SteveG 🇺🇦 IStandWithUkraine

#IStandWithUkraine

[Triceratops @dryceratop]

No one's gonna believe you lil timmy

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

What campaigns can be run with Traveller?

* Free traders trying to keep their ship flying
* Bridge crew of a capital ship
* Bounty hunters!
* Deep space scouts exploring new worlds
* Detectives in a dystopian city

And so much more!

https://t.co/kYM5uCYuUP

#ttrpg #TravellerRPG

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

The Deepnight Revelation campaign explores the glories of the cosmos.

In The Crossing, your Travellers will walk on surface of a dead star – and find they are not the first to set foot there…

https://t.co/9cdEye33iM

#ttrpg #TravellerRPG

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

The Vehicle Handbook Update 2026 comes out later this month!

Loads of new changes, but we have not forgotten the classics. The humble Air/Raft and ubiquitous ATV have both had a face lift, in more ways than one, as Fusion+ power plants have now arrived.

#ttrpg #TravellerRPG

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

JTAS 12 and 13 have just been released on Fantasy Grounds!

https://t.co/ubZBE5KCvD

Packed full of goodies, adventures, worlds to visit and aliens to meet that can be slid into your Traveller campaign.

#ttrpg #TravellerRPG

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

Vehicle Handbook Update 2026 changes vehicle combat.

Instead of knocking off Hull points, you will instead be dealing with failing systems as the vehicle gradually erodes while under fire.

Big vehicles take a lot of punishment. Bikes still get vaporised by big missiles.

#ttrpg

[Michael DiMercurio @MikeyDiMercurio]

NAVAL REACTORS ARE SAFE, RIGHT?

Everyone asks me, "Mikey, are naval reactors safe?' and I always answer, I'm glad you asked that question.

Before we go any further, I would just like to state for the record that what happened was totally not my fault.

The thing about a complex system like a nuclear reactor is that it tends to be right as rain if it's running at steady state - that is, just constantly at one power level, humming away.

It's when you upset the system that bad things happen.

Case in point - Chernobyl. The reactor exploded during a (cough) safety test. Take that, safety Nazis! Here's the play, see, the thing is, if the Chernobyl reactor were to, say, lose the grid (offsite power) during a scram (reactor trip, with control rods pushed to the core bottom), it could experience, um, "trouble."

What kind of "trouble," you might ask. Well, I'll tell you what kind of trouble. The fuel modules of a reactor need flow from coolant. Not just to cool them down to avoid them melting but to get hot enough to make steam for a turbine that makes electrical power.

If the coolant stops, bad things happen. The hot fuel can't cool down and it will melt. If it melts, bad poisonous radioactive things will go into the enviro.

The fear about Chernobyl was, let's say it scrammed - tripped. You have to understand. Reactors don't just switch off. You shut it down and it will still make what's called "decay heat," which is heat not from fission (uranium or plutonium splitting apart) but from the radioactive decay of the atoms that resulted from fissioning. Those of us in the know call them "fission products."

So, a reactor at 100% power gets shut down. After shutdown, it is still at 8-12% thermal power output. And you gotta cool that down by circulating water or sodium or gas or whatever the "working fluid" is, or else the fuel elements will melt. Those of us in the know call THAT "fuel element failure."

Which is bad.

Back to fear. See, Chernobyl put out a LOT of heat, so when it scrammed, the coolant pumps still needed to work hard to cool it down.

Some engineer asked the embarrasing question - "so what happens if the reactor scrams and we lose offsite power? If we lose the grid, we don't have pumps to pump water through the core and it'll melt down!"

Right, which is why nuke plants have emergency diesels. Later, much later, Fukushima had "trouble" when the tsunami ruined the emergency diesel generators when offsite power was lost - so they melted down. That was a bad day.

But another bright engineer said, "No problemo! As the steam stops from the reactor, the 'spin down' of the turbines will provide enough power to the coolant pumps that they'll give us cooling until we can get our act together and get the emergency diesels online."

Impotent note - our plants have diesel generators that will start within half a second, which is a big deal for a diesel, since diesels notoriously don't like waking up.

Anyway, everyone said, yeah, that spin-down idea is a good one! Let's test it out!

