This is what your news shows are for.
Have you ever created your own setting?
- Thread starter stofsk
- Start date
This is what your news shows are for.
casquilho
SOC-13
I don't know if you want to count this, because I didn't create the setting, but I used Traveller rules to play out a Morrow Project game. I loved the idea of the Morrow Project setting but was less than excited about the rules. So Traveller became the rule set. A friend and I came up with a couple of career paths for Morrow Team members. Characters took one of them as their last term.
Most of the equipment could be converted quite easy. Then I admit I used published Morrow Project modules as the core of the games with adjustments of my own for fun.
Like I said, I didn't create the setting, but I did use the Traveller rules not in the 3I setting.
Most of the equipment could be converted quite easy. Then I admit I used published Morrow Project modules as the core of the games with adjustments of my own for fun.
Like I said, I didn't create the setting, but I did use the Traveller rules not in the 3I setting.
It is quite literally what my news shows, encyclopedia entries and all such are for! But sometimes it feels like throwing pennies down a well.
My experience is that the majority of players are going to do a minimum of homework when it comes to understanding the setting. It's up to the Ref to present the exposition in a way that is organic to the campaign, and digestible to the players.
My own observation is that at this point, the sheer volume of OTU material is actually a barrier to many players even attempting, and my work has been in figuring which parts to disseminate.
D.
That would have been great fun. The longest campaign I ran as a kid was using the T2300 rules and setting. It took most of high school, with a very stable group of players.
IMTU i had the same problem. I brought non-Travellers gamers into T20 TNE.
I setup my game site for the sole purpose of their education in their free time.
Only one of the players bothered examining it. He was impressed and became the defacto history expert.
On Settings;
The first Traveller ref i played with had his own universe setting. A star cluster somewhere in the TU. He based it heaving on the soviets, americans and Europe. Players we're from the Europe like setting.
I too have worked on non-TU environments. The most recent, i'm not certain i would even put into the game system.
epicenter00
SOC-13
Do an extremely abbreviated write-up of what everyone would know, I mean extremely abbreviated. In the entertainment industry doing write-ups for plots and so on you're supposed to be able to describe every character in a single sentence. I've found it works really well for focusing my thoughts on write-ups. It's also very easy for the players to read to get a gist of what's going on. Obviously in a rich and complex setting there's many ways to describe something, but try and describe the most interesting and relevant thing about them. If they're more curious, they can drill-down deeper for more information.
Use graphic aids as much as possible. A picture really can tell it better than 10,000 words or more. Especially, players love maps. Maps that have the major powers highlighted, the planets they control, and so on are very useful.
Don't do write-ups that your players don't care about. If you're concerned they're not reading the stuff, ask them if they're reading it. Tell them it's okay to be honest; if they're in the "I mean to read it, but I don't get around to it" boat tell them it's okay to say that (eg; a polite way of saying "I'm not looking at it"). If they're reading it but not retaining any of it, that's another concern, one that's harder to avoid (a polite way of saying "It's not interesting to me.") Regardless, if you think they might be interested, ask them to look at the stuff you post and give you feedback on it.
Obviously people are people, so some players are going to be more interested in this stuff than others; some players really only care if they can shoot it or not. Others will read stuff. If your players really are the types who are reading the OTU materials but don't read yours, then half of your work is done for you - you need to find out why they're reading that material but not yours. Figure it out and make your information like the OTU books and they'll read it.
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I've found that to be the case pretty much with my own group. Two are interested in turning up and playing. Two are interested in everything that could intersect with their PCs or their PCs interests.
Really good point, it can save a lot of time. Except the latter two players mentioned want EVERYTHING and will read it all. Couldn't keep up if I tried, so the summary you mentioned before is what I've tried to do.
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
Just a thought here (and not a particularly popular one on this forum):
If you look at the text of the original three little black books of Classic Traveller you'll find no mention of The Imperium or any reference to any details that later came to define the OTU.
This was on purpose. Miller and company assumed every would go off and build their own settings. (Miller has been explicit about this in interviews.)
Second point: if you read the original text of LBBs 1-3 you'll find that the the default assumption is that the PCs travel an area at the edge/frontier/whatever of a centralized government. If you look at the selection of ships, weapons, the world generation system, and how trade works, it is clear they have left "civilization" far behind.
