Dithering About MTU

[leo knight]

For quite some time, I have been trying to cobble together a homebrew Traveller setting. I wanted to avoid the OTU, and craft something of my own, but I just keep chasing my tail. So, if only to vent, and amuse others with my plight, here goes.

I had a small setting years ago (1980s!), based on a list of the nearest stars given to me by the director of the local planetarium. I wanted to use real star names and info, but the learning curve was steep. Ultimately, I kept the star names, locations and color commentary ("It's a binary system"), but rolled the primary planets standard Book 3 style. I called it the League of Planets. See, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the "Sky Raiders" trilogy had just come out, and I wanted a sort of pre-WW2 feeling, so... League of Nations, League of Planets, yadda yadda. I put it aside, and thought it was lost, but had fond memories.

Fast forward to a few years ago, when Mongoose came along. Just for fun I rolled up a new subsector, and started writing sketches of mainworlds, naming them, etc. Of course, I was hooked all over again. Then, in a box of stuff, I found my old notes. I keep trying to find ways to blend them together. I've tried setting them side by side, blending them into one dense subsector, wrapping one around the other (the League was originally a big hex of the stars within 5 parsecs of the Sun; wrapping another 2 layers of hexes adds 78 hexes, almost as many as a susector). None of it feels right.

Part of it is the conflict between head and heart. Head says, "Use real star systems, use real science, do lots of research." Heart says, "Blasters! Aliens! Green slave girls!" Another part is, I don't want to give up any of my old stuff again. I had convinced myself that losing my Traveller stuff was no big thing, I'll get over it, but when I found my old notes, I was overjoyed. Now I feel a strong desire to preserve what I have as much as possible.

I realise there is probably no way to resolve this that preserves all of what I want. I will eventually have to throw my hat over the fence, rip off the band-aid, or whatever other metaphor you like, and live with the results. But I wanted to share part of the process here.

 

[aramis]

I've wanted to do an MATU setting for years... but only just did so. Such a work only really works when one has players who will intellectually invest.

So, my advice, meager as it may be, is (1) get some players and then (2) throw some ideas out, and see which they grok and which they don't.

Now, I must run, so I'll post more later.

 

[Gerry Miller]

Imtu

I really know how you feel. I have wanted to start from scratch and create a really cool alternate setting but just stumble on the details. the OTU is hoaky and I believe it has way to many cozy hospitable worlds compared to real science. Yet it is a fun universe and an amazing game setting.
I have recently come back to Traveller now I have two campaigns going with my sons every other weekend. The first campaign is set in 2170 Terran Confederation. They are a crew of a small Terran Scout exploring new worlds rimward and preparing for espionage missions against the Vilani Empire. The second Campaign is 1106 Third Imperium and the crew has a beefed up Scout courier and they are Travelling Across the Imperium from The Solomani Rim to the Spinward Marches on a resourceful tip of Ancient treasures.
Traveller is just fun and I play the classic rules while both my sons have mongoose. The game was mean't for any setting possible and the rules can be modified and adapted to whatever us referees like as long as the players are in agreement. I would treasure your League of Worlds setting. It probably is pretty cool.

 

[beowulf2044]

I love Traveller. I hate what the OTU has become. But the inheirent beauty of Traveller is the ability to make of it what you please. At present, I'm constructing a setting in our solar system (stealing a bit from others who have worked this area already) with no jump drive or magical contra-gravity. And I'm having the best damn time with it. I'm looking forward to springing some sceanarios at the convention circut.

 

[Icosahedron]

Leo, I've used an ATU since before the OTU was published. I've done some merging of ideas in that time. As I understand it, you created a sun-centric 'subsector' decades ago, and have recently created a new subsector, and you want to use both in your ATU?

So what is stopping you? What are the specific difficulties you are facing?

eg. the obvious solution to me would be to make your two subsectors different pocket empires reasonably close together, and just create some intervening space. What prevents that? Are they both sun-centric? Do they use the same stars? I'm missing the crux of your difficulty.

 

[leo knight]

Thanks for all of the replies so far.

Icosahedron, the difficulty is in my own head. I feel pulled in many different directions. Any of the solutions you mention are perfectly reasonable, and I've drawn up several different maps. At work, during slack time, I use the MS Paint program to make test maps. Some people play sudoku, I do this.

None of them says "Yeah, this one!" to me. I realise this is my own hesitancy/ indecision. I've been working on this alone, in a vacuum. In order to give myself a push, I started this thread.

The direction I'm leaning in right now is a sort of pulp feel. Keep the real stars I have (League of Planets), seed some better known stars further out, and fill in with the random systems in my new subsector, just to trailing of the League. This would give me 2 subsectors, side by side, with a few bits hanging off the original subsector.

