More on the Ring

Cool guy Evan Elkins made several improved versions of my map of the Ring.  Thanks, Evan!  I especially like this one that shows the borders of the interstellar polities and the names of the subsectors.

The borders make it a lot easier for me to notice a few details about the multisystem governments of the Ring.  A big one is the fact that fully half of them do not possess a class A starport.  (Starport type is the letter above the planet in the center of the hex.  A is the best.  An X indicates no starport whatsoever.)  This lack of class A starports is super interesting to me, as class A's are the only starports with facilities for the construction of starships. 

So where do these poor governments get all their jump capable vessels?  Do they buy them from other interstellar polities?  If so, which ones?  Do the sellers limit the sort of naval technologies they'll make available to others?  Or do the pocket empires that lack a class A buy all their ships from the two non-aligned worlds with class A starports?  A third possibility is that they make do with rickety old fleets from a previous era.  Some combination of all three of these possibilities is probably the best answer.  But one of the things I love about Traveller is how the random distribution of something like starports suggests ramifications for the campaign.

Another thing to glance at is the presence of naval bases, which take the form of a little star in the upper left of the hex.  Most of the governments of the Ring have either one or two naval bases.  So that's the norm for the region.  But two of them have no naval bases whatsoever.  They also don't have a class A starport.  I think it is fair to ask whether or not these two governments even have their own navies.  If not, what does that mean for the campaign?  If they do have a navy, why don't they have a base of some sort?  Whatever the answer, it should provide some interesting material for the setting.

Then there's the blue-outlined and white-outlined regions in the middle left subsector.  They possess 3 and 4 naval bases respectively.  Having more naval bases than average seems like an indicator of possible belligerency.  That looks like the section of the Ring with the biggest military build up, so maybe those two neighbors have a long history of interstellar warfare.

The Ring revised

So here's a revised version of the Traveller map I shared the other day.  I made a major goof in the first version: the bottom right and upper left corners of the map were the exact same subsector.  Whoopsie.

Now that this little issue is fixed, here are some next steps to make this map into a viable Trav setting:

• Take a good look at the jump clusters.  What places are jump-1 vessels limited to?  Where can a j-2 ship go?  What parts of the Ring can only be accessed by j-3 or better?
• Plan some travel routes.  I prefer the pre-Imperium (the official setting) version of trade routes in the 1977 version of the rules.  Tales to Astound has a good post on this subject.
• Figure out what some of the Red and Amber Zones might mean.
• Look at which worlds are dominant in the region.  Generally, a world with a high population, a high tech level, a class A starport, and a Naval base will be one of the big players in the setting, as those are the kinds of worlds with the resources needed to force their will on others.
• Determine what all these dang allegiance codes indicate.  Those are the the little two letter things near the bottom right of each world.  Na stands for Non-aligned.  The rest are random output of the generator and are meant to suggest the name of some sort of interstellar political unit.

The Center Cannot Hold

The Ring (pictured above) was created as a Burgess Shale type Traveller environ.  At 3 x 3 subsectors, the Ring is a bit more than third smaller in area compared to a standard Trav sector, but still plenty large for many kinds of adventures.

The individual subsectors were generated using the Zhodani Base's cool random generator tool, with race set to "Pocket Empire," settlement level to "Backwater," and most subsectors either "Standard" or "Scattered" density.  The central subsector was set to Barren settlement level and Rift density.  The graphics for each subsector were autogenerated by clicking the nifty "send to TravellerMap.com" button.  I then stitched the individual maps together rather hamhandedly in pixlr.com.

The inspiration for the structure of the Ring comes from a couple of old strategy sci-fi games I played in my undergrad days.  I fondly remember searching U of I's local AppleTalk network for an unsecure Mac that could host our games of Spaceward Ho!.  Usually someone in the Foreign Languages Building unknowingly obliged.  Later we spent a lot of time playing the sci-fi mash-up game VGA Planets, where the Cylons could fight the Federation and the Rebel Alliance at the same time. 

As I recall, both games had options for configuring the initial spacemap and we tended to favor ring-shaped universes.  This choice allowed for each player to face at most 2 foes in the early stages of the game.  We liked slow build-ups, ending with titanic battles between well-prepared opponents.

World info and subsector maps below the thingy.

Traveller session #3

Ran two games this week, Trav from 7:30 to 10pm on Wednesday then I got up for Doom of the Jaredites at 4:30am the next day.  That was unwise; I was a bit of a wreck yesterday.

The Traveller session was graced by the return of Dane.  Dude had been much missed in recent weeks, as he passed his bar exam and moved to anther town to take up lawyering full time.  It was great to see him and even better to add his particular maniacal style to the session.

Play resumed at the monastery of the Techno-Monks of the Seven-Pointed Star, whose small brotherhood keeps the paranoid, backwards, theocratic Belgardian Empire running.  Their operation on planet Eleson is the Empire's only source of lanthanum, a key element in jump drive technology.  The friendly brothers explain that maintaining the lanthanide mine is a holy duty they regard as a great honor, even if the monks on the planet all eventually die from radiation poisoning from working the mines.  No one in the landing party even flinched at the hint that they were in danger from background radiation, but they ended up not staying long enough to pick up a harmful dose.

Things got interesting not long after the party inquired how often a Belgardian vessel came by to pick up the lanthanide ore.  "Every three months or so."  "How long since the last vessel was in-system?"  "About three months, that's why the nav beacon you used to find us was on."

Cut to the bridge of the Leviathan, in synchronous orbit over the monastery.  Two blips are detected on short range scanner, heading for the planet of the Techno-Monks.  They're only 200 displacement tons apiece, so the Leviathan almost certainly outguns them, but the Captain is a careful man.  He doesn't want to take any unnecessary chances, knowing that even a small ship can put a lethal hole in your vessel.  He orders silent running mode, powering down as much extraneous equipment as possible to avoid detection.

When in doubt throw in a Space Pope.

When I rolled a random encounter with two Belgardian Lancers (what passes for military ships in their crapsack empire) I decided that Belgardian standard operating procedure was for one ship to put down on the planet for the pick-up, while the other vessel stayed in orbit scanning for enemies.  The Papal Admiral of the Belgardian Empire maintains power over his subjects based on the paranoid idea that the 3rd Imperium is always just about ready to invade.  Sort of a North Korea of outer space only more pathetic because the 3rd Imperium doesn't even know the Belgardians exist.

Anyway, what happens next is the sort of thing that can only really happen in games with dice.  The dice showed snake eyes for the Belgardian's scanning roll, the worst possible result for a 2d6, roll high system.  Not only did the Belgardian vessel not spot the Leviathan, they placed themselves in a parking orbit ridiculously close to the PC vessel.  Meanwhile the Lancer heading down planetside clears the cloud coverage and spots the away team's boat sitting on their landing pad.  Nick, playing the pinnace pilot, is quick-starting his vessel and getting the hell out of there in classic Han Solo Out of Tatooine fashion.  Some laser fire lights up the landing pad right where the pinnace was sitting moments ago as the second Belgardian vessel breaks orbit.  The Captain puts his ship into action mode as threats from both sides are mutually ignored via radio.

