[TML] "Dies the Fire"

[shadow at shadowgard.com]

On 9 Dec 2007 at 2:53, Richard Aiken wrote:

> On Dec 6, 2007 6:13 PM,  <royce at efn.org> wrote:
> >   ObTrav:  A Red Zone world where the author's near magical restriction
> > pervades.  But the planet has a working elevator to orbit (powered from
> > above the field's boundary), so the PC's can visit.  (Yah, this is a
> > real stretch for a token ObTrav.  Someone please one-up me with a more
> > interesting notion.)
> 
> I've actually been thinking of putting a world with this effect into
> my next campaign.  Say, replace the description of Nirton with a
> low-tech world that you can land on (deadstick) but can never leave.
> IISS researchers can only watch from orbit, but that can't tell them
> much.  If the PCs end up there, then I'm tempted to take one of the
> other repliers options and say the Ancients have a teleport gate at
> "Nantucket" that takes them . . . somewhere else.  When I get finished
> with "The Sunrise Lands" maybe I'll decided Yea or Nay.
> 
> I've also considered running a fantasy game - using a very low-magic
> background such as Columbia Games Harn - and a Traveller game at the
> same time.  The fantasy gamers wouldn't know their world was Nirton.
> Heck!  I could even run the same group of players in both games.
> Depending on the course of the campaign(s), they may or may not ever
> meet.

Well, I'm sorely tempted to stick my old D&D game on an Alderson 
Disk. Then have a *bad* misjump bring the PC's ship out somewhere 
near the disk.

They'll be too busy trying to deal with the (obviously :-) 
malfunctioning instruments and getting down in one piece.

After that they get to try finding help on a disk 10 AU across, with 
a central hole about an AU across. And that's thousands of miles 
thick...

Do note that since gravity from a disk has *no* decrement with 
altitude until you are a significant fraction of the diameter up, the 
effective escape velocity is completely out of reach.

But they might have had brief radio contact with someone before they 
went down. All they have to do (once they figure out that the ship's 
instruments weren't lying on the way down) is figure out how to cross 
anywhere from thousands to *millions* of miles of alien "planet".


--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com