Exploring the explorer-side of me...

[Gaming Glen]

I've come to realize that I like finding new things, although I think I'm more of an armchair explorer than one that actually goes outside . In RPGs, my interest perks up when the group comes across unexplored lands, and my favorite part in the Civilization computer game is the early exploration. I love Traveller's world generating books. In an MMO (Vanguard) that I played for a few months I played a bard that could travel very fast; I ran around the whole "world", up and down mountains and into dangerous places. I bought the Colonization computer game hoping there was a lot more exploration, but alas, not so much.

So, are there games that let you explore more?

Are there novels that have an exploration theme? Perhaps there are fiction works set during the days when deepest dark Africa or the Amazon existed, but I just can't go back there; Africa isn't so dark any more and the Amazon less so every day.

I have a Traveller character story to develop, one in which she has left her backwater world, spaced her kidnapper, and now has a whole new politically-fractured human known space (MTU) to get to know; but I can't seem to get motivated enough to solo-roleplay her and explore. Perhaps the world books don't generate enough information for me? BTW, what's the latest and greated in these books? (I loaned out my DGP one which I never got back ).

Anyway, I welcome any suggestions for exploration-themed activities.

Glen

P.S. I wonder if I was born a 100 years too late (but probably would have died in the wilderness anyway) or 100-300 years too soon (but with robots doing most of space exploration, will we ever really explore in person ever again?)

 

[Andrew Boulton]

Fire up Google Earth and explore away!

 

[JAFARR]

I'm right with you on the exploration bit. If you can find it, the old Starfire (IIRC) campaign allowed you to explore the universe. The 2nd version was Starfire Empires I think. I have it around somewhere, but couldn't lay my lands on it quickly to verify that I had the names correct. It is/was precomputer so it is all on paper and fairly paperwork intensive.

 

[aramis]

Starfire 1st ed was 3 books: Starfire, Starfire II:Strikefighter, and Starfire III: Empires
2nd ed was Boxed Starfire, New Empires, Gorm-Khanate War
3rd ed was Starfire, Imperial Starfire, Stars At War, Crusade, ISW4, UTM
4th ed is available via M. Lamb: Galactic Starfire, Ultra

 

[CosmicGamer]

There are numerous games where exploration is a part, usualy in the begining and then the game becomes more strategy oriented. Most RTS games are like this. Many turn based strategy games are also like this. Settings vary from the past to the future, and sometimes span them. You mentioned Civilization, a favorite of my father and myself. A couple games that come to mind are Imperialism II: Age of Exploration, and 1701 A.D.

I haven't bought many games in the last 5 years or so, they seamed to be more about fancy graphics, sound and movie like sequences and I found the older games more fun to play. So, like the OP, I welcome peoples recommendations for these types of games and wonder if something new, fun and replayable has come out.

For non gaming exploration, you could give geocaching a try.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching
http://www.geocaching.com/

 

[Mithras]

Its just called LBB2 or MgT or whatever.

Build.

Create a subsector, create the worlds, do them in-depth. Build up relationships, trade links, political units. Create NPCs using Supplement 4. Create the navies, tweak the ranks, the organization. Build the ships. Keep going.

Create maps of the worlds, encounter tables, animals. Write individually themed human encounter tables for every world ... you are going somewhere no-one has ever gone before.

 

[rancke]

Its just called LBB2 or MgT or whatever.

Build.

Create a subsector, create the worlds, do them in-depth. Build up relationships, trade links, political units. Create NPCs using Supplement 4. Create the navies, tweak the ranks, the organization. Build the ships. Keep going.

Create maps of the worlds, encounter tables, animals. Write individually themed human encounter tables for every world ... you are going somewhere no-one has ever gone before.

A lot of work if you have to do it all on your own.


Hans

 

[Whipsnade]

Starfire 1st ed was 3 books: Starfire, Starfire II:Strikefighter, and Starfire III: Empires

Aramis,

Ahhh... Task Force Games out of Amarillo, TX... that brings back memories...

In their hands Starfire was a fairly taut, fairly quick, wargame with just enough detail and not the baroque monstrosity it is today. I've two of the 4th Edition books, picked them up for basically the same reason Gaming Glen started this thread, and the damn things are nearly unreadable, let alone unplayable. They remind of Chinese stereo instructions translated into English via Xhosa.

