Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Pyramids have an inherent stability.
At that point, it might be more preventing collisions with flying vehicles.
At that point, it might be more preventing collisions with flying vehicles.
Looking for advice: Planet invasion and high TL adventure/source books
- Thread starter Thisdan
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Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Outside possible astronomical alignment, a metaphor for mountains?
Arkathan
Emperor Mongoose
Long term dry goods storage at the focal point.
Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
34 Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt during the seven years of abundance.
35 They should collect all the food of these good years that are coming and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh, to be kept in the cities for food.
36 This food should be held in reserve for the country, to be used during the seven years of famine that will come upon Egypt, so that the country may not be ruined by the famine.”
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
I completely agree. If the rules aren't consistent and don't apply to every character, vehicle, every circumstance, completely impartially, then the ruleset is a failure and unfit for purpose. It's like a ref fudging dice rolls to force the adventure in a certain direction despite the player characters' solid plans, good skills, good gear, and good dice rolls. The setting and the game might as well be a D&D "magical realm".
@Arkathan vertical farming at high TLs would be very productive.
'World-first' indoor vertical farm to produce 4M pounds of berries a year
Major steps towards better, sustainable and affordable food production free of environmental challenges have been taken, with the "world's first farm to grow indoor, vertically farmed berries at scale" opening in Richmond, VA. It's backed by an international team of scientists that see this new…
newatlas.com
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
Sadly yes. No one's perfect, no game mechanics are perfect, but games need to decide what they want to be. If it's going to have inconsistent rules favoring or disadvantaging PC's or NPC's in certain situations, then it needs to give up and call itself a storytelling game. If a game is intended to provide a consistent impartial simulationist type ttrpg experience, then it needs to strive toward impartial consistent rules that conform with the physical laws of the game setting, unafraid to hone the ruleset until it does its job to the best its writers and developers can provide.
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actionman
Emperor Mongoose
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
I don't know about that. A novel is fundamentally different from a setting history. A novel is sculpted to make the reader feel a certain way at certain structural points in the story. IMO, the dramatic things in the little of AotI that I read, that's why those events were there. There were for reader impact, no other reason.
Anyway 'glassing' or 'scrubbing' a planet. I doubt the Imperial authorities would balk at the loss of life, but consider the logistics of it.
It could be done, but it would take a long time and be extremely expensive in terms of warheads to melt every surface of a planet. Even then life would survive in oceans. 'Scrubbing' would be very difficult and take a very long time. Killing a sophont population would not be nearly as difficult, destroying the planetary ecosphere with asteroid strikes wouldn't be that hard, but destroying all life, that would be very difficult. The only way I can think of would be meteor bombardment with the meteors able to explode due to atmospheric friction at a certain point above the ground (meteor airburst). Even then life would survive in the oceans or deep in the soil. But, it would totally destroy any hostile civilization and destroy almost all if not all of the population. If there were survivors, they would be scattered and would possibly die out in a few decades or less. The film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's The Road could be a good visual representation. Food plants don't grow, food animals die because the plants they eat die and won't grow, civilization suddenly halts because there's simply no food to be had, the meteoric winter makes people, plants, and animals freeze and inhibits plant growth... very few survivors, probably those in isolated installations with years of supplies, would make even to when the meteoric winter finally lifts.
This Yellow Egyptian Glass Was Forged by a Meteorite Impact 29 Million Years Ago
New research suggests yellow Libyan Desert Glass was formed 29 million years ago when a meteorite struck Earth, not by an airburst.
Hmm.I completely agree. If the rules aren't consistent and don't apply to every character, vehicle, every circumstance, completely impartially, then the ruleset is a failure and unfit for purpose. It's like a ref fudging dice rolls to force the adventure in a certain direction despite the player characters' solid plans, good skills, good gear, and good dice rolls. The setting and the game might as well be a D&D "magical realm".
@Arkathan vertical farming at high TLs would be very productive.
'World-first' indoor vertical farm to produce 4M pounds of berries a year
Major steps towards better, sustainable and affordable food production free of environmental challenges have been taken, with the "world's first farm to grow indoor, vertically farmed berries at scale" opening in Richmond, VA. It's backed by an international team of scientists that see this new…
Maybe I was too flippant, or worded it badly.
Yes, the same standards apply to PCs as well as NPCs. But it's a matter of focus.
Not all NPCS are equal in importance. A NPC crewmember uses all the same rules as the PCs, as does any important character.
But the scope of any RPG is the players and what they know about and what they do. It would be important for the story to work out if a patrolling warship encounters the players' ship. It is NOT important to construct a full naval base for every would in the subsector and track every ship.
Use the same rules, but only as required, up to and including none of them if it isn't going to matter. I tell stories, but I don't railroad players either. They live or die on their choices, on their luck and the luck that the NPCs.
But...
Any designed scenario that isn't just emergent from random tables (and Traveller can certainly be played that way) already needs choices that have little to do with the rules. You need plot, character design (that is, description, personality, motive, resources, weaknesses, biases etc, not a statblock), rewards, penalties, obstacles, locations, set dressing etc. That's generic storytelling stuff - you can use the same scenario in Traveller or as fiction, or in Star Wars, or in D&D with the serial numbers filed off.
