leo knight
SOC-12
As I mentioned in another thread, I've been trying to resurect/ revamp an old setting of mine from the 1980s. At the time, "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was fresh in my mind, and the "Sky Raiders" trilogy had just come out. The central setting for the latter was the League of Suns, and I had always been struck by the failures of the League of Nations leading up to WW2. Ergo, League of Planets. I thought I'd share some of my thoughts here, partially to straighten out my own thinking, and to offer ideas for others to borrow.
I started with a list of nearby stars copied for me by the director of a local planetarium. I plotted them on a hexmap out to 5 parsecs. This seemed like enough elbow room, without getting too big to manage. I randomly rolled the major worlds, and tweaked a few here and there until I was satisfied. I largely ignored real astrophysics, but kept track of star type for dramatic effect, e.g. "The sky is red". I also left any system with a white dwarf star empty, reasoning any planets had been fried long ago. I had two major worlds, the Republic of Earth, and Panthalassa, a water world orbiting Barnard's star. Farther out, I had a pop 8 world at the near end of a small cluster, which I named Dante. The Danteans were an up and coming, aggressive culture, making territorial demands against systems in the cluster. essentially, they were my 'Space Nazis'.
Certain planets became settings when I ran "Sky Raiders", and thus have names and details. Others are still strings of numbers. I had tried to do a quick sketch of each all at once, similar to the "Pilot's Guide" supplements, but bogged down. Then, real life caught up, and I misplaced my notes. I thought they were lost for good in a move, but recently discovered them in storage.
I've been mulling things over, in hopes of getting my regular group to play Traveller again, in which case I'll have a ready, sandbox type setting for pulp style adventures.
I keep coming back to certain ideas recently. First, exploitation is common in the League. Actual chattel slavery exists, but less blatant forms like debt and 'company stores' keep billions in servitude. The standard minimum wage is 1CR per hour, thus the term credit (I stole this idea from Jack Vance). Dishonest employers find all sorts of surcharges to cheat workers of their pay. By way of comparison, in Chinese WoW 'gold miners' typically earn about $.50 an hour.
Second, genetic manipulation and selective breeding have created distinct sub-species of human. Some are still property of their creators, others are public domain.
Oops, computer time's almost up. I'll post more soon.
Enjoy!
I started with a list of nearby stars copied for me by the director of a local planetarium. I plotted them on a hexmap out to 5 parsecs. This seemed like enough elbow room, without getting too big to manage. I randomly rolled the major worlds, and tweaked a few here and there until I was satisfied. I largely ignored real astrophysics, but kept track of star type for dramatic effect, e.g. "The sky is red". I also left any system with a white dwarf star empty, reasoning any planets had been fried long ago. I had two major worlds, the Republic of Earth, and Panthalassa, a water world orbiting Barnard's star. Farther out, I had a pop 8 world at the near end of a small cluster, which I named Dante. The Danteans were an up and coming, aggressive culture, making territorial demands against systems in the cluster. essentially, they were my 'Space Nazis'.
Certain planets became settings when I ran "Sky Raiders", and thus have names and details. Others are still strings of numbers. I had tried to do a quick sketch of each all at once, similar to the "Pilot's Guide" supplements, but bogged down. Then, real life caught up, and I misplaced my notes. I thought they were lost for good in a move, but recently discovered them in storage.
I've been mulling things over, in hopes of getting my regular group to play Traveller again, in which case I'll have a ready, sandbox type setting for pulp style adventures.
I keep coming back to certain ideas recently. First, exploitation is common in the League. Actual chattel slavery exists, but less blatant forms like debt and 'company stores' keep billions in servitude. The standard minimum wage is 1CR per hour, thus the term credit (I stole this idea from Jack Vance). Dishonest employers find all sorts of surcharges to cheat workers of their pay. By way of comparison, in Chinese WoW 'gold miners' typically earn about $.50 an hour.
Second, genetic manipulation and selective breeding have created distinct sub-species of human. Some are still property of their creators, others are public domain.
Oops, computer time's almost up. I'll post more soon.
Enjoy!
This is the curse of Traveller: I look at almost everything through the lens of "how can I use this in the game?"