The test had been done several times before - no problemo. But it failed at Chernobyl because of what those of us in the know call "power history."

See, that decay heat I mentioned? It could be large or small. If the reactor mopes along at 15% power for a day or two, the fission product "inventory" is low, so decay heat is minimal - which was stated in the test protocol.

But if you're blamming away at 100% power and then shut down? Decay heat is MONSTEROUS.

So, a spin-down test after low power operation might pass. A spin-down test after full power ops? That would lead to a melt-down.

The shift supervisor at Chernobyl, Comrade Diatlov, blew off the test requirements and, despite the plant being at high power for a long-ass time before the test, ordered the test to proceed.

Then bad things happened. You know the rest of the story.

So, just as a nuclear reactor is happy as a clam if you don't fuck with it, a Navy reactor might get grumpy if you mess around. Like we do with drills.

So there I am, minding my own business, see, and we're at 400 feet beneath the tossing waves of the Atlantic, right? and we're running a "scram drill," in which the "drill monitors" cause a reactor scram and the watch section has to deal with it, find the cause, then recover.

We'd done the drill a hundred times. No big deal. Except THAT DAY, the control rod drive switch broke off the panel while we were withdrawing control rods.

See, control rods have hafnium or boron in them - which is a black hole for neutrons. Sucking up neutrons gives fewer neutrons to cause uranium to split - to fission. So it will lower or raise power level.

In a scram recovery at sea, control rods are withdrawn from the bottom of the core until the reactivity in the core starts adding enough heat to the coolant that it can boil water to make steam to make turbines rotate that make power, right?

The broken-off control rod switch would be like driving down a steep winding mountain road when the steering wheel breaks off.

The reactor operator is holding the broken-off switch in his hand. Everyone in "Maneuvering," the reactor control room, stares at the switch.

Now, as for me, I'm engineering officer of the watch, nominally in charge of the whole operation, but I have an under-instruction EOOW who is doing the scram recovery. Standing next to me is the chief engineer, and standing next to him is the executive officer. So there's more supervision and brain power than you can shake a stick at.

But we are all so laser-focused on the broken switch that no one notices that rods are still coming out of the core. The switch is spring-loaded to boink back to the HOLD position if you let go of it. In fact, the spring loading is so strong that to withdraw rods, you need to stand up and move the switch to the nine o'clock positing with two hands, and your muscles will shake as you do - that's how strong the spring is.

So everyone assumed that when the switch broke off, the control rods returned to the HOLD position.

They didn't. They were stuck in the RODS OUT position.

Which meant reactor power came screaming out of the source range, into the intermediate range and was headed at 200 miles per hour into the power range and would blow up the core.

It's not a nuclear explosion. It's a "prompt critical rapid disassembly," or a steam explosion. So much energy goes to the coolant loop that the equipment can't take it. At about 30,000 % power, the reactor vessel head blows off, the reactor compartment ruptures, the boat is flooding through a gap you could drive a truck through, and you're headed like a broken freight elevator straight to the bottom of the sea. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.

Fortunately, solid state reactor protection circuits were vigilantly watching all of us humans fuck up, and at a certain point, re-scrammed the reactor.

The reactor alarum rang out in Maneuvering, and none of us could figure out what the hell had happened.

Since I was the EOOW (despite having an under-instruction who was supposed to be EOOW), I got blamed for the whole thing (despite it totally not being my fault).

And as the guy at fault, it fell on me to write the incident report that would go out to the entire fleet in our lessons learned monthly newsletter.

The calculations were scary. We were 6 seconds (count 'em) away from a prompt critical rapid disassembly.

If not for those circuit boards, your favorite author would be, right now, bones on the bottom of the Atlantic.

So, are Navy reactors safe?

Yeah, totally.

[Orla Joelsen @OJoelsen]

Premier of Greenland 🇬🇱 statement this morning;

This morning, I am both saddened and grateful 🇬🇱

Saddened, because during a press conference last night, the President of the United States once again expressed a desire to take over Greenland. With such statements, our country is reduced to a question of security and power. That is not how we see ourselves, and it is not how Greenland can or should be spoken about.

