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Tag Archives: RPG Blog Carnival

August RPG Blog Carnival – What we need is … more focus

This is going to be a bit of an introspective post (and a bit late again).

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I’m a bit behind in reading through all the posts on the blogs I follow and finally read the kickoff post for August’s RPG Blog Carnival which is being hosted by Campaign Mastery. The topic is “What We Need Is/Are …” When reading the post, I had to chuckle at the comment that “more prep time” wasn’t a good answer given the current COVID-19 situation.

But to be completely honest, that really is one of the things that I need. Since the pandemic shutdowns started, I’ve actually had less free time to do gaming activities than I had before this all started. I already worked from home full time before the pandemic. My wife was still going to work every day. And I had all of my kids home full time, many of them still in school and even over the summer, trapped in the house without friends to distract them and keep them out of my hair. I could definitely use more time. But since that is off the table, I have something else to write about.

To be honest, I hadn’t planned on doing a blog carnival post this month, but as I was driving to pick up one of my kids from work (the joys of having 6 people working and only 3 cars), I was mulling over the topic and the thought hit me that what I really need, more than more time, is more focus on what I spend my time on.

And that got me thinking about all the irons I have in the fire.

Myriads of Projects

Not counting my full-time job, plus my wife and seven kids and all the things that go along with that, here’s a list of all the different hobby projects that I’m involved with or have on-going.

Obviously, the biggest part of my distraction revolves around the Star Frontiers RPG. For many years now, I’ve sort of been the primary torch bearer for the game in the on-line communities. With that comes a number of projects.

Websites & Social Media

To start I host all of the following websites on my personal server here at my house:

  • This site
  • The Star Frontiers Network (starfrontiers.info) – wiki and on-line game forums
  • Star Frontiers: Join the Revival (starfrontiers.us) – forums, development projects, character generator, and other items.
  • The Frontier Explorer fanzine (frontierexplorer.org) – currently active
  • The Star Frontiersman fanzine (starfrontiersman.com) – currently dormant

I didn’t initially create all of those sites (just 3), but have inherited them over the years as the original owners have drifted off to other things.

With the exception of possibly this site (which is relatively new) and the Star Frontiersman site (which I rebuilt when I inherited it), the others are all in desperate need of of updating. Two of them date from 2007 and one from 2012. I have standing projects to update all of those sites to new technologies. But those are daunting tasks and require a lot of dedicated time.

In addition to the websites, I’m a founding member or admin on multiple social media platforms including a Facebook group and a Discord server. There are a few others but they are not nearly as active (or were shut down as in the case of the Google Plus group). Each of those also compete for some of my time.

Fanzines

Circling back, the Frontier Explorer fanzine is still active. With the exception of the year we took off at the request of Wizards of the Coast (due to the attempt to acquire the trademark by Evil Hat), we’ve put out an issue every 3 months. I’m getting ready to start working on issue 30. This takes up a significant chunk of my time the 6 weeks prior to each issue being released.

Related to the Frontier Explorer, I’ve done two starship technical manuals in the past that were full products by themselves and released in the “Frontier Explorer Presents” line. I’ve been asked about doing another one on the HSS History’s Hope which I’m considering. We are also in the editing and art stage on another Frontier Explorer Presents” publication that will be a short story collection based around the Khad’dan, a fan-created Yazirian honor weapon.

And we are also looking at resurrecting the Star Frontiersman magazine to be a vehicle for publishing adventures in, separate from the Frontier Explorer. I have several submissions from authors that might end up there.

Another project in this category waiting for my attention is an on-line index of all the articles from all of the fanzines and the old Dragon, Imagine, Polyhedron, and Ares articles. I have that list mostly compiled (it was complete up the the hiatus), but still need to make it searchable on-line.

Finally, there is the project to get all the articles on-line in HTML format as opposed to just the magazine PDFs. Some of that is done and we had the intention of doing that for all the Frontier Explorer articles originally, but that fell by the wayside early on (issue 7) and I’ve never gotten back to it.

Blogging

Then there is this blog. The writing of each article takes 1-2 hours, sometimes more, depending on the topic and length. And that doesn’t count all the time that goes into making the content that I’m writing about.

Which brings me to the next list. Namely projects that I’m working on related to this blog.

  • Detailed Frontier Timeline
  • Death at Rosegard adventure
  • Ghost Ship Osiris adventure
  • 3D ship models
  • New starship construction rules
  • probably others I’m forgetting

Long time readers should recognize the items there. Newer readers can peruse the archive to find my posts on those projects.

I have a couple of other blogs that are no longer active. One of the things I’ve been meaning to do is consolidate all the writing I’ve done on those blogs into a sort of “blog archive” on my personal site (thomasstephens.info)

Active Games

Next there are the on-line Star Frontiers games I’m either running (Skills for Hire) or playing in (a Second Sathar War game from the Knight Hawks Campaign Book). The SSW game doesn’t take up a lot of time but it does consume some. Prepping for the Skills for Hire game, on the other hand, does take a fair bit of work as I need to prepare adventure outlines, maps, etc. for each adventure. The goal was to have a weekly session. I quickly discovered that I didn’t have time to prep for that and so dropped back to bi-weekly. But recently, as my players can attest, even that hasn’t been possible. On the flip side, this prep does give me items to share as blog posts here.

Podcasts

Addendum: I completely forgot about the podcast projects until after I posted the article originally. I want to start a podcast as well a post the audio from my on-line games on-line. The game sessions are recorded. I just need to convert them into an audio format and get them posted.

As for a regular podcast, I have several ideas (and did one a decade ago) but with all the other projects, this has just never gotten off the ground. Maybe it won’t happen. But it is definitely something I want to do. One idea I’ve had is to do a discussion of the Star Frontiers rules. Start at the beginning and go through them discussing the rules, how they work, and various fan-created variations.

Other Projects

In addition to all of that, there are a few other projects kicking around. One is my Second Sathar War computer game. I started that a long time ago. It’s about 90% of the way to the full base functionality. It works (except for seeker missiles and repairs) but needs a lot of polish (and a few bug fixes). I haven’t really worked on it recently (other than to get it working on Windows 10 a couple of years back) but it’s always sitting there in back of my mind begging for attention.

Another project is a pair of books I’m writing. One is a sequel to my book Discovery. That is roughly outlined and has one small section written. The other is a Star Frontiers story set on Pale when the sathar attack that planet. That one is outlined and I have about 1/4-1/3 (~56000 words) of the first draft done. Both of those are projects I’d like to get back to.

Next, there is some freelance stuff I do including indexing games for DWD Studios (publishers of FrontierSpace), editing FrontierSpace modules for Trevor Holman, and I’m on tap to do some science nuggets to include in the upcoming Space Kids RPG by Nick Landry. Those are hit and miss but when they come up, they can take most if not all of my free time for any given week.

Finally there are my other blogs and website, most notably my personal site (thomasstephens.info) and my game company site (newfrontiergames.com) Both need a lot of work.

I’m sure there are other things I’ve worked on (and probably not finished) that could go here but this list is already long enough as it is.

Gaining Focus

As you can see from the list above, I have a lot of irons in the fire. While I’m not necessarily actively working on all of those things, they are are there hoping to gain my attention. And because there are so many options, I can get easily distracted bouncing between them all. Hence the need for more focus.

I’m not sure what the best path forward for me is right now. The Frontier Explorer and this blog are definitely my highest priorities. Mostly because I enjoy them, but partially because they actively generate some income (through their respective Patreon campaigns) that I use to keep the websites going, cover my time spent working on them, and reinvest into time or resources for other projects. If you like the magazines and the blog, and want to encourage me to keep them going, consider supporting the Patreon campaigns for the Frontier Explorer (per issue) or this blog (monthly).

Even just the blog suffers from a bit (okay, may a lot) of a lack of focus. There are a lot of topics I’ve covered and would like to continue covering. To focus on fewer of them may mean that I don’t post as often as there won’t be anything to post about. So I could see the blog slowing down if needed. I’ve been consistently getting out at least a post a week (even though some, like this one, don’t get out on time at 8am on Tuesdays) for over two years but maybe I need to scale that back a bit. The real question is where to put my focus.

For all the other projects, I think what I need is to sit down and really prioritize them. Then focus on one until it’s done and move on to the next. I think part of the problem is that the huge number of projects creates a large cognitive load as they are all vying for attention and so I can’t pick just one and I spend a lot of time thinking back and forth and don’t make any progress.

The only other thing is the on-line games. As much as I love them, they are a huge time sink and I often find prepping for the game I’m running takes all my free time and then some. Maybe the option there is to fall back to one session a month. Although they do help generate content for the blog that are inline with my original goal for the blog, namely to create and provide resources that others can use in their games.

What’s Next?

I’m not sure. This is going to take some more thinking. I might have more to say about this in my next State of the Frontier post next week. Or it may take a bit more time to sort all of this out. School just started and that might free up time (as I have the kids around less during the day and so get less distracted from work that I have to make up later) or if they shut down due to COVID-19 again, it may mean less free time like it did last March and April.

But this is a chance for you, dear readers, to chime in. Which of all the projects I’ve listed above would you like to see more of? Which should I focus on? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

August 25, 2020 Tom 9 Comments

June RPG Blog Carnival – Organizations – Wrap-up

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It’s the end of the month and time for a wrap-up on this month’s RPG Blog Carnival.  Regular readers of my blog know that I normally do a “State of the Frontier” post on the last day of the month, that post will be up tomorrow.  Today we’re going to look at the various entries in this month’s blog carnival topic, Organizations.

I don’t know if the topic wasn’t very appealing, people were crazy busy, or if the blog carnival is losing steam but we did not have a lot of submissions this month.  I know I’m guilty of not doing an article every month as sometimes I’m strapped for time or just don’t have the inspiration to bend the often fantasy themed topics to sci-fi.  But I was hoping this month’s topic of organizations would be broad enough to appeal widely, I guess I was wrong.  That said the entries we did get were great.

First up was Building a Financial Landscape with Megacorps by Phil Forbes on the Stray RPG Thoughts blog. This entry discusses how to use Keith J. Davies’ Polyhedral Pantheons system to, instead of creating gods for a setting, create a series of mega-corps that are the main influencers in a setting.  Phil then goes on to apply the system to the local branches of the mega-corps and the local markets they are operating in.  This provides a rich framework of connections and competing interests for the players to interact with.  I found this one interesting as my preferred setting, Star Frontiers, already has a pantheon of canonical mega-corps controlling various interests throughout the setting.  I’m definitely going to take a look at this system for expanding these interactions.

Next up was an entry by Andrew Girdwood on the Geek Native blog.  He gave us a random secret society generator. You can never have enough random names on hand and this generator gives you an infinite supply.  You choose a general genre (Contemporary, Horror, Low or High Fantasy, or Sci-Fi) and then generate a name.  You can keep clicking to get new ones or until you find one that sparks your imagination.  The second one I got on his sci-fi generator was “The Eternal Planet Faction.”  I immediately thought of a tie-in with the True Yazira society that I posted as part of the kickoff of this month’s carnival.  In this case, it’s not part of the True Yazira Society, but a faction within the Family of One and the GODCo mega-corp that is trying to recreate their homeworld.  I might write that up in the future.  I’ll definitely use it at some point in my game.

