Having decided that our player group should start on the world of Edgware within the Barbican subsector, and having one session of play under our belt that boiled down to the player sgetting used to one anothers’ characters and the sketched out facts about their current situation, it makes sense for me to turn my attention to where the players might choose to go next. Keeping in mind that hewing to minimal prep is a factor, we really want to just be laying track right in front of the train. Where might the players be going right away, in the next session or two.
Knowing that their ship, the Garden, is only capable of making jump-ones (although it can carry enough fuel to do this twice before refuelling). The most likely places to go next are the worlds a single jump-one away: the neighbours.
Edgware has three neighbours a single parsec away: Gant, Oval, and as-yet-unnamed world off the map around the star 70 Ophiuchi.
Gant
On the face of thigns, Gant looks pretty straightforward and hospitable:
Gant C89858A/5 Ag, Ni, Gg
A routine quality starport, without the benefit of refined fuel, sits on an Earth-size world, shrouded by a dense, tainted atmosphere, covered in a bit more water than Earth. Population is order hundreds-of-thousands. The government in place is a run-of-the-mill civil service bureaucracy. The law-level is unusually strict, the tech-level is below average.
Unsurprisingly, Gant doesn’t have much going for it, but its conditions are sufficient to make it a net-exporter of Agricultural goods.
Oval
Oval, by contras, is an intriguing packet of contradictions:
Oval E8A0ADC/5 Gg
Oval has only a frontier starport installation; odd for a world that’s so close to the centre of the commonwealth. It, too, is an Earth-size world, but has an exotic atmosphere of some kind (oxygen tanks required), and has no surface water. What’s an odd match for these forbidding physical features is the social characteristics. Oval boasts a population of order-tens-of-billions, has a religious dictatorship as central authority, and a highly restrictive law-level (even more so than Gant).
With no air to breathe, and no water on the surface, and no starport, how does this world support such a large population?
70 Ophiuchi (Odéon)
From the Near Space source of stellar data, we start with this information about 70 Ophiuchi:
70 Ophiuchi KDV,K4V x97Axxx-x Gg, Ab Temperate
The Near Space book provides the kind of physical data that it can about the system, but it doesn’t flesh out any social details (starbase level, population law level, government type, etc).
In order to go the next level down of detail on this world, we’d need to:
Pick a name for the world; this would require us deciding on what world-naming pattern to use for the subsector next to Barbican.
Earlier we had decided to use subway station names for global cities, so let’s choose Paris as the global city to provide names for this subsector.
Starting from that, we pick Concorde as the name for the subsector and Odéon as the world name for the 70 Ophiuchi system.
Fill out the rest of its basic characteristics: starport level, population, government type, law level, and tech level. The world has a standard, although tainted, atmosphere, and is entirely covered by water.
Because the world is relatively farther away from Sol, we had decided to have a DM+1 to the starport roll, so generating that, and the follow-on social UWP factors produces this information for the world:
Odéon C97A630/7 Ab, Ni, Gg
The low rolls for this world produce a strange result: an order-of-millions population, but a low law level and no central authority to speak of. Perhaps population on this planet is either in individual sub-surface or raft/ship-based centres affiliated with off-world corporate research or on-world clan-based tribes of colonists.
Summing things up
Given what we now know about Edgware’s neighbours, where does that leave us? What kind of relationship does Edgware have with these worlds?
Gant’s status as an agricultural world probably means a steady flow of foodstuff shipments that come through Edgware. Perhaps it also means people travelling in the other direction: companies sending representatives to keep track of their agri-business plantations on Gant, perhaps skilled workers (agricultural scientists and the like) and even unskilled labour (as Gant’s population is significantly lower than the more core worlds).
Possible patrons headed for Gant might be something like: business people looking for security; hunters looking for transport or guides; companies seeking to ship industrial parts for farm machinery; or workers looking for inexpensive transport.
Oval’s strangely high population combined with its religious, authoritarian government, and ultra-high law level suggest that nobody really comes from Oval to go anywhere, unless they’re “official delegations” from their government. Oval is neither a sizeable exporter, nor particularly an importer of goods, agricultural or industrial. I suspect Oval has a finely tuned, sub-surface system that keeps its massive population under control and simply fed; no doubt this requires industrial components to keep machinery working.
Possible patrons headed for Oval might be off-world adherents to the religion in control there: pilgrims looking for low-cost transport, or delegates of some status willing to pay more. There might be shipments of industrial or agricultural materials, but probably basic in nature, and without much opportunity for profit.
Odéon’s lawless and non-industrial nature leads one to believe that it’s not a terribly inviting place to go. Given its generally temperate climate, and its water-world status, it’s not hard to feel like life on Odéon might be of the sort that suits people who would love to spend their lives on a boat.
Possible patrons headed for Odéon might be: wealthy hunters looking for exciting sport fishing experiences; shipments of industrial parts for marine upkeep and repair; corporate or government specialists pursuing research in a station below the waves.
Because Edgware doesn’t have a large population, or industry, it seems highly likely that it’s direct relationship with these worlds is as a customer for food, or as a waypoint for passenger traffic.