This is related to my 'Fishing' Thread, where I ask for ideas on NPC driven events to provide a sort of clockwork to frame the sandbox of the Player's actions.  I don't have high hopes for this thread based on that one, but the exercise is useful for itself.

For a starting point I have the vanilla Traveller setting, the Third Imperium. This is Easy, as the books I plan to be using (Mong-Trav) are based there, and the star charts  (link? I'm too lazy to hunt it down and link it without special requests) support that well.  Due to travel times, scaling the game to cover several years of operational play is fairly easy. Thus, were I to remain in a 'pure' Third Imperium traveller setting, I have a countdown clock to a major civil war and the collapse of 'civilization', though off the top of my head the 'clock' is somewhere between six and ten years, which would imply a very long campaign or a LOT of travel.  Or both.   I am, however, not wedded to the idea at this time.

I, however, have no desire to play a straight canon game, even if I use the default time line. Maybe its too easy.

Influences: Fading Suns, Firefly/Serenity, possibly Star Wars (bear with me here...), dune

In theory any of the first three three influences may be done without significantly altering any rules.  Psychics are 'Jedi', guns are blasters, and swearing in chinese (or psuedo chinese, given that almost no one I know actually KNOWS chinese...) and so forth are simple. Ditto the noble houses and so forth from Fading suns. Even Dune isn't terribly hard to implement, aside from personal shields and whatnot (note, however: the use of the plot anvil idea that lasers plus shields equals two nukes is dumb and gone. FS did it better.). WHile Dune is an influence, actually porting elements may be too difficult directly due to the narrative driven aspect of so much of it.

This does suggest a darker, more superstitious post-scientific Traveller setting than most, more superstitious, even 'weird'. VOid Kraken weird.  The Things Between The Stars weird, so I could throw a sort of Cthulu influence in there if I wanted.

But lets peel back for a moment.

Traveller has Nobility, specifically the Imperium, which works on a sort of vague corporate/heredity fashion with a monopoly (or near monopoly) of space, influenced strongly by H. Beam Piper's Imperium.  So we can easily suggest that the Imperium is even more byzantine and omnipresent in some aspects. Noble houses, some lifted straight from FS and some less well known ones from Dune become possible, with the Imperium's nobility having a near total control over the Imperium itself but much a much less organized system of governing themselves, full of nasty infighting and flexible ideas of who gets the top seat, the Iridium Throne (because it sounds perfect anyway...).

Power within the Imperial Nobility is determined by wealth and shares of the Imperial structures (Landsraad? Senate?), with the Imperial Navy officially serving the Emperor, but actually having fractured loyalty based on which houses have the most influence within specific ships and subsector fleets.  A House Decados Noble serving as Captain of a primarily Hazat crewed ship is possible but difficulties with loyalty make it impractical. Assassinations and plots are extraordinarily common.

Anagathics remain essentially the same. However, their cost and rarity come from the absolute monopoly the current ruling House has on their production. Black Market and bootleg anagathics are rare and dangerous, with uncertain reliability. Addiction to Anagathics is deliberate rather than incidental, a design feature.  There are a lot of secrets around anagathic production.

Traveller assumes a handful of precursor races, notably the Ancients, who warred against each other and wiped eachother out long ago. The setting assumption is of course that Ancient Artifacts are 'common' to the campaign (rare in setting but available) and are a lot creepier and mysterious. Gargoyles that protect ships from inexplicable whatsits. Baroque, if you will, with Tech appearing more like magic.  Ancient conspiracies abound, potentially run from the shadows by Ancients and their enemies.  The existing conception of Ancients is tossed, if only to force players to accept that they can't just look them up online and go 'meh'.  Some of the things that lurk between teh stars are ancient warships of nearly unimaginable power.

Codes and rituals for assassinations, duelling and revenge all exist. A lot of things considered crimes by most civilizations are allowed, at least to nobles, but may have obscure rituals associated with them.  Wars of Assassins are preferred over wars with soldiers and guns for most Noble Houses.  

