When I say I want to create a galaxy, I mean a fully realized setting in the same spirit as Star Wars or Star Trek. So far all I have is the beginning of the setting's history and lots of ideas for alien races and different planets.
If anyone has any advise or suggestions concerning the creation of a galaxy spanning setting, I would love to hear them. Regardless of what help I may recieve, I will likely be posting my work here as I complete it simply for the joy of sharing it with a like-minded community.
If you would like to take a look at my work, please click on the Land of Nod link in my signature.
Also, Skrittiblak wrote an amazing setting as well. For the most part it spans a star system instead of a whole galaxy (with a few noteworthy exceptions), but that star system is incredibly well detailed. Check out Elysium Nebula to see his work.
From what I can tell your a fairly respected member of this community so I appreciate you sharing your experiance with me.I've heard from alot of people that Saga is a better system, but I really don't want to change systems. I like the d20 system and I already have alot of experiance with it. If I were to switch to Saga now I would first have to learn the system before I could try and create the setting I have brewing in my head.
I'll deffinetly glance at your setting as well as Skrittiblak's just to see what information you decided was important enough to include.
Don't forget that everyone will be at a different PL, so there could be aliens who have been travelling the stars for centuries, or some that are just starting, etc.
Also, make sure you include the fact that galaxies are 3-dimensional. You might want to only have some of the galaxy actually explored, so the players only have a foggy idea of what is in the rest of it- sort of like in ST: Voyager, where they get thrown way out into space and don't know anything about the area?
Check out some NASA images of galaxies and base your map off of one, it will make things a lot easier, I'd imagine. Also, the vast majority of planets will be uninhabitable without advanced terraforming, so the more advanced an empire is the more planets it'll be living on. So even if some race claims an entire spiral arm, they might only have a few planets they actually have large populations on, and minor colonies or outposts on the rest.
without the FTL headaches.
dbay, its funny you should mention the concept of being launched deep into space as that is the very thing I did to seperate humanity from earth in the early part of my setting's history. It seemed like the easiest way to explain humanity living in another, far off galaxy with no contact with Earth or our home galaxy.
Also I have already considered the fact that each solar system will only have one or two planets that we humans would consider habitable. I plan to have the majority of the galaxy explored already, not by humans but by the other alien races, some of whom will be allied with humans, thus giving humans access to that knowledge.
My biggest concern is the relations between the races. I don;t want to copy Star Trek and make a federation where all the aliens get along, and I'm not overly fond of the senate idea from Star Wars. I'm leaning toward keeping all the governments seperate and just having treaties between certain races, and since humans will be the new comers to the galaxy and the least technologicaly advanced, I'm thinking of taking a page from Mass Effect and having them be treated like second class citizens by most of the alien races. I'm also considering an active war between two of my planned alien races.
This ofcourse is all rough planning and half baked ideas right now. :P
Rather than trying to fil an arm of the galaxy with bunches of stars that have a few plannets each with billions of people in hundreds of countries causing thousands of relationships....
In a young location verse the plannets/moons have only 1-5 factions that can be as few as 50 to a city of 50k or more. By leaving most landscape 'unused' or 'claimed', you can get by with a small group on an entire moon/plannet.
If we set up shop on Mars, a mining corp and a shipyard and spaceport corp, it would be with thousands of folks not Billions, and there only needs to be 2-4 factions. If we started exploiting Gliese it too would be just a few thousand folks with few factions. We dont need to fill every location (plannet/moon) with separate races of billions of folks in hundreds of countries
One thing you should really bear in mind: a galaxy is huge. This can't be stressed enough. Seriously, it is MIND-BLOWINGLY, RIDICULOUSLY, GIGANTANORMOUSLY HUGE. I've been working on my own sci-fi setting with heavy attention to realism (with FTL being one of the very few breaks). This might but it in perspective; the average FTL speed of any ship in my setting is a few thousand times the speed of light. I got a huge picture of the galaxy to try and map out a few of the systems and it was impossible. The region of space colonised in my setting spans a few thousand lightyears. It is far, far, far smaller than the galactic core, it's tiny. But nonetheless, a ship traveling from one end to the other with no stops ever would take a few years. Don't make the mistake of underestimating the sheer enormity of space.
But its 99.999....% empty and uninhabitable. So in an enormous galaxy, depending on the game, there could honestly be as little as 20 planets that are inhabitable. Or only 2 or 3. Or even only earth, and everywhere else is pretty awful... which would actually be interesting for a game- all the aliens have these fudgesack planets and suddenly start hearing about Earth. War? probably. could be neat.
Be prepared for a lot of work. Lots of work, but in the end it can be very rewarding.
That is, of course, assuming that you care particularly for realism regarding the placement/types of planets and stars.
*As close as one is going to manage without serious and time-consuming research and study.
What I mean is, I'm starting with a pocket of space, occupied by humans in a region of the Milky Way around Sol (roughly 13 star systems total). With that in mind I figure out what I want in each system, that is, number of planets, etc etc. Then name em (easy stuff for me).
After you have that pocket, build. Factions of humanity? I'm using five or six big ones (little ones I'll allow to grow organically through gaming). Those factions have ranks, ships, even unique weapons. Right a page or two blurb about the faction.
So now a small area of the galaxy is set, and it can be big. there might be uncolonised dead systems in there. All that is left at this point is game mechanics, that is, classes, skills, feats, etc that are unique to your system. None of this is reliant on D20, Saga, or anything else (hell, you could do all this for the really old Alternity system).
Basically, what I am getting at is start small. Build up, I won't tackle the whole galaxy anytime soon, but I have ideas. Once my players grow bored of the thirteen colonies, I can start to work on alien space, human expansion, and some really weird stuff I have. But its a galaxy, and its where I want it to be.
btw, except to see my setting come alive in the SW forums soon.
edit: Shroeder isn't lying about the GURP system designer, I've used it, and its great. DL is http://www.sjgames.com/gameaids/gurps/GSSC.zip. Creates a very long list of systems (I used habitable planets scarce myself, to make it a little more desolate) and you just pick and choose as you see fit.
My hardrive was infected by a virus and as a result I have lost everything I was working on. I managed to save an early draft of the history I was working on, but its an old version that will need to be heavily edited to get it back to what I had before, and I'll have to rewrite alot of the history that was lost.This has proven to be extrememly depressing and I'm questioning wether or not I want to start all over again.
So I've experianced my first big setback for this project.
This has proven to be extrememly depressing and I'm questioning wether or not I want to start all over again.
Ouch that hurts which is why I either save or copy/save all my data to a USB flashdrive and burn them to a CD-R/RW every few weeks when I have major additions and what not... could the data be retrieved by a professional
Ouch that hurts which is why I either save or copy/save all my data to a USB flashdrive and burn them to a CD-R/RW every few weeks when I have major additions and what not... could the data be retrieved by a professional
Its possible someone more skilled with computers could fix the problem and save all my data, but I don't know anyone like that and I don't have the money to pay for someone to do it.
A: Linux
What matters are three things:
* How long to it take to travel to a "useful" planet.
* How developed are these "useful" planets.
* How practical is it to visit a "useless" planet, and what might one find there?
If FTL travel is millions of parsecs per hour and terraforing tech is weak, "useful" planets will be those that are garden-like worlds. otoh, if FTL travel is slow (mere dozens of parsexs per week), a "useful" planet might be one that has rocks from which a breathable gas been be processed, and most habitats are enclosed mining colonies.