Traveller is an endlessly fascinating game to explore in the 2020s. Its first release was only three years after Dungeons & Dragons, but unlike D&D, which really is just a name and a couple of archetypes attached to a number of very different games, the revised 2nd edition Traveller from Mongoose has changed very little from Classic Traveller. Even though there have been about as many different edition over the last 48 years. And like D&D is sticking to some mechanical elements because they are traditional, even though their original purpose hasn’t existed for over 30 years, Mongoose Traveller is sticking to some terminology even when it’s completely outdated by now. While Traveller is presented specifically as a generic sci-fi game about characters who own and operate a small private cargo ship, and the rulebooks of the various editions come with no description of an assumed default setting, fans have long recognized that, just like the earliest edition of D&D, there is actually a lot of worldbuilding being done in the tables and character options. If you don’t alter the tables and mechanics to make the rules fit the world you have in mind for your own campaign, they do reveal quite a lot about the default assumptions that probably seemed obvious and not requiring any explicit mention at the time of writing almost 50 years ago.
The first thing where I noticed it is with the types of armor. One of the basic types of body armor is “flak jacket”, which comes at the standard Tech Level 7 version and the improves TL8 version. Flack jackets were an early type of modern body armor common in the Vietnam War and introduced in the early 50s. So a TL5 technology. The flak jacket can be seen as an ancestor of modern (TL7) ballistic armor. But calling those flak jackets is like calling a modern car a motor carriage. In the mid-70s, this was an appropriate term to use. I don’t know if sticking with it was a deliberate choice or ignorance on the side of the most recent writer, but I do find it quite endearing. Maybe the world of Traveller is so retro-futuristic now that they actually do have flak jackets in space?
Another thing that had been puzzling me for a while is with some of the Trade Codes. They have names like “Industrial”, “Poor”, “Ice-capped”, or “Non-Agricultural”, that seem like they would be entirely self-explanatory. But creating some planets and checking which Trade Codes apply to them, I found it weird to see some codes applying to worlds where I think they don’t fit, or planets not qualifying to a code that I think they really should have. “Industrial” is the one that stands out the most. Somehow none of the homeworlds of the big shipbulding species and their major factory worlds did qualify for being “Industrial”. Either their population was too small, or their atmosphere wasn’t one of the correct types. So let’s flip the question around: What conditions are required to have an Industrial World.
As it turns out, the planet must have a population of at least 1 billion people. So just having a planet whose economy is dominated by heavy industry is not enough. It has to be industry on a massive scale. And second, the atmosphere has to be either non-existent, tainted, exotic, corrosive, or insidious. Or, in all cases, non-breathable to humans.
“Why would anyone pick a planet where they can’t breath to settle a billion people?” I was asking. But that’s looking at it from the wrong side. Nobody would do that. Instead, the planet started with a population of billions of people, and then the air became unbreathable. That’s the intended meaning of an “Industrial World”.
I was born in the mid-80s. I didn’t become aware of what was going on in the world until the early 90s. I remember acid rain. I remember Forest Death. I remember lakes being covered in dead fish as far as the eye can see. I remember “wild mushrooms are radioactive”, and the latest reports of radioactive contamination in milk. Americans might remember the river being on fire 14 times in Cleveland alone. Yes, climate chance can cause a lot of damage on a global scale. But toxic pollution and it’s local and regional environmental effects before the 90s were on a level that is hard to comprehend now. The idea that a planet with a focus on heavy industry on a massive scale would be a toxic wasteland probably seemed very logical and obvious back in the mid 70s.
That’s why the industry has to be on such a massive scale of billions of people. If the population is smaller, they don’t have the capacity to poison the global atmosphere. And if air is still breathable, then it is not “industrial”, no matter how big its manufacturing sector and its output of goods is. Almost all the goods that can be found on Industrial worlds (excepts polymers and robots) can also be found on High Tech worlds. So non-apocalyptic advanced manufacturing is possible in the world of Traveller. Though High Tech means Tech Level 12 or higher. Which is very high.
