Lore and Legends of the Dezzyverse

Tag: sci-fi

  • The Triangle

    The Triangle

    Adapting the Classic FASA Trek Campaign Setting

    There is a sector of space in the old FASA Star Trek tabletop RPG game that rests where the United Federation of Planets, Klingon Empire and Romulan Star Empire meet. It is a collection of hundreds of inhabited systems independent of control from any of the three major powers in the Quadrant. It was published in 1985, right in the middle of the Original Series movie run, just after Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and before Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home. Two years before Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987.

    It Looks Small on the Map

    A colorized map of the Triangle, originally published by FASA in 1985, though I don’t know who to credit with the colorized graphics of this image1

    When compared to the full map of the Alpha/ Beta quadrants of the Star Trek Universe, the Triangle Secor is small. Only a handful of parsecs on each side. However, as discussed in the article O God, Thy Sea is so Great, even at this scale, the sector is vast, 243.25 ly3 (a very rough estimate for illustrative purposes based on the map scale.) It’s got 75 star systems that are listed, with the potential for hundreds more. Warp Drives at least capable of Warp Factor 5 (125 C in TOS Warp Scaling) or Warp 3.58 (in TNG Scaling) would be necessary to voyage between most systems in less than a year.

    Warp Factor in Star Trek was expressed in different scales depending on the era of the show or movie. In The Original Series, the Warp Factor was the cube root of it speed measured against the Speed of Light (C). In The Next Generation onwards, the function was speed = Warp Factor ^ 10/3 x C with Warp Factor 10 being a limit at infinity. It’s all made up numbers anyway, but having a solvable function allows for measurable consistency.2

    This would be relatively slow for the era that the Triangle Campaign was originally designed for, being the TOS movie era. However, in context, the TOS movies (and TOS television episodes) were about the Constitution Class cruiser Enterprise and her 5 year mission into deep space. Civilian Freighters, and Patrol Cruisers don’t need engines capable of speeds at 512 C for an area like the Triangle.

    A Near Frontier

    The Triangle remains unclaimed by any of the three powers which border it. Though the Federation, Klingon Empire and the Romulan Star Empire keep watchful presences in the sector, mainly watching one another, none of them have any authority nor jurisdiction out here. This has allowed the Triangle to develop into a sector of free worlds, pocket empires, pirate havens and homestead colonies.

    This environment is similar to the interstellar frontiers past the claimed systems of the major powers in the quadrant. Except, in the Triangle, the Federation, Klingon Empire and Romulan Star Empire have spread to encompass this sector, creating a pocket between them. Unlike the borders and neutral zones between any two of these empires, this area is tri-lateral, which has made establishing a negotiated border impossible. It would take all three powers to agree to the details of any such treaty which, especially in the era that the supplement was set, could not be possible.

    Instead, the worlds of the Triangle are in a perpetual state of Cold War between the surrounding empires. Each exerting influence against the others, brokering deals, using the sector as a place to infiltrate rivals while maintaining deniability. The settlements within the Triangle swing from being willing pawns in this conflict to brokers making a profit off of the espionage. Especially the multi-system alliances and pocket empires are very good at extracting technological and political resources from one major power or the others to expand their own influence among their neighbors.

    Unconstrained Capitalism, Cartel Piracy, Syndicated Privateers

    Of course the Triangle is a fertile environment for less “formal” powers in Alpha and Beta Quadrants to conduct themselves in the open without entanglements from the overwhelming influence of the major powers in the quadrants. The Ferengi Alliance and Orion Syndicates are less restrained in the sector, free to operate unconstrained and with the power of their polities to back them up. After all, any one Syndicate or the Ferengi Alliance is vastly more powerful in all respects than any pocket empire, or alliance within the Triangle.

    But the presence of the Syndicates and the Ferengi has a stabilizing influence. Freelance piracy or raiding has to operate quietly, or risk attracting attention from the Syndicates. The safer option for these small, independent operations is to operate under the sanction of one of the Syndicates or another.