Organizations: Traveller Aid Society is gone, but rolls for it may instead suggest a contact or connection with various secret orders. Psychic nuns and mentats, etc. Such groups are join-able, but require a psychic class, with most orders focusing on a specific type of training. The word 'psychic' should not appear in the general lexicon of characters.

Among ordinary characters, houses and orders and all of that is largely a distant and dangerous 'other'. Life on the fringes is wild, few worlds have strict rules about personal weapons (while larger stuff tends to be restricted to members of powerful organizations...). The sort of free wheeling 'every man for himself' attitude prevails, and the Imperium, and the Navy, are largely viewed as outsiders and interlopers.  'Imperials' out on the fringe are either fleeing from something, seeking something, or both, and tend not to be respected.   Many worlds may only have one or two settlements on them, who may or may not get along.

Danger: Most 'nations' are essentially in a near permanent state of cold war. The Aslan invade and are thrown back, the Sword Worlders raid with near impunity, etc.  THis doesn't prevent diplomatic ties and ambassadorships, and a human might walk freely on an Aslan world during a hot war period and vice versa, so long as the specific worlds in question aren't actively involved, though racial tensions persist even in times of relative peace.

The Weird: In addition to the 'knowable' threats (including the ancients and psychic orders) there are unnowables. Ships 'disappear' all the time, especially if they stray too out in star systems.  "things" are said to lurk out there, but also reports of more fabulous treasures. Sometimes drifting hulks are found, damaged by unknown forms of attack (or unbeleivable attacks), sometimes they are just... empty.  Superstition is the norm for most people, and with good reason: Those who salvage such wrecks tend to come to bad ends, very quickly. (Plot hook moment!), though out in the 'black' between stars is where the treasures may be found, at least according to some stories.

Monsters: Alien life forms on new, undiscovered worlds tend to be lethal, and sometimes they are more than just lethal... sometimes they are 'smart'. Not smart in the form of civilized men, but smart enough to find ways to spread to the stars in order to expand their hunting grounds. Horrible things are out there, some found long ago, their original homeworlds long lost, others are yet to be found. They aren't just lethal and scary, some are truly, profoundly disturbing.  Some are lost and abandoned weapons designed to fight for long dead alien masters, murder-beasts and worse.

Starships: On the personal scale, a man's starship is a cross between a cowboy's horse and some sort of Age of Sail personal domain.  There is a bit of romanticism behind having a ship, behind being an independent spacer.  Most ships, however, are owned by larger interest groups, from Noble Houses, Guilds, Merchantile Unions and so forth, a fact that makes the truly independent captain a rarity. Even among criminal pirate fleets there is a sharp tendency to find layers of control that extend beyond the ship, hidden behind a thin fiction of outlawry.


More on this later. I think I've covered broad catagorization well enough for the moment, so I may try to start nailing down details.

Hmm, OK. That was a lot of detail and consideration. A bit to absorb at first, but good stuff. I like the notable weirdness of space and crumbling plaster of civilization.

Super compressed liquid hydrgen miners are having a claim jumping war on the southern Jovian hemisphere, near the Big Red Spot.

This involves battle mechs that suspend their coordinates on nuclear explosions counter to Jupiter's gravity and winds. Due to the necessity of being nuclear blast resistant energy shields, most Jovian mech combat comes down to melee weapons stressing energy shields to breaking. Arial melee duels amid epic explosions and storms become normal way to protect claims.

Hook: Local regional sheriff of Io wants to curb the lawlessness and needs schematics on an ancient Earth tech known as "vulcan cannon" to build a moon-mounted space-sized version. He'll use this to routinely shred common dueling areas in order to crush dueling in his Jovian sector.
Needs: vulcan cannon schematics, factory production of massive projectile gun parts, advanced automator to calculate routine projectile shredding of highly mobile duel sites (where the winds lull most reliably but too small for mining operations).

