So this is the map of the setting used in most Traveller products. Each white rectangle on that map is 24 parsecs wide by 32 parsecs tall (78.2775 light years by 104.37 light years, if you'd prefer). Those white rectangles are called sectors in the terminology of the game and each sector typically contains 3 or 4 hundred worlds you can visit, all of which have been sketched out using one of the greatest game mechanics in RPG history, the Universal World Profile. There's enough material on that level to riff a whole campaign out of a sector's worth of UWPs. The Imperial Fringe does just that. The PCs are hired to survey the Spinward Marches sector.)
Even with all those worlds and all that space, in the greater scheme of things that map doesn't really cover much of the galaxy. Check this out:
That little red blob labeled Charted Space? That's the map above shown in scale to the Milky Way. Thanks to Joshua Bell and his great resource travellermap.com for that view.
At 256 parsecs tall by 384 parsecs wide, the Charted Space map fits neatly into one hex on this map:
This is the board for Federation & Empire, the strategic board game for Star Fleet Battles. The round blue area is Federation space. The grey area down and to the left is Klingon territory and the grey to the right is the Romulan Star Empire. The little dark bit between the three at the bottom of the map is where the Tholians weave their webs.
Each hex on that map is 500 parsecs across. This is really convenient in that the galaxy is maybe that thick along the spiral arms, allowing a 2-d map to accurately describe a volume of 3-d space. However, I've always been slightly annoyed by this scale. Here's why.
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| This chart proves that I'm right and the F&E designers are wrong. Honest. |
Star Fleet Battles is a fork of the Star Trek universe, incorporating the Original Series, the Animated Series, and the Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph. The latter is one of the truly great examples of fandom lore. One of the things that Franz Joseph does is define what the heck a Warp Factor is. Turns out that if you cube the number of the Warp Factor, that gives you the speed in terms of units of C, e.g. Warp Factor 6 (the safe cruising speed of the original USS Enterprise) is 6 x 6 x 6 C, or 216 times the speed of light. That means, according to this source at least and my own limited arithmetical skill, it would take Captain Kirk's Funtime Pals over seven years to cross a single Federation & Empire hex. Seeing as how each turn is six months, my guess is that the F&E designers ignore Franz Joseph on this point.
Since Federation & Empire first came out in the 1980's, the lovely folks at Amarillo Design Bureau (who make SFB and F&E) have expanded their universe even more. There's now an adjacent area of space, the ominously titled Omega Sector, with 20+ new polities and hundreds of more spaceships you can blow up. They've also mapped out at least one Magellanic Cloud. But my favorite expansion to Amarillo Design Bureau's expansion of the Star Trek universe is this one:
Companion Games came out of the blue in 1993 or so with it's own chunk of the SFB universe, located on the opposite side of the galaxy. They called it the Far Side and had their own races and spaceships, completely compatible with Star Fleet Battles. As a non-canonical supplement to a non-canonical and super duper complicated* Star Trek game, the Companion Games material didn't exactly set the world on fire. But I'm a sucker for weird little corners of fandom like this. In full SFB tradition, each spot on that map has its own unique navy with its own special weapons. How different ships with different weird subsystems that only one species possess interact is half the fun of Star Fleet Battles.
*Seriously, you may think modern D&D is complicated, but full-blown all-the-bells-and-whistles SFB blows it out of the ding dang water. The only comparable non-computerized game I know is Advanced Squad Leader.
>>Seriously, you may think modern D&D is complicated, but full-blown all-the-bells-and-whistles SFB blows it out of the ding dang water. The only comparable non-computerized game I know is Advanced Squad Leader<<
ReplyDeleteI will confirm this as absolute truth speaking as a long time SFB fan.
Agreed, and I would add that that is one of the things that fans like about the game. There are so many dials and knobs to twist and buttons to press that it takes a lot of player skill, and there is always more to learn about the interaction of rules systems. It has an enormous amount of depth and the satisfaction that comes with learning more is always there.
DeleteI don't know if all of that applies to Federation Commander, the new and streamlined game that uses the setting (Jeff, there's also a Starmada version for people who prefer that, as it happens), since I haven't played it, but that one is designed with modern gamer preferences in mind. It's important to follow the market, after all.
SFB added Kzinti to the Trek universe. Playing as the Klingons, I spent a resource point to have Kzinti skins on the bows of all my ships. Similar to, but decades before the Reavers in Firefly
ReplyDeleteRod, that's beautiful in its own sick, twisted way.
DeleteThe Kzintis in the SFU were lifted from the animated series episode The Slave Weapon, itself an adaptation of Larry Niven's Known Space (not Trek) short story of the same name. Steve turned what had been a defeated and treaty-bound Kzinti Hegemony that was only allowed to operated a few armed police vessels in the episode into a major second-tier military power in the SFU, mostly because he needed an enemy for the Klingons to have butted heads with - and then made up the Lyrans to be enemies for the Kzinti (and Hydrans) because the Klingons were outpowered after the Hydrans were introduced.
DeleteI didn't mention it above, but there are also roleplaying games set in the Star Fleet Universe, at least one of which includes stats for spaceship combats if you want to use RPG-oriented space combat rules. There are versions for both GURPS, which includes stats to use with GURPS Spaceships, and D20 Modern, though I don't know much about that one since I'm not a big fan of D20 Modern.
ReplyDeleteI knew the guys who made up Companion Games, some of whom were local regulars at the game and comic shops I frequented. Their sales on the unlicensed SFB stuff were reportedly very good, although dwarfed by the first few sets of their later Galactic Empires CCG in the mid-90s. They were, however, really, really illegal due to massive IP infringement, and ADB drove them to cancel the entire line precipitously through threatened legal action. The Far Side name was dropped but the setting and its existing races were ported to GE wholesale, with many more fleets being added. They closed up shop about the time Galactic Empires stopped selling as the late 90s CCG bubble burst and had some financial issues, but some of them briefly resurfaced as Component Game Systems making a Babylon 5 boardgame, also with somewhat iffy licensing.
ReplyDeleteI remain proud of having broken the GE CCG's game engine badly enough while playtesting that they wound up rewriting some cards in the later expansions. :)
"But I'm a sucker for weird little corners of fandom like this. In full SFB tradition, each spot on that map has its own unique navy with its own special weapons. How different ships with different weird subsystems that only one species possess interact is half the fun of Star Fleet Battles."
ReplyDeleteI trust you've played Gamescience's Alien Space, which is pretty much the poster child for the "every race has a weird gimmick weapon" school of design theory. Also fully compatible with the Star Fleet Battle Manual rules they released shortly after Alien Space, which was (and is - there was a spiffy 2nd edition a few years back at long last) the first licensed Trek starship combat minis game. If you somehow missed them, you should definitely take a look at both on the net.
I've read both Gamescience systems. I think they look like a hoot to play. I've long considered that they might make good con games, especially if you used some minis.
DeleteAnd thanks for the background info on Companion Games!