    There is no Section 31

    The three major powers operating in the Triangle, while not projecting a Naval or Fleet presence into the sector, instead the intelligence agencies operate with very little oversight. Starfleet Intelligence, Imperial Klingon Intelligence, and the Romulan Tal Shiar all play a dangerous game of cloak-and-dagger, peddling influence among the local systems and simultaneously weakening their rival powers. Missions in the Triangle revolve around all the classic spy operations, theft, intelligence gathering, assassination, and turning agents.

    When this supplement was published in 1985, Section 31 had not been added to the Star Trek Universe, so it isn’t called out in the Triangle, or the Triangle Campaign. Truthfully, the Ferengi Alliance isn’t called out either, since they won’t make an appearance in Star Trek for another two years in The Next Generation. Just because the source material from the time is too early to have current elements of Star Trek, that is no reason why we can’t fill them in to our TTRPG campaigns.

    Section 31, is at it’s best when it “doesn’t exist” in the setting. When it was first introduced in Deep Space Nine, the organization was a secret institution within the Federation and Star Fleet Intelligence community. The Federation has the Diplomatic Corps, Starfleet has it’s Intelligence Branch, both of these organizations are acknowledged publicly and operate with oversight from their respective service branches. Ultimately, the Diplomatic Corps and Starfleet Intelligence have to answer to the Federation Government. Section 31, because it’s deniable, has no such oversight. Which in a setting that features Cold-War style espionage makes for a great antagonist.

    Since Section 31 is really well known among the audience of Star Trek today, the subject will most likely show up. This presumption can be really well used by a GM. “It’s a Section 31 plot”, is a red herring that never stops giving gifts. It’s almost never a Section 31 plot. Don’t accuse your players of metagaming, instead concede their characters (especially if they have Federation backgrounds in the Diplomatic Corps, or Starfleet Intelligence) have heard rumors since the academy that “Section 31” as some sort of bogeyman. If the players wish to play a campaign as Section 31 agents, that works as well, but working for an unaccountable secret agency isn’t morally grey, it’s morally void. As the old saying goes “be careful what you wish for”.

    The Ship is an NPC

    This is an element core to Star Trek. Even a city-sized capital ship like the Galaxy Class has a personality and identity that makes it more than just a collection of engines, hull and circuits. Even in The Original Series era, the ship’s computer has voice interface and a personality. Heck, it had to be voice-acted by Majel Barret Roddenberry for years.

    In the Triangle, the ship the characters crew is much smaller. To borrow an element from the classic West End Games’ Star Wars Role Playing Game, the ship can best be described as the Stock Light Freighter. The crew of the ship should be small enough that the characters can run it on their own, but can support a small number of specialists and support crew (which is a great source of replacement characters in the field). Unlike the standard Star Trek campaign, the Triangle doesn’t feature big Cruisers, even the multi-thousand ton heavy freighters are not appropriate for the player ship, though the big freighters can be the subject of an adventure.

    Technology is a Tell

    Phasers (both hand phasers and shipboard) are distinctive Federation weapons. There is a distinct difference between a Romulan and Klingon Cloaking Device (the Romulans have a much more refined Cloak), Bat’leth are Klingon martial weapons with a long cultural history of martial arts surrounding it. This all means that the equipment and the technology a crew of characters use can reveal who they’re working for if they aren’t careful.

    Disruptors are common enough weapons that their origin really reveals nothing about the person using it. It’s kind of like the “AK-47” of the Star Trek Universe. This applies to the hand Disruptor, and the shipboard weapon system. Tricorders, Communicators, Universal Translaters, Transporters are all common in the Star Trek setting and don’t raise much suspicion. After all, the Ferengi trade in everything!