Space combat in Traveller uses 10 minute turns, so at some point we switch to what the crew members in the monastery are up to.  Kirk's PC has been in the radio shack atop the monastery, trying to determine if anything clever is to be done with the beacon.  He's joined by a frantic monk, who grabs the mike and begs the Lancers to cease fire.  Dane's guy has taken the rest of the monks hostage, with the support of a couple of well-armed buddies.   This time the dice don't go the PCs' way: a quick roll suggests to me that the Lancer crews consider the monks and their tin shack monastery to be expendable.  The home planet has more monks and more tin, denying the enemy their expertise is more important than their measly lives.  I got a 6 on the "how dickish are these dudes" d6 roll.

The monastery erupts in laser fire.  The radio shack takes a direct hit but Kirk's man survives.  He's a blackened mess that spends the rest of the expedition in sickbay.  He'll be haunted the rest of his days by visions of a frantic Techno-Monk suddenly evaporating before his eyes, but at least he's alive.  The rest of the landing party comes out of the wrecked and exploded monastery with hardly a scraped knee among them.

While this is going on, the pinnace has come around and is firing its one measly laser at one Lancer.  But a lucky hit sends it crashing down, forming a large impact crater on the Mars-like surface and spreading debris over a 20 square kilometers.  Meanwhile the combat computer on the Leviathan is revved up and the Selective Fire program is run, allowing the Captain to order the gunners "take out the other ship's power system!".  Three of four turrets bearing put their lasers right into the ordered bullseye while the fourth goes astray and wrecks the ship's computer.  It was leaving orbit, so it veers off on a hyperbolic course as its engines go dead.  Three lame-ass escape pods pop out of the vessel a few minutes later.  They're the majority of the crew, the prize crew later find the captain in the bridge with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.  He couldn't remember how to activate the self-destruct sequence and killed himself out of embarrassment.

A week's worth of tinkering with the captured vessel render it spaceworthy with a working computer and Jump-1 capabilities, but that isn't enough to get them anywhere in this thinly-populated subsector.  So they hid the vessel among the minor asteroid in a trojan point, estimating that it might be worth 4 to 8 million credits even with outdated technology and shot up.

The rest of the session is rather tame in comparison.  They run into a Jump-3 capable free trader from the Marrakesh Free Trade Association, a pocket empire two or three subsectors spinward.  While half the party seizes the opportunity to open trade relations with a new multi-system market, the other half is trying to figure out how to seize the NPC vessel.  But after requesting and receiving a tour of the Marrakesh vessel they realize that any boarding or hijacking attempt will be met with stiff resistance.  So they make friend instead.

They also befriend the Gollerians, a "feudal technocracy" on a nice little ag world.  Feudal Technocracy is one of those little pieces of Trav lore not often seen in other sci-fi RPGs.  The concept is borrowed from an old SF novel (H. Beam Piper's Space Viking, maybe?) and suggests a world where the masters of technology rule by consent of the governed.  For my purposes I interpreted the world as some sort of far-out Techno-Geek Eco-Libertarian Utopia (no, that doesn't really make any sense).  They run a just pre-interstellar society at near maximum efficiency, with a Right Tech for the Right Job approach to technology.  Thus they are able to quickly produce replacement parts for the Belgardian vessel, which the PCs trade to them for a sizable credit line for future company vessels entering the system.  So they ferry a crew of Gollerians back to the system of the Techno-Monks.  Incidentally, these Gollerian astronauts become instant heroes once back home, as they are the first of their people to visit jump space and return.

The final encounter of the night is with the Shigu, the other Leviathan-class working the subsector, which the party had encountered previously.  This time the Shigu was sporting serious damage.  Just prior to a previous jump they ran into the killer encounter that the PCs had managed to dodge: a Zhodani frigate carrying ten fighter craft.  The Zhodani are major rivals of the 3rd Imperium, fighting a cold war with them that sometimes goes hot.  Fortunately the Shigu had already refueled when the Zho spotted them, so instead of being completely screwed they were able to jump out once they were outside any local gravity wells.

That about wraps up our time with Adventure 4: Leviathan.  Through a combination of cautious play, the occasional wreckless move and some good dice throws, the Leviathan makes it back to home base a little ahead of schedule, with information on most of the subsector, good prospects for company expansion into the region and friendly relations with most of the local polities.  Not too shabby.

I wonder what the heck we're going to play in two weeks.

Traveller campaign update numero dos

You know what's kind of a kick in the head?  Running Traveller with Tom in the group.  Tom was in the game store version of the Wessex campaign and acquitted himself admirably as Lankii the Elf.  GMing a sci-fi game with him at the table was interesting because of the following:

• Dude helped build the particle accelerator at Fermilab.
• His second career is as a sci-fi author.
• He was among the original Traveller playtester and ran a campaign back in the seventies.
• He's on a first-name basis with most of the principals involved at good ol' GDW.

Fortunately, he's also a cool cat who did not beat me over the head with his credentials.  He asked some very penetrating questions* prior to the start of the campaign and kept me on my astro-science toes through Wednesday's session.  But that's okay.  Why bother GMing if the players aren't willing to push back at my supposed omniscience?  Anyway, I gave him something to think about too, because I had held back the pregen captain for him.  It's session two, he's missed session one, and suddenly he's in charge of this zillion-credit vessel and the 60 people aboard.

So the BTS Leviathan visited two more solar systems and encountered one other starship.  The first planet they encountered was another slowship colony set down on a Marslike world with a a thin, tainted atmosphere.  The locals live a Road Warrior-like existence, raiding each other in custom dunebuggies and landcruisers and whatnot.  Peaceful contact was made with the dome city closest to the dilapidated starport, where they entered into a trade agreement with Boss Udag, the fat bastard running the dome.  At first Udag wasn't sure if he wanted to do business with these soft outworlders, but Jo's grunt PC Malachi turned him around.  Malachi ended up in a duel with one of Udag's warriors, over a misunderstanding at a banquet.  Not only did the starhopper trounce one of his best men, Malachi put a cherry on top of the affair by gratuitously beheading the mofo.  That's why the party decided to name the joint Vegas.  What happens there, stays there.

While the away team was enjoying this little scene, the bridge crew were dealing with an issue of their own, in the form of a bogey burning through space towards them at 4 or 5gs.  The vessel turns out to be the Shoji, another Levathan-class merchant explorer owned by rival corporation MacLellan Factors.  The Shoji hails them: "Marcucci, stand down and prepare to be boarded!"

At this point I almost started a third action sequence.  The shuttlecraft was at the northern polar region cutting ice for fuel (no gas giant in system and the poles are the only standing water on the surface).  With no stats prepared and no PCs present for this operation, I decided on the spot to roll a 7 or less on 2d6 for the shuttlecraft to be jumped by yetis.  That's not in the module, I was just being a dick.  But for most of the night my dice were going the way of the party.

Case in point: the Shoji incident.  The bridge crew did the smart and totally not-PC thing of not immediately going for the space combat rules.  They figured out that the Shoji had misidentified them as the Marcucci, a vessel of their same class that had been hijacked and turned pirate a few years back.  What neither party knew was that the boys back at MacLellan corporate HQ had altered the Identify Friend or Foe software on all their vessels in the subsector, intentionally misidentifying the Leviathan as the pirate vessel, in hopes of provoking an incident.  With the PC's catching me by surprise by actually exercising restraint, I gave Captain Zadek of the Shoji a 10+ to figure out what was going on.

