Planet Ankara

 

Ankara

Single Star System. Red Giant Type M

System Features: Radiation and Energy Barrier

11 Orbiting Planets

1: Rocky Planet - Icy/Snow - Large - 1 Moon

2: Ankara - Rocky Planet - Ocean - Medium - 1 Moon

3: Gas Giant - 29 Moons

4: Rocky Planet - Volcanic - Medium - 3 Moons

5: Gas Giant - 22 moons

6: Ice Giant - 11 Moons

7: Dwarf Planet

8: Gas Giant - 23 moons

9: Gas Giant - 16 moons

10: Gas Giant - 24 moons

11: Dwarf Planet

Planet Ankara

Size: 6  

Atmosphere: 6 Standard

Hydrographics: 10

Population: 5 100 000

Government: 3 Self-Perpetuating Oligarchy Ruling functions are performed by a restricted minority, with little or no input from the mass of citizenry

Law Level: 0 No restrictions

Starport: A Excellent, Refined Fuel, Shipyard and repair for all types,
Tech Level: 9

Bases: None

Trade Codes: Ni, Wa, 

Something that really appeals to me and something that I would like to be a strong flavour in the setting is the anachronism of Star Wars. I love in Star Wars how they’ll have settlements that consist of ancient buildings but with futuristic technology installed and even that tech has the feeling of being old, battered and barely functional. Fading Suns does something similar. It is literally medieval questing knights but with space ships. Dune and 40K do this to an extent as well. I love the idea of a starship landing pad made from quarried stone, wattle and daub and timber. 

Something else I like the idea of is religion. Again, fading Suns does this and I liked it in Firefly as well. The seemingly anachronistic idea that many space travellers are at least passingly religious and that ships might have a small shrine as a standard fitting or even a ship’s priest. I like the superstitious belief that it would be unwise or unlucky to not have either.

Anyway, Ankara is the ocean world. Everyone has one. This is mine. A planet covered in water with only a few tiny islands upon which the starports are built. There might be vast floating landing pads as well, like lily pads on the surface of a pond. Any habitats would also be either in or on the water and the bulk of the agriculture would be sea-bed farming. It has an A class starport, which is odd but I’ll go with it. Maybe the export of various seaweeds and fish is big business. Maybe there’s a lucrative holiday and hunting economy here. Maybe its non-aquatic inhabitants are all gathered in one place resulting in a huge city that barely fits on to the island on which it’s built. Maybe it’s a narrow but very tall city or maybe it spreads out from the island on a sprawling and complex array of pontoons. Its Trade code is Non Industrial, which makes sense. I imagine there might be habitats and even factories on the sea bed or floating on the surface but not to any great extent. Still seems odd for it to be A class, though. Maybe I’ll downgrade it to a B. The government suggests rulership by the elite. Could be royalty. Could be a cabal of the wealthiest business people.

Planet Amidha

 

Amidha

Single Star System. White Main Sequence type F

System Features: Volatile gas Pockets and Ion Storms

9 orbiting planets

1: Rocky Planet - Barren - Giant - 15 Moons

2: Rocky Planet - Barren - Large - 4 Moons

3: Rocky Planet - Barren - Small - 0 Moons

4: Amidha - Rocky Planet - Swamp - Medium - 2 Moons

5: Gas Giant - 24 moons

6: Ice Giant  - 22 moons

7: Dwarf Planet

8: Ice Giant - 26 moons

9: Ice Giant - 20 moons

Planet Amidha

Size: 5 

Atmosphere: 6 Standard

Hydrographics: 8

Population: 8 100 000 000

Government: 7 Balkanisation No central authority exists; rival governments compete for control. Law level refers to the government nearest the starport.

Law Level: All weapons and all armour are banned. 

Starport: D Unrefined Fuel and limited repair. Birthing Cost 50 Creds.
Tech Level: 8

Bases: No.

Trade Codes: Ri, 

These entries are all very dry so far. At some point I want to go back over these and add in some illustrations and mood boards and some more cultural concepts to try and give each planet a bit more flavour than just forest, desert, snow etc. I think it might have been better to do that to begin with but I feel like this is the initial brain-fart stage and going back over them and fleshing them out is for later. Plus a lot of details will develop through play. It’s also possible that I’ll try and make them a bit more alien and a bit more whimsical than just analogous to Earth biomes.

