From: [email removed] (Rob):
>There is yet another solution. You could back off of the GDW
officialness of the rebellion a little (not much mind you). There
is room spinward of the Spinward Marches where the Zhondani have
not expanded rimward and the Aslan have not expanded coreward.
Right next to the Marches, that corridor is quite thin, however it
does open up some a few sectors out. (Look at the adventure
Laviathan (sp) for references). There has been plenty of
unexplored turf to mess with.
I take the official Imperium maps as ending at the edges of the Atlas
of the Imperium, and have indeed selected the very area you mention
for an unexplored region. There is (in my maps) a thread of systems
(forming a Jump-2 main) running to spinward from Darrian/Five Sisters,
which puts a big enough gap to coreward to avoid any Zhodani
influence, and a similar one to rimward to keep the Aslan out. This
thread leads to a sector with a dense cluster of worlds which are
unexplored by humans, which is where my players are right now.
I have totally backed off the rebellion, as I find that setting a game
at the fall of a civilisation, with lots of warring factions, to be
restrictive to the players (and the GM). To me, Traveller is a
setting where the characters can do pretty much whatever they want,
and can move from being simple merchants to investigating intrigue to
being agents for the Imperium explorers to fighting in an interstellar
war (not involving the Imperium directly) to being pirates raiding
alien merchant traffic, to take my current campaign as an example. I
think that having a strong stable Imperium behind them drives the
characters to much more interesting development than if they were
pawns in petty squabbles between Imperial nobles.
Why was there no rebellion? Easy. There was no Fifth Frontier War to
spark egos and power struggles among the nobles. Archduke Norris came
to power in the Spinward Marches as a result of his actions in
preventing war, using evidence of advance preparations by the Sword
Worlds and the Zhodani to get them to back down. (Yes, characters in
a previous campaign discovered that evidence, investigating ship
losses in the Zaibon system.) Relations (and mutual respect) with the
Zhodani have improved greatly since then, again due greatly to the
diplomacy of Norris, while the Sword Worlds have returned to their old
internal conflicts and are no longer a useful ally for anyone.
So it is now 1118, and the Imperium is as strong as ever. This moves
the focus of adventurous characters from internal conflict to
exploring the bounds of the Imperium.
>The real problem that I have is with the world generation. It is
built on assuming that a thriving interstellar community exists.
A little creative thought can go a long way in interpreting the
data from the UWP. High TLs and starports are hard to justify,
but could.
I solve this the same way I do many other consistency problems one
comes across in a long campaign: I wing it. I generate the star
systems and world data (based on World Builders Hbk) with a SAS
programme, print out the whole sector, stick it in a binder and
scribble all over it in pencil when I disagree with the data. I have
quite frequently taken a high population system and declared it to be
uninhabited. Since I also have made _Hard Times_-like changes to
systems in a war zone (again, winging it rather than using any
specific system, based on what I "know" about what has happened in the
system) this process is essential to my campaign.
>The other factor that can be used is the fact that a majority of
the worlds outside of the Imperium were mapped from long range by
the IISS during the first grand survey and that information may
not be completly accurate.
And in many cases was not done at all. The J2-main from Darrian to
spinward, for example :-).
Martyn
- -------------sasmjw@unx.sas.com----(Martyn J. Wheeler)----DoD #293------------
SAS Institute, Inc: [phone removed] H: [phone removed] (Raleigh, NC)
"Nuke 'em!" Captain Delaney of the Merchant Cruiser _Anastasia_