Yesterday I finally had the chance to play some 3-16: Carnage among the Stars at a small convention in Essen, run by members of the DnDGate forum. I picked it up at Dragonmeet last year and have been itching to try it ever since.

So after playing in A Burning Wheel session, getting some food and bagging a copy of the Savage Worlds Explorer's Edition in a round of "Wichteln", I grabbed three players and off we went on our first ( bug hunt ).

The session took about two and a half hours including rules explanation and character generation. It went very well, although we were still feeling our way around the style and detail of the game. For example I was a bit hazy on the movement rules, and we missed the opportunity to move the troopers on the chart a few times. I had planned to run a second mission if the first went quickly and smoothly (which it did), but felt a bit tired from the day of gaming and not quite up to GMing again. Luckily one of the players (Trooper Daker) offered to take a shot at GMing a session himself, and I was happy to do a second session as a player. Another latecomer to the con showed up, and we drafted him into the game too. We rolled up a planet and off we went on the ( mission to the volcanic planet of the apes ).

Overall we had about 3.5 hours of of good fun. The game was definitely "about the missions", as expected for a starting game of 3:16. But I can see that it might develop into a very different direction with time. Unfortunately this was only a convention game, and we'll be unable to continue the story of Sergeant Bicker, Corporals Dox, Daker and Payne, and Trooper Crusher.

Just recently I became aware of boxninja's game "3:16 - Carnage among the stars", a small press rpg about space troopers fighting a never-ending war among the stars - obviously inspired by classics like Starship Troopers, Traveller, Aliens, Warhammer 40k, Space Crusade and others.

I read the the short-but-intriguing session report by robin-d-laws and consequently picked up a copy at Dragonmeet. I read it through on the train back home and really liked what I saw. Hopefully I'll get a session together here soon.

I really dug the combat system and the neat range placement mat. And of course the cartographer kicked in, itching to create a CC3 version. So I took the star system template from October's Annual issue and played around with some effect settings to create this little thing (posted with Gregor's permission).



I think it came out pretty nice. Click below to download the large version and see a shot of the printed map with some old Space Crusade minis I dug up.

( Click for more pictures )