I wonder many people play Star Fire 4e and how many people play with Star Fire 4e...

Task Force printed the first versions of Star Fleet Battles too, back when that game too was a fairly taut, fairly quick, fun wargame with just enough detail and not the baroque monstrosity it is today.

They published a good number of fun games like Cerebus, which put GDW's Invasion:Earth to shame, Asteroid Zero One Four, which involved the US and USSR lobbing nukes at each others' base in the Belt, and Battlewagons, which covered gunships through WW1 and WW2. I always thought the Asteroid game would have made for an excellent computer solitaire game even in the days of 16 bit graphics.

Getting back to Gaming Glens' question, CT's Zhodani Alien Module contained a system you may find useful. The AM included an adventure involving shanghaied Imperials who, for various reasons, find themselves in control of a Zhodani ship deep in Consulate space. They don't know where they are and seemingly have no navigation records they can access either. The Imperials can obviously use the ship's sensors to identify the classifications of and distances to stars around them. They can also identify the presence of gas giants from two or three parsecs away. The idea is for the players to "feel" their way home, fashioning a general course towards the Imperium(1) while identifying and jump towards gas giants they can (hopefully) refuel from without meeting too many Zhodani ships.

This points to one drawback in trying to model "Really Unknown" exploration in the Traveller setting or any setting that uses FTL drives like jump or warp. With jump or warp drives, you can see your destination before your voyage begins. You know you're heading for *that* star system and, depending on how good your sensors are, you can tell a great deal about *that* star system before you even arrive.

In the Starfire setting, this prior knowledge does not exist because you don't know where you'll end up when you enter a warp point. A warp line could move you 1ly or 100ly in any direction, unlike with jump or warp you don't know that you're heading to a system next door that you can already see.


Regards,
Bill

1 - Because they know the Imperium is trailing and rimward of the Consulate, the players can travel in those general directions, much like how I can, when lost in Iowa, head for my destination in California by driving into the sunset.

 

[Gaming Glen]

Its just called LBB2 or MgT or whatever.

Build.

Create a subsector, create the worlds, do them in-depth. Build up relationships, trade links, political units. Create NPCs using Supplement 4. Create the navies, tweak the ranks, the organization. Build the ships. Keep going.

Create maps of the worlds, encounter tables, animals. Write individually themed human encounter tables for every world ... you are going somewhere no-one has ever gone before.

As someone else said, that's a lot of work. Although, using my character in solo-play adventures, it is one way to create and develope the worlds of my MTU. I have worked on a spreadsheet to roll up the UWPs of solar systems (what is that called? USP?) but it's not perfected as yet. And, creating my own world using my imagination does not really seem like exploring, except for my imagination (I do that to get to sleep at night).

One of the things I did back in AD&D1 days was using the DM's random dungeon generator for solo play. But once I started thinking about things, like why are there lawn gnomes living in this cavern even though lawn gnomes were on the encounter table (I'm making this up) , I stopped that particular solo play.

Guess I need to find an RPG group to join, but it's almost all typical-fantasy groups that are playing now around these parts; excepting the one once-every-2-weeks-maybe scifi RPG game (Rifts ) game that I'm in now. Also, I don't like D&D4.

 

[JAFARR]

Starfire 1st ed was 3 books: Starfire, Starfire II:Strikefighter, and Starfire III: Empires
2nd ed was Boxed Starfire, New Empires, Gorm-Khanate War
3rd ed was Starfire, Imperial Starfire, Stars At War, Crusade, ISW4, UTM
4th ed is available via M. Lamb: Galactic Starfire, Ultra

OK all I ever saw was the original Starfire and the boxed "new Starfire" then

 

[Icosahedron]

Sounds like you need to get involved as a player in a decent Traveller PBEM, Glen.

 

[aramis]

Bill:
2nd ed starfire was actually quite playable; it consolidated SF I and SF II into the box, and simplified fighters to 9-load normal movement (and no hard-mount weapon, no assault movement phase). That's it for rules changes from 1st ed tactical to 2nd ed tactical.
New Empires integrated the "New Carrier Rules" from Nexus Magazine, and completely revised system design, empire running, etc. It's Webber's work, again, but a much better game for the extra few years of revision and the much increased reality... and no more "one base covering a whole star system with it's lasers..."

