Thank you!
Have you ever created your own setting?
- Thread starter stofsk
- Start date
Thank you!
Thank you!
My Traveller Universe
I was playing D&D in ’76, and in ’77 a friend and I went “halfsies” on the LBB box set.
I wanted to fit my D&D game world into the Traveller game we were going to start, and so I wrote up some really bizarre ideas (well, maybe not so bizarre for a 14 year old in 1977). I still have those hand written notes, somewhere. I’ve retyped them several times, making adjustments, thinking I might actually be able to explain some of the crazier ideas.
But, yes, I use my own “Traveller” universe, where I keep such ideas as ship construction, basic game mechanics and resolutions, and other minor details, but how space travel works is entirely the same/different.
Since I eventually wound up working in the engineering field, I sort of obsess over ship designs, practicality, space for utility systems, that sort of thing, but otherwise I enjoy just making a lot of things up.
My most recent game was a revisit to the Annic Nova Adventure. I ran this in 2012, with my son and some of his friends. It felt weird, but we had a good time.
I was playing D&D in ’76, and in ’77 a friend and I went “halfsies” on the LBB box set.
I wanted to fit my D&D game world into the Traveller game we were going to start, and so I wrote up some really bizarre ideas (well, maybe not so bizarre for a 14 year old in 1977). I still have those hand written notes, somewhere. I’ve retyped them several times, making adjustments, thinking I might actually be able to explain some of the crazier ideas.
But, yes, I use my own “Traveller” universe, where I keep such ideas as ship construction, basic game mechanics and resolutions, and other minor details, but how space travel works is entirely the same/different.
Since I eventually wound up working in the engineering field, I sort of obsess over ship designs, practicality, space for utility systems, that sort of thing, but otherwise I enjoy just making a lot of things up.
My most recent game was a revisit to the Annic Nova Adventure. I ran this in 2012, with my son and some of his friends. It felt weird, but we had a good time.
I have a setting I have worked on off and on for nearly ten years, It's highly tweaked to get around some ummmm some of the more pesky holes in the stndard Imperium, and to fit a certain style I wanted.
while the setting was originally for a very different system I converted it over a while back and have ran it for several groups online, and at the table.
I use the basic skills, careers, gear, and core rules but the ummm set dressing is a bit different.
Races are there, I just reskinned ( altered appearance, and names)them so people wouldn't quite know what they are dealing with
Since i wanted a lot of cat and mouse type operations for starships. With a lot of up close and brutal slugging matches.... I had to get around the No Stealth in Space, and you cant intercept a ship in jump space..
.so I went with the hyperdrive options for star ships..with hyperspace being a very dangerous, very active place full of dust debris, floating obstacles, and lots of very hungry often aggressive/predatory life forms.
this had an unexpected side effect, players in my setting often found themselves up to their neck in Hyperspace shenanigans more often than planet side. It also forced them to be a lot more cautious during travel since they had to worry about intercept, and attack during what would normally be a two minute," Okay, you jump from The system and settle in for the next week..." monologue, into a real challenge if they had to traverse a tough region of hyperspace.
it also made piracy and raiding more viable since a hostile could hide along a trade route and hit ships well away from patrols, and rescue....with one group this forced them to rethink their approach, up until then they were prone to only trading, working in areas where they dint need a well armed/armored ship which made it more profitable....
once they were transitioned over they suddenly were forced to take less profit, to buy a bt more robust combat capable vessel, which derailed their usual time tested routine which they had used to great success over the years...
usually in short order they were flush with cash.....the groups merchant player had been playing since the early eighties, and had making money down to an art..... He hated the changes at first since he had to come up with new ideas, and couldn't go from down and out merchant, to merchant prince as easily.
http://pax-belum.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Hyperspace
Also to dress the world up a bit I added a few new technologies that replaced the standard fusion drive and materials tech with a more advanced form of power generation based on Quantum level manipulation of matter to generate lots of heat and charged gasses.
http://wbyrd.deviantart.com/art/Quantum-resonance-reactors-Q-Paks-441627586
I didnt change much in the way of mechanics, it all did pretty much the same thing as standard Traveller tech, cost/tonnage/availability....oddly just changing the set dressing and descriptions altered how players treated the tech, and thought about it....I guess after ten or fifteen years playing with the same toys the changes were shiny and new....it never really occurred to them it was the same stuff with new whizzy words tacked onto the game mechanics.
