Can you talk more about this? ...
Hey there, thanks for the interest. And thank you for your CT blog, great stuff!!
I think if I start with character generation first it will lay the groundwork for the world building. That's sort of how we did it, anyway.
First off, we were playing MgT 2e, with many books from MgT 1e available, mainly for the career and life events tables (because they're D66 rather than 2D) and the Spica Publishing career books have a lot of wonderful options. Also, after many years of playing Trav, I've developed a few simple tables of my own: birthplace and upbringing, expanded SOC levels (the Emperor is 33 (Z) for instance) and a Drifter/Draft table that can land you in a noble's personal army, or maybe as a scavenger, or maybe you get job as a grease monkey at the starport. So not as clean (some might say terse) as CT char gen, but we wanted to be surprised as we worked thru Session 0.
The players could choose any career as usual and could make up anything they liked and it went on the map - unless it was panned by the other players or myself. No one went Navy so the naval bases were "over there" back towards where "humanity originally colonized this area from" - probably there were a few recruitment offices here and there but no naval bases on the map. We didn't know what it would mean but it seemed cool. Basically one subsector was civilized, with a tenuous, subsidized route back toward the Core Worlds, the two adjacent were where the action was happening, and the final, diagonally located one was basically unexplored territory.
We had a Scout, Agent, Merchant and Scientist. So we had four birth worlds, a Scout Base, a corporate entity (I used Barracai Technum), another corporate entity (the player came up with Quasar Astronomics, specializing in sensors and nav gear) and some kind of university or research institution. A blank map is a tough space sometimes so for all those elements we threw d4+D8+d10 to place them in a given subsector. They were pretty spread out and I was nervous at first but we still had all of char gen to go.
The scientist wanted to be from an Ag world who made it good on a hi-tech world. Which was great, she placed both an Ag planet and a Hi Tech one (I would place at least one Industrial world somewhere on purpose if we didn't discover one, but we did). Her university was on the hi tech planet itself but an event mentioned travel and she said what about a companion planet? So the hi tech planet had settled its system, or at least one other body in it.
Those 1e books gave us a couple things, too. A merchant event gave an opportunity to work with pirates. I recall the Agent being sent to some kind of special training facility. The Scout uncovered a ring of spies within his branch. All this generated people and places, a sort of timeline, which we were tying together as we went.
Later, the Scout mustered out and became a Cosmonaut for a term (Spica Pub again), working at a starport. An event had him coming across an illegal arms shipment but he failed his Deception roll and gained an Enemy. That was what made it all click. Everyone mustered out at that station (which happened to be the hi tech world's starport... and off we went.
Well, not quite. Four characters, four terms each and we had a fairly well fleshed out quadrant and a handful of NPCs, all of which the PCs knew intimately. But there were some areas that still needed development when we called it quits for the session. So we had a Session 0.5 after I fleshed things out a bit, wove it all together and ran the trade lanes (yep, used the old spacelane rules - cheers!). But that was mostly email and a few phone calls and a little bit of housekeeping at the start of the first adventure session.
In terms of the over-arching setting, it was quite inspired by your essays on the universe of CT. "The Man Who Would Be King" is a favorite film of mine, and that was sort of what this was - a declining colonial area, the law is still there but weaker as you go rimward, noble houses fighting over the scraps while sleek, wealthy megacorps quietly usurp and gain real power. And we did have an outlying area where humanity never reached that was completely unexplored save for long range scans. You know, just in case
Humanity at TL 11 average, TL13 max. No aliens. But the big McGuffin of course was discovering an ancient alien site. Not THE Ancients, one of my own design. But honestly the campaign didn't need it. The players were really invested and the backstory you get from char gen is full of hooks, and the little intrigues we came up, all that with was plenty of fodder for adventure. I just had it in my back pocket to keep the biggest gears slowly turning in the background, dropping a clue here and there, to help give the sense of the universe being alive.
And now we're working on the same idea for a D&D campaign. I drew up about three paragraphs to describe the basic world and my pitch and now we're populating the map based on character backstories.
I'm sure it would work in an OTU campaign as well, if you're willing to squint a little at canon. Looking at you, District 268!
Thanks again for the interest. Best sandbox I've ever run - because it was truly ours, not me just making stuff up
