User:Urbi et Orbi
About me[edit]
Born 1976, I have been playing table role-playing-games since 1987. The games I run included Warhammer, Tiny toons, Berlin XVIII*, Over the edge, a home-made game which is a crossover of Shadowrun with Vampire and GURPS Vaudou, the also home-made Deep Space (see below) and some others I forget to mention.
I eventually bumped into Traveller looking for some SF inspirational data this year - 2009. I know, it's quite a shame that it took me 20 years to find out about Traveller. It had not been sold so much in my country (France).
I tend to focus my games more and more on the psychological part of the story, more than the plot or the action, trying to push the players into more acting.
(*) if you have no idea what Berlin XVIII is, it is normal : it was a french rpg about cops in a dark futuristic unified Europe whose 70 millions inhabitants capital is Berlin. It had three editions, with the last one reaching to my opinion a higher level of maturity. I loved that game.
Deep Space[edit]
I had been game-mastering very irregularly a home-made RpG called Deep Space (originally inspired by movies such as the Alien series) since 1995 (more or less .. I am not sure ). However, I never had had a good setting for it. It did not matter much as most of the adventures were somewhere lost in space, so the social and political structure of the universe was secondary. I used for a while an alternate version of the world of Star Wars (without the Force and with less aliens) but grew unsatisfied with it. I also admit I was too lazy to build up one from scratch as this was only one the games I ran.
When I discovered Traveller I was pleased to have found a setting which fitted well the type of SF I was running : long dangerous journeys in the cold infinity of space with alien species which are .. alien and often dangerous.
I started purchasing some Traveller books and I am now thinking about how I could eventually adjust the Traveller setting to match what I had already defined of my game universe (which is mainly technological stuff).
The characteristics of my Deep Space universe (which I may consider a IMTU, I guess) are :
- Space journeys between solar systems last weeks, months, sometimes years. They are accomplished by what is sometimes called warp drives : the ships travel on a wave (or bubble) of time-space where the laws of physics have different constants, i.e. : the speed of light is much faster than in the normal conditions of universe, thus enabling the ship to travel "faster than light".
- Ships accelerate progressively as they leave the vicinity of gravitational masses (i.e. the vicinity of the center of the stellar system) and slow down progressively when they reach another stellar system. That means ships do not 'jump' suddenly.
- Inter-stellar ships are quite huge, the smallest of them being over 100m long, and the biggest ones rating in kilometres (I like huge labyrinths !). At the same time, ships which are too big are not able to land on planets due to structural constraints.
- All living beings must travel in hyper-sleep, due to the length of the travel, but also because their bodies would not survive without the assistance of the hyper-sleep containers since the mere laws of physics are altered during the warp drive journey. Still, cold sleep stays a dangerous thing.
- There are robots, droids (robots with an artificial intelligence, i.e. capable of learning and taking unprogrammed initiatives) and androids (droids with a human-like appearance).
- Gravitational technology exists but is not used so often as it consumes a lot of energy, thus limiting toys such as gravitational belts or 'speeders', but explaining how you may have a nice comfortable earth-like gravity inside a space ship and are not floating around, or how a fighter ship pilot survives a sudden change of direction which would normally kill him due to the centripetal acceleration.
- Originaly, there is no psionics. However, to enhance a better compatibility with Traveler, I am thinking of changing my mind. Nevertheless, they would be based on the principle that psionics can only deal with the mind, and not with the matter (thus, no teleportation, for example).
PS: and yes, if after all that you still wonder, I am an engineer.
My contributions[edit]
My favorite pages[edit]
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