A recent discussion here on Tor.com, one which mentioned C. J. Cherryh’s starmap, reminded me of a few remarkable roleplaying games (one of which was reviewed here ages ago). Remarkable because they were fun to play; notable in this context because each game wrestled with a then-intractable problem: user-friendly starmaps.
When you read a novel, short story, etc., you may be given hints as to star locations and the distances from star to star. Most of us just take those vague gestures at maps as given and focus on the exciting space battles, palace intrigues, and so on. Only a few nerdy readers (ahem!) try to work out star positions and distances from the text. And only a few authors (like Benford and McCarthy) provide maps in their novels. There are reasons why maps are generally left out, and who notices an absence?
Roleplaying games (RPGs), on the other hand, have to give the players maps (unless all the action takes place in one stellar system). If you are plotting a course to Procyon A, you need to know just where it is and how long it will take to get there. Game companies have experimented with several approaches to the mapping problem; most are unsatisfactory.
The problem is twofold: there are a lot of stars in the galaxy, and at least on the small scales typical of most games, they are arrayed in all three dimensions. If all game developers have is printed material (words, tables, 2D maps) to map the sphere of action, then their choices are:
- skimp on detail;
- generalize inaccurately;
- focus on a fraction (a small fraction) of the galaxy.
A scene in one of Poul Anderson’s Flandry novels (exactly which one I have been unable to track down) gives an idea of the scale of the issue: The protagonist notices a small defect on one face of a coin—a face of the coin with an image of the Milky Way. The defect, almost too small to see on the coin, covers an area of the coin that, were it to erase that area in real life, would take out the vast polity the protagonist calls home.
Imperium1, the second board game I ever bought (inspiration for the name of my old store Imperiums to Order), and Traveller (the second roleplaying game I ever played) opted for starmaps that were two-dimensional, easy to read, and wildly inaccurate.
The Milky Way in our neighbourhood might be a comparatively thin disk, but the joker there is the word “comparatively”—it’s still a thousand light-years thick, and a thousand light-years is much, much larger than the average distance between stars.
Furthermore, planes (2D) scale as the square of the linear dimensions while volumes (3D) scale as the cube. On the Traveller maps, not only are the relative positions of known stars wrong, but there are many fewer systems than there should be, given the distances involved. The Third Imperium has 11,000 worlds across distances that would in a 3D map have billions of stars.
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But (and this really mattered back in the days when game-masters were likely to be limited to paper, pen, and calculators) the Traveller mapping solution is easy to grasp and use. It only takes an hour or two to generate a sub-sector of space and players can easily understand the relative positions of worlds at a glance. It may not be accurate, but it’s extremely user-friendly.
Of course, game designers were well aware that space is 3D. SPI (Simulations Publications Inc.) designer Redmond Simonsen seems to have taken this as a personal challenge. His work in 1974 StarForce: Alpha Centauri offered a 3D presentation of the stars within twenty or so light-years of Earth. It used a flat map and various keys to let the players know how far above or below the plane of the map each system was located. Simple geometry and a couple of moments with a slide-rule would reveal the distance between any two stars.
In March 1981, SPI’s RPG Universe delivered an even more ambitious map: all of the stars within thirty light-years of the Sun (or at least all that were known at the time). Universe came with a very pretty fold-out paper map and a handy book of tables. It wasn’t really an SPI game if it didn’t come with a stack of tabular data; Universe more than delivered. Still, as pretty as the map was, it wasn’t as user-friendly as the Traveller solution.
For various reasons that might be diplomatically described as “impressively catastrophic business decisions,” SPI did not survive long enough to make more games using the Universe setting. Perhaps if they had, GMs and players would have been scared off by the increased complexity of the map. Or perhaps they would have embraced it. I am inclined to think it would have been the first, and the reason for that involves a major player in the field, Game Design Workshop (GDW, not to be confused with Games Workshop).
Some years after SPI was abruptly taken off life-support, GDW decided to revisit science fiction RPGs. In 1986, the misleadingly titled Traveller: 2300 enticed players with an entirely new continuity unrelated to the even then venerable Traveller setting. Quickly renamed 2300 AD when the first title proved confusing to GDW’s customers, the game came with a map of the stars within fifty light years of the Sun. To put it a different way, the map covered a volume almost five times that of Universe’s and about fifteen times as large as StarForce’s. Lamentably, the 2300 map was not designed as elegantly as the Universe map (eyeballing the Z coordinates of each star was, as I recall, impossible). To compensate, the game came with a thick booklet with an alphabetical listing of every star on the map2. In the long, long ago of 1986, it was an astounding resource.
It covered just about one hundred millionth of the galaxy.
