Copyright 03/1983© Andy Slack

The decision to run a campaign can occur any time during your exposure to the game; sometimes people become referees solely in order to start a campaign, at other times a campaign will grow almost by itself out of a linked list of scenarios. So how to go about it?

The question is, what kind of adventures do you want to referee? That's to say, are the players going to be revolutionaries, spies, would-be merchant princes, mercenaries, serving Imperial personnel, criminals? The key point is that too many referees start by designing their universe, and only then asking what the players can do in it. Start by deciding what kind of adventures to run, and create a campaign background which will give suitable opportunities.

Second important decision: How much of your campaign will be homegrown, and how much borrowed from published games, scenarios, novels, films and so on? There are several factors bearing on your choice. First and pragmatically, how much time, effort and money are you prepared to sink into your campaign? Which do you have more of to spare? If money is no object, but you have practically no spare time to design in, you will probably wind up running a Spinward Marches variant campaign from published material. The important thing to bear in mind is that it will be a variant; any published sector is necessarily vague, and since we are all individuals as soon as we start filling in the details those details will diverge from the designer's idea of how the universe works. Be prepared to remind your players gently from time to time that you are under no obligation to include Supplement47's ideas on grunge rifles into your campaign, just because they happen to be waving it under your nose.

Using published materials, especially the Spinward Marches, has another advantage besides being quick; if you move around a lot, or meet a lot of new players who will be i n the group only temporarily, you will have a lot less explaining to do since most of them will already be familiar with the background. Also, if you use a reasonably high-quality product, you can be certain of it being fairly believable important if you haven't run or played in too many campaigns previously.

The second alternative for a campaign demands both a reasonable amount of cash and quite a bit of effort. This kind of campaign is based on a novel, film, or game. In this, you get the novel, film script, game, whatever you're using, and go through it notebook in hand, taking notes on the background, worlds, governments, technology, races, and so on. Then you sit down with the notes and the rules and translate everything into Traveller terms. Again, both you and your players must expect the campaign to slowly diverge from the source. This method has advantages and disadvantages as do they all; some of your players will know the source, and so you'll have less explaining to do; some of them will know it better than you, and ask Awkward Questions. Care must betaken as to which source you use, but this is a matter of personal taste. For novels and series, I’d recommend the Dominic Flandry and Polesotechnic League stories, both by Poul Anderson; E C Tubb's Dumarestsaga; Jerry Pournelle's Future History (including the More in God's Eye); H Beam Piper's Federation and Empire stories; Frank Herbert's Dune. And, of course the Star Wars films. Most TV series and SF films are a bit unbelievable for my own taste.

The third major method is to do it all yourself. Obviously, this is at once the cheapest and most time-consuming, and it also has to be explained to your players in detail -though not necessarily all at once. However, it will be exactly what you want, and have exactly what you want in it.

What follows is perhaps less relevant to a campaign based on published sources or novels, but is essential to the do-it-yourself variety.

It consists of writing an overview of your background. This needs to cover both the history and geography of the campaign area - perhaps astrographv would be a better word. You need a rough sketch-map of campaign space; this has to show the location and extent of the major power blocs and governments. Do you see the future as a mass of system-states, a vast all-encompassing Empire, or a myriad tiny states of a few to a few dozen planets each?

In trying to 'predict' the future for our games, it's helpful to look to the past. Throughout history there have been pressures for unification of small communities like the Greek city-states; the unification has usually happened, and by conquest or colonisation. Once unified, states are usually held together by loyalty to a leader or dynasty, which is usually supported by the priesthood. So whatever they call themselves, we will likely have a state religion and leaders.

In the Traveller universe, the area governed by an interstellar state - assuming one would rise out of the 'inevitable' pressure to unify - is large, and communication across it is slow. The government must have two attributes then; emotional ties to keep its subjects loyal, and stability. A hereditary aristocracy has both these, and while not inevitable, has the advantages of being believable and having a lot of opportunity for scenarios. The ancient Persians are a good place to start looking for ideas on how to run your Empire.

Now, assuming you have a fair-sized Empire, as most referees do, there is one thing you must keep in mind; the Emperor is likely to be more worried about one of his provincial governors revolting and trying to seize the throne or become independent than anything else short of a really major interstellar war. How is he going to ensure it doesn't happen? Again, the Persians had some good ideas. These include independent inspectors wandering around, spies everywhere, the best communications you can manage, and being related to all the provincial rulers. A common step is to separate military and civil rule, so that the armed forces are controlled by independent admirals/generals.

How big is your main state going to be? That is, the state your players live in. Probably it will grow to the maximum size its communications will allow; if we assume that the state will build the best possible courier ships and is prepared to cope with a lag of, say, two years between sending an order and getting an acknowledgment of its receipt - about the biggest lag humans have ever managed - then you have the answer straight away; depending on the rules in use, your Empire will have jump-5 orjump-6 couriers, so at most it will be 52 weeks x jump-6 in radius, or about 300 parsecs from frontier to capital. A little smaller wouldn't hurt, as it's now too big for comfortable comprehension. Using the unadulterated Book3 rules, that gives the Empire about 3,500 subsectors and almost 150,000 worlds. More than you'll ever need.

