[HOE] Lost Colony AB (Shane??)

["Jeff Shoffner" <shoffner@esper.com>]

Finally got a copy of LC to read.  Have to agree with most of you; seems
like a large portion was chopped out to make room for d20 stuff.  The
biggest clue is Debster will make references to things & folks, but you have
no clue what she's talking about.  "Fer instance," what's a Black Gun?  Mind
you, I only read the player's part as I may be a player in this game.

The other thing that bugged me a bit is the cost for AB: Mute.  Man, three
points?  I would've made it five.  Yeah, I know all the other ABs are three
points, but just from the writeup in front section, it sounds like Mutes are
very rare to find--kind of like HI is bottlenecking the supply.  That, and
there are some niggling points about the Mute powers.

First off, even if you royally screw up the manufacturing of an item, you
should still have the materials around--I mean, all these little nano-bots
are doing is building it at a molecular level.  Kind of hard to destroy
matter.

Second, why would anyone have any other package other than the Expert
Package?  I could see that you'd possibly want to build stuff at the get go,
but man, if you're able to make your own blueprints of things, why bother
buying the other packages?  Just buy a whole bunch of dataslugs, tear down a
working model, rebuild it (see above niggling part about not losing the
material components), & pretty soon, you'll have a good portion of all the
other packages.

Finally, I think the time to build something is rather fast; if I were
running it, I'd make it a much slower process, but then again, I'd give the
Mute break if he started with something first.  Like if he had a partial
frame of a car or somesuch, I'd just figure he'd be "repairing" it rather
than tearing that one down to build it over again.  However, I'd also allow
them to take straight raw materials to build & make that the true "matter
forming" & make it take a loooonnnnngggg time.  Oh..... Reminds me of a
David Drake story..... All the Way to the Gallows.  heh-heh....

Anyway, the last item I'd like to suggest to LC players is if you can find
them, I'd suggest picking up some Traveller space ship books for LC
ships--no need to reinvent the wheel-- & figure out numbers to assign them.

Jeff S