Working on Traveller

We ended the most recent game in my Star Clans Traveller campaign with the party split.  The characters of the players who couldn't attend had remained in Star City, on their homeworld, Arden.  One character was in prison, awaiting transport to the mines of Tralnor for fifteen years of hard labor.  The rest of the party was in their starship, newly christened the "Arianwyn," in the middle of a jump from Tralnor to Arden.  I make the player who is piloting roll to see what happens, and this time it indicated a misjump.  As they entered hyperspace, I told them the engines didn't sound right, and at the end of the week, when they should have dropped out of hyperspace into the Ardeni system, nothing happened... they remained in hyperspace.  That was the last thing I told them as we ended the session.

During our next game, they'll have to determine where they are, and plot a course home.  Well, that's what they'll do if they want to regroup with the other player characters.

I rolled the dice for the misjump, and they got lucky, when they drop out of hyperspace, they'll actually be in a star system rather than an empty hex!  I have some work to do now, since the misjump takes them beyond the few worlds they've explored, and in fact out of their subsector altogether!  Luckily for me, I had started jotting down the history of the sector (the entire campaign, actually) over a year ago, before we started playing.  Between these initial thoughts, and the random world tags I can generate using the Stars Without Numbers rules for all the worlds between their new location and home, I can be ready to ad lib a game in just three or four hours.  Of course, that work will just add to the Rasu Sector Encyclopedia I'm compiling, and make future games even easier to plan for.

I had originally used a small database to record sector data, including system locations, universal planetary profile data, and my notes.  More recently, I just used a text file and the Star Clans blog itself.  It occurred to me that I could use the database again, keeping my own notes in one data field, and Ardeni Information Services (AIS) library data in another.  This would let me show both data fields on one form so I could cross reference them, and it would allow me to generate reports based on either the AIS library data, or my own notes.  I'll let you know how it goes.