I got hung up on the science as well. Most of the real stars are dim, M class, unlikely to have the friendly, Book 3 planets. I could go back and renovate, but I've become so attatched emotionally to the existing real estate.

More later. Thanks!

 

[Icosahedron]

Heh, yeah, I know what that vacuum's like.

Best not to get too hung up on the science - especially in a 2D universe! There's no way those stars are in anything like the right relative positions anyhow. It's a game.

All that matters is that you enjoy creating the universe and that one day you find some players who enjoy gaming in it.

In fact, there's nothing to stop you gaming in several completely different ATUs.
I'm Reffing two games at present that may or may not be set in the same universe. Each game plays out entirely in its own separate region of space, neither party will meet up with the other party (cos the Ref says so), so the question of whether they are set in the same universe doesn't really arise. Both games use my Traveller house rules and both games obey the laws of physics as modified by Traveller handwavium, but beyond that, who's to say?

Maybe that's another option for your two subsectors?

 

[Malinor]

I've run into the same problem with mapping a sector. One option I'm considering to get the 3D effect is to use Google Sketchup. Has anyone else experience with this?

 

[aramis]

I've run into the same problem with mapping a sector. One option I'm considering to get the 3D effect is to use Google Sketchup. Has anyone else experience with this?

Sketchup can do it. It's not ideal for starmapping, but it will work; it's absolutely wonderful for deckplans, tho'.

 

[leo knight]

Thanks again for all the feedback. It did help clarify where I wanted to go with this.

My original League planets, randomly rolled, produced some disappointing results, especially around the 'name' systems like Alpha Centauri and 61 Cygni. I've decided to essentially meld my two settings together, or, more accurately, pick and choose planets from my newer subsector to spruce up the League. So far, I've produced a couple of happy synchronicities.

For example, Alpha Centauri was originally home to Ringer's World:
A101300-G, a freeport, most often the mustering out point of newly rolled-up characters. I reasoned that other, more terrestrial worlds had never formed in the trinary system, leaving only remnants like poor little Ringer. I placed a still active Ancient ruin on the planet, object of mystery and center of a religious cult, to explain the high tech level.

But, hey, this is Alpha Centauri, a trinary system. Seemed a waste not to populate that further. So, now Alpha "A" will be home to New Hope, a once beautiful world now trying to recover from a terrible war. Alpha "B" will be home to Job (like the guy in the Bible, long 'o'), an overcrowded refugee camp. Ringer, whose fortunes have ascended since they bypassed all this strife, now moves out to Proxima Centauri.

Similar fun came about with 61 Cygni. It had only held Seldora, a world similar to Ringer, but with more government and law. Boring! But now 61 "A" has two planets: Feldspar, a Stasi wet-dream police state, and Pyrite, an asteroid belt kept on a shorth leash. 61 "B" now has Matheson, an over crowded industrial world. Their cultural oddity is food. Soylent Green, anyone? Last in this system is Seldora, a breakaway from the dominant system-wide govenrment. On the Mongoose cultural oddities chart, I rolled "xenophobic". No wonder!

I'll post more as I come up with it. So, up-ship and thanks again!

 

[epicenter00]

So, my advice, meager as it may be, is (1) get some players and then (2) throw some ideas out, and see which they grok and which they don't.

This is quite important advice. The questions you can answer for yourself:

1) Are you making this subsector for your own entertainment?
2) Or do you actually have a stable of players who are going to go with it?

If you're doing choice #1, I think you should go with the hard science approach. There's a lot more work and hobby you can put into researching real stars, real star positions and so on.

If you're doing choice #2, you should at least consider the pulpier side. The thing I find is that most groups of players don't like hard science games. Concerns about realism often kill any kind of adventure. Adventure, at its core, often involves a lot of counter-survival behavior that we usually call "heroism" but can just as easily be called "stupidity."

As an old hand GM, there's a certain overtone that I sense from your original post. If it's not there, ignore this. It's going to be a bit controversial, but I feel I should at least bring it up:

The quest for "realism" can be a kind of cancer.

It grows and grows, invading every part of your setting and game. Eventually you'll find yourself asking "is this realistic?" and "is that realistic" and some player who is more knowledgeable about some subject will eventually insist on telling you that some other area of your game isn't realistic. Eventually, I find "maximum realism" games get stifled by the quest for ever greater realism as the response to a lot of things becomes, "you can't do that, it's not realistic." So I'd definitely suggest drawing a line at how much realism you're going to have in a game and what you're going to handwave away.

 

[Fovean]

I had a small setting years ago (1980s!), based on a list of the nearest stars given to me by the director of the local planetarium. I wanted to use real star names and info...

