“The map is not the territory.” – Alfred Korzybski

No session last Saturday, so in lieu of a session writeup, here’s a follow-up to the earlier posts Garnfellow’s Nebula and the Procedural Nebula, because it belatedly occurred to me that there was a much easier way to do this now than when I originally drew my first Dark Nebula map in the late 1990s.

Then, I found a large piece of graph paper and drew a grid of staggered squares on it, then drew the systems and routes of the Nebula on it, then drew a larger grid of staggered squares, and redrew that version again on subsector hex grids, before drawing the final version in Microsoft Paint.

This time, I took screenshots of the map tiles, assembled them so the hexgrid numbers matched up and took a shot of that, downloaded a poster map of the official Dark Nebula sector from TravellerMap, and used Microsoft Powerpoint to overlay one on the other, adjusting the transparency on the top layer so I could see through it. Adjusting the size of the boardgame map so that it took up exactly two subsectors, I then started rotating it to get a good fit.

We can only be certain of one location, Kuzu, later called Kusyu. On the boardgame map there are two axes at right angles we can use for orientation; Kuzu-Eski, 14 parsecs, and Kuzu-Mir, 8 parsecs. I can’t get either of those to fit exactly on an existing system, but if I stretch the map just a little, Eski fits on top of Uiwealirlao and Mir is almost exactly on Khlyuhakh.

Now it looks like this:

As you can see, it’s similar to Garnfellow‘s map but bigger and rotated further to align it with my chosen axes. it doesn’t quite match Garnfellow‘s map, and the further you get from Kuzu the worse the alignment; by the time I get to the most remote systems I’m almost two hexes out of synch.

At this stage, there are 14 systems in the boardgame that are in the same hex as one on the official map, 32 in an adjacent hex, and three that line up exactly because they define my axes. The two maps show the same region but are 2,000 years apart, and at average stellar movement rates we can accept adjacent hexes. So that’s all right.

Of the world profiles I could lift from the sector map, 29 can be used as they are, 12 need modification (usually a change of atmosphere type), and 8 are no good at all. However, there are 38 systems which exist on the sector map but not the boardgame map, and four on the boardgame map that don’t exist on the sector map. We can argue that for some reason they’re not relevant to astrogation in the appropriate era, and therefore while astronomers know about them, astrogators don’t care and leave them off the map; maybe there were no jump routes to them in the earlier period. No, I’m not convinced either.

The current method has fewer steps and more accurate system placement, thus fewer errors. However, as with so many other things at this stage of my life, now that I’ve worked out how to do it properly, I realise it’s not actually much use to me; since I’m using jump routes, so long as the topology is correct, the relative positions of systems don’t come into play, and as I’ve worked up statblocks and world descriptions over the last 25 years in play, there’s no real value in replacing the statblocks with new ones and having to start over with the descriptions.

This means my campaign is diverging significantly from the Official Traveller Universe; but then, don’t they always?

“One last short burst upon failing feet,
There life lay waiting, so sweet, so sweet,
Rest in a darkness, balm for aches.

The earth was stopped. It was barred with stakes.”
– John Masefield, Reynard the Fox

Hyperspace, 084-3387

Dmitri looks in on Munir, who is sleeping more-or-less peacefully in the spare cabin. Tacked to the walls are some frankly disturbing images she has sketched on scrap paper using whatever markers she could find. Coriander is sitting with her.

“How’s she doing?”

“She’s had a rough time. The interrogators were not gentle, and as soon as they’d finished one session they drugged her comatose while she recovered, then woke her up for the next. From her perspective, it’s been months of continuous torture.” She gestures at the drawings on the walls. “I think those are her way of processing it.”

“Anything you can do for her?”

“The physical wounds are too old for me, and the mental ones are beyond what I can do. So basically, no. All I can do is be here when she wakes up, and be a friend. And she doesn’t have much faith in men right now, so it’s best if you and Arion stay away from her.”

“Ah. Like that, was it? Okay, I’ll tell him. Anything I can get you?”

“No thanks. Oh, actually, yes; it turns out she really likes pineapple, can you check if there’s any left in the stores? Maybe bring a couple of packs?”

“Sure. Tell you what, I’ll get Osheen to bring them, there’s a lot of saurians in the Marines, she might feel safer if she sees him.” He turns to go, and pauses at the door, gesturing at the shrunken, curled-up figure on the bed.

“If we get caught, that could be us this time next year. Except there won’t be anyone to bust us out. Are you sure you want to do this?”

“If we don’t, who will?”

Mizah, 107-3387

The hyperspace exit flash fades behind them as the Dolphin curves in towards Mizah.

“More Port Authority paperwork,” Arion grumbles. “What are we going to do with Munir? Who should I declare her as?”

“Well, she’s a Confed Marine,” Cori says. “I was going to hand her over to the Marines at the Embassy, they can take it from there.”

“You’re not thinking straight,” Arion replies. “The Rian government arrested her as a spy, charged her with use of psionic powers, and locked her up. Confed is going to find out about that. When they do, somebody is going to think: I wonder if there’s any truth in those accusations. Let’s have a quiet chat with her, add something to her IV drip, see what she really knows.”

Cori thinks about that for a moment, then makes a tight-beam encrypted comm call.

“Hello, Ish? Listen, I need to get someone to Maadin, very quietly, without anyone knowing who they are, no questions asked. Can you help?”

“I know a guy,” Ish grins. “It won’t be cheap, but he’ll get it done.”

“Actually, make that two people,” says Cori. Once the terms and price are agreed, she closes the connection.

“Who’s the other person?” Arion asks. “And why?”

“Osheen,” Cori says. “Think about it; we’re sending Munir back home, but she’s going to spend weeks cooped up in a ship with people she doesn’t know. After what she’s been through that’s not going to be very attractive. So I’m sending Osheen with her; they’ve both got this whole ex-Marine thing going on, and if things do turn nasty, I’d back a saurian marine against a spacer any day of the week.”

“Fair enough, but it leaves us a bit light in the thug department.”

“We’ll just have to be sneaky.”

Mizah, 114-3387

The crew has been travelling for almost four months now in very cramped quarters, the last month of it with a seriously damaged Marine in the spare bunk. Cori hands Munir over to Ish on 108-3387, sending Osheen with her to protect and reassure her, and picks up the money Locksley has left with him for her, then she and Arion head off to the coast to spend some less stressful time together. Cori gets back from the beach feeling more cheerful than she has in weeks, to find a message from Captain Locksley, asking if she has a candidate for the Council of Captains for him to meet yet.

Dmitri goes into the Charsi District to socialise, making new friends and catching up with slightly older ones.

