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Post by Forresst on May 30, 2013 13:12:57 GMT -8
Hey guys!
I'm about to start up a game of Traveller with some excited players. my idea was to take some foundation elements of Firefly (because everyone loves Firefly), and change it a whole lot, to arrive at a new world with a familiar feel.
I thought up a historical timeline where the people of earth split off into three big empires as they spread out through space. One is more militaristic, one is more idealist/explorer... y and one is pure greed and capitalism. Of course, if they were stuck together with finite borders there'd be all-out war all the time but hey, space is big! So there's a whole lot of grey zones in between the three.
My big plan is to have the characters basically run around and discover stuff. There's a bunch of interesting people with big plans all over the place. I don't want to bog them down with a ship mortgage, but they're gonna have to find fuel to keep rolling, and jobs to get some money, and so on. So, I figure they'll be willing to do a little legwork. And I trust these players to not become deer in headlights searching desperately for rails that my one group of primarily WoW players became.
I won't ask if anyone's run a Firefly-esque game because it seems to me enough people must have to warrant someone making a Firefly system. But I guess what I'm mostly looking for is... maybe, tips or tricks or pitfalls to absolutely avoid so I don't end up being a Joss Whedon cover band. Whaddya got for me?
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Post by Kainguru on May 30, 2013 13:26:09 GMT -8
Well you shouldn't panic cause Firefly is sooooo much like Traveller - and the theories abound. Really one could say Firefly is the cover band to Traveller. If you have, what sounds to me like, a big sandbox drop plot hooks blatantly and let them choose. If its important as a clue use props - when you hand that letter with important info in to the player physically they get it : 'this is important we should pay attention'. The other thing with Traveller is the use of Patrons - they can set your nefarious crew on course to adventure. Using Firefly the Doctor Tam, River, Shepard Book and Inara start out as textbook Patrons buying passage (or in Inara's case leasing the shuttle). A big difference between yours and Firefly is Firefly is after the war - yours is very much a set of wars waiting to happen. Very much like Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century - skirmishes have happened but at some point someone will light the powder keg and it'll all go up (the PC's maybe - discovering a secret military build up which may have been purely defensive but on being discovered the other factions treat it as a threat and commit to making a pre emotive strike) Aaron
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Post by Forresst on May 30, 2013 14:00:29 GMT -8
Yeah, I've definitely got a couple of big name NPCs from each empire running super dangerous political/spy/big gunfight games with the other empires. This isn't like "well there's only so much space out there" or nothing, but the attitude of "we could waste our time trying to kill you all, or we could just expand outward nearly infinitely and leave you all in the dust, suckas" is really tempered with "we'd be lonely if there was only 5 of us", I think. I love patrons, both the customer kind and the old latin kind. There's a bunch of those types hangin' out doing things too. And there's a cool secret if they decide to go far beyond the edges of the empires (which is hard, they're big). And a cool other secret if they decide to go visit the husk of earth. I'm super excited
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Post by The Northman on May 31, 2013 4:53:37 GMT -8
One of the things I've done to facilitate plot hooks in more tech-based settings is to literally have a contract kiosk for legitimate work. Obviously you'll have to rely on 'that one bar,' and contacts to come up with less-than-legal options, but putting a collection of hooks in one place is a good way to at least get things started for a star-faring game.
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Post by Forresst on May 31, 2013 13:52:13 GMT -8
Oooh! That's a GREAT idea! Like a "Bounty Booth". .... @_@
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Post by Forresst on Jun 5, 2013 17:41:44 GMT -8
Oh, man. I am now officially not worried at all about this game. I casually told my players after the character gen to maybe think up a little bit more meat on their shiny new characters' histories. So far, in response, I've gotten a two-page tragedy that would be worth turning into a movie if I had those skills, and a hilariously dry spy thriller comedy.
This game is gonna be aweosme.