Fast forward to a few years ago, when Mongoose came along. Just for fun I rolled up a new subsector, and started writing sketches of mainworlds, naming them, etc.

This is almost exactly my experience as well... I liked the new stuff I made with MGT, but really liked my old Terran Confederation, based on real-world data. What I ended up doing was a quadrant-sized (4 subsectors in a square) piece of "real" space, centered on Terra and using real stellar data as much as possible. I marked a few F- and G-class stars that were a bit farther out then I tacked on the newer, MGT subsectors in interesting areas and put in a few systems to connect things up.

Handwavium, but a bit of real science as well. I've added in a few real-world stars to some of the MGT subsectors to help it all hold together. The setting is now just under a sector in size which is perfect for me.

And it's actually a pretty cool history, as I grew it outward from Terra over several waves of expansion, updating UPPs as I went, so the X-Boat network, naval and scout bases, and human population movements all make a lot of sense since they're based on the discovery and exploitation of valuable systems, not random die rolls (though there's been a lot of those too! )

 

[Ulsyus]

Thanks again for all the feedback. It did help clarify where I wanted to go with this.

...

I'll post more as I come up with it. So, up-ship and thanks again!

So Leo, did you every do any more work on this?

 

[robject]

The quest for "realism" can be a kind of cancer.

Epicenter's right. Traveller is tuned to Golden Era SF. If you want to play Traveller with a group, use its tools as designed. Otherwise, tinker away and rewrite the toolset.

Thanks for all of the replies so far.

Icosahedron, the difficulty is in my own head. I feel pulled in many different directions. [...]

None of them says "Yeah, this one!" to me. I realise this is my own hesitancy/ indecision.

Purpose. You're looking for a purpose. If the purpose isn't playing Traveller, then you have to find another, motivating purpose.

The direction I'm leaning in right now is a sort of pulp feel. Keep the real stars I have (League of Planets), seed some better known stars further out, and fill in with the random systems in my new subsector, just to trailing of the League.

That's the direction I would recommend.

 

[kilemall]

Since you are working my area of space,try my methodology on for size.

#1 use this list for real star names and update/note their spectral class with real world ratings-

https://www.prismnet.com/~thrash/known.html

#2 match em to your map- make your own, use Travellermap (but ignore the canon UWPs), or do what I did, use the Imperium map.

#3 use this worldgen, which starts with the spectral class and how long the region has been settled.

https://wiki.rpg.net/index.php/RTT_Worldgen

You end up with a lot of red dwarf cold hard rocks and tough pioneering/mining, various odd results (I am quite taken with how Alpha Centauri turned out), and a lot of the populations clustered around the desirable planets.

If you want a core worlds feel, just assign habitation of several hundred or thousand years to Earth then reduce the years colonized the further until you get the edge of the frontier, with a lot of pop 1-4 outposts clinging to rockballs.

 

[Silverhawk]

Epicenter's right. Traveller is tuned to Golden Era SF. If you want to play Traveller with a group, use its tools as designed. Otherwise, tinker away and rewrite the toolset.



Purpose. You're looking for a purpose. If the purpose isn't playing Traveller, then you have to find another, motivating purpose.



That's the direction I would recommend.

Whole heartily agree here that the resolution is in having purpose. But I don't think that his problem (if it still exists) is the playing Traveller so much as Hard Science vs. Soft Science. Use local space and a Hard Science or go somewhere in the galaxy and be Soft Science with blasters and green slave girls.

For my own TU, I know the 'area' that it will be in (even if I haven't rolled up one world yet). I know exactly just how much Hard Science I want. My issue is which version of Traveller do I want to use. :CoW:

 

[Silverhawk]

I thought about it some more and came to the realization that even if Leo solved his dilemma the last couple of messages in the thread are still good advice for anyone who has come along since.

 

[Ullarsskald1957]

I found a sheaf of notes from the late 70's - early 80's...am re-working into a group of sectors about 1200 parsecs Trailing from Sol. Name for the major political entity is the Farmanni Rekké, which covers a good part of 4 sectors. Other polities with which they interact cover another 4 - 6 sectors.

My notes of the time state that Humans from Sol were seeded here thousands of years ago (destruction of Atlantis and Mu being a source of seed stock), up through the early Middle Ages of Earth. The "Farmers" (known as the Doonu Cá) were an offshoot of the Ancients who hived off and insulated their experiment from the worst effects of the Ancient War.

 

[robject]

Now that sounds like an ATU I can enjoy.

 

[leo knight]

Wow! I had fogotten about this. Real life got very complicated right after I posted this. Job changes, losing our home, finding new digs, etc. Also, my regular gaming group had similar shakeups. Everything got put on... well, not even the back burner. No burner.