Saturday, May 7, 2011

Traveller Sandbox: The Cube

Last year, when I worked on a sandbox for Traveller, I got quite a bit done and some pretty good feedback.  I wasn't happy with it and how it was too tied to the OTU for me to do anything with it.  I decided that I would attempt it again, but from a decidedly non-Traveller direction.  I just finished an Astronomy class that I really enjoyed, although I had to ignore it in the face of the three Psychology and one English classes I took in addition to Astro this semester.  Psych's my major and English is my minor, so Astro was the one that had to give.

Anyway, I thought I'd like to work on another stab at a setting for Traveller.  I don't like the RAW when it comes to sector/system/world generation at all, but I love what GURPS Space does with it.  GURPS Space is awesome, and a lot more realistic than anything I've seen in any of the editions of Traveller that I'm privy to.

The Premise
The sandbox will be a small, densely packed "cube" in space.  6pc x 6pc x 6pc, to be exact. The Cube started getting filled with explorers traveling via wormhole from a much larger Galactic Empire approximately 500 years ago.  Two hundred years ago, the wormhole suddenly collapsed, cutting off The Cube from the Empire.  A New Empire, founded on the shell of the Imperial bureaucracy of the Galactic Empire, rose in its place.

Where I Am At Right Now
I don't have much else, right now.  I generated one of the 100 systems.  When I decide on a format, I'll collect the notes together in some kind of format to display.  Interesting things that I came up with...
  1. There are rebel/terrorist bases two of the three inhabited worlds in the system.  One of which is the more highly populated colony world, the other holding a prison.
  2. When there are no Garden worlds generated, I reckon that I'll just take the planet with the highest Affinity of 0 or greater and make that a colony.  It might not be super realistic to establish a colony that will eventually grow to 5.4 million people on an icy world with half the gravity of Earth and has an average temperature of negative 200 degrees Fahrenheit, but it would be keeping with Traveller traditions.
  3. There is an alien enclave on the technocratic outpost at the rim of the first system.  Also on this planet is a military espionage facility and a government research center.  It's pretty awesome when the random rolls all make sense like this.  I'm debating if I want to insert analogs for the Aslan, Vargr, or Darrians, of I want to go with 2300-esque aliens that are more alien.  I haven't decided if that is where the aliens are from (unlikely, it's a small little ball of ice, but you never know) or if they just established something there because they dig the fact that it's a worthless little ball of ice, nitrogen, and methane.
I'll keep you all posted on what I come up with.  If anyone has any potential directions to send me for easy to use formatting for the systems, I'd love that.

4 comments:

  1. I love the premise to divorce the game from the OTU. Is the cube just the dimensions of your sandbox, or is the cube truly isolated from other space without the wormhole?

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  2. It is completely isolated... At least isolated from current Jump Technology. I haven't given much thought to the actual close distance. With 100 systems in the 6x6x6 cube, it's good enough size to be used as a sandbox. I'll have a better idea of what I want to do with any potential openings once I have the whole thing done.

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  3. A pretty intriguing idea, I look forward to watching it develop. I've loved Traveller for ages but the scope of the Imperium was always too vast for me (and I was too lazy to make my own setting entirely from scratch...) so I was always looking for excuses to limit the "size" for my peace of mind.

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