What Kind of Sports Leagues Are In the Third Imperium?

[AlHazred]

So, I'm working on material for the third (and possibly final) "season" of my Traveller Hero game. At the end of "last season," the Fifth Frontier War had just broken out as they arrived on Regina.

Among other ideas for scenario seeds, I thought an interesting job prospect would be rescuing a sports team from a planet that is thought to be behind the front lines. So, I went looking for sports franchises in the Third Imperium milieu, but there's very little canonical.

JTAS 11 - "The Atmospheric Re-entry Kit":

• Personal Re-Entry Kit: There are many re-entry clubs in the Imperium, organized similarly to the parachute clubs that existed on old Terra. Most clubs are part of the Imperium-wide Inter-Sector Re-entry Association. Judges are assigned by the ISRA to preside over the various meets held by the clubs. The type and quality of re-entry kits used by these meets is also regulated by the ISRA.

DRAGON 86 - "Interstellar Athletes" (non-canonical):

• Z-G (Zero-Gee) Ball: An anti-grav sport played on worlds of tech level B+. It consists of two four-man teams in light plastic armor, a four-kilogram steel ball, and an enclosed null-grav court.
• Slaughtersphere: A more violent form of Z-G ball which uses a ten-kilogram steel ball. Slaughtersphere is illegal in most areas, and private enterprises are often the only sponsors of such teams.
• Lightracquet: A racquetball-like sport played on worlds of tech level D+. The ball is replaced by a holographic image and light trail. The racquet is a light sensor/refractor that sends the hologram ball off in the desired direction. The walls perform the same functions as the racquet.
• Gladiatorials: Highly illegal on some worlds, gladitorial combat is a way of life on others, particularly on low-tech worlds. High-tech worlds that allow gladitorials sometimes pit men not only against other men or animals but also against robots. Robot-versus-robot combat is also popular on many worlds, the contestants remotely controlled by the players.
• Magnaball: Magnaball consists of an enclosed, magnetic-flux court (some varieties allow for the use of an outdoor court), padded uniforms for the players, and a two-kilogram steel sphere. Gauntlets are provided which can control magnetic fluxes sufficiently to attract or repel the ball, and the court can generate random magnetic “bottles” to alter its flight.
• Hyperball: A variant of magnaball played on worlds of tech level D+. Hyperball equipment differs from that used in magnaball; a set of plastic body armor with reflex-enhancing bionic relays, effectively doubling one‘s speed as though they were taking slow drug, is worn by all players.

I also know a lot of people used FASA's Grav-Ball game with their Traveller Universes, but that's non-canonical. Also, there's the Psionic Games, but those are pretty much of no interest to staid Imperials, and wouldn't work with my scenario idea.

Of the options listed, the most exciting one is the Personal Re-entry Kit clubs, but it's not exactly a sport. Grav-ball also has some interesting potential.

Are there any other references to sports leagues and/or franchises in Traveller canon or third-party products? Does anyone have any sports team logos they made up for their own games they'd be willing to share?

 

[Nightwind1]

I've included a version of pod-racing IMTU.

 

[nobby-w]

Q...

I suppose you could have a game where players rode around on modified grav-powered janitorial equipment chasing a grav-powered ball with an A.I. programmed for evasive manoeuvres.

Nah, that'd be silly. Noone would read that ...

 

[epicenter00]

Of the options listed, the most exciting one is the Personal Re-entry Kit clubs, but it's not exactly a sport.

There's mention made in TNE under its entry for PRKs that they're used for recreational uses as well, where the foam of the re-entry shield is used to burn in various spectacular colors (probably very brightly). The Traveller universe also contains men (and boys).

At this point, machismo takes over and various daredevil (and sometimes fatal) stunts are done. Eventually rules are developed and objective scoring criteria set up. At this point, it's a sport.

It might be like olympic diving today; athletes would be rated on how "clean" their entry is, or how many "bounces" you could do against the atmosphere before actually making your final entry (similar to spins or flips) without actually screwing up your re-entry. Contestants might manually rock their re-entry cradles while making re-entry to make it corkscrew. The consumable PRK foam shield colors are not the same across the entire shield. So by making one area of the shield burn you could produce different colors. By utilizing various spins or rocking motions, you could get combinations of colors to mix and make new ones or sequences of colors that are particularly pleasing. And of course, they'd be rated on how close to the target spot on the surface they could land. After people start faffing around too long, time limits between release from your starship and when you hit the ground would be instituted. Equipment allowed would be standardized (for instance, for the sake of safety everyone would be required to wear a TL14/15 grav-belt so they can make re-entry even without the PRK.

There might be other variations, like synchronized team PRK re-entry events where the teams try and set-up and execute coordinated re-entry setting up patterns of diamonds and so on which fold and unfold like flowers, spin, fly apart, then back together again. The contestants might be required to do this without communications with their team-mates, relying only upon a clock and their own skills (and practice). Scoring would be done by the daring nature, complexity of their presentation, and their coordination.

The sport might be watched by thousands on the ground, who only really need to look up at the sky.

 

[Meteoric Assault]

You know ... I thought the game pyramid on the RDM BSG was original... I could see sports being tweaked.... and modified into unusual combinations..

 

[GypsyComet]

I think you'll find most of the same sports we see today at some regional level, and in wilder variation. Most of the ball based sports are going to need changes to work under lower G conditions.

 

[ovka]

I suppose you could have a game where players rode around on modified grav-powered janitorial equipment chasing a grav-powered ball with an A.I. programmed for evasive manoeuvres.

Nah, that'd be silly. Noone would read that ...

LOL!!! :rofl: I laughed so hard my family is staring at me like I'm crazy.