So, Amidha is my Dagobah, I guess. A gloomy swamp world. Louisiana and Indonesia on a planetary scale. Not that I would describe either of those places as gloomy. I’m thinking more of Dagobah in that sense, I think. Gnarled trees and dense foliage alive with fauna. Mud huts and half-submerged ancient stone temples. Once again a white, main sequence star which we shall pretend is harmless. It is a planet with a variety of polities and very strict gun control. Maybe there have been terrorist incidents and the Starport has been forced to crack down.  Its trade code is simply ‘Rich’ which feels odd. I’m not sure that that works with how I see the planet. What could it export other than brackish water and alligators? I imagine that it might be heavily agricultural with an abundance of swamp flora and fauna to export. It doesn’t fit with the trade table but I think Agr is a better fit than Ri in this case. Maybe that’s the reason for the strict gun control. Maybe there have been organised crime issues with the planet able to mass produce a controlled substance and the various political bodies seek to control it for themselves. You might have a Dune situation where the substance grows only in a particular region (we begin to see the short-comings of the single biome planet trope) and it is an impoverished region constantly being fought over by the various political bodies like South America. Or maybe, it’s an incredibly wealthy region like Saudi Arabia is with its oil. That would explain the Ri code. I guess the difference being whether the substance produced is deemed illegal or not.

Planet Aksu

 

Aksu

Binary star system. Aksu A: Red Supergiant Type L. Aksu B: Orange Main Sequence type K

System Features: Solar Winds and Funnel Clouds

6 Orbiting Panets

1: Rocky Planet - Barren - Large - 3 Moons

2: Moth Rocky Planet - Terrestrial - constant rain - Medium - 2 Moons

3: Rocky Planet - Barren - Giant - 27 moons

4: Rocky Planet - Swamp - Medium - 3 moons

5: Gas Giant - 27 moons

6: Gas Giant - 21 moons

Planet Moth

Size: 4

Atmosphere: 6 Standard

Hydrographics: 8

Population: 8 100 000 000

Government:6 Captive Government. Government by an imposed leadership answerable to an outside group. A colony or conquered area.

Law Level: No weapons except shotguns. No open carry.

Starport: C Unrefined Fuel, reasonable repair facilities. No bases. Birthing Cost: 300 Creds
Tech Level: 6

Bases: No

Trade Codes: Ri

Aksu is a binary system with a red supergiant and an orange main sequence star. Moth, itself is lifted wholesale from Alan Dean Foster’s For Love of Mother Not a pip and Flinx prequel. It’s a drab, grey, ringed world but the ring has a sizable gap either side, dividing the ring into two separate fans making it look like delicate wings and the whole planet like a Moth, hence its name. The surface of Moth is Earth-like but the region we see in the book and the defining feature for my setting is that it is constantly grey, gloomy and raining. It has a standard, earth-like atmosphere and I imagine it to be a planet of markets. Vast sprawling hives of market stalls and traders and back alleys. Maybe this is the place for the setting where anything can be bought for the right price. Its tech level is 6, which suits the ramshackle nature of the place that I imagine. In the book, Moth has a monarchy but according to my dice rolls, Moth here has a captive government. I’m not sure what to make of that. Obviously a local polity has installed a puppet leader (no reason that can’t be a king as well) but who and why? It’s on the edge of the map so maybe another world off the page has invaded, perhaps a small, expansionist pocket empire. Not sure. It’s not likely to have a huge impact on the setting so I’ll leave it for now. It’s more interesting than every planet being a free and fair democracy. The Starport is C which, given the population and the fact that it’s a trade hub, if off the main route, that sounds okay. Trade code is simply, ‘Rich’. Not sure what to make of that either. Perhaps that’s the reason for the puppet government. Previous governments were fragile, volatile and simply bad for business. Perhaps it’s Moth’s own guild masters who have installed the puppet government in order to keep the economy safe. 

The fact that I’ve given Moth a different name from its parent star, Aksu, makes me think that I should do it with all the primary planets.