The assumption then, is that the PCs are NEW to the area of play. They served their time in the forces back in "civilized" space, and now -- like Civil War soldiers going west, or mustered British soldiers going to the Indies -- they are heading off to new lands to make fortunes.
I bring this up only to say that I don't think Traveller was ever designed or meant to be played with a four foot stack of supplements supporting it. What mattered was the setting material that the PCs could learn about and interact with *through* adventures.
This issue of setting bloat is something that happened after the first wave of RPGs. TSR, GDW, and others were certainly happy to produce material that consumers wanted to spend money on. But I question how much valuable utility actually came from such purchases. While I can see the fascination with countless details about fictional worlds I would propose that asking anyone (players or referee) how much digging through and mastering a thick background of setting really matters against having the players focusing on *this* adventure, right here, right now.
I mean this challenge in the most practical sense: honestly ask how much all that thick material imperial lineage matters to some ex-marines getting caught up in a derelict ship with aliens coming to kill them.
Please note: I'm not talking about having NO context or background. I'm asking: how much does one really need to support sessions of regular play focused on adventure-style tales.
Note as well that the 1977 version of the rules assumed that TWO SUBSECTORS would be enough of a setting area to keep players busy for years. (The concept of a "sector" isn't even in the text!) The 1981 edition said there would never be need to go larger than a sector. (A nod to the release of Spimward Marches material released the same year.)
The OSR in the filed of fantasy RPGs has been solid in their recognition that what you need is to focus on background material that matters to the PCs *through play.* My own approach to Classic Traveller is to bring this OSR sensibility back to the game. (In this and in other ways.)
I'll be playing some Classic Traveller tonight, set at the boundaries of interstellar empires (much smaller than the OTU). The remains of a fallen empire will be scattered across the worlds of the subsectors. There will be settlements to lay claim to worlds. Local politics. And, significantly, the PCs will be recent arrivals, here to make their fortunes outside the bounds of civilization, just as the rules of LLBs 1-3 suggest. What they need to know is what they have to learn.
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We're largely in agreement. This is why I'm running an ATU myself. To a certain extent, I can handwave some of my players' ignorance of the local situation using similar rationale.
But in the end, the problem isn't an ATU/OTU thing so much as an "it would be ever so nice for my players to become thoroughly familiar with the rules, for once" thing.
This was always one of the benefits of running Tunnels & Trolls: All you had to understand, really, were saving throws and when to roll huge honking fistfuls of D6's. And at one level, a Traveller player can get by on "roll 8+ on 2D6 to succeed unless you're trying to hurt the guy in battle dress." But even if all the particulars of a subsector are completely obscure, players conversant at least in the core rules can make better sense of things. Sigh.
mike wightman
SOC-14 10K
I agree completely.
Bob Weaver
SOC-12
That's what my blog is for! I have maps, maps, maps, some general background of my ATU, and lots of posts that describe & discuss what's going on in the setting. I have focused down to one subsector, Holtzmann's Corridor, but there's info on what's going on around that subsector to connect to the larger setting.
The blog has static 'pages' that I can create as a campaign record, so players can check in if they forgot something important. Comments section can (hasn't so far) be used for discussions, and I can post links to a file sharing service if there's a bigger document the players need to have.
Best regards,
Bob W
That's all well and good, but that really doesn't necessarily work very well in an advanced society.
The nice thing about a fantasy world is not only is communication limited, but general overall knowledge is limited as well. History is tied more to folklore than to documentation. The written word is simply not prevalent.
In an advanced society, it's completely different. There is far, far less isolation. Information travels instantly within the star system, and regularly outside of it. Plus all of that information is archived, accessible, and searchable. This is "the curse" of the 24 hour new cycle.
That's not to say people aren't ignorant of things. Were I to travel to a foreign country, I would certainly be a fish out of water. But, I don't necessarily have to be. I could read a few books or articles before I go to get some lay of the land. I could read news reports to better get a feel for the situation on the ground. I would arrive knowledgable with book learning, which is a good leg up. And the resources while no doubt incomplete, would have a reasonable expectation of accuracy.
Now, would I know that Senator Bob is running for the Chairmanship of the High Council? If my task was remotely political, then I probably would know that. If I'm just a trader looking for cargo, likely not (unless this Senator is well know to the trader industry, then ideally I would have at least heard about him).