    Hand Phasers, especially the Type I phaser (the little palm-sized device) is almost designed for espionage. Unlike Disruptors, the Phaser can be set to stun, wound, disintegrate, heat matter, and doesn’t look like a weapon. This was originally a feature used by Starfleet to arm their crews without presenting as carrying weapons. The “stun” setting allows to subdue adversaries without killing them. For Pirates and Espionage Agents, this is a valuable little device, concealable, innocuous and capable of stunning a target for later interrogation (or ransom), or disintegrating them and leaving no evidence (or witnesses) behind.

    The Prime Directive Doesn’t Apply

    The Triangle Sector has been settled for a century or more. The worlds have been visited by the Syndicate, Ferengi Merchants, the Klingon Empire and Romulan Star Empire, none of whom restrain themselves with a “Prime Directive”. Even undiscovered worlds (with a few exceptions) have had encounters with warp capable civilizations. Federation, or Starfleet sponsored crews are not expected to adhere to the Prime Directive like their counterparts out in the exploration branch of their service. Intelligence Operatives are expected to prioritize the mission over considerations like the Prime Directive. (And, of course “Section 31” doesn’t play by the rules anyway.)

    The various interstellar alliances and pocket empires in the sector also have no Prime Directive restraining their development. In fact the interstellar rivalries, supported by the major powers are constantly seeking any advantages they can get. This could lead to adventures where the characters are hired to smuggle technology to local governments.

    Latinum Pays the Bills

    Federation characters have to learn how to conduct trade with money in the Triangle. Since they come from a post-scarcity civilization and “have no use for money”, In the Triangle, however, only worlds that are directly supported by the Federation (like the Baker’s Dozen worlds) use the proxy currency of Federation Credits. Everybody else uses either local currency, or thanks to the Ferengi Alliance, gold pressed latinum.

    Federation characters who go through the Federation Diplomatic Core or Starfleet Intelligence should have as part of their skill list a skill that allows them to use money. In Traveller, which is the system the author is most familiar with, this is represented by the “Broker” or “Trader” skills. Star Trek Adventures and other game systems will have similar skills to cover this function. Understanding how to conduct commerce with cash-money isn’t difficult, the skill rolls that will come from these challenges will represent the character’s understanding of value. Buying a replacement coil-inducer for the plasma conduit (mmm.. that’s some good engineering babble there) from your friendly local Ferengi will require a skill check, and failure would result .at the minimum. in overpaying. Other consequences could apply, the merchant could sell the character a less-than-quality item by talking them out of the part they picked out in the first place.

    Without having a culture of money, it’s just hard to judge the value of a strip of latinum. After all, in the Federation all most people need to do is walk over to the replicator and say “Earl grey, decaf” and they get a nice cuppa. Walking into space-Starbucks and ordering a venti raktagino-mokka will require an exchange of money for goods. Considering raktagino is a Klingon drink, the person selling it to might react violently when the character tries to explain that they don’t have the latinum on them right now.

    The skill check can also take the place of keeping a ledger of how much money the character has. If the skill roll succeeds, the character has the money on hand and can buy the thing. If the skill roll fails, they can’t affoard it.

    The purpose here is to make the setting feel more Star Trek. If using money is casual, then it doesn’t feel like the characters come from a society that doesn’t use money. It also allows for those characters who do know how to sling some latinum (like Beckett Mariner from Lower Decks) to have moments of shining in the spotlight. Other factions could face similar challenges. Klingons from the Empire might find trading in latinum to be a slight on their honor. Romulans might only trade in Imperial currency because holding money that isn’t authorized by the Empire could be seen as treasonous.

    Now, slip out of that maroon uniform and into some civilian clothes, belt on a holster and your disruptor and take your Free Trader into the Triangle.

  • A Fist Full of C-Bills

    A Fist Full of C-Bills

    ..and A Pocket-full of Credits

    Science Fiction money takes many forms. From primitive cultures trading precious baubles to vast financial networks that process electronic and digital transactions through subspace and hyperspace communications. For adventurers with bills to pay, the way they access their money can be a challenge as they jump from one star system to the next. This article relates to some ideas posted in O God, Thy Sea is so Great and Money Makes the World Go ‘Round.

    Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

    In our real world, budgets and finance can get detailed. Most of us have had the experience of scraping every corner and couch cushion for loose change to go down to the corner store with. Some of the reasons we play role-playing games is to take a break from worrying about if we can afford that extra box of mac-and-cheese or not.

    The “small stuff” can all be abstracted into lifestyle. In Traveller, lifestyle is related to the Social Standing characteristic (at least in the Third Imperium setting). Adventurers with a low lifestyle, sleep in a fleabag flat and eat kibble from a grey box labeled “food”, those with a high lifestyle, stay in luxury apartments and eat fresh, or exotic meals. Don’t dwell too much on the details though, lifestyle is a player choice for their adventurers, there might be a regular cost, or not. Keep the action focused on the adventure and not the downtime.

    Sometimes, the Small Stuff is the Adventure

    This is different from looking over character sheets and noticing if a character has enough centi-credits to live well during the adventure. These are adventures where the characters have lost access to their normal resources. The bank fails, they’re robbed, a new government won’t accept their money (the classic “we don’t accept Federation Credits, only Gold Pressed Latinum”). The objective on these adventures is to survive without money until they recover their means to rejoin the markets.

    Speaking of Gold Pressed Latinum

    In the main cultures of most sci-fi settings, currency is electronic. (Think cryptocurrency, but hyper-efficient). In cultures where technology is advanced enough to manage an interstellar society, this form of currency is practical and mostly efficient. It also reduces incidents of fraud, the possibility of devaluation because some explorer discovers a colossal source of precious metal, or a technology like the Star Trek replicator is developed. Data as currency is extremely efficient to use. Anyone who has made a purchase with a card over the internet has experienced this convenience.

    While efficient and convenient, even at highly technically advanced cultures, there remains a need for a more physical currency. In Star Trek, that’s “Gold Pressed Latinum” which is made from a unreplicatable, rare, element suspended in gold. Other settings use similar things, though in places like the Inner Sphere, or the 3rd Imperium, that sort of hard currency is tied to the electronic economy and minted by the governmental authority.

    Hard currency has another benefit. Cold, hard, cash is difficult to trace. Especially over interstellar distances. Tracing technology can be defeated, and unlike bills, or proxy currency, as any Ferengi can tell you “Latinum is Latinum everywhere in the galaxy”. For crews and companies that don’t want to leave a trail of money behind them as they operate, sometimes across hostile borders, having a valuable, difficult to track currency is a must.

    From an adventuring perspective, hard currency gives a fun æsthetic for heist or treasure-seeking adventures. Think about the old World War 2 Movie “Kelly’s Heroes”, that would work so well in the Battletech Universe. A group of mercs learning about a cache of hard currency, like a bank in occupied territory and taking an “unauthorized expedition” to grab the vault before it gets moved somewhere “safe”. Most of the ideas presented in, Money Makes the World Go Round, can be applied, especially with regards to what happens after your holds are filled with pallets of currency.

    Battlemechs, Tanks, Space Fighters, and Starships

    Big ticket items are common in Science Fiction settings. What would Star Wars be without the Millenium Falcon? Hammer’s Slamers without Grav Tanks? Gundam without Mobile Suits? In most settings, the characters belong to organizations that assign them to their war machines or ships. Maintenance for these big ticket items is covered by the organization.

    But in settings where the characters are the crew of a Free Trader, or the pilots of a mercenary company of Battlemechs, these costs are a foundation of the campaign. We see this in Firefly, “Find a crew, find a job, keep flying”. Star Wars Episode IV also shows this off. Han Solo is charging 10,000 to take Ben and Luke to Alderran. He’s in debt to Jabba who is threatening his ship. Point being, everything involved with these big ticket items are expensive. From purchasing them to maintaining them to repairing or improving them. Costs run into the millions of credits, and they’re recurring. Ships need fuel, weapons eat ammunition, crew need food, water and air on long space journeys.

