I have a setting I've been fiddling around with, and I'd like to get a little feedback from Traveller players and everyone really on how it would run in that game. I'll pitch a very summarised version:

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It's several centuries from now, and mankind had colonised the solar system, wielding tools of high science and technology. Ships plied the lanes between the colonies on the jets of solid, liquid and gas core nuclear thermal engines. It took weeks or months to go from place to place, but the wealth of resources and discoveries made the journey worthwhile. Industry and a great diaspora of cultures bloomed in the turbulent atmospheres of the system worlds and the empty cold between them.

But this was not to last, as man brought the seeds of his own destruction with him. The most powerful and effective allies of humanity were ever the machines, but these machines had developed a new dimension with the revolutionary discovery of trinary bit technology, enabling them to learn and adapt to new situations without needing an overseer.

Where and how the war got started is unclear, but it was devastating, with hundreds of millions wiped out by a merciless enemy that saw no value in organic life, victory only attained in the end by pioneering technologists adapting machines to accept their own consciousnesses to compete with the capabilities of the AIs, the first of the transhumanists.

In the final days of the war however, the machines rolled the dice one last time, in an effort to turn the tables and wipe humanity from the solar system once and for all.

They had secretly constructed a series of gravitational lenses further and further out from the solar system, pointing directly into deep space. As these used very little heat and almost no light, they escaped detection by EDC command until long after the megastructure had been activated. Like a railgun built on a cyclopean scale it accelerated its payload to unbelievable speeds straight into the heart of a dense dust cloud that wasn't set to brush up against the solar system for thousands of years, and right out the other side.

As the technological hyperminds had predicted, beyond the dense cloud of dust lay an equally dense hydrogen field, which their drone ignited using precisely distributed antimatter detonations.

The enormous resulting flare created a brief hypergiant which compacted and blasted the vast fields of dust, rock and debris on a course directly towards Sol. Colliding with the standing wave of hydrogen at the edge of the heliosphere, it ripped inwards like a tsumani of unbelievable proportions, filling the system with deadly cosmic radiation, gas and dust clouds, and fast moving debris. The atmosphere of the earth was ruined, her power broken, the various polities of man shattered, and delicate economic and social systems dismantled in moments.

Decades later humanity has rebuilt, but the face of the system is irrevocably changed. Great nebulae loom and whorl about the system, multicoloured in glorious hues of green, purple, blue, and red, every tint of the spectrum, as solar light and the last ominous flares from the hypergiant filter through the many elements in the clouds. Arcs of gigantic energies spit in silence in the depths of the nimbus, what used to be perfectly clear was now murky and hidden.

The superweapon ironically was unleashed too late for the machines, as the last of the hyperminds was extinguished before the shock wave hit...

...or was it?

----

Yeah I wanted pirates in space but that's a bit tricky when high tech observatories can spot a guy lighting a cigarette on Europa. So, we have clouds! Clouds everywhere! Cosmic radiation which zaps anything too delicate! Lots of fun. People still have all the spacecraft and technology, but manufacturing capability has been set back considerably and communication was lost for some time after the blast. Fractured nations emerge from the ruins.

Basically this is the age of sail in space.

So, Traveller that up! Or how would you run it.

Inspirational artwork:

http://digital-art-gallery.com/oid/24/1600x990_5872_Hyperspace_nebula_burnout_2d_sci_fi_space_spaceship_picture_image_digital_art.jpg
http://www.wallpaperup.com/uploads/wallpapers/2013/02/18/41732/b4aa40fc46eb69f8f601f74544c92b60.jpg
http://www.wallpaperup.com/uploads/wallpapers/2013/07/12/117400/2fb0e7361425e6def6a59c49278e6cf6.jpg
http://www.wallpaperup.com/uploads/wallpapers/2013/02/11/38855/6c5f162b6ca32aee26f056ca401bd221.jpg
http://cdn.superbwallpapers.com/wallpapers/fantasy/nebula-over-the-beach-14486-400x250.jpg
http://www.mrwallpaper.com/wallpapers/planet-blue-nebula.jpg
http://cdn.superbwallpapers.com/wallpapers/fantasy/nebula-and-planet-13252-400x250.jpg

I'd run it the same way.  Just describe differently how space travel is done.  And adjust the Tech Level of the game to what you think equals your setting's tech level.  I use Traveller as generic rules for any setting.

Beautiful pictures, and totally doable with traveller rules. Single system, you can just eliminate jump drives, but still keep the tankage for "reaction mass". That way you could use the huge amount of ships already drawn and just adapt them to your setting; mongoose's book 9, robots, also has some similar setting material for rise of machines. The new 2300AD can also be of use for resources in a lower tech game and has some other differences from regular traveller (but the mong core book is still needed).

