Ready Player One as a Role Playing Game setting

[Thomas Bowman]

What if we wanted to do a paper version of the Oasis in Ready Player One? I've read the book and it seems to me that much of it was based on Dungeons & Dragons, in that avatars have hit points and an armor class and like the 1st and 2nd editions, if they collected coins they gained experience points, and if they slayed a creature worth experience points they would turn into coins. So I suspect that players can either spend their money on the basis of one gold piece per experience point, or they could buy equipment instead. There are two levels to this setting, there is the "Real World" which we could represent by using d20 Modern and the Oasis, which we could represent by using Dungeons & Dragons. So each player would roll up two character sheets, one for his "Real World" character and the other one for that character's Avatar in the Oasis.

Now I read the book, and it appears the Oasis is in the shape of Rubic's Cube, which is a 3 by 3 by 3 cube with 27 sectors. Each sector has a bunch of planets in it, and these planets represent various settings. For example, one sector has all the planets that ever appears in all the Star Wars movies and novels. Another Sector has a bunch of fantasy planets for Dungeons and Dragons and perhaps Lord of the Rings as well. There are Post Apocalyptic settings in another sector, and yet another sector has a world with superheroes in it. and so forth.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

The Tomb of Horrors is featured in the book, and I found a conversion of the Tomb to 3rd edition
http://www.ekkaia.org/rpg/dnd/tomb_of_horrors.pdf
You still need the original module to use these conversions.

One main difference is when your character kills something that is worth experience points, its body turns into gold coins equal to its experience point value to defeat, the character then gathers the coins and decides whether to "spend" them to increase his experience points or whether to use them to buy equipment. Purchases of equipment can only occur in certain areas such as stores, while experience points can be "bought" immediately.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Here is a map of the Oasis according to the book. There are 27 sectors, each sector is a cube 10 light hours on a side. I am dividing each sector into 1000 subsectors, each one 1 light hour on the side. Since it is a top down map of the subsectors I am only showing 1 box per 10 subsectors. Each subsector can contain one world orbiting one Sun. On the map, if you want to add a world, just add the third digit to the right of the first two to indicate vertical displacement, the numbers should be from 0 to 9. This would allow up to 100 worlds per sector, which is a good start.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

This is my first completed Sector, Sector 2, also called "NASA's Solar System Orrery" NASA bought the right to develop this sector, to create a virtual reality simulation of the Solar System. This sector consists of a single region where both magic and technology work. the Earth is presented in its natural state, without cities, roads or buildings. The ecliptic is all located 5 light hours from the top of each subsector, at about the halfway point from top to bottom of the entire sector. Above and below that are comets and asteroids, not much of anything.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Sector 3 is the Traveller RPG sector. In this sector are some worlds from the Solomani Rim setting, each system is truncated, with most being one subsector across (1 light hour) with just enough room for the habitable zone where the Mainworld orbits, and for a gas giant if the system is supposed to have one. The NPCs have recently been upgraded with true AI software, and the characters have fake memories of their prior lives in the fictional Solomani Rim, they woke up one day to find that the systems have been rearranged, their Jump Drives are now light speed drives, which still require their ships to be more than 100 diameters from a planet before it would activate. In turns out the simulation continues even when it is closed to player characters on Tuesdays and Thurdays, but it turns out every other day of the week the NPCs are visited by all sorts of Avatars some with magic powers some with equipment the NPCs never heard of. Each square is 1 light hour on a side, and it turns out the NPCS can travel to the neighboring systems and even outside of their sector with their ship's maneuver drive. Most NPCs can't explain why they avatars can suddenly appear and disappear without warning. It seems to them that their Universe has gone crazy!
The Avatars like to shoot em up with seemingly almost total disregard for their own self-preservation. Some of the Avatars when killed, reappear sometime later without their equipment. The NPCs also can't explain why whenever someone gets killed they turn into a pile of gold pieces. The Universe is not making a lot of sense to them.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

This is Sector 4 Dungeons & Dragons Realmspace, the home of the D&D world Toril, this is a sector where Technology and Magic exist. Within the atmosphere's of each planet, there is a null field preventing the operation of technological devices greater than at the Renaissance level. Chemical explosives other than prepared by alchemists and specifically magicked do not work here, neither to electronic devices of any kind within the simulation. There are spells which will negate these effects of course and allow the operation of these devices on a case by case basis. For example a wish spell can allow a specific device, such as a machine gun for example to operate within this field, otherwise it will not. This System is surrounded by a crystal sphere. The area outside this shell within the sector is dominated by a gaseous nebula called the Phlogiston made of glowing gases. The only way through this crystal shell is through circular portals, which appear from any of the planet's surface within to be stars. The phlogiston tends to explode whenever an energy discharge occurs, such as a spark, or a laser cannon from a ship is fired Reactionless maneuver drives can operate fairly safely within the phlogiston however.

 

[Morrus]

You have stars 10 light hours from each other?

 

[Thomas Bowman]

This is recreating the setting from the fictional movie and book Ready Player One, these worlds exist on a Computer simulation called Oasis. According to the novel the Oasis is arranged like a Rubics Cube. In other words it is composed of 27 cubes arranged in a 3 x 3 x 3 cube. The Oasis as a whole is 30 light hours across, Each cube of the Rubiks cube is 10 light hours on a side and those are called sectors. In the movie, much of the action occurs in Sector 12, which is the sector in which the planet Doom is located. Doom is a first person shooter game, so I guess that World is based on that computer game. In the Traveller sector 3, I couldn't include every world, but the game tends to focus on mainworlds, so a one-hour subsector is a large enough space to fit an inner system which includes a mainworld, its sun and a bunch of inner planets. The Worlds from Traveller come from the Solomani Rim area near Terra, which is there version of Earth. I rearranged them in a three dimensional space in this instance. All the spaces are contiguous, so you don't need a special fictional faster than light drive to travel from one sector to the next. The faster than light drives in each setting default to a light speed drive, which take 1 hour per light hour to travel. To get someplace faster, you can use a teleportation portal which gets you there instantly. Every world in the Oasis has a teleportation portal, you pay money in Oasis credits to be teleported from where your Avatar is to anywhere else in the Oasis. There are also teleportation spells as well, if your avatar can use magic. Sector 1 is where the world Incipio is located, where all avatars are created. When a character first creates his avatar, it starts out on the planet Incipio, there are a bunch of online shops there. One can use real money to buy Oasis credits and purchase virtual items in the setting with those.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

This is Sector 5, the Star Wars Sector, it contains canonical Star Wars planets and moons, but not complete systems. each subsector is its own separate world, and subsectors are cubes 1 light hour on the side by the way, that is enough to fit our Solar System from the Sun out to the asteroid belt.

I had to split the sector cube into two halves to accommodate all the planets and moons I had to chart.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

This is the Time Travel sector, this has 1000 time zones in it, every subsector is filled with an inner Solar System out to the asteroid belt, this comes in five parts, 6a, 6b, 6c, 6d, and 6e, this fills out a cube 10 light hours in width breadth, and depth. The time periods are in chronological order from left to right, top to bottom and from layers 0 to 9. The initials MYA stand for "million years ago", the initials YA stand for "years ago", BC and AD are used for the near prehistoric and historic time periods. Interesting time periods, such as during important wars are also broken up into months. Here they are: