THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF THE HAMMER’S SLAMMERS
THE CRUCIBLE RULES SYSTEM HANDBOOK
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Non Canon Rules to use with The Crucible Rules
A Wolf Amongst Men -
Cybertanks in The Crucible
The marriage of artificial intelligence and
Armoured Fighting Vehicles has been a
longstanding one in military science fiction
going all the way back to the late 1960s at the
very least. It combines the [relative]
invulnerability of a tank with the inhumanity of a
computer brain, an encapsulation of a dream
and nightmare all at the same time. The term
'cybertank' has entered colloquial usage to
describe these vehicles, though they may be
(or often are) wholly machine-controlled.
It is not a theme discussed within the
Hammer's Slammers milieu at least in large
part because David Drake has repeatedly
noted that he is writing stories about the men
and women themselves and not specifically
about the technology they use (or even a future
history as such). The rules portrayed in The
Crucible seek to emulate the stories to this end
and they succeed in large part…
But sometimes the players of that game yearn
to match themselves against the ultimate tank-
or even to be that tank, facing off against an
entire force of colloid minds, a Goliath against
so many Davids.
John-David Karnitz offer here his Crucible rules
adaptation for use in all scales.
John Treadaway - July 2015
Power Armour & Mechs
in The Crucible
Many people ask about conversions for the
Hammer's Slammers the Crucible rules. What
they tend to ask for are 'non cannon' items from
the Slammer's world. Top of that list are usually
two items.
First off is the Power Armour and from Drake's
book The Voyage. In that story - which is,
despite involving characters based in that
Slammers universe - is more a retelling of
Jason and the Argonoughts than the hard SF
that is typified by the Slammers novels, which
is why the material didn't appear in the main
body of The Crucible. Nevertheless it has some
interesting items in it and power armour is one
of them.
The other non-slammers SF type that heads
the request list are mechs and walkers. They
don't appear anywhere in the Slammer's novels
and - on a personal note - I think that they're
pretty silly as an idea, but lots of people say
that about hover tanks! However, they are so
prevalent amongst other SF literature and films,
that I thought I ought to generate some basic
rules for them.
These are a few ideas built around those
suggestions as guidelines for those who might
like to use such systems within a cohesive
whole. They aren't assigned to any mercenary
company within the rules.
The Crucible is a flexible rule system but was - obviously - designed to be used in the
“Slammerverse”. However, it can be used in other areas in general SF and with adjacent,
non-canonical technologies. Here are two pieces written to exploit those options.
Check out Stuart Murray’s Ogre Crucible blog report!