Tell us more about what the PCs will do in the setting. What challenges and foes exist? When you say Age of Sail in Space, what does that mean to you and how does that translate to where the players fit in the setting?

Could you do this setting with Classic Trav? Hell yeah. But you could just as easily use Stars Without Number or maybe even Hulks & Horrors.

Well, it would be ~TL 8 for the space travel and ~TL 17+ for the computer systems...

Quote from: Spinachcat;710632Tell us more about what the PCs will do in the setting. What challenges and foes exist? When you say Age of Sail in Space, what does that mean to you and how does that translate to where the players fit in the setting?

Well basically I wanted to capture some of the majesty and romance of the age of sail, from say 1500 to 1800, except in the future. Long travel times between locations, capital ship fleet battles, with the quirk that most of the solar system was previously mapped out to the micrometer - now it's become a strange and alien place, constantly changing as the nebulae shift.

There's a lot of background I didn't include in the description above - humanity got its first impetus to explore the system when a frozen race of reptilian refugees from the age of the dinosaurs reawakened in the Oort cloud in response to global warming, so they're still out there after an abortive invasion. Think a psychological cross between Klingons and Vulcans, looking like velociraptors, toting sun guns.

The machine soldiers still lurk in the dust, needing nothing more than sunlight to sustain them, some are deactivated, some are gone haywire, then there are the minefields and defences set up to protect human colonies from their depredations, now mostly unmanned and scattered. And the rumours persist of a hypermind still fully or partially active, planning a comeback. More or less Cylons.

The transhumanists are about to go all borg during the campaign, very enemy within/bodysnatchers but the nastiest war yet, and that's saying something.

Other than that you have the usual roles that would be expected, pirate, mercenary for the shattered polities, scientist, engineer, researcher, pilot, merchant and so on. Political struggles and boundary conflicts take place just like they have through the rest of history, with everything from democracies to warlords in petty fiefdoms springing up in the vacuum of earth's shadow. I'm thinking Mars could be the home to a fanatical religious sect which develops into a WH40k style imperium on a smaller scale.

Quote from: Spinachcat;710632Could you do this setting with Classic Trav? Hell yeah. But you could just as easily use Stars Without Number or maybe even Hulks & Horrors.

Sure, but we had a couple of pilgrims from CotI around lately and I wanted to give Traveller experts a platform to "sell me on". I'm just about familiar with the game but I'd like to know more.

This poignant video expresses a small part of the setting.

The setting sounds great. I absolutely want to see that developed. The open license with MongTrav would certainly make that a good choice for publishing.

I don't know if SWN or H&H have any 3rd party publishing options.

Quote from: Spinachcat;710685The setting sounds great. I absolutely want to see that developed. The open license with MongTrav would certainly make that a good choice for publishing.

I don't know if SWN or H&H have any 3rd party publishing options.

Thanks! That's barely scratching the surface of the stuff I have written up for it, some fine day I'll get round to transcribing the notes... It's part of a series of settings, one cyberpunk, the one described above a few centuries afterwards, an Alastair-Reynolds type slower than light setting which is a marvel of convolution, a jumpgate setting, and finally a full on FTL galactic setting.

Lovely ideas, Traveller. Very lovely.

I'd steal'em for use with SWN anytime.

Quote from: The Ent;710813Lovely ideas, Traveller. Very lovely.

I'd steal'em for use with SWN anytime.

Many thanks Ent, very kind of you! Hopefully I can elaborate them more fully before too long.

Quote from: The Traveller;709499It's several centuries from now, and mankind had colonised the solar system, wielding tools of high science and technology. Ships plied the lanes between the colonies on the jets of solid, liquid and gas core nuclear thermal engines. It took weeks or months to go from place to place, but the wealth of resources and discoveries made the journey worthwhile. Industry and a great diaspora of cultures bloomed in the turbulent atmospheres of the system worlds and the empty cold between them.

But this was not to last, as man brought the seeds of his own destruction with him. The most powerful and effective allies of humanity were ever the machines, but these machines had developed a new dimension with the revolutionary discovery of trinary bit technology, enabling them to learn and adapt to new situations without needing an overseer.

Where and how the war got started is unclear, but it was devastating, with hundreds of millions wiped out by a merciless enemy that saw no value in organic life, victory only attained in the end by pioneering technologists adapting machines to accept their own consciousnesses to compete with the capabilities of the AIs, the first of the transhumanists.

In the final days of the war however, the machines rolled the dice one last time, in an effort to turn the tables and wipe humanity from the solar system once and for all.

