Magyar Sector

When I am not playing around with the Great Dungeon I am often tinkering with Traveller in its various forms. Not only do I believe that Marc Miller’s 1977 science fiction game is a genius design, but I find the Third Imperium setting to be endlessly fascinating. I developed four frontier sectors of the Solomani Confederation for submission to the Traveller Map: Canopus, Aldebaran, Neworld, and Langere. These sectors have relatively limited canonical information and I tried to stitch the few references together into a coherent whole.

Limited existing canon might be why I am drawn to Magyar sector, which has seen very little development over the last 40 years. There are maps of the Ziru Sirka borders in Vilani and Vargr, Terran Confederation borders and settlements in CT Solomani, and a map of “Wars of the Imperium” in the Imperial Encyclopedia. A subsector and some worlds were detailed in Traveller Digest 14, and then? Only scattered references here and there.

And yet, Magyar occupies an interesting place in the Third Imperium setting. Located between the Solomani Rim and Dark Nebula, it is the intersection of three different major polities: the Aslan Hierate, the Solomani Confederation, and the Imperium. Magyar was the far edge of the Vilani Ziru Sirka, and the site of many early Terran colonies. During the Long Night Magyar would have been subject to Reaver attacks and would have both benefited and suffered from Aslan encroachment. All of Magyar was part of the Solomani Autonomous Region and incorporated into the Solomani Confederation. During the Rim War the Imperium invaded the sector and drove further rimward and spinward than in any other theater.

One of the really intriguing pieces of Traveller is the ability to spin detailed stories out of just a few data points. As I am interested in the Rim War campaign in Magyar, one of my side projects has been to develop a sort of wargame to simulate the progress of the Imperial campaign. Traveller has two boardgames that use mechanics that can be readily adapted to just such a venture: Invasion Earth, which is set during the Rim War, and the Fifth Frontier War. But in order to start, I first needed to develop regressed sector data to reflect the sector in 990.

The 1105 data shows a battered and backward subsector, with few decent starports and a signficiant tech lag compared to the Solomani Rim. No Imperial world in the sector has reached TL 15.

Until fairly late in the Rim War, Magyar would have been fairly insulated from much of the fighting. So presumably in 990 the sector was reasonably prosperous.

Combined with the Imperial Encyclopedia map, which shows battles in subsectors D, G, H, J, K, L, and P, I’ve assumed that many Magyar systems were hammered during the War in a “Sherman’s March” type of campaign that destroyed what might have been a significant industrial base, including many starports and shipyards. Post-war reconstruction efforts have generally failed, as the sector plunged into a deep economic recession resulting in the closing or downgrade of even more ports and yards—all of which is reflected in the 1105 data.

I assumed that subsectors untouched by the War would have relatively fewer changes between 990 and 1105 than subsectors that were subject to combat. These subsectors would have even less changes than those worlds that were occupied by the Imperium after the armistice.

To reconstruct Magyar in 990 I went through the following steps:

• I regressed the sector population by reverse-engineering T4’s Pocket Empires formula for growth and by adapting T5 economic extensions. In general this resulted in slightly less population but in a few cases I had worlds with significantly more population in 990 than 1105.
• I then looked at the expected distribution of starports based on Solomani and Aslan’s world gen mods, which are supposed to make better quality starports much more common in Solomani space—something not reflected in 1105 data for Magyar. This provided some soft targets for 990 starport distribution. Using the 1105 starport distribution as a base, I regenerated the starports. Worlds in the spinward half of the sector and not directly affected by the War had slightly lower quality starports in 990, showing slow but positive post-war growth. Worlds in the trailing half of the sector tended to have much better starports in 990, showing the ravages of the Imperium offensive.
• Based on this assumption I generated new government codes using population but influenced by the 1105 code. Worlds in the spinward half of the sector generally had the same government type in 990 and 1105; worlds in the trailing half were much more likely to have a different code.
• I then regenerated law levels based on the revised government for all worlds.
• I calculated new TL values, capping the Solomani at 13 with limited exceptions for TL 14.
• Then I regenerated the rest of the T5 extensions. I removed a few Confederation bases in the spinward half of the sector and added a few bases in the trailing half.
• I looked at the Confederation member-states and shuffled the allegiance of several worlds around. The Dootchen Estates, infamous for its slavery system, would have been a pariah state to the Imperium and was right in the path of the Imperial onslaught. I assumed then that the 1105 holdings are much reduced from what the Estates controlled in 990.
• Based on owned worlds I conjectured a couple of “lost” member-states: the Interstellar Kingdom of Tolson and the Allied Acaran Worlds, neither of which survived the Rim War. The Acaran Worlds, also in the path of the Imperial offensive, collapsed and never reformed. The Tolson Kingdom was dissolved upon admittance into the Imperium.
• With all of these changes to UWP data I made several name changes to various worlds to reflect the turmoil from the War. In a couple of instances I assumed that, for a couple of systems, the 990 mainworld was a completely different world than the one listed by the Scouts in 1105: Amon (2507) and Hyalin (2602).
• I seeded several non-aligned worlds and Aslan populations in the spinward half of the sector; I assume these were forcibly integrated, displaced, or even purged by the Confederation in a nasty bit of post-war cleansing.
• Finally I redrew trade routes to reflect the “new” data.

The result is unofficial sector data for Magyar sector in the 990 Milieu, generously hosted on the Traveller Map. This reflects a period fairly early in the War after the Solomani have pushed the borders several parsecs coreward, reclaiming old Autonomous Region systems and even occupying systems never ceded to the Region. I also created 990 data for Daibei and Diaspora sectors using similar principles. The T20 sourcebook Fighting Ships of the Solomani provides some helpful baseline information on the Diaspora borders at the start of the Rim War.

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