Figures of Text

I’m four sessions into my new Traveller campaign, which means it’s over the startup hump that any develop-in-play game suffers from. The characters have established themselves and the players are beginning to feel comfortable in the setting. I’m mapping subsectors as the party jumps around, staying a few parsecs ahead of them (and I really must map Jefferson and Castle subsectors before Wednesday).

The campaign background is designed to be a lot more chaotic than the Third Imperium of Classic Traveller, and incorporates some transhuman elements into the space opera. A few hundred years ago, humanity was contacted by a race of interstellar merchants called the Jonkardo, who sold us plans for a physics-breaking faster-than-light drive. Using this jump drive, humanity spread to the stars. 

A loose alliance of settled worlds, called the Interstellar Concordat, was formed to govern humanity’s nascent empire. Surrounding the Concordat is a halo of corporate colonies and lightly populated fringe worlds outside the Concordat’s control. One of the major factions in the Concordat is a cybernetic hive-mind called the Unity. Members of the Unity are equipped with neural communicators allowing them to communicate via the Unity network. They use augmented reality to shape their surroundings, and are closely associated with artificial intelligences. 

Long-standing disagreements between the more conservative elements of the Concordat and the Unity have now erupted into open war. The Unity has higher technology; the Concordat has vastly larger fleets and resources, so the two sides are evenly matched. The Corporate worlds are staying neutral and supplying both sides with war materiel, while another group of planets took advantage of the Unity/Concordat war to break away from the Concordat themselves. This latter group, the Free Worlds Alliance, believes the Concordat government is dominated by Terran interests and want to reform the system.

Humanity has encountered few other sentient species. The mysterious Jonkardo are encountered from time to time; they seem to have no worlds of their own, but live on travelling trade caravans. Another species, the M’sho, have an empire of their own, and have demanded that humanity not settle any worlds within a dozen parsecs of the M’sho border systems. 

Of the five player characters, I’ve got two Unity members, two wanderers from the Corporate worlds, and one ex-Concordat scout. The group is relatively apolitical, more concerned with making a quick buck and loose women than the ongoing conflict.  Recent events have forced them to take a look at the bigger picture. They were hired to ship arms to a little corporate war on a desert world, but accidentally uncovered a secret research base buried in the desert…

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