Today I posted about my Planescape-Spelljammer-Traveller mashup on Google+ and I was asked to say more about it.
Basically the players got hold of a Spelljammer ship to sail the astral sea. It was one of the classic ships: a Mindflayer Nautilus class called the Black Strangler. Basically the astral sea is what Planescape has as the sea at the bottom of Celestia. When I read about the astral plane, the big wheel and all that, I was confused and I figured the players would be as well. Instead I opted for something alike Marion Zimmer Bradley’s travel to Avalon: get on a boat, travel for a bit, use some magic and you can be elsewhere. I think the astral sea is how D&D 4E does it as well?
Anyway, so we have a “sea” and “islands” on it – or basically worlds, systems. It already starts to sound like a bit of Traveller. Many of them will have gates linking them with larger worlds – fantastic worlds inspired by Planescape: hells, elemental planes, alternative prime material worlds. A bit like Philip José Farmer’s World of Tiers, perhaps?
One world, for example, is non-magical except for the gate that leads to the astral sea. So they built a fortress in the astral sea and discovered that magic works on the other side. Now they use it like a space station or star port to manufacture mundane stuff that requires magic to be built.
All these small worlds, astroids and stations get an UWP and I feed it to my Traveller Subsector Mapper to produce a nice map. Check out the astral sea map and click on the systems to go to the campaign wiki pages.
I think my greatest inspirations from the web where the One Page Dungeon submission The Forgotten Depths by the author of The Metal Earth and the session reports on Planet Algol. Nevertheless my campaign took a while to evolve to this place. At first it was very traditional Wilderlands of High Fantasy. Then we explored the first few levels of Dismal Depth, the Fight On! megadungeon and a bit of Barrow Maze. And when a player character fell into an “infinite pit” and another player character threw himself after the first one (picture), I decided to push it to a new level.
Oh, and the Google+ post was me saying that I was working out the domain stats for the region using the rules from An Echo Resounding (interesting comparison of An Echo Resounding and Adventure Conqueror King). I hope my players aren’t overwhelmed by my sneaky introduction of these domain rules. I think the two key phrases I heard last session justifying this move were “I think we’ll keep Monkey Island as our base!” and “Can we benefit somehow from reopening the mine on Monkey Island?”
Since I’m apparently going to use my Spelljammer-Planescape-Traveller map for a while, I added a way to make map display even easier on Campaign Wiki pages.
Write “Traveller:” followed by the UWP like this:
Traveller: Tu Akhra 0404 D0602B3-1 P As De Lo Lt R Susrael 0503 B0604A4-1 N As De Lt NI A Nova Genova 0607 B867686-1 N Ag Ga Lt NI Ri Hinia Oot 0705 E060200-1 As De Lo Lt A Monkey Island 0308 E064105-0 Lo Lt
And the result will be this:
Klick to switch to the map. There, you can click on the systems to get the wiki pages.
I finally decided that the Astral Sea needed a map. One of the player characters decided to pursue his quest to revive Arden, the dead elven god. His corpse is being drained of its remaining life force by the sorcerer queen of the gray elves (Githyanki). His corpse is also drifting in the Astral Sea. A gate was found (a bottomless pit in the Barrowmaze), a ship was gained (pictured on the right), and now the party is sailing the Astral Sea Spelljammer style and finding places in the Planescape fashion. 
Anyway, I was wondering how many random encounters I should be rolling for any trips from A to B. I should draw a map, I thought. I remembered my Traveller Subsector Mapper. All I had to do was to generate an UWP for my locations.
Easy:
Tu Akhra 0404 D0602B3-1 P As De Lo Lt R Susrael 0503 B0604A4-1 N As De Lt NI A Nova Genova 0607 B867686-1 N Ag Ga Lt NI Ri Hinia Oot 0705 E060200-1 As De Lo Lt A
I basically ignored the requirement for an atmosphere of 0 to generate the asteroid trade code. All these worlds have breathable air. Plugging this into the mapper:
I’m running a biweekly Diaspora game in a Traveller Subsector. The party had just crash landed on a planet after being shot down by a gunship using space combat rules and made it to the base on a sort of social combat map with the opponents being earthquakes, a sea monster, and a patrol of aliens. Inside the base, they saw the overgrown and partly disassembled remnants of the ship that had brought the alien infection to the system and decided they were going to hook their diplomat-hacker up with the central nervous system running the base. I asked the table whether they felt like another map and combat but Harald reminded me of another technique I often use: Just go around in a circle and ask each of the players what they’ll do to help solve the problem.