As for psionics I kept them fairly close, just boosted the frequency they occured and gave several races innate psionics to make them a bit of a handful for non-talented races.
I've been working on fully converting and detailing things in the past few months so I have it all nice and tidy for players instead of having to work from notes that I have to do conversions on the fly to use.
while the setting was originally for a very different system I converted it over a while back and have ran it for several groups online, and at the table.
I use the basic skills, careers, gear, and core rules but the ummm set dressing is a bit different.
Races are there, I just reskinned ( altered appearance, and names)them so people wouldn't quite know what they are dealing with
Since i wanted a lot of cat and mouse type operations for starships. With a lot of up close and brutal slugging matches.... I had to get around the No Stealth in Space, and you cant intercept a ship in jump space..
.so I went with the hyperdrive options for star ships..with hyperspace being a very dangerous, very active place full of dust debris, floating obstacles, and lots of very hungry often aggressive/predatory life forms.
this had an unexpected side effect, players in my setting often found themselves up to their neck in Hyperspace shenanigans more often than planet side. It also forced them to be a lot more cautious during travel since they had to worry about intercept, and attack during what would normally be a two minute," Okay, you jump from The system and settle in for the next week..." monologue, into a real challenge if they had to traverse a tough region of hyperspace.
it also made piracy and raiding more viable since a hostile could hide along a trade route and hit ships well away from patrols, and rescue....with one group this forced them to rethink their approach, up until then they were prone to only trading, working in areas where they dint need a well armed/armored ship which made it more profitable....
once they were transitioned over they suddenly were forced to take less profit, to buy a bt more robust combat capable vessel, which derailed their usual time tested routine which they had used to great success over the years...
usually in short order they were flush with cash.....the groups merchant player had been playing since the early eighties, and had making money down to an art..... He hated the changes at first since he had to come up with new ideas, and couldn't go from down and out merchant, to merchant prince as easily.
http://pax-belum.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Hyperspace
Also to dress the world up a bit I added a few new technologies that replaced the standard fusion drive and materials tech with a more advanced form of power generation based on Quantum level manipulation of matter to generate lots of heat and charged gasses.
http://wbyrd.deviantart.com/art/Quantum-resonance-reactors-Q-Paks-441627586
I didnt change much in the way of mechanics, it all did pretty much the same thing as standard Traveller tech, cost/tonnage/availability....oddly just changing the set dressing and descriptions altered how players treated the tech, and thought about it....I guess after ten or fifteen years playing with the same toys the changes were shiny and new....it never really occurred to them it was the same stuff with new whizzy words tacked onto the game mechanics.
As for psionics I kept them fairly close, just boosted the frequency they occured and gave several races innate psionics to make them a bit of a handful for non-talented races.
I've been working on fully converting and detailing things in the past few months so I have it all nice and tidy for players instead of having to work from notes that I have to do conversions on the fly to use.
Yes!
In the last couple years, I created a scenario set in a Traveller near-future setting that's not that distant from T2300. It's my "Nova Roma" thing and I run the scenario at conventions (like TravellerCon).
Yesterday, in fact, I wrote out a summary of a new setting based on the same principles as Nova Roma, but extending the timeline way out and bringing in a lot of post-cyberpunk ideas a la TNE and adding singularity-level Artificial General Intelligence and giving them the ability to meddle with time as in Charles Stross' Singularity Sky ("Thou shalt not violate causality within my historical light cone"). I'm calling it Time Traveller as a working title.
Time Traveller assumes a few hundred years of interstellar exploration and expansion, an early technological singularity, centuries of relative peace and prosperity, virus warfare that affects minds as well as computers, then a crashing dark age, and an eventual renaissance. The PCs are agents of the AGIs, traveling through time to mold the events of the galaxy into a desirable shape and protect those events from the competing AGI.
Both settings employ a completely different form of star travel than the OTU (pocket universe bubbles, hackdrives, sungates, sundiving). Both settings eschew the usual subsector hex maps and use network-style sungate wormhole maps.
I see Traveller as a toolkit for assembling SF campaigns. It does one particular kind of SF really well and you're swimming upstream if you try to do something else, like I am. If you tweak a little bit here and there, like you are, then it's much easier!
In the last couple years, I created a scenario set in a Traveller near-future setting that's not that distant from T2300. It's my "Nova Roma" thing and I run the scenario at conventions (like TravellerCon).
