Traveller Map Generation is Fun

I’ll keep this one short because there have been some long ones and there will be some REALLY long ones over the next few weeks.

I took a break from my breakdown and read through of Traveller5 to start building out a world. What I love so much about these systems is that you generate a tremendous amount of information in a really straightforward and clean manner. It’s just one string of text per system, and even in T5 which has significantly more info present, they still manage to keep it truncated in this fashion.

This is cool not only from a gaming perspective, but also just as a fun generator of ideas.

I have removed the subsector dividers to show the entire sector here. A sector is sub-divided into 16 sub-sectors, like chunks in a procedurally generated video game. There is a tool called Random Subsector Generator on a website called The Zhodani Base which creates a single sub-sector at a time based on the parameters you feed into it.

Just because I’ve been so Australia brained thanks to AUZ, I wanted to try generating an entire sector with that in mind. I’ve talked about Tao of D&D before and his amazing map work for AD&D, a life long project where he is mapping the entirety of the Earth in the context of his own fantasy take on it and how I admire it. I’m not as detail oriented, but I liked the idea of a starmap that roughly reflects our own world, and so The Union Commonwealth as it’s so playfully called here acts as a very loose representation of Australia, the New Zealand coast, and Tasmania. Of course, it looks and feels not much like that after generation, but you do have more densely populated areas combined with some comparatively desolate ones. It has modeled a civilizational j-curve, some of the more desolate regions of Aus, and I was particularly happy with the archipelago feel of the western side of the map.

The process was pretty simple, I tried to break down each chunk into different population densities before generation, removing or adding systems manually as necessary to keep the map “playable” at tech levels below 17, allowed Zhodani to randomly generate each system name for each sub-sector, and then went in and manually changed them by referencing settlement names in Australia. I could have put a lot more time in getting it as accurate as possible, but this was more about bringing the game down to Earth a bit. It just so happens that a lot of town names and things in Australia happen to fit right into a science fiction milieu thanks to a strong aboriginal influence.

There are also just some fun references, particular in this sub-sector, to some of my influences. Donny and Clarence landing in hexes 1639 and 1640 were a complete coincidence. I’ve mentioned Big Lez here a couple of times, but Donny and Clarence is a little sub-series of that where a Yowie named Donny the Dealer who sells paraphernalia under the guise of a sort of servo/pawnshop (and one dollar scratchies, for fiddy bucks) has effectively made the universally despised Clarence into his shitkicker, making him work presumably as cheap labor while occasionally taking him out to a shooting range and murdering him over and over since Clarence, although he feels the pain a thousand times worse physically and emotionally, and feels it forever, also happens to be able to regenerate from death. My particular favorite is an episode where Donny is trying to teach Clarence “how to defend himself” by mercilessly beating on him and filming the ordeal in the process.

Poor Clarence.

Because the generator only deals with sub-sectors, I used Traveller Poster Maker as part of Travellermap.com by taking the data from each subsector and putting it into a text file that looks like this.

The great thing about the way this data is generated is that as long as you are generating a single sector at a time, you can specify which sub-sector you are actively generating using this little button menu.

This ensures that the data that spits out won’t overlap, since each hex is individually numbered with a co-ordinate. So, when you are finally done with each sector, you can paste the data whole-sale how I have presented it above without any editing whatsoever, and Traveller Poster Maker will spit out a complete map in one of several selectable styles.

It will also generate a full scale poster sized PDF so you can take it to a print shop and make a copy for your wall. So with enough time and effort, you could wallpaper your entire house and your cats and anything else in your way with endless galactic maps so that you can fantasize the overwhelming pain of existence away by pretending you are a spaceman. Pretty awesome.

There are some other tools that will take this base data, since it’s essentially based on Classic Traveller, and extrapolate it into more complete datasets. A system in Traveller always has one primary planet or asteroid belt, plus possible gas giants, and multiple possible other planets and stars, and if you have sat and read the 96 pages or so that exclusively deal with system generation, you will understand how insanely deep this well is; I haven’t even touched world generation yet because that’s a whole other bunch of bananas, and Marc makes it very clear in T5 to only generate what you need until you are actively engaging with a location in some form or another.

Oh, just wait ‘til you see how that all works. For the D&D guys who like to approach different scales of hex-mapping, this will make you grit in your fangin’ trousers. Whatever the hell that means.

And speaking of which, the real interest for me with Traveller has been engaging in this whole “prep as play” thing. This was a lot of work, it took quite a bit of time, and it really got the juices flowing in my brain. I am working on a short story right now that is set in this little galaxy, and my next jumping off point will be to take the dozen or so alien races I developed for my Star Vanguard universe, and am going to be putting the sophont generator through it’s paces to bring them into Traveller as well.

This is still a blog where I talk about how awesome Mad Max or Doom is from time to time ultimately, but I am so engaged with T5 as a system that I can’t see there be any going back. Even while I have also been looking at Tunnels & Trolls as a basis for the world I’m working on developing with my daughter, my full attention is on this game, and while I don’t know if I’ll ever write a traditional review of it, this is going to be a primary source of “guy talking endlessly about thing he likes” as it pertains to T5. I’ve built a decent readership of people who are interested in these things, and some have come to me telling me of their own similarly obsessive ventures into this kind of deep worldbuilding, and it’s been such a treat to see what other people are doing with this system and in systems with parallels to it.