Four players, four rolls. I said you need at least two successes. First attempt by Thomas at finding a quiet corner fails spectacularly. The aliens get spin. Second attempt by Florian at fighting the immune system of the mega-organism fails spectacularly. The aliens get spin. Third attempt by Harald at hooking up the hacker fails spectacularly. The aliens get spin. Whoa!! The last roll comes up and I ask for the stakes. What’s going to happen when Jörg fails? I say he’s going to be taken over and integrated into the base if he fails. He says “w00t!?” He doesn’t want to take the consequences for all the earlier failures. Harald volunteers to take a severe consequence that would change his result into a success – “infected by an alien mind”. Yay!! Jörg manages to reprogram the alien factory in order to make the resulting ship something they can use. Victory!
As the session was about to end, I give the diplomat-hacker the following choice:
They picked #3 – Alien 2 style. So proud. 
Bye bye Traveller category – our gaming group has decided to give Diaspora a try!
What happened?
Today we had three hours. First we discussed the state of the campaign and decided to switch to Diaspora. I printed out character sheets, skill reference sheet, personal combat sheet while Harald explained a bit about the rules. Then we converted our Traveller characters. It went pretty smoothly. The free form aspects are a real boon.
We assigned a system to each one of us, and said that we’d convert the UWP to the Diaspora stats on our Campaign:Kaylash subsector wiki. We’ll convert them as we go. Technology, Environment, Resources, and three aspects, that should not be too hard. We already have a map and a lot of info on some of the systems.
I don’t think we need a Diaspora cluster. Perhaps I’m missing something? The benefit of having small clusters might be a localized game suited for people that like to switch campaigns often? We’ve been playing our biweekly game for a year, now. I think we want to keep playing in this subsector and we want to keep exploring our characters for quite a bit more.
Wish us luck! 
Tags: RPG
Traveller
Diaspora
FATE 
Comments on 2010-07-14 From Traveller to Diaspora
Good luck!
I’ll be following this with interest - Diaspora is firmly on my To Do list!
– greywulf 2010-07-14 21:36 UTC
Well, I converted one character: CW:Kaylash/Bergofan Maia for Traveller → CW:Kaylash/Bergofan Maia.
– AlexSchroeder 2010-07-15 01:19 UTC
My SVG Mapper for Traveller got a bit better regarding communication routes (at least compared to last time).
It uses a two-step process:
I’m still working on the trade routes. At the moment it looks way too busy, so I’m trying to think of an elimination step that will get rid of some of them again. Anyway, I have some working code, but it needs some improvement before I’ll deploy.
I also fixed the spinward/trailing labels. I had them confused!
Note for the curious: If you check the link you’ll also find a source link at the bottom. It’s Free Software. Enjoy! 
Update: Trade routes now added!
Later: I suspect that there are still bugs in the system. It generates an unpopular trade route between Labeveri and Sogeeran, but as far as I can tell, there is no reason for it to exist. Must debug… Hm… Nope. Everything is as it should be. If you check the debug output (there’s a new checkbox) you’ll find that the system participates in other trade-routes as well:
Phew! 
Comments on 2010-05-20 Updated Traveller Mapping
(waves from travellermap.com)
For automated communication route generation I was pondering trying a minimal spanning tree.
– Joshua Bell 2010-05-24 05:01 UTC
… just remember that the maximum node length is 4, since XBoats have Jump-4 drives.
– Harald Wagener 2010-05-24 09:48 UTC
Traveller Map is the best! 
Thanks for the excellent suggestion! I’m still calculating the trade routes according to the rules:
I’m not quite sure whether I like the result, but it’s already good enough to be used, I think.
I can already see the next problems:

I announced it on Citizens of the Imperium.
I like the work you have done … I only found one small problem which was you limit the law code to 9 … when in theory it can rise higher than that.