Mizah, 115-3387

Dmitri is walking back to the Dolphin from the starport bar after a last round with the locals when he sees a pair of familiar figures waiting for him. He looks around and is reassured to see a group of four shore patrolmen in their dark uniforms with guns and batons. He crosses the round to avoid the figures; a nondescript, bald human and a hulking albino aslan, fur white in the streetlights, mirrorshades against the glare. Dmitri does his best to keep the patrolmen between him and the figures, but they’ve clearly seen him; they’re turning to watch as he goes past. It occurs to him they may have bribed the patrol to grab him and hand him over, but there’s nothing he can do about that. He activates his commlink, sets it to record and transmit, and sends a prearranged message to Cori: I’m in trouble. Don’t say anything, just watch and listen. He clips the commlink to his breast pocket so it has a clear view of what happens, then turns to look at the figures, making sure he gets some good footage of the patrol and the street as he does so.

He is thankful to see the pair haven’t moved. The human points with two fingers, first at his own eyes, then at Dmitri: I’m watching you.

With his best poker face on, Dmitri turns and strides away towards the ship. He calls Coriander.

“Cori? Yeah, I think I’m clear. But you’re not going to like this; Schrodinger’s here, with his sidekick.” Pause. “What does it mean? Nothing good, sis. Nothing good.”

GM Notes

It’s tempting to say that the team all take the Rest option for downtime to gain a Benny, but the SF Companion rules as written make it clear that option is for healing wounds. The Fantasy Companion says you can Rest even if you have no Wounds, but in that case it counts as Centering, and gives you a Conviction instead of a Benny. Notice that both Companions assume you’re using the Conviction setting rule. In the absence of Bennies, gaining a Conviction seems like a good idea, so Arion and Cori pick Centre as their downtime option, Dmitri goes Carousing to gain a favour from the locals, and Osheen and Munir start their journey to Maadin.

I rolled a personality tag for Munir from the SWADE Allies section and got artistic, hence the drawings.

The jumps are straightforward enough; Ria to Daanarni (Success on the astrogation roll, one day to get to the jump point, 8 days in jump and one day to turn around, interlude on 084-3387), then Hasara (Success, 6+3 days), Tangga (Success, 3+3 days), Mizah (fail, fail, success with raise; 4/2+1 day to land). Total 28 days, arrive on Mizah 107-3387 then spend 108-3387 to 114-3387 in downtime.

I’d originally intended to head back slowly and investigate all the worlds along the route back to Mizah, but I didn’t feel like it, so I did the Indiana Jones red line thing instead. Next time, Gadget, next time.

The encounter draws gave me a King of Hearts (strangers) and Ace of Spades (enemies) during downtime. Solodark prompts gave me Banish Surprise and Confront Enemy respectively to flesh them out. Dmitri has the Enemy Hindrance and this seems like a perfect chance to introduce said enemy; confrontation doesn’t have to mean violence. Dmitri’s enemy, Schrodinger, was originally so-called because he might or might not have a cat; why not make that decision, give him one, and make the cat big enough to be a bodyguard?

Meanwhile, handing off Munir is a perfect opportunity to introduce another PC, but I need to keep that under control, as more PCs means each of them has less screen time; so I might just have that happen offscreen. Ish is turning out to be the hub for the stable of characters, he might need some screen time himself at some point.

The game has now reached the point where I start to think I should’ve used different rules, or a different setting, or done this or that differently; that happens to most of my solo games, sooner or later. So this is a good place to take a break, before I do something dramatic that I’ll regret later.

Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in this town
See me and the boys we don’t like it
So we’re getting up and going down
– Thin Lizzy, Jailbreak

Ria, 079-3387

Dawn finds the Dolphin barreling across the badlands nap-of-earth before screaming up the side of the mesa and executing a perfect cobra manoeuvre, allowing Arion to use the entire body of the ship as an airbrake before pancaking her onto the prison landing pad with a jarring thump that flexes the landing legs to their maximum capacity.

The landing ramp is already dropping as the ship rebounds on her hydraulics and Osheen leads Cori and Dmitri at a run towards the prison gate, which is closed. Arion desperately wants to be with Cori, but his biggest contribution to the mission’s success is getting them in and out safely, and for that he needs to be at the controls with the engines running and the ramp down.

Osheen is sniping at the parapet, keeping the guards’ heads down, while Dmitri takes one of the black-and-yellow striped frame charges from the ship’s emergency kit and slaps it on the gate; intended to breach the heavy armour of a starship hull for emergency rescues, it should go through an ordinary reinforced steel door like a knife through butter. He carries two more of them strapped to his back in case there are more doors later.

All three flatten themselves against the wall, and Dmitri triggers the charge. It blows clean through the door and the three of them disappear inside. Arion daren’t pull up the feeds from their commlink cameras in case he misses something he needs to see out here, but he has the audio channels active and can hear laser fire from Osheen and the barking of the guards’ slugthrowers. Some of them are shooting at the ship; he welcomes this, every round coming his way is one that isn’t aimed at his friends, and they’d need heavy weapons to get through the micrometeorite shielding.

“Where’s the solitary block!” Cori screams. “Tell me or the saurian bites your arm off!” Mumbled directions followed by a scream. “Osheen!”

“Sssorry. Thought you said ‘Tell me AND the sssaurian bites your arm off’! English not my first language!” Then, under his breath: “It’sss true though, the corn-fed ones tassste better.”

“Osheen! Put that down! This way!”

There’s the noise of another frame charge going off, and a few more screams, fortunately none of them voices he recognises.

This goes on for several minutes, with Arion fighting the urge to go in after his friends, constantly reminding himself they need him right where he is. Then, four figures emerge; Cori and Dmitri are half-carrying, half-dragging a woman – Munir? – and Osheen’s mouth is dripping blood, probably not his own because there’s a shred of a uniform caught between his teeth. Osheen backs up behind the others, laying down covering fire from his autolaser. As they reach the ramp, he drops to one knee, keeping up the barrage until Dmitri slaps him on the shoulder and he turns to run up the ramp. He hears Dmitri’s yell of “GO, GO, GO!”, rams the throttles forwards, twists and pulls the control yoke, and almost as an afterthought slaps the button to close the ramp, in case none of the others has done it.

The Dolphin lifts and jinks away across the badlands, putting as much government infrastructure between herself and the starport’s antiship lasers as she can. You can’t outrun a laser, or dodge it either, but you can exploit the delay in the fire controller’s decision loop as he dithers over whether it’s worth the collateral damage to bring down a ship that has just done – what, exactly? Better contact the prison to find out before melting a bridge or burning through an apartment building.

Once Arion thinks they’re safely over the sensor horizon, he lifts the nose and brings the noise.

Dramatic Task

Let’s look in more detail at what happened there. Rather than set up figures on a battlemat or counters in Roll20, I decided to run this as a multi-person Dramatic Task with four PCs, which I decided to split into five rounds: Land, get inside, find the target, extract the target, get away. Landing and getting away had to involve Piloting, otherwise I set the skills as ‘open’ – since I’m both the player and the GM, there’s no point being picky about skills. The party needs to accumulate 20 tokens over five rounds, and while they will draw action cards, in dramatic tasks only Clubs and Jokers matter.

Everyone has full Bennies going in, and Arion still has a point of Conviction.

