Redefining the TU

[robject]

Occasionally, some of us have wondered if the Imperium is too big, and if its boundaries are too well-defined; there's no frontier anymore.

Rarely, the point is also brought up that, waaay back when, the hazy, undefined Imperium even had a different astrography: Capital was seated conveniently between two massive rifts thousands of parsecs long, essentially owning the route between the two.

Has anyone else thought of re-defining the TU? Rearranging, shrinking, and skewing the map instead of starting over from scratch?

I've thought of doing things like:

(1) removing Deneb, Reft, Verge, Lishun...
(2) extending rifts to meet either Vland or (more ambitiously) Sylea.

Etc.

Anyone else thought of committing similar acts of mutilation?

 

[DaveChase]

I think the Virus version addressed your desire for a new frontier. Or at least a revamped frontier to rediscover again

How about not changing the TU but adding to the galaxy on the other side.

What if one of the old Acient stargates is found. You know something that we can not destroy and it leads to the other side of the galaxy where an Empire has been growing, changing and etc for just as long as the Imperial side has.

And the war that takes place can only happen after traveling through this gate, so it is limited in scale.

This thought process brought to you via 'StarGate' and 'Honor Harrington' series.

LOL

Dave
(hey, it is possible

 

[mike wightman]

MTU went from the Spinward Marches, through Corridor to the Core sector which contained Capital (as described as the only passage between the rifts), through to Vland and then on to the Solomani Rim.

 

[RainOfSteel]

I remember seeing a link to a map of the Capital/Core Sector area on the TML. It was mapped based on the description of Capital from Adventure 1: Kinunir.

Here is Larsen Whipsnade's request for a copy of the description:
http://lists.travellerrpg.com/pipermail/tml/2002-September/165326.html

Here is the response with the description.
http://lists.travellerrpg.com/pipermail/tml/2002-September/165330.html


Here is Larsen saying he's going to make a map.
http://lists.travellerrpg.com/pipermail/tml/2002-September/165351.html


And sometime last year (although my searches can't seem to locate it), I swear I found a posted link to an actual map.

 

[mike wightman]

I remember the link, and I have a copy of the map as a pdf downloaded from the link.
But like you I can't find the link yet...

Someone provided the link on CotI...

 

[signless]

Heh. The Imperium TOO big and well-defined? Heh.
I remember what a screaming letdown it was to watch that unfold. The universe began to slowly change from a wild, unknown, dangerous and spooky place, to the home of a bunch of dried-up civil-servants...and in spite of their obvious advantages, they allowed the Solomani to kick their b*tts up between their shoulderblades in the Interstellar Wars (you want to talk about unlikely...?).
So if someone wants to shrink the Imperium, they got my vote. Heck, shrink that sucker down to a couple of SUBSECTORS and I'd be happy as a clam. In the current OTU, there just isn't enough space on the map for players who want to get to the parts which usually say "here there be dragons".

 

[robject]

There you go. Signless, you've captured the gist of what I'm feeling. Maybe not quite as strongly as you, but there it is.

Still, I'm afraid of changing things "too much". On the other hand, part of the experiment is to play with several different possibilities, huh?

I do like the feeling of distance conveyed in the Imperium; I don't like the claustrophobia I feel of being mired in 10,000 settled worlds. But, Terra should be far from Sylea should be far from Regina. Other empires shouldn't share much border with the Imperium; they may touch, or may have a 'neutral zone' or 'buffer zone' between them. Thus I muse.

Hum. What if sectors were 2x2 subsectors in size? Thus the canon Spinward Marches would be the Marches (subsectors ABEF), Troy (IJMN), Deneb (CDGH), and Reft (KLOP). Note that subsectors KLOP will get trashed... Glisten, Lunion, and Mora are now on the Rift.

Vland would take the place of Corridor, Vland, Gushemege, and Dagudashaag.

Core would take the place of Lishun, Antares, Core, and Fornast.

Ilelish would take up itself + Zarushagar, Daibei, and Reaver's Deep.


