Adventure on the other side of the Milkyway
- Thread starter Shonner
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BlackBat242
SOC-14 1K
Ask Captain Janeway.
Whenever, you want to keep the premises of the Original Traveller Universe but want to dispense with the official history, it is done. I have pulled this trick a number of occasions. It is known as the Star Trek Original Series trick but could work equally well with Farscape.
One of the beautiful things about Classic and to a certain extent other versions of Traveller (Mongoose & T4 - maybe notwithstanding) is the low tech feel of its technology allowing one to port a 21st century or 1970s gestalt into a fantastic realm which is perfect for those trips across the galaxy. Once the tech becomes too high, it becomes Voyager...the possibility that players could make it home in their lifetimes...which would run against the grain of most Traveller games that I know.
One of the beautiful things about Classic and to a certain extent other versions of Traveller (Mongoose & T4 - maybe notwithstanding) is the low tech feel of its technology allowing one to port a 21st century or 1970s gestalt into a fantastic realm which is perfect for those trips across the galaxy. Once the tech becomes too high, it becomes Voyager...the possibility that players could make it home in their lifetimes...which would run against the grain of most Traveller games that I know.
You could always have the trip be one way and the players not be the first ones to discover it. On the other end there might already be a human or Vargr or Aslan presence (maybe 2I) forging a new empire. When the players show up, they garner a lot of attention if only because they are the latest to arrive, with news of home. Maybe they're barely hanging on, fighting the forces of a Droyne heavy; a child of Grandfather who faked his death and escaped to the other side of the galaxy.
I think your idea has merit if only because it allows you to forge your own TU while still keeping the OTU concepts you like. Good luck and have fun.
I think your idea has merit if only because it allows you to forge your own TU while still keeping the OTU concepts you like. Good luck and have fun.
far-trader
SOC-14 10K
Not quite, but I have an escape clause from the OTU built upon the idea that the maps of charted space are in fact flat (relatively) due to the nature of jump space. That is jump space allows travel across vast distances but is limited to a fairly flat plane (+ or - a few parsecs from the center of each slice through the galaxy across its spin plane).
The escape clause is that some misjumps can bump you from one plane to the one adjacent. So one day you're tooling along fine in charted space and you misjump, skip off the charted space plane and land in the next plane with no real way back because the misjump is too unpredictable. So you're in a whole new ballgame, though possibly with other "lost" ships from charted space, now refugees like yourself.
And I don't need to break the 36 parsec misjump rule to get there
The escape clause is that some misjumps can bump you from one plane to the one adjacent. So one day you're tooling along fine in charted space and you misjump, skip off the charted space plane and land in the next plane with no real way back because the misjump is too unpredictable. So you're in a whole new ballgame, though possibly with other "lost" ships from charted space, now refugees like yourself.
And I don't need to break the 36 parsec misjump rule to get there
Swipe from some of the published material, T4 had an adventure (series) based upon Ancient jump corridors which took characters from core to the far side of the rift. Who's to say Granddad didn't have a jump corridor to do some research on the far side of the galaxy (this also will allow you have humans on the farside if you want)?
The only time I tried it was with an experimental TL-16 quantum flux drive that the players found in a derelict ship (along with a couple of less risky shiny objects to take home) that they decided to try to mount in a ship and use.
They burned through a fine inheritance that one of them (Count) had in a trust fund hiring experts and building the ship. They had to spend even more money and cash in favors to keep it all secret because they were afraid someone would take it away from them. According to the experts the theory was sound and the drive appeared to be working properly, but no one would really know until they hit the big red jump button. They launched a year later with visions of fame and wealth beyond imagining dancing in their eyes..
It worked in that it allowed them to shift through parallel universes to get from A to B. The psionically powerful aliens who had designed it used their minds as navigation systems to control it and shift without getting "lost". The players' clairvoyant navigator wasn't powerful enough even after using boosting drugs. The ship began to run away from them, they panicked after a couple of them (NPC's to show them how the monster works) phased into the bulkheads or out of existence and they shot the psi navigator with another dose of special.
The whole went out of control after the navigator overdosed and the engineer made it to the panic switch and shut the whole thing down. One of the PC's went insane because he failed a saving roll as they phased into reality again. They found that the stars were ok, but they were several subsectors away from where they started; deep in unexplored territory.
With no jump drive, and scared to death of this quantum drive they headed for the planet in the system they dropped into. From there they began a whole campaign of exploring this unknown area of my universe populated with ideas and aliens I hadn’t used in my own unofficial universe because I couldn’t fit them into the design. This turned out to be a very nonhuman neck of the woods and gave the players and me a chance to play out some multi-planet version of the Jack Vance Tschai style adventuring.
They never did go back to their own universe, partly because they were scared to try the drive again, but mainly because it was fun to step out of the constraints of the “real world” and have a place to play where anything goes.
They burned through a fine inheritance that one of them (Count) had in a trust fund hiring experts and building the ship. They had to spend even more money and cash in favors to keep it all secret because they were afraid someone would take it away from them. According to the experts the theory was sound and the drive appeared to be working properly, but no one would really know until they hit the big red jump button. They launched a year later with visions of fame and wealth beyond imagining dancing in their eyes..
It worked in that it allowed them to shift through parallel universes to get from A to B. The psionically powerful aliens who had designed it used their minds as navigation systems to control it and shift without getting "lost". The players' clairvoyant navigator wasn't powerful enough even after using boosting drugs. The ship began to run away from them, they panicked after a couple of them (NPC's to show them how the monster works) phased into the bulkheads or out of existence and they shot the psi navigator with another dose of special.
The whole went out of control after the navigator overdosed and the engineer made it to the panic switch and shut the whole thing down. One of the PC's went insane because he failed a saving roll as they phased into reality again. They found that the stars were ok, but they were several subsectors away from where they started; deep in unexplored territory.
With no jump drive, and scared to death of this quantum drive they headed for the planet in the system they dropped into. From there they began a whole campaign of exploring this unknown area of my universe populated with ideas and aliens I hadn’t used in my own unofficial universe because I couldn’t fit them into the design. This turned out to be a very nonhuman neck of the woods and gave the players and me a chance to play out some multi-planet version of the Jack Vance Tschai style adventuring.
They never did go back to their own universe, partly because they were scared to try the drive again, but mainly because it was fun to step out of the constraints of the “real world” and have a place to play where anything goes.
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