Star Clans - Next Stop

Been thinking about my Star Clans campaign, but not writing anything down.  The other night I figured out where the party will drop out of hyperspace at the end of their misjump.  Tonight I looked at what I had for the world:  BA69774-A, no original native life before The Blight, and the world tags:  Psionics Academy and Trade Hub.

A class B starport is capable of producing non-starships, so even though the tech level is A, I decided they haven't, so far, been able to recreate the jump drive.  With a balkanized system and the world tags I rolled, I've decided the system had been a trade hub before the collapse, especially given it's location in the sector and the worlds around it.  The entire system will be inhabited, with colonies in orbit around the gas giants, belters mining the asteroid belts, and a home world of several nations.  I'm also going to include not just humans, but two other races from the home galaxy (to be determined, but I'm leaning toward Vargr and Newt) and two native races as well, which I'll have to create.

After I settle on the home galaxy races, and design the two local races, I'll figure out a rough culture based on their past as a trade hub... but I think I'll include some sort of accords that determine what information is shared (raw stellar data, for instance) and which is jealously guarded (technology and engineering) which will help to explain why they've made tech level A without developing the jump drive.

This will percolate overnight, and by tomorrow evening I should know much more about this system.

Pure Awesometivity!

In a display of pure Awesometivity, the Universe has conspired to affect my Star Clans campaign setting in what we Neo-Anticoincidentalists call a "Well, Duh!" moment.  I mentioned yesterday that the World Tags I randomly generated for 37 of the worlds in Kapu Subsector included this set:  "Zombies, Bubble Cities."

As it turns out, I had a few notes for a several more worlds than I remembered... and when I reviewed them this evening to start work, I saw that one of the worlds had this UPP:  E-100999-7.  The UPP shows a tiny worldlet with no free liquid water or atmosphere, but with a population in the hundreds of millions.

Among my notes about the planet and it's repressive regime, notes written around 14 July 2012, I found mention of "bubble cities"...... Bubble cities?  WAIT!  Check the sector data file... Yep!  "Zombies, Bubble Cities"... same planet!

Now... I could increase the size of the world, add water and air, and have bubble cities designed purely to prevent the disease-ridden "undead" from infecting the living... or I could go with the original world, and have both active bubble cities and destroyed bubble cities, where the government hides the zombie plague under the guise of dealing with terrorists...

I'll have to steer the players away from this world during Sunday night's game, it deserves a much more in-depth workup than I usually do for first time visits, and unless it all comes to me overnight (which is certainly possible, given the pure Awesometivity of the whole thing!) I won't be ready.

Back to Star Clans

Pulled up my copy of the free .pdf version of Stars Without Number this evening, because I'll be running my Star Clans game Sunday evening, and I wanted to give World Tags a try.  For those not familiar, world tags are simple descriptives of one or two words that can either be chosen or randomly determined and that are used to generate ideas for adventures.  In Kevin Crawford's more eloquent words, "Tags are brief conceptual tropes that set the world off from planets of otherwise similar population and characteristics."  Yeah, what HE said.

Kapu Subsector contains 44 worlds... and I already had notes on 7 of them.  I ended up generating tags for 37 worlds, and will read them over a couple of times before I go to sleep tonight.  Tomorrow, I'll have a pretty good idea how those tags intersect the background story of the sector that I decided on last year, and I'll jot down notes on the 10 or 15 closest to Arden, the player characters' home world.

The recommendation is to note enemies, friends, complications, things and places, and the booklet gives a short paragraph description of each tag, as well as examples of each of the five points for each tag.  Further, it's recommended you choose 2 tags per world; one is two flat, three or more just lead to confusion.  In my case, I stuck with two per world, and I got such gems as, "Restrictive Laws, Freak Weather," "Major Spaceyard, Warlords," "Forbidden Tech, Unbraked AI," "Area 51, Theocracy," and the one my players may like best, "Zombies, Bubble Cities."

Can't wait to see what percolates overnight!