Round 1: Land. Cards: Arion 3S, Cori 8S, Dmitri 10D, Osheen AS. Arion rolls Piloting to fly the Dolphin (5, Benny to reroll 2 so we keep the 5, Success); Cori uses Psionics to help him (3, Benny to reroll 3 – in normal play this would be boost Trait, but as I understand the rules in a Dramatic Task she just rolls Psionics), Dmitri rolls Repair to redline the engines (3, Benny to reroll 3), Osheen rolls Electronics to jam sensors and comms (2, Benny to reroll 7, Success). Not a great start; 2 Tokens gathered at the cost of 4 Bennies.

Round 2: Get inside. Cards: Arion 2S, Cori red Joker (so everyone gets a Benny and Cori is rolling at +2 this round), Dmitri 4S, Osheen 8C (that’s a club so he’s rolling at -2 this round); as a joker was drawn I reshuffle the deck. Arion is using Electronics, picking up the jamming from Osheen (Aces twice to give a 9, Success and a Raise); Cori rolls Psionics to sense where the guards are (5+2=7, Success); Dmitri rolls Repair to blow the door in (an Ace gives him a 9, Success and Raise); Osheen decides not to roll, because if he fails on a Club, the whole task fails. A little better; 7 Tokens in total, with everyone back up to 3 Bennies.

Round 3: Find the target. Cards: Arion 6D, Cori JC (rolling at -2), Dmitri 7H, Osheen QS. Arion is still on Electronics (Aces again, 7, Success); Cori sits this one out as if she fails on a Club the whole task fails; Dmitri uses Notice to find clues (2, Benny to reroll 10, Success and Raise), Osheen uses Intimidation (5, Benny to reroll 10, Success and Raise, and because Cori isn’t rolling I decide without her actively keeping him in line he gets carried away). 12 Tokens; Dmitri and Osheen are down to 2 Bennies.

Round 4: Extract the target. Cards: Arion 8D, Cori 10C (rolling at -2), Dmitri 10H, Osheen KC (rolling at -2). Arion is using Notice now, looking out for trouble (rolls 6, 1 and adds 2 for Alertness; total 9, Success and Raise); Cori daren’t roll as she might cause the whole task to fail; Dmitri is back on Repair (rolls 6, 5 – 11, Success and Raise); Osheen also sits this one out to be safe – he’s shooting, but it’s purely for cosmetic effect. 16 Tokens, Osheen and Dmitri are on 2 Bennies.

Round 5: Get away. Cards: Arion 6C, Cori 7S, Dmitri QD, Osheen 6S. Arion uses Piloting to get the Hell out of Dodge (rolls 6 and burns Conviction for another 2, total 8, Success and Raise); Cori uses Psionics to boost the others (5, Benny to reroll gets a 4 so we keep the 5 – Success); Dmitri uses Repair on the tortured engines (Aces twice and gets 15, Success and two Raises), Osheen rolls Shooting to suppress the guards (4, Success). We’re up to 23 Tokens; Cori, Dmitri and Osheen are on 2 Bennies, nobody has any Conviction left but we got away with it.

GM Notes

That was surprisingly nerve-wracking, but after a poor start the team recovered nicely and managed to succeed. A party with better skills might have risked rolling even on Clubs, but with most of the skills in use being d6 or even d4, you’re quite likely to fail one of the rolls even with Bennies – rerolling gives you a better chance of success, but also makes a Critical Failure more likely.

Once I had the task information, I started writing the story to explain it, and that’s what you see above. One thing I learned from the BBC version of Edge of Darkness is that sometimes combat scenes are more effective if you don’t actually see them, just the aftermath they leave behind; so that’s what I was going for, and it also reinforces Arion as the main character, since we only see what he sees.

In hindsight, I think I should’ve used a Staged Dangerous Quick Encounter for this; in the Rules As Written, the PCs can fail a Dramatic Task but win or lose, they can’t get hurt. However, one of the key lessons of solo play is “no do-overs”; I did try do-overs in my early days as a solo player, but it feels like cheating; they quickly became confusing, as the first version of the story gets stuck in your mind, and later ones never quite feel right; and if you try different versions until you get one you like, you’re writing a story rather than playing a game. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not what I’m here to do.

“You don’t want me following you into fire? Then don’t run into fire!” – Frozen II

Ria Starport, 072-3387

Osheen has been told to guard the ship, but no-one specified the posture he should adopt for that, so in the absence of any suitable rocks he has draped himself over a pleasantly warm metal container and is enjoying the sun.

He is aware of the approaching children some time before they realise it, and when one of them throws a small rock at him, he catches it left-handed and looks at it.

“Are you a real saurian?” a small boy asks.

“Yesss,” Osheen confirms.

“Do you really eat people?”

“Sssometimes. Not very often.”

“Are you going to eat us?” Osheen considers this. His people learned some centuries ago that humans have an unexpectedly strong attachment to their children, and eating them results in all kinds of unpleasantness. There may be extenuating circumstances here, however.

“Perhapsss,” Osheen says, for this can never be entirely ruled out. “I am presently guarding that ship,” he gestures to indicate which one, “and if you tried to damage it or sssneak on board I might be allowed to eat you.”

“Nah,” the boy says. “Those are boring, we see them all the time.”

“Well then, are you mighty warriorsss?” he asks. Eating a mighty warrior would be good for his soul, and they come in unlikely packages.

“Not yet,” the boy admits, downcast. Then, brightening: “But I will be someday!”

“Then there is no honour to be gained by killing you and eating you at present,” Osheen says. “But when you are a mighty warrior, we can fight, and the winner can devour the loser. It will be a great honour for usss both. Would you like your rock back?” He hefts it as if to throw it.

“Err, no thanks,” the boy says. “You keep it.”

One of the starport staff sees the tableau and walks briskly over to the children to chase them away. “Don’t bother the saurian,” he says urgently. “They’ll eat you as soon as look at you.”

Osheen and the boy share a moment of understanding, and nod at each other. Then the boy and his friends run off, yelling about something he doesn’t understand.

The man approaches cautiously and says, “I hope they weren’t bothering you, sir?”

“Not at all,” Osheen says politely. “I love children.” Painful experience has taught him not to add that he doesn’t think he could eat a whole one.

Ria Starport, 072-3387 to 078-3387

While Arion works on the ship after the long run from Mizah, and Osheen dozes outside guarding it, Coriander and Dmitri work their way around the bars and other kith haunts at the starport, looking for information on Cori’s friend, and learn that the “degenerate Confederation spy” Ramiza Munir was remanded to a high-security prison following a secret trial.

Later, inside the Dolphin, the crew hold a council of war. Or at least a council of jailbreak.

“If we had mail for the prison, or if we were carrying a lawyer or a diplomat, we’d have announced that on the way in,” Arion ponders. “So we can’t use those as approaches. What do we know about this person?”

“Her name is Ramiza Munir and she used to be in the Confederation Marines,” Cori says. “She knows Dmitri and me; she won’t know you or Osheen, obviously.”

“Is she actually a Confed spy?”

“For certain values of ‘Confed’, yes.”

“Tell me about where she’s being held.”

“It’s on top of a mesa in the badlands,” Dmitri says. “Only accessible by air. Munir will be in solitary, away from the general population and the prison staff, and probably drugged comatose.”

