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Att'n Firefly fans

Originally posted by Flynn:
[QB] I'm sorry to hear that you won't be able to make it to GenCon. (Actually, you'd mentioned it earlier this year, but I'd forgotten momentarily.) I really enjoyed your presence at last year's GenCon, and was hoping to see you at the gaming table this year.

Flynn,

Thanks a lot. I'm going to miss playing in your games as well. Unfortunately, its a matter of my wife going to nursing school vs. me coming to GenCon..... so we had to make the obvious decision. If at ALL possible, I'm going to try to pull it off anyway, but its extremely unlikely.

There's always next year and I promise to make sure she shows up at opportune moments with the tea.

John
 
I'd seen a few episodes and was curious, so I bought the whole set as DVDs. It ROCKS!!! Actually, it's a little bit country...
file_21.gif


I would have loved to watch this series.

"Two by two,
hands of blue..."
 
It also helps greatly when you take into account that when the series was broadcast, Fox aired the episodes in the wrong order. The last episode aired was the pilot.
 
Well, by about halfway through the second DVD I was determined to figure out the opening chords for the theme song. I did in the end too.

I think it goes something like this - I can't format it properly here though, but hopefully you can follow it:

</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">G-A-Bb Eb-C-Bb

Cm F
Take my love Take my land

F (Cm) Eb Gm
Take me where I cannot stand


Eb F
I don't care I'm still free

F (Cm) Eb Gm
You can't take the sky from me

Repeat that for the second verse. I'm not sure you need the Cm in the brackets there.

Not sure about the chords for the instrumental. I think it starts off as Eb - F, but I'm not sure
what it does in the banjo part.

The melody notes in the instrumental go something like


Violin Banjo Violin
G-F-G-F-Eb-F D-F-G-Bb-G-F-D-C-Bb-B A-F-A Bb-G-Bb C-A-A-Bb-A


Cm F
There's no place that I can be

F (Cm) Eb Gm
Since I found Se reni ty

Eb F
You can't take the sky from me

[F-G-Bb-G-F-D] Cm

(the bit in [square brackets] at the end is played on the banjo)</pre>[/QUOTE]Of course, if you don't play guitar that won't mean anything to you.
 
"Take my love, take my land,
Take me where I cannot stand.
I don't care, I'm still free,
You can't take the sky from me.

Take me out, to the black,
Tell 'em I'm not coming back.
Burn the land and boil the sea,
You can't take the sky from me.

Instrumental Break

There's no place, I can be,
Since I found Serenity.
But you can't take the sky from me."

I will admit to liking westerns a lot, so the obvious Western influence in Firefly never bothered me, it added a little different spice to the mix, and was much better than a lot of TV SF that I've seen. I fell absolutely in love with this show, and curse the names of the Fox execs who cancelled it before its time. I am seriously thinking about running a Firefly game now that my current campaign has ended.
 
Someone posted the original intros that were spoken at the start of each episode when they were on the air at fireflyfans.net. The first one that lasted about 5 episodes concludes with this:

"Out here, people struggled to get by with the most basic technologies; a ship would bring you work, a gun would help you keep it. A captain's goal was simple: find a crew, find a job, keep flying."

Don't think you can get much more Travller-esque than that for a TV show in recent times.
 
I would have to agree that Jayne is a certified Rogue but the others, I would have to express my reservations.

Simply because they are skirting the fine edge of the law by moving contraband makes they merry Travellers, IMHO and most of the merchant campaigning that I have run often involves moving illicit goods. After the large commercial carriers have taken all the plum cargos...what is an honest free trader to do?

Take the remainder even it is something the Imperium...I mean alliance frowns upon.

BTW, I found this little transcript on the Firefly site particularly relevant to our discussions...

Firefly Traveller - Where does it take place?

:cool: Where does Firefly Traveller take place?
:cool:
Okay, based on previous assumptions, I am going to locate the Firefly ‘verse in near earth space. This is the only collection of star systems close enough to Earth to possibly be colonized in the next 500 years given anything short of an “infinity drive” that will let you go as far as you want as fast as you want. I also want to use 3D space since we have so much data available now on where local stars are located (this site has about 11,000 stars within 150 light years of Earth: http://www.caco.demon.co.uk/2300ad/NearStar.html ).

So, if we can’t go as far as we want as fast as we want, how far and how fast can we go? Since this is never addressed in Firefly, there is some leeway here. I am going to use two technologies (because people always seem to come up with more than one way to do things, we only seem to remember the most successful ones).

