rust

Well, think of the warm climate, the sun, the sea, the swimsuits ... A good idea. Once the dolphins have learned what is safe and sufficiently nu- tritient to eat, or have created their own food supply from "escaped" fish, there could very well be some dolphins, especially ones born on Varun, who decide to "go native" and give up their "jobs" with the colonists for a much more free life elsewhere. - Thank you.

What I really find "unfair" are the players who expect the referee to know the most unimportant detail of a setting whenever their character asks for it, but who themselves are too lazy to learn and remember much more than their character's name and gender.

I think they will have INT 6 or 7, but centuries of using trained dolphins as helpers for aquaculture farmers, underwater construction teams and other divers have improved the training methods to a point where dolphins seem to be more intelligent and versatile than that - think of a very well trained border collie. I had fully intelligent dolphins in a previous campaign, and this did not work well at all. The players relied more on their "expendable" dolphin companions than on their own skills, some players insisted on roleplaying dolphins - with truly terrible results, and so on. And I am also not keen on roleplaying dol- phin NPCs ...

I think that some Earth species will be able to digest at least some of the lo- cal life, while some others will be unable to do so. This would give the marine biologists and geneticists among the characters an opportunity for research projects, always a good way to "bridge" unevent- ful campaign time while gaining some experience, and potentially also some status. For example, a new variant of whale sharks that are genetically modified to become able to digest Varunian plankton could become a new and important food source for the colony, and the geneticist who researched the necessary modifications and carried them out could well become a "local hero". It would also give me a kind of "escape hatch" whenever the players decide that their characters will introduce a certain Terran species into the local biosphere. For example, they could want to introduce trained killer whales as guard ani- mals to deal with some dangerous local creature. If this would ruin my plot, there would always be the possibility that the killer whales and the local bio- chemistry are incompatible ...

Not necessarily. In fact, as I understand it, even if the life forms would be almost identical, little differences in the biochemistry (e.g. "left handed" in- stead of "right handed" molecules, the wrong amount of certain trace ele- ments, etc.) could make it impossible for humans to use these life forms as food. Just think of our Earth, where we humans are unable to get any mea- ningful nutrition from the most ubiquitous food plants of our world's animals, the common grass and tree leaves.

And now that the financial problems have been solved, thanks to a friendly interstellar neighbourhood bank with 750 million Credits to burn (*cough*), it is time to decide what this money could be spent on. Once the characters have explored the planet and their patrons have agreed to choose Varun as their future home, an advance base will be established on the planet. It will consist of prefabricated modules (power, life support, hou- sing, workshops, etc.) for about 50 people, plus their equipment (vehicles, machines, aquabots, etc.). While the characters will continue to explore Varun, the other members of the advance team will wait for a bulk transport starship to deliver the parts of a floating landing platform, and will then assemble it. This platform will be ca. 150 m long, 50 m wide and 8 m high and will rest on two SWATH floaters. In the beginning there will be almost no interior furni- shings, except the electronics needed to handle starship landings and starts and the machines required to move the cargoes, but over time the platform will become a regular swimming starport. A very similar model will much later be used for the colony's mining platform, from where the aquabots doing the actual mining will be remotely controlled, and where the crystals brought up from the seafloor will be processed and prepared for the export. Back to the first floater. It will be used to import the material needed to build the future colony's core, a dome with a diameter of ca. 80 m and a height of ca. 30 m. It will have ca. 66,000 square meters of useable area on 8 levels. Almost half of this will be used for housing up to 600 people, with 50 square meters per person. The remaining ca. 36,000 square meters will contain all the infrastructure: Power Plant, Life Support, Hydroponics, Administration, Hospital, Research Center, Workshops, and so on and on. Once the advance team has constructed the dome's hull, filled it with air and established power and life support, the first of the colonists can come to Va- run and, for example, start the aquaculture of the colony, go prospecting for natural resources, or get eaten by some hideous monster in one of the deep sea trenches ... Speaking of trenches, the map of Varun has not yet changed much, it now looks like this:

