Topic: New Spacemaster Setting?

[nash]

Great summary ;-)

Traveller is a super cool setting.   The 1 week to use a jump drive means it's super easy to have isolated adventures without the imperial navy or mega corps on top of you straight away.

Years ago I played Spacemaster:Privateers with the default setting; and found it boring (they really needed some adventures).   Traveller was a much better setting.

300000 years ago an alien race achieved sentience and technological advancement never seen since.  They went to Earth and transplanted humans on dozens if not hundreds of worlds.  They also uplifted wolves and transplanted them coreward and trailing.  To this day there's some debate over whether Terra is really the human world of origin but it is the best candidate in known space.

So my memory was that this was pretty much settled if you know where to look.  Terra medical technology was way ahead of Villani because Terrans had a whole biosphere of related species that biologists could study.   Basically Terrans have relatives on their planet of various distances and a whole evolutionary tree; whereas Villani had a few useful species and a whole pile of unrelated creatures in their biosphere.

I got that from the encyclopaedia entries in the original traveller.   Some extra muddying of the waters or lore changes after may have taken place.

[David Johansen]

It's more a case of muddling of the lore by Villani archeologists.  It's pretty clear that humans were originally Terrestrial.  One thing about the time line that I like is that, even though ancient aliens came to Earth and meddled, their civilization vanished long before the pyramids were built.  There is a funny vingnette somewhere where a Villani tourist on Earth is somewhat disappointed that the Pyramids were so new.

[DerGraumantel]

Personally I think the SM1/2 Imperium setting was superior to the SM:P setting. The only thing I liked about SM:P was Letters of Marque and Reprisal. That one game concept is worth keeping, but the rest of it can be thrown away IMO.

Wasn't the setting just there so that you could run Traveller with it with the wolf men and such? Never saw it as a "real" setting.

[David Johansen]

I suggested as much to the author and he deflected with "Traveller has wolf people in it?"  Anyhow, it's entirely possible he didn't know.  Animal people are the defacto elves and dwarves of sf.

Still the Tulgar are quite different than Vargr, they're bigger for one thing, and they're all noble and knightly.  A Vargr might be impressed by the charismatic notion but chances are they'll find another fad to follow in a week or two.

As for the Privateers setting, I'll agree it's pretty thin and oddly restrictive.  If you get the Races and Cultures book, it expands on the races a bit and makes them more interesting and there's a couple of the Datanet articles that build on the setting.  It's a shame we never got the setting books to flesh it out more.  I have long maintained that the stats are not representative of the descriptions and in some cases (Valesiens in particular) virtually un-playable.

[pastaav]

Traveller has had a number of publishers and there has been 12 book authers that has written novels about the setting. It is given that such a setting will have much more flavor and detail compared to a setting that mostly is the main book itself and some limited support material.

I have never run Privateers myself, but if there should be an official Sci fi setting for Ironcrown, I think it should be a common one for both Spacemaster and Harp Sci fi. The pool of authors playing sci fi Ironcrown games is too limited to support multiple settings IMHO.

[David Johansen]

HARP SF is the only one being supported right now at any rate.

Traveller's Third Imperium is a vast and sprawling setting which is easy to insert just about any sf story into.  It's very much like an sf Forgotten Realms.

The Space Master Privateers setting is a tighly focussed setting designed to be easy to set up and play.  Really, a couple adventures would probably have helped with that but conventional wisdom of the time was that adventures don't sell.  WotC developed a formula for adventures that do sell that involves a decent chunk of new mechanical goodies in the appendix that aren't available elsewhere.  Then later they gathered them up into a supplement and sold the information again.