The premise of going faster than the speed of light is that you can’t. So, the way you go faster than the speed of light is by avoiding the issue all together. The ship itself never goes faster than the speed of light, it slips in and out of Normal Space (where the speed of light is a hard limit). The two ways that you do this in Firefly Traveller are the Classic Traveller Jump Drive, and the Traveller: 2300/2300 AD Stutterwarp.

I’m not a gearhead (Traveller term for someone who likes to spend lots of time designing equipment and discussing the logic behind various future technologies), so I’m not going to even try to explain the ideas behind these technologies or how they work (I’d probably only mess it up anyways). I will explain what they do though, as that will shape the geography of Firefly Traveller.

Jump Drive: The Classic Traveller jump drive moves a ship a given distance in one week. The ship leaves Normal Space (NSpace) and is in Jump Space (JSpace) for the entire journey. Jump Drives are rated from 1 to 6, with higher numbers going farther, but no matter what the rating of the drive, it still takes one week to make the trip.

There are two issues with Jump Drives in the Firefly ‘verse. The first is that it clearly isn’t the kind of drive the Serenity uses. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t exist in the Firefly ‘verse, but that we need a second drive system to run Fireflies. The second is deciding how far you can go at Jump 1. In Classic Traveller Jump 1 was set at 1 parsec (approximately 3.26 light years). But as the designers admitted, that was a somewhat arbitrary distance to facilitate the game, so I don’t feel any guilt in adjusting that distance to facilitate a 3D mapping system (CT used a 2 dimensional map).

I’m going to set the distance of Jump 1 at 5 light years rather than 3.26. This gives the Jump drive a longer range than the original, but given that I’m going from a 2D map to a 3D map, the increase in range is actually on the small side. 5 light years means you can reach the Centauri systems (Alpha and Proxima) in one jump, but not Barnard’s Star (that’s important later). So, Jump Drives can get you up to 30 light years in a week at Jump 6.

One final note here; the limit on Jump Drive is not the size or the power of the drive, but the resolution of the navigation calculations. In Classic Traveller, you could build a Jump 6 ship by strapping a big enough jump drive to a small enough hull, but until you got to Tech Level (TL)15, you couldn’t go Jump 6 ranges until you had the computing ability of TL 15. The same holds true in Firefly Traveller.

Stutterwarp: This system was designed to support Traveller 2300/ 2300 AD, a game system that came about a decade after the original Traveller game. It was based on newer ideas about how you can cheat the speed of light limit. This system (as someone already pointed out) is much closer to the Firefly ‘verse. A ship skips through space in short, but very fast hops. In fact, Anonymous pretty well summed up the argument for Stutterwarp in Firefly already, so I’ll just say the only thing left to do is figure out how fast and how far you can go with Stutter warp. I’m going to stick with the 7.7 light year limit to a single Stutterwarp trip, and adjust the speed to the level of the drive.

I’m going to rate Stutterwarp at 1 to 6 as well, and say that a Jump 1 Stutterwarp drive takes up the same space and same fuel requirements as Jump Drive 1. (OK, at this point I am punting, as I want to keep the ability to design Stutterwarp ships using the CT rules). Once again, the speeds of Stutterwarp drives are somewhat arbitrary, but they are based on going 1 Parsec in a week (comparing CT jump 1 to Stutterwarp). Even though I’m now using 5 light years as the range for Jump Drives, I like the speed of Stutter warp that the old comparison gives. It takes longer to get to 7.7 light years with Stutterwarp, but you can go almost 50% farther than Jump 1 in one trip. That is the kind of technology trade off that makes two types of technology competitive (so I like it, and I’m going to keep it).

So, where does Firefly Traveller take place (I hear you asking after reading through all of this)? Well, it takes place in a cluster of stars between 10 and 30 light years of Earth. At 10 light years radius from Earth you have 20 stars, at 15 light years you have 70, and at 30 light years you have 334. Now, many of these stars are brown dwarfs, but those that aren’t could have more than one terraformable world in orbit, so it balances out. Given the range of jump drives, you can cross the first span in 1 week at jump 4, the second span at jump 6 and the third span in 2 to 3 weeks at Jump 4, 5 or 6 . Given that Firefly has just ‘over 70 Earths spinning around this galaxy’, and terraforming is common (though dangerous) that’s about the range of systems you’d need to produce Firefly’s ‘verse (depending on how many systems you want to have planets around them).

Next: How do we get from 2004 to 2517? The first step.

Anonymous Wednesday, April 21, 2004 - 11:01

This is just my opinion, but I don't think that there is any sort of "future magic" involved. No Warp drive, jump drive, stutter warp, etc.

