{"id":31881,"date":"2016-04-03T06:30:16","date_gmt":"2016-04-02T18:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=31881"},"modified":"2016-04-02T19:42:47","modified_gmt":"2016-04-02T06:42:47","slug":"58-eridani-the-game-behind-the-story-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2016\/04\/03\/58-eridani-the-game-behind-the-story-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"58 Eridani: The Game Behind the Story, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

~ by Andrew Robins<\/em><\/p>\n

58 Eridani: The Game Behind the Story<\/span><\/h3>\n

I have always been a fan of the game Traveller<\/em>.\u00a0 It probably dates me, but when I was first getting in to role playing games, Traveller <\/em>was the only real option if you wanted to play a serious role playing game in a science fiction milieu.<\/span><\/p>\n

I loved Traveller <\/em>mainly because of its rich setting. There were so many different worlds to explore, and the game came with a rich backstory. Plus zipping around in spaceships was cool \u2013 and if those spaceships tended to be a weird extrapolation of 1960s technology that didn\u2019t really allow for things like computers (smaller than a house), then that was fine with me.<\/span><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until I started to run games that I came to see \u00a0a fundamental flaw in the basic premise of the game.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you give players a space ship, and lots of worlds to explore \u2013 then pretty much you are encouraging them to explore those worlds. This means that if you put a problem in front of your players, then it is very easy for them to choose just to jump in their ship and fly off somewhere completely different \u2013 and ignore your carefully constructed storyline.<\/span><\/p>\n

This problem is not unique to Traveller <\/em>but Traveller <\/em>campaigns tend to suffer from it more than others, in my experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

For 58 Eridani<\/strong>, I wanted to tell a single story with a tight ARC. I wasn\u2019t interested in running a sprawling multiworld campaign.<\/span><\/p>\n

I had the basic idea of a small ship carrying a group of refugees, in hostile territory, as the core of the story that I wanted to tell. I also had the basic idea of the Vaders (freely borrowed and ultimately adapted from Peter F Hamilton\u2019s Commonwealth Saga<\/em>).<\/span><\/p>\n

I also knew that I needed to find a way to make the players interact with the Vaders rather than just making the purely rational decision to jump to literally ANYWHERE else, rather than deal with them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Enter Bringer – <\/em>and then Lepanto.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I wanted a story that worked. I considered a lot of options, some of them tried and true favourites of campaigns from my past:<\/span><\/p>\n