Next was the entry by Gonz from Codex Anathema with their entry on the Silver Arrows, a loose, crime-prevention organization that might be part of the Church of the Silver Flame in their Ebberon campaign.  They even provide a variation on the Arcane Archer archetype to play a member of the Silver Arrows.

As host, I offered up two different organizations. The first as part of the kickoff post, was the True Yazira society, primarily a cultural organization striving to preserve the traditions of their homeworld but also opposing the practices of the group that has usurped authority (as the True Yaziria Society sees it) from the rightful rules of their species.  The second was the Investors, as shadowy, behind-the-scenes organization that works to influence governments and corporations to increase their own wealth and power.

That’s it for this month’s RPG Blog Carnival. I hope you found a nugget you could use in your game from this month’s posts or were inspired to generate some new organizations for your world even if you don’t blog or didn’t submit an entry.  For me this is just a springboard as I plan to present various organizations from my setting in future posts, not just part of the Blog Carnival.  I have several ideas lined up, I just need to find the time to write them down and get them posted.

Next month’s entry is still TBD but be sure to check out the RPG Blog Carnival’s home page on the Of Dice and Dragons blog to find links to past and future topics. And come back tomorrow for my regular “State of the Frontier” Post.

June 30, 2020 Tom 1 Comment

The Investors

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This is another new organization for the June RPG Blog Carnival which I’m hosting here on the Expanding Frontier.  I had  originally thought I was going to write about my vision of the Galactic Task Force, Incorporated, which I am using in my current game, but decided that I would rather go with something completely new instead of an already established mega-corp in the setting. So I decided to write about “The Investors” a secret society I created as part of my Detailed Frontier Timeline project.

The Investors

The Investors is a secret society composed of a number of the very, very wealthy citizens of the Frontier.  They work behind the scenes on nearly all the worlds of the Frontier.  Very few people outside the organization even know of its existence. Star Law has a slim file on the organization, and a few of the large mega-corps have some data, and a few planetary governments have some data, but beyond that, they are very obscure. 

The society does not have an official name, the members just refer to themselves as “investors.”

Aims and Goals

The aims and goals of the organization can be summarized by two words, money and power.  The organization exists to increase the wealth of its members and increase the power they have in influencing the operation of the Frontier economy. 

The members of the society, while sometimes at odd with one another, and always in competition with each other, use their already considerable assets to influence businesses and governments in ways that will increase their personal wealth and make it possible for them to exert greater influence in the future.

An example of this recently in my Detailed Frontier Timeline is their acquisition of the Groth Energy Corporation on Groth in the Fromeltar system, the major power supplier on that world.  First, they manipulated the finances of the company to force it into near bankruptcy.  They then bought out the previous owners, and finally tripled energy prices on the planet.  Since GE was the only power supplier to many portions of the planet, people either had to pay the new prices or go without power.  At the same time, they started trying to buy up all the smaller energy producers as well.  They were a little too rash, however, and many of the smaller energy providers banded together to form the Consolidated Nebula Energy Group to fight back.

As the society has grown, and due to its decentralized nature, sometimes the members find themselves working at cross purposes with other members.  When this is discovered, they meet to discuss the best way forward that provides the greatest benefit to all.  If there is ever a business conflict that seemed to be at a compete impasse and then suddenly resolved itself, sometimes in a completely unexpected manner, it may very well have been the investors behind the scenes making deals.

History

The society started at a country club on Triad in the Cassidine system, in 37 p.f.  There was a gala event and three of the Frontier’s richest beings, including the then CEO of Pan Galactic Corporation, were commiserating with one another about all the laws and restrictions their respective planetary governments were placing on them.  One of them joked that they should create an organization to invest in the right people to sway things in the direction they wanted.  The idea stuck with them and by the end of the night, the three had formed a rough outline of how they would operate.

Over the years, the original three members felt out others around the Frontier with similar feelings and desires and the number of investors grew.  While they are primarily a self-interested lot, not everything they do is necessarily bad.  Fed up with the depredations of the pirate Hatzk Naar, the organization worked to facilitate the organization of the First Common Muster. The sathar invasion in the Truane’s Star system a few years later was definitely bad for business and the organization was instrumental in the speed at which the Second Common Muster happened, which allowed the sathar to be quickly defeated.  And with the formation of the UPF, most of the new military contracts for the creation of Spacefleet and equipping Star Law went to businesses owned by members of the society.

Today, members of the society control, or at least exert strong influence over, nearly all the mega-corps and large planetary corporations.  They have tendrils into almost all the governments of the Frontier with some of the members serving in those governments. 

Membership

There are no more that a few dozen members of the society across the entire Frontier.  You must have a net worth of over a billion credits to even be considered for membership and there just are not that many billionaires out there.

No single person within the organization knows all the members, or even the true names of all the members as they only interact through holovid communications and use aliases in their interactions.  While a single member might know the true identity of a few other members, possibly the person who recruited them and those they may have recruited, the members are careful about not revealing their identities, even to other members of the society.

That said, due to the limited pool of possible recruits, it is sometimes possible to determine the identity of other members by the agendas that they support.  And a few members openly share their identity to other members.

The membership contains representatives from nearly every major industry in the Frontier. 

Recruitment is done slowly and carefully.  As members interact with the other elite, wealthy citizens, they keep an ear out for those that are discontent with restrictions they are facing or which are limiting their opportunities.  These contacts are nurtured and if they are deemed to have the right mindset and ethics, they are approached for membership, sometimes openly and sometimes indirectly.

Organization

There is no real hierarchy or formal organization to the society.  In theory all members are equal.  When conflicts arise or major decisions have to be made, they form committees consisting of the members affected by the activity to discuss and debate the issues and reach a decision. 

Occasionally, some endeavors are so large in scope, that it requires a meeting of the entire society.  These events are rare and are usually scheduled around major events on one of the core worlds that all the members would reasonably expect to travel for anyway.  Even these major meetings are held remotely so as to preserve the anonymity of the members that wish to do so.

Despite there being no formal organizations, there are definitely clicks and power blocks within the organization.  Most members are at least somewhat loyal to the member that recruited them and gave them access to the society.  Other power groups form along industry lines or other areas of common interest.  Some major decisions can take weeks to resolve as each group tries to influence things most favorably for themselves.

What do you think?

The society’s outline is fairly vague and nebulous.  That is intentional.  It is partially due to the fact that the society is still taking shape in my game and I haven’t decided exactly how and where I want to use it.  But it is also partially to allow others to shape and use it in their games as they wish.  This description paints broad strokes over the society’s operations and memberships but leaves the details for individual game masters to implement in ways specific to their campaign. 

Let me know your thoughts on the society and how you might use such an organization in your game.  And don’t forget to check out the other posts linked in the comments of the kickoff post of this month’s blog carnival to see what others are writing about on this month’s topic.

June 16, 2020 Tom Leave a comment

RPG Blog Carnival – Organizations – True Yaziria Society

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Welcome to June! Regular readers my have noticed that this post is a day early as I usually post on Tuesdays. That’s because this month, I’m hosting the RPG Blog Carnival and we need to get this month’s topic, Organizations, kicked off. This post will replace tomorrow’s regular post as the first post of the month. But don’t worry, the next installment of the Detailed Frontier Timeline will be up next week.

If you’re new to the Expanding Frontier, welcome. After you’ve read today’s post, maybe you’ll stick around and take a stroll through the archive and hopefully find something else of interest as well.

The Topic – Organizations

When I volunteered to host a month of the blog carnival, I had already had in my mind to do some development of new and existing organizations in my game. I had already done a few posts on the topic and thought it would be a great topic to get input from other creator on how they handle different organizations in their settings. Plus it would give me the motivation to flesh out a few more of my own.

I’m using the term “organization” here very loosely. It could be anything from a megacorp, like I detailed in my post about the Streel Corporation, a small private company (e.g. Obar Enterprises), a religion, a governing body of a planet or city, or a band of adventurers. It could be a single business, a sports team, or a knitting club. Guilds, cults, and secret societies are other examples. Anything that has two or more people involved and some sort of order or hierarchy counts. The sky is really the limit.

Maybe like me, you want to flesh out one or more organizations in your setting an share them as part of the carnival. What makes the organization unique? How does it stand out in your world? How do the player characters interact with the organization, if at all?

I remember a business from a fantasy game I played in when I was in high school. It had been created by a retired character in an earlier campaign run by the GM, he wasn’t part of our game. It was a chain of establishments that were a combination of high-end tavern, inn, casino, and other attractions. You could find them in almost every major city. But they only accepted silver coins. You could not pay in gold, copper, nickel, or brass (the various other coins of the world). Only silver. Apparently, the retired PC who set up the original inn, which he created as a safe house, had something happen to him that made him leery of every other coin type. It was a great, safe place to stay, you just had to have a lot of silver on hand to pay your bills.

Or maybe you have a unique set of rules for handling the way various organizations interact with one another. I remember when I read Stars Without Number, the faction rules were so interesting I almost wrote a little mini game based just around that set of rules.

Another topic that comes to mind is how you keep track of all the organizations in your game and what they are up to. Do you have lists of all the projects they are working on? Or maybe you just have short descriptions of their aims and goals and when something happens, you attribute it to the organization most likely to have done it.

Those are just some ideas I’ve had of things to write about as I’ve contemplated this topic the last little while. I’m sure you’ll have others. Share your ideas by linking to this post in yours, and posting a comment here once your post is up. At the end of the month, I’ll gather up all the posts from the comments and consolidate them in to an organized list to provide a handy reference.

And with the kickoff out of the way, it’s time to turn our attention to a semi-secret society in my game universe, the True Yazira Society.

The True Yazira Society

True Yazira Society Logo, a stylized tree shaped like the leaf of the major tree species from Yaziria with the society’s initials forming the branches.

I teased this organization back in my posts for the February Blog Carnival, whose topic was Legends and Lore. As part of that month’s posts, I did two posts on the legends and lore of the yazirian species in my Star Frontiers game universe. The first, Yazirian History, I covered the background of how the yazirian race came to be in the Frontier. Most of this is general knowledge to yazirian characters. In the second, Legends & Lore – Yazirians, I covered more less known information including things the characters may not know. It was in this post that I introduced the True Yaziria society.

Creation

The True Yazira society was formed about ten years before the first sathar attack. It was created by surviving members of the old Warhon’s guard, supporters, and retinue.

When news reached the yazirian colonies that the only ship to be lost in the exodus was the one carrying the royal family, many believed that foul play by the Family of One was involved and that they didn’t want to give up control of yazirian society on the new worlds. This was most strongly vocalized by members of the royal court and the Warhon’s personal guard that were already in the Frontier.

It was at this point that the “accidents” and disappearances started happening. Many of the most vocal dissidents died or simply vanished. Fearing for their lives, many of the royal court and royal guard took the opportunity to emigrate to the Prenglar, Cassidine, and Truane’s Star systems were there were multi-species worlds and where they would be out of the direct influence of the Family of One.