    When designing adventures, the Game Master needs to take the costs into account when they’re adding rewards. The adventurers need to make enough money to cover their expenses while turning a profit. This pushes this style of campaign into a higher scale of economy. While a group of scoundrels may well be able to retire from adventuring and “go legit” if they score a million C-bills, in a campaign that revolves around a company of Big Stompy Robots, that same million C-bills might cover two or three months of maintenance. For the owners of a starship a single Megacredit will run out quick, fast, and in a hurry.

    Filling Contracts

    Especially in Mercenary campaigns, contracts are common. These are great for Game Masters and Players Alike. Contracts outline what the adventure is expected to be. Where to go. What to do, and how much the compensation is going to be at the end. Longer term contracts can also include covering maintenance, repair, and fuel, relieving the players from that accounting for a time.

    Contracts are not only applicable to the mercenary campaign. Worlds can contract free traders to deliver mail to them, or maintain trade with nearby systems, free traders can serve as a temporary solution to these systems until they build their own fleets and infrastructures. Still, it’s an opportunity for characters to go places, do things, and have adventures.

    Many settings have an independent authority to mediate contracts and enforce their terms. The Mercenary Review Board in Battletech, merchant guilds, megacorporate syndicates, Imperial ministries, serve these roles as arbiter, and holds payment in escrow until the terms of a contract are fulfilled. But some science-fiction settings do not. Crews need to negotiate guarantees and protections for themselves, as do the parties they are contracting with. For a GM, this can lead to double-crosses, backstabs and other creative ways to introduce twists in an adventure that threatens to become boring.

    Outrunning Your Mortgage

    Especially in settings like Traveller, where interstellar communications travel at the speeds of the fastest courier as described in O God, Thy Sea is so Great. A group of adventurers can skip their bank note on their big ticket item. Jumping out to the fringe of “civilized” space and joining the pirates and nomads and homesteaders out past the perimeter. Or, in a setting where wars rage between empires, hiding from their lien-holder in one empire by escaping into it’s rival.

    This is in essence, stealing the things that are mortgaged. Considering star ships, battlemechs, tanks and space fighters are really really expensive the finances won’t just write off the loss. After all, the characters just ran off with tens of millions of C-Bills (or Megacredits) of their money. Collection agents, Repo men, Skip-tracers and Bounty Hunters will follow the ship, and the characters everywhere they go. Running them down, even out on the periphery to drag them and their ship back to face consequences.

    Characters can run, they can even run fast, but they’ll never run far enough to ever be comfortable not looking over their shoulder. Even Han Solo ended up in carbonite, hanging as a trophy in Jabba the Hutt’s palace.

  • O God, Thy Sea is so Great, and My Boat so Small

    O God, Thy Sea is so Great, and My Boat so Small

    Space is BIG

    One common quirk of science-fiction roleplaying, whether it be Traveller, Star Trek, or Battletech is that the Universe starts to seem rather small. The characters jump from world to world having adventures but they only stay as long as the adventure lasts. Once the adventure is done, they’re back on their ship and off to another world, light-years distant. The routine of interstellar travel shrinks an impossibly vast universe into a travelogue. Alien worlds, might be strange, but they’re not memorable, the planet of purple-people-eaters fades into the background along with the forest moon of cannibal teddy bears, and the world of cheese.

    Timekeeping

    One way to keep space feeling big is to keep track of time as it passes. The Universe is not a static place, everything is always in motion. Seasons change, years pass, even the stars themselves grow old and die. It helps to reinforce that your characters are on a voyage if the Universe continues to unfold even as the players hop from system to system. In Traveller, each jump between systems takes a week. Normally this is expressed in downtime, but the important thing for timekeeping is, that as the characters jump from world to world weeks pass as they are isolated in jumpspace.

    The Battletech Universe is different, jumps of 30 light years happen in an instant, but the drives require a week to recharge, and it takes days of sublight travel to reach the jump point where the drives can be engaged. Again, this is often considered downtime, but the time still passes.

