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Shatterzone
''Shatterzone'' is a space opera role-playing game by West End Games. The game went out of print in 1997 after the company went bankrupt. The game is now back in print, owned and published by Precis Intermedia. The universe of ''Shatterzone'' shares some structural similarities to the ''Star Wars'' expanded universe including an intergalactic government called the Consortium (like the Republic from ''Star Wars'') run from a central region of space known as the Core Worlds, large megacorps that run galactic affairs (a theme common in the cyberpunk genre of storytelling), and a super-industrialized capital world, called Centaurus, but similar to ''Star Wars Coruscant. Likewise, there is a sentiment of xenophobia in the setting similar to that of the Empire in ''Star Wars''. Humans, Glahns, and Ishantras, the three ruling races of the Consortium and a few others are given full citizen status while other races suffer under prejudice and second-class-citizenship. In an interview ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shatterzone Box Set
''Shatterzone'' is a space opera role-playing game by West End Games. The game went out of print in 1997 after the company went bankrupt. The game is now back in print, owned and published by Precis Intermedia. The universe of ''Shatterzone'' shares some structural similarities to the ''Star Wars'' expanded universe including an intergalactic government called the Consortium (like the Republic from ''Star Wars'') run from a central region of space known as the Core Worlds, large megacorps that run galactic affairs (a theme common in the cyberpunk genre of storytelling), and a super-industrialized capital world, called Centaurus, but similar to ''Star Wars Coruscant. Likewise, there is a sentiment of xenophobia in the setting similar to that of the Empire in ''Star Wars''. Humans, Glahns, and Ishantras, the three ruling races of the Consortium and a few others are given full citizen status while other races suffer under prejudice and second-class-citizenship. In an interview w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
West End Games
West End Games (WEG) was a company that made board, role-playing, and war games. It was founded by Daniel Scott Palter in 1974 in New York City, but later moved to Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Its product lines included ''Star Wars'', ''Paranoia'', '' Torg'', ''DC Universe'', and '' Junta''. History Scott Palter received a JD from Stanford in 1972 and joined the New York State Bar before he began work at the family firm, Bucci Imports. Drawing on this financial connection, Palter was able to found West End Games, named after the bar in which the meeting that finalized its founding occurred: the West End Bar near Columbia University. Initially a producer of board wargames, In 1983, Palter hired Ken Rolston, Eric Goldberg and Greg Costikyan as game designers, and WEG's focus turned away from traditional wargames. Costikyan's 1983 game '' Bug-Eyed Monsters'' brought WEG into the science-fiction and fantasy genres. Then Costikyan and Goldberg brought Palter a manuscript fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Precis Intermedia Gaming
Precis Intermedia (formerly ''Politically Incorrect Games'' and ''Spectre Press'') publishes downloadable PDF-based and traditional printed role-playing games. They also publish downloadable paper gaming miniatures called Disposable Heroes, and other various miniatures and tabletop games. Precis Intermedia merged with Spectre Press, one of the first RPG publishers to offer PDF-based products on the internet. Games and products Precis Intermedia has brought back a number of previously out-of-print games, including Shatterzone, Masterbook, Bloodshadows, Darkwood, Supergame, Maelstrom Storytelling, and A Fistfull of Miniatures. The company has also published its share of original roleplaying and tabletop games, including Treasure Awaits!, HardNova 2, Ghostories, EarthAD.2, Two-Fisted Tales, Lord of Olympus, Active Exploits Diceless Roleplaying, Warcosm, and Brutes. Other notable products include Disposable Heroes Paper Miniatures, The Amazing 8in1 Die, Exiled in Eris, and Eldritc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Torg
''Torg'' is a cinematic cross-genre tabletop role-playing game created by Greg Gorden and Bill Slavicsek, with art by Daniel Horne. It was first published by West End Games (WEG) in 1990. Game resolution uses a single twenty-sided die, ''drama cards'' and a logarithmic results table, which later formed the basis for WEG's 1992 sci-fi RPG '' Shatterzone'' and 1994 universal RPG '' Masterbook''. WEG produced over fifty supplements, novels and comics for the first edition. A revised and expanded core rule book was produced in 2005, with a single adventure. After WEG closed in 2010, ''Torg'' was sold to Ulisses Spiele, who, after a successful crowdfunding campaign, published a new edition called ''Torg: Eternity'' in 2018. Overview ''Torg'' takes place in a near future setting, known officially as "the near now". At the starting point in the game setting, Earth has been subjected to an inter-dimensional invasion by a series of "High Lords", who have changed the natural laws of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asteroid Belt
The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies called asteroids or minor planets. The identified objects are of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, and, on average, are about one million kilometers (or six hundred thousand miles) apart. This asteroid belt is also called the main asteroid belt or main belt to distinguish it from other asteroid populations in the Solar System. The asteroid belt is the smallest and innermost circumstellar disc in the Solar System. Classes of Small Solar System body, small Solar System bodies in other regions are the near-Earth objects, the Centaur (minor planet), centaurs, the Kuiper belt objects, the scattered disc objects, the sednoids, and the Oort cloud objects. About 60% of the main belt mass is contained in the four largest asteroids: Ceres (dwarf planet), C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Technophobes
