... I know you like your hard SF!
 
I bought it myself, and usually do NOT buy things on only PDF but I like the subject matter. It is alot like a part of my 2330 AD campaign setting, except my mars is much further along with the Terraforming process and alot more built up with alot more inplay. Much of the tech that was discovered was reengineered and gave the American forces a leap forward in technology and etc.

So two thumbs up for your product!

Penn
 
I also bought it, and there is much to compliment.

Importantly, you could use this as a model for nearly any sketchy inhospitable colony world in your campaign, Mars or otherwise.

I also really like the fact the scenario makes players dependent upon one another but also competitive with one another, making answers and solutions quite a bit more complicated than the usual Way Of The Gun RPG. The fact that there are no weapons readily available just adds to this.

I’ll give it a real go-over, but what I see on a cursory glance is potential to build a locked room, claustrophobic mystery, with a mission team cruelly killed and looted for supplies... by whom? Someone has them, and has the advantage. And can you really trust your partners?
 
My own campaign is set in 2332 at this point...players have been playing in the same campiahn setting now for 3.5 yrs. They are Federial Enforcers (think of US Marshals) and they are the Law in space. In my campaign America has been on Mars for 300 yrs now and they have discovered ancient Alien complexes there. In the time many complexes became colonies and then cities. With all the Terraforming going on for almost 200 yrs, it has become a extremely popular place to immagrate to from Earth and all the toubles of the past and still live the American spirt and dream.
 
Lemnoc said:
Importantly, you could use this as a model for nearly any sketchy inhospitable colony world in your campaign, Mars or otherwise.
This was almost my first thought about it, too. Outpost Mars
is both a very interesting setting and a source of good ideas
for my usual hard science fiction colony settings, with a new
approach to solve some of the typical problems of such a set-
ting, like for example how to make character roleplaying an
interesting and challenging focus of such a setting.

Today, after a closer look at Outpost Mars, I went back to the
DTRPG website and gave it the 5 Stars it in my opinion deser-
ves.
 
Now Print on Demand, in a trade paperback format:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/paul-elliott/outpost-mars/paperback/product-20227932.html
 
Mithras said:
Now Print on Demand, in a trade paperback format:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/paul-elliott/outpost-mars/paperback/product-20227932.html
Excellent. Is the smaller size what accounts for the increase in page size or is there additional content?
 
kafka said:
Mithras said:
Now Print on Demand, in a trade paperback format:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/paul-elliott/outpost-mars/paperback/product-20227932.html
Excellent. Is the smaller size what accounts for the increase in page size or is there additional content?

With such a modest page count, I decided to go for a smaller size, but to increase the text slightly I had to expand the page count. No extra stuff, but a clean up of two or three grammar errors. It's also an experiment in Print on Demand, ready for my next Traveller project!
 
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