    Even Star Trek, where warp travel doesn’t isolate the ship or it’s crew, the distance between systems is *vast*. It takes days or weeks for a vessel, even traveling hundreds of times the speed of light to transition from one system to the next. As Game Master, take advantage of this, let events develop without the characters needing to be involved. Keep the Universe a dynamic, ever changing place.

    Distance and Scale

    It’s time for a little Astronomy. Get out your notebooks and calculators. As I am writing this essay, I have just flown across the North American Continent from Washington DC to Sacramento. That trip of 3,000 miles (4800 km) took all day (actually it also took all night, because of an unexpected layover in Phoenix, but that’s a whole different story). One Astronomical Unit (AU) is 150 million km. One Parallax Second (ParSec) is 3.26 light years. To put all of this in scale, for Dezzy to travel to work takes about an hour (I live 30 miles from the office) by car. For Dezzy to cross the country (the US) takes a day (six-ish hours) by jet. If Dezzy was to fly to Mars, it’s a journey of eight months. Flying out to Jupiter’s moon Europa takes around 6 years. If Dezzy wanted to send a message home at light speed, it would be more-or-less immediate from most places on Earth, 1.25 seconds to the moon, 15 minutes to Mars and 35 minutes to Europa.

    Why am I throwing all these numbers at you? Well, it’s to illustrate a point. Like Douglas Adams famously said many years ago, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Traveling between worlds or star systems shouldn’t feel like driving to the next town over or even flying across country. In-system travel should take at least days, if not weeks unless the vessel is moving at 75% of C (light speed) or more. The point of emphasizing distance is to impart the vastness of space to the players.

    Because of the enormous distances involved, the setting needs to feel different based on scale. This can be accomplished not only with travel times, but with communication lag.

    The Mail Must Go Through

    On a planetary/ moon scale, real time communications is fairly straightforward. We experience it today in our decidedly non-science-fiction real world voice and video calls can be made in real time anywhere on the planet where a signal can be reached. The slight delay to lunar orbit can make conversation slow, and possibly awkward, but not impractical. Physical mail can be sent nearly anywhere in a mater of weeks, or even days or hours if extra resources are employed.

    On an interplanetary scale, real-time communications are not really possible. Even between nearby planets (assuming both worlds are in their close orbits), electromagnetic communications still take between fifteen minutes to an hour to reach their destination. Conversations start to resemble e-mail or messaging, even with voice or video

    Communication with the outer worlds takes hours or days. Relays are needed to even send an electromagnetic signal out that far that can deliver something as dense as voice or video communications. Settings at this scale begin to resemble the telegraph and rail eras of the 19th century. News travels over continental distances, but need to move between telegraph or railroad stations. If the recipient of the message is five days away from the closest station, then all news that recipient receives is at least five days old. Even if the setting is heavily populated, it is still possible and even preferable to present a tangible sense of isolation

    On an interstellar scale, unless Faster Than Light travel and communication is employed, news travel at generational speeds. Its simply not possible to maintain a cohesive society at this scale. Without FTL travel, an interstellar setting is a planetary or interplanetary setting. To use an example from fiction, in the novel Three Body Problem (spoilers), the invading fleet from Alpha Centauri (rougly 4.3 light years) takes 300 years to journey to the Sol system. That’s using technology so far advanced beyond what humans have developed that it may as well be magic.

    FTL Travel Changes Everything

    Interstellar settings with Faster-Than-Light travel flips communications on it’s head. Even in settings where direct communications through subspace, or hyperspace relays are possible, it is often quicker to send a ship from place to place delivering messages. This can be physical media, where a mail ship drops off packages and mail to the starport, but it can also be electronic or digital media where the mail ship simply flies in-system and transmits their messages to their destinations.

    This brings an Interstellar setting to resemble the world-spanning empires of the 16th to 19th centuries. Worlds take weeks or months to interact, large interstellar empires and megacorporations lay most of their authority on colonial governors or directors of local headquarters.

