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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 6061734" data-attributes="member: 55680">Was just looking at the sci-fi mapsets for hexographer and I've been thinking of maybe doing a sci-fi spinoff of this thread for an old school sci-fi Traveler-type setting. This wouldn't happen for a while (few months?) but I've had so much fun with this thread that I thought it might be fun to give the sci-fi half of my brain a bit of workout as well.However, unlike with fantasy you really have to set up some ground rules about basic physics since that can't be quite as inconsistent as magic.Some random thoughts to making a sci-fi setting that's as game-able as possible.-A long time ago scientists figured out that the sun was getting ready to go nova way ahead of schedule. People were upset about this and built lots of massive generation ships (slower than light) to get people away from Earth before the sun went boom. These scattered to anything that looked like it might be habitable within range of the solar system.-The sun goes boom. Poor bastards who got left behind die. Maybe some survivors in the outer solar system.-The generation ships keep on trucking and human culture goes weird in a lot of them. Some establish human civilization on other worlds, many die, many go feral.-Some smart guy figures out FTL tech. It works by going through "wormholes" that link solar systems. Some wormholes are really big and can fit an entire fleet going through at once but most are small enough to not be useful or to only let through a small tramp steamer in space. The bigger ones are very stable, the smaller ones are less stable and the really tiny ones can land you on the other end of the galaxy for all you know. All but the biggest only let through one ship at a time so they make good defensive/toll collecting bottlenecks.-The early adopters of the FTL tech spread out pretty quickly across the big wormhole lines met up with the human cultures they'd been out of contact with (not having FTL travel made contact very hard). They dominated the wormhole network, sometimes conquering, sometimes just camping the wormhole gates with battle station and collect tolls and generally acting like big jerks.-However there's loopholes in the dominion of the big jerkass powers. Some small powers were able to defend their wormhole links and are hard to conquer since the wormholes are choke points (but if you get enough spies...) and there are small craft all over the place going through the small worm holes and acting as pirates, smugglers, traders looking for shortcuts, prospectors, and explorers looking for lost human planets, weird alien races or whatever weird stuff is at the other end of some uncharted wormhole. The smaller wormholes shifting around a lot makes this dangerous but potentially very profitable (the other end could have a space monster or a major commercial center willing to buy your good for ten times what you paid for them). Those guys in the little ships would be the PCs.-No real thoughts on aliens, but weird-ass alien artifacts would be a given.-Tech levels would be VERY uneven and there could be a lot of weird-ass tech on specific worlds that hasn't spread since the unreliable wormhole network and the jerkasses dominating it would often make it hard for tech to spread. -Lingua franca is youtube comment/twitter style ungrammatical abomination version of English.-Would the hex map show relation in actually space or relative locations on the wormhole network? I think the later would be easier. Throw in some handwavium about how sun-light stars get more wormholes so we don't have to put in a gazillion "nope nothing interesting here, just a bit star" systems and not have to worry about if the distribution of planets is realistic since people only care about planets they can get to via wormhole and those aren't representative of the average mix of solar systems because of *handwave*Thoughts?</blockquote>

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