Here's the next episode of THE podcast focusing on the classic Traveller RPG. Science fiction role playing at its best. In today's line up you'll see a whole bunch of ideas you can rip off for inclusion in your own games (maybe even non-Traveller games)!
Episode Lineup
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Episode Lineup
- Tircesoe Subsector: Mamaros
- Story seed: Vargrtown
- Rules Talk: Travel time
- Review: Tarsus, The world beyond the frontier
- Creature Catalog: Killeroom
- People of Interest: Dr Sali Gehansh
- Fiction: The Lost World
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Interesting to hear that you play the computers squarely pre-silicon. That level of Zeerust might bother some people but I can appreciate the logic.
ReplyDeleteRe: Multiple worlds per system, in my game I maybe had a second colony somewhere in a system for mining/prison/research needs - but for the most part, the mainworld is where all the action is. Travel across a system just takes so long for diminishing returns unless there's something really interesting worth utilising. Those second world have minimal populations - we're talking thousands at most.
Very occasionally you get a system like Sol where many other planets are colonised but that usually means it was a major races origin point (so they colonised outwards before inventing jump) or the center of a small empire during the Long Night (so, again, they colonised outwards while re-establishing themselves.)
Also, re: Vargrtown - in my game I ran with the idea of the Vargr being a minority but present on many high population worlds, kinda like a Chinatown in a major city. This isn't even vaguely supported by canon, though I would point out the whole "one of the six arch-dukes is a Vargr" thing does at least give me an opening here.
ReplyDeletePart of why I did this was a sop to my players, who I wasn't sure would go for all-human PCs - this way they got a choice of an alien if they wanted, albeit they'd still be odd. Vargr aren't too alien in that they won't require any translation issues or technological boundaries but they do think differently. In the end two players went with Vargr, both of whom had been raised on human planets.
I think it also sorta fits that the dog-descended species would get on better with the humans than the other sophonts. Part of why dogs make such good pets is that they have a lot of body language in common with humans, we can easilly read their emotions from their tails, ears, mouths and their noises. (Compare cats, who aren't exactly less emotive than dogs but have a reputation as snooty because they're harder for humans to read)