You get the idea. The Imperium is reduced to 25% its original size. About 5 sectors instead of 20. That's still 2000+ worlds... and doesn't really solve the border problem...

 

[signless]

robject posted:

Still, I'm afraid of changing things "too much". On the other hand, part of the experiment is to play with several different possibilities, huh?

Lead on, MacDuff! I LIKED the idea of an Imperium, just not one that's so big.

I do like the feeling of distance conveyed in the Imperium; I don't like the claustrophobia I feel of being mired in 10,000 settled worlds.

Yep. For me, the feeling of "distance" was conveyed in the time it took to jump from one system to the next, and to travel to and from various 100D limits.

But, Terra should be far from Sylea should be far from Regina.

I agree. It doesn't make much sense to get so many interstellar polities crowded too closely together...especially when we're talking about aliens. I can't see that as being a very comfortable state of affairs. More likely I see a long history of brushfire wars erupting into longer, more conflagatory affairs which would unhinge even the most stable of economies. Given their territorial impulses, I never really understood why the Aslan weren't seen/used as more of a threat. After all, these bozo kitties practically wiped themselves out during a nuclear war.

Hum. What if sectors were 2x2 subsectors in size?

I kinda like the present size of sectors. I'd rather see some entire sectors/subsectors eliminated/consolidated, drag the Zhodani Consulate rimward/trailing, and scale the entire map down that way. Granted, that way lies both peril and madness in some respects, but allows us to keep the current sector/subsector division method as outlined in the venerable LBB's.

You get the idea. The Imperium is reduced to 25% its original size. About 5 sectors instead of 20.

I LIKE the idea of an Imperium that's only a handful of sectors in breadth and depth.

That's still 2000+ worlds... and doesn't really solve the border problem...

If I had m'druthers, 2000+ worlds in a handful of sectors would have been PLENTY for any company to develop. Spend more time on fleshing out those territories with in-depth development of subsectors and planets, and still leave plenty of undeveloped, and unclaimed and most importantly EASILY ACCESSIBLE territory for players to do with as they would. You get the best of both worlds...a system of "canon", with PLENTY of room for "variants" of all stripes. I LIKE being able to have my cake and eat it, too.

 

[BeRKA]

What if sectors were 2x2 subsectors in size?

I like that idea. I have even played with the thought of making the Imperium even smaller, by putting all of known space in the upper part of a sector, Terra somewhere in the middle, and close to Terra, som 2300 stuff, and in the lower eight subsectors stuff from our favourite Sci-Fi books, shows, movies (Star Wars, Bab5, Asimov, Heinlein, Alien, etc... and also some trekkie stuff for those who like that.)

But for quickly transforming (shrinking) the current known space we need a (perl) program that shrinks a sector. That program should keep the subsector capitals and pop 9+ worlds, and have 1/5 chance of keeping any other world. Then it should change the location number (e.g. 1232 to 0616 or xxyy to int(xx/2).int(yy/2)). For planets ending up in the same hex, keep the one with the highest population. It would be interesting to see how that universe would look.

 

[Morte]

Next time I kill the party, I may well actually do something like this:

- Get an empty sector.

- Put a big clump of about 50 dots in the middle, with another 50 in straggling chains and outlying clusters leading off, then assorted rifts to make the rest of space difficult but not impossible to reach.

- Go through my various setting materials -- Gateway, Reaver's Deep, etc -- and pick a hundred or so interesting worlds and some (pocket) empires to bundle them up. Allocate them to dots on my map, reshuffling at will.

- Slap a current set of politics and power dynamics on it, paying attention to (a) internal consistency and (b) generating the maximum number of adventure opportunities.

- Slap a history on it, without worrying too much. [Gaming happens in the current setting, not the past. Who cares whether the archdukes had their balls cut off in 400 or 600 or 800?]

I now have a setting in the middle where all the worlds are defined, and good, and if my game suddenly heads off at 90 degrees because they found some cargo that will sell well "over there" I don't have to scramble to create the intervening planets. I can overwrite the planets at will, though, if I decide I want to run some adventure that needs a particular world. So that's low-effort GMing in the middle.