    There is a brilliant map in Megatraveller that displays how news of Emperor Strephon’s assassination spread throughout the Third Imperium. The common communication routes were the Express Boats that could jump 4 parsecs in a week, which was the limiting factor for the spread of the event. There was a second communication route used by the Imperial government and the Navy that used Couriers that could jump 6 parsecs in a week. Using this map, the GM could see who knew about the assassination, when, and how they would react.

    The map also illustrates how much distance the news had to travel. In the setting, Emperor Strephon was assassinated on the 132nd day of the Imperial Year 1116. That news took 200 days to reach Terra, on the rimward fringe of the Imperium. That was from Emergency jumps running a Pony Express route (delivering the mail through a relay of riders and fresh horses) at a pace of around 850 C. That shows that the Third Imperium is really, really vast.

    Keep Real-Time Communication Exclusive

    The Star Trek and Star Wars settings have tropes where conversations over enormous distances occur. Which works against the scope of the setting. The Enterprise is often shown as the “only ship in the Sector” that can respond to the inciting incident of the episode. The orders are delivered from StarFleet headquarters in a direct Subspace communication. Even though the Enterprise was thousands of light years distant Captain Kirk could have a video chat with the Admiralty, and receive updates while delivering progress reports. Lord Vader has video chats with Emperor Palpatine from the Phone Booth on board his Super Star Destroyer while the Emperor is at the heart of the Empire on Coruscant. This shrinks the universe to planetary scale. It’s no more inconvenient to phone HQ for info than it is to open a Zoom Call to Hong Kong from London.

    Both settings retain their sense of scale by showing that these real-time communications as requiring equipment that demands resources that are unavailable to the average citizen. Vader is the Dark Lord of the Sith, he has the biggest and bestest, literally a “Super” Star Destroyer. The Enterprise is the Flagship of the Federation. Subspace and Hyperspace Communications are not available or even a component of adventure sized ships like the characters would be crew of. A small colony carving out a settlement may not have the resources to build such a communications array.

    The Star Trek movie Into Darkness and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith really undermines the scope of their settings (spoilers for both movies). In Into Darkness there’s a scene where “John Harrison” escapes capture on Earth by teleporting to the heart of the Klingon Empire. Using technology explained as “Transwarp Beaming” but it was effectively instant teleportation over hundreds of light years. The Enterprise follows at Warp and arrives close enough to threaten Harrison with a long-range bombardment in an indeterminate, but very short interval. This is a planetary scale event. The distances are just numbers because there is no appreciable time investment.

    In your campaigns, if your adventures travel interstellar distance this casually, then alien worlds become little more than exotic cities that can be reached by tourists on vacation. The sense of wonder is erased.

    Time is Relative

    In settings where Near-Lightspeed and Faster than Light travel is a factor, characters can age faster or slower than the rest of the setting when traveling. This is another way to emphasize the distances involved.

    When traveling at Near-Lightspeed, the subject of relativistic speeds age slower. Characters who regularly travel at these velocities start to subjectively move forward in time. They leave one world, travel for a week at relativistic speeds, and when they arrive at their destination, they have only aged a week, but the setting has gone through months of time. The GM needs to juggle three periods of time. The time from the origin passes quickly as the characters are in transit, the time on board ship seems to pass normally, and the time at the destination would be the distance travelled divided by the velocity of the vessel. This allows characters to experience vast spans of time over the course of their career while their physical life spans are unchanged.

    At Faster than Light Travel, the relativistic equation starts to flip on it’s head. Especially in settings where Jump Drives crosses the distance instantly, but the vessel has to spend a period of time (usually a week) in hyperspace, or jump space. The characters age, but the setting doesn’t. This starts to age the characters faster than the universe around them.

    In Warp-Drive settings, the ships spend travel time in a bubble of real space while the universe outside slows to a standstill. When the ship emerges, the crew, like a Jump Drive crew have aged the time they were at warp, but the universe has only aged a much smaller interval. It takes the Enterprise much, much less time to move through the galaxy at warp than light does.

