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I’ve always been a sucker for mining, perhaps because of all those hours I spent playing Eve Online digging out Veldspar and Scordite and trying to find a nice load of Golden Omber so that I could upgrade my mining ship … and mining should make a great solo past-time. Uranium Fever provides you with all the essentials for a game of space mining; initially the book describes asteroid mining in the context of Stellagama’s These Stars Are Ours! setting, and there are ideas there for use in any SF setting. I particularly like the miner’s slang table. Neat! To add variety Stellagama has provided three variant careers for miners, the interdependent miner, the corporate miner and the planetary miner. The event and mishap tables are full of flavor and gaming hooks.
The meat of the book is composed of the prospecting and mining rules, and these are made up of dice roll ‘chains’ that eventually lead the player to an asteroid of ‘X’ value that he can mine. Earlier, when I said the Uranium Fever provides ‘the essentials for a game of space mining’ I sort of meant it, this is a ‘game’ in itself that could easily be played solo, the characters trying to locate and exploit bigger and higher yield rocks. Just as free traders chase the next speculative cargo, these miners are searching for that rock full of radioactives. But of course that is the problem, too … few gaming groups want to mine asteroids in every session – there has to be adventure too! Just as Marc Miller envisaged that speculative trade and the life of a free trader should serve merely as a vehicle for adventure, Uranium Fever should be used in much the same vein. ‘What can happen while we are mining?’ ‘What will we really find?’. Alien artifacts, pirate bases, lost shuttles, abandoned cargoes, fugitives from justice, wrecked battlecruisers … the genre is filled with exciting plot elements that sit ‘out there’ in the asteroids waiting to be found. Traveller itself based two of its adventures around such a situation, Adventure 1: The Kinunir and Adventure 6: Expedition to Zhodane. And let’s not forget that the TV show The Expanse opened with the ice mining ship Canterbury responding to a distress call in the asteroid belt…
Buried in the asteroid mining mechanics is a great section on the legalities and processes, including claim beacons, reporting claims, claim jumping and selling claims on to bigger corporate outfits. Rounding off the book are three small mining ships suitable for a little group of mining characters, the 10-ton gig (a shuttle), the 100-ton Prospector and the 600-ton Miner. These designs come with great deckplans, and are purposefully designed to resemble the ‘low-tech’ spacecraft that you see in The Expanse; perfect designs for my own settings in fact.
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