I mentioned in yesterday's post about my favorite science fiction roleplaying game map that Traveller's star maps are two-dimensional and that that's long been an issue for some fans of the game (though it mostly doesn't bother me). In the comments to that post, several readers mentioned the three-dimensional star maps included in GDW's 2300AD (né Traveller: 2300) and SPI's Universe. Here's the Near Star Map from the former, which covers a volume of space within 50 light years of our solar system:
Much as I loved that map, though, my absolute favorite 3D star map came from SPI's Universe:
This map included far fewer star systems and covered only a volume of about 30 light years from Earth. However, I probably spent far more time poring over this map than 2300AD's. The reason for this is quite simple: I encountered the Universe map first, making it perhaps the first three-dimensional star map I'd ever seen. Unlike 2300AD, I never actually played Universe, but I read the one-volume, softcover edition of the game released by Bantam Books cover to cover multiple times. The pull-out star map left a lasting impression on my thirteen-year-old self.
I love the idea of using a properly three-dimensional star map in a science fiction roleplaying game. Nowadays, the availability of much better astronomical data and personal computers with useful software, employing 3D maps is probably easier than it's ever been. Despite that, I've never refereed or played in a long-running SF RPG campaign that made use of them. I don't know why that is or if it's likely to change anytime soon. I have very vague ideas of following up my ongoing Twilight: 2000 campaign with a 2300AD one, but that's still some years in the future, if ever.
Has anyone reading this made a good use of three-dimensional star maps in their roleplaying games?
I have used a 3D seller dataset for a number of years in a solo Cepheus Engine campaign. I put the data in a database and built a web front end that made it easy to determine the distances between the stars. It really does make things feel more realistic when you can deal with stars that you could (theoretically) look up and see.
ReplyDeleteNot a 3D Star map, but a guy made a 3D Traveller world viewer: https://morfyddjames.github.io/index.html
ReplyDeleteThe Evil Dr. Ganymede was working on something like that: http://evildrganymede.net/wp/rpgs/stellar-mapping/
ReplyDeleteI have used real star maps when setting up games; but their being in 3D has turned out to not matter that much to game play.
ReplyDeleteThe action of the games concerned has been largely restricted to planets.
So once "it takes this long to communicate between planets", "a starship can fly this route in this many years", etc. are established the star map can be collapsed down to a simple graph.
Yea, that's where I sort of started to realize with a 3-D star set I was trying to set up for a campaign. Based on another gamer's star ship technology for Traveller, the maximum jump range was 30 parsecs (he chose that so that things like the Pleiades were possible to get to, and I think also a bit to allow a decent selection of habitable stars). One problem I found with that is that main sequence G stars are not bright enough to show up with much density that far out. So the system I was using to set up habitable worlds was inventing stars to the point where beyond the near stars, few real stars were actually used.
DeleteMy "map" for this was actually a list of stars and the nearby stars that could be reached from there.
But "terrain" also stopped mattering. In theory, ANY star could be used as a jump point, which means that each world has to stand on its own. It can't depend on enemies having to come through a choke point.
And then the more and more I thought about "reality" the more and more I became disillusioned with the whole premise of Traveller trade and travel.
And so I dumped all of that and went back to Book 3 and started to roll up a 2D sub-sector. And dumped my friend's attempt at a more "realistic" star ship generation and just used Book 2 ships...
For the games I was running; that things move around in space also mattered. But there again it was not necessary for gameplay to have the full 3D map all the time - I just had a game calendar with things like "you can't send a message to Earth during these 3 days" and "this is when the planets pass through conjunction".
DeleteInventorying our stellar neighborhood has made leaps and bounds since the 80s. But it's still a limitation in trying to use real-world astrography for an interstellar RPG game: the bigger the setting you want to use, the thinner and more slanted (toward just-the-bright-stars) the map gets. So you find yourself working around that by, say, stipulating that FTL is still pretty slow, or really expensive, so that those vague/patchy regions haven't been reached yet; or that the FTL device has _just_ been discovered and nobody has had a chance to get out to the speculative bits yet (etc.)
DeleteYep, so it's a juggle, do you do nearby stars only so the data is thick and probably includes all the stars except maybe for brown dwarfs but not feature some of our favorite stars (because they are bright stars much farther away) or do you include a larger volume that then, as we both pointed out, is biased very heavy towards large bright stars.
DeleteIt is neat though to use real star data.
Whereas I had a happy couple of evenings trying to 'flatten' 2300AD's known space onto a Traveller subsector map. It worked, albeit with some selective editing.