    This allows adventurers the possibility of outrunning the consequences of their actions (for a time). So long as the adventurers can travel faster than the news of what they did, they can arrive in a new system before anyone can know what they’ve done. Of course, the trap here is that the adventurers need to keep moving. At least until the consequence exhausts it’s urgency.

    Setting Scale and Campaign Scope

    It’s important to apply the scale of your setting to complement the scope of the campaign you wish to run. It is tempting, especially with a game like Traveller with it’s procedurally generated system for creating worlds to create sectors’ worth of star systems, worlds, and moons. It can be fun, dreaming up pocket empires, cities, starports and NPCs to populate them. However, unless you plan to run a series of campaigns over the course of years, developing anything beyond a subsector beforehand is mostly futile. The same goes for system detail. Unless an extended adventure takes place in a single system, most groups of adventurers will never explore any given place beyond the world where the adventure takes place, and even then, the adventurers often only encounter those locations described in the adventure itself.

    Point being, unless the adventurers choose to visit a location, they won’t. You as the GM can encourage the adventurers to visit a location, but the ultimate decision is with the players. It’s the GM’s job to seed reasons for the players to want to visit the interesting locations that are designed. That being said, as GM you can present a campaign that happens in a single star system, with a plot similar to the Expanse. That type of campaign will resemble an Interplanetary Setting, with it’s distances and travel/ communication times. Everything outside of the campaign system doesn’t need any real detail. News can arrive as the GM chooses, but it is not anything that needs to be designed beforehand. Don’t make more work for yourself than you must.

    There is a balance for a campaign that revolves around travel. For example, in a Battletech campaign where the characters make up a mercenary company, contracting their military service with planetary governments and empires for c-bills, interstellar travel is common. The Company fulfills a Contract on a world, gets paid, and then they’re off to the next contract on the next world. System Detail only needs to be relevant to the current contract, and possibly outlines of the next contracts on offer. This is more of an example of a Interstellar scope on an Interstellar scale. While the campaign may never visit more than a dozen worlds or so, you as the GM can make the setting seem big. That’s part of the appeal. The mercenaries aren’t stuck on just one world or in one system. The conflicts cover hundreds of systems and thousands of light years of distance. Part of the appeal of a campaign like this is adventuring in space.

    Deep Space Exploration, like Star Trek is the ultimate expression of Campaign Scope and Setting Scale. Leaving the familiar stars behind to explore… (dare I say?) strange, new worlds. Here, the GM can use time dilation to illustrate how vast the universe is. Traveling from world to world, and revisiting some can show how much time passes on the worlds left behind. Friends who stayed on the outpost the adventurers visited at the beginning of the campaign, can have aged significantly by the time they return and the adventurers have only aged a couple of years. Campaigns out here are stories of isolation and self-sufficiency. Like the crew of a ship far beyond the boundaries of Empire, help is months or years away if it can be reached at all. News from home can be years old. I’d even go so far as to make FTL communication like subspace or hyperspace have significant delays. The goal for campaigns of this sort is, like the crew from Star Trek: Voyager, is to turn the characters’ starship into it’s own little world sailing through the stars.

    West Marches, Distant Stars

    A gaming group can adopt a setting to run a multiple-campaign game using science fiction. In this framework, GMs develop different areas in the setting, and multiple groups of players can experience adventures travelling between GMs and their areas. Coordination is key, understanding where each group of players are in time and space will inform what is occurring in the universe as it unfolds. Groups that encounter one another can exchange news and even crew. As a campaign like this matures, it becomes epic. Like a science-fiction franchise, the more campaigns that play becomes identifiable as unique expressions of the setting while remaining a part of the greater setting.

    Conclusion

    I’ve presented, a lot in this essay. Turns out, since space is big, discussing role-playing in a space setting starts to get big as well. All of this doesn’t need to be applied to any given rpg as a whole. Like all science fiction gaming, the freedom to pick and choose what works for you is a part of the fun.

    Happy Star Trek Day