Quote from: KenHRCT is just such a great toolkit for making a custom universe.

Somewhere on some disused hard drive or disk hidden away in my house are the notes that Paul Elliott (aka "Mithras") developed in a sort of challenge he issued over on RPG.net a few years back.  The idea was to take Books 1-3, strike any knowledge of 3I canon from your mind, and develop a new campaign setting based on the explicit conventions displayed in the basic game:

• A system of hereditary and meritocratic nobility
• Hi-tech shipboard marines who train in the cutlass out of tradition
• Cold sleep berths
• Accident-prone/risk-seeking Scout corps
• Rigid, 4-year terms of service for all vocations
• Transfer of information limited to the speed of FTL travel

...etc.  I recall being particularly impressed with his "Eternal Dragon Legion", a batallion of blade-wielding marines who are trained to perfection, then housed, company-strength, in cold sleep aboard drop ships until needed.  There were plenty of other cool ideas, too.

!i!

I KINDA did - I had a region of space to Spinward of Zhodani space that I sorta fleshed out a bit for a one-off alien that I ran as a PC forever. His race's history evolved over many years of play, to the point that I had their home sector mapped out at least. Nalsa-Engineer, how I miss thee. Even had his "portrait" done by an anime-style artist at a convention once. For some reason, he made his mane look like Robert Preston's hair. Ah well, it stuck.

Ian, a guy on CotI ran a similar experiment a few years back.  He concluded by LBB 1-3 that the TAS and Scouts were the only true interstellar institutions and that they serviced an endless sea of independent worlds and posket empires.  It was a very cool-looking campaign set-up.

Jeff, that's the Festrian Empire guy.  Yeah, he had a really good setup.

I vaguely remember Mithras' thread on RPGnet.  Gotta go there and search (har har har) it down.

Quote from: jrientsIan, a guy on CotI ran a similar experiment a few years back.  He concluded by LBB 1-3 that the TAS and Scouts were the only true interstellar institutions and that they serviced an endless sea of independent worlds and posket empires.  It was a very cool-looking campaign set-up.

Which really makes sense if you recall how permanent trade lanes were rolled up.  I recall, when I first got the game and tried making my first two subsectors, how frustrated I became when trying to roll up a consistent and contiguous system of trade lanes (which is, by the way, why I adopted The Spinward Marches maps not long thereafter).  

So, basically, you have -- for the most part -- politically independent and/or isolated star systems that are tied together by free trader merchants willing to hop from system to system, and the TAS and Scouts (possibly operated under the auspices of the TAS?) providing an over-arching cohesion.  Neat.

!i!

(P.S. Weird how I forgot about the TAS -- and psionics! -- as standard, generic conventions of Books 1-3.)

I'm using the Animal Encounter portion of LBB3 to populate my Metamorphosis Beta (original Metamorphosis Alpha inspired) colony starship game.
If that counts.

Used to use the Spinward map and my own details Back In The Day.
=

Okay, I'm inspired. Going to finish up my dungeon for tomorrow night and then hand-generate at least a subsector or two, just for the hell of it. Dice rolls only, no fudging, take 'em as you get 'em. Map it out and see what we end up with.

Should be fun!

Quote from: KenHRPart of planning those scenarios involved me rolling up a sector using the stuff from LBB3 and the Scouts book where needed, then making sense of what came up (which was so much fun I ended up going through the process several times for a few subsectors).

You don't know how refreshing it is to see someone say this as opposed to trashing the system for not being realistic.

I generated my own sector way back when and detailed a few of the worlds. Then I took advantge of someone else doing the lifting and just started using the OTU instead of MTU.

Quote from: WerekoalaOkay, I'm inspired. Going to finish up my dungeon for tomorrow night and then hand-generate at least a subsector or two, just for the hell of it. Dice rolls only, no fudging, take 'em as you get 'em. Map it out and see what we end up with.

Should be fun!

Woohoo!  Let us know how it turns out if you get to it!  I just may do the same tonight; my mega-dungeon project is slowing down and I need a breather from that.

Quote from: Lazy WombatYou don't know how refreshing it is to see someone say this as opposed to trashing the system for not being realistic.

I generated my own sector way back when and detailed a few of the worlds. Then I took advantge of someone else doing the lifting and just started using the OTU instead of MTU.

I was all for realism until I started really studying planetary formation theories and such.  And then I realised that what we consider realistic today will be ridiculous tomorrow.

And really, the whole point of the exercise is to generate fun worlds for adventuring.  None of my players are scientists, I'm not a scientist, we're just all :emot-taco:

Quote from: Werekoala...then hand-generate at least a subsector or two, just for the hell of it. Dice rolls only, no fudging, take 'em as you get 'em. Map it out and see what we end up with.

I just did that myself a couple of hours ago, though with the help of 1001 Subsectors.  I set the system density for "Scattered" and had it roll up four subsectors at random.  I then arranged them to suit my sense of aesthetics (a nice, small rift in the middle, with a Jump-2 route that leads through all of the subsectors).  Next, I'm going to roll up trade routes randomly, trim them down so that they don't criss-cross too much, draw up political borders, then see where it takes me.

No matter what, the Scouts are now a division of the Travellers' Aid Society, not a government agency.

!i!

Huh, isn't that a spiffy generator! I used to tinker with Galactic and another generator that slips my mind (it was REAL slick, would even detail the worlds WITHIN the system if you wanted). But somehow actually rolling the dice and writing the numbers feels more like - creating, to me. I've got Campaign Cartographer and Dungeon Designer and all that good stuff, but after hand-drawing my last dungeon, I think that there's something to the tactile element (for me at least) that really makes a difference. Plus you don't need to learn CAD to draw on graph paper.

We'll need a new thread to share our little sectors/subsectors/whatnot - seems like a few folks have got the bug now.

Note to self: Hand-generating two subsectors takes a LONG time...

Also, using straight Book 2 rules, seems like I got alot more planets than the supplements did per subsector. Just lucky, I guess. I know I could tweak the rolls, but I said I was gonna take 'em as they fell. Getting some potentially interesting results at least.

Still not sure how I'm gonna handle trade routes. Draw what looks good, random, or skip 'em?

For Marches density, you want a system about 1/3 of the time, rather than the 50% chance given in book 2.

Trade routes: the first edition had a little table to generate them, but you get some really weird results.  I'll see if I can find the text somewhere rather than type it out...

EDIT: It can be found here.

EDIT 2: I gotta do up a subsector myself tonight, you've got me fired up!  I think the more dense star system map going by the book works better with J-1 ships and such, which also lets you use the by the book economics rules without tweaking them so the PCs can make profits on trade.  For trade routes, I'd go with what looks good, but what the hell, we're going totally random here, why not roll the routes, as well?

I've got the reprints here, so I can find it. I think I'm going to cheat JUST a tad and maybe use a program to generate the rest of th worlds - I'll be here all weekend if not.