We are a people with a long history, a strong culture, and a vibrant democracy. We are a country with responsibility for our own territory and for our own future. Our territorial integrity and our right to self-determination are firmly anchored in international law and cannot simply be ignored.

That is also why I am grateful.

Thank you to everyone here at home for the clear support and unity that has been shown. The calmness and dignity with which you have met this situation send a strong signal of a people who stand firm in their values and in their responsibility.

I would also like to thank heads of government and partners around the world who have clearly and unequivocally expressed their respect for Greenland, for our democratic institutions, and for the fundamental principles of international law. That support confirms that we here at home do not stand alone.

Once again: Greenland is our country. Decisions are made here. And I will at all times fight for our freedom and our right to decide for ourselves and to shape our own future.

For now, I hope that the peace of Christmas can settle over us all.
Merry Christmas 🇬🇱💙🇬🇱

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

Without self-sealing hulls, anti-grav tech or fusion reactors, the smallest air leak suddenly becomes a major event.

Pioneer, the RPG of space exploration in the very near future, has its Kickstarter project end this Saturday!

https://t.co/t8BAPxiVwB

#ttrpg #TravellerRPG

[SteveG 🇺🇦 IStandWithUkraine @SteveTheG33k]

@SandyofCthulhu I had the good fortune to play in a game of Ringworld RPG at Chaosium Con UK earlier this year. It was a fun game. Ringworld is one of my favourite books and the RPG is fun and exciting. Thanks, Sandy!

[YoDanno #DragonlanceDragonlance @YoDanno]

Ever wonder why reading old-school D&D rules sometimes feels like you’re leveling up your vocabulary score?

That’s High Gygaxian, the gloriously overstuffed, archaic, sesquipedalian 😉 style Gary Gygax used when he wrote AD&D in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

It’s the language of:
“dweomers” instead of magic
“chthonic powers” instead of underground monsters
“fustian proclamations” instead of boring speeches
and more five dollar words than a wandering sage with an 18 INT

Gygax didn’t just write rules, he wrote vibes.
His prose made dungeons feel older, dragons feel grander, and even goblins feel like they stepped out of Appendix N literature instead of a cartoon.

So starting today, I’m doing a High Gygaxian Word of the Day, a fun dive into the wild, weird vocabulary that shaped early TSR-era D&D.
If Gary’s writing ever sent you running for a dictionary… you’re in the right place.

Stay tuned, adventurers.
Your linguistic XP is about to go up.

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

The countdown has started - the Pioneer RPG Kickstarter ends in one week!

https://t.co/t8BAPxiVwB

This is the game of near future space exploration. Build a Moon base, mine an asteroid, and conduct daring rescues in Low Earth Orbit!

#ttrpg #TravellerRPG

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

Mongoose Publishing is looking for a full-time Layout Artist to join our team.

If you are looking for a place that will give you creative freedom, a good salary, and eventually equal ownership of the company, this is the position you are looking for!

https://t.co/vz90gkaH0f

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

30.10.25

#PioneerRPG

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

This is an excellent writeup :)

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

YouTuber supremo Seth Skorkowsky has just posted his 10th and final episode of the Secrets of the Ancients campaign!

https://t.co/xAOwHsCOOi

See how his campaign ended and get his thoughts on the storyline as a whole...

#ttrpg #TravellerRPG

[SteveG 🇺🇦 IStandWithUkraine @SteveTheG33k]

@BackintheBronze Inhumans

[Roll20 @roll20app]

Want to see your players panic in real time?

Run ALIEN: The Roleplaying Game by @FreeLeaguePub on Roll20—where every roll could be their last. 😈

https://t.co/I4E6mHT7y8

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

The new JTAS (13-18) books are released tomorrow - but today, we have posted a free download of the JTAS Index that catalogues every article published in them.

Ordered alphabetically and by category, find articles you need quickly!

https://t.co/UdInWJyYS9

#ttrpg #TravellerRPG

[Mongoose Publishing @MongoosePub]

The brand new Volumes 13-18 of the Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society have just been released, in both PDF and printed formats!

https://t.co/8UW5thpseW

Each is packed with additions for Traveller, including adventures, new ships, aliens, and more!

#ttrpg #TravellerRPG