Gorm-Khanate war gives us the whole Gorm empire, and about a quarter of the Khanate, all mapped out... and on the brink of war. "Here, fight the war as a regional engagement..." Adds a bunch of tech. Not good for Tac players.

3rd made one Great change: 1d10 instead of 2d6 for to hit rolls. MUCH faster, since you can roll an entire volley conviniently (rather than having to roll pairs and find them...) Tables adjusted accordingly.
It made one simplification change that I like: Frieghter and Warship hulls use the same sizes.

3rd Starfire + ISF is a good set of rules. Stars at War adds only 1 tech, and is the expanded version of the story told by SF I & II scenarios; it's all supertactical and tactical scenarios. Crusade is post ISW III, adds some variant tech, advances the timeline. Excellent read; I don't think I've ever played any of the scenarios. Akelda Dawn adds two new races and alternate drive tech - avoid like plague - not well playtested. I never ordered ISW-4 when it was available in hardcopy.


I've got 4th as well... aside from revising the coding, adding SFB-ish detail levels, and basically proving that Marvin shouldn't write rulebooks, it added too many options stolen from SFB, and still has the 3rd ed ISF issue of too much money for the empire. Further, Marvin said that "Nobody plays tactical starfire except in campaign play." I retorted with "No one but me and my friends, apparently." It's utter crap, except for the additional modelling of reality in system generation.

I remember a game, set up over WWIVnet, 2nd ed rules, 30,000MGC, TL6. Both of us showed up with over 20 ships; I had 32. Set up took about 10m. Playing the battle took 30 min to destruction of his fleet. (My last 4 Es's held the field with a crippled CL, and his two crippled BC's, down to just an H each... they surrendered). Both of us had PM'd our fleet totals to a third party in another state... and he verfied the fleets were legit, and under budget. We played at the local library.

And I agree... Starfire (like both the early Honorverse novels and the Vorkosiverse, and Stirling/Doohan's Flight Engineer universe), you really don't know where you're going until you get there when on exploration duty. Nice thing about SF's setting: the drive is all sublight... (fixed speed alcubierre style warp, 10PSL ship speed max). The reason fighters can't go? They use hotter, smaller, Fusion Plants; ships use large scale fission plants... Fusion reactions go funky critical in transit.

Ok, I'm done "bearding" my SF Geekiness...
Ob Trav:
Now, I've figured out that a good measure for integration with traveller is to use 1HS=20Td, and thus Size 8-12 (ES) is 160 Td or so. the Third Ed EX hulls (5-7sp) thus correspond to 100Td. All SF weapons are 45 (3HS) or 60 (4hs) ton bays, plus crew quarters. Rc are 75Td + quarters (25Td of them!)
A buddy of mine used Starfire 1st ed in place of Bk 2, HT1=TL9... he had some different conversions for size and mapping.

I've got a system generator for ISF I wrote (MS-DOS 3.3 or later, runs fine in DOSbox; Compiled QBasic) that is excellent for setting up a universe. PM me if you want it (.exe, source, or both)

 

[Spinward Scout]

Solve a Mystery

Anyway, I welcome any suggestions for exploration-themed activities.

Hey Glen,

Here's some ideas for you. Maybe not exactly what you are looking for, but might get your mind wandering.

http://www.scientificblogging.com/cash/the_top_10_mysteries_of_science

http://www.world-mysteries.com/sci.htm

http://www.scavenger-hunt-fun.com/index.html

http://www.geocaching.com/

http://listverse.com/bizarre/top-10-unsolved-mysteries/

 

[the angle]

I, too, have wondered occasionally whether I was born in the wrong century. Crossing a continent with Lewis & Clarke or Stanley is where I belonged. Of course, the idea of going where no (white) man has gone before is a lot more attractive than the actual process, which tends to gobble explorers like popcorn and leave the survivors sick and maimed.