As part of this second exodus, these yazirians formed the True Yazira society. The members initially consisted of those fleeing the yazirian worlds but that would change over time.

Aims and Goals

The initial aims of the society were really just mutual protection and support. Coupled with a desire to preserve as many of the traditions of their homeworld as they could in their new environment. First and foremost in the beginning, the members of the society worked to keep track of each other in order to keep them safe from the Family of One and alert one another if someone went missing. The other major aim was to support one another as they settled in these new worlds among aliens species. Contact with the humans, vrusk, and dralasites had started only a few years before and the society provided a social outlet for yazirians to meet and just be themselves.

As word reached the members of the actions being taken by the Family of one on Hentz, as well as the other yazirian colony worlds, the True Yaziria society’s goals expanding to opposing the actions of the Family of One. Many members returned to the yazirian worlds, either permanently, or as regular business visitors, to both monitor and actively work against what they felt were encroachments by the Family of One on the true yarziran way of life. These early efforts were quite fruitful, and the society was gaining momentum, most rapidly on the worlds other than Hentz where the Family of One was centered.

And then the sathar attacked. While the actual devastation was confined to the Truane’s Star system, the repercussions would be felt all over the Frontier. Most of the membership of the society living on Pale were killed in the sathar attack, as whole cities and towns were obliterated in single strikes from space. In the decade after the attack, when everyone thought a fresh attack could occur at any moment, the focus of the entire Frontier shifted and the concerns of the True Yazira society were far from the concerns of the average yazirian citizen. The Family of One worked efficiently and effectively during the crisis and people just came to accept their leadership.

In the intervening decades the aims of the society have shifted somewhat. They still oppose the Family of One, but their efforts are much more behind the scenes. Openly, they focus on cultural preservation and teaching about traditional yazirian values from their homeworld. But behind the scenes, many members still work to limit the power of the Family of One and to get equal treatment for yazirians everywhere regardless of world or clan. These efforts have been much more effective on the worlds other than Hentz. They have given up on completely ousting the Family of One from its position in yazirian society but rather now focus on neutralizing its influence as much as possible.

Membership and Organization

Initially, members of the True Yazira society were all members of the royal court or royal guard and refugees from the yazirian colony worlds living on the mixed-species worlds or the worlds of other species. With the return of some of these yazirians to the colony worlds, the society began to grow there as well. Anyone who expressed displeasure with the operations and ideals of the Family of One would often find their way to True Yazira. On the non-yazirian worlds, many joined simply for the comradarie of fellow yazirians in their new alien homes.

Today most of the membership of the society is fairly old and consists of first generation colonists who still remember Yazira itself. While there are new recruits of the younger generations, their numbers are relatively few but growing. Some of these younger members are truly interested in preserving and sometimes restoring practices from Yazira, most are there for the opposition of the Family of One and its policies and practices. The old world doesn’t mean as much to this younger generation as they have never seen it.

The society is organized in to chapters and councils. The chapters are the local organizing body and typically cover a single town or small region. Although in the larger metropolitan areas such as Port Loren, or Point True, there might be multiple chapters each covering a part of the city.

Councils are the higher level organizations. Each world has a single council that coordinates activities across all the chapters of the world. Each chapter has a representative that attends council meetings and votes for the interests of the chapter. This representative also has the responsibility to make sure that the chapter members adhere to any decisions of the council. Typically, the council representative is the head of the local chapter.

There is also a Frontier wide council consisting of two representatives from each of the world councils. This is the governing body of the society. All current members of this council are former members of the royal guard or royal court.

Activities

In the early days of the society, the members openly opposed the actions of the Family of One although they did so as individuals or groups and never in the name of the True Yazira society. And in return, the Family of One actively hunted down these members of the society, although that was done clandestinely as much as possible.

Openly, and in the name of the society, the early members organized activities and cultural events for yazirians on all the worlds of the Frontier where chapters were organized. They also welcomed any visitors of the other species in the Frontier to the events as a way of teaching them about yazirian culture.

After the sathar attack, the opposition to the Family of One became much more clandestine and behind the scenes. They supported organizations that opposed the practices of the Family of One with money and manpower but took much more of a supporting role than active involvement. They have worked extensively, especially on the worlds in the Athor, Gruna Garu, and Scree Fron systems, to get equal treatment from GODCo on those worlds and limit the control the Family of One exerts on the govenments of those systems.

At the same time, the society has actively stepped up the cultural and historical activities on worlds all around the Frontier, working hard to preserve the cultural heritage of the species and the histories of their homeworld. In the last decade they have launched a major effort to interview and record all surviving members of the species who actually lived on Yazira and participated in the Great Exodus. All of these stories are available for anyone to listen to.

As the society is slowly recruiting younger members, many dissatisfied with the actions and policies of the Family of One, the opposition is becoming more vocal and open once again.

Once recent activity which the society is indirectly a major supporter of, is the voyage of the HSS History’s Hope, a small exploration craft currently trying to chart a way back to the system that they believe to be Yazria. The Family of One suppressed the location of Yaziria shortly after the yazirans arrived in the Frontier claiming a computer crash wiped all details of the location and routes there. With the recent discovery of a system that might by Yazira in the right direction from the Frontier, many members of the society were quite excited. The support for the mission was quite spontaneous and not an organized event. However, most of the crew of the ship are members of the society and much of the mission’s funding comes from members as well. While unintended, this means that the mission has the ability to call on the society for assistance if needed. You can expect to hear more about this relationship in an upcoming post and in upcoming events in the Detailed Frontier Timeline.

Closing Thoughts

That’s my first organization for this month’s carnival. I intend to do at least one more later in the month and have new organizations be a regular feature on the blog. I created the True Yazira organization as part of the Legends and Lore blog carnival entry and have since tied it in to several events in my setting. It hasn’t come up with any games I’ve ever run but that is sure to change in the future.

I can’t wait to see what other organizations my fellow bloggers come up with and other aspects of using organizations in games they discuss. Be sure to check back regularly to see what new posts have been added to the comments and come back at the end of the month for the wrap up and summary post.

What do you think of the True Yazira society? How would you use an organization like this in your game? What more would you like to know about this society? Feel free to share your ideas in the comment section.

June 1, 2020 Tom 8 Comments

Star Map Generator – GUI Edition

So I sat down last week with the intention of working on a new spaceship model but I just wasn’t feeling it. On the other hand, I’ve been doing a fair amount of coding at work and was in the programming mindset. I’ve been thinking about getting back to working on my Second Sathar War (SSW) game but wasn’t quite up to tackling that yet. So I decided to dust off the Star Map Generator that I’d been working on (and used to create the Extended Frontier Map) and add a graphical user interface (GUI) to it in order to make it a little more user friendly for non-programmers.

Since the code is written in Python, and I’m already familiar with the wxWidgets GUI framework from my work on the SSW game, it made sense for me to use the wxPython framework, which is just wxWidgets for Python. Since I’m seriously considering converting the SSW program over to Python, this would give me a bit of practice.

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Also, this post is going to be my entry for the RPG Blog Carnival this month. The exact topic is “To Boldly Go” hosted by Codex Anathema and is on the topic of exploring the planes and other worlds. It’s couched in terms of Spelljamers and from a fantasy perspective (common with the blog carnival) but I thought, if you’re going to be exploring new worlds, you need a map. So I’m tossing this tool out there for people to use in making their maps.

Building the Basic GUI

The first step was to just implement a basic interface over top of the existing code. The main goal here was to allow the user to specify the various map parameters that up until now, I’ve had to write into the code whenever I wanted to run the program. I’ve never implemented a way to pass those parameters in when it starts. That ability is actually issues number 3 (Add command line parameters) and number 4 (add configuration file option) on my list of open issues. This interface doesn’t solve those issues, but it does provide a workaround.

Building an interface that just accepts some input and stores the values is pretty straightforward and in just a short time (after getting my development environment all set up), I had the basic interface.

It didn’t do anything yet, but could accept the input of all the parameters you need to set to generate a map. Let’s talk briefly about each of those parameters.

  • Map width – This is just the horizontal size of the map. If you’ve seen any of the maps I’ve made with the program, it’s just the number of boxes wide the map will be. The units are light years (this will be important shortly).
  • Map height – The vertical height of the map, again in light years
  • Map thickness – This is the z dimension of the map or how thick of a slice of space you are looking at, again in light years. This is the total dimension just like the width and height. The program will split that into a maximum positive and negative value for use in system generation.
  • Stellar density – This is a measure of the number of stars that should be placed on the map. The units are star systems per cubic light year, which is why the number is so small. The default value (0.004) is roughly the stellar density around the Sun. If you want your map to a parsec (3.26 ly) per square instead of light years, and keep the same approximate density, you’d use a value of 0.138 (a factor of almost 35). That will be a very crowded map.
  • Text scale – As I’m writing this I realized this is mislabeled. While the setting here does affect the text size that is printed on the map, it also affects the size of the stellar symbols printed as well. The default is 1 and that is what I used on the Yazira Sector map. However, I used a scale of 1.5 on the Extended Frontier Map.
  • Output map filename – This is the name of the output map image file. It will be an SVG file and should have .svg as its extension.
  • Output data filename – This is the output file that contains all the coordinates, names, and spectral types of the stars generated as well as the list of jump routes generated. It’s just a text file and you can call it anything you want. I typically use the same same as the map file but with a .dat extension so I can keep track of them together.
  • Input data filename – This field is left blank for a randomly generated map. If you specify a name here, the program will try to load that file and use it to generate the map. The file should be the same format as the output data file. This allows you to randomly generate a map, then tweak the data file and have the program redraw the map with your modifications. This is how I made both the Yazira Sector map and the Extended Frontier Map. If the file specified doesn’t exist, the program will probably crash. Or at least not do anything.
  • Print Z coordinate – This just tells the program whether is should print the z-coordinate (distance above or below the plane of the map) on the map itself. You can see what that looks like on the Yazira Sector Map. I had it turned off for the Extended Frontier Map.

I initially implemented those boxes as simple text boxes but realized that the first five really needed to read in values so I changed them in the code. I should probably change the Input data filename field to be an Open File dialog so that it guarantees that the file is actually there. I’ll need to add that to the open issues.

Finally I added the code to properly process the buttons. Clicking “Generate Map” will do exactly that and write the files to disk in the same directory where the program is located. Clicking “Reset Values” will change all the input values back to the defaults if you’ve made changes.

Making the Program Distributable

By adding the GUI to the program, you need even more setup to run it. Before, you just needed a Python installation as it was pretty vanilla code, but you still needed to install Python. Now, in addition to Python, you need to have installed the wxPython distribution as well. Since I wanted to make this easily usable by non-programmers, I wanted it to just look like another program you that click on and run. So I started looking for ways to package it up for distribution.

It turns out there is a great little Python program called pyInstaller. It takes your program and bundles it up with all the code and files it needs to run and puts it into either a single program file (.exe file) or a folder with all the bits you need and an .exe file to launch it. You can then just distribute it as a zip file, users can unpack the zip file, and run your program.