Because the Law Level code is restricted, any worlds with Law higher than 9 just don’t appear on the map. I can see the Regex expression is 0-9 and could be changed to 0-9A-F
All of that aside I think you did a great job 
– Brennall 2010-05-31 19:50 UTC
Indeed, I looked at the tables on the Imperial Encyclopedia [3][4] and fixed both the UWP Generator and the SVG Mapper for Traveller.
– AlexSchroeder 2010-05-31 23:41 UTC
Alex, I was looking at the SVG you generate, and I noticed the special symbols you used for the Gas Giants etc. When I attempted to save the SVG locally and look at them in an editor it replaced the symbols with “?”. Obviously my editor defaulted to the wrong character set, but I am curious what character set you did use which had the emblems in?
– Brennall 2010-06-02 12:29 UTC
Its ok .. should have looked further in the extended UTF-8 Character set. Found them now.
– Brennall 2010-06-02 12:44 UTC
For future readers looking for help:
| ◉ | gas giant | 0x25C9 | FISHEYE |
| ■ | imperial consulate | 0x25A0 | BLACK SQUARE |
| ☼ | TAS | 0x263C | WHITE SUN WITH RAYS |
| ▲ | scout base | 0x25B2 | BLACK UP-POINTING TRIANGLE |
| ★ | navy base | 0x2605 | BLACK STAR |
| π | research base | 0x03C0 | GREEK SMALL LETTER PI |
| ☠ | pirate base | 0x2620 | SKULL AND CROSSBONES |
| ▮ | communication/trade | 0x25AE | BLACK VERTICAL RECTANGLE |
– AlexSchroeder 2010-06-02 13:06 UTC
Thanks Alex .. Very helpful
– Brennall 2010-06-02 13:36 UTC
I am curious Alex … have considered a method of saving the SVG output from the map ?
– Brennall 2010-06-04 13:41 UTC
Uh… What browser are you using? I just hit Ctrl+S and save the SVG file. And since I also have the option of printing to a file, producing a PDF is no problem either.
In fact, I sometimes update the UWP of my campaign, regenerate the SVG map, save it, and use Inkscape to add the spheres of influence we have. The result: http://campaignwiki.org/wiki/Kaylash/download/Karte.svg
At one point the party caused civil war in a system by dropping a tactical nuke on large part of a government. I then assigned a red zone to the system, which caused the major trade routes to shift. Result:
| before | after |
|---|---|
| note the spheres of influence | but I forgot them here, hehe |
– AlexSchroeder 2010-06-04 14:26 UTC
After some quick testing the following results
Interesting difference given Chrome and Safari both use Webkit.
I will have to switch over to Firefox from Chrome to get what I want!
I will also have to give Inkscape a try as I haven’t used it yet.
Cheers Alex.
– Brennall 2010-06-04 15:03 UTC
Yeah, I
Inkscape! 
I wasn’t aware that browser reactions varied so much. But then again, I was surprised when I learnt that Firefox was going to support SVG in the first place.
– AlexSchroeder 2010-06-04 22:57 UTC
Mark Merrell Great work! I love this program.
A few quick questions though…
1) I’m importing my own UWP codes so that I can make my own sub-sector but I can’t seem to get the Amber or Red Zones to show up on my map. I can see them when I do a randomly generated map, but just not my own.
Here is an example of my UWP code: Darkgate 0810 X563401-B Ni G R 124 Ukn
It shows the: Gas Giant, Research Lab,X Spaceport and name (Darkgate) but no red circle. Name
2) What UWP code do I use for asteroid belts (to see the circle in the hex)?
– Mark Merrell 2011-08-03 01:28 UTC
Mark Merrell Nevermind, I figured it out. I had extraneous info in my UWP line.
Also, figured out the grey circle is in fact the amber zone.
I learned something today!
Again, thanks for the program!
– Mark Merrell 2011-08-03 01:35 UTC
AlexSchroeder Heh, excellent. No idea regarding the asteroid belts – those didn’t show up in my Mongoose Traveller book. 
– AlexSchroeder 2011-08-03 08:26 UTC
I’m spending about an hour after each Traveller session (itself usually 2½h) updating our Kaylash campaign wiki with notes on money made for trading, money spent for repairs, maintenance, salaries, etc. It’s a lot of bureaucracy. [1]
Unlike D&D 3+ where players can spend a lot of time away from the table thinking about their character and tweaking it, Traveller seems to be the game where players can spend a lot of time away from the table thinking about their ship’s finances.