Now, the point about discovery through play is completely sound, but the there's an implied knowledge of living in the advanced society that comes without saying, and also an almost implicit idea that anything that might have background material, notably public background material, should be available to the players.
In a fantasy adventure, that's not necessarily so. It's difficult to walk down to the County Recorders office and look at the design blueprints of the local Lords castle.
So, in a fantasy adventure, it's much easier to keep players in the dark and keep information away from them than perhaps in a more modern setting.
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
This statement is true.
You seem to see the statement as a contradiction what I typed. I don't think it is. Nowhere do I assume the PCs are going into utterly unknown territory.
The point of my post was this:
If the Referee plays in a subsector of his own creation, with the centralized government "back that way" [jerk thumb over shoulder], there's no need to have detailed stacks of information about the Imperial lineage of the royal family going back six hundred years. Even if one is playing in the Spinward Marches, I suggest that most of information about the Imperium is moot if it doesn't affect the adventures at hand the PCs are adventuring through.
That was my point about the comparison to the OSR. You've misunderstood what I meant with the comparison. (Which is on me. I didn't go into detail.) Remember, I can go dig up fantasy setting books from the 80s and 90s thick with gazetteer-style setting info... and maybe .05% of that stuff will actually have any bearing on a bunch of PCs going into a dungeon. The OSR, as a design philosophy, is dumping useless encyclopedic books like that. The wisdom of some of the OSR publishers is that the setting material that matters is the setting material that PCs can interact with. And it's fine to have stuff that is about matters far afield from the haunted keep the PCs are exploring, but that none of that matters until they interact with some broach or imprisoned relative or something in the keep that ties into that far afield bit of politics or whatnot. That's all. That was my point for bringing up the OSR.
Now, as for secrecy...
I'm not advocating it. Things will be known. Of course. So let's take that off the table.
But let's talk about incomplete information:
There is a reason Basic Traveller kicked off with the notion that communication worked at the speed of travel. In the implicit setting of Books 1-3 trade and travel are relatively rare and interstellar civilization has not taken full hold of the setting yet. (The "setting" being the subsector of play. The game assumes there is a well-developed interstellar community "back that way." But that is not the setting of play, per the rules in Books 1-3.)
The PCs with a Type A Trader are like packet boats in the Age of Sails, bringing news and communication to remote areas where trade does not exist. Note, please, that the PCs are contracted to deliver mail on every jump. The PCs' dinky ship is what folks are depending on to get communication out. (Vital Note: In LBBS 1-3 there is no X-Boat system. The 1981 edition of the rules establishes the concept of "Communication Routes." Which one can already assume exist from dedicated routes of travel for vital trade routes.)
Now, some people want to blow past these assumptions. That's fine. Some people find these assumptions intolerable. That's fined. I don't want to blow past these assumptions. I like them. I find them inspiring. They are part of why I want to play the game.
My post was built from the default assumptions of LBB Books 1-3 -- and specifically Books 1-3, which are in many ways very different in implicit and explicit assumptions about the setting.
So, we have worlds which are in some ways settled (by someone, each campaign is different), trade is rare, communication is rare, political connections between worlds is tenuous -- so tenuous as to require ties of feudal loyalty to keep any sort of interstellar government going. (And we all know how not-particulary-stable feudalism is.)
All of the above assumptions are from LBB 1-3. I extrapolate from them and find that the PCs will have information about that world they are traveling to. Awesome! But we're not sitting on a stack of internet forum arguments about how the Imperial council (located a year of travel away) conducts regular business. That's all. That's the point. The Imperial Council is "back that way." It's the thing the PCs got the hell away from.
Thus, the Referee is responsible for the data for one subsector (maybe two), as the rules state clearly in the 1977 edition. That's about 40 worlds to kick off with. With the political and cultural elements easily contained and explained within those 80 hexes. Especially since, if using the rules from Books 1-3, the Referee is making up his own subsector. She isn't worrying about trying do dig through the logic of what someone else wrote and created. She's got a handle on her own setting because it is hers.
It's all still relatively a "frontier."* If the Referee has done her job, it is ripe with adventure possibilities. That means subterfuge, deceit, secrets, changing tides of politics and power, and more. All of this means that the PCs get to interact with the environment, find out more about the environment, impact the environment, and get kicked in the head from the fall out of their actions and the actions of everyone else getting things done.