I tried it out and sure enough, it just worked. You could click on the .exe file and the program would run. Here’s that version of the program. Just download the zip file, extract it somewhere, and run the StarMapGen.exe file.

StarMapGen-initialGUI.zip (12.3MB)

It works fine, but everything is done behind the scenes and the files are created on disk in the directory where you launched the program.

Adding in the Map

The next step was to add in a map display. I mean, what good is having a graphical interface if you don’t get to see the map?

This is where I ran into the first snag. It turns out that the current release version of wxPython (4.0.7) doesn’t have the ability to read in an SVG file and display it. It can write one if you’ve created your image from it’s primitives, but in my case, I’m writing the SVG directly and just want a display. Luckily, the current development version of the package (4.1.0a) does have that capability.

Normally I try to stick with the released versions of packages, but after looking around, all the other options for displaying SVG files required more packages to to be added to the dependency list and in the end, used the same backend that I would have to install for wxWidgets. So I bit the bullet and upgraded to the head of the development channel. Since pyInstaller grabs everything you need and packages it up, I wasn’t too concerned.

So I wired everything up so that when you click that “Generate Map” button, in addition to creating the map and writing the files, it would then load up the file in to the panel on the right hand side of the GUI. Unfortunately, it ended up looking like this:

Initial map display in the program

Notice anything missing? It’s supposed to look like this:

Full map render in Inkscape

All of the stars and text were missing. Not very satisfying.

Fixing the Stars

For the stars, the SVG code uses a series of radial gradients to create the limb darkening and glow effects and maybe the default renderer just couldn’t handle those yet. After all, it was the development version of the software.

So I started digging. Since the default renderer wasn’t working, I looked for alternatives. The package gives a couple of other options for renderers, the best one being based on the Cairo package. This is the same package that I saw being recommended for rendering when I was searching around earlier. I didn’t really want to pull in another dependency but after trying everything else and failing, I added that in. Unfortunately, that didn’t work either.

However, after some testing, I was able to run the wxPython demos and found that it could render radial gradients. A lot of the sample images had them and the images were created by Inkscape, which I had based my code off of. So it had to be an issue in the code I was writing for the image.

After much experimenting with simple images and trying to render them, I finally discovered that the old Inkscape code I based the SVG data on just wasn’t up to snuff. I originally wrote that code in 2015 and things had moved on. Luckily, it didn’t take much to fix it, I just had to add two additional parameters to the gradient specification to get it to work (cx="0" cy="0" if you’re wondering).

When I next ran the program, the stars appeared!

Render with fixed gradient code. Notice I’m reading in the old data file so I get the same map. Also this renderer makes the grid lines finer so they don’t show up as easily in the small screen capture. They are there though.

Fixing the Text

Next up was to figure out why the text wasn’t rendering.

In the SVG file I’m writing, the labels are all rendered as <text> elements. You’d think that would just work but it wasn’t. After the experience with the gradients, the first thing I checked was my implementation. I went into the new Inkscape and exported a simple SVG with just a few characters. That wouldn’t render.

Next I tried some other on-line SVG code generators to create some <text> elements. Those wouldn’t render either.

I then went looking at the sample SVG files from the demos. In every case, it seems that the text in those files were not stored as <text> elements but rather had been converted from text to paths. In other words, they were no longer text but rather drawings.

It appears that the renderers don’t handle the <text> element. This is a bit of an issue because I want to be able to edit the text as needed. Mostly I’m just moving it around, but sometimes I want to be able to change it as well. And once it’s a path instead of text, you can’t edit the characters. Plus I eventually want to allow the user to specify the fonts used on the map (That’s even an open issue, number 5). I like the defaults I’m using but users should have options.

I could have the program write the paths for the text, it would just require hard coding in the paths for the various characters. Currently there are just 23 characters used across two fonts but I don’t really want to do that as that makes it harder to use different fonts or add in additional characters.

In the end, I decided to pass on this issue for now and revisit it at a later date. The full file written out by the program has the text in it, you just don’t see it in the preview at the moment. When I revisit this, I have several options from just building a library of character paths, writing code to do the conversion from text to paths, or even writing code for wxWidgets to do the text rendering natively. There is also the option to use the native wxWidgets primitives to generate the map and then using its ability to write SVG files to make the map file. All will probably be explored.

After taking a pass on generating text, I did make a banner image for the program to load that rendered the text as a path so you could see it. This now what you see when you load the program.

Program start up screen

Adjusting the Display

The last thing I wanted to tackle in this version was resizing the display. You may have noticed that all the maps I’ve shown so far have been square. But you don’t necessarily want a square map. Otherwise, why allow specification of both a height and a width?

By default you get the display shown in the pictures above. However, I wanted the user to be able to enlarge or reshape the window and have the map expand (or shrink) to fill as much of the space available as possible. This required playing a bit with the layout engine in wxWidgets.

If you notice, in the very first image, the region on the right has a little border around it with the “Map” label. I had intended to keep that border but the layout element that makes it will only resize in one direction and I couldn’t come up with a way to make it stretch in both. It may be possible but I wasn’t finding it and it wasn’t that important. In the end I went with a different element that did stretch the way I wanted, I just lost the border. Which really isn’t that big of a deal.

Now when you generate a map it will scale the map to fit in the available space and then you can resize the window and it will expand or shrink as needed to keep the whole map visible. Here are some examples.

First just a new square map. It fits just fine since the map area was already square.

Next, let’s make the map 30 light years wide. When we hit the “Generate Map” button, we get a view like this:

It’s all there, but has been shrunk down to fit in the space provided. But now we can grab the side of the window and stretch it out a bit to make everything fit.

Packaging Woes

At that point, I was going to package it up as a distributable program and add it to the blog post so you could grab it and play with it. Unfortunately, the addition of the extra dependencies for some reason caused pyInstaller to fail and not make a proper program that I could share. I think it’s just not finding the Cairo rendering library. It has tools to handle that, but I haven’t had time to sit down and figure it out. I finished this last night and am writing this post just an hour before it gets published. Look for an update later this week with the program once I figure it out.

UPDATE:

I got the packaging working. You can grab the version of the program that does the proper rendering of the stars from this link:

StarMapGen-v0.2.0.zip (MB)

Just download it, extract the contents of the folder, and run the StarMapGen.exe file.

Getting the Code

That said, if you’re comfortable installing Python and the dependencies, you can get the code from my StarMapGen GitHub repository. This version of the program is sitting on the master branch. You’ll need to also install the cairocffi Python package and follow the instructions on this page to get the development version of wxPython. Once you’ve done that, the StarMapGen.py script is the main file for the GUI version of the program. makeMap.py is still the command line main program.

What’s Next?

There are a lot of things still left to do and work on. Already identified is the issue of the text rendering in the preview and some of the existing open issues.

A bug that I noticed with the GUI is that if you specify a data file to load, if it’s not square, it doesn’t get scaled properly in the display when rendered and loaded. That will probably be the first issue I track down.

Other improvements include adding a parameter to allow you to turn on and off generation of the jump routes and if you are making them, another parameter that specifies the maximum distance that the program will use to connect systems (currently set to 15 light years).

I also want to add some features to the GUI to include instructions, the ability to save parameter sets, and specify a random seed for map reproducibility.

Finally, I need to do some refactoring of the code to clean it up and document it better.

I’ll be working on this more in the coming weeks so expect to see updates in the future. If you’d like to help out with the code, feel free to clone the repository, make changes and submit a pull request.

What do you think of the program as it now stands? Are there features you’d like to see? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

April 21, 2020 Tom 8 Comments

Legends and Lore – Yazirians

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This is the second part of my post on the history, legends, and lore of the yazirians in my Star Frontier universe. Part one, Yazirian History, was posted last week. Both of these posts are part of February’s RPG Blog Carnival, Legends and Lore, being hosted by the Enderra blog.

In last week’s post, we looked at the history of the yazirian species in relation to their arrival in the Frontier region and colonization of the worlds they now occupy. Most of the material presented there is both fact and general knowledge in the Frontier that most characters would either know or be able to discover with just a little bit of research. In this post, we look at things that may be true but unknown, true but hidden, rumor, speculation, or conjecture, the latter three may be true or false. I’ll try to flag each of these items as I discuss them.

Some of this information is part of the ideas I have for an major campaign where the PCs go in search of the yazirian homeworld, the fate of those that remained behind, and the Warhon’s ship. They are definitely spoilers for anyone that may play in that game if I ever run it.

I think the best way to do this will be to organize the ideas by general topic, possibly with a miscellaneous section at the end. In each section, I’m just going to provide a bulleted list with the relevant information. Let’s get started.

The Fate of Yazira

  • The last exodus ship that arrived in the Frontier departed Yazira some ten years before closest approach of the interloping brown dwarf. (fact, known)
  • Millions of yazirians remained on Yaziria unwilling to leave their world. (fact, known)
  • No ship has ever returned to the Yazira system. (fact, known)
  • In the early days after yazirians arrived in the Frontier, several ships attempted to go back to Yazira to see what happened. None of these ships have ever returned. (fact, obscure)
  • Most of these ships that failed to return were destroyed by agents of the Family of One. (fact, deeply hidden) Some simply disappeared and their fate is unknown, but none made it to Yazira.
  • There is no known jump route data back to Yazira. (false rumor). Deep within the archives of Clan Anglann and the Family of One, there is a stored set of routes back to Yazira. They are known only to a few yazirians and heavily guarded and obscured. They are also nearly a century out of date at this point and may not be valid.
  • Modern yazirians don’t even know which star is their homeworld, just the general direction in the sky. (fact, known) There are some members of the Family of One who know, but this knowledge is a closely guarded secret as well.
  • Predictions of Yazira’s fate, based on the path of the brown dwarf, indicated that the planet would be hurled out of the system into deep interstellar space. (fact, obscure)
  • Instead of being spun out into interstellar space, Yaziria was actually captured by the brown dwarf as it passed through the system and now circles that object in a wide orbit as it continues on its journey. (fact, unknown)

Fate of the Warhon and his Guard

  • Of all the exodus ships, only the Warhon’s ship failed to make the trip to the Frontier (fact, known)
  • The Warhon’s ship was sabotaged by agents of Clan Anglann so that it wouldn’t arrive and they could seize power. (discredited rumor, but true). There is no evidence to support this anywhere in the Frontier but Clan Anglann did sabotage the Warhon’s ship. All records possibly relating to this were lost in a computer “crash” early after the exodus. Only two living yazirians, seniors elders in the Family of One, know the truth and they aren’t saying anything.
  • Most of the Warhon’s personal guard that were part of the early exodus died soon after arriving in the Frontier. (fact, obscure) Most of these deaths were “accidents” caused by Clan Anglann (obscure rumor, fact). Most modern yazirians have moved on and just don’t care.
  • Some of the Warhon’s Guard survived the purge and quickly emigrated to the Prenglar, Triad, and Truane’s Star systems where they went into hiding from the Family of One. (fact, obscure)
  • The survivors of the Warhon’s Guard formed a secret society named “True Yaziria” that word to oppose or diminish the influence of the Family of One (fact, obscure)
  • Despite the sabotage of the Warhon’s ship, it was not destroyed and managed to survive long enough to make planetfall on an unknown world. (fact, unknown) Rumors exist that it is still out there, spread by True Yazira, but it is all speculation. No facts exist to support it.
  • The genetic Ark on the Warhon’s ship survived and is completely intact in the remains of the ship. (fact, unknown)
  • All of the conspiracy against the Warhon was a very small slice of Clan Anglann. (fact, unknown/hidden) Most clan members were not involved and would be horrified to know the truth.

The General Population

  • Very few living yazirians actually remember their homeworld as most were born in the Frontier. There is a small and dwindling population (maybe 10%) of older yazirians that actually lived on Yazira. (fact, known)
  • There is a fairly large generation gap between this older population and the next wave of yazirians. In the final years leading up to the exodus, the birthrate dropped off significantly. (fact, known)
  • The yazirians of the Frontier, while aware of Yazira, don’t give it much thought except as it is used in holovids and expressions about how things used to be. (fact, known)
  • The problems with terraforming operations on the worlds in the Scree Fron, Athor, and Gruna Garu systems are intentional problems caused by the Family of One and the General Overall Development Corporation (GODCo) to keep those systems in line. (false, rumor). The problems truly are technical and result from GODCo being overextended trying to work on five different worlds instead of just the one they original planned for. Despite having nearly a century to grow, they still don’t have the resources and manpower they need. These issues provide openings for rumors to be spread by the True Yazira society in their effort to undermine the Family of One.
  • Interaction with the other species of the Frontier dealt a serious blow to the yazirian cultural identity as a warrior species. (fact, obscure) They discovered that despite their history, they were neither the strongest nor the nimblest species in the area. Although it is slowly fading away, ripples of this are still seen throughout yazirian culture, especially among older yazirians.

Lost Scoutships

  • There were many scout ships sent out from Yazira shortly after FTL travel was discovered, most of these never returned. (fact, obscure)
  • Several of these lost starships made it to systems in or near the Frontier, including Volturnus in the Zebulon system. There may be survivors, possibly descendants of the crews, in primitive societies to be discovered. The crew that made it to Zebulon did not survive. (fact, unknown)
  • Some of the scoutships penetrated into sathar space and were captured or destroyed. (fact, unknown)

Family of One and GODCo

  • All of the upper management of GODCo are members of the Family of One (fact, discoverable).
  • All of the upper management of GODCo are members of Clan Anglann (false, rumor). While a significant portion are, not all of them are from the same clan.
  • The Family of One is using the work done by GODCo to attempt to control all of the yazirian populated worlds. (false, rumor). While the upper leadership of GODCo are members of the Family of One, they are not ideological power-mongers. At least not any more than leaders of other mega-corps. While some fervently believe in the idea of a unified yazirian species according to the Family of One precepts, many are only interested in helping their fellow yazirians and are members of the Family of One out of necessity – they couldn’t hold their position if they weren’t.
  • Many members of the Family of One are members in name only and only minimally hold to many of the tenants of the religion. (fact) They are members because you need to be to hold any significant position on Hentz (Araks).
  • Family of One members on worlds other than Hentz tend to me more fervent as membership is optional on those worlds. (fact)
  • The Family of One is watching all aspects of yazirian culture, everywhere. (partially true, rumor). While the Family of One tries to keep abreast of everything going on, they don’t have nearly as many spies, inquisitors, and informants as the rumors (spread by the True Yazira society) would have you believe.
  • The Family of One is preventing GODCo from deploying all of its technology and releasing all the flora and fauna from Yazira on the worlds other than Hentz. (fact). Debates about this practice arise regularly in yazirian society. GODCo claims that it is because the environment are not ready or suitable, but most of the restrictions come from the Family of One and their effort to ensure that Hentz is the only “New Yazira”.

HSS History’s Hope

In my Detailed Frontier Timeline, one of the story threads is covering the travels of the HSS History’s Hope, a small exploration ship registered on Hakosaur (Scree Fron) that is currently trying to chart a route to a star system believed to be Yazira. If you want to use this little storyline in your campaign, there are some rumors about it, even though the project has just started.

  • The Family of One tried to cover up and suppress the discovery of the star system with the nearby brown dwarf because they knew it was Yazira. (fact, rumor) This rumor popped up almost immediately and is based in fact. The star system is Yazira and the Family of One doesn’t want people poking around because no one knows what they will find.
  • The HSS History’s Hope is being financed by True Yazira. (partially true) While many of the original supporters of the expedition, and and many that provided initial funding, are members of True Yazira, not all of them are and it isn’t a project being directed by the secret society. It just aligned with the society’s goals and many members independently jumped on the opportunity.
  • Most of the entire crew of the HSS History’s Hope are members of True Yaziria (fact, obscure rumor). Since the society’s membership is very obscured, it is hard to tell for sure who is and who isn’t a member. The rumor circulates among upper members of the Family of One. Most others don’t know about the secret society or don’t care. The fact is that about 80% of the crew are members of the society simply because they have an interest in finding Yazira. It wasn’t intentionally planned.
  • The Family of One has sent ships to eliminate the HSS History’s Hope. (fact, hidden). This one is a spoiler for the timeline. As I’m writing this, the History’s Hope has had a bad string of calculations and made some misjumps. When they finally get back to the known space lanes, they are going to have to deal with this.

Outstanding Questions

The points above provide some ideas and background but they also raise a number of questions. These are either things I’m going to flesh out in the future as I develop the storylines more or things that someone using this information could expand upon as well. Some of these are:

  • What exactly happened to the Warhon’s ship?
    • How did it fail? What was the damage?
    • Did the crew survive? All enter freeze fields?
    • What happened to the Warhon’s family?
  • If they made it to a planet surface, what is their current state?
    • Another yazirian colony?
    • What tech level are they at?
    • What happened to the genetic ark?
  • What is the “True Yaziria” society doing?
    • How to you become a member?
    • How well known is it?
    • What resources does it have access to?
    • I invented this organization just recently as I was working out the detail of these two posts so this is an area I plan on expanding on. This may very well show up as an entry in June when I’m hosting the Blog Carnival.
  • What events and consequences will the HSS History’s Hope expedition trigger? What will they find?

Final Thoughts

That’s what I have for now. There is still a lot of legend and lore for the yazirians that could be explored. I intentionally didn’t cover much in regards to the daily life of a typical member of the species and current events in the Frontier, just items that are part of their cultural heritage. Some of these other ideas will undoubtedly show up in future posts. Other bits may show up in the pages of the Frontier Explorer.

What legends and lore do you have for the yazirian species? Share your ideas in the comment section below.

February 25, 2020 Tom Leave a comment

Yazirian History

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The RPG Blog Carnival this month is being hosted by the Enderra Worldbuild & Role-playing Games blog and the topic is Legends and Lore. You can follow that link to find all the other posts people have made on the topic.

When I read this topic, my mind immediately went to the Yazirians in the Star Frontiers setting. They were a natural choice to pursue in greater depth, especially based on much of the fan material that has been developed for that species. And while I’ve been thinking about these ideas for all of the Star Frontiers species, the yazirians are particularly relevant to me right now since part of my Detailed Frontier Timeline (most recent post as of this writing) is currently dealing with a plot line exploring this history directly, namely a ship, the HSS History’s Hope, that is headed toward a system that they think might be Yazira, the yazirian homeworld.

A lot of the foundation for this background is set in two articles that we published in the Star Frontiersman nearly a decade ago in issue 16, back in December 2010. The first is an article written by my friend Tom Verreault entitled “Origin of the Species & the UPF” on page 34 of that issue. In this he gives his version of how the various species in the Frontier got there. The second article, which I wrote to support the ideas he presented for the yazirians in that article, is entitled “Interstellar Interloper (Brown Dwarf)” (p. 46), and discusses what could happen to a planetary system if a brown dwarf sized object passed close through the center of a star system. I recommend you grab issue 16 and read both articles.

This is going to be a two part series. In this first post will look at the background and history of the Yazirian race as I conceive them when running games. The next one will look at the Legends and Lore as it exists at the current point in the campaign. Some of the material is fact, some is common knowledge, some is belief, and some is propaganda. I’ll be looking at it from all those angles.

The Loss of Yazira

The yazirian homeworld, Yazira, orbited a K4 star that is located some 100 light years “west” of the Frontier in an area known as the Vast Expanse, so named because of its low stellar density and large distances between neighboring star systems. Interestingly, very, very few yazirians living today actually know the location of this star system. More on that in the next post. To start let’s go back to about 200 years ago.

It was a time of relative peace and growing industrialization and prosperity for the world. The world had been united under a single government for several centuries and was beginning to develop spaceflight and really start looking into the universe beyond the Yazira system.

A Threat Discovered

It was at this point, as they began to survey the cosmos, that the yazirian astronomers noticed something in the sky that would completely change the course of their specie’s history. When it was first discovered, it was a curiosity. An object extremely bright in the infrared but extremely faint in the visible, even with the yazirian’s definition of visible light that extended somewhat into the infrared. It wasn’t long before a theoretical model was developed for the object, something we today call a brown dwarf.

The astronomers were excited. Based on the observed characteristics, they realized it had to be very close to Yazira. It would allow them to study this type of object up close. As the object was studied more, the distance, a mere 1500 AU, was established.

However, what was also established was that it was coming closer. Over the next few years, the orbit of the object was refined and it was realized that the brown dwarf was falling nearly directly toward their star and would pass very close to their world in the process. Simulations showed that depending on the mass of the object and its exact path, their world and species was in for a major catastrophe ranging from severe and drastic orbital and therefore climate change to complete ejection from their solar system. If something wasn’t done, they were probably doomed as a species.

The bad news was that they were in trouble. The good news was that they had nearly 140 years to prepare. To the Warhon’s credit (the leader of the yazirians), he took the news in stride and neither dismissed it since it wouldn’t happen in his lifetime, nor panicked. Rather he understood the issue for what it was and began charting a course for his people.

The general populace wasn’t so stoic. Many denounced the scientists as alarmists. Others claimed the discovery to be a hoax. Still others used it to as an excuse to hoard survival gear, food, and other essentials and drop out of society. Many just ignored it due to the long time scale. The most troubling, however, were those that took the news to mean that society was over and reverted to lawlessness and anarchy. It was these latter groups that would plague yazirian society for the next century.

A Plan Takes Shape

Over the next decade, as the Warhon’s troops dealt with the anarchists and the astronomers worked to refine the object’s trajectory even more, the government began investing heavily in space technology. While yazirians had already visited their two moons and had many low altitude orbital flights, the extra push from the government allowed them to set foot on other worlds in the system for the first time before the decade was over.

With the development in space technology well under way, the government also started a few other projects. One was increased medical research, especially related to long duration spaceflight and how the yazirian body would adapt and change under different conditions (gravity, stellar flux, etc).

