Now that I’ve held up a thumb in the wind about how I might want to use
M-Space circles in my Traveller games (with some concrete examples to
support my current campaign), I’m going to follow up with some suggestions on
what the descriptive mechanics for them mean in a Traveller context, and some
initial rough working out of how to use them. This post is, accordingly, quite
house-rulesy.
Borrowing bits and pieces from other table-top roleplaying games for use with
Traveller seems like a good way to fill out places where it has a few gaps;
but I try to do this with care, mindful that the spareness of the original
rules-set is more often a feature than it is a defect. Still, while Traveller
provides an excellent framework for describing people, space-ships, worlds and
star-systems, and creatures, one place where it stumbles a bit is on the
social side of things. While it does contain a workmanlike “reaction table”
and some assistance in building “patrons” and encounters, it doesn’t really give
much guidance on ways to build and represent groups of people and their common
interests. Enter the “Circles” rules from the M-Space game: a clean and simple
way to define factions, of various sizes and kinds.
The Distant Star serves as the flagship of Vargas SL, the patron merchant
corporation employing our heroes in my current Traveller adventures for one of
my weekly groups. I wanted to start with a standard 600T type-M Subsidized Liner
from the classic game, and heavily mod it as would sensibly be done by the
company for the use of one of their highly placed representatives on special
trade missions. This requires fiddling with the basic design in Book 2, chopping
away some of the suites, adding useful features not in the stock liner: a light
refactoring rather than a complete rebuild.