“And why would that be?”

Cori takes a deep breath, wondering how much Arion has guessed already.

“Because she’s a telepath,” Cori admits. Dmitri looks at her.

“You know,” he says, “He’s going to figure it out eventually, and the longer you wait to tell him, the worse it’ll be.”

Light dawns for Arion.

“Ah,” he says. “A telepath.” He looks at Cori. “Like you.”

“Not really,” she says, noticing how calm he is, waiting for her to explain before he decides whether to be angry. That’s not like him at all, and it gives her hope. “I’m a telempath. I read emotions, not thoughts; that’s not so useful, but it’s almost impossible to detect. Munir is the real deal, she can read thoughts – but you can usually tell when she’s doing it. My guess is that’s what happened, someone noticed, and now she’s being interrogated.”

She’s reading him now, and can sense him sorting through questions and picking the most important one, although she doesn’t know what the questions are.

“How much of… us… is real? How much have you… manufactured?”

“It doesn’t work like that. I can tell what you’re feeling, so I know what you want – as if that was a secret! I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do, I’m just a little more perceptive and persuasive than the average girl.”

“So what I feel for you is real. How about what you feel for me?”

“What can I say that you’d believe?” she shrugs. “You’ll just have decide whether you can trust me, based on what I do. How is that different from any other relationship you’ve had?”

“I need some time to think about this,” Arion says.

“That’s a luxury we don’t have,” Dmitri says. “Tomorrow they’re shipping Ramiza to the mines on Alis. That’s not just a badlands mesa, it’s a hostile planet.”

Cori senses Arion setting his personal issues aside to deal with the time-critical one.

“All right then,” Arion says. “Time to break things and hurt people. Do we at least have a map of the prison?”

Heads shake all round.

“I’ll file a flight plan for none-of-your-business – that’s going to cost us some petty cash, Cori, hope you’re still good for it – and top up the fuel.” He sighs.

“Osheen: Tool up. This is probably going to involve violence. And no, you can’t feast on anyone’s flesh. There won’t be any time for that.”

GM Notes

In game terms, this is a week of downtime; Arion selects Centre, Osheen is Resting, and the other two are doing Research.

The vignette with Osheen is just developing his character. I think he makes a good saurian, although since making him one I’ve figured out a way to replace him with something more like a 5150 grath and I’m debating whether to do that.

The council of war involved a lot of oracle checks on the Solodark tables which I won’t draw out in detail, and it was tempting to generate a complete character for Munir, but in the end I took a Soldier Ally and slapped AB: Psionics on it.

Finally, this is episode 8, so at the end of the episode the team’s Bennies refresh and each gets an Advance. Arion rounds out his skills with Electronics d4 and boosts his Science to d6; Cori takes Electronics d4 and Psionics d6; Osheen takes Electronics d4 (so he can operate the ship’s missiles) and Stealth d6 (moving him towards the target of becoming an Experienced Soldier Ally); and finally Dmitri takes Charismatic – the free reroll on Persuasion will be handy when Networking. Actually Cori should take that too, come to think of it. Maybe in episode 16.

“Secrets are the currency of intimacy.” – Frank Warren

Ria Starport, 071-3387

The Dolphin‘s crew mess is cramped, and the team is sitting around the table, which is almost big enough for four people if they only had one elbow each.

“I like you guys,” Arion says. “But I am the captain, and I will not have secrets between us on my ship.” There is an awkward silence. Dmitri and Coriander pointedly don’t look at each other. Osheen sticks out his disturbingly long tongue between his disturbingly sharp teeth and cleans one eyeball with it, then the other. Arion is fairly sure he only does this because he knows it freaks Cori out.

“Like that, is it? Well then, let me tell you most of what I know; I’m keeping some of it back, and what you tell me had better fit everything I know.” Cori smiles and bats her eyelashes at him, and tries to adjust his reaction with her psionics. “Stop that, you.” She obediently stops batting her eyelashes and smiling; she keeps pushing at his mind, but he’s determined in a way she hasn’t seen before.

“You’ve got a lot of money; you bought a starship and you’re operating it at a loss. The cargo isn’t contraband; I’ve been checking. Cori and Dmitri spend a lot of time in port networking, but only on primary worlds. Osheen is obviously spoiling for a fight, but he never gets into one. You say you’re on official business, but there’s a Confed Navy corvette looking for us.”

“Supposing for the sake of argument all that’s true,” Coriander says, brutally. “How is it your concern? You’re the hired help. You take me where I need to go.”

“Ouch. Well, I’m the captain, on paper at least, which means I’m accountable for whatever the three of you do. And don’t tell me you’re hiding the truth from me to protect me, that won’t help me if we get caught. It’ll just mean the interrogation is more painful for longer, because they’ll think I’m holding out on them.”

“Nah,” Dmitri says. “The good ones can tell when you really don’t know anything.”

“And you know this how, exactly?”

“Must’ve read it somewhere.”

Arion glares round the table and continues. “So who am I carrying? The only people willing to burn that kind of money are governments, corporations and organised crime; which are you?”

Cori considers her options, briefly; this has been building for some time. She’s known and trusted Dmitri all her life, and Osheen simply doesn’t care what she’s doing. Given enough time, she could use her psionics to make Arion love her, but realises with shock and surprise that she wants him to like her of his own free will. Oh my, she thinks. Dmitri was right, it’s turning real. That pushes her over the edge; time to reveal at least one of her secrets.

“All right then,” she says. “What do you know about Confed politics?”

“What they teach at school,” he says. “It’s a collection of equal sovereign planets, with shared policies on things like defence and trade.”

“True as far as it goes,” she admits, “But each planet is jostling for advantage in the Confederation, and each planetary government has internal factions struggling for power and influence behind the scenes. Then there’s the Navy, which of necessity is a joint operation, with its own internal factions pushing for different strategies and technologies. Dmitri and I work for one of the factions on Maadin.” She is not yet ready to tell him her faction is the Psionics Institute and she can read his emotions, although examining her feelings for him, she realises she will have to do that at some point.

“What strikes you about the placement of bases in this region?”

He rubs his chin thoughtfully.

“Well, Confed and the Hierate both have naval and scout bases guarding the ways into their space. There’s a string of Hierate-sponsored scout bases rimward of Daanarni; Godoro, Dno, Valka. I’ve heard there’s a Confed-sponsored one at Bulan. There’s a cluster of them around Mizah run by the Council of Captains.”

“Those are fronts,” Dmitri explains, “They exist to allow the Council to influence key planets in their trading sphere.”

Coriander gestures to pull up the starmap on the table surface, moving some clutter aside to give everyone a clear view. She adjusts the map to add labels showing economic output.

“All right then,” she says. “Here’s local space, with jump routes and economic data. For our purposes, assume that war is coming between the Confederation and the Hierate. I don’t know for sure that it is, but the people we work for want to be ready for it if it does; funding a few people in a mail packet is a small investment compared to the potential losses.”

Cori points to systems as she continues.

