Traveller 'verse: the empire

The empire sounds kind of sinister...

But really it's more 'distant.' It's the paradigm. Hereditary families called nobles look after the somewhat time-consuming and arcane world of interstellar relations...after all, who else has time to sit for 3 months on a starship just to go to a meeting?

The empire itself regulates and protects interstellar trade. Everything else resides in the jurisdiction of its member worlds, which can have any government they like: It has a very, very few rules:

• No non-imperial warships with jump drives (there are some ways to skirt around this, megacorporations have heavily armed route protector cruisers, there are interstellar mercenary corporations...but internal warfare can't interfere with commerce at large without the Empire intervening.
• All tarriffs to member worlds must be lower than those to non-member worlds by 50%; and tarriffs can't exceed 5%.
• No use of nuclear NCB weapons;
• No slavery.

The empire can of course claim jurisdiction in cases of interstellar commerce, and has its own court system. But there is no appeal to the imperial level: a judgement on a planetary level is final, it's final.

The empire supports itself through something like a 0.5% revenue tarriff on interstellar trade, which adds up to ALOT of money, and a fairly large military, though ground forces are not organized on a federal level except in times of war (think civil-war-era USA)

The imperial Credit is the usual medium of exchange in interstellar trade, though member worlds are allowed to issue their own currency, and even make it the only legal form of exchange onworld. Rate-fixing is not a problem, because it's illegal.

So there you have it.

The traveller universe: Technology.

Imagine everything we have now in the cozy early 21st century. Then add a few fantastic items, and a few steps backward.

• Medicine is performed with microsurgery and advanced pharmaceuticals. Infectious disease is not a danger...unless it's bioengineered.
• Strong taboos mean that getting cybernetic upgrades or biotech grafts are unknown technology. Somewhere, somebody knows about these things, or did, but they were a mad scientist and didn't last long outside their own Private Idaho (a small asteroid in the outer belt of the Glisten system).
• AIs and robotics have a similar taboo around them. Outside of table service and simple floor cleaning, people don't really like robotic workers, for two reasons: one, most planetary governments pursue policies of maximum employment, and two, the Imperiums' biggest threat, the Zhodani consulate, is a robot-friendly, telepathic-mind-control government. A branch of the Zhodani government is actually called the thought police.
• Imperial law forbids the enslavement of sentients. No one really devotes much time and money to creating AIs, as they're likely to have some legal problems if they were successful.

So, what is there, since we know what there isn't?

• Compact hot fusion. Buses and trains can and do run on fusion power plants.
• Contragravity devices, and artificial gravity aboard ship...these are very cheap, and so almost all personal transport (motorcycles, cars) are built on this principle, at least on high-tech worlds.
• Superconducting battery/capacitor cells. "Energy cells." Battery-operated devices use universal sizes, kept in place for at least a millenium.  Even cellular communicators have interchangeable batteries.
• Sensing technologies that we can logically expect. Chemsniffers, Biosniffers.  Densitometers are highly sensitive at mapping the interior of objects using gravity sensors. (probably uses the CG tech; though we have crude densitometers using radioisotopes.)
• Gauss (magnetic accelerator) weapons
• Laser weapons.  These were at one point standard issue to space crews (extrapolation), but have never been as damaging as similarly-sized gauss weaponry at the personal scale.
• Bullets are still pretty good for regular folks, and cheaper.
• Flying power armor suits: "Battledress."  Different interpretations of canon have these on almost every regular army trooper, sometimes only on imperial marines.
• 'Reactionless' Thrusters. These require power, and increase an object's inertia. Imagine a rocket that burns nothing. These are pretty much the cheapest way of moving something, and so are ubiquitous. Even on lower-tech worlds, these might be imported and installed in gasoline engine vehicles (unsupported in canon, but believable extrapolation).
• Nanomaterials have developed to the point that carbon fibers and thermal superconductivity are normal for military hardware; some efficiencies in manufacturing may be due to nanoassembly...but...things are still made in factories and sold by retail/mailorder, not asked for in from a household factory.
• Some biotechnology, however most of these advances (in agricultural production) have been made millenia ago, and the technologies are now open-sourced or sold as a service package (chemlawn). Folks are just as creeped out by the throught of putting a rebreather lamprey on their face as you are...so most people just wear masks when they have to.
• REALLY cheap computers, and a large market for specialized devices. IR 'shades,' about as light and expensive as a pair of Oakleys, are available. Brands exist that combine these with handheld cellular devices to lookup products...but a lot of people value their privacy.

The traveller universe: the way it is.

The driving logic behind Traveller is the Jump drive. A ship sublights out to 'shallow space' (at least 100diameters from any celestial body) charges up its jump grid, does some calculations, and falls out of existence.

It remains in Jumpspace (a poorly understood other quantum of reality) for about a week, undisturbed, and pops out somewhere between 1 and 4 parsecs (depending on the quality of the drive) away. A jump always takes about 160 hours.

The implication is a powerful one: Information from another star system is at least one week old. There is no other form of FTL travel in the traveller 'verse. No FTL radio. The capital of the Empire is about a YEAR away from the imperial fringes on 'swift boat' 4 parsec mail carriers.