This morning I was pondering a particularly stupid paradox of my views about good worldbuilding. I think most long running series of anything decay over time because the progression of the story increasingly chips away at the worldbuilding elements that made the setting interesting in the first place. Particularly when it comes to campaign settings for roleplaying games, moving the timeline forward a few years or decades always seems like a really bad development. I’ve long been thinking that my disinterest in any new Star Wars story for almost 20 years now is precisely because the Clone Wars era and the Feloniverse are set in a world that is very different from Classic Star Wars in the 80s and 90s. (Though that’s actually going back in time rather than moving ahead, but it’s still a case of being a very different setting.) When you have a story that is about dealing with a particular situation in the world, and you continue the story after that situation has been resolves, it’s not really set in the same world anymore. Which is why for example Mass Effect has nowhere to move forward after three games that establish a conflict in the first game and resolve it in the third game. The Mass Effect setting doesn’t actually have anything interesting going on in it other than the Reapers situation.
Yet how this becomes a stupid paradox is because my whole core concept about Iridium Moons as a setting to have many different stories take place in, is all about a struggle of regular people fighting back against a kleptocratic elite. It’s a setting based on a specific situation, made for stories about resolving that situation. Players are meant to contribute to a greater struggle to break the power of the oligarchy, but as I established above, I also don’t want the situation to change in any meaningful way.
“But tonight I say: We must move forward, not backward! Upward, not forward! And always twirling! Twirling! Twirling!”
But this conflict in priorities is not actually that bad, and the solution to it is really not that difficult. Instead of asking at the end of a particular story “And what happens next?”, the question should be “And what has happened somewhere else, at the same time?”
The issue with movies in particular is that the faces of the main actors are a huge part of the marketing and advertising campaign for any follow up movies. But also in videogames, stories are often written specifically to get the players attached to specific main characters. (Mostly happens in games that try to emulate blockbuster movies the most. Who would have thunk?) But it does not have to be that way. The Dragon Age games, even though they are all set one after the other with a kind of ongoing metaplot continuing through all of them, each mostly have a completely different cast of characters. As do the Fallout games or Elder Scrolls games. (Which also always advance the timeline. Why?!)
Many popular long running series are set up from the start to be about a small group of characters first, and the setting build around them to accommodate their story. Since the stories of specific characters are linear, and the characters are the main selling point of these stories, there are difficulties in adding more stories that aren’t added to the end of the latest installment. (Or in front of the earliest installment.) But when designing a world from the ground up to instead accommodate several stories of different characters happening in different places during roughly the same time period, this is a situation that is very easy to avoid. It’s a corner I really don’t have to paint myself into. I know I want to use this world in two or three campaigns over the coming years, and maybe manage to make a little Godot game or two also taking place in it. Each story can be about toppling one villainous oligarch on one of the three planet, making one big step towards the ultimate goal that I have no intention to ever see playing out.
Of course, I have the luxury of not being beholden to corporate suits who’s main priority is to monetize the face of some world famous movie stars. But then again, Fallout has been a huge success even with the continuity between stories being just fan service and not being relevant to each story. If you want to have a world that can be reused for many stories and does not change with each story, and your vision does not revolve around finishing that ultimate battle where evil is destroyed for good, then there really isn’t anything that would force you into that situation in the first place.
Magic is probably the biggest challenge with worldbuilding I’ve always had. I do like supernatural and mystic stuff, but I just really don’t care for magic spells. I always knew that I wanted to have a mystical element in Iridium Moons, but always kept that off for later. Early on in the development of the setting, when I wanted to stick to realistic physics, demographics, and economy unless necessary for a Space Opera, I had the idea that people could be trained to have a greatly heightened sense of intuition by subconsciously processing information in parallel to logical reasoning. That seems physically and biologically possible. That idea was very much inspired by the mentats from Dune.
I’ve been diving into Traveller for the last three weeks, and that game does come with a default optional system for psionic powers. It’s very generic (like everything in Traveller) and basic, and from what I’ve been reading across the internet, most people never use it in their campaigns. Even though they does exist in the official setting, psionics are super illegal in the main empire as it is very strongly associated with their main rivals as their signature power. So illegal and hidden underground, that it could just as well not exist in most campaigns, and just way more trouble than it’s worth by painting a big target on your back. I can understand that. It’s not really interesting or inspiring as written, and the most popular setting makes it even more unattractive to characters.
