I think Space Habitats can be used very nicely for a campaign setting
(although at the moment I'm biased, having just finished _Vacuum_Flowers_).
I also think that they will rarely show up in traveller campaigns. Personally,
I think the Imperium is too friggin' big! The GM should pick a nice-sized
chunk and flesh it out a lot (detail on each world, sprinkle a few space
habitats and curiosities around, etc). Back to the subject...
Two good books for Space Habitat background: Christopher Rowley's
_Starhammer_ and Michael Swanwick's _Vacuum_Flowers_. The latter is cyber-
punk, and has space habitats ranging from orbiting cans to dyson worlds to
cometary settlments. It's a good book which I highly reccomend for reading for
personal pleasure, and it could serve as a nice little unusual but highly
fleshed out system for Traveller (hmm... that's an idea, take fifty or a
hundred of your favorite SF books and "place" them in a chunk of imperial
space, either carefully subsituting for near matches or merely putting them
where you like...).
The problem with Vacuum Flowers is that it is cyberpunk, and much of
the material of the world therein might not match your traveller campaign,
especially the wetware (computer-brain enhancements) and the apparent dichotomy
of technology (wetware, but their space travel is pretty weak, and interstellar
travel non-existent). You might get around this by making the citizens very
humanoid aliens (but their brain structure is different enough to allow them to
easily use wetware, while normal humans cannot) or by making the fancy tech
VERY dependent upon the rest of the society's technology (either because it is
not compatible with tech from other systems, or because it relies on the
extensive support tech of that world).
Either way, it might make a very good "It's an interesting place to
visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." sort of star system.
The other book, StarHammer by Christopher Rowley, is much more suitable
to the traveller universe. The first half of the book (after the first chapter
or so) is spent on a set of space habitats that are nicely fleshed out in terms
of general information (the Vacuum Flowers space habitats have more cultural
information, but less "practical" information; the culture of the Starhammer
habitats is pretty much normal human, aside from the aliens that make up an
important part of the book) and is almost a campaign packet for running a game
based on a space habitat.
Unfortunately, even though the book is good, they only spent the first
half of the book in the habitats (Frankly, I would have been happy with a book
concerned solely with the main character's life on the space habitaat - he is a
borderline psionic, an empath able to sense strong hate and fear, and is a
member of the "mass murder squad," a special squad of habitat police who
operate almost like a Covert Intelligence operation to avoid attacks by the
very criminals they hunt, the Mass Murder cultists, who get their kicks by
staging mass murders...) but it's well worth the read anyway, and the main
story of the book is pretty decent also. Try it out...
If somebody is interested in some specifics from the books, ask me in a
week or two, after mid-terms and my eye-strain have gone away...
Steven J. Owens | [email removed] | [email removed]
"Okay, Major Jonathan "Wrong-Is" Wright rubs his magic ring of Imperial
Intervention and twenty stormtroopers with battledress and gauss rifles pop
out of the microwave oven..."
- Sean T. Grape, in a truly bizarre traveller campaign...
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