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Scout Service Travel Advisories

I wanted to give out some information to my players on a world they'll be travelling to, but I didn't want to make it too easy for them to figure out what kinds of problems they might have. I decided to give them a Scout Service report on the planet as a handout. I went to the State Department website (http://travel.state.gov/travel/warnings_consular.html) and grabbed a Consular Advisory sheet to use as a starting point. It's been fairly easy so far to alter it to what I need
 
Well for it to be any use, a Travel Advisory had better be fairly darn specific about what threats travellers may face. After all, the whole point of them is to ruin the surprise of being shot by the locals in a war or kidnapped by troublemakers or whatever.


You wouldn't expect an advisory against travel to a place to say "Don't come here, there's er... stuff going on and people might not like you much". ;)
 
I wanted to give out some information to my players on a world they'll be travelling to, but I didn't want to make it too easy for them to figure out what kinds of problems they might have. I decided to give them a Scout Service report on the planet as a handout. I went to the State Department website (http://travel.state.gov/travel/warnings_consular.html) and grabbed a Consular Advisory sheet to use as a starting point.
helpful. thanks.
 
Originally posted by Malenfant:
Well for it to be any use, a Travel Advisory had better be fairly darn specific about what threats travellers may face. After all, the whole point of them is to ruin the surprise of being shot by the locals in a war or kidnapped by troublemakers or whatever.


You wouldn't expect an advisory against travel to a place to say "Don't come here, there's er... stuff going on and people might not like you much". ;)
Right, but my worry was that I would give them too little information and make it easy for them to know what to look out for. It's like when you're describing a room and say "the room looks perfectly normal except for the BIG RED LEVER on the wall." I wanted them to have an advisory sheet to look over and see a whole mess of things that might go wrong.
In fact, as I was writing it I came up with quite a few interesting scenarios I might not otherwise have thought of.

Here is the finished document, for those who might be interested.
 
That's not bad as world descriptions go. Though one thing bugs me - if there are 10 possibly warring nation states there, why doesn't the planet have government code 7 (Balkanised)?
 
Originally posted by Malenfant:
That's not bad as world descriptions go. Though one thing bugs me - if there are 10 possibly warring nation states there, why doesn't the planet have government code 7 (Balkanised)?
I had actually thought about that. When I first looked at the info generated by Heaven & Earth (thank God for computers to do world generation for me) it showed the government as Self-Perpetuating Oligarchy/Several Councils. While the planet is technically divided up into ten different states, they are nearly identical cultutrally and structurally. The ten clans grew out of the ten original families that colonized the world, and have remained stable (if belligerent) since that time. So it's not so much ten separate governments as one government that solves internal squabbles with live ammunition.
 
The CIA gives a guide to all the nations in the world. The format might be more useful as the IISS is more simmilar in concept to the CIA, than the State Department. The IISS is it's own thing however.
If you want something that is really like the IISS, the old British Empire used to collect tons of information, some of which is still in various archives in the UK. I don't know how to get at much of it online, but it is presumably possible. Perhaps it was simply because I was to stingy to pay a fee.
Anyway, these are ideas of formats for the IISS guide
 
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