But last week, James Maliszewski wrote about the big impact that spiritism and Theosophy had on Pulp Fantasy. Which reminded me of the very similar story of how psychic powers became a default element of sci-fi in the 50s to 70s. Some very prominent writers and a very influential magazine editor had really high hopes in the big breakthrough in parapsychology research being just around the corner and gave it a big presence in many of the popular stories of the time. I made the deliberate choice to step away from realism and tilt fully over to straight up space fantasy and to go for a very retro-futuristic aesthetic. I think classic psychic powers are pretty much a must for that.
My still early idea for Iridium Moons is that the psionic field is a regular element of the physics of the universe and always has been, but it is usually only interacting very weakly with the electromagnetic field that controls electricity, magnetism, radiation, and atomic bonds. So weakly that it’s an almost invisible phenomenon in everyday life, and that almost no creatures have ever naturally evolved to gain any traces of psionic powers.
However, a rare mineral called midorin, that only forms naturally on planets inhospitable to life, does significantly amplify interactions between the electromagnetic and psionic fields. Midorin is a soft and brittle, pale green mineral similar to soapstone or asbestos. Many reports of mines on remote planets being haunted and miners having uncannily accurate dreams and hallucinations were traced back to traces of midorin in the rock. Near high concentrations of midorin, the mere presence of people can cause anomalous physical changes in the environment as their brain activity disturbs the psionic field, which amplified by the midorin affects electromagnetic phenomenons.
Miners working in midorin-rich rock were the first people to display signs of real telepathic abilities, that only had been considered as archaic superstition and fraud for centuries. These abilities were connected to particles of midorin dust they had breathed in and made their way into their brain. This led to the development of the synthetic drug midorinol that can be injected into a person’s brain and then be subjected to radiation that causes it to form networks of microscopic midorin crystals inside the the brain’s neural pathways. These midorin filaments then serve as an amplifying antenna between the brain’s neurons and the psionic field. Disturbances in the psionic field can stimulate reactions in neurons, making it possible to sense psionic phenomenons and activity. And in reverse, electrical activity in the brain can produce psionic waves.
Over time it became clear that only a limited number of people possess specific brain structures that make it possible to learn to use this psionic sense to manifest useful powers. And of course, with a procedure as this, there is always a considerable risk of causing significant brain damage to the subject. While midorinol is quite expensive, psionic researchers are always looking for volunteers (or other subjects) who are physiologically suited to attempt the procedure, to study the process of developing psionic powers. They will often cover the entire costs, and in some cases even pay people for agreeing to undergoing the procedure, as long as the subject agrees to be studied while undergoing training, typically for a four year period.
Psionic powers in Iridium Moons cover the aspects of telepathy, clairvoyance, and awareness (which is actually body control). Teleportation is definitely out, and I am currently leaning strongly towards excluding telekinesis as well. That still leaves quite a broad range of potential powers that characters can learn. Psionic characters are quite rare in society, but many organization manage to recruit small numbers of them into their ranks. Compared to many other magic systems, telepathic powers in Traveller are quite limited in what they can do, and psions can only use them for a few short moments before they become too exhausted to continue. Midorin compounds mixed into building materials make them opaque to psionic powers like a Faraday Cage interrupts electromagnetic signals. This makes it fairly easy to shield small spaces from psionic intrusion. Shielding individual people is also possible, but carrying psionic disrupting objects on the body for prolonged periods is disorienting and uncomfortable, as it scrambles the natural very subtle influence the psionic field has on all brains at all times. Alternatively, midorin-based drugs can suppress any psionic abilities in a person for several hours, and it is widely accepted that certain high security areas can only be entered by known psions if they take an injection. This is also commonly done for the apprehending and arresting of psions, but keeping them drugged long term without holding them in a shielded area instead is widely seen as abusive treatment of prisoners.