The system features here are Solar Winds and Funnel Clouds. Not sure what to make of the Funnel Clouds. Perhaps they are a feature of Moth.

The Planets

 For generating the planets I obviously use the Traveller world creation system but I also use a handy little quick generator by Morrus at EN World.  I quite like this. It’s a fun, simple way of generating the outline of a star system. I had to cheat a bit, though as the star creation is weighted toward red stars and I wanted more yellow main sequence stars, simply because each of my main planets is an earth-like biome and so, whilst they don’t need to be exactly the same as our Sun, they need to be similar. I have made some exceptions where it would make the planet more interesting. Also, with gas giants usually having around two dozen moons in the Morrus generator, there is more real estate to set adventures on than I imagine I could ever need in a campaign. So I created the system using the Morrus generator and then picked a planet in the system to be my hero planet and statted it out using the Traveller world creation, cheating a bit in places as I’d already decided on each planet’s dominant biome. Also, as unrealistic as it is, I want most, if not all the main planets to have a largely Earth-like atmosphere. PCs might need a mask or environmental clothing for some but on the whole, they should be habitable without a vacc suit. At the moment most main planets share the name of their star (or vice versa). I can’t decide if it would be more or less confusing to give them separate names. Let’s work through them for now.

The Morrus Star System Generator can be found here:

Morrus Star System Generator

So let's look at the first star alphabetically:

Adana

Single Star System. White Main Sequence Type F

System Features: Spatial Anomalies and Psychic Phenomena

8 orbiting Planets

1: Adana - Rocky Planet - Desert - Small - 0 Moons

2: Rocky Planet - Water - Giant - 13 Moons

3: Gas Giant - 16 moons

4: Gas Giant - 19 Moons

5: Rocky Planet - Icy - Large - 1 Moon

6: Gas Giant - 28 Moons

7: Gas Giant - 25 moons

8: Dwarf Planet

Planet Adana 

Size: 3 Small

Atmosphere: 5 Thin

Hydrographics: 0 Desert

Population: 4 10,000

Government: 4 Representative Democracy

Law Level 3: Military Weapons and Flak armour banned

Starport D - 20 Cred berth, Unrefined Fuel, Limited Repairs.

Tech Level: 6

Bases 0

Trade Codes: De, Ni, 

This is going to be my Tatooine. It has a single, white, main sequence star Type F. I imagine stars like this probably give off huge amounts of radiation and would likely sterilise any planet in its orbit but we’ll handwave that and say that it doesn’t. Adana is, however, going to be very hot, desolate and sandy. It has a thin atmosphere, due to the paucity of water and plant life. Also, due to the harsh conditions of the planet it has a low population of around 10,000. Probably mostly employed in and around the starport or on scattered ranches farming livestock, water or crops, maybe even sand-whalers. They have a representative democracy, so I’m guessing it would be a collection of farming cooperatives and officials at the starport and there would be a government meeting hall at the Starport itself. The Starport was a C which I wasn’t sold on. This is a podunk backwater with a very small population. I want all my major planets in each system to be at least a D. Starports E and X are reserved for the minor planets and moons. I think a D suits this place much better so I changed it. There are no bases here, which is fair enough and its trade codes are Desert (obvs!) and non-Industrial.

Other than the starport change I’m quite happy with that. The star system generator also created other planets in the system that are predominantly ocean and ice but I’m ignoring them as I already have an ocean and ice world. I imagine that there might be small mining settlements on each but otherwise they are inhospitable and not worth visiting most of the time. Morrus also randomly generates weird phenomena in the system. There’s a lot of repetition, sadly but this system has Spatial Anomalies and Psychic Phenomena. I don’t know what I’ll do with those yet and I might well ignore them, but they might make for interesting quirks upon entering the system. Echoes of ancient technology.

Creating my own Traveller Universe.