Hmm... with Trav as a baseline I can't really make much use of battle mechs and whatnot, and confining it to the Sol system is missing the size of the Imperium, but I'm pretty sure I can make use of that.

Ima go sleep on this and the other thread and hopefully I'll have some good stuff to write.  Gotta start doing the GM shuffle, rustling up some players too...

"Void Gremlins"
A computer scientist is trying out his theory why computer systems tend to aggregate 'ghost in the machine' errors out in trans-star system space. His hypothesis is without points of focus AIs do just like biological systems and "fill in the blanks" so as to keep their program coping. Like the human brain readjusts the size of the moon in the Earth sky in lieu of comparative data, or outright hallucinate in sensory deprivation, an AI adjusts calculations by 'warping' code through its randomizer.

He's testing out AI distractions, such as turning off sensors and 'playing games' (solve computational problems), to keep them from aggregating spontaneous errors in code. He needs to perform his experiments between star systems and is willing to pay for your ship to be a control subject.
Needs: party's ship, time, space between star systems, access to ship's AI and logs.

Risks/Hooks: potential HAL 9000 effect. maybe actual void gremlins? party's ship model is notorious for handling 'ghost in the machine' poorly? also flying blind without sensors for weeks is a huge leap of faith regardless.

One of the things I covered poorly earlier is the vast stratification of society. Nobles live in one world and only interact distantly, or poorly with the rest of society, but they aren't omnipotent.

On the Surface, the interstellar nobility has all the power, opposed only by various organizations that could be viewed as Noble Houses without the titles, which for the sake of simple discussion could be called The Bene Geserit and the Jedi Temple, though obviously that will need to change.

However, the Guilds, while lacking a say in the politics of the Imperium are collectively, roughly on par with the (Landsraad), with any given sub-guild roughly equal to a noble house.  Why? Because the Nobles refuse to get their hands dirty with industry and technology (Ownership of industry? Sure. High Finance? No problem. YOu want me to actually pick up a tool? You must be joking!). The Guilds hold, essentially, a monopoly on all the hard sciences and technical skills. There is a stratification between Guild Run Trade Schools and Elite Universities for the children of Nobility. Without Guild Trained engineers, scientists, even Doctors, the Noble way of life, the Imperium itself, would collapse.

The same could be said of the Church. Again, tempted to steal directly here and call them the Orange Catholics or the Zensunni, but it seems a bit too direct.  While there are a number of minor faiths scattered around the galaxy, they are largely confined to individual colonies, or scattered and fragmented by the vast gulf between the stars.  In space, particularly within the Imperium, the Church is the dominant religion. Two parts old earth religion, 5 parts carefully constructed 'new myth', and 1 part Precursor Veneration, the Church is the dominant faith in space, the only faith openly practiced on dozens of 'pure Imperial' worlds in the core, most space stations and, more or less, the entire Navy. The Church, like the Guilds, shares power with the Imperial Nobility by reinforcing their political rule, and demands a share a seat at the table.

Underneath this ruling class is a vast and often poorly educated 'serfdom', part industrial cogs, part illeterate colony-farmers.  Centuries of social manipulation to make the 'poor' more tractable has resulted in a vast population that can not sustain a space age technological society, while only marginally increasing their loyalty to the regime.

Between the three main upper class branches and the vast and middling peasants lie a sort of hidden class of Freelancers, people who are not tied to, or have escaped from, peasant serfdom, have fallen from grace. Most spacers fall here by default, too well educated, too exposed to the 'big picture' to be trusted, but too useful to eliminate.  Most are still part of the system, the crew of an Imperial Warship have deep ties to Noble Houses, some have memberships (no matter how tenuous) to various Guilds, and the ship itself serves the needs of the Imperium. A smaller trade vessel may be in thrall to a given Noble House, being owned by this or that nobleman, rather than the captain.  But in this vast sea of 'owned' freelancers lies those who swear fealty to no one. Viewed by some as parasites and others as heroes, they exist on the margins, and live or die by their own efforts.