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HyveMynd
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Dirty hippie, PbtA, Fate, & Cortex Prime <3er
Posts: 2,273
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Post by HyveMynd on Jun 5, 2013 19:32:44 GMT -8
Glad to hear you're no longer worried about the game forresst. One thing that popped into my mind when reading your set up was "Why haven't these different empires begun open war?" You mentioned that if all three of them were confined to a small space there'd be all-out-war, but why hasn't that happened already, or why isn't that currently happening? Is distance a factor? Are things just too far away to bother? Are the empires actual empires, with borders and armies and whatnot? Or are they more of a loose grouping of like minded people? Like the closer you get to the center of Empire A the more militaristic the people get, but there's a smooth transition of ideals when you move closer to Empires B and C.
I'm thinking of the Eclipse Phase setting, which is fucking awesome. Transhumanity has covered the solar system, dividing itself into groups according to beliefs. The Inner System is corporate-controlled, with people believing that there should be some form of central government who regulates commerce and protects its citizens. People who contribute to society, by working, are given rights and protection. The Outer System is Anarchist-controlled. People out here believe that individuals should be in charge of themselves, and that you should be basically allowed to do whatever you want. The only police force is mob rule, meaning that individuals who cause too much trouble are going to find their neighbors at their doors with pitchforks and torches. The space around Jupiter is a third faction, and has basically cut itself off from the rest of the solar system. They fundamentally disagree with the use of technology the rest of transhumanity has embraced, and strictly regulate all travel to and from its space.
Anyway, the creators of that setting have done a really great job presenting how these three factions interact with each other (or don't). I recommend checking it out and brainstorming how the different empires in your Traveller game deal with wach other.
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Post by jazzisblues on Jun 6, 2013 5:07:40 GMT -8
Glad your players are on board sounds like a very good set up to me. In answer to your original question, trite? No it isn't trite. Tropic? Yes it draws from several tropes which I think is a good thing. I am very much a fan of tropes.
Good luck with your game, very much looking forward to hearing about it.
JiB
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Post by Forresst on Jun 6, 2013 11:38:46 GMT -8
Hyve, the biggest reason there isn't open warfare among the different empires is really a question of logistics. Each empire is focused mainly on expansion, and it's WAY easier to go outwards, take over (so-far) uninhabited planets with little to no effort, and build ever more wealth into their respective economies. It's just like the economic realities of war here on earth, but on an exponential scale. None of the empires have done anything so overtly hostile to any other to cause a war, and barring some massive slight, it's not worth the money. No particular planet has appeared yet with resources significant enough to fight over either.
I have a whole little writeup of the way the empires developed that I purposely stopped thinking on about a thousand years or so before the characters' adventure starts. My one player is Chinese, and was very enthusiastic about picking the empire vaguely descended from current-day China to come from. He's already given it a name, "The Galactic Communist Realms Union". I coulda never thought of that.
He also took his character from a seeming joke in mechanical gen to a fabulous tragic hero with 2 pages of backstory. I'm excited. I asked for his permission to post it here. He's alright with it. Check this out:
雪飛乞兒王粦七 – Lun Chut, Hobo Marquis of Sufei
窮人十三區 Kung Yun Sub Sam Kui (Poverty Zone 31) used to be a beautiful place called 雪飛 Sufei (Drifting Snow). Although there was always strife between the people and the governing Imperial Lun Court, the reformed Imperial system was a breath of fresh air amid the rest of the Galactic Communist Realms Union. The people earned what they worked for and an individual’s success derived from their effort, in contrast to the communistic government of the Union.
Sadly, it wasn't long before the neighboring planets caught on to the news of a renegade monarchy. For years, there was a cold war between the Union Republic Planetoids and Fei Sut Sing's Lun Court. Espionage, corruption and information trade supplanted the laws and rules set by the Court. In 2540, an invasion finally broke out, heralding the hostile takeover of Sufei by the Republic. Republic scientists unleashed their latest invention, a frost bomb, into the planet's atmosphere, turning most of the surface into a frigid wasteland within days.
Most of the civilians froze and starved. The Imperial Court evacuated them as fast as they could, but their transports were shot down in orbit by Republic forces. At the end of the week, those survivors left have given up all will to live, leaving them ready for Republic subjugation. The landing forces raised pre-manufactured towns called Cage Villages to house the newly enslaved civilian workers, while more educated talents were escorted back to the other planetoids to work for the Republic. The closed- off, climate controlled bubbles of the Cage Villages dominate the surface. Very little outside of them is still habitable. Collectively, these became the Republic foothold called Cage City, with the people of Kung Yun Sub Sam Kui now locked within.
