Developing Dark Nebula

A barbarian nomad overlooks the ruined Aslan city of Hkarlye on Gilead (DARK 2921 X586879-1).

Many years ago I sketched out a proposed Traveller game to be set in a small, backwater cluster of low tech worlds. A bronze-age swords and sandals setting, like Conan the Barbarian but instead of towers of sorcery and vaults of gleaming treasure, the great cities would hold bazaars filled with technological wonders, and a starport with the promise of passage offworld.

For whatever reason, I specifically wanted to place this game in the Third Imperium setting. So I spent quite a bit of time poring over sector data looking for a suitable location. This was all long before the T5 Second Survey Project cleaned up and regularized sector data, and before the dream that is now Traveller Map made such data readily available and searchable. Back then plenty of semi-canonical data could be found out on the internet, but it was messy and strange and hard to use.

One problem I discovered early on: truly primitive worlds (TL 0 or 1) are really quite rare, particularly inside the Imperium, and they are almost always interdicted. Checking Traveller Map, I count only nine TL 1 worlds and no populated TL 0 worlds in the entire Imperium.

I initially scoured the frontier sectors around the Spinward Marches, then looked at the neutral areas around Hinterworlds before I started zeroing in on Dark Nebula. I eventually found a promising group of fairly primitive Human worlds in the neutral space between the Solomani Confederation and the Aslan Hierate, and after reading up on the history of this region, these worlds seemed to fit the bill.

It’s an area of Charted Space with an interesting backstory but not a ton of published canon, leaving it open for further development. And by happy coincidence, some of the best supplements written for Traveller have dealt with the Aslan: the CT Alien module, MT Solomani and Aslan, and GURPS Traveller: Alien Races 2 are loaded with gameable ideas, hooks, and background.

My original campaign idea never actually went anywhere, as sometimes happens. But much of this canoodling eventually fed into other games, including my current Into the Interface campaign. As a result, I’ve ended up doing quite a bit of development work on Dark Nebula, which I’m going to start sharing on this blog.

I had seriously considered publishing this material under Mongoose Publishing’s Travellers’ Aid Society license, but one of the more important sources I’ve relied upon has been the DGP Solomani and Aslan supplement. While this is a fantastic game book, most of the DGP material is currently trapped in a copyright limbo, usable for non-commercial fan material like a blog but generally off-limits for Mongoose to use. And as such, not usable for TAS licensed material.

So why use Dark Nebula as a setting? I find the Aslan to be one of the more interesting alien races of Traveller: a bit more exotic than simply humans in fur suits, but not so alien as to be completely unidentifiable. Intra-Hierate politics alone are complex enough to fuel many adventures, but throw in a conflict with the encroaching Solomani Confederation and the possibilities multiply quickly. Both Aslan and Solomani can work well as protagonists or antagonists, giving PCs many opportunities to work for and against either side. The Buffer Zone lends itself well for remixed Western adventures: a dangerous frontier region with a wide mix of tech levels and law levels.

Over the next few weeks I’ll walk through some of the tweaks I’ve made to the sector as well as some thoughts I have about the nature of the Aslan Hierate, which is really very different from any other major interstellar polity.

Copyright Information

The image at the start of the blog is from the science fiction illustrator Peter Elson, and was used as the cover of Samuel R. Delany’s novel The Einstein Intersection (1967).

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