The other was called the Ark Project. This had two areas of focus. The first was to catalog the genomes of every species on the planet, plant and animal, and collect this into a large database as well as collecting samples of as many species as possible. The second was a push into cloning technology that would allow the recreation of those species from the database.

The ultimate goal was to move the yazirian population off of their homeworld to somewhere else. Where was yet to be determined. The initial plan called for the creation of huge generations ships that would travel to likely star systems looking for a world to inhabit. Astronomers had already begun looking for worlds around other suitable stars.

A Change of Plans

Some thirty years after the original identification of the brown dwarf, a discovery occurred that would change the very foundation of what had come to be called the Exodus project.

Using a variety of propulsion technologies, a major break through had been achieved that would allow them to accelerate small probes fast enough to reach some of the nearer star systems before the generations ships would have to leave the Yazira system. The first probes were launched, and as they achieved speeds of about 1% the speed of light, only a fraction of their final velocity, they vanished.

At first it was believed that the probes had broke up or otherwise become inoperable. However, deep radar scans of the region of space they should have been in returned no data. And having five probes, all going different directions, vanish in exactly the same way was more than mere coincidence.

Another set of probes were launched as a test which ended with the exact same result. Yazirian scientists realized that this was some fundamental aspect of physics that they had not suspected or known about. Hundreds of researchers started working on the problem.

It was nearly a decade before a breakthrough was made and a theory of hyperdimensional travel was discovered. In the mean time, work had been going on to improve technology to the point that a crewed vessel could achieve the speeds necessary to invoke the effect.

It would be another decade before a ship was ready to make the first attempt at testing this theory. With a total delta-V of 5% of the speed of light, the ship should be able to achieve the hyperdimenional travel speed, slow down and do it again. Thus is should be able to make a trip and return. In theory.

A Historic Flight

With an all volunteer crew, the YSS Grand Voyager set out on its maiden voyage in an attempt to make history. It took a month of acceleration to get up to near the 1% speed of light threshold and then another agonizing month of small bursts of thrust to precisely measure and cross the threshold. Then just like the the probes, the Grand Voyager vanished.

It would be months of anxious waiting before the fate of the Grand Voyager would be learned. Most people had given up hope when a faint radio signal was received from the ship coming from high out of the orbital plane of the system. They had survived the trip and hyperdimensional travel, which would come to be called Void travel when they met the other species in the Frontier, was possible. There was still much to learn about this new form of travel, but the travel time for the exodus had been greatly reduced.

Looking for a Place to Call Home

Over the next two decades, propulsion technology was innovated and improved and more and more ships were launched to scout out the nearby star systems looking for a world that they could move the population of Yazira to. Most of these ships would eventually be lost as they explored further and further from Yazira. It was not known if there were troubles with the Void travel, mechanical failures with the ships, or they had suffered misfortune in the systems they visited.

As ships did return, they learned much about the nearby stellar systems but no suitable world was found. Finally, after nearly two more decades of searching, a ship returned from a two year journey reporting that a suitable world had been found, nearly 100 light years away. The star was significantly brighter and yellower than Yazira but the world itself was nearly Yazira’s twin in climate and gravity.

During this time, the designs of the exodus ships were rebuilt from the ground up to use this new mode of faster than light travel. With a destination finally established, exploration ceased and construction began on the first ship, the YSS Yazira’s Ark, that would take a select crew, along with a copy of the genetic archive, to this new world to start preparing it for the arrival of the rest of the population.

The Exodus Begins

It took five years for the YSS Yazira’s Ark to be completed. Crewed primarily by members of Clan Anglann, it departed for the new system which had been dubbed Araks to colonize and begin yaziriforming the planet Hentz.

By this time, the brown dwarf was visible to the unaided eye on Yazira and was year by year growing brighter. The world began to focus almost completely on the construction of the exodus ships. While there were some that decried the damage being done to the environment due to the industrialization of the planet, most understood that the world was doomed and so accepted the changes.

Five years after the YSS Yazira’s Ark left, five more ship were completed with nearly twenty-five more in some stated of completion. These later ships were gigantic, nearly ten times the size of the Yazira’s Ark. It would take nearly two hundred more to move the entire population. With the first five ships complete, the exodus of the yazirian population to Hentz began in earnest.

It had been decided early on that when the time came, ships would be populated by clans. While the crews were often from Clan Anglann, the passengers were drawn from a single clan or possibly two. Depending on the size of the clan, it could take two or three ships to hold the entire clan population.

Over the next two decades, a steady stream of ships departed the Yazira system. Finally, the last ships were completed, three of the giant colony ships and a final, smaller ship modeled on the original Yazira’s Ark. This last ship contained the Royal Court, the Warhon and his family, who was the son of the Warhon who had started the project, 120 years earlier. It also contained a final copy of the genetic database including all the additional data that had been collected since the Yazira’s Ark had left. It was the last ship to leave their doomed world. The interloping brown dwarf was clearly visible in the night sky and only 18 years away. It was the last ship to leave.

Trouble at the Destination

As the second wave of colony ships were arriving at Hentz, the yazirians detected signals from other spacefaring species not too far from their new world. Concerned that they might be hostile, Clan Anglann, which had been organizing the exodus, diverted ships from waves three and four to several new worlds in systems nearby. These ships went to the Athor, Gruna Garu and Scree Fron systems. The worlds there were not as desirable as Hentz, but the yazirians wouldn’t have all their eggs in a single basket if these new species proved to be hostile.

Loss of the Warhon

The trip from Yazira to Araks was a long one requiring nearly twenty Void jumps along the way. As the final fleet of ships made the journey, disaster struck. On the 5th jump, the Warhon’s ship didn’t arrive in the destination system. The other three ships waited for nearly two months but the Warhon never reappeared. Finally, they completed their journey and delivered the news to the yazirians on Hentz and it was related to the others in the Athor, Gruna Garu, and Scree Fron systems.

A week of mourning was held for the Warhon’s family. And then political chaos erupted. With the entire royal family gone, a power vacuum was created. In the end, Clan Anglann and the Family of One, who had been organizing the exodus on behalf of the Warhon, took control of the yazirian government.

Fallout

Many suspected foul play. Of the nearly 250 ships built, only the newest ship with the most up to date technology was unable to make the trip. Coincidentally, it also happened to contain the Warhon and his family. The most vocal opponents of the Family of One’s rule was the Warhon’s personal guard that had arrived in advance. Their voices were quickly surpressed. Many just vanished. Others emigrated to the Prenglar, Cassidine, and Truane’s Star systems, integrating with the other races in the Frontier who the yazirians had established contact with some years before.

It wasn’t too many years later that the sathar first appeared in the Frontier. This effectively put an end to the inter-clan conflict as the species in the Frontier united to fend off his new foe. With the formation of the UPF, the yazirian race started looking forward instead of back. Some still remember the old days but most have accepted the new order and are working toward the future.

Next Time

That represents the history of the Yazirian people as most people know it. There are a few things in that narrative that are not widely known (such as the suppression of dissension by the Family of One, but that information should be familiar to most yazirian characters and many non-yazirians as well.

Next week we’ll look at lots of details behind the scenes and outside the Frontier that impact the store and contribute to the lore of the yazirian species.

February 18, 2020 Tom 5 Comments

Worlds of Origin for Star Frontiers Races – part 1

This week we’re going to begin looking at determining the origins of any given character or NPC in the Frontier. I’ve labeled this as part 1 in a series as it is a preliminary draft that I plan to tweak and expand on in the future. This is really a preliminary, first pass but still quite usable in its current form.

This is the post I had planned for last week but didn’t quite have it ready in time so you got the UPF Minelayer a week early.

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This project is something that’s been kicking around in the back of my mind for years now and I was inspired to look at it again as part of the RPG Blog Carnival this month which has the topic “Random Encounter Tables“. While this isn’t necessarily a random encounter table per se, it can be used to randomly determine information about someone you encounter in the game. It’s a bit of a stretch, but still relevant. I encourage everyone to visit the main topic page for this months carnival and read all the posts linked to in the comments. I’ll be hosting the blog carnival in June so I’m going to make an effort to write a post each month for the carnival this year and become more active. It tends to be more focused on fantasy gaming so sometimes I’ll really need to stretch the topic but we’ll see how it goes.

We’re going to start right with the table and then I’ll talk about how it was generated. If you’re interested in a slightly different take on this same topic, we published an article, “Star Frontiers Birth Locations” by ExileInParadise, in issue 19 of the Frontier Explorer back in Jan 2017 as part of our Star Frontiers 35th anniversary issue. This article will be a first pass at my take on that same topic.

Where Are You From?

To randomly determine the world of origin of one of the “Core Four” Star Frontiers species, roll d100 on the following table. Find the value rolled in the column for the species in question and the line tells you the origin world and system for that character. This version of the table is ordered by system and not the name of the world.

Planet (system) Dralasite Human Vrusk Yazirian
Hentz (Araks) 1 1 1 1-12
Yast (Athor) 2-3 2-3 2-3 13-19
Rupert’s Hole (Cassidine) 4-6 4-10 4-5 20-22
Triad (Cassidine) 7-18 11-20 6-17 23-33
Laco (Dixon’s Star) 19 21-22 18 34
Inner Reach (Dramune) 20-27 23-24 19-21 35-37
Outer Reach (Dramune) 28-35 25-31 22-28 38-44
Groth (Fromeltar) 36-40 32 29 45
Terledrom (Fromeltar) 41-52 33-35 30-41 46-49
Hargut (Gruna Goru) 53-56 36-38 42-45 50-61
Ken’zah Kit (K’aken-Kar) 57-59 39-40 46-52 62-63
Zit-Kit (Kizk’-Kar) 60-62 41-42 53-59 64-66
Kawdl-Kit (K’tsa-Kar) 63 43 60-64 67
Kdikit (Madderly’s Star) 64-65 44-50 65 68-69
Gran Quivera (Prenglar) 66-78 51-61 66-76 70-81
Morgaine’s World (Prenglar) 79 62-63 77 82
Histran (Scree Fron) 80 64 78-79 83
Hakosoar (Scree Fron) 81 65 80-82 84
Minotaur (Theseus) 82-85 66-75 83-86 85-87
Lossend (Timeon) 86-87 76-79 87-88 88
Pale (Truane’s Star) 88-95 80-86 89-95 89-95
New Pale (Truane’s Star) 96 87-90 96 96
Clarion (White Light) 97-100 91-100 97-100 97-100

If you just want to use the table, you’re done. Enjoy. If you want to learn a bit more about how I created it, read on.

Building the Table

First off, this table just covers the original systems presented in the original (Alpha Dawn) ruleset, and doesn’t include Volturnus (Zebulon) as there is no indigenous core four population there in that rule set. Also, that rule set left Kawdl-Kit (K’tsa-Kar) out of the data table so I’ve used the values from Zeb’s Guide for that system.

Design Decisions

One of the decisions I made in creating the table is that it is possible for any of the core four races to be from any planet, although the chance may be very small.

Another decision I made was that I didn’t want either a d1000 table (although that’s easy enough to do in Star Frontiers that only uses d10s) and I didn’t want a series of sub-tables. One roll and you would be done.

The result of those decisions is that the smallest probability of having a race/homeworld combination is 1% and for certain situations this is probably a bit (or even a lot) higher than it would really be given the demographics and politics of the Frontier. An example is a non-Yazirian race from Hentz, a world controlled by the Family of One where non-yazirians are second class citizen. There just aren’t that many there. Similarly, vrusk from Kdikit (Madderly’s Star) after most vrusk were driven off world by the Freeworld Rebellion. Although you could also argue that those situations drive up the chance that those beings would be off-world and increase the chance. So in the end, it’s all good.

Getting the Base Numbers

The rules give a dominant population and a population density for each world in the Frontier. The dominant population could be one of the core four races, a mix of two (Terledrom, Fromeltar with a D/V designation for dralasites and vrusk) or an asterisk (“*”) meaning relatively equal mix of all species. The population codes were either outpost, low, medium, or high.

To determine the relative number of each species on each planet I used the following formula. First, an outpost was given a value of 1, low population given a value of 3, medium population a value of 5, and high population a a value of 8. Next, if a species was not listed as a dominant population on a world, it just received the value above. If it was the dominant population, I multiplied that value by three. For the systems marked with an asterisk, I gave all the species the x3 multiplier. Since these planets are the core planets of the Frontier, typically with high populations, this just helps to concentrate the population density there.

For example, Inner Reach, Dramune, is listed as a medium population and the dominant species as Dralasites. So for this world, humans, yazirians, and vrusk all receive 5 points while dralasites receive 15.

This was done for each planet in the Frontier which gave me a large table that listed points for each race on each planet.

Calculating the Table Percentages

Next I tallied up the points for each race. Depending on the species, those totals ranged from 190 to 226. Using those values I scaled the points for each species so that the total came to 100. This effectively gave me the percentage of each species that came from each planet. Some of these, especially on the outpost worlds, end up with percentages less than 1 but given my assumptions, those all get rounded up to 1%.

After that, it was just a matter of tallying up the percentages to make the table. I built a cumulative table first by just adding up the percentages. Due to the small fractional percentages of the low probability planets, this resulted in some planets having the same value.

To fix this, I fixed some of the percentages to 1. This in turn, pushed the totals above 100 for some of the species. To fix that, I then adjusted the percentages down on a few of the worlds based on physical characteristics and game lore.

I started by reducing the percentage of non-yazirian races on Hentz to one. This reflects (as mentioned above) the fact that that world is very rigidly controlled by the yazirian Family of One and non-yazirians are practically, if not in fact, second-class citizens. Next I reduced the percentages of yazirians on high gravity worlds. This is based on the idea that those worlds are less desirable to yazirians because their gliding ability is greatly diminished on these worlds and so the populations would be smaller. For the vrusk, I set the percentage on Kdikit (Madderly’s Star) to one to reflect the expulsion of the vrusk after the Freeworld Rebellion. Finally, I reduced the percentage of non-yaziran races on the worlds in the Scree Fron system because it is far from the core of the Frontier and deep in yazirian space.

After making these changes, and a few other small tweaks, I ended up with the results presented in the table above.

Thoughts and Discussion

This is definitely a first draft. It will probably get tweaked a bit as I flesh out the lore of the worlds a bit more. I may change the relative populations of the the various species as well as the overall population numbers for any given world (i.e not making all medium populations a value of 5 or every high population world a value of 8) That said, this is definitely usable to get a rough idea of where any given member of each species is from. Future versions will also include the Zeb’s Guide systems as well as generate tables for the Rim races, at the very least.

One thing that this doesn’t do is show the relative percentages of each species on any given planet. Since I renormalized the values for each race, that changed the relative percentages of the races on any given planet. As I refine those relative values a bit more, they will get reflected into the raw data used. I may start presenting that information in separate posts on each world.

What are your thoughts on the table? What other information would you like to see? What is missing? What would you do differently? Let me know in the comments below. And be sure to head over to the Random Encounter Tables post to check out the other posts in this month’s RPG Blog Carnival.

January 28, 2020 Tom 1 Comment

Your Final Destination – Exiting a Void Jump – November Blog Carnival – part 2

This post originally appeared on the now-defunct Arcane Game Lore blog.

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My last post on Void Sickness along with reading Mike Bourke’s second portal article (I’m still a week behind but I’m catching up!), got me thinking about another aspect of Void travel that I like to use but which I don’t see talked that much about: where you come out on the other end.  And since I’m approaching it as something you can’t completely control, the exact location is somewhat unpredictable and can have unexpected results.  So this will be another entry into the November RPG Blog Carnival.  Enjoy.

Never the Same Place Twice

Last time I played with the Disruption parameter.  This time I want to talk about Repeatability.  When I was defining void travel in the previous post, I stated that the repeatability was “vague” which was defined as “A new Portal from the same origin may be directable to some point near where the old one was” in the original portal article that sparked my first post.  In his second article, he added, “but the exact same destination is unreachable” to the end of that when he summarized the detailed definitions.  In that second post I liked the definition he gave for “unpredictable” which was “A new Portal from the same origin will connect with another point completely at random, uncontrollably, within the destination plane of existence, perhaps restricted to a significant region.”

My idea of void travel falls somewhere between those two.  It’s not that reaching the exact same location is impossible, it’s just very unlikely.  You’ll always end up close (on a cosmic scale) unless you make a major mistake but probably not in the same location.  And in truth the chances of actually starting in the same place are slim to none as well depending on your definitions of location and the scale of what constitutes the “same origin” (Are you measuring in meters, kilometers, or AU?).  Given the two summarized definitions I’m actually leaning a little more toward unpredictable but both work.  The point is, the place you come out is always going to be different.  Let’s look at that and what it may mean for your game.

Non-repeatability

So why is it not possible to come out in the same spot?  From my perspective this comes down to two factors that related to how I treat void travel.  In my interpretation of how void travel works, whatever vector you have in the real universe when you enter the void is the vector you maintain in the void.  You can’t change your direction and you move in a “straight” line.  Which means you need to be lined up exactly right or you’re going to go way off course.

Stay on Target

Just how exactly do you need to be lined up?  Let’s look at a couple of examples.  Take a piece of paper.  Draw a small dot on it no larger than half a millimeter.  Now hold that up at arm’s length.  See how big that dot is?  Depending on the size of your dot and the length of your arm, that dot covers an angle of about 2-3 arc minutes.  If your direction vector were off by that much, how far off would you be at your destination?

I’m going to be generous and assume you drew a small dot and have a long arm and go with the 2 arc minute number.  Assuming you make a small void jump, say 4.3 light years, the distance to the nearest solar type star, Alpha Centauri, you’d be off target by only 5.5 billion kilometers.  Space is big, that’s not too bad, right?  Well, that’s about 36.7 Astronomical Units (the distance between the Earth and the Sun).  Which means if you were shooting for Earth, you’d be out by Pluto.  Depending on how fast your ship is, that may take a while to compensate for.

But an error of 2 arc minutes is pretty big.  We can do better than that.  Let’s say we can get our error down to the size of an arc second (1 degree = 60 arc minutes = 3600 arc seconds).  That’s equivalent to putting your dot about 24 feet (7.2m) away.  If we do that and make the same jump to Alpha Centauri, we’d still be off by about 46 million kilometers or 0.3 AU, roughly the distance between the Earth and Venus at closest approach.  (By the way, an error of 1 arc second means your ship moved laterally 4.8 mm after traveling 1 kilometer).  And if you make a jump twice as far, the error will be twice as large as it is really just the direction error (in radians) multiplied by the distance traveled.  Double the distance, double the offset.

Just based on that, you can see that you’re probably not going to come out at the same place at your destination no matter how hard you try.  Getting your vector to that accuracy is going to take some effort.  But there is another effect, the time spent in the void.

How Good is Your Clock?

The other aspect of determining your position is how long you spend in the void and how far you travel in a given amount of time.  If there are errors in your time keeping, this will translate into errors in the distance traveled.

Let’s use the example I gave in my earlier post: void travel occurs at the rate of one light year per second.  Now, a light year is 9.4607×1012 km.  That means that an error of a millisecond equal a distance of 9.4607×109 km (63 AU, roughly twice the distance to Neptune).  A microsecond error reduced that by a factor of 1000 and an error of only a nanosecond reduces that by another factor of 1000 or down to an error of only 9460.7 km, less than the diameter of the Earth.

Modern computers can get to about a 10 nanosecond resolution which means an accuracy of about 95,000 km roughly 1/4 the distance to the moon.  Depending on the technology you allow in your setting (and what you allow to work in the void), the accuracy could be better or worse than this.  But even with a microsecond error, the distance you’ll be off is only 0.063 AU.

So while there is an effect, and you probably won’t end up in the same spot, it is much less than the effect you can expect from an error in the velocity vector.  Depending on the story you’re trying to tell, that may or may not be negligible.

Impact on Your Game

We’ve seen what the scale of the effect is, what impact does that have on your game?  While the details will depend on you exact setting, here are three ideas off the top of my head.

Travel times

Given the natural variation in arrival locations, you are typically going to be off target which means the actual travel time to the destination is going to vary.  It will no longer be “three days” but “three to four days”.  You can’t really plan on exact time tables.

To put some numbers to that, assume you were off by the 0.3AU distance from earlier.  Assuming your ship is traveling at 1% the speed of light (3,000 km/s, just under 11 million km per hour), it will take you about 4.25 hours to cover that extra distance.  If you’re off by more or going slower, it will take even longer (and that’s ignoring a bunch of real world physics about changing direction and such which will only add to the time).

This means that you have to plan for and account for the extra time and it may add tension to a situation.  We only have 100 hours to reach the destination and stop the “big event”.  The jump and associated travel time takes 80+2d10 hours to just get to the location where the big event will happen.  Do the characters arrive with hours to spare or are they landing with only minutes until they have to spring into action?  What impacts will this have on their preparations? Will it limit what they can do or bring to bear in the situation?

Space Piracy

Again ignoring real world physics of matching velocities in space, the result of non-repeatability of void jumps means you’re probably not going to have space pirates lurking in the outer system for ships to appear and then pounce on them.  Even if you had hundreds of ships entering a system every day, the odds of one appearing near where a pirate vessel was lurking is really, really small.  The pirate ship could sit out there for years and never have an encounter.  This means that piracy, if it occurs, will happen near the population centers, at remote, fixed outposts, or on the outbound leg of a journey before the void jump when the routes are much more predictable.

Arriving in Formation

Remember this scene from Return of the Jedi? (0:43-1:04 is the relevant part if you don’t want to watch the whole thing).

That just isn’t going to happen with void jumping.  Even assuming that you can get the velocity vector the same for all the ships, which might be hard but could be possible (although not with everyone dodging in and out among each other like the fighters in the beginning of that clip) the timing variations between the ship computers will scatter everyone across tens of thousands of kilometers of space.  You will need time to regroup.  Which means you probably want to appear further out in the system to allow yourself that time which in turns means longer travel to your destination and a greater chance for discovery.

