
                       General Introduction


This program is mainly for those types of Traveller referees who
like to build big campaign settings. How often have you looked at
all your notes on all the different worlds you've detailed
(either in the official traveller universe or in your own variant
campaign setting)? More likely than not, you've got a notebook
full of such material. Now just imagine how nice it would be if
all those world write-ups were right at your finger tips, so that
you could open up a program, arrow over to a particular star
system, hit <enter>, and all your notes would be right there in
front of you.

Well, that's exactly what this program will do for you.

Not only will you be able to map out your campaign universe, but
you'll also be able to access it quickly in the middle of the
game session if you need to, and (best of all) you'll even be
able to share it with other people on the net.

How are you going to do all this?

First, if you haven't yet done so, go look at the map of the
Spinward Marches by selecting the Star Map option at the main menu.
Take a look at the Glisten Subsector, for instance. You'll notice
that many of the hexes there are red rather than blue. Red hexes
are hexes where the starsystem has a write-up of some sort. Rob
Dean (robdean@access.digex.net) has kindly donated most of the
write-ups which you'll see there.

Creating write-ups with this program is pretty easy. There are two
ways you can do it. The first is to create a text file. You simply
hit the <enter> key on top of a blue-hex star system and tell the
computer you want to create a text file. It'll zap you right into
one, and you can start writing the world description from there.

The second method involves creating a menu (only suggested if you
have a lot of material you need to break down by subject).
Overnale (Glisten/1937) is a good example of this, and you can
read about creating menus in the very next help file.

One of the things you may want to try is creating your own star
sector. To do that, you need to choose the Select/Create Sector
option at the main menu. This will take you into the sector menu of
Galactic's configuration program. From here, you can simply hit the
<insert> key to get the sector generation process underway (just be
ready to answer a whole lot of questions).

I developed this program for two reasons. First, while the
previous sector viewer/generators have been good, there seemed to
be an awful lot of room for improvement. The second reason,
however, is that I know there's an awful lot of Traveller
referees out there on the Internet, and I really think it's a
shame that we aren't pooling our creativity and coming up with a
shared-universe of some sort. True, some people have branched off
and started their own projects, but the rest of us have been
essentially slaves to the official Traveller setting. While I
have nothing in particular against that setting, I think it's
only one of many possibilities, and that instead of watching
what the "official" game designers are doing and trying to
work around them, what we should be doing is developing our own
completely original galaxy of sectors (or _galaxies_ of sectors
if you prefer). With the number of people we have on the
Traveller Mailing Lists, we could really create something awesome
if we pooled our creativity, and with this program, it is very
easy to put star sectors alongside one another and have them mesh
seemlessly. This program is essentially a tool to allow us, as
the long-time Traveller consumers, to start being Traveller-
creators, developing a shared-universe for the game which is as
rich as varied as even that which GDW & DGP have jointly
designed.

If you like this idea and want to take part in this sort of
project, please write me, and I'll see if we can't get something
organized. And if you have any questions at all about this
program which aren't addressed here, please feel free to bug me.
I'm one of those weirdos who actually likes getting email (even
if I'm sometimes slow in responding).

Jim Vassilakos
jimv@empirenet.com


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