The other states must include several roughly comparable in size to the main one - its main rivals; and many smaller ones.

You're probably panicking by now! Calm down. You will never need more than a dozen or so subsectors to play in; the rest need only be very roughly sketched in on a master map the players will likely never see. When you pick the locale for your campaign, choose a frontier region since this gives the adventurers the most scope. The police are too powerful nearer the centre of government. So, you have a sketch map maybe the size of a WD page with major states blocked out on it, and have picked an area of a few subsectors in size to be the main theatre of action.

On to history. Simply put, this must tell how the state the players are citizens of got to its present position. Again, real history can be shamelessly stolen. Major historical events, such as wars, the invention of jump drive, brief history of the rulers and possibly the state religion, are sketched out on a sheet or two of paper. The players' characters are useful here, especially in the expanded Mercenary and High Guard systems; their prior service die rolls and assignments fill in detail of the last few decades. If a marine was involved in a battle 4 years ago, there must have been one around then for him to fight in; check your map and decide with whom he fought. How long has the main state had a presence in the region? Why did it come? Was anyone there before then, and how did they feel about it?

The history should also touch briefly on alien races, if any. Alien races are essentially chrome; they look nice and give a nice feel to the game, but usually not necessary. Most adventures can get by very well with only humans involved, the same as most science fiction games. Whenever you introduce one, think - could I achieve the same effect with humans or human states? Most players will request aliens for one of two reasons: (a) to give them something horrible to shoot at with the full approval of their government and other non-player characters; (b) to get hold of a superhuman character for themselves. The classic examples of (a) and (b) respectively bugs (from Starship Troopers) and either Vulcans or Wookies for the second. In either case, humans are quiet sufficient for game purposes. Nonetheless, most referees will want alien races to help the 'feel' of the game and rightly so! But make sure they are alien, and moderately believable; make sure their motives and approach to problems are different from the established human norm of your campaign. Limit them to about one new race per subsector at most. You’ve selected a region of the master sketch map and given it an interesting mention in your historical overview. Now, you choose a subsector arbitrarily and work through it in reasonable detail, dicing up the worlds and assigning its worlds to one or another, or none, of the local states and m.: laces. No more than the subsector map, names and statistics or worlds are required yet. If you know exactly what kind of worlds you want there, don't dice them; design them deliberately.

Now choose one of your worlds and flesh it out in detail. Bearing in mind everything you've decided so far, you now create the world the adventurers will start on. It may not need fleshing out; you may have pinched one from a published source. You need, in addition to the stats, a couple of pages on the society, government, and mores of the locals, and a few NPC personages worked out in some detail - note that the more powerful the NPC, the less need you have of his characteristics and skills; attitudes and motives are far more important, and increasingly so at higher social levels.

I recommend an essentially earth like world to start with; this minimises the shock of adjusting for both referee and players. A low-grade starport will help you keep the players on-planet until you're ready for them to move on; size, atmosphere and water percentage similar to our own mean you can stop worrying about them and get on with the adventure; a balkanised world with several governments allows for plenty of action on one world, and average to low law and tech levels help the fun. Population should be fairly low, though, at around levels 5-8, to give a pleasant frontier atmosphere.

Animal encounter tables -well, I usually use Supplement2. It's a lot of hassle dicing up endless animals most of which will be only peripheral details on the game's progress, mere background detail of an unimportant kind. What is important to the game is the creature's appearance and habits, for background and often the animals will hardly enter into an adventure at all. Only if you expect your group to be heavily involved with animals in their adventures on the planet should you bother working them out or detailing them. If you do, I recommend a look at Dougall Dixon's book After Man and David Attenborough's Life on Earth, both of which will show that creatures can be weird and still believable. An interesting technique is used by Dixon, which referees could well adopt; take an ordinary animal, say a rat or penguin, and stuff into the wrong ecological niche. Leave for 25 million years to evolve, and see what you come up with. Dixon's penguins which have tried to do a whale's ob, or rats hired as polar bears through lack of other suitable applicants, have a marvellous feel to them and would enhance any role-player. Such animals are believable end consistent, but at the same time novel. That’s what you need.

The struggle – I’ll be brief here as I've already covered this theme in Backdrop of Stars (D241. Until your players find their feet and invent their own gals in your universe, you must provide them with a struggle to generate commissions. A war or revolution perhaps, culled from your background that is essentially what it is for, to generate moderate-to-large scale plots in which the players may become immersed. Do the players think they are good guys or wearing black hats? Are they freedom fighters or terrorists in their own eyes? And what do the locals, the government, think of them? It's more fan if the viewpoints aren't in agreement; as for example when the players see themselves as neutrals out for a quick buck, the locals see them as daring Robin Hood types, and the government sees them as terrorists...

Essentially, this is the overall plot of your series of adventures. Each scenario along the way is part of a grander design - a coup d'etat is a nice one to aim at. The struggle is tricky, though; you must try to stop the players from getting so powerful that they have no further need to adventure, while not making them feel that whatever they do makes no difference to the flow of games' events.