Certain games handle this better than others. A very old title from TYR Gamemakers (a group that I believe went on to become FGU) published an SFRPG called Space Quest. It contained system generation rules that were more detailed than Traveller's but still simple enough to be usable. I designed a dying home planet and a ship specifically to be crewed by one person with the help of a handful of robots (very "Silent Running"-ish), placed the planet at the center of an unexplored stellar neighborhood, then launched out into it. The goal was to find an Earthlike planet where everyone could move. They were sufficiently rare to make it a long journey, and I had great fun with it.

Computer games are another way to go. I've found the Myst games to be an excellent way to satisfy that "exploring strange new worlds" itch, with Tomb Raider a close second (the earlier ones were better than the more recent titles, IMO, at least as far as creating a sense of exploration and discovery).

Steve

 

[the angle]

P.S. There are plenty of excellent books to scratch that itch, too, both fiction and nonfiction. For historical stuff, your best bet is to go to the library, tell a librarian what you're interested in, and let him or her steer you to all the many different areas where you can find it. And don't overlook the children's section -- that's where you'll find all the books with big, colorful photos, drawings, and maps.

For SF, I prefer the classics. The "exploring new worlds" theme was big in the expansionist 50s. Clarke was among the best, with books like Rendezvous with Rama.

There's also old National Geographics and Scientific Americans. Every library has a complete copy, because whenever someone dies, they try to donate Grandpa's collection to the local library.

Steve

 

[the angle]

Oh, and one last thing ...

You absolutely must find a copy of a boardgame called Source of the Nile. It was published originally by Discovery Games, then by Avalon Hill. Copies of the AH version aren't hard to track down. It lets you explore Africa hex by hex, battling wild animals, hostile tribes, and murderous terrain every step of the way. This is simply the best exploration-and-discovery game ever. It's a kick in the pants whether you play with a group or solitaire. If you have the least interest in the exploration of Africa, I guarantee that you'll love this.

Second best in the boardgame category is Age of Exploration by TimJim Games. This one will be harder to find. It covers the European discovery and exploration of North and South America, from Columbus's first voyage to the conquest of the Aztecs and Incas. It's a very different play experience from SotN, but the system is so clever and the results so satisfying that if the subject grabs you, it's worth tracking down.

Finally, go to Warpspawn Games and peruse their lists of free games. (I recommend the Old School listing -- it's easier to use than the database.) It includes many exploration style games, most of which are playable with nothing more than a few sheets of paper, some dice, and a deck of cards.

Steve

 

[Whipsnade]

2nd ed starfire was actually quite playable...

Aramis,

My poor prose style strikes again!

I've got 4th as well... aside from revising the coding, adding SFB-ish detail levels, and basically provi]ng that Marvin shouldn't write rulebooks, it added too many options stolen from SFB, and still has the 3rd ed ISF issue of too much money for the empire. Further, Marvin said that "Nobody plays tactical starfire except in campaign play." I retorted with "No one but me and my friends, apparently." It's utter crap, except for the additional modelling of reality in system generation.

That's the SF version I was writing about. You name a "monster" and I've played it. Advanced Third Reich, Trobruk, Advanced Squad Leader, Victory in the Pacific, Terrible Swift Sword, I've tackled all those rules and more. I even play DBM regularly and those rules read like a legal brief. SF 4e though... sheesh...

I took the rules with me on a business trip and wrestled with them for a week. Never again.


Regards,
Bill

 

[JAFARR]

I picked up a copy of PCGamer Big Book of Free - 365 Free Games today

# 239 is Noctis. Description says, "Open ended space exploration game where you get to name the planets you discover."
http://tinyurl.com/cjkd6w

I haven't gone there yet as it's pushing bed time, but I remembered this thread and decided to give this heads up.

As a side note, I guess 2/3s of the 365 are either shooters of some discription or some form of what they call platformer like the old "Lode Runner" game. There are 8 MMORPGs in addition to the 365 and some links to free programming software - some of it reported to need little or no programming experience. I think it might be well worth the $10 (US) it cost.

Added: Other categories include puzzle, action, and sims.

 

[the angle]

Thanks for this link to Noctis. I haven't unzipped or played the game yet, but from what I've seen so far, it looks very cool.

Steve