Our group and one on the west coast have been using for 10 years now a
campaign in the TL 9 to 12 range set in a non-standard post-imperial-fall
future history. Paul Gazis (PhD Astrophysics, MIT, now with Voyager at JPL)
created both the campaign setting -- modeled after the long-boat raiding
in dark-age europe -- and the Traveller rules variants in use in both
campaigns. The east coast campaign is set in a barbarous back-water, the
Scarp region, of the parent-campaign; the two GMs coordinate historical
fluxes between the campaigns, such that a couple of wars from the other
campaign are about to redirect our commercial/exploration campaign.
Paul's rules modifications consisted of:
* Skill learning system, not unlike that presented in Cosmos by J.Redden,`
which Paul credits to Mike Yoder and the Eastern Isles campaign of
Warren Dew, Frank Adams, &co at MIT & DC etc. (A very low-tech medieval
game with several games-masters for different islands, which now runs
in multiple cities on the east coast.)
* Character generation tables for different sub-services and countries,
not unlike Mercenary/HighGuard but moreso and completed (to all classes)
sooner.
* Ship construction, maintenance, operation, and combat which didn't offend
an astrophysicist, but are usable by non-technical players.
* stars live in 3-space, based rougly on the known structure of our galactic
arm (the Scarp is just this side of the Orion nebula; major, old imperial
space stations are located on the arm's fringes nearest tangencies to earth)
Space combat, however, is done either as chalk-board vectors or kriegspieled
verbally.
His rules variants have been serially published in The Wild Hunt, a role-
playing APA (Amateur Press Association) run by Mark Swanson. I can provide
information to anyone who'd like more...
Bill Ricker
[email removed]
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