Yesterday, in fact, I wrote out a summary of a new setting based on the same principles as Nova Roma, but extending the timeline way out and bringing in a lot of post-cyberpunk ideas a la TNE and adding singularity-level Artificial General Intelligence and giving them the ability to meddle with time as in Charles Stross' Singularity Sky ("Thou shalt not violate causality within my historical light cone"). I'm calling it Time Traveller as a working title.
Time Traveller assumes a few hundred years of interstellar exploration and expansion, an early technological singularity, centuries of relative peace and prosperity, virus warfare that affects minds as well as computers, then a crashing dark age, and an eventual renaissance. The PCs are agents of the AGIs, traveling through time to mold the events of the galaxy into a desirable shape and protect those events from the competing AGI.
Both settings employ a completely different form of star travel than the OTU (pocket universe bubbles, hackdrives, sungates, sundiving). Both settings eschew the usual subsector hex maps and use network-style sungate wormhole maps.
I see Traveller as a toolkit for assembling SF campaigns. It does one particular kind of SF really well and you're swimming upstream if you try to do something else, like I am. If you tweak a little bit here and there, like you are, then it's much easier!
it's surprisingly flexible at it's core. The loose rules framework does have that going for it.
If you want to use it for any basic sci-fi setting you can strip off the Imperium Set Dressing fairly easily. the basic skills, career, and task mechanics aren't exclusively linked to the setting.
You can rework the careers fairly quickly without breaking the character generation system. You simply swap out a few words in the life events, and restructure a few of the skills on a chart to rework the skill acquisition..or you can use the alternate creation system, which lets players custom build their character.
I do know of one friend who used it for a cyberpunk game by using the character templates from the original game to work out the career/life-path charts.
My issue is that I keep changing the FTL system, and so much depends on that.
Also, the basic careers don't work for my new setting, so I'll be redoing character generation or just falling back to a skill point-buy, but I want lifepaths, and that's a lot of writing.
Also, the basic careers don't work for my new setting, so I'll be redoing character generation or just falling back to a skill point-buy, but I want lifepaths, and that's a lot of writing.
FTL travel is key to a lot of factors..It can radically alter a lot of factors in a setting. Safe easy, quick transport accelerates trade, while FTL that allows for intercept, and ambush, well that's when players and the world get very paranoid.
Simply switching to hyperdrive which does not burn extra fuel makes for a lot of extra free volume in a ships hull. When I started on a lot of the ships I used in my project I had a metric buttload of free space.When converting to a standard jump drive I had to rework most of my designs and rethink priorities.
I spent years running "Traveller" using the Traveller chargen (extended and otherwise) from MT matched up to the CP2020 rules engine and Lifepath. It was surprisingly robust and enjoyable.
D.
Came across this post from almost a decade ago. The interesting thing is how these ideas evolved into my Visions of Empire setting, especially the Matriarchate and the Inheritors...
Back in the early 80's I created a 21st century Sol system (no FTL travel) campaign.
I created major population centers on Luna, Mars and Titan and populated the moons of the gas giants and the asteroid belt as corporate mining bases.
It was a very "rough and ready" and seedy setting, with the PC's being a sort of frontier sheriff/ranger force, policing the new wild frontier. "76 Patrons" was a goldmine for plot ideas and I used the Scouts LBB to create the ranger force characters.
I took the existing ship designs, up to 800 tons, but rejigged them for the setting. So very, living/command module-fuel spine (with attached cargo modules)-power plant/maneuver drives layout. With weapons pods/turrets carried on pylons fixed to the spine. Most carried a streamlined "shuttle/lander" of 10-95 tons. And I used the space vacated by the Jump Drives for extra fuel, cargo, shuttle space etc.
My most vivid memory is drawing up massive (to scale) gas giants, for the ships to duel around. It was either Jupiter or Saturn that was so massive that I could only draw a quarter of the sphere on one A1 sheet of card!!!
It was a long time ago, so the memory is vague, but I ran it for about a year, back then.
I created major population centers on Luna, Mars and Titan and populated the moons of the gas giants and the asteroid belt as corporate mining bases.
It was a very "rough and ready" and seedy setting, with the PC's being a sort of frontier sheriff/ranger force, policing the new wild frontier. "76 Patrons" was a goldmine for plot ideas and I used the Scouts LBB to create the ranger force characters.
