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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Korgoth" data-source="post: 5381537" data-attributes="member: 49613">The Third Imperium is a ton of fun as a setting, since it strikes a nice balance between having the Big Picture background filled out for you (to be gleaned from reading the Library Data entries and the like), and giving you plenty of room for whatever you want to do with the details (since the Imperium rules not the individual planets but the space between them... so you can have a Totalitarian Dictatorship planet, a Hippie Planet and a Balkanized Eternal Warfare planet... the only thing the Imperium cares about is whether they pay their taxes, allow reservists to be called up, and don't break any Imperial property at the starport). You have plenty of room for virtually any story.And since the Imperium is based on an Age of Sail information model (there's no FTL communication, only FTL travel via Jump drives... so the mail moves only at the speed of the fastest ship, and no faster), whole conflicts and wars can take place without the Emperor ever knowing (at least until after the fact). Thus the Sector Dukes and so on. Plus, since it is so enormous and outlying worlds so inefficient to patrol, you can even have exploration missions... "The Scout Service wants you to re-survey the Tricana system and see if anything has changed in the last 400 years. Also, please deliver to the mainworld, Tricana IV, this bill for back taxes. That is, if any habitation persists. Hail the Emperor!"That being said, I also played around with making my own setting. The Terran Combine is a "small ship" setting, using only up to 5kton displacement hulls (i.e., only the rules in the original LBBs). No spinal weaponry, meson guns, etc. Just lasers and nukular missels. It is one mostly randomly-generated subsector, with Terra at the center. No aliens, no super tech, nothing like that. The Combine is a totalitarian but fairly benevolent polity that exists in the wake of a military coup against an ineffective Republic. There are a couple of independent clusters, but mostly the Terran Combine rules with an iron fist.A recent one-shot in that setting had an amusing ending. After attempting to recover a contraband cargo from an asteroid field (the cargo being left over from the civil war), the PCs were bushwacked by space pirates, whom they defeated (one of the characters, a former Combine Marine, had a Cutlass skill of 4 (!) and was basically Duncan Idaho in melee). In time the Combine Navy showed up in a fast patrol ship that would easily catch their freighter. They were in a state of panic until they realized that they had not yet harvested the cargo... in fact, they had only broken a few minor laws, but had actually killed a bunch of pirates! So they played on the bloodthirsty attitude of the Combine Navy and got off easy. It was funny seeing them have the epiphany that if you just killed half a dozen outlaws, you don't necessarily have to run from the fascist cops. If you can convince them that you're just harmless salvage scroungers, they might actually clap you on the shoulder and give you an "attaboy!"</blockquote>

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