Planet KordCorp

Behold, the genius of Traveller!

KordCorp 0508 A445511-14 SRTI Ag Ht NI

A sleepy little world populated mostly by robot farmers, and that happens to be the headquarters for KordCorp.

NPCs of note:

Ted Kord, billionaire industrialist extroardinaire. Mostly too busy to bother with the PCs, but they very well might see a well-coifed man storming through the space station, surrounded by sycophants and aides.

Yeven Orthos, once the head researcher for KordCorp. He and Ted had a nasty falling out, and now he spends most of his time trying to drum up support for a takeover by people with "the real knowhow," him and his scientist buddies. Wiry little guy with messy black hair, and quite pleasant when he's not on the subject of Ted Kord, traitorous bastard.

"The Shining Star" would be easy enough to write off as a bunch of drugged up hippies, if it weren't for their unfortunate tendency to assassinate an important public figure every so often. There's a rumor going around that they get their instructions (and supplies) from some offworld interest, but most investigations into the matter end in unhelpful conversations in bars with shadowy figures you are never seen again.

Local Rumors:
1 Erdo Mitchel's robots have gone crazy!
2 The West River Boys, a bunch of no-good surly frog-ox rustlers, have been spotted at least once or twice in the hills to the north.
3 Rusty Sallone is looking for someone to ship something awfully weird to Goro. Comes in boxes and growls.
4 Sunday Jones ran away from his father (Stewart) a couple days ago. He's still looking for her, and worried that he'll try to hitch a ride with some offworlders and he'll never see him again.
5 There's some real shady guy wandering around town, says he needs a couple people he can trust to get a message offworld.
6 A couple lab-coated guys came downport a couple days ago, looking for something with scanners (wouldn't say what it was, so we couldn't help) and they haven't been seen since.

Locations:
Kordford -- the only thing approaching a city on KordCorp. Named for the leader of the original settlement, Elijah Kord, an age and a half ago.

Snake Eye's Saloon -- Run by the eponymous Joe "Snake Eye" Jefferson. Mostly the best place to pick up rumors in Kordford, but Snake Eye occasionally needs a job or two done, too.

"Speedboat for the lake of your imagination" indeed.

This is pretty much the extent of what I'm designing for each of the half a dozen planets that comprise the starting area of the campaign. Everything else in the sub-sector gets a paragraph, at most, until the PCs express interest in it. I'm good at winging it, and I plan to make use of that skill. And Traveller looks to have a lot of support for such shenanigans, with its spiffy random encounter tables and list of pre-statted NPCs.

This is the first time, though, that I've actually had to sit down and decide that I'm not going to obsessively detail everything on the map. Normally, that nonchalance comes naturally. I don't know if it's because I've gotten older or because Traveller hands me a subsector map to fill out, but I did feel an urge to go and detail every planet on the map, and put a lot more together for KordCorp. Not that I had any ideas to either effect, mind you. I just felt like I should drive myself crazy.

My Problems with a Mostly Modern Setting

Almost done reading through Mage. The main item I've got left is the Boston mini-setting in the back, and then there's some legacies and merits and things that I'll read in more detail later. (It's unusual for me to read a new RPG book as thoroughly as I've been covering these new World of Darkness volumes, I'm usually a lot more haphazard about it. But it's an entirely new system and I've got a lot of time on my hands, and I'd like to do a thorough appraisal before I get back to school and start playing.) So far, I like what I see. The system's spiffy, I'm starting to get this whole "themes" thing, and there's an amusingly large number of references to dungeon crawling -- I mean, exploring Atlantean ruins. Right.

The one thing that's keeping me from enthusiastically throwing myself into running the thing is the setting. Not that it's bad -- for "secret modern occult politics" it's quite good, and I like what I've read of it so far. But it's still modern, and it's still a pre-made setting. Both of those things make me nervous.

I've never run a modern game. The closest I came was when I ran a session of Feng Shui where the characters helped President Harrison Ford fight Nazi ninjas. I've run post-apocalyptic cyberpunk, a fair amount of fantasy, and a brief, ill-fated space campaign, but never anything even close to real world modern. I don't write much realistic (or even semi-realistic) fiction, either. I've started giving it a little more attention lately, but for a long time I just wasn't comfortable writing anything set in anything remotely resembling the normal, modern world. Even if it was supers or something, the real world parts would trip me up.

I'm not entirely sure why this is, but it makes me wonder if I can do a decent job with Mage as written. What if there's a real, good reason I've avoided running a modern game all these years? What if being uncomfortable with it throws off my game? What happens if, three sessions in, I decide I can't handle it?

Pushing myself out of my comfort zone could be a good thing. But the other problem with the setting is simply that there is one. All but one of my campaigns have used more or less custom settings. I did once run a game in the Diamond Throne, but I completely changed the geography, significantly altered the history, and didn't use several of the races. It's a habit that worries me, because while there's a lot I can do to alter the magical parts of the Mage setting, I'm a lot more limited in geography, history, culture, and most other major things I could change, if its still going to look vaguely like the real world.

The set up does have its advantages. Everyone has more or less the same baseline knowledge of the world: like ours, but darker. I don't have to do much in the way of pre-game explanation to allow everyone to make characters that fit. And there's a lot of material already out there. I can use maps, neat history facts, and locations from the real world, even with a few minor modifications.