They maybe travelling a fraction of light speed, 25%, (approx. 45,000 Mile per second) which is pretty fast. I think that keeps in the spirit of the show. I think the real magic they have is Terraforming, Gravity generation/negation, compact energy production and/or very high thrust/fuel ratios.
As far as the background of the show.
I'm guessing an exodus to the stars in generation ships occured, 400 years earlier( more or less)maybe travelling 5 to 10 years at a time, travelling 3 to 5 light years. The goal being to find planets to terraform.
The crucial point being that a Base Planet would have been terraformed by advance ships working remotely many decades in advance. That would be the spring board. After several generations of geometric expansion you get the the current day "70 plus Earths" with lord knows how many in the process of being terraformed.

I think in the spirit of Firefly, space travel is still a rare thing to the majority of people. Remember how wonderous it was to Kaylee to be asked to join the crew. "I ain't never even been up in one of these" Please read on before crucifying me.
How many people do you know who have never left there home state? Even with the ability to fly to anywhere on the planet, they choose not to out of cultural reasons, financial reasons, etc. The fact is, if you really want to get to someplace, you can. Max a credit card, take several cheap flights, etc. If you have the will, you can go. So, with that said, there are those who don't go anywhere.
So, in the Firefly universe, those agencies who travel are
1) Military/Government 2) Corporations 3)Travellers (Go West young man!)
So I think the slower travel time and shorter distances work in the spirit of the game. Remember, the entire series of 14 episodes takes place over a single year. That's allot of flight time and some places revisited several times. So the notion this takes place in a single sub-sector is good. I could imagine the core worlds being MONTHS away.

Just my 2 cents. Excuse the spelling errors, I'm typing fast 'cuz I should be working! lol.


BrownCoatCat Tuesday, February 03, 2004 - 12:18


The interstellar travel system is the only thing about "Firefly" that does not remind me of Traveller. The suggestion of using some sort of stutter warp really appeals to me.

I always imagined that the series took place in a single Classic Traveller sub-sector, much of the time they stay within a few weeks travel of Persephone. This sub-sector would have two bands of worlds and a big gap in the middle. I say this because in the series the longest journey seen is the three weeks from Persephone to Jiangjin, and it is during this period, Serenity transverses a big band of nothing. The worlds at the bottom of the map, like Jiangjin, Triumph and Higgons's Moon are the backwarters that Inara complains Mal does not want to leave, and she wonders why he doesn't gross the divide back to Persephone and more civilised worlds.


Anonymous Tuesday, February 03, 2004 - 09:18

The stutterwarp travel speeds are slow enough to keep the core worlds far enough away that Serenity's part of the 'verse remains a true frontier. If it is too easy to travel, the Alliance would be breathing down our crew's necks all the time. Wasn't there a comment in one of the shows that said "I didn't travel ?? days...". That could have been from the far side of the Alliance sphere, i.e., two radii.
Hovtej aka Anonymous

paragraph.gif
Hunter, NEWSFLASH, NEWSFLASH...get some T20 into Joss' hands and we might have our first Traveller movie! As in a private email he expressed great interest in a Traveller related movie. He wants to know more about Traveller and how he could incorporate these concepts into Firefly ;)
 
I doubt you'll find a direct email address for Mutant Enemy let alone Joss (having said that I'm sure someone will find them right after I post this
).

This thread suggests

Joss Whedon
c/o Mutant Enemy Productions
PO Box 900
Beverly Hills, CA 90213

which is basically the same

There aren't any official Mutant Enemy or Joss Whedon websites are far as I know. They mainly use forum and online chat sites (The Bronze and its successors) to communicate with fans and the official Firefly site is really just a "buy the dvd" ad for Fox now. :( (it used to have some great extras on it)

Casey
 
I think it was Harlan Ellison who pointed to the difference between "scifi" and science fiction. The latter is seldom faithfully transcribed to screen. The former is just drama/action placed in a futuristic fantasy realm devoid of actual "science."

Don't get me wrong, I like most of scifi. Firefly was high in entertainment value. But it doesn't work for a hard science fiction game milieu, nor vv. The ship had no fuel storage capacity and I don't recall the issue of fuel coming up except as limiting the life support of the shuttles. The means of travel does not distinguish between in-system (presumed sublight) and interstellar (presumed very much FTL) modes.

It doesn't appear that the writers had a tangible map to work with, only vague descriptions of where planets were located (core worlds back that way, others here and there, some out on the frontier). Like the OTU, it seems to be two-dimensional in outlook.