Dice came up a five and a six, so instead of a shoot-out Tom's PC and Zadek talked things out like civilized men, over a bottle of wine.  Their gentleman's agreement included a non-aggression pact, respect for prior claims, and splitting part of the unexplored subsector between them.  As this was happening the party hothead was racking his brain as to how to get onboard the Shoji and seize the vessel, bomb them or at least steal their stardata, but this general belligerence never made it out of the planning stage.

So both vessels zoomed out of Vegas with no space shooting.  Boo hiss.  For their efforts the PCs come away with a trade agreement with a local tinpot, knowledge that at least one vessel in the subsector won't shoot them on site, some ornate hand-crafted lowtech weapons, and quite a bit of local booze, which the party has yet to discover is actually a byproduct of the dome's waste recycle system.  Good times.

The next system is a dense blue giant that captured a brown dwarf and one of its satellites during a close pass a few million years ago.  The brown dwarf got so close to the main star that all that is left of it nowadays is a spiral of gaseous material.  The one world is another Mars-type in an orbit highly eccentric to the star's plane of rotation.  This planet sports a series of wicked scars in the form of multiple parallel Valles Marineris style super-canyons.  Near the bottom of one of these mega-rifts, close to the canyon wall, is a beacon emitting a nav signal on an old imperial frequency.

The landing party puts the pinnace down on a small landing pad near the beacon, which is mounted atop a fairly large building of cheap corrugated prefab metal slabs leaning right up against canyon wall.  No one is out and about, so they hoof it to the front door and pull the rope, ringing some bell with a nice, satisfying low-register bong.  The front door opens and they are greeted by a human in a monk's robe, wearing a holy symbol-type amulet depicting a seven-pointed star.  End of session.


*"Are we playing the standard Traveller rules?" "Yeah, the original three books, roll 2d6 for most stuff and hope for a high number, etc." "No, I mean the jump drive and interstellar communication rules. Those are what make a game Traveller."  That dude is smart.

Traveller session #1

Last night the exploration vessel Leviathan set out into the unknown with its crew of 55 and 4 civilian scientists.  Each player had one of the senior officer pregens and one or two characters rolled up using the original Traveller rules.  Yes, some PCs died in chargen.  The players rolled up a large number of ground-pounders (Army and Marines), which resulted in many PCs assigned crap jobs aboard the ship.  There are only so many starship gigs available for a dude whose best skill is Cutlass-3, so we ended up with several trained killers working as Cargo Handlers and Galley Hands.

Many of the extra PCs ended up serving most of the session as the landing party.  While the Leviathan and its shuttle scooped fuel from a nearby gas giant, the landing party would survey the mainworld of the system with the ship's pinnace, a term that provided unlimited amusement to the players.  

The first world explored (dubbed "Erebus") was an airless rockball with the remains of three domed cities, all bombed out. Under the largest they detected some trace emissions of breathable gases, so the party donned vaccsuits and descended below the street level.  That's when the morlocks jumped them.  It was a brief struggle, as the morlocks only had clubs and daggers while the party had a large array of firearms.  Pat's vaccsuit helmet was dented up a bit and a couple suits had to be patched quickly, but the morlocks were defeated.  A quick examination of some of the less laser-blasted bodies revealed small limpet-like symbiots on the bellies of all the morlocks.  These creatures oxygenate the blood in exchange for nutrients, allowing the morlocks to live in thinner atmospheres than normal humans.  A live symbiotic limpet is the only thing of value they found on the world.

The second system visited was more promising.  They found an earthlike world they named Wibbly.  Wibbly is inhabited by slowship colonists whose technology level had crept back to the stoneage due to lack of heavy metals, but they had a very successful neolithic civilization going.  First contact with the Wibblonians went reasonably well and some trade followed.  More importantly, vast deposits of petrochemical were found just under the surface.

troupe Traveller

So I made this super-simple Traveller character sheet that holds five PCs per page.  Eight of them come with one of the pre-gens from Adveture 4: Leviathan already filled in for the first character.  Like this:



Stupid red squiggly lines.  Anyway, the eight pre-gens fill out the command staff of the ship nicely, putting the players in charge of the ship.  The other four slots on each will be generated randomly using the normal methods and then jobs on the ship found for them.  So, for example, if you put together a character with the skills Admin-1, Computer-1, Gunner-1 they could be assigned as the Boat Deck Officer (Admin-1, Comp-1 required) or as the Fire Control Officer (Comp-1, Gunner-1) or as one of the Computer Operators (Comp-1).  Or anybody can wash dishes and chop onions as a Galley Hand, no skills required.

Each player operating a stable of up to five characters on the ship is advantageous in the following ways:

• Cuts down on my work fleshing out the rest of the crew.
• No need to send the whole dang command crew down with every landing party.
• Makes it easier to switch scenes "Meanwhile, back on the ship..."
• By running different PCs with different jobs, we all will get a better sense of how the ship operates.
• Combat in classic Trav is pretty brutal.  It's good to have some back-ups ready.
• Gives the players a sense that there are people on the ship they can trust to handle things while they are planetside or whatever.

Since we're using the basic generation system I don't think it will take too long to fill up the sheet.  As is typical for games of this period, buying equipment will probably take the longest.  I ought to figure out how to streamline that.

So which player gets to be the captain?  Hell if I know.  I think I'm just going to fling the charsheets down on the table and let the players work that out among themselves.  If they can't figure it out that have no business flying a fifty billion credit starship into unknown space.

Goodbye Wessex, hello outer space

Tonight's tabletop game is going to be the last Wessex game for a while.  I don't know if anybody has noticed or not, but I haven't run my Monday morning game for a couple weeks now.  School has gotten kinda hectic and I've needed my Monday mornings for homework.  I don't know when I will next run an online game.  It may be a spontaneous thing, with those of you on Google+ at 4:30am my time getting a "Hey, anyone want to play a game of ______?"

Meanwhile, I'm going to pitch to my Wednesday group a few session of Traveller.  I've long wanted to run Adventure 4: Leviathan, which involves giving the party command of a big merchant explorer and sending them into an unknown subsector.  Since it's a commercial interest providing the ship the scenario is an interesting hybrid of Star Trek's exploration/first contact ethos with Traveller's more grubby economic bent.

Thanks to all the super-cool players who made the Caves of Myrddin/Dungeons of Dundagel a hoot.  That dungeon still has a crapload of unexplored nooks and crannies (whole levels, in fact), so I will probably return to it some day.

Here's an old Trav chart I made

Found this on the old hard drive the other day.  I guess I made it for filling out the roster of larger ships plying the Gateway Quadrant.