I’m not sure I like it. Right now we’ve been rotating game masters, so I’ve been recharging my creative energies, but once I return to running games, I might not feel like updating the site. My players don’t seem too interested in it, and yet the rules afford spending a lot of time on it – just like D&D 3+ rules encourage players to spend time tweaking their characters.
You’re not required to do it, but the rules invite you to do it.
Comments on 2010-05-12 Traveller Bureaucracy
I think your ship needs an expensive malfunction…
– BeRKA 2010-05-13 06:34 UTC
The ship just had an expensive malfunction with a couple botched impromptu repair attempts.
Alex, when you take over as GM, I’ll be happy to have a look at the finance side again.
– Harald 2010-05-13 12:31 UTC
Tim’s Give them a ship suggests that finding an excuse to give the party a ship with no mortage payments to be made would free the party to more adventurous stuff.
– AlexSchroeder 2010-06-08 15:51 UTC
Last time I said I was going to improve the Traveller Subsector Mapper I had written to show communication lines. Well, now it does. But I’m still not happy. My unhappiness just moved on.
I’m now looking at some sort of algorithm that will “simplify” the network. Take a look at the sample subsector. I’d like this algorithm to delete the connection between Bemaat and Atcevein and the connection between Esgeed and Maxereis. Those I think should be obvious. Less obvious would be to delete the connection between Diare and Esgeed and between Atcevein and Esgeed.
I’m still struggling, however. What should the exact elimination rules be?
This would make the following changes:
Or I could try something else.
Hm, I don’t think this is going to work.
Comments on 2010-03-12 Traveller Communication Lines
I’m just going to say I so wished your Traveller mapping apps (and similar technology) had been available way back in the day when I first scored my Trav LLBs. You know - instead of plinking around with the TRS-80.
– Brian 2010-03-14 16:06 UTC
Thanks! Isn’t it ironic that I bought Traveller and started writing the mapping app because of the Mongoose Traveller review on 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction? 
– AlexSchroeder 2010-03-15 15:23 UTC
I have this (Mongoose?) Traveller Subsector Mapper. I started thinking that maybe I should start looking at automatically drawing communications and trade routes. I started writing some code that calculates the distance between two hexes. And I started wasting hours. Whoa, big time code failure on my part!
There was something about |Δx| div 2 + |Δy| and all that stuff, but there was always some case in which it wouldn’t work. I googled many times, but finally I found what I needed to know in a rec.games.design archive.
And it works!
I guess I’ll look at communications routes next week-end. 
use POSIX;
sub d {
my ($x1, $y1, $x2, $y2) = @_;
if ($x1 > $x2) {
return d($x2, $y2, $x1, $y1);
} elsif ($y2>=$y1) {
return $x2-$x1 + $y2-$y1;
} else {
return $x2-$x1 > $y1-$y2 ? $x2-$x1 : $y1-$y2;
}
}
sub pt {
my ($x1, $y1, $x2, $y2) = @_;
my $s = sprintf("%02d%02d:", $x2, $y2);
# shift coordinate system
my $y1 = $y1 - POSIX::ceil($x1/2);
my $y2 = $y2 - POSIX::ceil($x2/2);
$s .= sprintf("%.1f ", d($x1, $y1, $x2, $y2));
return $s;
}
my ($x1, $y1) = (4,5);
foreach my $y (1..10) {
print join(" ", map { pt($x1, $y1, $_, $y) } (1, 3, 5, 7)), "\n";
print join(" ", "", map { pt($x1, $y1, $_, $y) } (2, 4, 6, 8)), "\n";
}Result:
0101:6.0 0301:5.0 0501:5.0 0701:6.0
0201:5.0 0401:4.0 0601:5.0 0801:6.0
0102:5.0 0302:4.0 0502:4.0 0702:5.0
0202:4.0 0402:3.0 0602:4.0 0802:5.0
0103:4.0 0303:3.0 0503:3.0 0703:4.0
0203:3.0 0403:2.0 0603:3.0 0803:4.0
0104:3.0 0304:2.0 0504:2.0 0704:3.0
0204:2.0 0404:1.0 0604:2.0 0804:4.0
0105:3.0 0305:1.0 0505:1.0 0705:3.0
0205:2.0 0405:0.0 0605:2.0 0805:4.0
0106:3.0 0306:1.0 0506:1.0 0706:3.0
0206:2.0 0406:1.0 0606:2.0 0806:4.0
0107:3.0 0307:2.0 0507:2.0 0707:3.0
0207:3.0 0407:2.0 0607:3.0 0807:4.0
0108:4.0 0308:3.0 0508:3.0 0708:4.0
0208:4.0 0408:3.0 0608:4.0 0808:5.0
0109:5.0 0309:4.0 0509:4.0 0709:5.0
0209:5.0 0409:4.0 0609:5.0 0809:6.0
0110:6.0 0310:5.0 0510:5.0 0710:6.0
0210:6.0 0410:5.0 0610:6.0 0810:7.0 For my Traveller game I have been using just-in-time dungeons: I invent atmosphere and details on the fly and skip right to the one or two encounters in the base, ruin, ship, city, or space station. It seems to work, but I still don’t feel too comfortable. Something’s wrong.
