Full Parsec Five - A Minimal d6 / Miso-Six setting
But what if, we speculated, you did not start with a new living character? What if rolling death merely changed the focus of the game? A series of adventures with undead astronauts in a dark secondary universe took place?
We were both intrigued by the idea, but (to me at least) it seemed like the sort of thing that could take a lot of work and an entire setting to flesh out. And, at the time, due to other commitments, didn't find much time to pursue it further.
But every now and then I'd jot down a couple notes about the sort of elements one might find in such a basement-universe setting. The results gradually became influenced probably less by Traveller and more other favorite space opera and transdimensional mayhem: Planescape, Spelljammer, Dragonstar, White Wolf's Void Engineers, the Martian Chronicles, the short stories In the Walls of Eryx and George R.R. Martin's Stone City. Even started a document cataloging ideas along the same lines.
Ultimately though, even that was turning into a larger project than I felt I could handle at the moment, and other settings kept trying to distract me from it. So, since things are a bit hectic here these days, I finally settled for piecing together a quick sketch of a game in Minimal d6 / Miso-Six format. The result was Full Parsec Five which you can find below:
Immediately upon thinking of this idea, two challenges that occurred to me. The first was that I would need to either (a) learn how to play Traveller, or (b) figure out a way to jerry-rig Traveller-style char-gen onto the front end of a game I already know.
ReplyDeleteThe second challenge was, you know, actually writing (or borrowing) some adventures. I think your inspirational material is exactly right. The fun of this idea is to take extremely prosaic, hard-science astronauts, kill them, and throw their ghosts into ultra-weird science-fantasy adventures. The juxtaposition between the characters lives up until this point (as represented in the life-path tables that create them) and the environment they now find themselves in is part of the fun, like an old Twilight Zone episode, or Stalislaw Lem's "realistic" novels.
The only Lem book I read was Pilot Pirx, so I'm not too familiar with his other stuff and can't comment on that aspect. But in all other regards I completely agree with you. Especially that I'd personally need for better familiarity with Traveller's mechanics to actually take that route. (I know the Cepheus Engine is available, but still a bunch to incorporate.). I thought of fitting it to some other more familiar system, but the way Minimal d6 sort of gestalts the setting based on a few broad strokes seemed like a really great way to go in this case.
DeleteStill thinking maybe another supplement or two could be added to this with more fleshed out ideas. Like mix-and-match locations, NPCs, situations, and other hooks. Maybe another supplement giving a more solid guide to common technologies, factions and goals.