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General Interplanetary campaigns

J

jackleg

SOC-12
A few decades ago there was an article in the JTAS about setting adventures in a planetary system. No jump drives, just going from planet to planet in one system. It really did not seem to gain any traction at the time.

Now with the TV show The Expanse, it shows a story could be within one system.

Is anyone doing this for their game?
 
jackleg said:
A few decades ago there was an article in the JTAS about setting adventures in a planetary system. No jump drives, just going from planet to planet in one system. It really did not seem to gain any traction at the time.

Now with the TV show The Expanse, it shows a story could be within one system.

Is anyone doing this for their game?
Click to expand...

Are you talking about "From Port to Jump Point" in JTAS Issue 22?
https://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Journal_of_the_Travellers%27_Aid_Society_22
 
I have run several campaign set within a single system - a near future solar system campaign or three and a couple set within systems of my own design.

In my longest running episodic planet of the week campaign we went for several months within a single system because the players kept finding hooks, leads, adventures and stuff to do.

You don't even need an extended system generation system, just use our own solar system and what we know of other systems.

Decide on how many rocky planets - design them and put them on the system map. Decide how many gas giants, ice giants, asteroid belts, even companion stars and just add them to your system map.

Consider orbital habitats, space industry, tourism and the like.
 
There was another article in JTAS No 18 called "Travelling Without a Starship" by J. Andrew Keith.

It also featured setting adventures in various sites within a single system, such as a Starport Complex, a solar weather station, a manufacturing facility or a military base among others ... plenty of ideas for an adventure or a campaign there.
 
Until you get up to about a Pop 7 even one world can be a big place. Millions of inhabitants and even a touch of technology aiding transportation starts to shrink a world quickly.

But, assuming the OTU, some areas have ten thousand years of exploration, settlement, retreat, bad investments, more settlement, lost records, and off-script development just lying around waiting to be rediscovered. Even the Spinward Marches has a thousand years of Imperial history, at least another thousand between the Zhodani and Vargr, and a few touches of refugee settlementa thousand years before that...

Old O'Neils or Stanford Torus stations are hard to hide, but buffered asteroid stations or colonies, lost ground installations, or large things on cometary orbits are a staple of SF. You can also explore, with the right "ship", objects in the Oort range, centaurs, and nearby rogues. Imagine a system that, pre-contact, had gone full Lockstep with artificially heated TKOs and Oort objects. Even if the inner system is fairly boring (and it probably won't be), the deep black can keep a party busy while never leaving the same map hex.
 
This (Earth's) star system alone has 8 Planets, 4 (or more) Dwarf Planets, an Asteroid Belt (possibly 2 belts), a Cometary Belt, and more than 200 Moons. Plenty of room to run a Campaign in.
 
Consider orbital habitats, space industry, tourism and the like
Click to expand...

mining/prospecting operations, science expeditions, scout bases, survivalist colonies, religious colonies, secret corporate research projects, ecosystem reservations, original native reservations, bioresearch stations, space cadet camps, alien ghettos, elite compounds, junkyards, prisons ....

Millions of inhabitants and even a touch of technology aiding transportation starts to shrink a world quickly
Click to expand...

no it doesn't. makes it easier to get to any place you focus on, but it's still a huge place. from downtown tokyo to the middle of the outback, and from the french riviera to the calcutta slums, offers a lot of possibilities.
 
flykiller said:
no it doesn't. makes it easier to get to any place you focus on.
Click to expand...

Which is exactly the definition of "shrink" I was using. Once you don't have to deal with every mile as a personal affront to your progress, the world is getting smaller.

"A few days on a train" is much like "after a week in jump space" conceptually. You are traveling by map, as Indiana Jones and some Muppets are know to do.
 
Hi
The Expanse, Firefly, Trans Human, and Orbital 2100 are all great examples of the type of game you might want to run.
 
A list to which you can add GURPS Terradyne, Jovian Chronicles, Serenity/Firefly and possibly Eclipse Phase and Blue Planet.

For near near future there are the rather good Cyberpunk space books, Near Orbit and Deep Space.
 
GypsyComet said:
...
"A few days on a train" is much like "after a week in jump space" conceptually. You are traveling by map, as Indiana Jones and some Muppets are know to do.
Click to expand...

We really need smileys for responses. always loved the Indiana Jones red dotted lines, now I need to go look up some Muppets because, well, Muppets!
 
Mind, a distinguishing characteristic of an interplanetary campaign is that travel is potentially less safe.

In the standard model, the ships (mostly) just travel from planet, to 100D, then jump to sit safe and sound for a week until they arrive 100D from their destination and proceed to dock.

The travel to 100D isn't very long, and can be readily patrolled.

In contrast, a trip to the outer system is easily a week depending on drive speed and technology (Heplar drives suffer a fuel and thus velocity and time disadvantage here).

If you allow a modicum of "stealth in space" (for assorted values of "stealth"), then piracy is more real. Encounters are more remote, etc. Your campaign went from airline travel back down to pony express and wagon trains.

And, of course, stealth doesn't have to be actual "can't see on sensors" kind of stealth. Simply having an overworked, ambivalent, or corrupt patrol authority casting a "blind eye" on activity is stealthy. Having ships "lost in the crowd" can be stealthy, etc.

The key point, of course, is that a ship in transit is accessible and potentially vulnerable during its entire flight vs tuck "safely" away in jump space.
 
The novel "2312" by Kim Stanley Robinson has an inhabited solar system with human habitation from vulcanoid asteroids inside the orbit of Mercury out as far as the moons of Pluto. Mercury has a mobile city called Terminator that rolls on tracks at the cusp between sunrise and darkness. Venus is being terraformed, with a vast sunshade to freeze the CO2 into dry ice. This is smoothed with super zambonis and will eventually be sequestered under an artificial crust. Asteroids hollowed and spun up into habitats called terraria roam the solar system. Definitely worth a read.
 
The Canadian TV series "Starhunter" was set in our solar system. I liked how it dealt with communications time lag, and long travel times. Messages were pre-recorded videos, like YouTube. I've only seen the first season, but the twenty or so episodes visited every planet, or moons of the gas giant planets, except Venus. The main characters are bounty hunters, who travel in a crappy old retired space liner they call the Tulip.It was on Trans Utopian Lines, but the paint faded until only a few letters were left, so, Tulip. They rent it from a rich patron. The captain, Dante, searches for his son, who was abducted by space pirates called Raiders. Another crew member has ties to a shadowy group of scientists called the Orchard. They have discovered that some humans retain ancient alien genes called the Divinity Cluster. When these genes become active, they give the host anazing psionic powers.
 
leo knight said:
The Canadian TV series "Starhunter" was set in our solar system. I liked how it dealt with communications time lag, and long travel times. Messages were pre-recorded videos, like YouTube. I've only seen the first season, but the twenty or so episodes visited every planet, or moons of the gas giant planets, except Venus. The main characters are bounty hunters, who travel in a crappy old retired space liner they call the Tulip.It was on Trans Utopian Lines, but the paint faded until only a few letters were left, so, Tulip. They rent it from a rich patron. The captain, Dante, searches for his son, who was abducted by space pirates called Raiders. Another crew member has ties to a shadowy group of scientists called the Orchard. They have discovered that some humans retain ancient alien genes called the Divinity Cluster. When these genes become active, they give the host anazing psionic powers.
Click to expand...

Excellent acting and story... but the graphics were poor for the era, and laughably bad now.
 
Aramis, true. I found it in the $5 bargain bin at Target. I think that obscure, flawed books, movies, TV shows often make the best sources of inspiration. I can mine them for ideas, and most players have no idea of the source.
 
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