Is this a game about exploration? Science fiction stories are often about the what-if – but that alone a good adventure does not make.
I’d love to see some submissions for the One Page Dungeon Contest 2010 using Traveller or a similar science fiction background. I find it hard to write science fiction adventures. I have plenty of role models, examples, and discussion of fantasy adventures. It would be great to see some 1PDC submissions to teach newcomers how to design a very simple science fiction adventure for a session or three.
Comments on 2010-02-11 Just in Time and Space Dungeon
I’ll show you sometime next time when I’m around and not killed by work and jetlag.
– Harald Wagener 2010-02-11 07:06 UTC
I think a lot of people share this feeling. I’ve tried to convince my players to try Traveller, and some of them are resistant, with the most common sentiment being “but what would I do?”
– mthomas768 2010-02-11 13:22 UTC
And what is your reply, Mark? Right now the party seems to be heading into Mutant Chronicles territory. They have shown interest in aliens, been shooting yetis on an ice world, grew an interest in Giger-like dead aliens, found an abandoned space station and faced four undead soldiers…
– AlexSchroeder 2010-02-12 01:06 UTC
This is a very common problem with Traveller. Ultimately, it comes down to knowing what types of adventures your players like and structuring the game in that direction. A lot of people who don’t play Traveller regularly (or haven’t been playing for years) get caught up in the Imperium setting and the underpinned merchant trader campaign arc and don’t see the appeal. For my part, I’ve not used either since the 1980’s. The game is an incredibly flexible (and simple) ruleset that will allow you to go in a thousand different directions.
I entered the one page dungeon contest last year and it didn’t even occur to me to do a Traveller adventure. I might have to take that up this time around.
– Tim 2010-02-21 19:18 UTC
Please do and help save my Traveller campaign! 
I think part of the problem is that none of us has ever played Traveller before so we were approaching the game like an experiment, waiting to see what kind of gameplay the rules afforded. I think the time has come to tighten up the campaign.
– AlexSchroeder 2010-02-21 23:44 UTC
I was wondering how to appeal to players with that game. Isn’t it funny that I don’t have a problem using dungeons in fantasy games all the time but fear that using stranded spaceships or space stations is straining it?
– Crescent 2010-02-25 03:17 UTC
I’ve used an abandoned station and an abandoned ship in my campaign now, but unlike a dungeon with a defined map to explore I’ve used two or three encounters. “You make your way through the abandoned station at zero G and near zero Kelvin. As you turn around a corner of the corridor you see…” I guess I think of it as a scene in Alien (1979). There, the public also never learns the layout of the place. All that matters are the chains, the water, the cat, and roll for initiative!
Yet, players have asked a few times about a map and all I’ve given them were sketches of the current encounter and vague shapes to illustrate what the scanners are showing.
– AlexSchroeder 2010-02-25 05:26 UTC
See also this series on the 8:05 p.m. blog:
– AlexSchroeder 2010-03-09 18:52 UTC
If I wanted an easy way out, I wouldn’t be playing in the first place.
– Harald Wagener 2010-09-23 14:04 UTC
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