I took the existing ship designs, up to 800 tons, but rejigged them for the setting. So very, living/command module-fuel spine (with attached cargo modules)-power plant/maneuver drives layout. With weapons pods/turrets carried on pylons fixed to the spine. Most carried a streamlined "shuttle/lander" of 10-95 tons. And I used the space vacated by the Jump Drives for extra fuel, cargo, shuttle space etc.
My most vivid memory is drawing up massive (to scale) gas giants, for the ships to duel around. It was either Jupiter or Saturn that was so massive that I could only draw a quarter of the sphere on one A1 sheet of card!!!
It was a long time ago, so the memory is vague, but I ran it for about a year, back then.
Actually, I've done a few
I've done a few homebrew settings completely unrelated to the OTU, both with Traveller and with a homebrew system that was based on a modified version of the Twilight:2000 rules.
I've done a few homebrew settings completely unrelated to the OTU, both with Traveller and with a homebrew system that was based on a modified version of the Twilight:2000 rules.
- The first was loosely based on the Falkenberg's Legion series of stories, or at least used a similar setting of a near-ish future with very under-resourced wars happening in a colonial setting.
- The second was a very pulpy Star Wars-ish setting that I only ended up running a handful of games in.
- The third, which ended up with four campaigns run in it, was a slightly tongue-in cheek setting that I ran with a %-based system that was a bit like Twilight:2000 or the Chaosium systems. It featured terminator robot with a defective speech system and a marketing software suite installed (imagine Max Headroom shooting up a bunch of NPCs and then launching into a sales pitch extolling the virtues of the Arnoid Cybernetics T1000 series).
That was pretty much the tone of the game - having one of the players laugh so hard they fell off their seat was a personal high point.
- A number of terrestrial cyberpunk and post-apocalyptic settings.
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I've done a couple settings. I have actually never really played in the OTU, used a few adventures, and things like the Alien Modules, but never ran around the Spinward Marches or anything like that.
In part that was due to how I engaged Traveller. I played a tiny bit of Traveller when I first got it, but I stopped playing before collecting many of the adventures (though I ended up over time buying most of the adventures).
My next engagement was after creating a universe in conjunction with trying to use RuneQuest for an SF campaign. After one session of that, I decided to use Traveller instead, though I retained all the ship construction and operation rules. That universe was created by putting dots on a sheet of 8.5"x11" paper. I think the scale was 1mm equaled 1 LY, and jump numbers corresponded to 10 LY per day per jump number or something like that (would have to dig things out).
Eventually I digitized the map (by getting the positions of the stars that had so far been involved digitized, and randomly populating the rest) and wrote a program to generate and display maps, all with an 8"x10" "sector" size.
The campaign also wandered through quite a variety of rules systems, I forget if Hero System was it's death or the penultimate system.
In grad school I set up another universe that I ran using Mega Traveller, though again, with a Jump = so many LY per day system. I only ran a few sessions of it. The map for that was created by creating a custom font for my Epson dot matrix printer, so the star locations were in a coarse grid.
I have been on and off working on a setting using real star data and a 3D universe, but work on that has mostly just been playing with programming to pick stars out of the real data, and invent lots of stars (it uses a standard maximum jump distance of 30 parsecs, so my assumption is most of the starts that are inhabited are FGK main sequence stars we haven't even discovered yet). I've placed some polities but haven't thought much about the nature of each of them. Mostly I've been bogged down by thinking too much about realism and what the heck would actually get traded and also disappointment that unless I can come up with a realistic reason to care about non-FGK main sequence stars that in fact for the most part, the campaign is based on invented stars, with polities taking their name from some nearby "bright" star.
Frank
In part that was due to how I engaged Traveller. I played a tiny bit of Traveller when I first got it, but I stopped playing before collecting many of the adventures (though I ended up over time buying most of the adventures).
My next engagement was after creating a universe in conjunction with trying to use RuneQuest for an SF campaign. After one session of that, I decided to use Traveller instead, though I retained all the ship construction and operation rules. That universe was created by putting dots on a sheet of 8.5"x11" paper. I think the scale was 1mm equaled 1 LY, and jump numbers corresponded to 10 LY per day per jump number or something like that (would have to dig things out).
Eventually I digitized the map (by getting the positions of the stars that had so far been involved digitized, and randomly populating the rest) and wrote a program to generate and display maps, all with an 8"x10" "sector" size.
The campaign also wandered through quite a variety of rules systems, I forget if Hero System was it's death or the penultimate system.
