What? A Gaming Post!?

Man, what happened to this being a gaming blog?!

Orite, a kickstarter and an SFF magazine.

I did score a copy of the 1983 Basic Traveller Starter box on Sunday as part of a weekend-haul that also included a handful of Amazing Stories from the early 50s.

I really don’t know if I’ll get a lot of user or play out of it, since it would require me to run it myself and my OG gamer friend is kinda soured on Traveller on account of the GURPS version. But I do plan on going through it and rolling up a few characters when I get a minute!

One thing I’m noticing just going through it is the similarity to Star Frontiers in terms of skills and some at-a-glance basics. I’m sure once I dig in it will be totally different. Though it’s the “basic” game, it looks pretty daunting compared to my game of choice, B/X.

Even if I don’t end up getting to play it anytime soon, I hope that once I read through it, I’ll have an idea of what Jeffro and other folks are on about when they’re talking Traveller.

On another note, some folks and I were talking basic Red Dragon Inn theory. Of course, this only applies to the base set, but hey, why not share?

Fiona – anti-cheating, direct damage, weak at gambling; loses when ganged up on or pressed into gambling. Pick one character and hammer them. Gerki will be easier than Deirdre, but Deirdre can give you trouble if she’s still standing and either cheater is out.
Deirdre – Healing, anti-cheating, weak at gambling; generally loses by getting too drunk (I’ve lost with max health and max alcohol). Try to hold on and make attacks of opportunity. Fiona can hit you back with some retaliatory cards, but you’ve got your healing; going broke gambling with Zot and Gerki will end you a lot faster.
Zot – gambling & cheating, money, and AOE; loses the long game, cannot deal with prolonged direct aggression. Focus on gambling and staying alive; Zot’s decent at avoiding having to drink.
Gerki – gambling & cheating, direct damage; loses when cannot press gambling advantage, undermined by Zot, or under prolonged direct aggression. Gamble, gamble, gamble; Zot’s a threat to your gambling and Fiona’s a threat to your health; attack Zot and make Fiona go broke.

Interstellar Empires

One of the guys from my D&D group sent me this. It’s a collection of ideas, quotes, tables, definitions, and examples of interstellar empires.

His timing could not have been better, as I’ve just recently finished reading several of LeGuin’s Hainish novels.

One of the greatest difficulties in maintaining an Interstellar Empire is, of course, distance. Distances in space are unfathomably, impossibly great. Consider that when Voyager took the famous Tiny Blue Dot photo of earth, it was 1.7 billion miles from earth and still not in interstellar space.

Any empire is going to be limited by its ability to react to situations on its fringes, and, even with light-speed travel, the fringes of an interstellar empire might be several decades away from main worlds. In the Hainish books, which largely take place on fringe and backwater worlds, the Federation of Worlds often appears distant, useless and incompetent, because the significant distances between worlds means that any actions taken involve such great lag times that it is an impractical body whose main impact on its member planets is exaction of taxes for a brewing galactic war (which it loses).

Even with instantaneous communication across space, being able to send response forces to deal with any sort of conflict situation is nearly impossible.

Interstellar political bodies are therefore problematic. There are difficulties in governance, difficulties in enforcing laws and difficulties in asset protection. How do they come about, then, if they are so impractical? Eventually, perhaps, technology would exist to shorten the temporal distances between worlds, but at what point would that make a federation practical?

Probably the hardest science fiction work I’ve read was Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which chronicles the initial colonization of Mars, the process of its terraformation, and resulting political crises of a whole new world that is beyond the effective governing control of earth. Even the relatively short distance between Earth and Mars results in vastly divergent cultural ideas, identities, and political solutions to the practical problems which they face. Isolation, in effect, means independence.

In an interstellar setting, what one would most likely find is a series of tributary worlds, whose status as tributaries is the result of an initial large show of force. Eventually, the tributaries, which, unless left under the control of some autocrat in the name of an empire, would realize that it was more or less independent, test its independence, and cease becoming a tributary, at which point the empire would decide whether or not it was worth the time and resource investment to re-establish its tributary status. And even under an imperial autocrat, the world might become independent under the autocrat who realizes that he can keep the world’s wealth to himself and the empire will only challenge him if he is particularly egregious in his defiance of imperial will.

Anyway, you’ll find more and better ideas than I can articulate here in the article I linked.