 I’ve long had a whole jumble of ideas in my head for things I would change about the Traveller setting should I run my own campaign. I hesitate to claim they would be improvements. Many of my ideas would have Third Imperium fans snorting and sneering in derision, but they are changes that appeal to me and, hopefully, any prospective players. I thought it might be interesting for folks if I jotted down my thinking here as I fumble through my ideas and try to make them work.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by the Silk Roads, the trade routes that criss-crossed Europe and Asia stretching from as far east as China and as far west as Italy and even Denmark. I’ve long wanted to create a sci-fi setting that has a similar feel. To be fair, that’s pretty much how Traveller works anyway. Space is the desert, the planets and their starports are the caravanserai, relatively safe stopping points along the route. Still, I liked the idea of a long chain of stars (with offshoots) that connected a distant alien Empire (probably Zhodani or Aslan) to the Human Empire.

I drew out a map using an extremely long row of Traveller sector maps and dotted in several dozen stars. Then it occurred to me that the chances of my players ever visiting more than, say, a handful of them was very unlikely. Also, you can very quickly run out of ways to make planets unique, so limiting the number in the campaign is, I think, a good idea. Part of Traveller’s original campaign philosophy was to explore a single sub-sector which only had around a dozen planets. Indeed, some terrific advice I heard from Bob Loftin of the SAFCO Traveller podcast was to, when beginning a campaign, just stat out three planets and go from there. Also, I've always said that I'd take half a dozen thoroughly fleshed-out planets over several hundred that were just UPPs any day.

So I cut my map right down to one single, small section of the route in the centre.

As I say, fewer planets makes it easier to make them unique and for that, I like the Star Wars idea of the single biome planet. It’s completely unrealistic but you always know exactly where you are. If you’re in a desert, then you’re on Tatooine. Snow? Hoth. Orange clouds? Bespin. Of course that’s not so cut and dried now but that’s because the Star Wars universe has expanded exponentially. I like it as a concept, though.

Another idea I like is the Caravanserai. The small settlement alone in the desert that acts as a resting place, watering hole, shelter from the elements and a place to trade, meet and make deals. I like the idea of a station being a linchpin in the chain of stars as well. It’s the only way to get from one part of the chain to another.

I moved this back and forth for a good long while. I wanted the gap between stars to be 7 parsecs so that all ships had to stop at the Station en route but it meant that there had to be a four parsec gap on one side of the station and the chances of the players or anyone else having a J4 ship are unlikely. So then I made the entire span a J6 gap with a J3 gap either side of the station. J3 ships are also rare for PCs but possible. In the end I shortened the jump to the station to two parsecs either side because most common ships are J1 or J2. This means that a J4 or 5 ship can make the entire journey in one go but they are very rare and there are no J6 common ships. So the vast majority of ships can make the jump to the station but would have to stop off at the station to refuel and it’s reasonable to assume that the players would have a J2 ship. Indeed, they would have to for the setting to work at all.

As I drew the map, it felt more and more obvious that the station should really be the home port for the PCS. It’s the most unique part of the setting and is central, so I’ll probably start them there.

The station, I imagine, would be huge. Like an O’neil Cylinder with sprawling urban areas and arboretums and hive-like levels of varying quality of life. Very much like Babylon 5 or the Citadel in Mass Effect.  It would also have fully artificial lighting as there would be no local star.

So with this in mind, I grabbed a couple of blank sector maps and I dotted in the planets, making sure only two of them are within J4 or 5 of each other so that the station is essential to most starfarers crossing the Expanse. I named the planets after settlements along the eastern Silk Roads, named the void after the formidable Taklamakan desert through which a sizeable portion of the eastern route passes and named the station, Caravanserai. All horribly on the nose but it’ll do for now.

On the Human Empire side (South West) we have Osh (an asteroid belt settlement), Kucha (Forest (Endor/Kashyyk)), Ankara (an ocean world), Adana (Desert (Tatooine/Arrakis)), Aksu (Rainy - I imagine like Moth in For Love of Mother Not by Alan Dean Foster), Kashgar (Jungle (Yavin 4)) and on the Zhodani (or Aslan) side (North East) we have Urumqui (Snow(Hoth)), Hami (Mountainous), Jiuquan (Arid rock Corrosive atmosphere (Venus), Tashkent (Gas Giant with Bespin-like floating cities) and Turfan (Mushroom World). I might well swap some of these around. For example Jungle and Forest are similar so I might swap Kashgar with, say Jiquan. I’m not sure.