Airship Daedalus
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Sample file CREDITS CONTENTS Written by TODD DOWNING CHAPTER ONE 3 Introduction, Setting, and Additional Material by Roleplaying Basics JAMES STUBBS GAVIN DOWNING CHAPTER TWO 29 Character Creation, Skills, Edited by Personality, Character Templates, DAN HEINRICH and Featured NPCs CHAPTER THREE 60 Based on the Airship Daedalus comic strip by System, Task Resolution, TODD DOWNING & BRIAN BEARDSLEY Combat, Damage, Healing, And on the AEGIS Tales radio adventures by and Vehicle Combat TODD DOWNING www.airshipdaedalus.com CHAPTER FOUR 73 Magic, Psychic Powers Artwork by & The Occult BRIAN BEARDSLEY TODD DOWNING CHAPTER FIVE 85 RYAN POTTER GM Section, Running Pulp, Cliffhangers, Pulp Films, Scenario Generator, and Vintage Art from Adventure Seeds Airboy by Charles Biro, Dick Wood & Al Camy The Black Owl by Robert Turner & Pete Riss The Black Terror by Richard E. Hughes & Dan Gabrielson CHAPTER SIX 99 Camilla by C. A. Winter Sample file Captain Aero by Ed Murphy & Ray Willner Equipment, Vehicles, and Weapons Captain Terry Thunder by Arthur Peddy Fantomah & Tabu by Fletcher Hanks CHAPTER SEVEN 118 Haunted Thrills by Ajax-Farrell Publications K-51 & Yarko by Will Eisner Bestiary Käanga by Alex Blum Patty O’Day by Adolphe Barreaux INDEX 128 The Phantom Eagle by Clem Weisbecker Unusual Tales by Charlton Comics Wambi by Henry Kiefer Wing Turner by George Tuska CHARACTER SHEET 132 Other Vintage Art & Advertisements from Dover Publications & Getty Images VEHICLE SHEET 133 (All works in the public domain) DAEDALUS III SCHEMATIC 135 Many Thanks to Gavin Downing, Michelle Downing, Dan Heinrich, Trish Loyd, Chris Crowell, Jess Suckow, Samantha Downing, Garth Doverspike, Shura Metz, Randy Hensel, James Stubbs, Mark Bruno, Ron Dugdale, Mike Stephan, Pete Alix, Hans Piwenitzky, Mentions of characters and settings created by Jules Verne, H. Rider Hag- the cast & producers of the Airship Daedalus and AEGIS Tales gard, H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar radio adventures, Brian Meredith, Steve Hartley, Matt Forebeck Wallace & Merian C. Cooper are made solely for reference purposes and Shane White, R.L. Pace, Ben Dobyns, John Sullivan, Jeffrey Smith, only in cases where the original source material is in the public domain. Brian Beardsley for helping build the hangar No challenge to existing character trademarks is intended. and mostof all my loving wife, Raechelle The historical personalities referred to in this volume (Crowley, Tesla, Ed- ison, etc) are idealized, alternate-reality caricatures, and are not meant The pulp authors, artists and ilmmakers who inspired the creation of Airship as literal historical interpretations. Daedalus almost 30 years ago are far too many to list individually, but a special thanks is due Alex Raymond, the master. AIRSHIP DAEDALUS is published by Deep7 Press, a subsidiary of Despot Media AIRSHIP DAEDALUS™ and the XPG system logos are trademarks of Deep7 Press and Despot Media 1214 Woods Rd SE, Port Orchard, WA 98366 | www.deep7.com © Copyright 1988, 1999. 2016 Deep7 Press. All rights reserved worldwide. Specific pages have been marked approved for non-commercial duplication. Unauthorized reproduction and/or distribution of this intellectual property is a violation of US and international copyright law and will be prosecuted to its fullest extent. 1 Sample file www.deep7.com / www.airshipdaedalus.com 2 CHAPTER ONE ack scowled, running the toe of his boot through a mound of torn canvas. He was certain this was all that remained of Professor Bancroft’s expedition balloon. The furnace of the African afternoon bore down Jwith full malevolence on the open meadow, baking the aeronauts in their flight leathers as they toured the carnage. The air stank of hot grass, sweat and rotting meat, and two intrepid vultures perched nearby, wait- ing for the landing party to leave them to their clean-up duties. Jack presumed the absence of a greater number of carrion scavengers was due to the presence of the Daedalus, hovering just above the area at an altitude of perhaps fifty feet. An aluminum chain ladder dangled from her side hatch to the grassy plain below. Jack took the lead, lending a general oversight to the search, while Doc followed behind, prodding under great flaps of torn balloon canvas and twisted metal. Charlie Dalton, well-tanned under his khaki infantry uni- form, took the rear with his Winchester carbine at the ready. Dalton was another of Jack’s compatriots during the Great War, a sharpshooter so gifted he’d been assigned to every special mission the U.S. Army could throw at him. The thrice-decorated Cherokee called “Deadeye” had saved Jack’s skin on more than one occasion, and it was he who Jack specifically requested to fill the position of