I certainly agree with "Anonymous" in that terraforming is indeed magical. For conversion to Traveller you can invoke a long-disappeared race that did the terraforming for their own inscrutible reasons. That's good on two levels. It shows how feeble and transitory our civilization is to date, and it leaves a question unanswered: "What happens when they come back?"

No government at the scale and tech of the OTU (much less the corrupt and balkanized milieu presented in Firefly) would have the resources to terraform even one planet. Processes would require dedicated effort of legions extended over many centuries, and that's just to create stable ecosystems on a favorably composed and situated planet. Geological processes require geological time, and that nobody can touch.
 
I'm personally totally smitten with the show. It's the best I've seen in a long long time. It was nailed earlier when it was said that the characters were carbon copies of characters we've all had in our games. Their interactions together, the feel of how they did things...it was all PC stuff. No reconfiguring, no negotiation, no magic tech. They thought their way out of things, and when they couldn't they fought their way out. Just like Traveller characters.

I understand the 'western' angle. It was mentioned in the show that the Alliance method of settling worlds was drop colonists on places and forget about 'em. They have to make do with what they have...that means animal power. Simple tools, homemade clothing. The basis of a working colony is it's agriculture so they're going to look like farmers or ranchers. I think part of it is 'what goes around comes around'. Just as a few years ago tie-dyed shirts and bellbottoms <shudder> were in vogue so to imagine that parts of the culture fixated on elements of "Earth That Was".

Now for the main reason of my posting: GREAT NEWS! If you haven't heard the official word already, check this out:

Subject: FROM SCIFIWIRE: 'Serenity' Takes Off Soon


"Serenity Takes Off Soon

Joss Whedon—who is directing Serenity, a movie version of his SF
western TV series Firefly—told SCI FI Wire that he will begin
production in three weeks, with all of the original cast members in
place, led by Nathan Fillion.

Compared with the Fox series, the movie will be "bigger, faster,
stronger," Whedon said in an interview at the Saturn Awards in Los
Angeles. "The show plays on a very small, personal level. And while I
want that to work in the movie, the movie has an epic quality and a
resolve that you simply can't afford in a TV show. Because if you have
the epic quality, you run out of money, and if you have the resolve, you
run out of ideas. ... The movie is really like, if you took a giant hit
of the show all at once. It's very big. Perhaps I should use different
imagery."

Whedon added that the movie will wrap up story points left dangling when
Fox unceremoniously canceled the show in the middle of its first season.
"It won't wrap up all the storylines," he said. "It's not a miniseries.
It's a movie. But it does deal with some of the outstanding questions of
the show. Like River [Summer Glau]. River is a very important question
in the show."

Whedon added that the movie will be shot in Los Angeles on all-new sets.
"They're a little grander in scale," he said. "They're a little more
movie-like. ... Everything outside of Serenity is a place we haven't
visited and people we've not seen, but it is the world that was from the
show." Serenity is aiming at a 2005 release."

Take that you all stupid-heads at Fox!!
 
Originally posted by Straybow:
The ship had no fuel storage capacity and I don't recall the issue of fuel coming up except as limiting the life support of the shuttles.
Fuel was mention in one or two lines of a discussion about how important it was for the Serenity to deliver goods. It was mentioned in the two-parter and one or two other episodes.
 
kafka, I'm impressed you were able to find my old Firefly Traveller blog. It's on pause at the moment due to real life interfering with fun time, but I plan to get back to it in the next few weeks. If anyone is interested here are the links to all the meaningful entries:

Firefly Traveller - Just a thought

http://fireflyfans.net/showblog.asp?b=159

Firefly Traveller - Where does it take place?

http://fireflyfans.net/showblog.asp?b=161

Where does Firefly Traveller take place (continued)?

http://fireflyfans.net/showblog.asp?b=168

Firefly Traveller - From 2004 to 2517… The first bit

http://fireflyfans.net/showblog.asp?b=171

Firefly Traveller Characters

http://fireflyfans.net/showblog.asp?b=185


I realized that I really needed to work on the CG section, and I've removed the old Hunter career and replaced it with a settler/colonist career. I'm also reworking the Nobel career some to take into account differences with CT. The final thing I need to do is come up with a way to deal with the unification war, which I think I have worked out in my head, but needs to be put down on paper.

I also came across a bunch of stuff here on near earth stars and have um... borrowed (with permission) the 45 light year mega hex map that I think Malenfant did up.

I also have more thoughts on options for FTL travel that I need to get down on paper.

Oh, as to the Rogue thing, I never considered a Rogue to be specifically criminal, but on the edge of 'legitimate' society. That seemed to fit the Browncoat vets after the war. Besides, how did Mal get enough money to buy and repair Serenity in the first place? I imagine there was a big score somewhere along the line...

