Sunday, March 09, 2008

Oh, Hello There!

I've been away for a while. Seems it's a bad thing when games get in the way of work.

I've still got the Festrian Empire material saved up, but I'm not sure how much of it I'm keeping. In retrospect, even that grew to be too much of a "big empire" for me and I'm interested in seeing how I can re-assess those subsectors to be closer to what I want IMTU.

I don't want monolithic empires, I don't want big ships. I want the spacelanes to feel like the open sea, not a crowded subway platform.

I still do like the Black Ships; I like an Independent Scout Service.

I like Starports to be local: either directly run by the planetary governments where that makes sense, or by on-planet merchant exchanges where the planetary governments are too poor to fund them.

I don't like the assumption of pan-galactic standardism that so much of the OTU seems to depend on. When you can buy a starship on planet Hoopajoop, hop along to planet Joopahoop three sectors away, and swap out hardware and expect it all to work - or expect to buy Joopahoop ammunition that fits your Hoopajoop revolver? That doesn't really fly for me. It reminds me too much of our modern life, where you can be dropped in midtown manhattan and see the same Starbucks, Chase Bank, and J Crew that you'll see in any commercial district anywhere in the country. I don't game so that I can pretend to be walking around my own city, you know what I mean?

7 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Just noticed you've started work on this again. Any chance you'll restart the actual campaign at some point?

Fred H.

7:47 AM  
Blogger Jwarrrlry said...

Hey there! I've been away from that particular game long enough that I don't even know where to begin with it. I might be interested in running a low-key game in a couple months.

In a completely selfish way, I'd much rather co-gm, collaborate on developing the Festrian Main and switch off on GM duties. In twenty five years, I have never got to play Traveller as a player more than once, apart from solitaire.

9:13 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I can certainly understand that. But it'd be a shame for all this detail not to be actually *used* at some point...

Fred H.

10:11 AM  
Blogger Jwarrrlry said...

Oh, I agree, and I'd certainly like to... it's more the time thing than any else. There's going to be a chunk of summer where I have more time for FTF gaming, maybe a short adventure or two.

10:42 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well, if you do end up running that, please keep me in mind. I'm at faherman at earthlink dot net.

6:43 AM  
Blogger Jwarrrlry said...

I will do, Fred. Dunno if I'm going to be able to find everyone from the last game, but something could be done.

Any thoughts on a collaboration - switching on and off from Ref duty? I don't have my subsectors in an electronic format yet, but if you wanted to cook something up in one of them, or build something in the frontier based on the kind of TU I've been working on here, that'd be awesome. I've got just the nine subsectors for Festeria and its dependent duchies, but outside of that are the ruins of the Old Empire - plenty room for another handful of pocket empires.

This solitaire business can be a drag sometimes.

7:09 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I think the other guy, whose real name I don't remember just now, used to be on the CotI forum as "William Mandella"; don't know if he's still there.

Oh, I doubt Reffing is really for me; after years of talking about it, I finally ran a game (not Traveller) a year or two ago and found it very stressful, even with the simplest ruleset imaginable (The Window). Though generating endless new subsectors is fun, of course.

11:35 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home