The playing field

A’den; the venue

The system is uninhabitable, but through a freak of chance it contains five major jump nodes which allow hyperspace travel to fixed points elsewhere at a fraction of normal fuel costs. However, the presence of the nodes distorts local space to the point where normal jumps to other destinations carry much the same risk as trying to jump too close to a solid object of some kind.

Pirate activity in the system is a constant low level problem.

Drifting debris and radiation zones in the system are a navigation hazard, although the routes between the jump nodes remain clear through a mixture of occasional sweeps by specialist vessels and the side effects of the jump nodes’ distortion of local space.

The navigation hazards and generally uninhabitable nature of the system have led the major trading nations to conclude that there’s no practical way to maintain a base in the system, and their anti-piracy efforts are confined to convoy escort, occasional Q-ship operations and very rarely a punitive strike when shipping companies have started complaining loudly enough.

No permanent pirate base of operations has ever been identified and it is generally assumed that pirates are staging out of another system.

Practical effects

1. Going to FTL is at all times as hazardous as going to FTL with another ship within 6 inches
2. Movement within debris zones is dangerous - roll below your M-drive rating on one d6 or take a hit equal to your current speed divided by your M-drive rating
3. The corridors between the jump nodes (which will be clearly marked on the grand tactical map) have no debris at all.
4. The jump nodes are arranged in a rosette with each node 72 inches from its neighbor. Each player will be entering through a jump node, and will have some knowledge of where other key elements will start.
5. All movement at first will be on maps. I'm going to use small hexes on hex paper and everyone will need to be levelheaded about the slight fiddliness of counting small hexes on big sheets of paper. The fixed points of reference will be the jump nodes. Debris will be ignored during grand tac movement; commanders will be assumed to deal with it in the background.
6. Once it's clear that units are within detection range of each other, their relative positions will be translated onto the table, and debris will be placed randomly all over the place. (for the quibblers, I'll be putting down about fifteen irregular templates and they'll be placed by dicing locations - start at one corner, roll a direction dice and a d 20 for distance. Place a template, repeat) There's a pretty good chance that you could find yourself either in a template or pointing right at it with no way to swerve...


I'll be managing the initial arguments and running any non-player characters. As much as possible, squadrons will be assigned to the roles within the game to which they're best suited, much and all as it would amuse me to assign on the more entertaining basis of complete unsuitability. This is intended to be at most a two week mini-campaign with a certain amount of pre-battle manoeuvre and two to three serious multi-axis clashes. What it will actually turn out to be as much up to you as it is to me.


And one last thing
It should be fairly clear to you by now that this game will involve boarding and dispersed patrolling and might involve pirates. It will also involve the possibility of pre-game force attrition. So when planning your squadrons, keep in mind that you may need to split your force and that you might not be able to start the game with the full complement of ships you designed. And although you might well have some ideas of your own, I suspect that a force of two optimaxed superdreadnoughts is NOT going to be either much fun or much use.