Or if you do allow for piracy to occur in the outer reaches of the system,  merchants and their escorts may be separated on arrival.  The convoy scattered across space.  Can the escorts get back to their charges before the pirates attack or do they only arrive in time to extract revenge for damage done?

Void Travel is Unpredictable

From the above thoughts, it’s fairly obvious that this method of FTL travel has the potential to add some randomness and unpredictability into your game.  Whether to add tension or just flavor, there is no real reason that void travel should be routine.  Are there other ideas for impacts that come to mind because of the unpredictability?  Let us know in the comments below.


Comments

Mike Bourke – November 24, 2015 at 11:28 am

There’s an obvious solution: the very short void jump. You arrive and find yourself 30 AU away from where you want to be? Jump for long enough to travel 29 AU. This distance is short enough that the final error will be relatively small.

Now, I happen to think that this tactic, while eminently sensible, is not as desirable as the additional flavor that the randomness gives. That leads me to suggesting that in order to make a jump, a ship has to utilize a minimum amount of power or more, which in turn means that there is a minimum jump distance.

This wouldn’t completely eliminate the viability of the tactic; it would mean that the most practical approach is to aim for a point half your anticipated error away from whatever the minimum jump distance is. For convenience, let’s say that your maximum error is 10AU per light year, and you are jumping 20 light-years, and that the minimum jump is 150 AU:

10 AU x 20 light years is 200 AU maximum error. Half that is 100 AU, so that’s the mean error that you will experience. But that leaves you too close to make the minimum jump, so you move that destination point out by the minimum, and aim to arrive 250 AU away. That means that your range of arrival points is 250±100 AU – so even if you get as close to your ultimate destination as possible, you are still a minimum jump away, and might be as much as 350AU.

The thing is that picking just any point that far away is not good enough; you would need some standard navigational reference points from which to get your precise distance for the second jump. Observations would take time, and without standard references, you might have to wait for weeks, months, or years for the objects you are measuring (presumably outer planets) to have moved enough to permit navigation.

And standard reference points for a jump means that your arrival point is a much smaller volume of space – making piracy possible after all. Not easy, but not entirely out of the question, either.

Mike Bourke – November 24, 2015 at 6:58 pm

Alternately, maybe a ship develops some sort of energy “charge” that simply delays making another jump for a period of time. That would prevent the “stop short and recalibrate” dodge – if there’s a deadline involved.

Tom – November 24, 2015 at 9:26 pm

Yes, both of those are possible implications as well. I like the minimum power required idea. I didn’t include it here but I also utilize limit on gravity wells. Kind of like Larry Niven’s hyperspace. You can’t get too close to a large mass and still have your void jump system work. This actually counter acts some of the implications depending on how you implement it. I think that will be another void jumping article at some point.

November 24, 2015 Tom 2 Comments

Void Travel Sickness – November RPG Blog Carnival

This post originally appeared on the now-defunct Arcane Game Lore blog.

Update: I hadn’t intended for this post to be part of the November RPG blog carnival, the topic of which is “The Unexpected“, even though the timing of it was inspired by a blog carnival post. However, in discussions with Mike Bourke, the host of this month’s blog carnival topic, he felt that it would be fine for inclusion. His argument was that since the degree to which (and even if) you are affected is unknown each time you travel, it fell within the realm of the topic. If the guy running the show agrees, who am I to argue? So this is now my entry into the November RPG blog carnival. Thanks for the encouragement, Mike.

In most sci-fi games, we typically take interstellar faster than light travel for granted with no individual consequences.  What if that wasn’t true?

This is actually something I’ve thought about off and on for the past few years.  It even makes a subtle appearance in my book, Discovery.  I was reading an article, The Unexpected Neighbor: Portals to Celestial Morphology 1/4, on Campaign Mastery and the discussion about disruption triggered me to think about my Void Travel Sickness mechanic once again.  I thought I’d write it up.

Defining Void Travel

First we need to start off with what Void travel actually is.  Basically it is a way of quickly traversing vast interstellar distances nearly instantaneously by traveling through another dimension (the Void). The ship plots/calculates a “Void jump” and then somehow engages the physics of the universe to move from real space to the Void, travel a bit in the Void where distance is greatly compressed relative to real space, and then shift back to real space at the destination.  Since distances in the Void are so compressed (or is it time?), a short trip in the Void corresponds to a long trip in the real universe.

The is the type of interstellar travel used in Star Frontiers (at least in the Knight Hawks ship expansion), basically stating that when traveling at 1% the speed of light (the mechanism to invoke the physics), one second travel in the Void, moves you 1 light year in the real universe.

In terms of the parameters Mike defines in his article, these Void jumps can be considered mono-directional, temporary, immense, stable (relative to the ship), safe, and vague (relative to the endpoint location) portals.  I want to play with that safe part.

What happens to the participants during that brief time spend in the void is up to the GM or the designer of the game system.  In my book, I described it thus:

Everything on-board the ship went crazy.  Colors seemed to invert.  Any displays that had previously showed empty space outside the ship just seemed to just vanish.  Sounds were distorted.  The sense of touch just disappeared.  It felt as if they were being pulled into their seats and weightless at the same time and everyone felt a strong case of dizziness, as if you had been spinning incredibly fast and then just stopped, and had to walk a straight line but couldn’t.

“What’s going on?” Allison asked, looking around a little wildly.  Her voice sounded muffled, as if speaking under water.

“I don’t know,” Alex replied his voice also distorted.  “You’re the expert on …”  And then the effect was gone.  “the jump process,” he finished.  The strange effect was gone but it was replaced by alarms and sirens going off throughout the ship.

“That was weird,” he added almost to himself.  While the strange effect was gone, Alex still felt a bit nauseous but it was passing quickly.  Looking at Allison, the slight greenish cast to her complexion indicated that she felt it as well.

but it really could be anything you want.

Void Travel Sickness

What if the effects of Void travel weren’t just brief and temporary disorientation and nausea but could be something more serious?  How do you decide if you’re susceptible?  Is it a binary option, i.e. you either get sick every time or not at all?  Does it get progressively worse? Can you prevent it?  This are all things to think about.  I’m not going to answer all of those questions in this particular article as some of them depend on the game system itself and I’m just going to cover general principles.  The ones I miss I’ll revisit at a later date when I implement a final version of the system in my Designing Out Loud series.

For my version of this, everyone is potentially susceptible and no one is completely immune.  However, even if you are susceptible, it doesn’t mean you experience the effects every time and just because you aren’t susceptible, it doesn’t mean you won’t occasionally be caught by it.  You might go for several jumps without any ill effects, and then be floored by the next one.  And I want it to be a progressive condition, meaning that as time goes on and you make more jumps, you become more susceptible, no matter where you start on the susceptibility spectrum.  So let’s start looking at details

Susceptibility

Not everyone succumbs to void sickness as easily as others.  Some people just seem to be immune to it while others get hit every time they make a jump.  Each character should have a susceptibility score that represents the probability that they will succumb to void sickness on any give jump.  Because I want this to be fairly fine grained and want the increase in susceptibility to be very gradual, this roll should be percentile (d100) based and the susceptibility score should range from 1-100.

The easiest way to initially determine susceptibility would be to make some sort of constitution or stamina check the very first time you make an interstellar jump.  For characters in a sci-fi campaign, where you can assume they have made jumps in the past before adventuring, you could make the check as part of character generation.  Passing or failing this first check indicates whether you tend to be immune or susceptible to getting void sickness and you can then determine your starting susceptibility score.

You start by determining your base score.  In a d100 system, like the one I’m designing or Star Frontiers, your base score is simply your constitution characteristic, in this case Stamina.  If you’re using this in a d20 or 3d6 characteristic system, you’d want to multiply that characteristic by five first. to put it on the same scale.  If your game of choice uses some other scale for ability scores, multiply by the appropriate factor to get the value on a scale of 1-100. (i.e. a 2d6 game would multiply by 8).

To this base chance you simply add your “first jump modifier”.  If you passed that first check, give the character a +20 to their susceptibility score.  They are fairly immune.  If you failed, give the character a -20.  They tend to suffer from void sickness more often. This becomes your character’s susceptibility score for the game.

Increased Susceptibility

I also want the chance to succumb to increase the more jumps you make but not very quickly.  (This is why starship captains are all young an dashing and admirals are all old, stay home, and only travel grudgingly :-) ).

The mechanic for this is straightforward.  If you fail a susceptibility check, your score drops by one.  If you pass, nothing happens.  This is why I wanted the check to be percentile based, so that the change is small on any single failure.  If it was d20 based (or something similar), a single point change is a big effect.

This mechanic has a couple of impacts.  First, those with high scores (i.e. immune) will often pass their checks and have little change in their score.  Those that are susceptible, however, will deteriorate much quicker as they fail more often.  Also, as time goes on, the rate of deterioration increases as they fail more often, regardless of where they started.  This was intentional as I wanted the overall effect to be that there will come a point that you decide that you’re done with interstellar travel or willing to accept that every jump will be a miserable experience.  However, I didn’t want that to come too quickly.

If fact, for player characters, instead of rolling, I’d probably declare that they are all void sickness “immune” and just start their susceptibility score at STA+20.  To goal is to have it be an occasional but real concern to add some suspense and drama but not really debilitating (at least to start).

On Any Given Jump

To see if you suffer the effects of void sickness, simply roll d100 against your susceptibility score with a 100 always being a failure regardless of the susceptibility score.  Success means a brief moment of disorientation/nausea/whatever the minor effects (if any) are.  Failure means more debilitating effects.  This is going to be system dependent.  However, there is the question of scale.

One option is to just make it a binary solution.  Success = no effect, failure = some fixed effect.  In this case the magnitude of the effect is independent of the degree of failure.  Everyone who fails suffers the same effects.

A second option is to have the effects be dependent on further die rolls.  Maybe the effect has a variable time frame (i.e. -10% on all skill checks for 1d10 hours) or varying severity (i.e. -1d6*5% to all skills for an hour) or both (-3d10% from all skill/ability checks for 1d6 hours).  Or it could be anything that the system designers/GMs want to implement.

The final option would be to have the effects dependent on the degree of failure with the difference between the roll and the susceptibility score determining the magnitude of the effect.  Thus you could fail by just a little on only suffer minor effects or fail spectacularly and be down for a while.

The first and second option are good if you want those with high susceptibilities to potentially suffer serious effects when they do happen to fail while the third one plays into the idea that those with strong resistances don’t suffer too badly while those that suffer chronically suffer extremely.  It just depends on the flavor you want.

Prevention and Treatment

I’m not going to cover this topic in this particular post as it really depends on the game setting and what the GM desires (if adding this to an existing system).  Maybe there are medicines or techniques that can boost your immunity.  There are most likely medicines that can be used to counteract the negative effects.  What they are will depend on the game.

A Work in Progress

This is obviously a first pass at the design.  As I test it out and look at it more closely there will probably be other refinements and details I’ll make.  What do you think?  Have you ever implemented a void (portal passage) sickness in your game?  What worked and what didn’t? What would you add or change to what I described?  Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

November 17, 2015 Tom 3 Comments

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