In grad school I set up another universe that I ran using Mega Traveller, though again, with a Jump = so many LY per day system. I only ran a few sessions of it. The map for that was created by creating a custom font for my Epson dot matrix printer, so the star locations were in a coarse grid.
I have been on and off working on a setting using real star data and a 3D universe, but work on that has mostly just been playing with programming to pick stars out of the real data, and invent lots of stars (it uses a standard maximum jump distance of 30 parsecs, so my assumption is most of the starts that are inhabited are FGK main sequence stars we haven't even discovered yet). I've placed some polities but haven't thought much about the nature of each of them. Mostly I've been bogged down by thinking too much about realism and what the heck would actually get traded and also disappointment that unless I can come up with a realistic reason to care about non-FGK main sequence stars that in fact for the most part, the campaign is based on invented stars, with polities taking their name from some nearby "bright" star.
Frank
That way lies madness.
For me, it comes down to "are we playing a game, or are we coding up a simulator?" I'd much rather play. So I use the Traveller rules out of the box and get all that prep out of the way so we can PLAY.
I think that rolling up my own subsector is fast enough to be fun, and reasonable enough to work.
Otherwise, I'll never PLAY. And the play's the thing, to misquote Shakespeare.
Oh, totally mad....
Yet, there is still an attraction to using real stars.
On the other hand, part of me is tempted to run Traveller as is, as a retro-70s SF. That would mean not getting bogged down with where computers "should be" and such, because in that way ALSO lies madness...
I might do away with anti-grav though. Tail landers and needing to provide thrust or spinning wheels to replace gravity have some appeal. On the other hand, being able to just use the Traveller materials as is also has appeal.
And who says you can't grab cool star names from reality for your sector map...
Course I might be more motivated if I had players, so right now it's mostly a thought exercise, though running a play by post might be the way I go.
Frank
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
GDW once seriously considered retconning the OTU to use the core rules and technological assumptions of Traveller 2300.
Imagine T2300 technology moved forward 3000 years. Would gravitics have eventually been discovered? How much more efficient would fusion reactors and stutterwaarp drives become?
Imagine T2300 technology moved forward 3000 years. Would gravitics have eventually been discovered? How much more efficient would fusion reactors and stutterwaarp drives become?
I created a setting where I took the near star map of the Universe RPG by SPI and plotted a 100 years of STL colonization then went forward 200 years to the present day of the setting.
The central ideas of the setting where
1) Ancients were a sentient dinosaur race circa Earth 65 millions year ago.
2) That the Cretaceous extinction event is accurate but the cause was a result of the Ancient's Final War.
3) The Ancient terraformed any potentially inhabitable world in all directions. Human exploration or the exploration of any of the known sentient races have not reach the limits of ancient terraformed.
4) This resulted in a far greater number of worlds that are inhabitabed without special life support. Although some have degraded from their earth normal conditions.
5) Some retained their original Mesozoic ecology with dinosaur dominate, other had their own extinction events resulting in a different ecology.
6) Human society is still balkanized with multiple colonies of different nations inhabiting the same world.
7) Earth is slipping into a new Ice Age causing more emigration then otherwise would have occurred.
8) Psionics are part of the setting although I tweaked it so that it only involves telepathy and/or mind-body control. The handwave is that sensitive can "tune" via quantum effects into their own body or another person's body.
9) There are alien races but all evolved from earth based ecologies. Only one is is technologically superior however luckily for humans it is dominated by a single polity that in the midst of cultural stasis. Humanity's primary contact with this race is thru a dissident faction on the fringe of the race's sphere of influence. The race are descended from dinosaurs and are called Saurians.
10) Contact has been made with another race who just discovered jump drive. They resemble kangeroos. Well resemble kangeroos as much as an Aslan resembles lions. They are called Kangers. They don't seem to mind the comparison and are savvy enough to use it to their advantage for PR purposes. For the most part human and kangers get along. Their society is also balkanized. However kangers feel the need to catch up to humanity so a lot of their disputes are on hold.
11) There is dissident faction of human that view psionics as the next stage of human evolution. They fled into deep space and established their own polity. They have been re-contacted 50 years and now viewed with distruct by most human polities due to a conflict 150 years ago.
12) In the last ten years the fringe of human expansion made contact with a sentient virus. The virus itself is just a proto-cell but when it infects a organism with a higher nervous system from a earth-base ecology it grants as a psionic ability the causes a hive mind to form. Only a few exploration teams, outpost, and fringe colonies had to deal with this. The threat isn't fully understood as of the present of the setting.
