While any sort of adventure can probably be run in any of the regions of Strange Stars (on sale now!), each one is particularly suited to certain types of adventures:
Outer Rim
Precis: A wildnerness with dangers lurking on often inhospitable worlds.
Good for: survivable stuff, encounters with monsters in desolate places.
Inspiration: Alien, Planet of Vampires, ST:TOS "Obsession" and "The Galileo Seven," The Gold Rush (1925), Flight of the Phoenix (1964, 2004).
Comments: Ksaa territory in the Outer Rim opens up additional possibilities. They make a good standin for the scheming Romulans or Farscape's Scarrans.
The Alliance
Precis: A civilized, polyethnic region with dangers on every border.
Good For: espionage, special ops missions, border patrol, law enforcement, crime & detective stories.
Inspiration: James Bond, the Dominic Flandry novels by Poul Anderson, Ocean's Eleven, E.W. Hornung's Raffles stories, the Trigger Argee stories of James M. Schmitz, the Luff Imbry stories of Matthew Hughes.
The Instrumentality
Precis: A theocratic, expansionistic empire to be fought against or served, surrounding smaller independent states.
Good For: freedom fighters or self-interested rogues fighting the system; space pirates or privateers operating out of an anarchic port, spy stories or law enforcement (pulpy or shades of gray)
Inspiration: Firefly, Howard Chaykin's Cody Starbuck, James Bond, Ice Station Zebra (1968), Tales of the Gold Monkey (1982), Zapata Westerns.
Coreward Reach
Precis: A "points of light" wilderness with hidden civilizations and ruins of the past.
Good For: Exploration; lost worlds; comedies of manners with quirky cultures.
Inspiration: Gulliver's Travels, Forbidden Planet, the Alastor Cluster and the "Planet of Adventure" series by Jack Vance, ST:TOS "Shore Leave" and "A Taste of Armageddon," among many others.
Comments: The incursion of the Locusts also gives room for military action and an impending danger to add a ticking clock to other sorts of adventures.
Zuran Expanse
Precis: A lawless frontier where different cultures meet and ancient secrets are buried.
Good For: rogues and crminals; pirates, civilization vs. savagery, artifact looting and tomb-raiding.
Inspiration: Tatooine in Star Wars, the Uncharted Territories in Farscape, particularly the episodes "The Flax," "Home on the Remains," and "Liars, Guns, and Money," A Fist Full of Dollars, Deadwood, Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948), King Solomon's Mines, The Professionals (1966).
2 comments:
I'm loving "Strange Stars". I finally have a setting to use with Rogue Space.
One question. Several of your maps have hyperspace gate routes that are dotted lines instead of solid lines. What does that signify?
@Richard - Excellent! I loved to hear about how that goes.
Oops. That was something we inadvertently left out because we couldn't decide on the best place for it. The dotted lines when there is a connection or connections unpictured between the two that are, and that line is just a summation. For instance between Novus Ordo and Circus there are two systems of just Instrumentality worlds.
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