You can roll up characters until you get the NPC you want. It's a fun diversion and one of Traveller's joys. But the character generation system is designed to generate player characters and you probably don't have time to do that often. So usually I just make them up. If I need a Psionic sleeper agent, I work out what she needs to be to challenge the PCs and write that down. If I forget a skill she might reasonably have but needs later on, it's no problem to say she already had it, unless previous events established not. (This isn't a hypothetical example. The agent in question was written up in fair detail, but later needed to have hacking skills. That seemed reasonable, and the previous appearance only used seduction and combat, so yep. She always had that training.
Another example - there's an NPC Vargr Safari Ship crew they players have encountered a few times. I don't track where they are at all. When the PCs were looping around the Glisten worlds trading, I'd have them turn up every few months, since they were basically doing the same. Since the players have headed off into parts unknown, they don't show up, although it's not impossible they might. No rolls, no rules. Just plot and common sense.
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Condottiere
Emperor Mongoose
Semi/complete random character generation is for non player characters that are either a semi or complete random encounter.
Otherwise, they usually need to be crafted.
Otherwise, they usually need to be crafted.
MasterGwydion
Emperor Mongoose
I build worlds, My players tell stories.
I usually detail 100 NPCs or so before the start of the campaign, organize them into a file so I can find them easy, and then whip them out as needed for the campaign. The initial level of detail I use is basically; name, race, gender, age, rough description, attributes, and whatever skills are needed to do the thing I built him as. Whatever "skillpoints" are left over, I make a note so I don't give them too many skills for their age, and add other skills using the leftover ":skillpoints" as the campaign needs as it evolves.
Most of this tells Me that you run Adventures as opposed to running Sandboxes. In a Sandbox, I do need to know where the Naval Bases are, because the PCs may go there without warning. Normally I will design one Naval Base and use that for whenever they go somewhere with a naval base. I just keep notes about who they met and what they did while there in case they ever go back and also so I don't accidentally put NPCs in places they wouldn't be. (such as meeting the Free Trader Captain and his ship 3 weeks after you last saw him 9 parsecs away.) You don't need to track where everything is, you just need to know where they can't be.
One method is not better than the other, just two different styles. Each style has its own requirements for what it needs to be successful. Your adventure-style, MOARN works really well. My sandbox-style, MOARN makes the game unplayable.
Yeah. there's no best way here, just style.
My style is mostly sandbox, though. I let the players chose their path and pretty much react to their recent decisions. I realise that way of running things does not suit many of people. I should note we were playing online once per month, so I had plenty of time to think of stuff.
Good example - players jumped to Caledonia/Glisten. Between sessions, I looked up the travellerwiki entry, which I'll change as needs be.
Noted that it orbits a very luminous star and the hab zone is very far out, meaning a very long oribital period - on the order of decades. That means long seasons, so I decided it is almost uninhabitable away from the poles and the population migrate every solstice between north and south. And as it happens... the players arrived during one of these migrations and were offered a charter to stay for a while to help ferry the advance party to fix up the destination. Or to accompany the giant land trains as they drove the bulk of the population from one pole to the other, since the wild life all migrate as well at this time and it becomes very dangerous.
The pilot and steward made a lot of suborbital hops, the combat types went with the train and shot a lot of monsters. Much fun was had by all.
My style is mostly sandbox, though. I let the players chose their path and pretty much react to their recent decisions. I realise that way of running things does not suit many of people. I should note we were playing online once per month, so I had plenty of time to think of stuff.
Good example - players jumped to Caledonia/Glisten. Between sessions, I looked up the travellerwiki entry, which I'll change as needs be.
Noted that it orbits a very luminous star and the hab zone is very far out, meaning a very long oribital period - on the order of decades. That means long seasons, so I decided it is almost uninhabitable away from the poles and the population migrate every solstice between north and south. And as it happens... the players arrived during one of these migrations and were offered a charter to stay for a while to help ferry the advance party to fix up the destination. Or to accompany the giant land trains as they drove the bulk of the population from one pole to the other, since the wild life all migrate as well at this time and it becomes very dangerous.
The pilot and steward made a lot of suborbital hops, the combat types went with the train and shot a lot of monsters. Much fun was had by all.
There are at least four systems in Trojan Reach alone where the Sindalians or Aslan - neither with the resources of the Imperium - did this to whole planets. I think there’s one Drinaxian effort as well which didn’t go as far but still ended in megadeaths.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
Well, perhaps it's that sandboxes have a different level of necessary. Though I never really liked the MOARN concept. It's just my personal preference, but I felt it devalued the great potential for creativity that Traveller's creation tools give us. I guess I call how I feel about it Map As You Please. The more defined a setting is, the easier it is to see adventure possibilities in it.
I suppose it could be explained like this:
There's top down, like I want to write an adventure with a particular kind of plot, so I will create/map what I need for that adventure.
Then there's from the bottom up, like I'm creating and detailing my sandbox, and I see situations emerge that are ripe for exciting adventures.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
How apply the construction cost rules can contribute to adventure. There might be a world with good resources and a low population, but it has a class C starport. If I know how much a class C starport generally costs, and I know that the world's GWP wouldn't be enough, that creates a situation that I can interpret as the starport is a failed bankrupt construction project, with unfinished structures, poorly staffed, perhaps with some shady dealings going on. Those two details, cost vs. GWP, let me add something different and unusual to the environment for the players. And then I think, why did the project fail? Who were the backers? How did it play out? How did it affect the world's population, that the players might have to deal with.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
Reminds me of Harry Harrison's Wheelworld.
actionman
Emperor Mongoose
Well, the writers just said they did it, so they did it. It's all about what's dramatic, not what's practical according to the conditions in the setting.
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