The Core Worlds

A few hours ago, I was unfortunate enough to be in a conversation which included this little gem (or something closely resembling it):

“I need to set up a Wiki or something”, said Jim, “D&D dungeon crawls are simple enough, but in Traveller there’s a lot more information to keep track of.”

I managed to resist for a whole three hours before I pushed aside the project I was working on (I’d hit a speed bump, and was looking for an excuse to procrastinate, that’s the joy of personal projects with no deadlines).

So, a system to track information about a Traveller campaign. Clearly, a subsector or two is going to be a key point of this, so we’ll have to represent that somehow (yes, let’s run directly to the output for the system). There’s a lovely standard map for these, so producing something similar shouldn’t be too difficult.

By trade, I’m a web developer, and two hours ago I knew next to nothing about dynamically producing graphics (so all systems were equal as far as learning enough to get going was concerned). The standard subsector map lends itself to vector formats, so SVG was the logical choice.

An hour later, and I’ve picked out enough from the specification to write a Perl script to generate an 8×10 hex grid with coordinates. You’ll need a browser capable of rendering SVG (which is pretty much anything except Microsoft Internet Explorer (which is years behind its competitors in everything but market share)) or a stand-alone program such as Inkscape.

I have plans for this (which include a nice database and lots of JavaScript), some of which might even make it to fruitition. I’m not holding out hope of finding a great deal of time for those plans, so I’ll publish what I do have (including the source code) and hope that you find it useful.

A friend of mine is in the process of setting up a MUD, and we’re going through a world building exercise.

I’d managed to come up with a description of a location (and the journey to get to it) that I was pretty happy with, and then someone came up with a map which contradicted it. There were two choices, either the description needed to be changed or the map did.

I didn’t want to add an ocean voyage so I set about amending the map so I could make my proposal for the general layout of the world. It was soon after that that I realized my error. The start of the journey that was described was in a temperate region, while the end was in a desert, and they were at the same Latitude. That, combined with their closeness, mean that the weather simply didn’t make sense.

In future, I’ll always draw a map to make sure that where I put things makes sense.