Yesterday, I was trying to get a sense of scale for ships in Traveller, as they are not usually measured in length but by volume. The CR90 corvette from Star Wars is fairly easy to measure for a volume estimate, having the volume of 9,000 tons of liquid hydrogen. (Relevant xkcd joke here.) With the Patrol Corvette from Traveller being 400 tons, and the tables for ship design in Cepheus Engine only going up to 5000 tons, that had me wonder how small ships in Traveller are. And how big even the smaller ships in Star Wars actually are. So I made this scale comparison for the CR90 corvette, the smallest big ship in Star Wars.
Click to embiggen.
Those are big.
The A380 might not have been a good size comparison, as these planes are gigantic. It makes a Saturn V rocket look somewhat unimpressive. So today, I made this size comparison too.
Click to embiggen.
The Iowa class is one of the biggest warships ever build. Even slightly longer than the Yamato, though not nearly as thick in the hips. Even the flimsy looking Nebulon-B frigate that disappears in the background in battles between the big hitters in Star Wars is bigger than that.
The A320 is by far the most common plane for passenger flights inside Europe. It’s the only plane I’ve ever been on, and when you look out the window at an airport terminal, almost everything is either an A320 or equivalent size. It’s volume can be approximated as a cylinder 37 meters long and 4 meters wide, plus let’s say +20% for the wings. Which comes out as 40 tons of liquid hydrogen. That’s only 40% the minimum size for a ship to install even the smallest possible Jump Drive. The classic Free Trader is a 200 ton ship. Five times as a big as an A320.
I also calculated that the Millennium Falcon would be 160 tons. That’s 4 times the volume of an A320. Can that be right?
It indeed does check out. It’s a bit sad that we never got any wide shots of it with people crawling under and over it (probably because that would be much more expensive to film), but it is a pretty big ship.
I made these sector hex maps for Traveller, Cepheus Engine, and Stars Without Number in GIMP for everyone to use. Got them in white if you want to print them out, or in black if you want to fill them out in image software. The default size in is 8 by 10 hexes, but I also made one in double width at 16 hexes wide, and if anyone wants to use it also in 12 hexes wide.
I’m also sharing the original .xcf-files if you want to fill them out or change the colors in GIMP or some other program that can open them. The files are set up with a correctly scaled grid, so if you enable “Snap to Grid” in the “View” menu, you can always fit every star perfectly in the center of every hex.
I made the maps as big as they are because GIMP gets a bit fussy when trying to color along vertical lines. If this size is impractically big and the computer’s memory complains, you can just scale them down to 50% and they will still look just as crisp. Under “Image” > “Configure Grid”, you can change the spacing to 43.31 and 50 pixels to match the new hex size.
Aside from the elaborate character creation mini-game, one of the main thing Traveller is famous for is its setting creation system. From what I remember, the system for making a map and populating it with planets is almost identical in Stars Without Number, and that was what I used for the Esekar sector map for the first version of Iridium Moons.
I now made a map for the new Foross (Sub)sector using the system from Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition. In previous posts, I already described the six primary planets of the Foross Sector. The first thing that I did was to translate these into Traveller game terms. For each trait, like planet size, atmosphere type, population scale, and so on, there is a table listing the different possible options and each of them is identified by a single character. These can then be strung together in a fixed order to create the world’s UWP code. It’s a summary of a planet’s statistic in just one 8 to 10 digit code. The first character for the size of the spaceport facilities, the next three characters for the planet’s physical traits, and the last four for the society of its inhabitants. And if you’ve been using them for long enough, you’re supposedly able to read quite a lot of information from them before even looking up the respective tables. That’s exactly the kind of RPG nerdery I can absolutely get behind.
For those Traveller nerds who are interested (I assume there might be one or two), here’s the UWPs for the six planets:
Sarhat C862733A
Kion C765734A
Palan B763695B
Meruna C8686469
Halon E9703008-A
Ataris D6A0416B
And for those Traveller players who have not read my previous planet descriptions: Yes, Iridium Moons is a pretty low-tech and low population.
