Nice!

Now I can work up a deckplan....

Quote from: KenHRNice!

Now I can work up a deckplan....

start with a 50 ton cutter, maybe something larger. . .


you'd have to fudge the j-drive, or just make it 100 tons :raise:

i gots me some npc's to generate!

This thread gives me joy.

i think there was an "entertainer" career in T4.  i could generate the band with that.  add a merchant (the manager), a noble (spoiled rich kid follower) and one of those weirdo psionic pets (beaked monkey?) and BLAMMO!  hijinks, possibly sponsored by Ling-standard products or GsBaG!  :discoball: :emot-rock:

Quote from: KenHRThat explains why it was so useful in my last campaign.

My next game is (hopefully) going to be a Moldvay-era D&D dungeoncrawl (or FtA), but I've been getting the Trav bug again.  I barely got a chance to scratch the surface of your game in the last game; I'll surely be taking a deeper look at it this time around!

At the core, it's an unholy melding of CT, Ringworld, and SPI Universe, Ken, along with CJ Cherryh, David Brin, and Larry Niven. Seeing how much I took from Trav, it's nice to give some back!

-clash

Quote from: flyingmiceI did back in the seventies. It eventually became the StarCluster setting through many transmogrifications and vast eons of time.

-clash

I KNEW IT!

RPGPundit

And to answer the question, I haven't played Traveller with the Traveller Universe for years: every time I've played it recently, I've created my own traveller-esque setting.

RPGPundit

I'd say about half of all my Traveller gameplay has been in my own Traveller universes. More often than not, I buy the Traveller books, and then just use them as springboards for my own ideas.

Quote from: RPGPunditI KNEW IT!

RPGPundit

I'm pretty sure I said as much when I replied to your SC review! Where is it... Ah!

"I had always thought that Ringworld had influenced me more than Traveller, but sometime after I released StarCluster 2, I picked up my little black books for the first time in decades, and was amazed at how much Traveller had influenced what I had done. Even some of the names of my homebrew Trav star systems had been remembered somehow and been transferred. It had apparently lodged very deeply in my brain and brewed there slowly."

-clash

Wow, so this is much more common than I'd thought!  That's heartening to hear.  There has been so much wrangling over the canon universe since the Mongoose announcement that I'd started to wonder why star system generation rules were included at all in later iterations of the game.

In my last campaign, I made a wiki for the setting and posted up library data, deckplans, etc. as they were needed.  As we were playing online via voice chat, it wasn't a problem for everyone to access the campaign info.

Quote from: KenHRWow, so this is much more common than I'd thought!  That's heartening to hear.  There has been so much wrangling over the canon universe since the Mongoose announcement that I'd started to wonder why star system generation rules were included at all in later iterations of the game.

In my last campaign, I made a wiki for the setting and posted up library data, deckplans, etc. as they were needed.  As we were playing online via voice chat, it wasn't a problem for everyone to access the campaign info.

When I played Trav - scattered games from '77 to '80 - most Trav GMs I knew of made their OTU. There in fact was no Imperium when I bought my first LBBs. The only reason I bought a couple of Imperium Setting LBBs was to use them as idea mines.

-clash

Quote from: KenHRWow, so this is much more common than I'd thought!  That's heartening to hear.

Oh, I never answered the actual question.

With the exception of the first mis-started campaign I ran, I've always run a loose variant of the "OTU".  Mind you, when I got started on it, all I had under my belt to set the official tone was Supplement 3: The Spinward Marches and Supplement 6: 76 Patrons (in so much as the latter was truly "canon" outside of a couple of unexplained names like "Vargr" and "Ine Givar").  I added interesting bits of canon as we went along, but they were always more adapted to my campaign than the reverse.  My Traveller universe had all the right names and stats, but was very different from just about anyone else's.

I've mentioned before how I've avoided the Citizens of the Imperium website like the plague, because of my fear of canon-hounds ready to pee all over my concept of the OTU that I've developed over the years.  The same thing happened to my vision of Glorantha when I joined the old RQ newsgroup, so I've been awfully protective about my own vision of Traveller.

!i!

Quote from: Ian AbsentiaI've mentioned before how I've avoided the Citizens of the Imperium website like the plague, because of my fear of canon-hounds ready to pee all over my concept of the OTU that I've developed over the years.  The same thing happened to my vision of Glorantha when I joined the old RQ newsgroup, so I've been awfully protective about my own vision of Traveller.

!i!

This is the sort of impression I've gotten from CotI and just about everyone who posts about Traveller on other message boards or mailing lists.  I do remember one guy from NYC who did a small setting of his own (Festrian Empire, I think?  He kept a blog about it, too.) that was well-received on CotI, so maybe it's just the loudest posters who are giving that impression.

CT is just such a great toolkit for making a custom universe.  My own, called Abzu (no reference to the Burning Wheel guy, just my own obsession with ancient Mesopotamia), was fun to play in, but was a bit haphazard in places, and I started adding way too much from the supplements (I overloaded and bought all the reprints before I had time to digest what I already had).  Next time I run the game, I'm intending to strip things down and be a bit more careful now that I better understand Trav's setting assumptions.  The "Burgess Shale" article about early Traveller campaigns captures the spirit of what I want nicely.

Quote from: flyingmiceThe only reason I bought a couple of Imperium Setting LBBs was to use them as idea mines.

-clash

That's how I've looked at all that material.  Ready-made and stealable ideas.

I find it quite frustrating that so many Trav fans are really Imperium fans, and don't seem to realise it's a generic sf rpg with a separate official setting that can be used with it.

For me, sometimes I use the Imperium, sometimes not, last game of Trav in my group earlier this year the GM used his own setting.

Traveller, it's a ruleset, not a setting.