Within the borders of the Imperium, the power structure is fairly ruthlessly enforced. As many as a third of all major Naval engagements are against 'rogue worlds' within the Imperium that violate the monopoly of power in one way or another, be it rejecting the authority of the Nobility, or attempting to establish a technological infrastructure independent of the Guild (and in defiance of the Church's doctrines against unsanctioned knowledge...).  Even the freest sort knows better than to challenge the Imperium openly.

And yes: I pretty much stole that directly from Fading Suns.


Pulling down to the player level for the moment:

Character creation would be fairly standard. No robots, no Dilettantes (unless they don't mind losing their Portfolio at the start, a decent means of creating a dispossessed noble). I expect the players to explain how their characters got together and to discuss their ship shares and what sort of ship they'll get.  Finances will force them to keep honest, so I'm cool with letting them pick what they think they can afford, whatever it is.

I do expect them to seriously consider a 'used' ship to save on costs. In fact, I intend to push this on them at least a little. If they go for it, this gives me some hooks to use later.

Being a member of a Noble House, a Guild or even the Church is relatively simple. To be a Noble, have a high SOC stat and declare you are a noble (or take the Noble career), to be a member of the Guilds have some technical or scientific skills and background and declare membership. To be a churchy, well... more or less declare you're a priest. I may tighten it up a bit, but simply being a member is, by itself, of little import. THere are thousands (many thousands?) of minor sons of various noble houses, not worth a damn, floating about.  Going 'adventuring' is a fine way to try and earn standing within various organizations, if not actually approved of.  To be an IMPORTANT member..that will require some effort. Noted earlier: A dilettant background without a portfolio is a good way to start out 'important' but without access to power. LIkewise, I tend to be fairly open minded in exchanging character 'bennies' for work in making backgrounds and other such 'enhancements'.

Age: Character age in Traveller is somewhat important due to the career path. On the other hand I'm not terribly fond of the 'geriatric adventurer' genre myself.  Rather than simply hand out skill points I'd rather let players define their age within some limits: First your character has to be old enough to have had their career, that is to say: You can take eight careers in teh Navy and wind up a lowly deck hand, and say your career was short (a decade, say), or you can wind up a captain, in which case you obviously served quite a while (twenty or more years). Retirement is still calculated by full, four year, terms. Mostly I'd be happy to ballpark a yes/no call for a character's age.  The only reason this reason this should matter is for anagathics and aging rolls, and if everyone has the same maximum number of terms (8 sounds more than fair, perhaps too generous?), then I can more or less ignore age rolls in favor of flavor.

Orders: As noted I intend crude analogs of the Bene Gesserit, the Jedi and so forth, more Dune than Star Wars. Joining is simple: Be a Psychic Class. That's a bit easy. Once I've started hard coding the orders, based on player interest as well, I may well be a bit more strict.  As noted, no one really discusses psychic powers or phenomena. Each order has its own focus. A bene gesserit would focus more on 'biokinetics', abilities that control their own bodies, with a few outwards directed abilities while a Jedi Analog would focus more on telekinetic abilities. This would largely replace the existing 'roll for powers' system already in place.  As the various orders vie for political power with one another, they are exclusive groups, so dipping isn't allowed.  Once a "jedi" always a jedi (even if you pursue, say, being a fighter pilot. More importantly, you can't go off and join a rival order later...). While they may allow a certain level of independence compared to some power groups, when a superior calls, they expect their members to jump (hook!).


Equipment: The Imperium still largely uses slug throwers, due to technological stagnation.  A previous era of technological growth was higher tech than the Imperium, and most 'neat things' come either from that era (and are hard, if not impossible, to replicate), or are Ancient/Precursor artifacts (I really do like the use of the terms 'Ur' and 'Annunaki', as used by Fading Suns, but I've stolen quite a bit already!).  I'll need to work up basic rules for personal shields, which shouldn't be hard.  Battledress is known, but largely restricted to certain classes of Nobles etc.