So, the project continues...
 
Ranger,

Thanks for all the hard legwork that you did making the transition of Traveller/2300AD into the world of Firefly.

I, too, was minor annoyed with the idea of Terraforming happening in such a near Future setting but I resolved it by understanding it as Terra Forming.

Terra being the old Latin/Greek for Earth. And, forming refering to creating as close to Earth-like conditions out there on the frontier. This way it resembles more 2300AD where there are habitable planets out there but it is going to be a struggle to settle them.

But, given that it is rather low budget TV they have to explain why all the shoot locations look relatively the same. I would have preferred, if they didn't but that's ok. Hopefully, in the upcoming movie we will see more types of worlds, but really, it is a hard task to visualize an entirely different world each time without obtaining the cheese effect. (both in the sense of creating worlds with a landscape of Northern Canada or the Outback in Australia AND having a generic world stand-in eg. Nazi-world, Desert-world, etc.)- as that is my sometimes gripe about Traveller, sometimes, it just seems too monolithic rather than diverse...

As to Fuel question, there were many references for the need for fuel and parts to keep on Travelling. This is what inspired me to think that it is very Traveller like...not to forget messy Starships of the protagonists and clean starships of the Imperium...ahem...Alliance. Plus, the entire storyline about a bunch of essentially honourable characters with flaws like all of us, who have to get by in a universe which simply does not care is very Traveller-like.

paragraph.gif
MJD, sorry, just being corresponding from Boards, such as this.
 
Ok, I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days now and here are some ideas that come to mind.

I’m not sure I want Firefly to become a Traveller TV/Movie, that is morph into the OTU. I like Firefly as a setting for a Traveller (pick your favorite rules flavor to fit your preferences) campaign as it is. I like the idea that lots of things are left unexplained because that gives lots of room for a GM to fill in the blanks, while having enough there already for a fun setting to play in. But having said that, I’d love to see an official Traveller TV project. I’d love to see the OTU brought to life, and Joss is probably the best guy out there to do it right now. He made vamps and daemons seem like a believable part of the world in his Buffyverse, so I have no doubt that he could bring the OTU believable as well.

So, my suggestion is that MJD/Hunter look at getting a license to do a Firefly campaign setting book for CT/T20. Something along the lines of the old CT Alien Modules with background info (including star maps), special CG rules for the setting, some ships and equipment, and finally an introductory adventure in the setting would do nicely. I think it should be set up to allow people to play in which ever form of the Firefly ‘verse they are happy with (one system/many systems/one system in many systems). If I ever finish up all the work I have backed up right now I might even submit a proposal myself.

I think that the working relationship that develops with Mutant Enemy/Joss would provide a great opportunity to pitch Traveller as a TV product. To be honest, I’m really surprised no one has picked up Traveller as a concept already. There is so much already out there that could be worked into years worth of product. The Traveller Adventure could be a whole season of TV in itself, and then you have all the other stuff out there in print. You could develop one series for each type of campaign (Merchant, Merc, Politics/Espionage, etc.), or do a different series at different levels (A free trader in the Marches, then a Political/Espionage show at the Domain/Imperium level [Norris and Strephon trying to stave off/fight the 5th Frontier War], mini-series of adventures from around the Imperium giving a picture of human interactions with all the different alien races).

Just my thoughts…
 
Yesterday evening I watched the first part of the two part episode "Serenity" on TV. Shiny!
I gather this was the original pilot (it was the 10th episode aired). Whatever possessed Fox to change the episode sequence?! The whole series sort of clicked in place with this episode. This would have been a much more solid start to the series, dare I say a perfect start for the series. The universe, backstory and characters would have gotten a decent introduction and a good basis on which to build the story upon (as was intended by Whedon, I presume). Everything makes much more sense now. Good grief, now more than ever, I can't fathom what those mental midgets at Fox were thinking! :mad: "Grrr!"

Heck, it was a much better pilot than what e.g. B5 had (and that's a lot from me, I *love* B5). There's no hesitation anymore, I'm buying the DVDs now. Hopefully the right episode sequence is indicated on the DVD box. Oh, I can't wait to hear Whedon's comments, they must be...er...illuminating. Let's hope Whedon gets to make the movie like he wants with little inteference from corporate suits.

BTW, I almost dropped off my seat when Wash said something like "hold on travellers" at the beginning of the ep.

PS. In this episode Mal sure was an a**hole. Now I see what Malenfant meant in his post earlier.
 
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