Out now on DriveThru: http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/109160/Orbital
Orbital is a science fiction setting for Traveller with a fairly realistic (TL 9) feel that is set within our own solar system. The Earth us locked in a Cold War with the people of Luna. Both face off, 400,000 km apart, threatening mutual annihilation whilst they compete to colonise the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Older colonies such as Mars and Mercury are independent and caught up in this struggle for solar system supremacy. Spacecraft use nuclear thermal rockets and create gravity by spinning pods or centrifuges, this is spaceflight as envisaged today!
In keeping with the near-future and hard-science fiction themes, role-playing campaigns focus on real people doing real jobs. The game has rules, technology and advice to allow scenarios based around deep space haulage, asteroid mining, salvage, rescue and exploration.
Should the referee and players decide to stick with the default campaign premise for Orbital, then the player characters will be spacers, the rough and tough crew of a deep space vehicle owned by a corporation that leases its spacecraft out to agencies, individuals and corporations. Like the crew of a salvage or heavy lift ship today, the characters will find themselves engaged in diverse, challenging and dangerous jobs with every mission.
One month may involve dropping a cargo of habitat modules into the Martian atmosphere, a few months later it could be salvaging a robotic drilling rig in the asteroid belt that has come to the end of its useful life. The emphasis is on ‘being in space’, working in space and dealing with all of the challenges that operating in the solar system throws at them. The referee can put all kinds of obstacles in the way of PCs, making the outcome of a mission always uncertain. It will be ingenuity, resourcefulness, skill and bravery that will see them right in the end – or alternatively, asphyxiated, frozen, irradiated, boiled, depressurized or out of a job!
Requires only the Traveller Main Book, although High Guard will be useful.
Orbital features:
- History of events up to 2100 AD and the causes of the Cold War
Organisations; 35 corporations, crime gangs, NGOs and agencies
Guidance on creating suitable TL 9 characters
Rules for designing and operating deep space vehicles
Hardware and how it works; from vacc suits to rovers, lunar landers to mass drivers, airlocks, oxygen mining units and plenty more
Habitats, space stations, outposts and O’Neill colonies
Ways to Die in Space
How to Establish a Colony
Rules for striking it rich as a Belt miner
UWP stats for all significant bodies in the solar system
Complete write-ups for all the planets and main moons
How to run a game of Orbital; what do characters do?
NPCs and plot ideas
Alien ruins on Mars, SETI transmissions ... options for aliens in Orbital
Reviews of movies, books and online resources that add to the game
