Advice on New Campaign

[Hardwire]

Hello,

I am looking at a Voyager style campaign and need a good sector/section of uncharted space to fling them into.

Concept, the characters fly a fairly beefy ship that is owned by a corporation in whatever area they start in. They are running supplies to new colonies in underexplored territory. It will have a little bit of a Firefly feel to it.

At some point they charge their jump engines and initiate the jump. However there is a hyperspace phenomenon happening in the area and the jump becomes supercharged. Throwing them extremely far. Now they are in uncharted territory and need to repair before they can even find out where they are, needing to get back home.

I just need an area that is unexplored yet could allow them to get home eventually.

 

[Terry Mixon]

Hello,

I am looking at a Voyager style campaign and need a good sector/section of uncharted space to fling them into.

Concept, the characters fly a fairly beefy ship that is owned by a corporation in whatever area they start in. They are running supplies to new colonies in underexplored territory. It will have a little bit of a Firefly feel to it.

At some point they charge their jump engines and initiate the jump. However there is a hyperspace phenomenon happening in the area and the jump becomes supercharged. Throwing them extremely far. Now they are in uncharted territory and need to repair before they can even find out where they are, needing to get back home.

I just need an area that is unexplored yet could allow them to get home eventually.

Toss them on the far side of Solomani space. That’ll do it.

 

[Sigtrygg]

Just about anywhere beyond the charted space setting, if you check out the galactic map the whole of charted space looks like a postage stamp on a tennis court.

 

[Hardwire]

Just about anywhere beyond the charted space setting, if you check out the galactic map the whole of charted space looks like a postage stamp on a tennis court.

Yes there is to many choices. The Solomani area looks good and the area trailing side of the Solomani is tempting, but then again so is the Coreward side of the Third Imperium. I wan to keep it to areas that are X-0 or * on the map.

 

[Tforbes]

You could try running Deepnight Revelation in reverse? a lot of the sectors are mapped out on Traveller Maps (at least with *) and most of the adventures could be repurposed to remove traces / mentions of the Entity.

 

[Hardwire]

You could try running Deepnight Revelation in reverse? a lot of the sectors are mapped out on Traveller Maps (at least with *) and most of the adventures could be repurposed to remove traces / mentions of the Entity.

Interesting, didn't even consider that.

 

[MasterGwydion]

Or wait for the Zhodani Core Expeditions book. It will likely be the published area furthest from the rest of Charted Space. Plus, you can see the Zhodani Core Route mapped out by sector on the Travellermap. Planets, TLs, everything

 

[Hardwire]

Or wait for the Zhodani Core Expeditions book. It will likely be the published area furthest from the rest of Charted Space. Plus, you can see the Zhodani Core Route mapped out by sector on the Travellermap. Planets, TLs, everything

Ya I see that area and that the systems are considered restricted by their expansion.

 

[rinku]

Spinward of the Marches or rimward of the Solomani may be your best bets if you want them to find their way back eventually.

Rimward of the Solomani are independent colonies etc, but beyond THAT is pretty much undefined and you could just pick a number of sectors rimwards to suit how long you want them to take getting back, then get to work rolling up systems. That area is not earmarked for anything, if that bothers you.

If they are well out of Charted Space, they will not have any basic astronomical data at all. At best, they may be able to fix an approximate galactic position using very bright objects that they can identify. But any local stars will be unknowns - just lights in the sky with a direction but not a known range until a bit of triangulation is done.

Fortunately, a Traveller starship can scoot around a system fast enough to get a decent baseline in a reasonably short period of time, probably mere weeks, and you'd be getting useful parallax on all the visible stars, so would identify the closer ones in one go.

Once you know that a star is within jump range and you won't jump short and be stranded in interstellar space, you can potentially use accurate observations of the star's other two dimensions to jump into its 100D bubble and arrive by precipitation. Marc discusses this a bit in T5, but it would seem to be a thing that can be done in all editions. But don't be complacent - the measurements do need to be quite accurate or you'll miss and end up stranded anyway. The proper motion of a fast moving star may or may not matter over a week, but that could potentially be important.

Human and alien colonies could potentially be anywhere. Just because none of the empires have expanded there yet does not mean no one has headed out there, although there's a practical limit on how long a normal starship can operate without spares or maintenance. The players should probably be cut a break in that regard and start out well supplied with spare parts they can use, and some kind of fabricator (a modest sized TL12 one most likely).

 

[Hardwire]

Spinward of the Marches or rimward of the Solomani may be your best bets if you want them to find their way back eventually.

Rimward of the Solomani are independent colonies etc, but beyond THAT is pretty much undefined and you could just pick a number of sectors rimwards to suit how long you want them to take getting back, then get to work rolling up systems. That area is not earmarked for anything, if that bothers you.

If they are well out of Charted Space, they will not have any basic astronomical data at all. At best, they may be able to fix an approximate galactic position using very bright objects that they can identify. But any local stars will be unknowns - just lights in the sky with a direction but not a known range until a bit of triangulation is done.

Fortunately, a Traveller starship can scoot around a system fast enough to get a decent baseline in a reasonably short period of time, probably mere weeks, and you'd be getting useful parallax on all the visible stars, so would identify the closer ones in one go.

Once you know that a star is within jump range and you won't jump short and be stranded in interstellar space, you can potentially use accurate observations of the star's other two dimensions to jump into its 100D bubble and arrive by precipitation. Marc discusses this a bit in T5, but it would seem to be a thing that can be done in all editions. But don't be complacent - the measurements do need to be quite accurate or you'll miss and end up stranded anyway. The proper motion of a fast moving star may or may not matter over a week, but that could potentially be important.

Human and alien colonies could potentially be anywhere. Just because none of the empires have expanded there yet does not mean no one has headed out there, although there's a practical limit on how long a normal starship can operate without spares or maintenance. The players should probably be cut a break in that regard and start out well supplied with spare parts they can use, and some kind of fabricator (a modest sized TL12 one most likely).

Looking around the Rimward side of the Solomani (as suggested by Terry) so that makes 2 suggestions for the same area. The Deepnight Revelation has some stuff to cover maintenance away from a starbase. They will have some supplies as they were making a run to supply a colony, one thing could be a fabricator. However their jump drive will need repair.

 

[rinku]

One of the staples of a lost ship scenario is being forced to find clever ways to keep it running. Strictly by the rules they have until the scheduled annual maintenance before bad things happen... but when that was actually last performed is at Referee's discretion. Could have just been done, might be due next week.

The unusual jump would probably reset that sort of thing for the Jump Drive, in a bad way. That is, the jump drive (but maybe not other systems) counts as needing annual maintenance RIGHT NOW due to the misjump, and the clock is ticking.

Fortunately the Engineer should have plenty of time to work on things while the Sensops and Astrogator are trying to work out how far away the stars are.

And... are those mysterious signals coming from that planet nearby???