RANDOM CREW MEMBERS
Human? (1d)
1-5 Yes, roll on Humaniti Type table
6 No, roll on Alien Type table

Humaniti Type (2d)
2-7 Mixed Imperial
8-9 Solomani
10-11 Vilani
12 Minor Human Race - glue something stupid on their forehead or something like that

Gender (2d) - works for most aliens too
2-7 Male
8-11 Female
12 Other

Alien Type (1d)
1 Vargr
2 Bwap - Karel Čapek's Newts as interstellar bureaucrats
3 Uplifted Animal - pick something besides a canine or feline, please
4 Parahuman - look like a Minor Human Race but a product of convergent rather than divergent evolution
5 Kancer - sixlegged crabspider types
6 Other

Adventures in the Nth Imperium

So here's a campaign idea I've been kicking around in my head off and on for a couple of years. Feel free to steal it for your home game if the spirit moves you. One of my favorite popular science books of the last decade is Fred Adams and Gregory Laughlin's The Five Age of the Universe. I've squeezed some mojo out of this particular gem once before. Today I'm going to tackle the idea on page 74 I mentioned in that old post.

The premise these guys tackle is diabolically simple: what if we run out the clock on the cosmos? Assume everything presently (well, circa 1999) understood about quantum mechanics and astrophysics is right, what happens to the large scale features of the universe over the course of a trillion years? A quadrillion years? A googol years? Turns out some pretty crazy stuff goes down, which can all be broadly divided up into five different periods. Hence the title.

According to Adams and Laughlin's analysis, we are presently living in the Second Age of the universe, the Stelliferous Era. That's the time when stars are plentiful and varied, spanning the first stellar ignitions after the big bang until the last miserly red dwarf sputters out sometime around 100 trillion years from now (give or take). That's when the Degenerate Era begins, a period where the only vaguely starlike objects left in the universe are white dwarfs, brown dwarfs and black holes. The Degenerate Era is when the Nth Imperium campaign happens.

This is the part that comes straight from Five Ages, in the form of a short fictional introduction to the chapter on the Degenerate Era. In this piece the authors imagine a future humanity as living in Dyson sphere type shells surrounding white dwarfs, the last bright emitters of radiation in the universe. Planets have long been abandoned since they no longer have suns to warm them and power biological processes. Only by completely enclosing white dwarfs in solar panel arrays can future society tap enough energy to sustain itself.

Imagine this set-up for a moment as an oddball Traveller game, where all the usual things that can happen in standard Trav are available against this unorthodox backdrop. Good ol' hydrogen, the fuel source for standard Trav FTL drives, ain't as plentiful as it used to be. The only easily accessible hydrogen sources left in the universe are the brown dwarfs, substars that never achieved sufficient mass to ignite the fusion process. In the realm of Nth Imperium, brown dwarf mining is a major factor in the maintenance of interstellar society.

Incidentally, the Dyson sphere white dwarfs, brown dwarf mines and black holes will be a lot less densely distributed throughout the galaxy than stars are today. Imagine a standard Traveller sector map with only a few dozen non-empty hexes instead of the normal 300-500. For Nth Imperium I would posit Quantum 2 Jump Technology. A Q2 jump drive can hop its jump number squared, allowing a jump-6 drive to travel 36 hexes in a single trip. Basically Q2 types drives allow for 'controlled misjumps'.

The wee tale on page 74 suffers from the same basic flaw as most future societies in science fiction: the assumption that people in the future will act just like the folks you meet at the grocery store, except they'll wear shiny silver pantaloons. In this case we're not going to solve that by trying to project some weird transhumanic society. We're talking about people who live so far in the future that they talk about the Sun as a long-gone by-product of the Big Bang. Imagine a timeline from the Big Bang to Now. Stack nearly seven thousand of those babies from end to end. That's how far in the future the Nth Imperium can be found, you can fit about 6,700 everything-that-has-ever-happened in the same period of time. Big Bang to now: one inch. Big Bang to Nth Imperium: nearly two football fields.

The sheer difference in scale demands that merely cyborging up the future ain't gonna cut the mustard. Think about how much 1977's Traveller missed the boat by in terms of computer technology. The first printing of Traveller measured computer memory in K and computer mass in tons. It took a few measly years of realworld technological developments to completely obliterate Trav's predictions of computer technology a mere 3,000 years in the future. Multiply that staggering miscalculation by ten billion to find our margin of error. It just ain't gonna work. Homework: if the sum of human knowledge, X, is presently doubling every five years, how big will the sume of human knowledge be 100 trillion years from now? For extra credit, compare your total to the number of grains of sand in all the beaches of the earth or all the synaptic pathways in the average human brain.

I see two solutions to getting a handle on the social milieu of the Nth Imperium. The first is to assume that rather than a technological singularity sometime in the future, humanity hits some sort of technological and sociological plateau. I reject that option as boring. I'm not about to substitute boring for baffling. I want a setting that is both weird and comprehensible. That's where my good buddy Fred Nietzche comes in.

I'm pretty sure it was Nietzche's Thus Spake Zarathustra where I first encountered the idea of the Eternal Recurrence. I've read a fair bit of Germany's craziest philosopher (at least in translation), but I won't pretend to have any deep understanding of the dude's work. But that won't stop me from woefully misunderstanding him and using that folly to power a game. So in this particular context I've decided that the Eternal Recurrence refers to the cycle of human history, in direct contrast to the arrow inherent in physical cosmology. To put it simply: there was a Roman Empire, there will be a Roman Empire again. And again and again. Over 100 trillion years there may be a thousand Roman Empires, a thousand Marcel Marceaus, a thousand House Unamerican Activities Committees. So when your Q2 jumpship lands at a white dwarf Dyson, you may bump into Mark Twain at the starport bar. Thomas Jefferson may be president of the subsector. Blackbeard is definitely a space pirate. Moreover, since pretty much every other science fiction setting is far, far younger than the Nth Imperium, you can pick one or two of your favorite sci-fi galaxies to be part of this recurrent history.

But why is Mae West, Adolf Hitler and your crazy uncle periodically reincarnated like that? Time to swipe from Babylon 5 here: There are a finite number of souls in the universe. At some point humanity hits its limit and people start getting recycled. Population control in the Nth Imperium isn't simply a matter of rationally managing life in the shadow of energy-poor white dwarfs, its also a way of keeping Philosophical Zombies from being born. And AI's are limited in numbers because every computer sentient is one fewer soul that can inhabit a human body. I hear Abraham Lincoln is a matrioshka brain in the next sector over.

So yeah, that's been knocking around in my head for maybe a couple of years. I think it might make a decent Encounter Critical setting.

The Starwolf Crusades

Today I woke up thinking the Gateway Quadrant needed more menace. So I wrote this:


The Starwolf Crusades

Imperial psychohistorians have long considered free trade and the regular exchange of ideas that accompany it as the best vector for intergalactic piece. Their poster boy for this relationship is the six sector long coreward border the 3rd Imperium shares with the canoids of the Vargr Extents. Although hostilities and outright warfare can be found in the annals of Imperial/Vargr relations, the relatively limited scale of such actions can be directly attributed to the ongoing commercial and cultural exchanges between the two powers.

The situation in the Empty Quarter and Ley Sectors of the Imperium is decidedly different. Paradoxically, the buffer zone of the bleak Star's End Rift allows hostilities to fester. Trade is limited to the handful of merchants with multiparsec-capable vessels willing to risk it all on long hauls across the rift. And save for the occasional effort by the Scout Service, cultural exchanges are non-existent. Thus stellar distribution and economic reality conspire to limit contact in the region between the Imperials and the Vargr to only those most motivated (i.e. crazy enough) to make the voyage. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of the trailing end of the Imperium that means incursions by the Starwolf Crusaders.

