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Well, I think it is not general knowledge that the standard textbooks about the plants of the Atacama desert, about agriculture in arid regions or about the my- thology of the earliest Egyptian dynasties were written by members of the Pega- sos Society.

Sorry, I just realized that I had failed to mention that this setting is using the background of Classic Cthulhu in the 1920s. The airplane is an Avro 504 biplane, and the advanced technology is advanced compared to the average level of technology of the 1920s. Yes, indeed. I thought that the players would certainly be aware of the setting's future back- ground events, and so I considered it useful to make the most important part of it - WWII - in-setting foreboding to keep player knowledge and character knowledge closer together. All of the important material assets of the society, like the manor in Scotland, the estate in France and the company Pegasos SA, are owned and controlled by one person, Hector Collins, so many of the other members of the society are not really aware how much effort is spent to keep the settlement on Duat running. As an example, not many members of the society have access to the information that much of the "input" of the company Pegasos SA is not used for its production, but is directly sent to Porta to supply the settlement. Besides, for many members of the society the Pegasos Society is basically an information net- work that provides them with cutting edge information about new developments in science and technology, and they are willing to pay for these informations and do not care that much that the informations were originally aquired to support the settlement on Duat. Finally, most of the society's important positions which directly have to do with the settlement on Duat are now held by people who emigrated to Duat or who were born there, and since they therefore control a lot of the informations handed out to the other members, they are able to keep much of what is going on more or less secret. You are certainly right about the often covered activities of the Duat settlers within the society. A more direct conflict between the two factions within the Pegasos Society is unlikely as long as Hector Collins remains in control of the organization and supports the settlers, but he is now an old man, and the society has no clear rules for the leadership in the time after his death - the content of his will remains unknown. Perhaps the Duat faction will inherit the core of the socie- ty's assets and take over the society, perhaps the Earth faction will do so and decide to cut the costs ... Edit.: Since you mentioned fuel, this is actually not a major problem for the settlers, because they pro- duce alcohol from grain as a part of the settlement's agriculture, and small and efficient engines running on alcohol as fuel are one of the technological fields where the Pegasos Society is at the cutting edge of technology - and, thanks to Pegasos SA's sales of such engines, even makes a ni- ce little profit.

An interesting organization needs some kind of internal conflict. In the case of the Pegasos Society it is a rift between the society's members on Earth and the settlers on Duat. While the members from Earth tend to see the society as a research organization, the settlers think more of the future of their community. This split has been increased by the "Prophecy of Nathan Kohn", a letter writ- ten by an eminent French occultist and contact of the Pegasos Society to one of its members, where Kohn claimed that the gate between Earth and Duat will close in 1940. Many of the settlers on Duat are afraid that Kohn is right, and pressure the Pegasos Society to prepare for such an event, for example by building stockpiles of raw materials on Duat, by moving the society's im- portant assets like its technical library to Duat, and so on. The society's lea- dership on Earth is convinced that Kohn got it wrong, and is therefore unwil- ling to react to alarmism by spending a huge amount of money on what they consider unnecessary preparations.

Thank you for an interesting idea, I will put it on my list. The most likely suspects for this kind of trouble would be goats, because of their ability to survive well in arid regions, their intelligence and their agility. And wild goats would make some game for hunting ...

This campaign will require a couple of non-standard skills, like for example Engineering, Geography and Survival. Therefore I have decided to reduce the overall number of stan- dard skills by introducing some new more general skills which each replace a number of the standard skills: Athletics covers Climb, Jump, Swim and Throw, Perception covers Li- sten and Spot Hidden, and Stealth covers Hide and Sneak. This way the total number of skills on the setting's skill list remains approximately the same as in other settings, and the players do not have to distribute their characters' skill points among more than the usual number of skills.

The Pegasos Society is very interested in the Mythos, for the reasons mentioned in the post above (gate magic, technology, etc.), but until now there are no other connections with the Mythos. Whether the races and powers of the Mythos have a presence or influence on Duat is at this moment still unknown, but I would definitely not rule it out (or give more details on a public forum ... ).

There are a couple of ways how the characters can come into contact with members of the Pegasos Society, here are just some examples. A somewhat typical case is the unexplained disappearance of a member of the socie- ty. He may have told his relatives and friends that he and his wife and children plan- ned to emigrate to Australia, and later on they might even receive letters written by him from Australia, but if someone would investigate on the spot in Australia it would become obvious that the person never arrived there and that the letters were posted to them by someone else. What really happened is that the person emigrated to Duat and covered this up with a story about Australia and the help of society members the- re. Another example could be the Pegasos Society's search for an alternative to the gate at Perpignan, because without such an alternative any malfunction of the Perpignan gate could become a desaster for the settlers at Porta. Informations about magical ga- tes can be found in Mythos texts, so some operatives of the Pegasos Society will soo- ner or later visit the places where such texts are traded, like auctions, or stored, like libraries. And if the Pegasos Society is convinced that a specific text contains useful information, they may well decide to attempt to buy or if necessary even steal it. And then there are the various alien technologies of Mythos races, which could prove useful for the Pegasos Society's operations. While the members of the society will not ally with Mythos creatures and will not become servants of some Great Old One, any other opportunity to aquire alien technology could well tempt operatives of the society into action.