If a revolution is taking place on a world (and let's hope the PCs are blessed with chaotic situations taking place on the worlds they visit) the news will be at least one week old by the time anyone in another system hears about it. By the time PCs hear about it will will be one week two two months or more, depending on where they've been traveling in the subsector. In one week to two months time of a government's collapse or the start of a war or a terrorist attack on the construction of an A-Class Starport lots and lots of things will have happened. Who got the news out, what was the agenda, who shaped it, who carried it, what was withheld, what was unknown, what has changed since the news was sent out... these are all questions affect what anyone can know when they arrive in-system.
So, that's my thinking about any kind of "secrecy" issue.
But, again, that wasn't the focus of my original post. The original post was about:
a) the Referee owning his own setting, per the original rules;
b) an emphasis of setting detail on a single subsector to kick off, rather getting caught up in buying a metric ton of setting books far afield from that subsector that have little relevance to the PCs in an adventure;
c) releasing background information through adventures (the PCs are going to a world? great, they get some info about the world as they Jump, and get more when they land and interact with the world);
d) that the setting, implicit in the rules, is still on some level undeveloped, not static and safe, and still contains mysteries, crisis, power gaps, confusion, and other details that must still be sorted out by the NPCs and PCs alike.
I will repeat (and as I made clear in the opening sentence of my post): Some folks on this board don't want a Traveller campaign to be like this. That's awesome! It's a toolkit! Make what you want of it!
I'm only talking about what I've extrapolated by building the implicit setting assumptions out from the rules of LBBs 1-3. And I like those assumptions. And since Books 1-3 are rare and paved over by the changes made in The Traveller Book (a much more common version of Classic Traveller), I'm pointing them out to folks who might have hit a wall with setting fatigue and setting bloat from the OTU.
* I'm not interested in arguing what sort of frontier we're talking about, nor the definition. I think it is clear from the context of my post my meaning.
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salochin999
SOC-13
I have a nostalgia thing for the Spinward Marches and so I stick with it and try to get it just right for me but I think your setting ideas are very good, suit the LBB feel very well and if i was new to Traveller I'd do it that way.
just sayin'
jager fury
SOC-1
Yeah, this is what I can get behind. Trying my hand at it as we speak.
...and just started a new campaign with a pair of SubSectors over the Christmas Holidays. This is completely new and set on a very small Interstellar Galactic Spiral arm of stars in a small cluster. The spiral is only a fifteen to twenty parsecs wide with about the same amount of empty space in between the spirals.
Pretty much have always run my own settings... Did Play in a 5th Frontier War Campaign from 1981-1982 and ran a 5th Frontier War Mini-Campaign early last year that went about six sessions.
Mostly I run games with just one or two subsectors. My all-time largest game was run in just five Subsectors, it was set after the collapse of the First Imperium. It was largely inspired my Isaac Asimovs' Foundation series, and the players worked at rebuilding Galactic civilization.
Pretty much have always run my own settings... Did Play in a 5th Frontier War Campaign from 1981-1982 and ran a 5th Frontier War Mini-Campaign early last year that went about six sessions.
Mostly I run games with just one or two subsectors. My all-time largest game was run in just five Subsectors, it was set after the collapse of the First Imperium. It was largely inspired my Isaac Asimovs' Foundation series, and the players worked at rebuilding Galactic civilization.
Minor point of order, the mail contract is for dedicated space set aside, whether there is or not, for subsidized merchants running a regular route and schedule that is government-funded.
It helps the player who is building the small starter merchant corp, not Tramp Trader.
Many people do not know that mail contracts subsidized a lot of passenger trains in the US, and when the US mail finally started going to an exclusive truck and air mix, the passenger network largely collapsed and thus an impetus for Amtrak.
As for Library Data/wiki type knowledge, I use a knowledge roll against Education for general items, + skill for certain questions.
Players will pay much closer attention when they have paychecks and/or bullets incoming that hinge on that information.
It helps the player who is building the small starter merchant corp, not Tramp Trader.
Many people do not know that mail contracts subsidized a lot of passenger trains in the US, and when the US mail finally started going to an exclusive truck and air mix, the passenger network largely collapsed and thus an impetus for Amtrak.
As for Library Data/wiki type knowledge, I use a knowledge roll against Education for general items, + skill for certain questions.
Players will pay much closer attention when they have paychecks and/or bullets incoming that hinge on that information.
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