Led by rogue hierophants of a splinter faction of the Church of the Chosen Ones, the Crusaders follow a creed of belligerent Vargr manifest destiny. Although Imperial chroniclers squabble over what constitutes a full-blown Starwolf Crusade, the Sector Navies closest to the Rift have engaged in fleet scale actions against the Crusaders no less than twelve times in the past half millennium, with many other lesser actions in between. Rarely have the Crusaders gained a foothold on Imperial worlds, but the damage they do to the worlds they target is immense: defense satellites and local navies destroyed, population centers bombarded from space, wholesale looting, and the carrying off of Imperial citizens as slave labor.

The last Starwolf Crusade ended in 1093 [seven years prior to the campaign start], so any ex-Navy or Marine characters with more than one term served can throw 4+ on 1d to have seen action against the Vargr. Scout and Army throw 5+, all others 6+. Those who fought against the Starwolf Crusaders may throw 6+ to receive some sort of decoration or commendation for heroic action, base chance 6+ on one die, with die modifiers of +1 per full term served prior to the conflict and +1 if an officer. Throw 1d on the table below to determine specific award.

1. Emperor’s Legion (Purple Heart type award)
2. Amulet of Cleon
3. Octagon of Honor (roll 1d, 1-5 Silver, 6 Gold)
4. Order of the Corona (nobles are Knights of the Order, others are Members)
5. Iridium Star (military only, civilians reroll)
6. Letter of Commendation (can’t wear it on your chest, but +1 reaction bonus in formal job interviews)

Filling Billets 2

Today I'm continuing my attempt to hire a crew for the Leviathan, the merchant cruiser appearing in the Traveller module of the same name.

2nd Officers

Position 07: Computer Officer

Navy 107*
Scout 67, 100

Suprisingly I could find few characters in the right Rank range qualify for this gig. The Naval character also qualifies for the higher-ranking Chief Gunner position. I wonder if offered this lower position instead of Chief Gunner, would that character take the assignment but resent it?

Position 08: Purser (NPC)

The ship's purser is the highest ranked company agent on the vessel and as such the command crew gets no choice in filling this billet. In the module it's explicit that the company people on the ship are present to prevent the PCs from skipping with the vessel. As an alternative idea, one could fill out the company slots with the PCs and start the campaign with them having to mutiny against the captain to prevent him or her from stealing the ship! A nasty firefight could leave the ship seriously under-crewed for the long trip home.

Position 09: Boat Deck Officer

Navy 61*
Other 63, 82, 90 94
Sailor 8
several Doctors
Bureaucrat 18, 23, 26*, 33
Scientist 14, 19, 26, 29, 36

Based upon the qualifications (Admin-1, Computer-1), this looks like mostly a desk job managing the ships complement of small craft. The Navy dude and two of the Scientists also qualify for the much more prestigious Exec Officer billet, so you might be able to put a back-up X.O. in this spot. My sense of humor can be very simple at times and the thought of a surface navy Sailor working as the Ship's Boat officer amuses me to no end. Make sure someone explains the concept of vacuum to that guy!

Position 10: 2nd Pilot (NPC)

No point in the purser seizing command of the ship if he doesn't have a loyal pilot to steer it back to port.

Position 11: Navigator

Navy 27*, 31*
Scout 16, 67, 96, 100
Scientist 4, 40

The two scouts who qualify as Computer Officer above also fill out this billet.

Position 12: Shuttle Pilot

Navy 21, 31*, 50, 53, 58*, 61*, 106
Scout 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 12, 16, 18, 20, 22, 25, 28, 30, 31, 33, 36, 38, 40, 45, 47, 48, 53, 55, 57, 58, 59, 62, 66, 67, 71, 72, 73, 75, 78, 84, 88, 92, 94, 95, 96, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 107, 110, 114, 115, 116, 118, 120, 123, 125, 128, 129, 130, 132
Merchant 5*, 15*, 21*, 37*, 46*, 47*, 54*, 57*, 63*, 69*, 80, 91*, 113*, 131*, 134*, 135*
Other 1, 7, 9, 19, 21, 32, 39, 41, 79, 87, 88, 90, 97, 107, 118
Pirate 9, 16, 37
Belter 2, 6, 7, 31, 34
Flyer 30
Noble 8, 11, 13, 15, 21, 23, 28, 40

The primary qualification of this billet is Piloting-1. In a game about spaceships, that's a pretty common skill. Personally I like the idea of hiring a Belter for this slot. The odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field may only be 3720 to 1, but these folks spend years there! Navy officer #61 makes another appearance here. Exec officer, the boat deck, shuttle pilot: Is there nothing this guy won't do to get onboard this ship?

Incidentally, this is where I would expect the PCs to get sick of recruiting. When 60 Scouts (Quickie adventure seed: Why are there so many out of work Scouts in the area?) and 55 other people show up to interview for the Shuttle Pilot job, it's time to ask the referee if we can hand waive the rest of this and get on to the space adventure. "Sure," says the ref with a grin, "I'll take care of the rest of the crew. I love the prospect of getting to pick out the doctor who puts you back together after laser shoot-outs."

Position 13: Surgeon

Army 12*

Scout 37, 57, 62, 99, 112
Merchant 21*, 59, 74, 131*
Other 4, 75, 112, 117
nearly any Doctor
Noble 30
Scientist 8

Obviously the Doctor career path from Supplement 4 gets big play here. But I'm curious about the Others, the Noble and the Scientist that qualify for this billet. Why did that Noble go to medical school? And why would he or she be trying to get onto a ship heading away from civilization? Are the Others back alley quacks who happen to be pretty good at what they do?

Position 14: Second Engineer

Navy 65
Scout 17, 61, 64, 77, 125
Other 91, 133

Scout 64 is the guy in the kilt from last post. Since's he's the only candidate for Chief Engineer, I doubt he's going to end up as 2nd Engineer. And as the only qualified Chief Engineer available, my guess is that he would respectively inform the captain and X.O. that he will hire his own engineering department and they can mind their own business. I'd look for the engineer department to be scout heavy on this cruise.

Position 15: Second Gunner

Navy 18, 107*
Scout 4, 18, 21, 28, 42, 54, 69, 74, 90, 92, 110

Navy character #107 is my first candidate for Chief Gunner and I'd pick Navy 18 as the first person to interview for this job for the exact same reason: the Navy shoots people for a living, so why not go to that service for gunners?

Position 16: Master-at-Arms (NPC)

The crewmember responsible for discipline among the ranks is another member of the purser's shadow crew. Given that Traveller spaceships operate somewhat like age of sail vessels, I would expect this character to be one hard ass son of a bitch. In the event that the purser has to assume command of the ship, it's probably this guy's job to detain or eliminate the captain.

I'll tackle the 3rd Officers of the MSS Leviathan later in the week. You may get a Mutant Future session update before them.

Filling Billets 1

I've talked about the Traveller adventure Leviathan a couple times before. The eponymous spaceship flown by the PCs in this module has a full complement of 55 officers and crew, making it a much bigger affair than the Millennium Falcon level operations in many outer space RPGs.