Meanwhile, off at the edges and across the rifts, there's a whole galaxy. But it's beyond the (very expensive) deep space refuelling depots, so only scout service types, and adventurers with patrons, and one-way ideological colonists, and megacorps with evil secret projects to hide, will go there.

So I'd get low effort merchant games in the middle and room for wild for wacky stuff at the edges. And I could do most of it by copy & paste. And if I want I can ditch psionics, or allow cybernetics and powerful computers/AI, or all the other things I kinda like that are problematic in OTU.

 

[robject]

Interesting ideas all. Sounds like y'all're brainstorming.

I like the idea of using a script (perl) to pare down Known Space and map it to a smaller space. And I also like the idea of retaining the worlds we know best (for the sake of familiarity and game resources, perhaps).

My next stage is to make conceptual sector maps, perhaps (for starters) by manually editing the Spinward Marches and Vland, and seeing if I can wrap them around the Claw Rift. Hey, the Rift gets smaller, too... dunno if I like that... as long as it's too wide to cross, I guess that's ok.
So, it needs to be what, 12 parsecs wide at least?

Or, maybe it doesn't get all that smaller... depends on how the maps are messed with, I guess.

 

[Evo Plurion]

Originally posted by signless:
The universe began to slowly change from a wild, unknown, dangerous and spooky place, to the home of a bunch of dried-up civil-servants...

Yes! A far-future, interstellar setting should convey a sense of vast distance and danger. But we need not alter the physical layout of the Imperium to achieve this. A GM can merely run his campaign with this thematic objective in mind. Don't allow players to hop from world to world with little effort or concern for what they may find. Loosen the threads of trade and communication so that each world feels more isolated from the others. Emphasize the differences in languages, politics and culture among different worlds. Two worlds with the same government type may be completely incompatible socially. Worlds with different governments or law levels may be incomrehensible to each other. There may be few cosmopolitan worlds to which the affairs of the Imperium at large are known. On most worlds, the inhabitants might be unfamiliar with - and mystified/frightened/appalled by - others beyond a few parsecs' distance. The Imperium could be perceived as a vast, shadowy threat of power, beyond the understanding of many locals.

I am a firm believer in fleshing out a world really well and giving players lots of time and opportunity to adventure in different places on that one world, before moving on to another. If they're allowed to skip from starport to starport every two weeks, visiting one or two sites of interest in the single, ubiquitous city surrounding each starport, worlds become bland, repetitive, cookie-cutter settings and make the whole Imperium feel like interstellar suburbia.

 

[robject]

Evo is right; attention to detail can make or break a campaign, and certainly it's the Referee's job to set the stage for the players. If s/he wants a cosmopolitan, bustling Imperium, or a frontiersy, dangerous interstellar wasteland, the Referee is responsible for communicating that to the players through the interactions of playing the game.

Pre-work is a given. Actually, there's no Truth with a capital "T" to discuss here: pre-work sometimes involves changing the TU to suit our needs. I admit that it may be uncommon to make drastic astrographical changes while trying to preserve the Imperium-model as much as possible, yet that's the kind of thought experiment I'm toying with.

 

[signless]

robject posted:

Pre-work is a given. Actually, there's no Truth with a capital "T" to discuss here: pre-work sometimes involves changing the TU to suit our needs.

And this is headed in a very cool direction, indeed. Shrinking the Imperium down by about 25% is a GOOD thing, IMHO. A sector is still a VAST thing, especially in a ship equipped with only Jump-1 or Jump-2 drives.

I admit that it may be uncommon to make drastic astrographical changes while trying to preserve the Imperium-model as much as possible, yet that's the kind of thought experiment I'm toying with.

I think selecting worlds already grabbed by canon, and re-seeding them in a new sector/subsector setting shouldn't be THAT problematic. As a matter of fact, it allows a pc group to realistically game through ALL of the LBB adventures in a single campaign...without the use of anagathics .
I'm gonna go through a list of adventure worlds this weekend, and see if I can get at least the CT stuff in order.
I still like keeping the sector/subsector sizes standard within the LBB format - but if y'all want to go with a modified "short sector", that's cool.
GREAT thread idea, robject! This is gonna be fun.