I was thinking of a team sport similar to the academy events they used in the book Ender's Game. It's kind of a high-tech capture the flag in a zero-g environment. Participants wear special suits and carry pseudo-laser rifles that immobilize body parts when the laser shots hit the suit.

Cheers,

Baron Ovka

 

[Condottiere]

Misjump roulette - radical sport where pilots keep using a starship with an unmaintained jump drive, until something unusual happens.

 

[Meteoric Assault]

I suppose you could have a game where players rode around on modified grav-powered janitorial equipment chasing a grav-powered ball with an A.I. programmed for evasive manoeuvres.

Nah, that'd be silly. Noone would read that ...

Well done...

 

[Ran Targas]

No racing? There's a whole new environment to exploit for high speed excitement, SPACE! For the ultra rich there's solar sailing and for the beer swilling masses there's modified shuttle racing! Pretty much any kind of vehicle racing on Earth today could find an analog in the 3I.

IMTU I've created a trans-Empire racing league for highly modified non-jump capable 100 tonners crewed by a pilot, nav, and engineer like the deep sea racers of today.

All three have to roll at every major point in the route to maintain their trajectory or engine power. Getting a little behind and want to exceed engine output by 15%, the engineer rolls. Want to skip off an atmosphere to change course without burning too much fuel, the pilot rolls. Need a faster route through an asteroid field, the navy rolls. And because these are high performance ships, there's lots of break downs and glitches that occur.

Throw in some nasty co-competitors, demanding sponsors, or other drama and you have a campaign that can last as long as you want it to.

 

[Supplement Four]

ROLLERBALL!

 

[Garnfellow]

I would imagine elemental sports like wrestling, track and field, boxing, and fencing would all be around.

I think there's a passage in GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars on the state of sports in the Terran Confederation -- I think baseball and soccer still endure. I also think there's something about Vilani sports, which are all team-oriented.

Isn't there a Vilani equivalent of golf?

Aren't the Ithklur crazy for baseball?

 

[ovka]

Maybe this was ATU, but I think I remember reading something about yacht racing requiring stops at various places in the Spinward Marches.

Cheers,

Baron Ovka

 

[Condottiere]

Brockian Ultra-Cricket is a curious game which involves suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away. "Let's be blunt, it's a nasty game," says The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Mice love this game.

While a complete list of rules has only ever been assembled once (and the book containing the assembled rules promptly collapsed into a black hole,) some of the rules are as follows:

Rule One: Grow at least three extra legs. You won’t need them, but it keeps the crowds amused.
Rule Two: Find one extremely good Brockian Ultra Cricket player. Clone him off a few times. This saves an enormous amount of tedious selection and training.
Rule Three: Put your team and the opposing team in a large field and build a high wall around them. The reason for this is that, though the game is a major spectator sport, the frustration experienced by the audience at not actually being able to see what’s going on leads them to imagine that it’s a lot more exciting than it really is. A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far less life affirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.

 

[Ulsyus]

I suppose you could have a game where players rode around on modified grav-powered janitorial equipment chasing a grav-powered ball with an A.I. programmed for evasive manoeuvres.

Nah, that'd be silly. Noone would read that ...

Well, they say that technology advanced enough and all that...

That said, would sports have been played in the Ziru Siirka? Could they have been a sop to entertain the caste-bound masses that better enabled the Bureaux to maintain control of their domains? Would there have been professional codes with competitions within and between the Bureaux? I reckon that's more likely than a grim sport-less Orwellian expanse of stars.

 

[Garnfellow]

That said, would sports have been played in the Ziru Siirka? Could they have been a sop to entertain the caste-bound masses that better enabled the Bureaux to maintain control of their domains? Would there have been professional codes with competitions within and between the Bureaux? I reckon that's more likely than a grim sport-less Orwellian expanse of stars.

From GT: Interstellar Wars:

The Vilani play uskamsii, a game with a remarkable resemblance to golf – one uses a club outdoors to drive a small ball towards a distant target in a minimal number of shots. Vilani view the uskamsii course itself as the opponent, with the odd side effect that they prefer to stick to the same course for every game rather than trying different challenges.

* * * * *​

Team games are deliberately cooperative, possibly as an attempt to obscure the fact that one team is deliberately trying to defeat the other. The most popular such game in the Imperium is duriir, which is played on a field shaped like two wedges pointing at one another. . . . In a way, the game resembles Terran volleyball, with the distant players working the ball forward a step at a time until the player at the front can smash it towards the territory of the other team (GT: IW p. 75).

 

[SanDragon]

I suppose you could have a game where players rode around on modified grav-powered janitorial equipment chasing a grav-powered ball with an A.I. programmed for evasive manoeuvres.

Nah, that'd be silly. Noone would read that ...

QUIDDITCH!!

 

[salochin999]

1) Zero-g Fencing

started as marine and navy zero-g training then became a sport

the arena like a squash court, transparent walls for audience to watch

fighters have to kick off walls to move so is more like zero-g jousting with cutlasses with the fighters trying to strike as they pass

sometimes obstacles, bars etc are placed in the arena as well to give the fighters more to kick off

2) Mecha Fights

Started as a Vilani thing

like gladiators but with mechs

individual mechs or team based with multi-person mechs

 

[Jame]

Drunk Jump-Ball!

 

[nobby-w]

Well, they say that technology advanced enough and all that...

That said, would sports have been played in the Ziru Siirka? Could they have been a sop to entertain the caste-bound masses that better enabled the Bureaux to maintain control of their domains? Would there have been professional codes with competitions within and between the Bureaux? I reckon that's more likely than a grim sport-less Orwellian expanse of stars.

You mean competitions between the Gryffendiir bureau vs. the Slytheriin bureau?