gunner on the Daedalus crew. Fortunately, DeadeyeSample was as equally file accurate on the pintle-mounted twin Hotch- kiss guns as he was with the Winchester. Jack noted the brutal slashes in the canvas through which Doc sifted. “The outer skin looks shredded. What could have done this?” “I think I’ve found something,” Doc offered, rising with a small leather-bound book in her hands. Jack hurried to her as she turned it over and flipped open the cover. She gasped with the discovery. “It’s Bancroft’s journal!” “Lucky find,” Jack offered. He noticed Deadeye tinkering with a metal case at the far end of the wreckage. “How’s the wireless?” “In pieces, Cap,” came Dalton’s reply, as he revealed the ravaged torso of something Jack could only imagine had been a human being at some point in time. “So is the radioman.” Doc surveyed the scene, her hazel eyes darting to and fro across the mechanical and human wreckage. Deadeye’s radio man was in three separate and distinct segments, while another two—possibly the balloon pilot and a scout or guide, Doc surmised—were slightly more intact but still wearing far more of their interiors on the outside than would generally be considered healthy. “Three bodies by my count, but none of them Bancroft.” Jack scowled. “Wish we could bury them, but it’s too darn hot out here, and if Bancroft’s still alive we need to find him.” He gave a crumpled aluminum strut a sturdy booted kick, sending the vultures frantically flapping into the air, and waved his companions to follow him as he paced toward the Daedalus’ ladder. “And discover what did this.” 3 Introduction What is Airship Daedalus? n the first decades of the Twentieth Century, elcome to Airship Daedalus, a roleplay- Victorian Colonialism dies birthing the Modern ing game set in a Modern Age that never IAge—with a Great War as midwife. As a ruined Wwas—a world in which the heroes and Europe rebuilds from the ashes of the first mech- heroines of classic pulp novels and comics seek anized world war, the USA, a new player on the fame, fortune and glory with a side of hair-raising global stage, leads the remnants of the colonial adventure. It is the setting shared by the vintage- powers by squeaky-clean example—with prohibi- style pulp comic strip and radio adventures of the tion of liquor and two-fisted diplomacy (and really, same name, and it’s a plenty large sandbox in who wouldn’t be quick to throw a punch without which to play. Within this book you will find the access to a beer now and then?). But in that same means to create your own unique two-fisted pulp dead Europe, another new power rises. Led by hero, a fictional persona that you’ll “play” in the an English mystic named Aleister Crowley, a man game. If you are a novice roleplayer, fear not—bthe without a country and driven by an endless hun- experience is mostly painless. If you are a veteran, ger for occult power, this secret order is ever grow- you’re in for a treat. ing, ever present, and willing to operate outside the law of any nation to achieve its goal—to rule What is Pulp? the world. It is well-organized, well-capitalized and well-militarized. It is the Astrum Argentum. amed for the cheap newsprint upon which The cult of the Silver Star. the stories and comics were printed, the pulp era spanned the late 19th to mid-20th In a bid to thwart this looming threat, a con- N centuries, with its heyday in the 1920s to 1940s. sortium of American industrialists and philan- From the first pulp novels and magazines to the thropists led by Thomas Edison, Harvey Fires- Sunday funny pages pages and comic books to ra- tone and Henry Ford have formed the American dio to the movie serials, a particularly rough and Enterprise Group for International Security (AE- tumble brand of fiction began to take over the na- GIS), a network of field operatives, academics tional consciousness. From John Carter and Alan and special strike teams from around the globe. Quatermain to Flash Gordon and Captain Mid- It is their dearest hope that these small, secret night, the pulps covered every genre of fiction—ac- forces, when outfitted with the most advanced tion, western, fantasy, scifi, sports, horror, crime tools and conveyances, can intercept Silver Star and even romance—and some of its crime-fighting operations and maintain the precarious balance heroes would become the archetypes of the mod- of good and evil. Sampleern superhero.file As law enforcement battles the criminal ele- Often confused with the steampunk literary ment around the world, explorers brave lost ru- subgenre, pulp tends toward a celebration of the ins, reporters vie for the big scoop, cultists await modern—of forensics over crime, science over the return of sleeping gods, and spiritualists savagery, or in the case of pulp fantasy, strength converse with the dead.