An assumption behind the adventure is that the PCs will fill out the top officer positions and then hire on the rest of the crew themselves, aside from a handful of positions that are to be filled by personnel from the company that owns the ship. Each job on the ship is given a position number and a list of qualifications. For example, the Captain of the vessel must have the skills Administration-1, Computer-1 and Pilot-1, while the two Cargo Handlers require Vacc Suit-1, Strength 8 and Endurance 7.

The other limiting factor is rank. You generally need someone with a first officer rank to fill a first officer billet. In the case of a Leviathan-class merchant cruiser, the assignment is prestigious enough that you can convince a recruit to accept a demotion of one rank to secure an assignment. So an ex-admiral might take the captain's slot, while you have a chance of convincing a captain to serve as a first officer, etc.

The module points the referee towards two Trav supplements, 1001 Characters and Citizens of the Imperium, for pregenerated crewmen. I've often wondered how easy it would be to crew the Leviathan with the NPCs from these two books, so I've decided to find out. Today I'm going to look at the First Officers of the vessel and see if I can fill those spots from the two supplements.

Position 02: Captain

Other 107

I was surprised to find exactly one NPC who could fill this billet. The Navy and Merchant NPC lists have plenty of captains, but none of them qualify for this assignment. Merchant #94 is a captain with 2 out of three required skills and Jack-of-all-Trades at a whopping level 5. I'd trust that character with the assignment, but only Other #107 actually has all three required skills. Which means the only qualified merchant cruiser captain has no Navy or Merchant service experience. Weird. Incidentally, another interesting candidate for this assignment is Other #58, whose only skills are Computer-5 and Forgery-3. Imagine a group of junior officer PCs, halfway into their voyage through unknown space, discovering their captain is an unqualified fake!

Position 03: Executive Officer

Navy 61
Bureaucrat 38*
Scientist 26, 36

If I was Other 107, I'd probably take a hard look at the Navy character to help maintain a disciplined ship. At first I thought employing Scentists anywhere on the roster would be odd for a mercantile venture, but the Leviathan is meant to explore new markets. In fact, the module calls for four company scientists to be carried as passengers, to help analyze data found during the voyage. A few more on the payroll might not be a bad idea, though maybe not as X.O. The Bureaucrat would be a fun choice from the ref's point of view, assuming the recruitment roll is made. Assume he worked a straight corporate desk job up until this point and you basically have Hermes from Futurama as second-in-command of the ship.

Position 04: Pilot

Navy 58
Scout 3, 18, 53, 55, 59, 66, 75, 84, 88, 116, 125,
Merchant 8*, 12*, 27*, 47, 56*, 81*, 89*, 122*, 126*, 132*
Pirate 9, 16

A crapload of Scouts qualify for this slot because all Scouts get at least one rank of Piloting skill. Most of the Merchants that qualify would have to agree to a demotion. Either of the pirates could be applying with fake credentials their pal Other #58 cooked up for them. One of them might be trying to go straight while the other one has mutiny on his mind. Or maybe they're just working stiffs who happen to have worked on private warships carrying letters of marque.

Position 05: Chief Engineer

Scout 64

Over a thousand NPCs to pick from and only one guy qualifies for Chief Engineer. Clearly Scout #64 wears a kilt.

Position 06: Chief Gunner

Navy 107
Scout 68, 89
Other 1, 136

Five candidates iseems reasonable. Twenty plus possible pilots looks like a big pain in the ass, while one captain and one engineer applicant would worry me if I was the money guy planetside. My gut here is to call in the Navy character for the first interview, since shooting people is sort of what the Imperial Navy is all about.

Normally all these top assignments go to the PCs. Seven pregens are provided for this purpose. But once the PCs are hired on, they're supposed to fill out most of crew themselves. Tomorrow I'll look at the Second Officers and see what the PCs would get to work with.

Traveller: What version?

A couple days ago Gameblog reader Erin asked "if one were interested in the OTU, but didn't know what version to pick up, what would you recommend?" In case Erin missed it I wanted to point out that donm61873, a.k.a. Don McKinney, a.k.a. my personal Traveller guru and one of the coolest cats I've ever met, provided an answer:

Mongoose Traveller is pretty good... (and I'm not just saying that because my name is in the books) but if you're really interested in the OTU, get the CT and MT CD-ROMs produced by FFE (www.farfuture.net). The TNE CD is now also available.

I think the Classic Traveller CD-ROM is definitely the correct answer here. For $35 you get one of the best buys in the history of the hobby, both in terms of quality and quantity. The only reason I don't own a copy myself is that I have so much of this stuff already and I'm a cheap bastard. Inevitably I'll want one of the harder to find/more expensive items on the disc and I'll order the dang thing. But before you go and get one I want to offer a couple caveats:

1) Holy crap, that's a lot of game stuff! It would be easy for a newbie to get overwhelmed by the amount of material. Don't fret. Start with The Traveller Book and The Traveller Adventure. I think those two would go a long way to figuring out how much you dig this scene. After those two, the rabbit hole goes about as deep as you could possibly want. There are 60 more books on that disc, and that's not everything ever written for the game. Which brings me to my next point.

2) A lot of Trav people take the idea of Canon very seriously. I am not one of them. While I acknowledge Marc Miller as the Supreme Overlord of All Things Traveller, there's a lot of superfun 3rd party stuff that he no longer considers official. If you get the CD-ROM, you get a horse-choking quantity of official Games Designer Workshop materials, but none of the cool stuff from FASA or the Gamelords or Judges Guild or a whole bunch of other publishers. Much of that junk lacks the polish of GDW or the hardcore wargamer work ethic of the people who worked there, but it's all still a vibrant part of Traveller's colorful publishing history.

Just a couple things to keep in mind.

quick Trav item

A glance at this wikipedia page suggests that the largest real world commercial ships top out at about 5 times the displacement of the largest military vessels, with many commercial vessels three times the size of the largest warships. So if the largest military vessel seen in your Traveller sector is a 60,000 ton cruiser, then the biggest merchant vessel one would expect to find would be 300,000 tons, with 180,000 ton vessels more common.

I've long wanted a rule of thumb like that.

a size comparison chart

Key

1. Type S Scout

2. Type A Free Trader

3. Type Y Yacht

4. Type R Subsidized Merchant

5. Type M Subsidized Merchant

6. Type C Cruiser

7. Lightning Class Cruiser (white)

Ships 1 to 6 are the silhouettes for the Judges Guild versions of various standard ship types. Ships 1 and 2 are the vessels your PCs are mostly likely to be operating when the Imperials show up in the system with Ship 7.

Fun with Jumpspace

One of the constant criticisms leveled at Traveller and several other sci-fi RPGs is that the spacemaps are all in 2-d. It's a legit beef, since being three dimensional is sorta why we call it Outer Space and not Outer Plane. Among the Trav fans I've seen three basic responses to this problem:

1. The Trav maps are like roadmaps. Triple A doesn't usually mark elevations on their maps because all you need is clear directions to your destination, not feet above sea level.

2. Jumpspace, the spooky fairyland ships use to go FTL, is flatter than realspace and thus a 2-d map works just fine.

3. Shut up. We're playing a stupid game, for crying out loud.

While choices 1. and 3. have a certain appeal, I like option 2 the best because of all the rad stuff you can do with the concept of a jump plane running through the galaxy. I'm going to try to demonstrate some of these ideas with pictures, but this is my first time working with iso-type graph paper so it may be a little inept.