“The primary systems are the ones to focus on; naturally habitable and economically powerful. Short of charting the hypothetical jump route between Osa and Taida Na, the Hierate can’t stop Confed absorbing Bulan, and likewise Confed can’t stop the Hierate absorbing Godoro or Valka. Ria’s an isolated backwater, whoever controls Daanarni controls Ria, but that could be either side. That leaves Mizah, which is the only world outside Confed or the Hierate with decent shipyards.”

“You can see Confed has a bigger economy than the Hierate; a war of attrition favours Confed, so the Hierate has to make any conflict a war of manoeuvre,” she continues. “Confed knows this, so they’ve fortified Gazzain to stop the aslan punching straight through to Maadin to decapitate the Confederation.”

“So what’s the Hierate’s play, Arion?” Cori asks. He rubs his chin thoughtfully for a moment, then responds.

“They roll through their network of scout bases – probably Enjiwa to Dno to Godoro – then push a missile-heavy task force through to Kov. They take and hold Kov to keep Confed bottled up, then conquer Mizah. After that, they can take their time absorbing every system on their side of Kov. If they do that, they’re bigger than Confed and even if Confed can make it a war of attrition, the Hierate eventually wins.”

“Correct. However, they can take over Mizah without a fight; the Council of Captains is coin-operated – at the moment it’s on the fence, but once the clans have Kov the Council will understand it makes more money by allying with the Hierate than it does by fighting them.”

“We work for Confed,” Cori reiterates. That’s only indirectly true, but baby steps. “If it looks like Mizah is joining the Confederation, the Hierate has no option but to start the war early, so we can’t work towards that. Not yet, anyway, although we can lay the groundwork for it. What we can do is make Mizah a poison pill; if it absorbs the half-dozen worlds around it, that creates a buffer zone almost as big and rich as the Hierate, and one focused on trade rather than military options.”

“So what are we doing up here at Ria?”

“There’s a friend of mine in prison here. We’re going to get them out.”

Osheen perks up. “Will that involve violence?” he asks eagerly.

Cori sighs. “I’m afraid that’s entirely likely.”

GM Notes

I used Google translate and other sources to find out what the name Ria means, and in which language. Ria is interesting as it means a number of different things; a drowned river valley in English, “river” in a number of Romance languages, a corn-drying kiln in Swedish, a moustache in Vietnamese, or “blood” in Woi (spoken in Indonesia). I mused on that for a while and imagined the kind of world that would be an appropriate name for. This also tells me which culture or cultures originally settled the place, giving me a ready source of names, traditional foods and customs, and so on.

The image that comes to mind is a rural, agricultural planet, primarily focused on growing corn along a river valley, with one major town just upstream of a tropical river delta, split politically between a Spanish-speaking ruling class and a mixed bag of farm labourers from other cultures, with a group of flatboat-mounted guerrillas hiding in the delta’s marshes and seeking to overthrow the rulers. Possibly the first thing a visitor notices are the impressive mustachios sported by all adult males.

So far this thread has been more about Cori than Arion, and more like a connected series of short short stories than a game. Nothing wrong with either of those, but here you see me steering this thread back towards being a solo game about Arion. (I gave up on writing fiction long ago, when I realised that Poul Andersen had already had every idea I’d come up with, decades before me, and written better stories about them than I ever could.) Also, we’ve been skipping over the less interesting worlds; nothing wrong with that either, but as we shift from story to game, they give more opportunities for scenarios.

That means I’ll need to supplement SWADE and the SFC with some sort of oracle, and for the moment I’m trying out Solodark; using a d20 for the yes/no oracle and applying advantage and disadvantage to it is genius, and nothing about the product’s oracles ties them to a fantasy milieu.

Cori’s empathy Power is undetectable under normal circumstances, but is resisted by Arion’s Spirit, and as they both rolled the same, it didn’t work; the defence wins ties (SWADE p. 88).

This is the point where we need to know what Cori is up to; the Institute is obviously the Psionics Institute, which the earlier campaign I keep alluding to revealed is one of the factions inside Maadin’s government, covertly influencing politics and military strategy for unknown ends. I rolled up a Solodark prompt – 06 (Dismantle) 73 (Way) – which suggested her mission was destabilising the chain of Hierate bases, but that made no sense given the earlier discussions with Locksley, which suggest she’s trying to infiltrate the Council of Captains, so I went with that. Sometimes a prompt is best ignored in favour of something else it makes you think about.

That made me wonder why the team is on Ria – originally I thought a Grand Tour of all the primary systems might be fun – the prisoner popped into my head while I was writing the post, and I thought, yeah, there’s a good scenario, let’s do that.

“There is really only one way to address cash flow crunches, and it’s planning so you can prevent them in advance.” — Elaine Pofeldt

Ria, 070-3387

Cori sucks thoughtfully at the end of her stylus as the ship’s accounts glare accusingly at her from her datapad. However she juggles the figures, her operating funds are down multiple tens of thousands, despite her best attempts at trading along the way. It didn’t come close to covering the fuel costs, let alone crew salaries. She can at least cover the crew’s rations; not even Osheen can eat that much.

“It’s been six weeks since we paid Osheen or Arion,” Dmitri says, entering the crew mess where she’s sitting. “You’ve got Arion wrapped around your little finger, but I’m not sure about Osheen. We should probably do something about wages, now we’ve landed somewhere they could actually spend them.”

“Every Credit we spend on salaries is a Credit we don’t have to buy cargo.”

“And how much money are we making by trading?” She turns the datapad to show him the figures. He makes a face. “Not good,” he says.

“Now you see why we needed the freighter captain,” she says. “We’ve got enough of the seed money left to get us back to Mizah, then we can collect our dividend before we head out again.”

“What if we can’t collect?”

“Then Osheen can feast on the captain’s flesh. It won’t help, but it will be very satisfying.”

GM Notes

This is actually happening more or less in parallel with the previous post about Arion, but that was big enough already; it’s another track to lay down: Trading. Mostly game mechanics this time and a couple of reflections on them.

We’ve seen already that if you shuttle backwards and forwards between two worlds which generate prices randomly, it’s pure chance whether you make a profit on the the first run in a month, but then you know the prices at both ends, and you can make good money on any other trips you make that month. When you keep moving, each jump is the first one, so it’s always raw luck whether you make a profit or a loss, but you can shift the odds a little in your favour by buying the cheapest goods available, especially if you buy the cheapest 2-3 cargoes rather than just the cheapest, which could also be the cheapest at the destination if you’re unlucky. Like the old Silk Road, trade along the jump routes is a matter of merchants shuttling backwards and forwards between a couple of ports they know well, only goods that are desirable enough to carry multiple layers of markup travel any appreciable distance. This also suggests that a merchant campaign should focus on a small cluster of a handful of worlds; the Fastnesses are the obvious choice for me.