Technophobia (from Greek τέχνη ''technē'', "art, skill, craft" and φόβος ''phobos'', "fear"), also known as technofear, is the fear or dislike of, or discomfort with, advanced technology or complex devices, especially personal computers, smartphones, and tablet computers. Although there are numerous interpretations of technophobia, they become more complex as technology continues to evolve. The term is generally used in the sense of an irrational fear, but others contend fears are justified. It is the opposite of technophilia. Larry Rosen, a research psychologist, computer educator, and professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills, suggests that there are three dominant subcategories of technophobes – the "uncomfortable users", the "cognitive computerphobes", and "anxious computerphobes".Gilbert, David, Liz Lee-Kelley, and Maya Barton. "Technophobia, gender influences and consumer decision-making for technology-related products." European Journal of Innov ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Terraforming
Terraforming or terraformation ("Earth-shaping") is the hypothetical process of deliberately modifying the atmosphere, temperature, surface topography or ecology of a planet, moon, or other body to be similar to the environment of Earth to make it habitable for humans to live on. The concept of terraforming developed from both science fiction and actual science. Carl Sagan, an astronomer, proposed the planetary engineering of Venus in 1961, which is considered one of the first accounts of the concept. The term was coined by Jack Williamson in a science-fiction short story (" Collision Orbit") published in 1942 in ''Astounding Science Fiction''. Even if the environment of a planet could be altered deliberately, the feasibility of creating an unconstrained planetary environment that mimics Earth on another planet has yet to be verified. While Venus and the Moon have been studied in relation to the subject, Mars is usually considered to be the most likely candidate for terrafor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nuclear Fusion
Nuclear fusion is a nuclear reaction, reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei combine to form a larger nuclei, nuclei/neutrons, neutron by-products. The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifested as either the release or absorption (electromagnetic radiation), absorption of energy. This difference in mass arises as a result of the difference in nuclear binding energy between the atomic nuclei before and after the fusion reaction. Nuclear fusion is the process that powers all active stars, via many Stellar nucleosynthesis, reaction pathways. Fusion processes require an extremely large Lawson criterion, triple product of temperature, density, and confinement time. These conditions occur only in Stellar core, stellar cores, advanced Nuclear weapon design, nuclear weapons, and are approached in List of fusion experiments, fusion power experiments. A nuclear fusion process that produces atomic nuclei lighter than nickel-62 is generally exothermic, due t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clandestine Operation
A clandestine operation (op) is an intelligence or military operation carried out in such a way that the operation goes unnoticed by the general population or specific enemy forces. Until the 1970s, clandestine operations were primarily political in nature, generally aimed at assisting groups or nations favored by the sponsor. Examples include U.S. intelligence involvement with German and Japanese war criminals after World War II or the botched Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. Today these operations are numerous and include technology-related clandestine operations. The bulk of clandestine operations are related to the gathering of intelligence, typically by both people ( clandestine human intelligence) and by hidden sensors. Placement of underwater or land-based communications cable taps, cameras, microphones, traffic sensors, monitors such as sniffers, and similar systems require that the mission go undetected and unsuspected. Clandestine sensors may also be on unmanned und ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ten-sided Die
In geometry, a pentagonal trapezohedron is the third in the infinite family of trapezohedra, face-transitive polyhedra. Its dual polyhedron is the pentagonal antiprism. As a decahedron it has ten faces which are congruent kites. It can be decomposed into two pentagonal pyramids and a regular dodecahedron in the middle. 10-sided dice The pentagonal trapezohedron was patented for use as a gaming die (i.e. "game apparatus") in 1906. These dice are used for role-playing games that use percentile-based skills; however, a twenty-sided die can be labeled with the numbers 0-9 twice to use for percentages instead. Subsequent patents on ten-sided dice have made minor refinements to the basic design by rounding or truncating the edges. This enables the die to tumble so that the outcome is less predictable. One such refinement became notorious at the 1980 Gen Con when the patent was incorrectly thought to cover ten-sided dice in general. Ten-sided dice are commonly numbered from 0 t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Faster-than-light
Faster-than-light (superluminal or supercausal) travel and communication are the conjectural propagation of matter or information faster than the speed of light in vacuum (). The special theory of relativity implies that only particles with zero rest mass (i.e., photons) may travel ''at'' the speed of light, and that nothing may travel faster. Particles whose speed exceeds that of light ( tachyons) have been hypothesized, but their existence would violate causality and would imply time travel. The scientific consensus is that they do not exist. According to all observations and current scientific theories, matter travels at slower-than-light (subluminal) speed with respect to the locally distorted spacetime region. Speculative faster-than-light concepts include the Alcubierre drive, Krasnikov tubes, traversable wormholes, and quantum tunneling. Some of these proposals find loopholes around general relativity, such as by expanding or contracting space to make the object ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