But I haven't quite been able to convince myself. I'm still wondering if I should put the effort in and whip up a neat little dark fantasy or cyberpunk world or something, give myself a little more room to breath, a setting more like I'm used to. The only problem with that is that, at the moment, I don't have enough to hang a game on. If I already had some crazy cool idea that would work with the system, I'd be sketching it out without giving it this much thought. Trouble is, I don't have anything like that already, and despite my misgivings about running Mage "straight" I don't know that it'd be worth the effort and risk to try to force a more unique setting.

A Problem of Lists

The Traveller game hasn't started yet, but it's coming along. I'm most of the way through my starting sub-sector, and I've started sketching out the larger political situation. Nothing detailed, mind you. I just needed to know who was running all those spaceports, if there's no Third Imperium in my Traveller universe.

The answer is: another sort of space empire. So far mostly cribbed from Dune, but I'll add in other bits as I go along. Combined with at least some of the Class A and B starports being alien relics, run by robots, this satisfies what need I have for the setting to make sense. I'll make up for it with the planets -- I still need to figure out a place to put the Red-Eyed Cat-Apes.

I am, though, struggling with how much detail to put into that upper-level political situation. I'd like to keep it as loosely defined as possible, partly for philosophical reasons, and partly to avoid doing work. I do plan on making up a minor noble from a minor house (noble houses being the main thing I'm stealing from Dune) to be governor of the sub-sector, and eventually I'll work out a few rivals and allies, to aid in the generation of schemes and plots. But there's no need for a big list of all the houses and nobles and all of that.

Except that I had this idea, that if each of the houses has its own army and so on, then some of the characters might have pre-existing allegiances to them, or old grudges or something. Which would, then, necessitate some manner of list. Unless the players could manage to make something up on their own, if the idea interests them, but I've had mixed success with those sorts of schemes.

Random World Generation Official Verdict: Awesome

Planets I have made so far:

• D79A65-7 S NI Wa. Gola Tau. Run by the engineers who keep the environment bubbles working. They will challenge you to duels!
• C683589-8 A NI. Degenerate agrarian communists. Currently being pestered by one of their neighbors (to be decided, as I fill in the sector) who keeps trying to set up a puppet government to take them over.
• C7838AF-4 S P Ri Lt Amber. Deutsches Reich. They got hold of some old Nazi propaganda tapes, liked what they saw, and now they have tourists swarming all over what the travel agency calls "Hitler World."
• E2108CE-4 P Lt Na. Holo. Religious nuts trying to keep their atmosphere generators together with duct tape.
• C555300-6 Ga Lo NI. Sukka. A bunch of Heinlein-ian farmers, mostly notable for the guy calling himself "the King of Cold" who keeps bothering space travelers and trying to set up his own little kingdom.
  
• B000A53-14 N T I As Hi Ht In Na Va Red. Hox Anoth. Alien space arcology that the Imperium (or whatever) desperately does not want to antagonize.

So yeah, I'd say I'm having fun. No group together to play it yet, but I'm working on it. It may take me a week or two to get the sector sketched out anyway.

Metal Steampunk Vikings

Yes. This is what my next campaign needs to be. Metal. Steampunk. Vikings.

Loud, horned hat dudes wandering around in a Conan-esque Lost World, fighting robots and finding rayguns.

Weird, clanking, brass and springs constructs rampaging around in the wilderness. Mysterious machines from dimensions beyond time. Mad scientists demanding tribute along with the necromancers and dragons and mad god-kings.

Dinosaurs.

Halflings Are Cannibals

Not all halflings, of course. Some of them cremate their dead. And their have been rare instances of halfling burial, generally under unusual supernatural circumstances. But most halflings, in most cases, eat their dead.

They're a nomadic people, and thus they feel that it's better to carry their lost loved ones with them then to stick them in the ground in a place to which they may never return. They also believe that, by eating a person, they can absorb that person's strength and wisdom, and carry on their works. There are also some practical considerations; though not all halflings inhabit swamps and waterways, many do, and it's difficult to properly bury someone in that sort of terrain.

It's very unusual for halflings to eat non-halflings, or even members of their race that they don't have a strong personal connection to. It does happen occasionally, most often when the odd, marginalized sect comes up with the idea of eating their enemies. It's even more unusual for a non-halfling to partake of a halfling funeral ritual, but that, too, is not completely unknown.

Halflings don't usually bring it up when they live around other races. They think everyone else's practices are a little unnatural, but they're aware that a lot of other people find theirs downright repulsive, so they don't push the issue. A halfling adventurer might ask it of their comrades, in the event of their permanent death, but only with people they'd known deeply for years.

(Yes, I sort of stole this from Dark Sun. Dark Sun is cool.)

Dwarves Are Crazy

Dwarves get psychotic when they see the sky. They have some weird dwarven word for "sky madness," that they call it, because I haven't decided whether I'm going to go for "old and germanic" for dwarven, or "lots of 'kh' and 'g' and 'd' and little triangle things over the vowels." Everyone else mostly just assumes that dwarves are all nuts, especially in the Southern Lands, where it's more common.

It's really the night sky that's a problem, the stars or the planets or the moons. And for most dwarves, it's not really a huge problem. In ages past, a dwarven sorcerer-king learned to craft a sort of charm that mostly protects against the curse, or whatever it is, and with these forged the first above-ground dwarven empire. Nowadays, like most of dwarven government, they're largely religious in character, and the priesthood controls their manufacture.

It still comes up often enough that that's what a lot of people think of when they think of dwarves: weird, psychotic, atheistic serial-killers. Usually it happens to dwarves who have been exiled, but every so often, for whatever reason, the charms don't quite work.

And that's why dwarves are crazy.