This means many things: progress has a hard time equalizing itself--to support the technology level we have on earth we need a 6 billion person economy. To support more advanced technology, even larger economies of scale are needed. So there's sort of an upper ceiling on what technologies are out there in the market.

For two, there's lots of nooks and crannies in the universe for the little guy. Because of the information gap, small(er) businesses can thrive because of the agility compared to the interstellar megacorporations.

For three, the only way such a huge volume of worlds (there are hundreds of trillions of souls in the imperium) can be governed is through federalism. In fact, the Imperium is just the interstellar layer of government; anything beneath is the business of its member worlds. The empire simply subsists on tiny revenue tarriffs on interstellar trade, and even with so little, there's a fleet for each subsector of space.

The Traveller Universe: the really brief version.

Humanity has risen and fallen twice, passed through manifold ages of barbarism. It is several thousand years into our future, but that frame of reference has stopped mattering a long time ago.

In the beginning, humanity developed jump drive. The US, Japan, the ESA, China, and a few others invested in a new spacegoing technology that allowed a starship to travel a parsec (~4.3 ly) in a week. the first jump away from earth, we contacted an advanced interstellar empire with materials and nuclear technology far superior to our own...who were, apparently, human in every respect. Of course the nutjobs with their ancient pyramit conspiracies (TM) were very excited, but the reality proved far more pressing than the metaphyscial angst.

The Vilani Imperium was a baroque autarchy, with stagnant corporations so byzantine in their power structure that Earth's political scientists could not pin down where enterprise stopped and government began (and vice versa). Innovation was strictly regulated in the Imperium, leading to software built on ROMs, almost exclusively rerun entertainment, and two thousand years of no progress. The Earth humans already had superior medicine and computers; the vilani weapons and engines had a significant edge.

Several centuries of alternate war, peace, and trade resulted. The Earthlings replaced the Vilani at the top of the empire, but the influence was two-way, like the British in India. Eventually the Imperium of Man fell, too, leading to more than a thousand years of piracy and isolationism on the planets of the former empire.

NOW...
A new empire has risen. It's really more like a federalism, to anyone that cares to look closely...but that's for the next chapter.

Games on the Horizon:

Holiday watch/buy list and I'm only going to point out the things that are new/not expansions.
1) Dominant Species.
This game synthesizes worker placement with amazing area scoring and optimization. It also drops in a tiny bit of uniqueness to each race, and therefore bouys itself out of being an entirely Eurogame. Has a map, has geometry, has competition, and has alternate ways to win. A lot like Founding Fathers, but easier to Grok, with perhaps slightly more replay value (and a longer play time)
2) 7 wonders.
I'm not the only one lining up to have this game's babies. It takes the (machine building) mechanic from RFtG/PR/51st state, and then allows for unique players, and has perhaps the ultimate opportunity-pimp mechanic (pass your hand to the left, pick up the player's hand to the left) after each play. Add into this a brilliant distillation of competition on map games (All competition/interaction lies in the players to your right/left), and some unique abilities from each city (fixed components/races) and you've got another Card-Game that isn't a Card game...The ease of play and speed of games looks mighty attractive also.
3) Merchants & Marauders. This is an Ameritrash title that I can get behind--a strong theme, many options, and player competition in paralell (to a high score) and in series (combat, opportunity pimps). There is a colorful map of the carribean, upgrades like chain shot to your ship, and perhaps most importantly, little plastic men (err...ships.) Z-Man seems to be a rising star if this game is one to judge them by.
4) Kingsburg (not new, but I just realized that it wasn't exactly Ameritrash. I simply assumed that most everything that FF published was all armies and boards.) A sublime combination of the worker placement mechanic with a dice roll that determines which opportunities you can bid on. Not all bids are equal. Of course, there are several goods-trading and challenge-resolution mechanics, along with base-building, which are layered onto the game for good measure. In some ways this game is what TI3 attempts--a combination of depth/number of layers ala' america, with the elegance and depth of thought required of a Eurogame.
5) Alien Frontiers. This game also uses dice for its workers, though some say it has a player downtime issue. However, it has something perhaps more important: WICKED GOOD THEME, absent from many of the worker placement games. Of course, it's out of stock, too.

6) A GAME NIGHT THAT HAPPENS REGULARLY.
Boardgames are simply too good to ignore. It's my aim to get going on getting people together at the 5+ per table level more often. Boardgames are so much more entertaining, reliably, than video games, drinking without boardgames, and usually...roleplaying games. As the DM, I'm more or less exhausted by the pressure to keep people engaged and entertained...In more cohesive groups, the DM can afford to suck or do something more in-depth, requiring a bit of patience/investment on the part of the party...
But in the group I have now isn't that. On top of that, because of the short attention span, I really don't feel motivated to prep monsters/encounters

Pocket Universe: Boardgame concept.

