Originally posted by Malenfant:
I presume top-down means "take an existing UWP and explain it". Which is a lot harder anyway, especially when it's broken in the first place!
Good grief no. Describe and explain the setting and worlds first,
then set the UWPs.
Originally posted by Flynn:
To me, Morte is implying that building UWPs without a sense of context within the sector is a broken process. I didn't get the impression he was talking about explaining a UWP.
Exactly.
I'm just curious how he would approach a solution to that perception.
Well, I guess the crux of it is that I wouldn't use a "system". I'd approach it more like painting a picture.
Ideally, I'd like a smaller setting (say 2-4 subsectors) with every single planet getting a text description. Write the overall setting, then decompose it down until you describe each system. When you've finished, abstract the text descriptions to UWPs. These are created solely for use with the trade rules and star mapping software.
For a large area, where you're not going to put text descriptions to each system, I guess I'd do something like this:
Write the history and overview of your setting. Decide what your major and minor powers are called, what they're like (how big, how high-tech, etc), and roughly where they are.
Work out roughly what sort of GWP, tech levels, populations and planet counts you need for each polity to be consistent with the description. [E.g. the Khuur league in G993 could do with a couple of high-tech hi-pops adding to make the description even slightly feasible.]
Knock up the biggest systems for each polity, and set their pop/TL so they combine to about 90-99% of the polity's social/economic weight. Give them sensible astrographics to match what you got so far. This won't be too many planets, since in economic/political terms the hi-pops are practically everything. Place them on the map. These are the "majors".
Place lots more stars, putting in mains and clusters and rifts and whatever you need to match the high level description/history. These are the "minors". They're the bulk of the setting by headcount but not economically very important.
Do the minor planet UWPs by the "bounded random" process you've been working towards in this thread, with proper astronomy etc. Weight the population so those closest to the majors get more people. Reroll all the weird ones once. This will hopefully junk enough weirdos to leave you with a handful for flavour.
Put in depots, X-boat routes, Droyne worlds, yadda yadda. Swap a few stars around to suit, if necessary.
Make an inspection, fix anything that breaks the setting (e.g. a randomly generated TL14 hi-pop minor in a pocket empire described as "week").
Go through, add up, see what you got and how it compares to the goal you started with. If some group has become too weak/strong, scale their population up or down by a suitable multiplier.
Do a final pass to set govenment and law codes that are consistent with the setting. "Consistent" will vary -- e.g. you might set everything except the prison planet to government 2/4 for the "bastions of democracy", or use weighted random generation inside the 3I, or place the odd code 6 (captive) on the edges of states that have just had wars.