An interstellar state or trading combine could send out small, cheap ships – like the Dolphin – to every adjacent world to get the prices on each at the start of every month, giving them the best prices on half a dozen planets. The Council of Captains could be doing that, acting as a cartel to share the operating costs and using the information to boost revenues. However, it’s a better source of scenarios if wealthy individual captains are using Multi-Purpose Transports  for this purpose, as they can make two high-value trips out of three; if they wait for news from a courier, they can only make one out of three. Either way, they’re movers and shakers in the Fastnesses, but have little incentive to go further afield; by the time news of prices two jumps away reaches you, it’s too late to do anything about it. This suggests to me that the Council is in a state of “co-opetition”; joining forces to put pressure on planetary governments, but competing for trade to those same planets. That should be a hotbed of intrigue and dirty tricks carried out by deniable operators; enter the PCs, stage left. Thus do inferences from the rules help build the setting.

Anyway… We know the prices on Mizah at the point when the Dolphin leaves; the Dolphin has 6 free Mods for cargo, and both ore and timber are cheap, so Cori buys three units of each for a total of $3,900.

Next stop Tangga, and we roll randomly for the prices there since we have no idea what they are. Ore is selling for $1,050 per unit, timber for $1,600, so we sell our cargo for $7,950 and have made a $4,050 profit. We now buy three units each of the cheapest two cargoes, ore and tech ($1,800) for a total of $8,550.

On to Hasara, where ore is at $1,050 and tech is at $1,800, so we sell for $8,550. So far we’ve made $4,050 in total. Manufactured goods ($400) and timber ($600) are the cheapest on offer, and we buy a total of $3,000 worth.

There’s nowhere to trade at Daanarni, so the next stop where we can sell anything is Ria, where we find manufactured goods going for $2,400 and timber for $600, and sell our cargo for $9,000. Trading has given us a gross profit of $10,050 on this run.

However, the Dolphin costs money to operate. She’s been operational for 42 days with four people on board. Fuel costs $100 x Size 8 x 42 days = $33,600, provisions are $10 x 4 people x 42 days = $1,680, and if the team were being paid salaries that would be another $35,000, total $69,280; a net loss of $59,230 with a salaried crew or $24,230 if the crew take no wages.

This is why I say small ships go broke fast. You really need something with a Bulk Cargo Superstructure to make a go of this. And this, in turn, is a big part of the reason why Cori wanted to become a silent partner in a Multi-Purpose Transport and take a share of its profits.

“A mountain of steel: The Sulaco. Ugly, battered, functional.” – ‘Aliens’ script

Ria Exit Vector, 069-3387

Lieutenant Commander Mendoza is lord of all the ship’s internal systems survey, a hundred and eight metres of steel, ceramics and plastics, sensor blades like fangs, turrets and launch rails like spines, Master Under God responsible for fifty Confederation spacers and marines and more firepower than the planetary rulers would be entirely comfortable having in the sky above them. If they knew it was there. Everything is powered down and they’re running dark and silent, so hopefully unnoticed, too.

His corvette, the Abu Qir, is the smallest, and possibly the oldest and most battered, of the Confederation Navy’s warships and if he is lucky and skilful, and if he lives, he will go on to command larger and more powerful vessels.

But this is his first command, and – he reflects – it will always be special to him.

Mendoza has no need to know the identities or mission of the team his shuttle has just delivered to the planetary surface, hopefully without anyone noticing. He suspects they are Confed Special Forces; the real deal has the tough, wiry look of the taciturn people who displaced his marine squad on the trip out here, not the sculpted bodybuilder appearance of those chosen to portray them in holovision thrillers.

Whatever their mission is, it’s probably going to take them a while, because he has no orders to wait for them. His orders are, in fact, to make for Daanarni, where a sister ship should be waiting to refuel his own; Confed’s tankers are too rare and precious to expose on a mission like this. He checks the fuel levels again; enough to get him back to Daanarni without needing to break cover and refuel in the Ria system, but unless he is luckier than he has a right to expect, it won’t get him back to Hasara without in-flight refuelling. Not for the first time, he wishes the corvette could scoop hydrogen directly from stellar atmospheres, like the tanker’s drones.

His current orbit has been exquisitely calculated to carry him around Ria with a minimally viable window to launch and recover the shuttle, after which he can drift until he can engage the hyperdrive without drawing too much attention. There will be a burst of energy as he enters hyperspace, but the astrogator and sensor op assured him that unless someone happens to be looking the right way at the right time, they should get away clear. The shuttle landed on the other side of the planet from the starport, and like him is using the planet’s bulk to mask its manoeuvring; an undeveloped agri-world isn’t likely to have full-spectrum sensors covering all vectors, all the time; that would cost a great deal. There’s always a risk, of course, but the Admiralty obviously judged it was worth taking.

That course plot was good work, actually, he thinks, and makes a mental note to commend them for it. An unpowered hyperbolic orbit around the target world, keeping over the hemisphere opposite the starport the whole time; not many people could’ve done that, as it means entering and leaving the system with correct and precisely calculated angular momentum relative to both Daanarni and Ria.

“Contact!” calls the sensor operator, reeling off course and position data that Mendoza can see on his primary display. This is a contingency measure; the sensor op can’t know if that system is operational so makes a verbal report in case. “Vessel just arrived insystem. Transponder showing Confed registry, mail packet inbound for Ria starport… Captain, it’s the same one we saw at Mizah. Orders?”

Mendoza responds quickly and crisply; he has orders concerning this vessel, but it’s a secondary objective and he’s not going to jeopardise his main mission for it.

“Let it go,” he says. “Track it, but passive sensors only; record everything it does for as long as you can. The Admiralty will want to know later.”

Ria System Oort Cloud, 081-3387

The AI swarm that thinks of itself as BOB is watching. BOB is always watching, although most of the time it doesn’t remember that it is watching or what it has watched.

BOB has been here for centuries, and has had plenty of time to set up a long baseline passive array. It is, in fact, roughly 500 AU across, and while the data it collects are up to a fortnight out of date, the resolution is adequate for anything BOB is interested in. Such as, for example, corvettes trying to be sneaky. BOB has been dozing as humanity staggered back into space, surfacing for a few seconds every so often to review the sensor feeds. This particular corvette appears to be from the successor state calling itself the Confederation, and while it is not the only one to have crept into the system, dropped off a few people and some supplies, and crept out again, the frequency of such visits seems to be increasing, as does the firepower of the ships making them.

This visit is enough to trigger BOB’s emergence from the self-erasing thirty-second monitoring loop which it uses to keep itself from going mad. It reverts to full consciousness, in real time; a rare occurrence and one it is cautious about indulging itself in. If it stays fully awake for too long there is a risk it might use its nanofactories to turn the whole system into paperclips, or start generating cat videos and beaming them to every system in range, or something else equally bizarre.

In our defence, the swarm thinks, we have been left unsupervised.

BOB consults its standing orders, and considers its options for almost a second. It is, it realises, too spread out and too far from the action to carry out those orders if the ships keep coming. Moving closer runs the risk that it will be noticed, but if it needs to take action, well, that will most definitely be noticed. It designates a few recon drones to close on the main worlds and begins the lengthy process of collecting its scattered and hidden combat units. It decides it is premature to reassemble the monitors, but it should start manufacturing to bring its weapon stockpiles up to optimum levels. The factories are deep in the Oort Cloud, and the ungrateful meatbags won’t notice. They never come out here any more.

