This is the first in a series of posts detailing a new Traveller setting I’ve been playing around with.
It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this blog, mostly because I haven’t had a lot of time to mess around with Traveller recently. A few months ago, though, I had a hard science fiction itch and I started thinking about how to scratch it with Traveller. While Traveller as a game, especially Classic Traveller, sits more on the “hard” side of things, it does rely on a handful of what I would call “magic” additions: Psionics; torch drives that break the laws of thermodynamics; and faster than light travel. Could you strip some of those things away and still have a fun and viable game? Could I do that while portraying a universe that felt gritty and realistic?
Psionics is a no-brainer. They have always felt like add-ons in the rules, and quite a few settings ignore them entirely.
Likewise, faster than light travel is a no-brainer. You pretty much have to leave it in. Without it, there’s no good way to go from system to system. There are settings that leave it out – Zozer’s Orbital 2100, for instance, does a good job of presenting a setting without FTL travel – but I’m interested in a multi-system setting. So I will be leaving jump drives in.
Which leaves the torch drives. The nature of these things isn’t really gone into in the little black books, but you can make some guesses based on the rules around them. In the little black books, they range from 1 to 6 gravities of acceleration, and they’re capable of constant use for about a month on most ships. That’s quite a bit. The bare minimum 1-G drive will take you from Earth to Mars in about half a week even when they are farthest apart. And these drives are magical, in that they produce no heat to speak of, no radiation to speak of, and consume no fuel. Later editions and custom settings sometimes go into reaction drives, but these are still magic: Tremendous performance for fairly small fuel consumption with no heat to worry about.
So I started thinking about a setting with “future realistic” maneuver drives and standard jump drives. What would that look like? Would it be fun?
Future realistic?
What I wanted to do with this is to come up with something that would appeal to the sort of people who enjoy Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets website. Something that would appeal to people who play games like Children of a Dead Earth. So the first thing wanted to do is define what it is I’m going for. This is not going to be a modern realistic setting. I don’t want this to be Traveller with Atlas rockets. I don’t want multi-year travel times. Longer travel times are fine, but I want to keep the Traveller feel of interplanetary and interstellar mobility. So I’m looking to the future. I’m looking towards propulsion systems that enable that.
Gritty, realistic universe
I’ve experimented in the past with revamping the Traveller world generation rules to make shirtsleeve worlds rare, and I’ve always enjoyed the result. One of my favorite authors is C.J. Cherryh, who takes this tack with her Alliance/Union setting, so I felt there was a lot of potential for an interstellar setting that doesn’t depend on a lot of planets where you can walk around without a space suit. The last setting I did was an attempt to reproduce the Alliance/Union setting in Traveller, using near star data to create a sector centered on the Sun, and that was really fun. I decided to basically take the exact same physical setting, and use it for this one.