"No love for the Perilous Void?" - Sully
Actually, I'd forgotten I had it! So let's take a quick look at Hollis under that rules system. Turn with me to World Creation (Perilous Void p. 46) and let's work through that...
As a reminder, we're trying to match Hollis; A370642-C NS De Ni GG CsIm, and we have accepted the possibly canon statements from Traveller Wiki that Hollis has a high temperature, that water has to be imported and extensively recycled, and the locals speak both Anglic and Vilani, the two Imperial languages.
World Creation
Right away I get problems, because I already know I want complex life, but Hollis is a desert world. So I need to work backwards from whichever climate table will give me those; as is often the way, it's harder to match existing parameters than it is to just roll dice. The best I can do is to assume I rolled a mixed world type on the Temperate World table and give the place a mixture of Earthlike and Arid features, but it doesn't feel right.
The Perilous Void tables are more variable than the other games I've looked at, so I've tended to pick the most likely outcomes.
Position: Near. This is the most likely to give me the Mixed Temperate world I need.
Climate: Temperate, mixed Arid/Earthlike. (I'm going to skip over the surface features and whatnot on pages 64-71 as I have no need for them currently, I can always come back to them later, and one of the keys to avoiding burnout is to remember you don't have to do everything right away.)
World Feature: None of these seem appropriate, but that's OK, because no features is the most likely outcome.
Size: Small (Traveller says 4,800 km, so we'll call it 5,000).
Gravity: Low (the most likely for a Small world).
Moons: 0 (most likely).
Regions: 4 (most likely).
Resources: Average (most likely given the mixed world types).
Atmospheric Density and Type: Medium, nitrogen-oxygen.
Water: None (0%) - a straight lift from the Traveller hydrographics percentage.
Life: Complex. (I'm going to skip over the lifeform creation process on pages 74-85 because I intend to lift lifeforms straight out of the SWADE core rulebook.)
Society Creation
By Imperial standards, Hollis is out in the wilds, so we'll use those columns on the various tables if necessary. For the most part, the ratings here are pulled through from the parent society, the Third Imperium.
Tech Level: Current, Interstellar (TL 4).
Condition: Stable. 50% populated area.
Political System: Different from parent society, representative democracy. That's taken straight from the Traveller statblock, but note that the Imperium itself is a feudal trade protectorate. (I'm going to skip over Factions and Communities because I don't need them yet.)
Reach: System, I suppose. This is tucked away in the Factions rules, but I need it for the Society summary.
To summarise:
HOLLIS: Arid Earthlike planet, near, small, temperate, R average, G low, A medium (nitrogen-oxygen), W none (0%), L complex. (Description/details TBA.)
HOLLIS: Representative democracy, T 4, R system, C stable.
GM Notes
What do we learn from this exercise? Well, the more game systems you use, the harder it is to keep them consistent; like any mashup, it works best when the games don't overlap with each other. The more detailed the game system, the harder it is to retrofit it to the existing theme. Perilous Void is the fifth system I'm using for Hollis, and the most detailed.
Think of it as layering Swiss cheese, with each layer representing a game system, and the holes being the parameters you're trying to preserve. The more layers there are, the less likely you are to have a hole that goes all the way through. More detailed systems, like Perilous Void, have smaller holes to begin with, making the exercise even harder.
I don't think this has added anything useful to the previous experiment, but that is probably because it is coming so late to the party. If I'd started with using it on its own to replicate Hollis, things would probably have worked out better.
So, love for Perilous Void? Maybe, but I think it would work a lot better as a means of creating a setting from scratch rather than rating one that already exists. I also doubt I have the patience for the level of detail it uses in the long term, but that's a matter of personal choice, and YMMV as always.
What I'm really enjoying about Perilous Void is that - yeah it is _a lot_ but it is all subsystems that interlink like Traveller. So if I already know most of the details but just need an extra lifeform or want to know what type of resources the planet's economy works off of -- I can do things very very quickly.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the other thing helping me is using the same concept from Starforged - Perilous Void hints at this but maybe isn't quite as explicit about it - but that's the notion of a "first look" - so what do I know when I run the ship's sensors vs. what would I know if I landed on world? Only generating up to the point that I would need/know based on where I am contextually in the game world.