However, it would be surprising if this life would be too similar to that of our Earth in its biochemistry. Therefore humans and other animals from Earth will be able to eat Varunian animals, but unable to digest them and gain any nutritional value from them, and the Varunian predators might find creatures from Earth tasty, but useless as food (although they are slow learners and will eat them anyway ...). This is why the colonists will have to import the livestock for their aquacultu- re in order to produce the food the colony needs. Since I have already mentioned the finances of the colony, a few more words on how I imagine this part of the setting. In the Traveller universe it is easy for a small group of people to use their sa- ved money, some ship shares and the skeleton of a business plan ("We will do profitable interstellar trade and get rich") to get a bank loan of several dozen million Credits to buy a spaceship and go gallivanting through the galaxy as free traders. If one accepts this as plausible, a much bigger group of people (about 560) should be able to use their saved money, their colony shares and a detailed business plan ("There is this water world in the Demidov Cluster ... crystals ... mining ...") to get a bank loan of several hundred million Credits for a coloniza- tion and mining project, I think.

Indeed. The valuable crystals are mainly the resource that enables the colo- nists (= player characters) to finance the very expensive colonization project, as my "plot device" to keep them somewhat independent of governments or corporations, who would otherwise "pay and therefore give orders".

Indeed, and I really hope that Atgxtg will put it up here to the forum when he is satisfied with its results, it is a very interesting and useful - and easy - way to design BRP spaceships - most probably easier and faster than Mon- goose Traveller and similar systems once it is finished.

Thank you for your questions. I have no idea whether the design system in Mongoose Traveller's Civilian Vehicles is able to handle ground vehicles and aircraft well, but it fails mi- serably when it comes to submarines - if designed according to the rules as written, they are not heavy enough to dive (none of the 4 example sub- marines in the supplement can dive ...), the nuclear fission reactors have less power output than an old fashioned steam engine, and so on ... The creature template mentioned above is the equivalent of Earth's "generic fish concept", and one of the next steps will be to develop the template in- to a number of unique species, as different from each other as a manta ray and a herring are here on Earth. Then I will have to complete the food chain with plankton and some drifting plants at the surface of the sea, some bottom dwelling scavengers at the opposite end, the "black smoker crew" and a few species that come from other templates and therefore are completely different. The potential attraction, and the reason to develop Varun, will be naturally occuring crystals with a comparatively high market value - provided the co- lony can develop a "crystal mining industry", probably mainly using remotely controlled machines and robots. The player characters as the first explorers will hopefully discover the crys- tals, and will then be asked to establish an advance base on Varun, for re- search as well as for the preparation of a permanent settlement. Bulk freighters will then deliver the building materials for a first base, and la- ter the materials and equipment necessary to expand the base into a con- struction site for the core of the future colony. Once this core (energy, life support, etc.) and the quarters for several hun- dred colonists have been established, a colonial transport spaceship will de- liver the colonists and their equipment to their new home world.

Meanwhile Atgxtg demonstrated to me that the Mongoose Traveller vehicle design system is ... problematic, to put it very politely. This saved me from wasting even more time and effort on attempts to create my vehicles with a faulty system - thank you again very much, Atgxtg. :thumb: So now I am looking for something else to replace the Mongoose Traveller sy- stem. EABA Stuff has been highly recommended by several people, but I do not like it, and do not enjoy working with it. GURPS Vehicles is too complica- ted for my taste, but there is a simplified modular aquatic vehicle design sys- tem in GURPS Transhuman Space - Under Pressure, and this is the one I in- tend to test now, while my Mongoose Traveller designs go to the scrapyard. For the infrastructure of the advance base and the colony I will probably use GURPS Traveller Starships and GURPS Spaceships, which both include modules for entire habitats, farms, factories and thelike, giving me the data for size, mass and costs I need to figure out how to transport all that stuff to Varun on bulk transport spaceships and how to design the advance base and the colony. So, back to the drawing board once more ...

While the "bare bones" of the planet Varun and its background setting are "stewing" in my mind and waiting for some inspiration to hit me and enable me to create the details of that part of the setting, I have turned to the technology of the setting: Spaceships, vehicles, robots and personal equip- ment. Since BRP does not yet offer the necessary design systems, I am using the systems of Mongoose Traveller to design the spaceships (explorer / scout, colonial transport, patrol ship, trader, etc.) and the water vehicles (e.g. sur- face and submarine research vessels, transport vessels, underwater work pods, seafloor crawlers, etc.) required by the campaign. The robots and the various personal gear I will take from Mongoose Traveller supplements, like the Central Supply Catalog, Scout or Beltstrike, at least for the initial phase of the campaign. A major problem is the infrastructure of first the advance base and then the colony, because roleplaying games rarely mention that kind of stuff, like sea- floor habitats, construction and industrial machines, aquaculture equipment and thelike - a lot needs to be "invented" there to create a plausible setting. And once the technology is covered, the next step will be the characters themselves, their professions and the specific new or modified skills required by an underwater environment, as well as the rules for the use of these skills. Still a lot to be done before this becomes a playable setting ...

Besides, even if the movie were to be understood as depicting the US military in the role of the evil guys with the black hats, I would not see this as any kind of serious problem. We Germans had the questionable pleasure to supply an entire generation of movie makers from all over the world with the "evil ones" for their movies, and the Chinese and Russians did likewise for the movie makers of the western na- tions, including the German ones. If our friends from the USA now share that "burden", too, and also are occa- sionally depicted as the "bad ones" instead of "squeaking clean", I really see no reason to get upset about it.

I would not attempt to read real world politics into the movie, and none of the reviews I did read over here tried to do it. It is just a "resistance fighter" plot with the same basic idea as, for exam- ple, the legends about Robin Hood, and someone has to play the evil guys, and from the logic of the plot and the technology available this can only be humans - otherwise Cameron would have had to find aliens as actors for the enemies of his computer generated race.

Merry Christmas ! (... or whatever you intend to celebrate)

But before I can travel anywhere else, I have to return to the drawing board for a while: Right now my planet has a lot of data, but it still does not have a geography - there is no map. The first draft of the map gives only a basic idea of what the planet is like: A lot of water, some shallows (a bit like "sunken continents"), a few sea mounts and a "deep cauldron" to start with. With this not yet final first picture it is time to think about all the geographi- cal data, like "how deep is my ocean" or "where to put the volcanoes" - and, of course, natural resources (the crystals that will one day be mined and ex- ported), important ocean currents, and finally some potential sites for the fu- ture colony (to give the player characters an opportunity to make a very good or terribly bad choice). And, on a "secret" copy of the map, "where there are dragons" - like alien ru- ins, the habitats of especially nasty creatures, and so on. Over time, this first map will probably be changed several times, both before and during the campaign, so it does not have to be especially nice. Here is my first draft of the Varun map:

If I remember it right, the first Star Wars RPG also had a chapter of this kind, in this case a solo adventure that introduced and explained all the important rules during the adventure.

The "SharedUniverse" is still a bit too empty to use as a background, so I ha- ve meanwhile figured out how to connect my Demidov Cluster with the Far Avalon setting mentioned above. In this setting there are both FTL drives and Conduits, natural "wormholes" that can be used by accordingly outfitted starships for fast transfer between a conduit's openings. In my version of the setting, the average performance of a hyperdrive of a ci- vilian starship is approcimately 2 Parsec per day, and a hex on my star chart is about 10 Parsec wide and takes about 5 days to cross. Therefore Varun is about 20 Pc or 10 days of travel time from the nearest in- habited world Hem, about 30 Pc / 15 days from the developed colony Poselok and 70 Pc / 35 days from the transfer world Demidov. Yep, I prefer my space big and travel times long. A visit to Poselok, for exam- ple to buy some urgently needed spare parts, takes a Varunian at least one month - and much could have changed on Varun while he was away. Demidov is one end of the Beacon Conduit, which is approximately 120 light years / 37 Parsec long, takes about 5 days to travel through, and leads to the Beacon system, controlled by the Nordica monarchy (from where the co- lonists of Hem once came), in the Far Avalon region. From Beacon it is about 15 Parsec to Dakota in the Trane League and about 25 Parsec each to Nordica and to the independent world Kirkwall, the nearest worlds of interest to the Varunians. This means that a diplomatic mission to Nordica takes 35 days to get to De- midov, 5 days through the conduit to Beacon on a transfer ship able to use the conduit, and another 13 days from Beacon to Nordica - 53 days to get there and 53 days for the return trip. As I said, I prefer my space big.

I like your draft, but it has a problem - it is a textbook example of what is called a "Bleiwüste" ("lead desert") over here, a very long text without any space (e.g. illustrations, etc.) for the eyes to recover from reading.

Unfortunately all I remember is that it was a very slim, black and white book- let, A5 sized, in German. Having all the CoC stuff already, I did not keep it.

No problem with that - except the language. While I am working with English roleplaying material, like GURPS Space, I use English and later on translate my design into German, so there are versions in both languages. However, once this part is done and I begin to add all the details, I use Ger- man, and I am usually much too lazy to try to translate that, too. So, whoever likes the "skeleton" material posted here is free to use it as he likes, including of course "SharedUniverse", but there will be no English ver- sion of the "flesh" on these "bones", I am afraid.

I am not sure whether this is on topic, but I just remembered an interesting marketing action of the German publishers of Call of Cthulhu. They produced and printed a quick start booklet with the basic rules and a short introductory adventure and distributed it for free to all the major mail order roleplaying games shops in Germany, asking them to put a copy of the booklet into every order - Call of Cthulhu and otherwise - for free. So, for a while all German roleplaying gamers who ordered any roleplaying material by mail received the quick start booklet, too.

Now that I have some first impressions what the planet Varun is like, it is time to put it somewhere the explorers and the colonists can find it. I usually design a small region with few planets as the surrounding space of a setting's planet, small enough to describe all the planets in some detail and to enable the player characters to understand the situation and to "learn the ropes" quickly. In this case it is the Demidov Cluster, consisting of a "transfer" planet that connects this frontier region with the "wider universe" (Demidov), an agricul- tural planet (Trava), a resource and industrial planet (Zhelezo), an old colony world (Poselok) and two young colony worlds (Hem and Misaki) - and Varun, of course. "Demidov" is the name of the scout who first entered the region, "Trava" (= Green), "Zhelezo" (= Iron) and "Poselok" (= Settlement) are Russian words, so you can imagine who settled these worlds. "Hem" is Swedish, "Misaki" is Japanese, so the "second wave" of the colonization obviously was done by colonists from different homeworlds and background cultures - the Cluster begins to get the outline of a history. I am still not certain what the "transfer world" Demidov will connect to, but I think it will again be a somewhat modified version of Martin J. Dougherty's Far Avalon setting.

I think the material is there, just look at the forum's front page: The Green for fantasy with a different "feel" than D&D, Aces High for Wild West, the upcoming Pirates supplement, and ... and ... - in fact, far more and far bet- ter stuff than I had dared to hope for a year ago. I have been reviewing and "marketing" most of the monographs I bought over on my German "home forum", and there was more interest in it than I had ex- pected - although I do not know whether this interest turned into sales of the monographs. The problem seems to be, from my point of view at least, to get that material into a form that is accepted by roleplaying games shops.

Seven - you can count me in. The story is a remake of Ursula LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest, and I am not interested in yet another version of this same story, no matter how good the technology used.