One Shot
The Far Avalon setting has arguably been in development since the end of the 1980s. Some identifiable concepts first emerged in an SF game I ran using my homegrown rules set. These included Tunnel drive, trackable drive wakes and the like, though the setting was considerably different in some ways.
I more or less stopped buying games in the mid 1980s, and just wrote what I wanted to play – including rules. There were exceptions of course. I was a big RuneQuest fan, I liked The Morrow Project and of course my association with Traveller is well documented. I’ve bought the odd game product since then of course, but for the most part I’ve tended to create a setting and a game to suit my own requirements.
For quite a while my professional commitments dictated what I wrote and played; development of my own setting took second place to work that paid the mortgage. However, that didn’t always work out. Some of my work was for less than reliable clients, and so I ended up with a large volume of material that I wasn’t going to get paid for. I still owned the copyright, but that doesn’t pay the bills.
Far Avalon was, to a great extent, a collision of these two influences: a need to make something on work I’d already done and a desire to create my own setting. I do need to mention at this point that other people’s work also got included – some of the guys who’re involved with Avenger contributed a fair amount. Thus, although the concept and most of the details are mine, other people had a hand in the creative process and the actual writing.
But overall, Far Avalon is my creation. I wanted a setting that was open to all kinds of gaming, from big-ship naval through grand politics to the more traditional half-a-dozen-heroes style. Thus the setting had to be turbulent and unstable enough that a bunch of adventurers could make a difference, but settled enough that large-scale political machinations were possible. I also needed to ensure that the characters’ actions could get them into serious trouble but that the setting was not so rigid that it stifled anything the players might do. Bit of a tall order, that.
I decided against using a major war as a backdrop. There are minor wars and conflict ongoing in Far Avalon, but a big war polarises the setting too much, and can make some kinds of gaming impossible. I decided that a fragmented setting offered far more possibilities. I also wanted frontiers, so that players could go boldly into the great unknown and all that.
So, I was asking the impossible really. A setting with established stable regions, several small empires, wide open frontiers, conflict and rivalry between emerging powers... and for some reason the great starfaring powers can’t intervene. A collapsed-empire setting might work, but that’s been done. By me, in fact (among others).
The conduit system offered an answer. The Far Avalon region is a backwater administered from elsewhere via a long Translight conduit, which has suddenly failed. This leaves a few powerful naval units in the area, but suddenly the bigger states of the Far Avalon region are the major players.
In addition to the obvious advantages of a great mystery (why did the conduit fail and is something really bad about to happen?) and the idea of a mission through normal-space to find out what has happened elsewhere, the cut-off colonies idea delivered everything I was looking for.
Thus the Far Avalon region is unstable overall, but there are several regions that are under good central control. Resources are stretched thin, and high-tech imports from the Home Worlds are now extremely valuable. It is possible to move around from system to system with normal Translight drives, but crossing the vast gulf of thousands of light-years to the Home Worlds is not practicable.
However, it is possible to push out beyond the frontiers of the Far Avalon ‘bubble’. Things get less settled as you go further out, until at some point you hit unexplored space. There are local conduits still working too. This allows the GM to create a whole new setting if he likes, linking it to Far Avalon by a functional conduit without changing the overall setting. The upshot of all this is that Far Avalon delivered what I wanted; a place where you can do pretty much any sort of gaming.
The actual writing was in a style we’ve used successfully elsewhere. Starting with the broadest brush strokes, we decided to present the overall universe, then focus in on increasingly detailed areas. Thus we started with a general overview, notes on the major powers, then a travel-guide style set of notes on each inhabited planet. From there we moved to the world of Far Avalon itself in much more detail.
Most of Far Avalon is presented in light detail. Our main focus is the rather nasty freeport of First Landing and the surrounding city. Our idea here was that you could play for months or years just in Landing City, or use it as a base for wider exploration of the region.
Just like the setting itself, Landing City is a hotbed of factional infighting (much of it involving actual combat), with many factions struggling for supremacy while others just try to get by. We wanted to make sure that the ‘low-level’ setting of Landing City influenced and was influenced by events in the ‘high-level’ setting of the overall Far Avalon region.
The idea was that you could play either (or both) end of a story out, perhaps with different characters. A band of adventurers might manage to, err, ‘recover’ some vital drive components from a faction in Landing City. Meanwhile a senior navy officer reactivates a mothballed cruiser to give his state a chance to defeat its arch-rival in an epic Space Opera storyline. You could play either end of this, or both, depending on your preferences.
It’s never been my intention to tell people how to play their own games, but there were identifiable influences during the development and writing process.
The overall ‘feeling’ I wanted was of the tail end of the Colonial Era on Earth. Armoured cruisers on the colonial station, adventurers and explorers discovering all manner of things, rivalries between the greater powers fought out in the colonies with tiny forces... that sort of thing. This fed into the idea of armoured warships with projectile-firing guns; torpedo boats rather than fighters, and so forth.
If I had to fish for other specific influences, I’ve always been a Babylon 5 fan and I really liked Firefly. Those represent two very different styles of game – high-end politics and naval stuff vs. running around in seedy backwater ports being shot at by gangsters. Far Avalon had to do both.
I know I was influenced by the new Battlestar Galactica. The scene in the pilot where Galactica comes out to fight, trying to cover the escape of the fleet, is simply breathtaking and helped shape my ideas about starship combat in the Far Avalon region. I’m not suggesting that the Prometheus mission in the Far Avalon setting is inspired by BSG, but now I think about it... . it’s about a fleet travelling through uncharted space in search of other human enclaves. It wasn’t a deliberate homage but I think the idea will appeal to BSG fans.
I also like military and naval SF, which was another influence. However, it was necessary to ensure that the big-ship end of things can’t swamp the setting. If the players are tooling around in a tramp freighter and they keep running into giant cruisers every five minutes they aren’t going to be able to do much. There are cruisers in Far Avalon – and a battleship (just one... probably) too – but since the conduit failure most navies can only operate little sloops and corvettes. That changes the balance a lot.
Of course, there are some big ships, mainly because it made sense that there would be some but also because it allowed that style of gaming. Of course, those ships are getting old, spares are in short supply and the chain of command was severed a decade ago. A game set aboard a military ship could be all kinds of interesting… but then that was the point.
Overall, though, there was no attempt to recreate a specific TV show or style of gaming. We started with a baseline assumption that the setting had to allow all manner of different styles of gaming, and went from there. After that, the most important thing was internal consistency. It all had to make sense.
That meant leaving out some things that seemed really cool, or which would have been good from a gaming perspective, if they disrupted the consistency of the setting. We tried to maintain an ‘internal’ perspective when we looked at what was in a given area. If there was a high-population society living on a harsh world, with a ‘green’ world nearby, then there had to be a good reason. If a small colony on the edge of an empire remained independent, there had to be a reason.
Overall, I’m very pleased with Far Avalon. In my opinion it delivers what it’s supposed to – a setting where players can do stuff and make a difference without needing to become all-powerful superheroes to do it. A place where you can have pretty much any kind of adventure you like. A setting that makes sense. But more than that, it’s a setting that I’d want to game in.
And that, in the end, was the point.
