Why the Astral Web is "Fake" & "Flat"

Last week I mentioned that I had hoped that a community would form around the Astral Web, but it never generated any interest. What I didn't mention is that a few people did email me. In my eagerness to build a community I felt that I had to incorporate all their ideas into the project, and that was a critical mistake.

One comment was something like “Why are there no aliens? I find that games without aliens are just about human issues in space.” This guy felt that we needed a multi-species society, so I spent time developing some more alien races.¹ They weren’t bad², but they changed the feel of the setting.

Another comment was “Why are you using a made up map? You can just use the Gliese Catalogue.” I set out to redo the map to match the real universe’s stars. This destroyed the setting.

I pointed out before that too much “color” is bad for a game. The flip side of the coin is also true: too much realism is bad for a game. Indeed, there is a common sentiment amongst gamers about the futility of arguing about realism in a game where your wizard is attacking a dragon.

Reason #1: Space is Big

According to the Gliese Catalogue, there are over 3,500 stars within 25 parsecs of Earth. I don’t want the “universe” to be that big. I have several reason for this:

• It’s too unwieldy.
• It’s too much information for GMs to keep track of.
• It’s too much for me to write.
• It makes the “this is the only planet with eludium on it” plot device less believable.

For these reasons, I think it is best to abandon the real stars and go back to using a few handfuls of made up ones.

Reason #2: Paper is Flat

Space exists in three dimensions, but the printed page is only two. This isn’t insurmountable. Gamers far smarter than I came up with three dimensional star maps long ago. They tend to look something like this:

A sample "3D" map showing three planets

The numbers in parenthesis represent how far above or below the star is from the “galactic plane.” In the sample above, the star Pinto is 2 parsecs³ below the galactic plane, and the star Badger is 4 parsecs above the galactic plane.

But what if there was another star at the same X and Y coordinates as Badger, but located 2 parsecs beneath it? I can think of several ways to display that on the map, but things get messy.

Reason #3: Too Much Math

In space games you often need to worry about how much fuel it takes to move from system to system. Typically, the further apart two worlds are, the more fuel it will take.

Using the original Astral Web mapping technique (shown in last week’s post), the distance is simply the number of jumps it takes to get from World A to World B (with each connecting line being a single jump).

Using the three dimensional map above, the distance is calculated using math:

So, if the players are at Mongold (coordinates +1, -2, -3) and want to travel to Pinto (coordinates +1, -1, -2), but only have 4 parsecs of fuel, can they make it? To find out, they have to perform to following:

So from Mongold to Pinto is 3.74 parsecs. They can make it. But, in my opinion, it took too much work to figure that out. Worse yet, imagine the situation where the players didn’t have enough fuel to make the trip, so they have to pick another destination and recalculate.

I don’t think a gaming session should resemble geometry homework.

Reason #4: Counter-Intuitive Maps

You might argue that the players would just look at the map and pick a closer destination. In the map above, Mongold and Pinto are shown far apart, but Badger is shown right next to Mongold. But let’s do the Mongold to Badger math:

So Mongold to Badger is 7.07 parsecs.

On the map, the Pinto "dot" is 3.6 times further away from the Mongold "dot" than the Badger "dot" is, yet the Badger system is almost twice as far.  If you can’t look at a map a determine the distance easily, is the map really useful?

Summary

For those reasons I like the original Astral Web system better. It’s not nearly as realistic, but for my gaming style it is way more playable.

With a sufficient in-game rationale (that I’ll share in a future post), the lack of realism can be hand-waved. It won’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, but it will be enough to make the game universe internally consistent and let the players suspend disbelief.

That’s my hope at least. What do you think?

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1. The Astral Web has always had an alien species called the Miltrani, but they were shadowy foes from history and a spooky threat for the future.↩

2. I particularly liked the Arth–my race of noble warriors who are physically weak and brittle.↩

3. I’m using parsecs for these examples. It could be light years, sectors, megaflumps, or whatever.↩

Travelling The Astral Web

Back in the mid-1990’s, I developed a campaign setting for space opera¹ type campaigns. My hope was to attract a community that would be interested in co-developing the setting under an open license. That part never happened.

While the map is long lost, I recently came across a bundle of my old notes for the campaign.

I thought it would be interesting to spend the next few weeks posting the surviving information here.

The setting is (was?) called The Astral Web. The name came from the way that the map works.

The map uses the ubiquitous hex graph, but instead of using the hex-shaped spaces it uses the lines. Where each group of three lines meet, that is a node of space that may (or may not) contain a star system. Ships travel from system to system along the lines. In my mind, this was much like a spider crawling its web.

Let me show you how it works:

Using the diagram above, imagine, if you will, that you're in a starship located in the “B” system. There are three nexus lines that leave that system (and, for that matter, every other system or area of space). If you were to activate your Nexus Drive with no polarity set (i.e. no vertical bias), then you would emerge in the “C” system. If, instead, you had your polarity set to negative (“-”), then you would emerge in the “D” sector. If your polarity had been positive (“+”), then you would have emerged in space at the “A” system.

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1. That’s “space opera” the science fiction sub-genre that Star Trek and Star Wars both belong to, not Space Opera the poorly named RPG.↩

Creation Myth: A Campaign Setting for Unlucky 13

Right now I'm in Alaska on a belated honeymoon, tapping out this blog post on my phone, surrounded by breathtaking views. Let me snap a quick picture as I write:

The unspoiled nature of this place got me thinking of a primitive game setting. I think I posted before about running a stone age setting but what if we go further back. 

How far back?

All the way.

The game would start with the creation of humankind. Each player would be created by a different Olympian type god. The party would be the first humans. 

Each character would be the head of a tiny tribe. Originally I was thinking about using D&D rules, and the tribe size would be based on the character's charisma score. Switching to U13, I'm not sure how I'll handle it.

The player characters will have no technology. No stone tools. No knowledge of farming or ranching. 

It's not fully formed yet. Just an idea.

Knoll of the Dead: The Map

 You may be wondering "Why hasn't there been a post for nearly a month?"

I've been working on one, but it's a long post, and I've been having trouble finishing it.  It dawned on me that I should just break it down into smaller pieces and make it a series.

This series of posts was requested by the players of Teena and Zyier. They wanted to see what they missed, so to speak.

The Map

I normally don't like to share my maps on here, because I like to reuse them and I'm afraid that my players will find the blog. But I specifically made this map as a one-shot disposable tutorial.  It's good for teaching the game, but not one I'm likely to use for any other purpose.

The map is the traditional 1 square = 10 feet. Because it is a thorny hedgerow rather than a building, there are no doors. The corners are probably not as sharp as shown on the map.

The party entered on the passage to the left (west) of the map.  When they reach the four way intersection they turned to their left (north). They followed that passage as it turned again to the east until they hit the four way intersection that leads to room 4.  At that intersection they turned to the north and ended up leaving the hedge.

They traveled outside the knoll going east the south, and re-entered through the eastern passage (on the right hand side of the map).  It was at the first three-way intersection where they lit the fire.

To Be Continued...

That's it for this week. Next week we'll start looking at the details.