The default subsector map is an 8 by 10 hex map, but since I’m not working on photocopied sheets, I went with a 10 by 8 arrangement resulting in a square map. It doesn’t affect hexagonal movement.
Each hex has a 50% chance of having stars in them, and after four attempts, I settled on this arrangement, which I quite like, and hand selected six of the stars for my planets.
Click to embiggen.
Unlike Traveller’s default Third Imperium setting, there is no such thing as scooping up raw fuel from gas planets and ocean worlds in Iridium Moons. Instead, ships must refuel at starports. It is possible to take on additional fuel as cargo to make multiple jumps without refueling stops, but this does significantly reduce a ship’s capacity to carry goods, and commercial cargo ships avoid doing this whenever possible. For this reason, new trade routes require an infrastructure of dedicated fuel stations every two parsecs to be commercially viable for cargo ships. There are currently six such station in operation in the Foross subsector.
With these stations being literally centuries old, and the subsector being heavily shaped by industrial decay, I had the idea that most of these stations would not be refining their own fuel, but instead get it delivered by giant tankers carrying thousands of tons. And at the scale of a subsector, that still has considerable local industry going on, it really would make sense to have one central refinery that is supplying all the starports and fuel stations in the area. Station 54 would be perfect for that, resulting in the addition of the seventh main planet to the setting.
Station 54 (B3305179)
This small planet (size 3) has sufficiently strong gravity to run fractional distillation and a non-toxic atmosphere dense enough to breath with regular respirators (atm 3), making it perfect for refining ship fuel. The planet typically houses over 100,000 people (pop 5), who are almost exclusively employees of the refinery (gov 1) on six months assignments. The refinerie’s starport has the capacity to service several of its giant tankers simultaneously (starport B), but lacks the equipment and staff to make major repairs (TL 9). The refinery and the starport are owned by one of the Sarantal Oligarchs from Palan.
The ancient tankers being out of commission sometimes for months has been causing huge disruptions to trade in the Foross over the last decades. Many traders and cargo captains have grown extremely concerned about the reliance on a single refinery for the subsector, and the economic damage that would result from it going out of service for more than a week or two.
Having such an obvious weak point in the aging infrastructure of the decrepit sector is just too interesting to not use, so this remains the only fuel source in the whole Foross subsector.
I also had a plan for a space station near Sarhat, and hex 62 seems like a great place to put it.
Station 62 (C000412A-A)
This old station (C000) is one of the oldest in the sector, going back to the first mining operations on Halon. Back in the early days of the Foross subsector, it served as a central trade hub where smaller mining camps from the surrounding systems would sell their ores and buy new equipment or food coming from Kion. With the closure of the mines on Halon and the depletion of many smaller mines, large scale ore and food trade has ceased on the station over a century ago. The station is now home to some 20,000 people (pop 4), and while technically being run by one of the Tauros Oligarchs from Sarhat (gov 1), it is largely under the control of several gangs (law 2). Most ships coming through the systems only make a quick stop to take on new fuel and have their crew stay close to the ship (travel code A).
The other four stations are simply fuel stations with nothing of interest going on there.
For the rest of the systems, I decided to see what the random generation rules can produce. I generated another 35 worlds (which with the help of spreadsheets and random number generation sites was fairly painless), and oddly enough, it started with giving me 7 really awesome planets that basically wrote their own descriptions, followed by 27 really boring ones and just one quirky oddity.
E3113797
A large moon (size 3) with almost no atmosphere (atm 1) or water (hydro 1). This gives it the Ice-Capped trade code to determine resource availability, so I’m making it like one of the main moons of Jupiter. It’s home to a few thousand miners (pop 3) who have split into rival factions (gov 7), but lack of access to weapons (law 9) has kept things civil so far. Unfortunately, they don’t have the technology to maintain a space habitat (TL 7) and they will probably have to leave the planet. Getting passage for several thousand people might be difficult, which is probably the reason for the hostile factionalism.
B420575E-A
A small planet (size 4) with thin and toxic air (atm 2) below freezing and no water (hydro 0). It is home to over a hundred thousand people (pop 5) who have split into competing factions (gov 7). Military weapons are banned but there’s plenty of smaller stuff around (law 5). It gets interesting with this being a an very high-tech world (TL 14) for the subsector, with a small shipyard (starport B). Not sure what’s going on here, but this has potential.
D0(2)02527-R
A space station (size 0) occupied by a few hundred people (pop 2) living under Technocratic Feudalism (gov 5) with free possession of almost all weapons (law 2), and their technology is incapable of maintaining a space station (TL 7). It was immediately clear that this is a derelict space station where everyone is under the thumb of the last engineer who maintains and controls what is left of the life support systems. Being the third world I generated, I made a mistake and rolled for an atmosphere, even though size 0 and 1 worlds don’t have any and everyone has to live in artificial habitats. However, since the low tech level indicates the station can not be properly maintained, and the atmosphere I rolled (atm 2) is “thin and toxic”, this is just way too good not to use it! Not only is the station going to shit, it’s already so shit that you can’t leave the living quarters without respirators. Given the circumstances, I also gave the place Travel Code Red. This is all one big nightmare.
XA645374
A large planet (size 10) with a hot but normal atmosphere (atm 6) and some small seas (hydro 4). Home to several hundred thousand people (pop 5) ruled by an hereditary elite (gov 3), allowing no guns (law 7). It has no ship landing facilities at all (starport X) and the original Tech Level I rolled was stone age (TL 0). Though it’s hot and has little water, it does qualify for the Agricultural trade code, which means visitors can pick up wood, textiles, live animals, biochemicals, uncommon raw materials, and luxury consumables. I like the idea of crops being grown in underground caves where it’s cooler and moist.
Option A is to take this as it is, and make it a new alien species native to this planet. Option B is to raise their Tech Level up to 4 and make them something like Fremen, because this is already totally Dune! With the crazy plants being grown underground and the outside being a desert, nobody might know about them except the locals. And with the way space travel works, you can’t just follow the one trader that is selling these new exotic plants to learn where he gets them. Great potential.
E8432008
Earth-sized planet (size 8) with a thin, hot, and slightly toxic atmosphere (atm 3) and little water (hydro 4). It is home to a few hundred people with very basic starport facilities (starport E, TL 8). Since they are so few and the planet has no special resources, I default to them being a small independent mine. With the air being thin, hot, and slightly toxic, I had the idea that their settlement is high up in the mountains, where the temperature is not as deadly and the toxic gases are low enough to be okay with just a respirator. Not sure what interesting things might happen here, but the environment is neat.
E6601006
Mid-sized planet (size 6) with a standard atmosphere (atm 6), very hot temperatures, and no water (hydro 0). On it there are a dozen or so people (pop 1) with no government (gov 0) or weapon restrictions (law 0), and they have no digital technology (TL 6) or the means to survive for long, but a basic landing site (starport E). Must have crashed their ship here. Is this Pitch Black?
D7C156A7
Mid-sized planet (size 7) with highly corrosive atmosphere (atm C), a brutal heat (17 on a scale from 2 to 12+) and very little water (hydro 1). Under these conditions, we get large lakes of petrochemicals and precious metals. There are hundreds of thousands of people living on this planet (pop 5), but they are being controlled by a hostile outside power (gov 6). They have no weapons (law 10) and their Tech Level (TL 7) is three levels to low to survive in this environment. This is obviously some kind of brutal prison world like Chronicles of Riddick.
X7880000-A
A mid-sized planet (size 7) with a dense atmosphere (atm 8), temperate climate, and a lot of water (hydro 8). Other than Meruna, it’s the only planet in the subsector that qualifies for being a Garden World. And it is completely uninhabited. Why is that? Certainly should have Travel Code Amber.
The other worlds are all very nondescriptive and don’t bring up any inspirations. Since 16 worlds is way more than I would think I’d ever need, with the three largest being home to several colonies and stations each, I decided to just erase some of the stars from the map that were particularly densely packed. Maybe I leave the remaining 25 stars blank until I have need of them. There is already so much here to work with.
