I've been playing Traveller off and on since 1979. Effing WOW!
My cousin introduced me to gaming and Traveller. I played with him like once.
I went my own way with the setting more than once. The original three books didn't give a lot of detail so you just used your imagination and filled in the empty spaces. My first campaign had a heavy Dune flavor since that's what I was reading at the time, but I kept some Star Wars and Galactica overtone.
I've converted it to GURPS four times now. Once for second edition, twice for third and once for fourth; plus playing the official GURPS: Traveller. My 4e conversion is really a conversion of GURPS: Traveller, which is a 3e game.
I've been tinkering with it since I did my 4e conversion and made more sweeping changes to how I want things to work. The original game was literally Imperial Rome in Space.
I am thinking I'd like something more like Elizabethan England in Space. The Zhodani make such good French Boogiemen and the Solomani play the Spaniards so well!
Big changes in tech is the elimination of almost all of the hand-wavium grav tech. Sadly this dooms the air/raft.
Next big change is the jump drive. I have come to dislike the week long jump. I have come to like the special effect of the new Galactica jump. I think I'll increase the gravitational threshold to a week at 1g from an earth sized world, whatever that may be. I'm also eliminating jump fuel and replacing that with capacitors. You need to build a charge for a jump. The jump drive moves a volume regardless of mass. Jump engines are still rated for the number of "parsecs" they can move.
The jump distance is a bit illusory. Hyperspace is two dimensional, the map of the universe is a flat sheet, to represent how the universe really is, crumple that sheet up into a big ball. Some things are very close in real space but widely separated in hyperspace. Real space distances tend to be the same, over small areas.
Manuever drives are a pseudo reaction fusion thing. This is where the fuel tanks come back. Basically I'm swapping the jump and power plant fuel requirements. Next is 1g is a super fast ship; equivalent to the Classic Traveller 4g level. 2g is equivalent to 6g. Then they only thrust in one direction and spit out a big ass flame. This is real acceleration, a loaded ship will have less acceleration than an empty one and will have more acceleration as fuel is used. Reaction mass/fuel is now water instead of hydrogen.
Power plants are essentially fueled for life, about 50 years.
Getting to the surface is going to require streamlining and maybe even wings. Really large ships that land just aren't. Really the upper limit to something that goes earth to orbit is C-5 Galaxy sized, which in Traveller terms is about 200 tons displacement (the cargo hold on a C-5 measures almost exactly 75 displacement tons).
Gigantic container ships ply the major trade routes. They don't have much maneuver capacity they meet lighters near the jump limit and transship cargo and passengers. Ships like the Subsidized Merchants and Liners move freight along the secondary trade routes and to orbital facilities. Similar sized lighters move things in-system. The Free Trader's niche is transporting stuff to worlds where there's no orbital facility to handle cargo.
I like the Traveller races and much of the cultural stuff. I'll keep those.
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I tend to take the tech in Traveller (I'm most familiar with the GURPS version) as given (hey, it's three thousand years in the future) and concentrate on the wonderful background of the Third Imperium. I've speculated about a real long-term campaign involving a huge, huge Scout expedition (dozens or even hundreds of ships, planning to stay gone for over a century) off to spinward, past the Aslan Heirate, into unknown space. I'd have four or five times the numbers of crew needed, with the extras in and out of low berths, so that there'd be rotation among the crews, and ships ranging from Imperial-surplus major warships down to Suleiman-class scouts. If the Aslan started raising a fuss, I'd invite them in on it as joint partners...they're always looking for new worlds, aren't they?
ReplyDeleteOr a campaign with the PCs awakening from a century in low-berths on their ships, which are on a very out-of-the-way planet...they were seriously wanted, and thought that a century or so out of the way would make them less of Number One on the Most Wanted Dead list. However, a lot can happen in a century...is the Empire still there?
Y'all forgot about The Great Rift that direction, didn't ya? I was often amazed that as expansionist inclined the Aslan are that their borders remain so static in all the iterations of Traveller's universe. Seems they'd be chomping at the bit to fill in the power vacuum of the Imperial Navy being fragmented to below the sector level. It also seems like they included the Scouts before they made their Imperium completely surrounded by foreign nations.
ReplyDeleteMany of the changes I've described are because of issues that stem from the player's experience.
What can I do to increase the drama for a week of down time during a jump? Change that to a week in normal space where they are at least available to be attacked by pirates or harassed by petty government officials.
The difficulties in handling hydrogen has bothered me for decades. It's a shitty material to deal with at best. Water is nearly as common and much easier to cope with.
The Traveller universe is ripe for setting ideas and things to do. I've often felt the long night portion of Imperial history was pregnant with possibilities. The scout service could be engaged in rediscovering lost worlds, recovering equipment and cataloging the level of devastation or reconstruction. Merchants could be involved in reestablishing trade and dealing with politicians, wholesalers and suppliers.
Dramatic possibilities during a week in down time? Hmmm...I could see a whole soap opera set on board a ship. Or a murder mystery...someone turns up mysteriously dead, and the Captain has to sort it out all by himself with no help from outside, and everybody on board with motives to kill the nogoodnick.
ReplyDeleteIf I'm remembering the maps right, the Third Imperium did extend past the Great Rift. And I agree with you about the Aslan. I think they'd make a wonderful partner species for Humaniti...the sources I have talk about members of both species who've pretty much gone over to the other's ways, kind of like how in the Old West you had whites who'd "gone Indian," and the reverse.
A campaign as people who're descended from asteroid-miners in a system overrrun by the K'Kree, who've held on as outlaws in K'Kree space, would be very interesting. I've been figuring out just how such an operation could continue, and come up with some ideas. If you're interested, e-mail me and I'll give you them.
The closed ship mystery, good idea; now what about next jump? Hijacking attempt. Then what?
ReplyDeleteQuickly ran out of things that could happen and the week in jumpspace became a week of abusing the skill acquisition rules.
Considering how brutal the K'kree are about things, that might be pretty tense gaming.
Much of this, of course, depends on the players. Too many groups will passively wait for the GM to drop something in their laps rather than actively doing something that leads to the interesting conflict.