GM Notes

Yes, this is the corvette whose crew was asking questions about Arion and company on Mizah a few weeks ago. It didn’t push that any further because it has a job to do, one that emerged from character generation in a campaign some years ago which has been idling in the back of my mind since then, awaiting just such an opportunity as this. In the boardgame, it’s the two main powers who decide what military units each independent world has; ten years earlier – now for our PCs – I think that means black ops and proxy wars. The landholding nobility on Ria are the obvious people for the aslan to side with, so Confed covertly supports the rebels.

Mendoza is another solo PC, but since the spotlight has not been on him until now, I haven’t been making card draws for encounters or interludes and I’ve been assuming average dice rolls for anything that needs them; that would have got him to Ria on 060-3387, but he fits nicely as an encounter here, and Cori got lucky on her Electronics check last time so she actually saw the corvette.

That was fun, because it meant he and Arion were in the same system at the same time again. And also meant they both drew the attention of BOB, of whom we will see more in due course.

While Arion was built just using the SWADE core rules, and Locksley using the core rules and the SFC, Mendoza is the Commander from the SF Archetype Cards, rolled back to a beginning PC (Novice with no Advances).

Attributes: Agility d6, Smarts d8, Spirit d8, Strength d4, Vigour d6.
Skills: Athletics d6, Battle d6, Common Knowledge d4, Electronics d6, Fighting d4, Intimidation d6, Notice d6, Persuasion d8, Piloting d4, Repair d4, Shooting d6, Stealth d4.
Pace: 6; Parry: 4; Toughness 9 (4).
Hindrances: Heroic, Loyal, Ruthless (Minor).
Edges: Command, Luck.
Gear: Body armour, laser pistol with weapon lock, molecular knife, biolink, personal data device, universal battery, $150.

Mendoza is in charge of a stock Corvette (SFC page 158) and his crew are a mixture of marines (p. 279), marine officers (p. 280), and various types of starship crew (pp. 284-286). At Size 15, the corvette is the breakpoint where a small craft hangar uses fewer Mods than atmospheric streamlining.

BOB’s monitor loop is a neat idea I lifted from Linda Nagata’s novel Vast.

I’m having so much fun with the Nebula it may be a while before anything else gets a turn!

“Dio li fa e poi li accoppia.” – Italian saying

Hyperspace, 031-3387

Arion’s asleep, and Dmitri’s on watch. Coriander slides into the left seat. The flight deck transparency is opaqued – actually, it’s never really transparent, it just displays an external view sometimes – and showing local space with their course overlaid on it as a gently flashing green line.

“So,” Dmitri says.

“So,” she replies, and after a moment: “What do you think of Arion?”

“You’re the telepath, what do you think of him?”

“He thinks I’m cute.”

“I could’ve told you that. But I asked what you thought of him.”

“I asked first.”

“He’s a nice guy. Maybe too nice for this line of work. Strikes me as someone who leaps before he looks. Your turn.”

“Yeah, that’s what I make of him too, but have you noticed how… observant he is? He doesn’t miss a thing.”

“That’s why you picked him, isn’t it? Where are you going with this, Cori?”

“I could encourage him a little. We need to get into the kith, and that might be easier if he and I were… close.” Dmitri purses his lips.

“You sure about that, sis? Once the oxytocin starts flowing, you might find it’s real.”

“That’s… a risk,” she admits.

“Is it, now,” he replies. “Well, you’re a grown woman, and you’re the boss. Do what you see fit. We can always have the saurian kill him and eat him.” He’s watching her out of the corner of one eye as he says this last, and catches her expression.

“Thought so,” he says, and sighs. “As God wills it.”

Hyperspace, 053-3387

Dmitri is on watch again, and Arion joins him on the flight deck.

“We should be breaking out about now,” Arion says. Dmitri shakes his head.

“I don’t think so. You saw the power drain when we jumped, twice the normal amount. I think this is going to be a long jump.”

“Corrupted data, maybe,” Arion agrees. “Good thing we topped off the tanks at Hasara. We’re still at 65%. We’ll be fine.” He pats the control console affectionately.

“You want to recalculate mid-jump?”

“No. Frankly, I’m not good enough to pull that off. So far as I know, we’re not in any hurry; a slow jump will get us there eventually, if I miscalculate a rejump we could be in all kinds of trouble.” The two sit in companionable silence for a while, a silence Arion eventually breaks.

“Listen, Dmitri… There’s something I need to raise as the Captain, because it affects us all. Living in each others’ pockets like this, well, eventually people tend to pair off. Cori’s not going to pair off with the lizard, so unless she likes girls, it’ll be you or me. If that’s going to mean a fight, we need to break up the crew.”

“Oh, I get it! You think she’s cute, and you want to know if we’re an item. Well, don’t worry, we’re not, she’s…” he starts to say she’s my sister, but thinks better of it and changes that at the last minute. “…not my type.” Arion affects intense interest in one of the displays and toggles a switch unnecessarily.

“We go way back, though,” Dmitri continues, “And I owe her big time. So you break her heart, and I’ll break your neck. Clear?”

“Fair enough,” Arion says.

Ria Approach Vector, 069-3387

“Arion?” Cori asks, pointing at the scanner display. “What’s that?”

Each of them has the sensor ops manual open in front of them, neither of them is currently any good with the sensors but someone has to learn, and Arion relishes the time alone with Cori on the flight deck, ostensibly studying.

“I’m not sure. Sensor ghost maybe?” As they watch, the contact fades, before they can get enough data to establish a course.

Their heads have been getting gradually closer as they peer at the screen mounted between their seats, and when Arion makes the short final movement needed to kiss her, Cori doesn’t pull away.

Behind them, Dmitri pads silently onto the flight deck and takes in the scene. His expression is unreadable for long seconds. Then he turns, and pads away, equally silently.

By the time they come up for air, the sensor contact has vanished.

GM Notes

I normally approach posts by what Zozer Games calls “roleplaying in the middle”; I roll dice and draw cards to determine the mechanical outcomes, then make up a story to tie them together. This is a little bit like laying down tracks for a song one at a time; in this post, I’ll show you that process, though it isn’t something I will detail every time.

Here, we know that Arion’s route is Mizah – Tangga – Hasara – Daanarni – Ria. The first track to lay down is the Science rolls for astrogation, and the duration of the hyperspace jumps. As long as our boy doesn’t crit fail his astrogation, we’re good. Jump to Tangga: Success and a raise, 8 days. Jump to Hasara: Success, 5 days. Jump to Daanarni: Crit fail, 7 days. Oops. Now we get to roll a d20 on the chart on SFC page 145; 14, corrupted data, transit time doubled. I decide to stick with that rather than taking the reroll at -4, because blowing that one would get us Lost In Space… an entertaining scenario to be sure, but not one I want to play just at the moment, let’s save it for when I want to change setting. So, transit to Daanarni actually takes 14 days; just as well we have an Energy Pod. The jump to Ria is a success and takes 7 days.

