Before beginning

I realized that just switching to Cepheus wasn't going to quite enough. Seeing as the main reason to switch over was to write stuff and not worry about offending or abusing FFE's trust I couldn't in good faith just use the 3I setting. So I am going to have to come up with my own and seeing as that is the heart of the LBB it may be of interest to the community. No I did a very quick outline of Fermi's Universe and conversing with +Christopher Kubasik made me realize I need to do more work on the fluff before I delve into the crunch. That being said I am not under the delusion I am going to create anything like the canon of Traveller however I do need to set out a few things to give me a context to adapt the rules.

First is the size of the universe or at least known space. The canonverse is ridiculously large like 32 (?) plus sectors in size. It would take several years game time just to travel from Terra to Regina even if that is all the PC's did. While known space being that huge is cool in it's own right it also meant the was very little unknown space for PC's to get to. Also there is the length of history to be considered 3I had been around for 1100 years with common space travel occurring for a couple thousand years prior to that again cool on one hand limiting on the other. And finally is that Earth is part of canon which has it's own issues. I try and follow +Joe Johnston Google+ posting guidelines from 9/18/2015 so real world politics and religion hold no interest in my gaming material. Yes I have opinions on these topics and hopefully you will never know it from any of my posts to the Classic Traveller community which is about gaming. Will I present situations and places that are obviously derived from our world? Yes I will but by adding the level of indirection of a completely fictional universe what ever I present is just an idea for a game not a attack or defense of any beliefs people I am sharing with may hold.

Why do I start my timeline at 25,000 years ago? It is because that is approximately when modern man makes his appearance in the fossil record. It is my point of view that we are fascinated by Traveller (and Sci-Fi in a more general way) by imagining ourselves in the setting or at least beings that are to a large extent the same as us. Assuming the course of human history is generally the same on the distant worlds there are around 10,000 years to get where we are now and give another 1,000 to expand into a star faring culture or five and the Forerunners disappear 14,000 years ago. Upon further reflection I think I will tighten up the timeline some. 11,000 years ago the Forerunners grab up a bunch of genetically modern humans from the early earth civilizations and brought them to the Fermi cluster. They lorded about being all godlike for a thousand years or so and then vanish. Humans on a couple thousand (maybe) worlds take sometime to go from hunter gatherers so astronauts. My thinking here is the Forerunners should be of as little significance as possible so the focus is on the here and now of the players' actions. Do I know what happened to them? No I don't because unless I am running for a group that wants to find out or I decide to write an adventure that needs to have it defined it really isn't necessary. I only need to define the big picture. It happened long enough ago to make it not clearly understood, there were many different Forerunners, they had really high tech, they built stuff that is still around and they are all gone.

Obelisks and nobility. 2001 is one inspiration for the obelisk idea although more for their appearance than function. Mr. Whoopee's 3D blackboard is what I view the patterns looking like. I am okay with the idea of a noble social class but was always a little dubious about how it was presented in 3I. As I understand it nobility originated in the idea of divine favor, they were chosen by god to lead. Tradition would keep the concept even after that idea went out of favor. However I couldn't really see why people would buy into it for a modern society when there is no benefit provided for giving one group of people special status. Leadin to my idea of a random ability to activate obelisks which did provide a concrete benefit without giving an in game one. The same information is revealed no matter which obelisk is touched and the usefulness can be defined or not as the GM chooses. For example a PC could activate a pattern that shows what elements combine to form bronze showing a copper molecule and a tin molecule and symbolically adding heat to end up with bronze. Not terribly useful to starmen but a pretty flashy effect. This means when I get into house ruling the different cultures I don't have to come up with what the sixth stat is as every culture would have an obelisk based social class. The mandatory nature of touching one is to add a story hook for traveling into the territory of the Real Men.

Because I want to create stuff that is thematically usable in 3I without just blatantly ripping off FFE I came up with the Patriarchy/Kent for Solomani/Vilani and the Enlightenment for the Zhodani. I will be going through the rules laying out how the apply to the Patriarchy as that is the Imperium analog for my setting. Don't be surprised if the name changes as it was just the first couple of things that came to mind. I am thinking each of the powers are around 10 subsectors in size which give 100 years to bring a subsector under control over the thousand or so years the governments have been tooling around the stars. I did not set out any full scale wars between the powers other than the one that gave rise to the Patriarchy and the Republic and Real Men. I think I have to go through the starship rules before deciding how effective interstellar war would be. Keeping in mind the upper size limit of 5000 tons invading a world is not an easy task. It is possible to bomb one out of existence but I think the principle of M.A.D would preclude using nuclear warheads on populated worlds. It would be to easy to lob missiles on ballistic courses from remote areas of any system for the powers to not come up with a policy not to do this. Leading to a consistent no nuclear warheads for civilians. The other powers are just ideas for cultures different than the standard one without being so weird as to make it a chore to create them or play a citizen from one.