Humaniti: In Trav there is a distinction between branches of humanity based on Ancients moving people around, so Solomani (men of Sol), Vlani (Men of Vland) and Zhodani, and other minor examples. I don't have much use for that, but I also don't care to eliminate it. Simply: there were numerous branches of mankind in the stars, as spread by the ancients, but the Imperium is a bit more unified than before. The Church makes a lot of hay out of this spread of man to the stars as part of their doctrine (which is somewhat racist against alien species... divine right type of stuff), and they view the Zhodani (a hostile 'alien' human power) as heretics as much as anything else.

Travel: Jump drives, pretty much bog standard. Conventional beliefs are that the Jump Drives were 'delivered unto man' by the Prophet, directly from God in the form of precursor artifacts, though highly educated people (Guild Engineers) understand that the technology actually comes from the more advanced pre-imperial human culture.

Basic history in a nutshell: When humans from earth entered space they eventually encountered other human races, with an old decadent empire, sclerotic and dying. They quickly conquered them, expanding rapidly until they encountered other alien races.  This 'Golden Age of Man' pushed the boundries of humanity as far as they've ever been, and for a time things were peaceful, the rulers of this vast star empire (the Second Imperium) were fairly enlightened and representative. Science advanced and so forth.

Reactionaries from the old Star Empire they had conquered found sympathetic ears among the new lords of the stars, men who desired power more than responsibility, and eventually the Second Imperium collapsed (note: They never called themselves an Imperium at all, that is revisionistic mythmaking) as people abused their power for personal gain, passing laws designed to spread political favor, rather than run world smoothly, etc.

The Collapse was brutal, but entirely natural. It might have ended quickly, if not for the Star Vikings. Early in the spread of Man, a large number of political exiles had fled earth in old, pre-jump ships, eventually settling in an out of the way cluster of rich, but inhospitable worlds known, eventually, as the Sword Worlds. A hard, militant culture based on personal strength and raiding eventually developed, and to the chagrin of the rest of the galaxy, rather than falling back into primativism, they soon developed or stole their own jump drives. While little more than nuisances during the Second Imperium, once it had collapsed, they quickly exploded out of their remote clusters, each independent captain taking tribute from as many worlds as he could muster, and after a century or more, most of the remanents of the Imperium lived in terror of these brutal, if remote, Overlords.  A few worlds, surprisingly far from teh Sword Worlds, had become permanent colonies of the Star Vikings, as they settled down and rebuilt, eventually forgetting their origins.

All the while the various alien races on teh fringes tore away vast swaths of human controlled space.

Enter the Church. WHile official doctrine is that the Prophet and his Acolytes were real, that the miracles they performed were real, the historical evidence is extremely thin, thinner than it should be.  That the Church actively destroyed historical archives and records only makes matters worse. The Church provided a unifying message, a means for various of these 'new nobles' to band together to rebuild the Imperium and to cast off the yoke of the Star Vikings and Alien menaces threatening 'all of Humanity!'. The Church also provided a framework for these new nobles to get along, to work together by offering 'shares' of power in an Imperial Corporation, whose wealth was determined by the investments made by the nobles.  Eventually the Imperial Corp outgrew the Church's foundation, but they still hold a large number of shares for themselves, something most people forget.

THe raiders were eventually driven back to their old territories, forgotten for a while, and a sort of cold war developed between the alien hostile Third Imperium and the other species that lived on their borders

Civilization had returned.

Only, somehow the THird Imperium skipped the vital growth faze of its existance and managed to more or less directly slide into a decadent stagnation that has persisted for almost a thousand years.