13) Known space encompasses a 5 by 5 block of sectors with the core 3 by 3 with high density civilization. There are fingers stretching out in most directions reaching specific points of interest. But they are mostly just surveyed routes with little or no settlements.
14) China, the United State, and Europe (as a loose bloc) dominate settled planets in a mix of sovereign territories, dependent territories and associations (think Puerto Rico via the USA or Greenland via Denmark). The big problem for the past 100 years is dealing with rogue actors. Nations like Russia, and India have a similar setup to the major powers but on a small scale. The remaining nations club together their effort on various projects. There are numerous private colonization projects but they are generally on a small scale. I deliberately made this a bit confusing.
15) There is a United Colonies organization that acts as a standards body and operates the equivalent of a Coast Guard doing search & rescue, inspection, and exploration. The European Union is a big supporter. China and United States also give their support but are touchy about their sovereignty and have large Space Navies.
The central ideas of the setting where
1) Ancients were a sentient dinosaur race circa Earth 65 millions year ago.
2) That the Cretaceous extinction event is accurate but the cause was a result of the Ancient's Final War.
3) The Ancient terraformed any potentially inhabitable world in all directions. Human exploration or the exploration of any of the known sentient races have not reach the limits of ancient terraformed.
4) This resulted in a far greater number of worlds that are inhabitabed without special life support. Although some have degraded from their earth normal conditions.
5) Some retained their original Mesozoic ecology with dinosaur dominate, other had their own extinction events resulting in a different ecology.
6) Human society is still balkanized with multiple colonies of different nations inhabiting the same world.
7) Earth is slipping into a new Ice Age causing more emigration then otherwise would have occurred.
8) Psionics are part of the setting although I tweaked it so that it only involves telepathy and/or mind-body control. The handwave is that sensitive can "tune" via quantum effects into their own body or another person's body.
9) There are alien races but all evolved from earth based ecologies. Only one is is technologically superior however luckily for humans it is dominated by a single polity that in the midst of cultural stasis. Humanity's primary contact with this race is thru a dissident faction on the fringe of the race's sphere of influence. The race are descended from dinosaurs and are called Saurians.
10) Contact has been made with another race who just discovered jump drive. They resemble kangeroos. Well resemble kangeroos as much as an Aslan resembles lions. They are called Kangers. They don't seem to mind the comparison and are savvy enough to use it to their advantage for PR purposes. For the most part human and kangers get along. Their society is also balkanized. However kangers feel the need to catch up to humanity so a lot of their disputes are on hold.
11) There is dissident faction of human that view psionics as the next stage of human evolution. They fled into deep space and established their own polity. They have been re-contacted 50 years and now viewed with distruct by most human polities due to a conflict 150 years ago.
12) In the last ten years the fringe of human expansion made contact with a sentient virus. The virus itself is just a proto-cell but when it infects a organism with a higher nervous system from a earth-base ecology it grants as a psionic ability the causes a hive mind to form. Only a few exploration teams, outpost, and fringe colonies had to deal with this. The threat isn't fully understood as of the present of the setting.
13) Known space encompasses a 5 by 5 block of sectors with the core 3 by 3 with high density civilization. There are fingers stretching out in most directions reaching specific points of interest. But they are mostly just surveyed routes with little or no settlements.
14) China, the United State, and Europe (as a loose bloc) dominate settled planets in a mix of sovereign territories, dependent territories and associations (think Puerto Rico via the USA or Greenland via Denmark). The big problem for the past 100 years is dealing with rogue actors. Nations like Russia, and India have a similar setup to the major powers but on a small scale. The remaining nations club together their effort on various projects. There are numerous private colonization projects but they are generally on a small scale. I deliberately made this a bit confusing.
15) There is a United Colonies organization that acts as a standards body and operates the equivalent of a Coast Guard doing search & rescue, inspection, and exploration. The European Union is a big supporter. China and United States also give their support but are touchy about their sovereignty and have large Space Navies.
Ah, now I see. This is the thought exercise, solo-Traveller mode. Got it.
How you design your space greatly depends on who your players are.