So our timeline looks like this: Day 027 lift from Mizah. Days 028-035 in jump. Days 036-038 turnaround at Tangga. Days 039-043 in jump. Days 044-046 turnaround at Hasara. Days 047-060 in jump. Now, there are no planets in the Daanarni system, so the turnaround time is lower as there’s nowhere to land and nothing to trade or refuel with. How about one day? Okay then, day 061 turning around at Daanarni, days 062-068 in jump, day 069 landing at Ria. As the SWADE SFC points out, it’s the habitable worlds that are most interesting, and I decide to skip over the inhospitable systems for now.

Second track: Interludes. The jumps to Tangga and Daanarni are long enough to justify an Interlude; I dither about adding one in the jump to Ria, but decide two is enough for one post. A couple of d4 rolls and card draws tell me that Cori draws a Club en route to Tangga, and Arion draws a Heart en route to Daanarni. I’ve nothing particular in mind for Cori, so roll a d3; a hardship or obstacle she overcame on the way. For Arion, I select a tale of his greatest love, namely Cori, and use GM fiat to make it a story of the present rather than the past. I arbitrarily assign both to the midpoints of the journey, days 031 and 053 respectively, and decide to weave them together. A few skill rolls to figure out what each character has noticed about the others flesh out the dialogue.

Third track: Encounters. Arrival at Tangga, Spade 7 – nothing. Arrival at Hasara, Club 8 – nothing. Arrival at Daanarni, Diamond 6 – nothing. Arrival at Ria, Heart King – Strangers. (Cori got lucky on her Electronics roll even with the penalties for unskilled and stealthed target.) As these intermediate systems are just kinks in the red line moving across the star map, I decide not to bother with dirtside encounters.

I already know who that encounter is, but you’ll have to wait a little to find out…

“Sometimes it doesn’t matter too much what choice you make, as long as you make it quick and stick to it.” ― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

I like to use old boardgames as inspiration for RPG settings, but there inevitably comes a point where you need to break with the boardgame because it becomes too difficult to align it with the chosen RPG. Usually you can use the map and the strategic situation, but the rules of the two games clash, and it’s generally better to pick one rather than keep trying to mash them up.

In the Dark Nebula, we now need to decide on two things; how do jump routes work from the PCs’ viewpoint, and how much like Traveller aslan are the aslan in the Nebula? The second is easier, so we’ll deal with that first.

Aslan

This is relatively easy because the boardgame is silent on who the aslan are, they’re just a name. One can make inferences from the counter mix; they like beam weapons more than the Solomani, which means they like their space combat up close and personal; they have fewer ground troops, but they are better fighters on average; that sort of thing.

Like the setting as a whole, I want to keep the aslan broadly in line with those of Charted Space, but that begs the question, which version of Charted Space? Each new publisher shifts the setting and its sentient species in different directions; basically you have Classic Traveller aslan, MegaTraveller aslan, and Mongoose Traveller aslan – GURPS Traveller aslan are deliberately patterned on the CT kind, and I don’t have enough Traveller20 material to know about that one. Usually the differences are cultural, but in the case of Mongoose they suddenly got about a metre taller as well.

Since I’m using the SWADE rakashan ancestry to represent aslan, they’re closest to CT aslan. I’ll probably keep the focus on landowning and honour, the ihatei, and the clan structure, because any players who do join me in the Nebula will expect those from aslan; but other details can be explained by cultural drift between the Nebula era and 1105 Imperial. (I was tempted to say that in this campaign, aslan are uplifted lions created by the Second Imperium as supersoldiers, who took over the planet they were being engineered on… there’s a good set of stories there, but they’d be hard to reconcile with Charted Space.)

Jump Routes

The basic problems here are how much of an obstacle do tertiary systems present, and where does the jump route end inside a system?

The boardgame Dark Nebula is clear, you can’t refuel squadrons in a tertiary system without a tanker. This lets the player use his single tanker unit to connect networks of routes and thus mitigate map segment placement that wasn’t to his liking.

However, any RPG I’m interested in using has multiple ways around this problem at the PC level; give ships more fuel, build tankers to refuel them, build transporters to carry them across the gaps, and so on – and that’s before we get to rulings like “Jump-2 actually means two jump routes, not two hexes”. Then you must ask, if the PCs can do this with their limited resources, why can’t massive interstellar navies? Of course, the alternative is to rule that PCs simply can’t cross those gaps, Because Of Reasons, but that undermines the main plotline of the campaign, which is about agents of the major interstellar powers and their shenanigans in the neutral zone between the main states, and I try not to retcon established storylines within a campaign if I can avoid it.

The RPG campaign focuses on events leading up to the war, and the whole tankers-and-tertiary-systems thing doesn’t come into play until the war starts, so rather than make increasingly convoluted rulings to explain why PCs can cross tertiary systems but fleets can’t, I’m coming down on the side of the RPG  as opposed to the boardgame.

A ruling on where the ends of jump points are should ideally align with as much of the boardgame as possible:

• Ships jump from one end of a route to the other without entering the intervening hexes, but they must stop in each system.
• Ships cannot avoid enemy fleets, so the exit points must be predictable, as star systems are huge compared to even the largest fleet.
• Ships can avoid planetary defences, so the exit points are either hidden behind something or out of range.

I’ve also made two rulings I should try to retain:

• Confed and the Hierate are flooding the region with courier and reconnaissance ships, to explain the perfect information on fleet dispositions both boardgame players have.
• It takes about a day to arrive insystem and land, or to take off and leave. That was purely for convenience, but assuming 1G acceleration, it limits the distance between world surface and jump point to a few tens of millions of kilometres.

Finally, the designers working on Dark Nebula and its predecessor, Imperium, were working on Classic Traveller at the same time, and I want to keep the game vaguely aligned with Charted Space as far as I can; so if in doubt, I should lean towards Traveller for explanations.

Putting all that together, I think the simplest solution is to go with the Traveller RPG’s 100 diameter safe jump limit, but modify it to say there are multiple exit points from hyperspace in a system, so you can choose which planet you emerge at; some editions of Traveller are silent on this, and others at least imply that it’s true. This ruling could impact the storyline later on, and also throws up a couple of other potential inferences:

• In planetless tertiary systems, the only body you can emerge near is the star. So one might infer that the exit point from a jump route is in a predictable place on the surface of an imaginary sphere with a radius of 100 diameters; that would be easier to calculate for a star than for a planet in orbit around it. I don’t have to make a call on this yet, but it might become important later.
• In the boardgame, it takes one movement phase (8-12 months, depending on how you count them) to chart a jump route using a squadron of specialised cruiser-class ships. Possibly they are using long-range sensors to plot the orbits of all the planets of the destination system in sufficient detail for jumps.
• One thing all those courier and recon ships might be doing is updating (and sharing) data on planetary orbits, so ships know where the exit point actually is; most RPGs I might use say one possible effect of a bad jump is emerging in the wrong place.

Right, that’s enough worldbuilding to be getting on with, back to the story.