ReplyDeleteI combined the CT "Sky Raiders" trilogy with a 2300-derived setting and ran different versions of it a few times -- also briefly tried to do a "play-by-wiki" version of it (http://travsr.wikidot.com/) years back. "Indiana Jones and Han Solo's three-booklet love child" we called it. And, to be slightly on-topic, we did use 3D star maps with software visualization and it worked like a charm.
ReplyDeleteI wrote about my own experiences with SPI's Universe in an old blog post, here: https://www.jamescambias.com/blog/2017/06/island-of-lost-games-universe.html
ReplyDeleteNo, not really.
ReplyDeleteOur games of 2300 AD turned out as kind of Twilight 2000 in Spaaaace, we just replaced Poland with Aurore and the Soviets with the Kafer.
As for the other SF games we played (Traveller, Spacemaster and a bunch of Cyberpunk games) the tridimensionality of space never came up as an important issue.
I've never used a proper 3D map like the ones shown here (not even when playing T2300), but one of my old groups got quite a lot of mileage out of cribbing the "hex-spiral-in-a-hex" mapping technique seen in Metagaming's Godsfire and Holy War wargames (both by Lynn Willis) to make 3D Traveller maps. If you haven't seen them, I strongly advise a look at their BGG listings to see what I'm talking about.
ReplyDeletehttps://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2503/godsfire
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3160/holy-war
We found the seven-level hexes of Holy War more practical (and readable) for subsector maps than the eleven-level versions from Godsfire. Given the low jump ranges of most PC vessels a seven-hex "thick" slice of the galaxy was usually good enough for us, but of course you can stack any of those cells into columns easily enough if you want even more depth.
Weirdly, I've never run into anyone else who did this trick, which in hindsight seems such an easy and obvious way to add a third dimension to Traveller flatspace without really overcomplicating the visuals.
Then again, that group did play a LOT of Lynn Willis' games, and the Holy War map in particular was very familiar territory for us. He's probably better known for his work on Call of Cthulhu and long, long career at Chaosium than he is for his wargames, but he's still a grossly underappreciated designer IMO, and sorely missed.
I didn't actually use the Holy War method in a Traveller game, but it's the first thing that came to mind when the subject of usable 3D star maps came up.
DeleteNot surprising for those who are familiar with the game. I think the seven-layer cell hits a cognitive sweet spot for most people - when you try to go to eleven like Godsfire did it winds up looking muddled and being harder to see adjacencies at a glance. I'm sure modern printing techniques could make improvements to Willis' idea, but it's fundamentally soud and I'm surprised it hasn't been used more widely rather than being largely forgotten.
DeleteTo be fair, SPI's Worldkiller took a similar approach the next year in 1980, using seven-layer squares instead of hexes. IME the hexes were much more player-friendly, but the squares were good for teaching Pythagorean math, if nothing else. Rather liked that game, even if teh balance seemed iffy. Probably a bias due to the striking Howard Chaykin artwork - he wasn't the huge name he'd become in comics at that point, but SPI still scored a win when they hired him.
I actually took a 6ft felt space battlemat and used a silver pen to mark the 3D pattern on every hex. Never wound up using it. Might still be in the garage!
DeleteI once ran a campaign using the starmap from the SPI wargame Starforce Alpha Centauri as a base. It worked quite well, but it helped I think that the map only had around six dozen star system on it.
ReplyDeleteThat's another solid option from wargames past. I used the mapping system from Holy War/Godsfire to make 3D subsector maps myself, and SPI's Worldkiller did something similar albeit with layered squares instead of hexes.
DeleteSPI was unusually conscious of 3D elements for their day. Between some of their air combat rules, Battlefleet Mars and Vector 3 they definitely thought less "flat" than many companies.
I played one game of Traveller and one of Traveller 2300. Both as a player and I don't remember the rules at all. Any comment on which rule set is best, and why?
ReplyDeleteI’m fine with a 3-d star map; 2300 did it well. However, it’s probably only feasible on a small scale: 30 or 50 light years in diameter. To do something like the Spinward Marches in three dimensions would be cumbersome to a level that would likely be unenjoyable, to put it mildly.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I’m a big believer in playability vs “realism”. We’re engaging in game play for the sake of fun, not trying to create some astronomical simulation. A two dimensional star map, while silly at face value, makes for clean, easy, playable fun.
Hulks and Horrors has an interesting stellar map style that I’m using for Traveller that is 2D but “feels” 3D.
ReplyDelete