Figure 1 - Here we have a perfectly ordinary subsector, sitting in space minding it's own business. A jump plane map (i.e. standard subsector map) and a realspace map of this region would look identical. If you imagine a Star D floating above or below the plane, that star would be inaccessible by jump drive and hence astrographers would omit that system from the standard jump map.

Figure 2 - What if more than one jump plane cut through the galaxy? Ships on the yellow jump plane could visit systems A, B and C. Ships on the white jump plane (below and parallel to the yellow one) could visit D, E and F. Even though B and E are very close to one another, you cannot plot a jump course from one to the other because there is no jump plane connecting them. If you want to get really crazy with your campaign you could introduce a second FTL drive that doesn't use jump space at all. A merchant with a warp drive (or whatever) could make zillions of credits moving goods between B and E. Without such a drive the civilization of A, B and C would probably be completely different from that of D, E and F. They could communicate via lightspeed transmission and STL ships, but compared to the hustle bustle of life with jump drives that may not amount to much.

Figure 3 - Here we have two different jump planes, but they intersect. A ship at system A could jump to B or C but they couldn't reach D or E in a single jump, since there's no direct jump plane connection. The ship at A would have to jump to B, then jump to D or E. Obviously, a world like B could be of enormous strategic interest to the powers that be.

Figure 4 - Here the jump plane is curved vis-a-vis normal space. Here you can plot a course from A to D, but it would be a very long jump, possibly outside the range of any known drive. Jumping to B then D would be the smart thing to do for most vessels. A navigator in a ship at system C could actually plot two different courses to system B, a short one and a long one.

Figure 5 - Here's a bump in the jump plane. B and C appears to be one parsec away in real space, but the the navigator has to plot a Jump 2 to get there. The Scout service identifies these sort of hazards and marks the maps accordingly, but in uncharted space something like this could leave you in the middle of space and out of fuel.

Figure 6 - A hole in the jump plane makes travel to world C impossible. And to go from B to D requires an intermediary jump to world A.

Now imagine that the the jump plane used the the 3rd Imperium, et al., is twisted and torn and tangled in ways a hundred times more complicated than my simple examples. This would easily explains oddities in the official maps like the Antares system being in the wrong place. It would also explain why ships need both fancy nav programs and high paid navigators. You can't just point the ship at the nearest star and hope for the best.

Someone with actual skills at geometry could probably come up with additional jump plane scenarios.

more fun with charts

One of the vendors at Winter War last weekend was Far Future Enterprises, the publishing company of Marc Miller, Traveller's dark lord. Mr. Miller was selling a whole host of reprints, his CD-ROM collections and a few original items still left over from the heady days of GDW. When I spotted a copy of Adventure 4: Leviathan I knew I had to have it. That's been my favorite GDW-published Trav adventure for a long time, as it basically takes the "seek out new lifeforms" ethos of Star Trek and puts it through a Traveller lens. You have a big spaceship (at least in old Trav terms) with a crew of sixty people wandering an unexplored subsector trying to meet new civilizations and economically exploit them. Good stuff.

I bought another copy because I only have Leviathan in the big landscaped-sized reprint volumes. I love having all that stuff bundled together, but in actual play its a bit unwieldy. Also, the original version uses red spot color on the subsector maps and the deckplan grids. The deckplans are a lot easier to read with the additional color.

Mr. Miller was selling Leviathan and similar book for five bucks each, with a three for ten dollars deal. Since my Trav collection is light on Journal issues, I picked up the first two "Best of" volumes. The Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society was one of the best magazines ever put out in the hobby, and probably the single best mag that covered just one game. A far amount of material in early JTAS issues later wormed its way into main Trav books, but you can still dig up neat-o stuff in 'em. Take, for example, this crazy ass chart from an article about robots:

It is important to remember that rarely will a category occupy only a point on the table; many humans are completely natural, but the addition of fillings in teeth, eyeglasses, replacement joints, or artificial nails prompts some shading into the artificial range. Similarly, surgical replacement of organs with cloned organs dictates shading from the purely natural to toward the artificial.

The rest of the article is a pretty dry article on building robots out of things like a Type II chassis and a TL14 brain and other technominutae. Really, I think the robot rules is one of the few places where Star Frontiers actually improved upon Traveller. I just can't get enthused about most Trav robot rules I've seen. There was an old Dragon article that I liked, but I can't recall the issue offhand.

Look back up at that chart for a second. You notice several blank areas? I can't live with a chart like that, so I added some more labels:


Honestly, I can't really tell you the difference between a Bioborg or a Cyborg, or what the heck a Roboborg is supposed to be. I just can't stand those spots being left undefined. Why draw the chart like that if you're going to do a half-assed job labeling it? A cyberclone would be a clone that enhanced beyond the baseline with cybernetics, I guess. By Darwinian Machine Life I mean mechanical forms that evolved naturally, like the Transformers before they found out their home planet was God.

How to Ruin A Perfectly Good Subsector

As we all know, Encounter Critical can be used for any sort of role play adventure. Any setting from any rpg, wargame, book, film, TV show, comic, play, wrestling promotion, toy line, or cereal box can be used as the basis for a series of EC adventures. Why just last week I was playing in a rousing game of Encounter Critical based upon the Meredith Wilson classic The Music Man. My fellow adventurers and I failed to retrieve the legendary Golden Medallion of Aught Five, but at least we defeated the Four Headed Barbershop School Board of Doom. (Okay, I lied. I just made that up. But I would totally play that game.) Since the primary, but by no means only, influences on EC are fantastical and science fictional in nature, those are the best places to go to start looking for campaign fodder. The path of least resistance for making an Encounter Critical campaign probably involves taking a fantasy setting and adding more robots and lasers and mutants. I say ‘more’ because any fantasy campaign worth its salt has at least a handful of those things, or could have them and nobody would blink. Today, I’m going to look at another option: starting with a sci-fi setting and tarting it up with fantasy.

My victim for this exercise will be Drexilthar Subsector from Traveller’s Charted Space setting, a.k.a. the 3rd Imperium and environs. Drexilthar isn’t one of those better-known subsectors like Regina in the Spinward Marches, but it’s one of my favorite in Trav canon. The book A Pilot’s Guide to Drexilthar Subsector is one of the many, many cool things created for Traveller by the legendary Keith brothers. What I like about Drexilthar is that by devoting a whole standard-sized Trav booklet to a single subsector, you get a nice write-up for each planet. I find that approach much more user-friendly than the sector book approach, where you get sixteen times more planets, but most of them are nothing more than a string of Universal World Profile digits. By the way, you can still get A Pilot’s Guide to Drexilthar Subsector, and several other awesome old rpg books, from the Different Worlds website. But feel free to pick another subsector for your EC galaxy. For other subsector data to abuse go here or here. Or BeRKA of the Zhodani Base will be happy to randomly generate one for you.