1) this is a 'hex tile' game. Random assortment of tiles, face down at start.
2) Theme: each player has a tramp ship that is attempting to exploit the cached resources of an ancient civilization that sequestered itself inside the pocket universe. The different players may be from civilizations with radically different technology and psychology--the wormholes open into wholly different galaxies, or at least the other side of the galaxy. Sometimes a player will want to trade with the newly contacted civilizations; sometimes he will want to close the Pocket off to prevent invasion, and other times he may be bent upon awakening the ancient builders of the Pocket.
Each player begins at a wormhole hex around the perimeter of the pocket universe with his ship.
3) Goal: varies by player card recieved; each player has a large VP bonus for completing the goal.

Mechanic: each wormhole has a demand for one of the (three) types of ancient technology stashed: culture, philosophy, weaponry, and biodiversity. The demand value indicates how many VP the given type of technology may be traded for at that wormhole.

SHIPS: each ship has three stats: cargo, endurance, and resources. Endurance is how long the ship can voyage away from its home wormhole before it returns ('rubber band' mechanic). A ship can have a number of cards in hand equal to its Endurance stat. When it has no more cards, it returns to a wormhole of its choice.

Cargo is how much technology the ship can carry, either as digital storage or AI scientists anaylyzing with all their computing might...or as an actual cargo hold.

Resources are used to buy upgrades for the character's ship.

DECKS: There are two decks in the game: the Explorer deck (used for movement), and the Ancient deck (used for scouring the Pocket for usable stuff.) A player draws from the explorer deck up to his endurance

MOVE:
An explorer card can be played either as its event, or as movement for the ship. JUMP X(hyperspace your ship to a system up to X). PROBE (peek at a face-down hex, and choose to flip it or look at one of the challenge stacks in the ancient deck and rearrange them.

CHALLENGE STACKS:
Each system, once flipped face-up, is assigned a CHALLENGE STACK number from 1-8. Each challenge stack contains 3 cards from the ancient deck. (only

ENDING THE GAME
In the

On the Psychology of DMing

DND, Roleplaying, et al. has a mantra:

"It [we] takes all kinds.

At least, such is the case of players. And perhaps, such is the case of DMs. But something unique happens. its the germ of an idea, a virus that spreads in your mind. In the lost moments between sleep and wakefulness, you muse upon what will happen next to the party of heroes...and what happenings they will next cause. When the campaign reaches a certain depth, its little microverse has all the truths of a waking dream: you both create and experience your reality at once. And it's a shared dream, not unlike something from a recent Major Motion Picture.

If you're like me, and you've broken though the fourth wall and realized that all stories are mechanical storytelling contraptions, you realize that the object is twofold:

• Fun. In a book, film, or any other creative medium, everyone there must both enjoy the moment at hand, and anticipate with excitement the next.
• Exposition. To be a good story, it has to awaken new ideas, or allow the participants to tell truths about what kinds of people they can be, and what sorts of things they think adventure really is. As the DM, it's your responsibility to create a world that, at the very least, gives reason for the players to think twice about who they are.

But here I want to change gears: I get tired. DND et al. forces a DM to create a million castles in the sand, all folded into his head. IRL dilemmas and delays can overwhelm the impetus of a game, and cause it to become the sort of Subconscious Hang-up that the protagonist of Inception so suffers.

Buried in my mind are the cities upon cities, decaying masterpieces of imagination, that so haunt the DiCaprio character. Every game that I've run, every time I've adopted a new setting, it's a dreamworld that gets tucked away in my subconscious. While it's only the year-long campaigns that literally have demons leaping about them, even the small games have poor lost souls inside.

Of course, I'm almost normal on the Autism-Asperger's-Etc. spectrum, and to me DND isn't nearly the obsession that consumes some folks. But don't you ever get weary of how unfulfilled most of your characters/plots/story arcs ultimately end?

Last year, I went to Pittsburgh, stood up for a few college kids getting shot at by police, and got the biggest legal shitbag imaginable thrown at me. That story arc is now about to conclude...and I've gotten a few EPs from it. It feels closed.

Now, I won't go into my IRL CG Wiz4 of Jesus character, his anarchist leanings, etc., as I find that the last thing people want from DND is something that resembles IRL. (speaking of which, where are the Gay NPCs guys? We've had female Everythings since 1e after all...)

...but do you ever think that you got into DND in the first place to feel like you were part of the big, important things that allegedly don't happen anymore? I know I did. I've met dozens of escapist players looking to pile up 100k of GP and learn 9th level spells...and as far as I'm concerned, they're not the sort of red blood cell that carries oxygen. It's the true dreamers, the ones that cry at the end (and the middle) of Les Miserables that made DND last 35 years. And to you types, I say,

Maybe, occasionally, we should wake up, not to the IRL world of Jobs, Kids, Girlfriend Aggro, etc., but to the world of an oppressed Palestine, of union busting at every Wal Mart, of the Taliban that exploded millenia-old masterpieces of Buddhist culture, of the still more fearsome hate-mongers that call themselves Terry Jones and Glenn Beck.

So here is my plea: For a gamers' delegation to something simple, something emblematic of the truth that there is good, evil, law, chaos, and neutral...and that we'd be better off with more of the neutral. What gathering could so epitomize a truth so complex, you ask? Why, look no further: