Author: Thom Thetford

So, what is a star drive? In Traveller the Jump engine expends all its fuel in a massive burst of energy and control that propels the ship from part of the Universe to another. For instance, a J-1 Jump drive will send a ship over one parsec distance taking about 1 week. There is more to it, but those are the basics.

What about other role-playing games (RPG)? In Other Suns the FTL (faster than light) drive will propel a 1,000 metric ton ship from 5 light years an hour (ly/hr) up to 31 ly/hr, depending on how much you pay for in the ship’s construction.

The biggest difference is in the style of play. Traveller likens its star travel to a time when travel to foreign lands took weeks or months to get where you want to go. Also, communications are held to the speed of light. So, any mail or data traffic waited for a ship to go to the next star system, or futuristic version of the pony express, the X-Boat.

Star Trek, based off the TV shows, used a Warp Drive. Over the years, they never had a specific time over distance formula. It all ran over at the speed of plot. If the story needed the Enterporise to arrive at Star Base 16 in a week, then either the star base was closer, or Warp 5 would get them there in the week for the story to continue. Now, Fandom has all manners of formulas, but the basics are “the speed of plot”.

There are many others, as many as there are authors with stories to tell. So, Dicer, what manner of faster-than-light would you choose for your game? Are you a Traveller or are you a Space Opera type of Sophant?

Good Year, everyone!

So let me start off this year with a little background about my role-playing game hobby. I started out, as millions have in the US, with Dungeons and Dragons, in 1979. Soon after I graduated high school, I went to college and was introduced to a whole new gaming environment.

I tripped across a new group at USM, early in 1980 and started down the path with ‘Classic’ Traveller (CT). My little black book (LBB) catalog started to grow as I bought the reprints from our local game store. The store was more of a generalized hobby store, run by a grumpy retired Postmaster. At the time, he did not have much, but I was always biking up there from the University looking for anything new.

It would be many years later, as I joined the Air Force when I discovered another game system, Other Suns. For some reason that game system has always stuck with me, though I was not a total fan of the Furry ‘Altani’ Hegemony that was the base universe for the Other Suns system. I would find out many years after that this system is now the basis for Call of Cthulhu, based off of Rune Quest.

Though many have written up ideas, I have often wondered what a merge of Traveller and Basic Role-Playing (BRP) would look like and how the game would handle. Don’t get me wrong, the simplicity of CT is still a draw for me. Heck, I am sure I will wax nostalgic about the 2d6 system and the other Cepheus Engine systems.

While I missed putting anything into this blog on January 1, I am going to resist entering this as a 1/1/2023 entry and just start here.

Many new systems are in place that could possibly help run a good Traveller-esque game in the BRP system, with a healthy 3-D start map. I have also been a fan of AstroSynthesis.

Let us see where we can go from here. Party on, Dicers!