I have a fairly long post ready to go describing the origins of the Imperium and the Church (and plans to address the foundation of the Guilds, and another to explicate the various sub-factions... that is to list and briefly describe the noble houses, the factions of the Church and the separate Guilds that make up, well, the Guilds...),

But for right now I am going to turn my attention briefly to ships.

Fading Suns includes Jump Gates, as alien precursor technology, and I've been toying with the idea of using the B5 Hyperspace rules, but for the moment I'm thinking...no.  I may include both as options, but for now the main form of FTL travel is Traveller standard Jump drives.  TL's can work the same, this time instead of a slow promulgation of higher tech through the massive Imperium, its the decay of infrastructure from the outside in. Functionally the same but different in feel.


However: I have been toying with a few other ship systems over the last six months, and it drove home a point I've been aware of for some time: Traveller ships are fairly huge but lightly armed, and this is essentially unavoidable.  The only way to get more guns on a ship is to make a bigger ship.

THis is only an issue once you realize that the ratio of ship to guns is 100:1, that is for most ships only 1% of their volume/mass is taken up by guns, and this is fixed by the rules.

(for the purists, yes; You can use a larger gun, which will throw off the ratio, but you can still only mount one gun, of any sort, per 100 tons of displacement. THis is true on capital ships as it is on tramp traders... Likewise the ratio is ALSO skewed for 'Small Ships', which still only have 'one gun' but are much smaller than 100 tons...)

A simple house rule might be to allow X guns per 100 tons based on size of the power plant, with a default of one gun per 100 for stock ships (meaning after market modifications to build additional hard points and fill them), and of course opening up things like Barbettes and Gun-Bays to almost any class of ship.

A bit more work, but more satisfying would be to actually calculate power drain (using the High Guard rules for Black Globe Generators!) vs power generation (based on rating and size of the ship's power plant?), which would make power usage a significant factor in tactical combat, if one exceeded the conventional designs of the ships (1:100 ratio means ignoring the minigame?).

The reason I point this out is less because I'm sure my players will be interested (I have no idea) but because I am interested. The lack of proper 'gunships' irritates me on some visceral level, like an immersion breaking level.  

Note essentially that this is only a problem at the sub-capital level for ships. In Capital ships the problem becomes the limitations of spinal mounts (That is to say: A million ton ship by definition can only have one spinal mount, but the biggest spinal mount is only 15k tons... now, either there should be an even bigger and more redonkulous gun, or a ship of that insane amount of mass should be able to mount a dozen or more of those fuckers.  Yes, this is the gloss of the argument, not the argument itself...). I Don't expect to worry my pretty little head over capital ships at this time, however.

If we assume, as we should, that the vast majority of small ships fall in the 200-500 ton range, then we need a better range of possible designs than 'armed' and 'unarmed', which is more or less where it stands now. (yes: a tiny handful of canon ships in that range have bay guns, thus altering our range to 'unarmed, armed, and oh-my-god-we're-fucked'. Still. More options is better, and since everything else seems redonkulously engineering based, why not a less arbitrary rule for guns?).

High Guard does provide the basic capaticence of a ship (based on Jump Drive, unfortunately), and it does provide a general list of power draw in abstract units for most weapons.  My initial thought there is that power generation produces Rating X (tonnage/100) in power points (checked against our expenses as I refine the system), and Manuever drives use Thrust X (Tonnage/100) in power, thus 'going slower' frees up more power.

This is per turn.

Jump Drives use, well, All of It.  A ship also 'stores' unused power in preparation for jump, thus has a smallish pool of power to use in a fight. Guns and screens use some of that power up, the more guns you have the more power that you use (explaining the popularity of missile launchers, by the way!).

This also provides other options, such as letting the engineer burn extra fuel for extra power (reducing longevity of operations) and so forth.  This could, in fact, lead into more complex rules for determining how long a ship sits 'on station' preparing to jump based on how much energy they've got stored in their capacitors (default is that they'd fill up en route to the jump point, thus managing Jump in only a turn or two...).