All of my earliest Traveller games were non-OTU; even tho we started relatively late with Trav ('84 or so) we didn't see a lot of GDW materials in our hobby shops. My first real subsector was basically giving my fave sci-fi movies a world - there was a Road Warrior world, a Blade Runner world, a Brazil world. Logan's Run and Dune too, the Dune world was Balkanized and the Houses fought for the star port. I remember working out a silly (inspired?) economics system based on UWP which affected the cost of things, including Trade, long before Merchant Prince became available to us.
Once we discovered the 3I, we loved the depth of history and the expanse of it all but missed the frontier. I think we were expecting the Marches to be like the Keep on the Borderlands, a gateway to a wild frontier... We played in the Marches for a while but then we all got on with our lives and role-playing, hell, gaming in general, disappeared for many years.
When I came back to Trav it was with the Mongoose reboot, I created a Terra-centric map with real stars and mapped as true as I could do. The golden triangle of Sol, Barnard's and Alpha Centauri allowed Humaniti to expand without bankrupting their cradle. They found the Vargr in the Canis constellations, the Ursa in the Ursa constellations and a wormhole trailing of the Vegans. I bet that is pretty freaking similar to Brin's Uplift series but I never read it. Just gave me a great way to use the Ancients (if I wanted) and gave some heft to an idea I was developing about ancient Terran monuments (pyramids, Stonehenge, Nazca lines, the very names of constellations, etc etc)
The wormhole of course gets me to a wholly new place, completely new sub sectors, and of course it closes... You can see where this is going. The OTU is great but personally I think it's unnecessary - you don't need the ISS to create Scout characters, call them Rangers or Explorers or whatever. It's there if you need it (and in my opinion Mongoose has done a stellar job of growing and deepening the 3I) but I recommend using Trav as it was meant to be used - a toolbox to create your own universe, not play in someone else's.
Once we discovered the 3I, we loved the depth of history and the expanse of it all but missed the frontier. I think we were expecting the Marches to be like the Keep on the Borderlands, a gateway to a wild frontier... We played in the Marches for a while but then we all got on with our lives and role-playing, hell, gaming in general, disappeared for many years.
When I came back to Trav it was with the Mongoose reboot, I created a Terra-centric map with real stars and mapped as true as I could do. The golden triangle of Sol, Barnard's and Alpha Centauri allowed Humaniti to expand without bankrupting their cradle. They found the Vargr in the Canis constellations, the Ursa in the Ursa constellations and a wormhole trailing of the Vegans. I bet that is pretty freaking similar to Brin's Uplift series but I never read it. Just gave me a great way to use the Ancients (if I wanted) and gave some heft to an idea I was developing about ancient Terran monuments (pyramids, Stonehenge, Nazca lines, the very names of constellations, etc etc)
The wormhole of course gets me to a wholly new place, completely new sub sectors, and of course it closes... You can see where this is going. The OTU is great but personally I think it's unnecessary - you don't need the ISS to create Scout characters, call them Rangers or Explorers or whatever. It's there if you need it (and in my opinion Mongoose has done a stellar job of growing and deepening the 3I) but I recommend using Trav as it was meant to be used - a toolbox to create your own universe, not play in someone else's.
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The one problem I have with running an ATU - which I am - is that my players are left largely ignorant of the universe in which their characters have notionally been functioning for some fifteen or twenty years. In some respects they're as ignorant at 38 or 46 as they would be expected to be at, say, 18.
Sure, I can shore that up with exposition via the "your character, with an education of X, would certainly know that the Grand Foofaw of Wapapitame Nine has been petitioning for full Imperial recognition for the past fifteen years." The biggest notional advantage of the OTU for me is that the players have at least the opportunity to inform themselves about a broad background of Imperial culture, politics and whatnot. With an ATU, for the sake of creative license you trade away that potential for deep player knowledge and autonomy.
Granted, it's all I can do to get players to familiarize themselves with the basic rules, so this might not make a difference. I try to spin up some background color and chrome for them to read outside of game time, but who the heck knows what they actually read!
Sure, I can shore that up with exposition via the "your character, with an education of X, would certainly know that the Grand Foofaw of Wapapitame Nine has been petitioning for full Imperial recognition for the past fifteen years." The biggest notional advantage of the OTU for me is that the players have at least the opportunity to inform themselves about a broad background of Imperial culture, politics and whatnot. With an ATU, for the sake of creative license you trade away that potential for deep player knowledge and autonomy.
Granted, it's all I can do to get players to familiarize themselves with the basic rules, so this might not make a difference. I try to spin up some background color and chrome for them to read outside of game time, but who the heck knows what they actually read!