 

[BeRKA]

I was thinking a bit more about a space shrinking perlscript and since the number of worlds should be 25%, then it is 1/6 of the worlds other than the pop 9+ worlds we should keep. (The probability of a pop 9 world is 1/12, and 1/12+1/6=25%.) But if we compensate for the non 9+ capitals and for removing worlds ending up in the same hex, then it is closer to 1/5 of the worlds that we should keep, as I initially suggested. I think we just have to do a testrun with different probablilties, to see if the result looks good.

To make rifts work better, why not half the jump distance as well? (A J-6 ships can then only jump 3 hexes.)

And hopefully the Sword Worlds will not look like a backwards "K" anymore.

 

[kafka47]

Making the Imperium into a more frontier like society certainly has its merits. However, I think the basic problem is that we are confusing chronological time with the time that it takes social structures to evolve.

The Imperium is an interstellar entity that emerged from the Long Night and its shows all the birth pangs of that order even 1116 years after its founding. Partially, because most of Chartered Space was never explored due to technological limitations. Within every system there are vast amounts of discoveries to be made. Just as when you travel to another country, unless it is a small one like the San Marino one will never fully understand the complexity of the society and the possibility of getting lost in the wilds is great. To view everything as having GPS satelites is not reflective of what the Imperium is or what it ought to be.

 

[robject]

There are lots of ways to shrink the Imperium (which is similar in effect to expanding the frontier), and each way will have its own pros and cons. Likewise, some folks will like some methods better than others, be it placing the most widely known canon worlds in a brand-new setting, or applying an algorithm to the TU, or manually engineering it the way you want.

I didn't start this topic in order to gain a consensus; I did it to share ideas, and so far this is proving itself very productive.

A link to my first attempt is here. I've decided to change my methods slightly, but the image sort of encapsulates my ideas.

http://home.comcast.net/~starcharts/smallimperium/TheSmallImperium.jpg

I'm tempted to algorithmically shrink the less-commonly-used sectors, while keeping the more well-known subsectors more nearly intact. Kind of a hybrid approach. Mainly because I want certain features to remain the same (the Spinward Main, for instance). BeRKA would want to keep the high-population worlds, I think, while I'd rather just apply the algorithm evenly and give every system the same chance for inclusion (I want the Imperial population proportionally smaller). But so far I've gotten lots of good ideas from y'all, and I hope everyone reading these posts has benefitted from the posts too.

 

[TheEngineer]

Hi folks !

Perhaps I did not understand the problem
But if somebody misses a frontier it should be a minor problem to choose a Traveller setting with a bit more "frontier" feeling, e.g. Mileu 0, MT or TNE ?

So you could keep geography and just modify time setting...

Or, to ask more directly:
What kind of setting would you like ?

Regards,

Mert

 

[robject]

Per BeRKA's suggestion, I scribbled up a Perl script that would keep 22% of the worlds, plus the capital worlds, and scale them into a 2x2 quadrant.

EDIT: I changed the algorithm to only implicitly keep the sector capital, and am working on a "list of worlds to keep" for additional control. I like the results better that way.

As an exercise to see the result, I ran the Spinward Marches through this script. Using the SM as a guinea pig has one major benefit: people who are familiar with the sector can see exactly how the distances are shortened, and how many worlds they're used to seeing just aren't there.

Suffice it to say that if I cobble together a Shrunken Imperium, I would keep most of the Marches, rather than butcher it like in this example:

http://home.comcast.net/~starcharts/smallimperium/SpinwardMarches.1116.PDF

However, I would probably not feel much pain in so butchering most of the other sectors.

 

[Evo Plurion]

TheEngineer has a good point. Why go to the trouble of recreating Imperial astrography when there are plenty of frontiers - physical, cultural, etc.?