More importantly, it provides some interesting choices in ship design, such as oversized power plants having a function, a reason to keep guns to a minimum in most designs and so forth without actually increasing the complexity of the ship design process. The default rule (you need a power plant equal to the rating of your drives) remains a good simple rule of thumb. (here too: Now we can show WHY you'd want to keep your PP equal to your MD, as a ship with powerful engines could only use their full capacity for brief periods of time if the PP is too weak, until they drained stored energy basically.)

The more I look at this, the better I like it.  Ideally I'd like to mess around with guns in other ways, like coverage, but I'm not setting out to make ship-to-ship combat a majority of play, much less fundamentally altering the Traveller ship-scape.

Since I'm at a different computer than my 'ready to go' post, I'll continue my divergent world building posts.

Sample Noble Houses:
Decados: Controls Earth and several nearby systems, claims decent from the Romanovs of Russia, Old Earth.  One of the most powerful, if treacherous Noble Houses. Bowed out at end of last Imperial War in favor of Richese when everyone thought they'd win it.
Richese: Current Imperial House for more than two centuries. Holds monopoly on Anagathic drugs, particularly Melange. Lots of biomedical concerns, but very few worlds, formerly a minor house.
Hawkwood: Major rivals to Decados, generally a martial house, with a high emphasis on personal honor.
Hazat: Another House Militant, with most of their important holdings along the Aslan border. Viewed as upstarts with very little actual nobility. Practicality and pragmatism are important, along with martial honor.
Li Halan: Claims of nobility from across old Earth Asia, along with minor bloodlines from 'alt-human' empires. Fronts the Zhodani border. High emphasis on ettiqutte, ritual and 'face'. Often viewed as more treacherous than most other houses.  Contrast with Decados: Both houses are viewed as decadent and betrayers, Decados openly so, and proud of it, Li Halan cover theirs with perfumes and polite smiles, protesting the knife isn't theirs...
Corrino: a former holder of the Iridium Throne. Mostly known for intruigues and political games. They hold numerous worlds, but most of them are savage and inhospitable. They have a small house military, but their soldiers are massively augmented and unshakably loyal unto death.
Ge-roque: A majority 'alt-human' house with an attitude about it, viewing 'solomani' as upstarts. While they hold vland, and have many Vlani bloodlines, the house itself was raised from a non-vlani client race.


There will be more.  I'm gonna shoot for around twenty 'great houses', with three to five major bloodlines in each house.

The Church of the Invisible Sun (Dunno. Name just sort of popped in...)
Symbolized by a corona ring, sometimes called a 'jump hole crux', though that is viewed as crude.
Orthodox: The primary leaders of the faith, with the Patriarch of the faith being the head of both the Church as a whole and the Orthodox sect. Headquartered on former Alecto world of Chalice.
Universalist or Catholic: Largely viewed as reactionaries, there is little actual difference between the two sects in terms of dogma. Originally there was a lot of space between these two sects, now the Universalists are viewed more like 'hard line' Orthodox members, a subsect if you will.
Inquisition: Actually known as the Avesti (Dei Avesti?), or the burners, they are largely self appointed watchdogs of the faithful. Originally they focused on the Faith, the Church itself, but in order to gain legitimacy they now focus more on the lay members... which they consider everyone.  Avesti are known and feared for their willingness to burn anyone they consider a heretic and for a hardline stance against aliens and high technology that crosses over into blind fanaticism.
Crusaders: Formed during the Crusade era, obviously, and largely made up (at that time) by soldiers from teh various houses who found god, they often objected to the political machinations of the father church. When the last of teh Crusade Fleets were officially disbanded, they remained, and were eventually recognized into a handful of close knit Orders.  Crusaders are the primary militant arm of the Church, and they officially do not concern themselves with politics, within the church or without.  It is, however, necessary from time to time to convince them of hte righteousness of an otherwise political order.  Crusaders are holy warriors, first and foremost, and they are recognized largely by their BattleDress armor and general stocism and discipline.