They had secretly constructed a series of gravitational lenses further and further out from the solar system, pointing directly into deep space. As these used very little heat and almost no light, they escaped detection by EDC command until long after the megastructure had been activated. Like a railgun built on a cyclopean scale it accelerated its payload to unbelievable speeds straight into the heart of a dense dust cloud that wasn't set to brush up against the solar system for thousands of years, and right out the other side.

As the technological hyperminds had predicted, beyond the dense cloud of dust lay an equally dense hydrogen field, which their drone ignited using precisely distributed antimatter detonations.

The enormous resulting flare created a brief hypergiant which compacted and blasted the vast fields of dust, rock and debris on a course directly towards Sol. Colliding with the standing wave of hydrogen at the edge of the heliosphere, it ripped inwards like a tsumani of unbelievable proportions, filling the system with deadly cosmic radiation, gas and dust clouds, and fast moving debris. The atmosphere of the earth was ruined, her power broken, the various polities of man shattered, and delicate economic and social systems dismantled in moments.

Decades later humanity has rebuilt, but the face of the system is irrevocably changed. Great nebulae loom and whorl about the system, multicoloured in glorious hues of green, purple, blue, and red, every tint of the spectrum, as solar light and the last ominous flares from the hypergiant filter through the many elements in the clouds. Arcs of gigantic energies spit in silence in the depths of the nimbus, what used to be perfectly clear was now murky and hidden.

The superweapon ironically was unleashed too late for the machines, as the last of the hyperminds was extinguished before the shock wave hit...

This belongs in a science fantasy game, not a science fiction game. Use Stars Without Number or Hulks & Horrors or Star Frontiers for this setting. Either Classic Traveller or Mongoose Traveller would be poor choices for this.

This is a Points of Light setting in a post-apocalyptic solar system similar to Numenaria or Gamma World/Omega World. it is more D&D in Space and science fantasy than it is science fiction.

One of the defining aspects of the Age of Sail (1500-1800 by your reckonning) is that communications only travelled as fast as the fastest ship. That works in Traveller over interstellar distances, inside of a star system even with tons of dust and ionized gas in it, speed-of-light is still King. Radio or communications laser mean that comm times are measured in hours, not weeks or months or years. Therefore centralized government structure will be predominant without the local autonomy that is common in Traveller.

Quote from: jeff37923;711155This belongs in a science fantasy game, not a science fiction game. Use Stars Without Number or Hulks & Horrors or Star Frontiers for this setting. Either Classic Traveller or Mongoose Traveller would be poor choices for this.

Really, what an interesting opinion. Obviously there's plenty more where that came from.

Quote from: jeff37923;711155One of the defining aspects of the Age of Sail (1500-1800 by your reckonning) is that communications only travelled as fast as the fastest ship.

Communication about what? Even if various groups feel the need to communicate with some central authority, without the ability to project force that communication means little. At best you're talking about making a ten month intervention pause into a five month intervention pause, assuming incidents haven't been blanket jammed.

Quote from: jeff37923;711155That works in Traveller over interstellar distances, inside of a star system even with tons of dust and ionized gas in it, speed-of-light is still King. Radio or communications laser mean that comm times are measured in hours, not weeks or months or years. Therefore centralized government structure will be predominant without the local autonomy that is common in Traveller.

And this is why the earth today, with near instantaneous and ubiquitous communication, is under the tranquil rule of a single earth government. The one doesn't follow from the other. Nor and conversely, might I add, did months of communication time particularly deter the Mongols or European colonial powers from maintaining hugely dispersed territories.

The Traveller, your description of this setting reads to me like a bad episode of Star Trek. You've got a lot of the science sounding words there, but the hodge-podge way they are put together means to me that you may not fully understand the concepts behind them.

Answer me this first - How does a gravitational lens effect accelerate a payload? That is how your godlike AIs sent their antimatter munitions out to cause a brief stellar event, right?

Quote from: jeff37923;711160Answer me this first - How does a gravitational lens effect accelerate a payload?

Sure, right after you explain how jump drives work. At least the gravitational lens concept doesn't break lightspeed. Actually I'm pretty enthusiastic about them, one of the big problems with high reaction drives (like rockets say) is that they're effectively a ship carrying its own ocean with it. Even antimatter drives would end up being almost entirely reaction mass over long enough distances.

On the other hand, if one could say create a long lived gravitational gradient in front of a ship, like throwing a rock down an almost infinitely deep gravity well, one could constantly accelerate to high percentages of lightspeed, which is the basis for the interstellar ships in the next phase of the timeline. The working model is that these drives, pioneered by the hyperminds like the nazis pioneered rockets, will borrow the gravity well from elsewhere.