Cepheus Deluxe: The Bounty Hunter - Session 9

 

Our bounty hunter Arman Doyle is recovering in a hospital in Krinnai, capital of Siento 1. While he's waiting for his impending rescue by the unofficial bounty hunters' network, we need to figure out where he's going to be dropped off when they take him off-world.

As you recall we're playing in the Caloo subsector of the Outer Heaven sector which is in my homebrew setting. It's roughly similar to the Third Imperium from Traveller but without aliens and psionics. I've always thought if you have psi powers in your sci-fi setting it needs to heavily influence the entire culture in a big way, like it does in Warhammer 40K, and I can't really be bothered to think about it.

I already played a short campaign in Caloo offline, with the crew of a merchant ship who might make an appearance in The Bounty Hunter at some point. I generated five star systems for that game, Siento being one of them, so let's roll up a new one now.

We'll say Arman will be dropped off on a world two parsecs away from Siento to make sure he's well out of their reach (not that their influence spreads beyond their almost barren system anyway. We'll use hex 0204 on my map which will mean he's surrounded by four other unexplored hexes. I like to use the Traveller star system generator on Donjon to generate the name and all the planets except the mainworld, and then I roll up the mainworld's stats myself.

This gives us the Honi system:

Honi, a yellow main sequence star

Honi 1, a rocky planet

Honi 2, a rocky planet with two moons

Honi 3, the mainworld with two moons

Honi 4, a rocky planet

An asteroid belt

Honi 6, a gas giant with eight small moons and one large moon

Honi 3 - The Mainworld

World size: 3. 4800km diameter with 0.25g gravity. That's less than half the size of earth.

Atmosphere: 2. Very thin and tainted. Residents require a breather with an air supply. Breathing the air outside results in 1D6 damage every 10 minutes.

Hydrographics: 7. 70% of Honi 3's surface is ocean.

Population: 3. Thousands. Let's say there are a small handful of settlements with a few hundred people in each.

Government: 4. Representative democracy. A republic run by elected officials.

Law level: 4. All automatic weapons are banned, but the settlers are allowed to carry blades, handguns and shotguns. Anything more advanced than an automatic weapon, like energy weapons are also banned.

Starport: Class C. A standard starport where ships can be repaired but not built from scratch. They only sell unrefined fuel which can occasionally cause problems for J-drives. Based on the world's characteristics there's no highport/orbital facility here, so for ships to dock they need to be designed to enter a planet's atmosphere.

Tech Level: 7. This is equivalent to early 21st Century Earth, the same as Siento 1. We'll allow some sci-fi tech though as the settlers will have to be living in sealed buildings with air conditioners that filter out the toxins and also condense the atmosphere to a breathable level for humans.

Trade Codes: Low Population. This is a recently established outpost, not an industrious and thriving planet.

Bases: No naval, research, scout or pirate bases present.

Trade Routes: In order to work out trade routes between systems and determine how much traffic a world on the route will receive, you need to generate the whole subsector first. I'm not doing this because it would probably use up every evening and weekend for several weeks! Later on I'll probably work out whether there are any trade routes between the systems I've already generated. 

Universal World Profile:

Honi 3    0204 C327344-7 Lo    111 Em

Based on the above rolls I imagine Honi 3 is a rugged, harsh place to live. A few generations ago an imperial scout ship noted its large oceans and abundant forests, marking it as a low priority world for colonisation. Years later a colony ship arrived, bringing a few hundred families who began a logging operation in the forests, spreading across one of the small continents and establishing five (D4+1) settlements that eventually began trading lumber and fish with each other.

Nearly all the folk there are proud to trace their lineage back to the original families who arrived on the colony ship, though they are much more welcoming to offworlders than the people of Siento 1. Although they're not wealthy enough to spread to the other planets in the Honi system, the pristine asteroid belt attracts mining crews from nearby systems so the starport has a bustling startown around it.