Anyway, here’s one method for putting your selected subsector to work for you as an EC campaign. For starters, don’t get in a hurry to alter any of the UWP data, that just ruins the point of stealing UWPs to begin with. (Of course you can do anything you want with your campaign; I’m just telling you this one method.) Instead, try interpreting that Universal World Profile through a crazy-go-nuts EC lens. So take the world of Kraan as an example. The Pilot’s Guide tells us Kraan’s UWP is C501456-8. That breaks down as an average starport at a smallish world with no atmosphere but polar icecaps, inhabited by about a thousand or so people with a representative democracy where everyone carries a shotgun. Yee-haw! Okay, so Encounter Critical thinking was starting to seep in on that shotgun bit. The Law Level of the planet indicates that shotguns are the only weapon you can legally carry. That doesn’t mean that everyone always walks around with one, unless you want it to. That highlights one of the core tenets of my thinking on EC: plausibility is for amateurs.

So let’s think about the UWP for a little bit. Why would anyone live on an airless turd of a world like Kraan? In Traveller the default answer is ‘economic advantage’, which is Marc Miller’s secret code phrase for ‘to make a buck’. Following Miller’s logic the usual reason a colony is set up on these vacuum worlds is to mine radioactives or mysterious sci-fi mumbo-jumbo minerals and sure enough that’s the route J. Andrew Keith took in his write-up of Kraan. Keith also puts an archaeological site on Kraan, which coincidentally sits on a big lanthanum vein. Lanthanum is the most important mineral in the Trav universe, as it is a key component of FTL jump drives. I can’t speak for your brain, but mine immediately starts thinking along the lines of the Lanthanum Pits of Kraan, a dungeon full of robots that can teleport around the room like blink dogs led by a cyborg lich with an atomic heart. After centuries of preparations the lich is finally ready to move against the surface dwellers. Soon they shall all be his cyber-slaves! [insert villainous cackling here]

Let’s go back to those 1,000 or so surface dwellers menaced by the minions of the Cybo-Lich. Why does a mining town of 1,000 need a representative democracy? For a community that small a direct democracy could easily work, with an elected mayor to run day-to-day government business. The text says that traditionally four mining outfits own all the mineral rights to the planet. But what if they licensed those rights to smaller outfits, because the ore veins are scattered about the planet in a way that makes large scale mining less profitable? Maybe those 1,000 people are split up across the face of the planet in ten or twenty smalltime operations. They usually all leave well enough alone, but they all have a vested interest in the lone starport, so some sort of centralized government is needed. Each mine camp sends one rep to the planetary council at the starport/capitol. So with just a thousand people on the world you’ve got all sorts of possible dynamics between the four companies, the archaeologists, the mining camps, the starport authority, and the planetary council.

Now let’s give those thousand people some EC color. For starters, the world ‘people’ could means lots of different things in Encounter Critical. A mining colony immediately suggests dwarves, but let’s put that aside as too pat an answer. Maybe the dwarves, being so skilled in mining and well-capitalized, can afford to only work large scale operations on planets with amenities (like atmospheres). Maybe the four companies who own the mineral rights are dwarves, but for a third-rate operation like Kraan they bid the rights out to others. Maybe the composition of each of the outlying camps merits a roll on the Race Determination chart on page five of the EC rulebook. That way some of the mines are run by klengons and some by hoblings and maybe even a few by plain, ordinary humans. A planetary council meeting should look like the League of Non-Aligned Worlds meeting in the Mos Eisley cantina.

For one last bit of UWP-generated Encounter Critical weirdness, look at the tech level of the planet. Normally, the tech level of a planet indicates what goods are readily available for PCs to buy, but for EC we can squeeze a little more mojo out of that number. Kraan is rated at TL8, which the UWP key in the Pilot’s Guide lists as ‘Circa 1980 to 1990’. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? I’m thinking a starport festooned with breakdancing wookeys carrying ginormous boomboxes and vulkin doxies dressed like early Madonna videos. I’m thinking TRS-80 computers and Pac-Man arcade games. I’m thinking criminals from Beat It and the living dead from Thriller, both ruled by a mysterious half-zombie who wears red leather armor and a glowing magical gauntlet.

That’s enough on Kraan, I think. Looking at Drexilthar in general, I think a lot can be achieved by simply remembering to add more dragons and wizards. That’s what most players seem to want when you talk about fantasy gaming, so why not just give it to them? And don’t hesitate to steal from Star Wars and Star Trek. Go ahead and make the Imperium into the evil galactic empire of Star Wars. When you’re playing Encounter Critical you don’t need to be shy about such things. A couple star destroyers wandering the hexmap commanded by an evil psi-witch named Darth Something-Or-Other will keep the PCs on their toes. Canonically the Drexilthar subsector is relatively close to Aslan space, but Trav’s catmen have never suited me (I’m more of a fan of the K’kree and Hivers). I’d probably just swipe Niven’s Kzinti as they appeared in that Star Trek cartoon, pink spacesuits and all.

one down, forty-odd to go

So I've started dicing up a random Classic Traveller subsector, because I don't have quite enough side projects just yet. The first world on my list to flesh out is Razlfrax. It's Universal Planetary Profile (i.e. its statline) is C-100200-8. Unpacking that for the uninitiated, what we have here is a small, airless rockball with a few hundred people living in a state of anarchy. They have an average starport and tech level 8 equipment. All in all, that's not much material to work with. It's a lame little world. But since it's the first world I'm tackling for this subsector, I want to make something cool of it.

TL 8 includes laser and fusion power, so it's nothing to sneeze at. How do a couple hundred folks with no real organization above the family level maintain such tech? For that matter, how do they keep a starport operational? The easy answer here is that they don't. The starport is fully automated, with only one or two techies on hand at any given time. Good luck finding them. Imagine trying to locate two dudes in an otherwise empty O'Hare International Airport. If you want to find them odds are these guys are doing their best to stay out of view. They signed on to this job so they could play videogames all day, not to actually help people. And all the robots running the place won't help you find them. The techies have programmed them to never help travellers locate human assistance.

Since there's no local government, I decided that the starport is maintained by some interstellar power. I went with the Scout Service, which in my Traveller universe is a fully independent organization. The Scouts set up Razlfraz Starport as a waystation to facilitate Jump-1 trade from outside the subsector through to nearby worlds, particularly the high tech world Laylah. None of the local powers want to cheese off the Scouts, so they leave worlds like Razlfrax alone. That makes Razlfrax an important world for folks fleeing persecution.

A lot of refugees go through the autostarport. But not everyone who gets onto the planet is able to get off of it. Aside from the two techies, the other couple hundred permanent residents of Razlfrax are all "airport refugees" caught between flights, kinda like that guy who lived at Charles De Gaulle Airport for 16 years. Some of them just need to find working passage or a soft-touch captain who will take them on for less than a full ticket price. Other folks have nowhere else to go because none of the local worlds will take them. Better to stay on Razlfrax where you're safe from your enemies. The robots are programmed to feed anyone "waiting for a ship" in the main terminal area. The next starport over probably won't be so cushy.

So when the PCs visit Razlfrax, what will happen to them? If they own their ship or are suspected of such, they will likely be mobbed by petitioners looking to negotiate for a discount ticket. If the PCs arrive in a high jump vessel, the folks with lots of money but no local prospects will pay top credit for transport several parsecs away. Or maybe the PCs need to find someone living at the starport, perhaps someone who doesn't want to be found.