Monday, February 27, 2012

Traveller: World Tags, An Introduction...

Good Afternoon, All:

If you've ever taken the time to look through Stars Without Number by Sine Nomine Publishing, you have probably considered applying the concept of World Tags to your own Traveller campaign. These tags are similar to trade codes, and provide a number of suggested elements to inspire adventures and flavor elements. After a brief description, each world tag suggests 3-4 adventure items in each of five different categories: Enemies, Friends, Complications, Things and Places. As you can see, these are fantastic for the Referee running his or her campaign in a sandbox style.

There's a number of existing world tags in Stars Without Number that already apply to Traveller trade codes, of course, but there are still many more that need to be addressed. For your reference, the following table captures my thoughts on how Stars Without Number world tags relate to Traveller trade codes. Empty cells indicate that no appropriate world tag exists for a given trade code.

Traveller Trade CodesStars Without Number World Tags
Agricultural 
AsteroidHeavy Mining
BarrenTomb World
DesertDesert World
Fluid Oceans  ;
Garden 
High Population 
High TechnologyFlying Cities, Major Spaceyard
Ice-Capped 
IndustrialHeavy Industry
Low PopulationOutpost World
Low TechnologyPrimitive Aliens
Non-Agricultural 
Non-Industrial 
Poor 
Rich 
Water WorldOceanic World, Seagoing Cities
VacuumBubble Cities

Obviously, upon review, trade codes aren't adequately covered by world tags, and so there would need to be quite a few generated to cover the bases. In order to capture the flavor of Traveller, particularly that of the Azri Drakara setting, I'm going to explore the concept of creating "world tags" for Traveller worlds.

World tags are not open gaming content, and as such, they cannot appear in any published work in the original format (due to trade dress issues) or using the text found in Stars Without Number (due to copyright issues). For my purposes, I will provide suggestions in the following categories: Allies/Contacts, Rivals/Enemies, Targets, Locales, and Challenges. It covers the same range of information, but is distinct enough to avoid trade dress and copyright issues. The work I'll create here is inspired by Stars Without Number, but I just want to avoid any legal issues that might come about in pursuit of this goal.

Looking Forward To It,
Flynn

1 comment:

Sine Nomine said...

In truth, I'd consider anything that doesn't actually lift the text of my world tags to be fair going. I'm certainly not the one who came up with the idea of thumbnailing a world with a few quick phrases. Feel free to go ahead and brew up anything that looks fun for you.