Called the Talosian Empire, The New Empire, or simply The Imperium it is home to hundreds of races, mostly humanoid, and is a place of marvels and deep secrets.
The posts here will be in two forms:
The first, like this one, will be looks behind the curtain and will discuss the development of the setting and why some things were ordered as they are and how the setting evolved over time.
The second, which I plan to make up the bulk of the work, will be written from the point of view of someone writing within the setting. Some will be common knowledge, but much of it will be peeks into the dark corners of the Empire giving you an idea of what is really going on.
The history of the Empire spans over 500,000 years as it's origins lay far in our own past and extends almost 600 years into our future.
The Empire was the brainchild of three minds, L. Ken Layton(He did not like his first name and no, I am not sharing it with you.), Chris Elliot,(no not the star) and myself. We served together for a time in the navy and became inseparable until the Navy sent us to the four winds. Over the years we lost touch with one another but the setting sat in my head and grew. We had originally developed and adventured in the Empire using a free-form style of role-playing where we basically told the story together and rolled where we felt it was appropriate. Together we discovered the basis of what I am going to share with you in these posts.
These early sessions combined elements of a multitude of material we had watched, read, and imagined. There was no attempt to write most of this down as we were creating this for the shear joy of it with no thought of the fact we would eventually go our separate ways.
I give credit to Ken for the original seed we built from. He had a passion for drawing ships and cars and had built a rough background history to explain them. As he shared this with Chris and I we decided it would be fun to take it further. Chris and I were already roleplayers and we taught D&D to Ken. We took the basic concepts and used them to build our first characters and then took off. Ken ran the majority of the sessions but looking back I can see that most of where our characters went and what happened to them did not exist until we sat down and pushed in that direction. Those adventures were pure space opera fairly rough by today's standards.
After we parted I tried to take what I had, mostly notes we had written down to keep track of things as we went along, and went in search of a set of published rules I could use to share the setting with the gamers I played with afterwards. Every system seemed to be too dedicated to the vision of its creator and would require extensive re-writes to adapt to our setting.(Yes, you can read into this that I had no desire to write a set of rules from scratch.)
The three closest matches I found for the longest time were "Traveller" by GDW, "Space Opera" by Fantasy Games Unlimited(major geek points if you remember it), and "Spacemaster" from Iron Crown Enterprises. The only problem with the first was that there were elements of the setting that had no existence in Marc Miller's Traveller, my main problem with the other two at the time, was their complicated rules for character generation and combat resolution. It was not until TSR/Wizards of the Coast published Alternity in 1998 that I found a home for the setting and started a regular campaign in the Empire. (a late revision is required as I ended up abandoning Alternity for a number of reasons mostly financial. I have since returned to Traveller realizing after all this time that the revisions needed to run the setting were neither as vast as I had originally considered them.)
All the time I was searching I was also reworking and expanding the setting in my head. Some items got swept away because we had pulled them whole cloth from other work and in retrospect made the whole look like just patchwork of other people's work. I began to flesh out things we had glossed over and began to look for logical reasons for some of the things we had encountered. I looked at this with both the eye of a storyteller and as well as that of a gamemaster. I decided much of what I was coming up with would be unknown by the population as a whole and a few parts would only be known by someone standing outside looking in because no one in the setting was in a position to see the whole picture. What I ended up with was a setting where the the secrets are as dangerous as any physical menace.
One of my favorite authors once said that a writer writes because he has no choice, what he has inside him has to be expressed or else. I understand what he meant, I find myself explaining elements of the setting out loud as if speaking to an audience when I am alone doing things like laundry or the dishes. When I am at rest my mind turns to explaining things and events in the setting. It has always been my desire to share my worlds with others so perhaps they can find their own adventures in this thing that lives in my head.
Welcome to the dawn of the 27th century. The Empire awaits you.
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