Duat certainly has metals, perhaps even near the settlement, but until now none have been discovered. The search is still going on, and sooner or later the settlers will find a source they can exploit and will develop the technology to work the metal. This is another question which has not yet been answered, although the society's scien- tists keep working on it. Their main problem is to get beyond the lava fields and the desert in order to take a look at other, perhaps less hostile environments of Duat. Indeed. One of the tasks of the Pegasos Society's botanical expeditions was to search for useful trees which would be able to grow on Duat, and the settlers have started tests with several species of trees from Earth's arid regions. I hear that eucalyptus from Australia is doing fine. Another, more theoretical problem is the position of Duat and its sun Aton and its dis- tance from Earth. The society's scientists have already created a detailed star chart of the part of Duat's night sky which is visible from Porta, but until now they did not find any correlation with the night sky of Earth. It therefore seems that Duat is very, very far from Earth.

Those members of the Pegasos Society who were born on Duat and operate or study on Earth could become the society's most interesting roleplaying element, because their upbringing on Duat and their loyalty to the community there makes them diffe- rent from most other people the characters are likely to meet - somewhat "alien", perhaps even sometimes "creepy" because of their different customs, manners and values.

It is somewhat understandable that the Egyptians who created the gate mistook Duat for their religion's underworld. The region at the other end of the gate is a semi desert valley, north of it is a high mountain chain with several active volcanoes and large lava fields, in the south is rocky desert. The only native vegetation consists of primitive algae, lichens and mosses. Otherwise the - small - explored region of Duat is much like Earth, a planet of a yellow sun, although without a moon, a breathable atmosphere and a gravity which feels normal. What looked to the Egyptians like barren underworld turned out to be fertile land for the settlers, who knew how to use wind power to pump water up from a subterranean aquifer, who were able to introduce useful plants and animals from the arid regions of Earth, and who received the necessary supplies through the gate while they were building first their research outpost and then a permanent settlement. At the moment the settlement Porta, run by a governor sent by the Pegasos Society from Earth and an elected local council, would hardly be able to survive on its own. While it has some agriculture and a number of craftsmen, there are no known sources of metal, and all technology still has to be imported through the gate. The size of Duat is currently still unknown. The Pegasos Society's scientists think that it is slightly smaller than Earth, but this is mostly guesswork. The explored part of Duat is al- most exactly a circle with a radius of approximately 200 kilometers, half the range of the one airplane that was transported to Duat. Somewhere south of this explored region seems to be an ocean, because the few clouds which occasionally bring rain to the valley come from the south. While the Duat settlers have not yet encountered any higher animals - and certainly no in- telligent natives - in their region, it is quite possible that other parts of Duat hold some sur- prises ... I tried to upload a map of the explored region of Duat, but for some reason the forum re- fuses to allow me to upload it.

All settlers on Duat are members of the Pegasos Society. The settlement originally began as the society's research outpost, but then some of the researchers decided to stay there for good, and after the Great War many society members and contacts became disillusioned of the situation and future of Europe and chose to try a new start on another world "without poison gas and trench warfare".

The headquarters of the Pegasos Society is at Pegasos Manor near Edinburgh in Scotland, owned by the Collins family. However, the centre of the society's activities is near Perpig- nan in southern France, on the estate where the gate is operated and at the nearby facto- ry of Pegasos SA, a company also owned by the Collins family. While the society has many contacts all over Europe and in the United States, it does not have branch offices elsewhe- re. The Pegasos Society is led by Hector Collins, the son of the late Edward Collins who disco- vered the gate and the world beyond it. He serves as the chairman of the society's council and makes all important decisions. The society is financed through the membership dues and donations of its members, but most of the money comes from the profits of the com- pany Pegasos SA. At the moment the Pegasos Society has approximately 200 active members on Earth and another approximately 250 settlers on Duat. Some of its leading operators on Earth were actually born and raised on Duat and only serve a couple of years on Earth before they re- turn to their homeworld. Since these Duat born members tend to be most loyal to their community on Duat, they are usually the ones responsible for the secrecy of the society's "special" operations. The society's technology is definitely cutting edge, but it is not futuristic. It is most advan- ced on the fields necessary to support and expand the settlement Porta on Duat, less so on other fields of science and technology. However, the Pegasos Society has contacts on the staff of several research centers and universities, for example the Miskatonic Universi- ty in Arkham in the USA, and usually can aquire any informations it considers useful in a rather short time. I will try to answer the second part of your questions a little later.

It began with Napoleon's expedition to Egypt. One of the scholars who accompanied that famous expedition brought a strange artefact back to France, where it ended up in a cel- lar room of an estate which was much later bought by a wealthy guy from Scotland. He discovered the artefact and realized that it had a lot of hieroglyphs on it, and so he deci- ded to ask a friend at a German university to translate these hieroglyphs. According to the translation the artefact was a portal to the Duat, the underworld of the ancient Egyp- tians. They followed the translated instructions, and to their surprise the artefact indeed created a portal. However, it was not a portal to any kind of underworld, only to a very strange new world. Once they had found the way there they decided to explore this world, and in order to do this they and some of their trustworthy friends founded the Pegasos Society. This society established an outpost on the world they named Duat, and over the years what had star- ted as a temporary outpost developed into a permanent settlement, supported and sup- plied by the Pegasos Society on Earth. The members of the Pegasos Society kept the existence of their ancient portal, of the new world Duat beyond the portal and of the settlement there secret. However, exploring Duat and developing the settlement required advanced knowledge and technology as well as at least some knowledge of the Mythos, and getting all of this by legal means proved difficult. Therefore the Pegasos Society soon turned to rather cavalier methods of obtaining what it considered necessary, including for example espionage and the occasional theft. Some of those who came in contact with the Pegasos Society considered it as another se- cret society with questionable aims, others mistook it for a more dangerous Cthulhoid cult. Investigating the Pegasos Society and finding out what it really was up to and what really was going on was immensely difficult - a task for true adventuring investigators ...

The guy who ruled Germany during World War II greatly admired the Spartans and praised them as a role model for Germany ...

I am not convinced that this would be a good idea. A historical Spartiate had rather little individual freedom and therefore would not make a very good player character. There are also some elements of Spartan culture which would be considered quite repulsive nowadays, like for example the rite of passage which required the murder of a slave to be accepted as an adult.

It is certainly possible, but the very high results could create a problem for the internal logic of the setting, because it could become difficult to explain why there suddenly is a true master swordsman (or whatever) no one has ever heard of before. This may be ac- ceptable once or twice in a campaign, but it becomes quite implausible if it happens mo- re often.

Yes, I think so, in fact I consider it the best science fiction game produced for the d100 system so far. Its only problem is that it contains lots of information about the Ringworld, but little useful material about the Known Space, becau- se unfortunate licensing problems killed the line before a planned supplement about the Known Space could be produced. So, if one wants to use the Ring- world as a setting, the game is all one needs, but if one wants to use the en- tire Known Space as the setting, one has to improvise a lot to add to the ma- terial provided by the original boxed game and the one companion published.

I usually have a few basic buildings (store, tavern, etc.) and a number of typical NPCs prepared and can use them whenever I need such an everyday encounter for the play- er characters. In my settings I use two generic types of civilians, the more common one has average stats and skills plus a high professional skill, the other one is a mem- ber of the local militia and therefore also has a low level weapon skill or two. If I want to make a conflict more challenging, I can always have a patrol of the city watch or a small mob of angry citizens nearby. However, I rarely need to improvise, the players and the actions of their characters tend to be rather predictable, the characters nor- mally have obvious intentions (relax, gather informations, buy equipment ...) which enable me to plan the relevant encounters in time, random movements through the setting and thelike are extremely rare. It certainly helps that I ask the players at the end of each session what their characters plan to do during the next session and pre- pare accordingly for that session, keeping the characters busy with and interested in whatever they had planned.

Then you might like this one, especially if you do not know it already:

I basically ignored it. Once a character was converted from the Traveller system to the BRP system I only used the BRP game mechanics in playing that character.

Thank you very much, the GEMA guys who black out You Tube videos in order to force Germans to buy the stuff instead of listening to it for free missed one of the three.

Very hard indeed, because that video is "not available" from Germany.

I would prefer the generic science fiction toolbox, for example something similar to GURPS Space, but from an economic point of view a "killer setting" would pro- bably be better for Chaosium.

There are a couple of good science fiction settings out there which are at least as hard as 2300AD, two examples which use the Traveller system would be Orbital by Zozer Games and Outer Veil by Spica Publishing: Orbital - Zozer Games | DriveThruRPG.com Outer Veil - Spica Publishing | DriveThruRPG.com

An outrage ... damn, I missed an outrage. That's what one gets when one looks at other forums while the interesting things happen here.