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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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.↩
That's a really interesting approach! I really like the map, and the way to decide where you're going is very interesting!
ReplyDeleteI could see this being a very fun format for players to map out where they've been.