Outside the city, the planet’s surface is a harsh place. There are settlements here and there, but they are impoverished places with no access to the technologies or resources they came to depend on in the imperial days. The Union Republic rounded up all of the Lun court to one of the villages in the outskirts of Cage City. They were then convicted of treason in show trials and systematically executed. Lun Gao, the youngest imperial son, made a desperate attempt to save his lineage by bribing Republic men to smuggle his wife and his seventh and youngest child out of Cage City the night before his execution. This effort was doomed. The Republic officials sold the details of the family’s escape plan to mercenaries hired to enforce the Republic’s extermination order. They tracked them down to the Grey River and a bloody battle ensued.
Gao's wife, Yung, had foreseen this, and developed an eleventh-hour counterstrategy. Without even having to ask, one of the fiercely loyal Imperial Guard willingly offered his son as a decoy. The actual Imperial legacy was encased in a protective cocoon and flushed into the city's sewer filtration system shortly before the rest of the family arrived at the Grey River, where the agents captured and executed Yung and the baby.
The baby, Lun Chut, had nothing but an imperial data seal embedded into his cornea. The seal contains information regarding his lineage, and the story of how his parents sacrificed everything to ensure his survival as a last attempt to keep the empire alive. The protective shell drifted for days, eventually washed ashore near the industrial district, where it was found by the community. At first, when the people saw the imperial seal in Chut's eyes, they erupted in rage. Some people wanted to leave the child to starve, as they wanted nothing to do with the Empire. But others saw this as an opportunity to have a home-grown Imperial that could march back into the Republic Capital, and take back the people's lands, hopes, and dreams.
Chut was raised in the lowest of the slums in Zone 31. The slums are frigid, and most of the inhabitants live in underground tunnels that they dug with simple tools for years. Blood related families are actually quite rare, but the scattered people are forced to rely on each other for survival. As Chut got older, the community taught him the ways of the now-Republic-dominated world. He learned what it used to be, and what his people need from him. Even at a young age, he proved to be a resourceful young man, despite his constant bad luck. At 9 years old, Chut was exploring the tunnels when they suddenly collapsed. After the rescue group unburied him, they had found that his contact with the chemically bombarded soil created an odd disease that caused his brain to freeze and slow down to the point of death. The community used their best minds to put together a temporary cranial device that revives Chut every time the symptoms appear, but it taxes on his health greatly to this day.
Time and time again, bad luck befell young Chut, but he survived, and even thrived through all these trials. Internally, he believed that each trial prepared him to be a stronger leader for his people when their fated day comes to retake the planet. For years, Chut helped the people dig the tunnels; he linked the catacombs of the slum he lived in to all the other inhabited slum towns around the surface. They had a plan to connect their catacombs to Cage City's sewage, where Chut drifted as a baby. Oddly, he would be reconnecting with his roots. He used his diplomatic skills to rally the people. They taught him their cultures and customs, language dialects, and arts. They believed in him. And on his 30th birthday, the people marched.
Heavily reliant on technology, the Republic was taken by surprise when the mob of thousands of drifters, scavengers and tunnel dwellers rose up from under the soil of Cage City's foundation. Armed with a low tech arsenal full of melee weapons, home-made ordinance, and pure unadulterated rage, the people stormed the capital. Just as the Royal Court fell in a matter of days all those years ago, the Republic was crushed in less than a week. Not willing to repeat the crimes of his enemy, Lun Chut told the Republic officials that he would let them live, albeit in shame. Shuttles packed full of Republic personnel were sent off to the neighbouring planetoids, with a warning.
"Don't fuck with us again."
For now, it's going to be busy days ahead for Lun Chut. Rebuilding an empire is hard work, but he's with family this time.
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Post by Forresst on Jun 6, 2013 11:41:34 GMT -8
(p.s. I'm told the name Lun Chut is pretty silly, it's kind of like being called Dick Cox in english. His answer? He got his personal name from the angry hoboes who found him as a baby.)
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