Again: I think there is room for a few more sects of the church, I can steal at least two from Fading Suns if I chose (I've already lifted so much...), and there is room for sub-sects within.

Guilds: I can steal entirely from the FS canon here, but I'd rather not. Assume major divisions based on catagories of scientific and technical work. Thus Electricians and Electrical Engineers would have their own guild, while Jump Engine Mechanics would be a second.  Ima need to pin down the political reality of the Guild more before I return to this.

External Orders:
So far I've put forth a Bene Gesserit rip-off order, focusing on biokinetic psychic abilities and a Jedi Order rip-off (or if I really wanted, two orders, light and dark) of warrior mystics that use telekinesis.  I'm not comfortable directly stealing either name. Likewise I could probably fit in the Mentats.  

Rather than soft foot it for two of four entries, I'm going to have to do something, so let me try my hand at an organic and original example Order.

Children of Ur:  the children of Ur is a psuedo-religious group that worships the precursor races (known to them as the Ur, or rarely Ur-Race), that they believe is responsible for spreading mankind to the Stars.  Largely popular with 'alt-human' races, which is to say those who claim decent from non-Solomani stock, due to their Doctrine of the Chosen, they attempt to parse what their purpose is, what they were intended for, so that they can continue to serve their long lost masters. They spend a lot of time hunting for precursor sites, artifacts and lore, and meditating on it.  However, it is their gifts that makes them notable. They believe that certain people are 'Chosen' of the Ancients, and those people have special powers that can be awakened by certain artifacts, which they have collected. Like most Orders they actively seek latent psychics and attempt to recruit them, and in the cases of the very young they aren't shy about using force to claim them. The Emperor and the Landsraad allow this because the Children of Ur are experts at finding Ancient Artifacts, and making use of them, and are willing to share, and their Seekers (as they call their mystics) believe (or at least are taught) to respect the Imperium as being part of the Plan of Ur. (note: The Children of Ur are likely to be secretly manipulated by Ancient conspirators, but their very obviousness means that they are most likely simple pawns and catspaws).  Seekers tend to be Psychic Adepts or Scholars and their meditations tend to result in Clairvoyance and Projection (out of body) powers, which they use both to find ruins and artifacts, and to spy for the Emperor (or whomever...).

Children of Ur tend to shave off all their hair and wear clothes that emphasis the size of their head. They believe, among other things, that the Zhodani and more alien races are agents of The Enemy, though who this Enemy is, and what they want is a mystery. However, it is known that the Children of Ur only reveal deeper secrets of their order to the highest ranks. The Children largely allow their members (once they've been fully trained/indoctrinated?) to wander freely, only asking that they report any and all ancient artifacts to the Order.  Failure to report them, or to keep ones that the Order wants for itself, is grounds for severe reprimands, even death.


bah. Not happy with the Children of Ur. Much thinkage necessary.

KO! "Wall of Text" super special attack! Victory, Spike.

Hmm, so why Traveller when it is so very Fading Suns? I like Fading Suns. Can't you just swap out the mechanics for the setting?

What do the players get from the Traveller game pitch that makes it better than running straight Fading Suns? Worries about bait and switch resentment?

Neither of those is an issue. No one I know has got my gaming library, no one is a huge fan of any given game (except maybe d*D).

Its me.


I like ships.








Actually, while I like Fading Suns setting, I don't like it all. Its very... small. I think its not supposed to be small, but it winds up being there anyway.  Besides, I do like the Trav rules, very streamlined, very close to what I would have designed for myself if I'd finished my various design projects before really getting into classic style traveller rules (mong trav, but whatever. the 2d6 etc was the optimal scale of variability was where I was focusing in my design efforts...).  Seeing as I'm having a hard time with the church and guild, I may wind up dropping one or both of them anyways. I want the weird and gothic more than I want the Temple Avesti, yanno?