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The player locations will determine the coverage of the different levels of detail. The higher level detail constrains the lower level detail to conform. There are four levels of campaign prep that a game master should work through in order.Įach level contains slightly more resolution detail than the one above but also has a smaller initial preparation area. I didn’t feel like doing the latter so over a period of forty years I evolved a way to define large regions of space from a “what is interesting to players?” point of view that, when you zoom down to a star system still has the old traveller basic numerical descriptions in place so that the other systems still work as designed. One of the things to note is that the purely mechanical value set for planets did integrate into some broader mechanisms that have an impact on the player’s general play routines, especially if they did any interstellar trade, so simply declaring things to be one way or another by game master fiat could lead to mechanical breaks in the system.Īny system of campaign creation would need to leave much of the Traveller nuts and bolts in place or create a whole new system of handling trade and economics. Have a look at the Traveller Map for a truly impressive example.Ī number of GMs longed for more detail within a star system and they were rewarded with Book 6: Scouts which contained a method for generating the other planets and features of a star system.Īll in all these mechanisms lead to a lot of work, a lot of which would not get used, and which didn’t really create much in the way of a sense of a real universe or interesting situations for the players to play in. Interestingly mapping the Imperium in technical detail outstripped the adventures that seem to have been played within it.
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The Third Imperium campaigns eventually provided more in the way of a big picture but the star systems had to conform more to imperial structure and there was still a sense of vacuum for a new game master to fill somehow.
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This actually did happen but it was a lot of work. This lead to a standard approach of rolling up sectors randomly and plonking players into them hoping that a game would evolve around them. There was some intent that the game master should tweak to taste but no mechanism for handling interactions and influences between star systems, allowing for the idea of a “nation” that covers many star systems for example. For that planet roll up its physical characteristics and let them modify the social characteristics of population, government type, tech level and law level. For each system randomly determine a star port class (A through E, and X for none) that then modifies the one planet in the system we care about. Print a sector grid, roll the presence of systems in the hexes. The methodology itself is aimed at creating interesting role play situations while limiting the amount of preparation the game master needs to do for each session.Ĭlassic Traveller presented a simple mechanism for generating the worlds for play. This article will start to provide you with a basic development structure that provides a way of making wide ranging Traveller campaigns, spanning large regions of space and including many astro nations, alien species, conflicts and ancient mysteries, star systems with many planets and complex economic and social systems, all while retaining Traveller’s core world/star port mechanics. At the same time the planets themselves and the star systems end up being a little lacklustre, the Scouts supplement notwithstanding. However, if you want to create a large scale setting where space nations covering territories of a hundred parsecs across and intergalactic friction between them, then as a game master you have to do a titanic amount of detail prep to determine what space nations emerge that are consistent with the star system detail.
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This procedural generation mechanic basically produces isolated worlds with some trade and travel mechanism between them that you can build a bigger picture on to. In the Traveller RPG, if you are creating your own setting rather than an existing one such as The Third Imperium, you use the classic mechanism of taking a blank sector sheet, populating it with stars and generating the planets. This is a Low Prep RPG Philosophy article.