Each increase in scale rendered 3D maps even more difficult to use. Long before the map covered even a small fraction of the Milky Way, the challenge became intractable. Or at least, it is intractable if one is struggling with paper maps and tables, plus calculators. We live in a marvellous world where all of this work can be off-loaded onto computers, which are more than happy to keep track of a great many objects for us. A modern game designer or hard SF author who wanted a highly detailed map could begin by obtaining a copy of the Hipparcos and Gaia data; more reasonably, they could turn to the ever useful Atomic Rockets site for pointers. There’s no reason a modern-day Cherryh or Anderson couldn’t conveniently chart an interstellar community spanning billions of systems..at which point the problem becomes knowing about any specific system3.
How one might present that to readers is an interesting question. I mentioned that Benford and McCarthy included maps in their books. Those maps were of the nearest stars, thus even more limited than the maps included with Starforce. Cramming a star map into an RPG booklet is nothing compared to trying to fit it on a single page. At least in ebooks, one could provide a link.
Synchronicity is an interesting thing. After I wrote the first draft of this I discovered that Paul Drye (author of False Steps: The Space Race as It Might Have Been) is working on a project tentatively called “Atlas of the Nearby Stars.” I will be very interested to see the results….
There is, of course, an entirely different solution—one that 2300 also used, and which appears in a number of popular novels and RPGs. Alas, I am out of space. Stay tuned…
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nomineeJames Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
[1]The sequel, Outreach (the first board game I ever bought!), reverted to a two-dimensional approach, but it was dealing with distances much larger than the thickness of the galactic disk. Outreach covered a third of the galaxy and centuries of time. Very grand scale indeed.
[2]A stats-minded friend of mine once casually flipped through the stellar catalog and commented offhandedly that the density per unit volume of dim red dwarf stars dropped off the farther the map got from the Sun. This makes sense as dim stars might well be overlooked by astronomers trying to map the near stars but…noticing that fact simply from a glance at an alphabetical listing of stars implies enviable cognitive abilities.
[3]See for example Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons, in which agent Sma is dispatched to Crastalier in search of a man named Zakalwe. It takes her some time to discover that Crastalier is an open cluster comprising half a million stars and who knows how many planets and orbitals…
I loved the Universe star map! My ambition at one point was to actually fully generate every star system, but I never quite managed it. Despite the fact that it would be kind of helpful for your game to have an idea what the biggest colonies were. I’ve often thought since then that I should write a program to do it. That hasn’t quite happened yet either…but I may have to dig it out again.
Did I ever actually play a game with the system? Well…it’s possible I may have tried once…
The cover of one of Niven’s paperbacks of Known Space stories had a star map/painting of part of the galaxy showing where some of the locations of his stories were. I have no idea how accurate it was.
Now that I think on it, his Outsider Hyperdrive, especially the Quantum II, would have a lot of trouble with all the brown dwarfs, wouldn’t it?
That would be this cover”
To paraphrase TVTropes, SF artists have no sense of scale.
Given the way that FTL drive works in Traveller (and in many other settings) — simple point-to-point jumping without occupying the intervening space — I’d say that the Traveller 2D starmaps were fine, at least on the smallest (subsector) scales the players were likely to be dealing with. Where the 2D representation really started to fall apart was on the large-scale map of the entire Imperium and its neighbors — not just because there should have been many additional stars (or the 11,000 worlds in the Imperium should’ve been much more closely-packed), but because boundaries would be a lot more complex in 3D. The Imperial map shows a region of space with the Imperium at its center and a series of other interstellar polities surrounding it, each of which borders the two adjacent polities as well (kind of like a hex grid with the Imperium in the center hex and surrounding entities in each adjacent hex); but in actuality, they’d be a series of blobs mashing against each other like close-packed spheres so you could potentially have adjacency between multiple entities at the same time. (And there could be a lot more interpenetration between entities.)
Traveller: 2300 AD fudged the location of a star or two to make the universe more explorable (their FTL drive kills you if you don’t hang out in a gravity well every 7.7 light years), and thus missed the chance to be one of the first SF settings where brown dwarves were of astropolitical importance.
Didn’t Traveller 2300 AD predate general knowledge of the ubiquity of brown dwarfs?
Well, the first edition came out in 1986, for whatever that’s worth.
Ubiquity of brown dwarfs might also have an impact on Cherryh’s Alliance/Union setting, which already had some jumps anchored by random mass points of one variety or another.
Something I noticed with Traveller is that if you use standard Traveller jump drives and a 3D map of the local stars, jump one isn’t good enough to get directly from the Sun to anywhere, and jump two only grants direct access from the Sun to Alpha Centauri, and Barnards Star, and Barnards only gets one as far as Ross 154. J1 and J2 are the workhorse drives of the Traveller universe.
The RPG FTL:2448 didn’t do a map because it listed stars out to 150 light years. Just pages of data. The atlas was compiled in the early 1980s, and predates all the other listings. Sadly, it’s woefully out of date, as the more accurate Hipparcos and Gaia data have “moved” stars, some as far as 100 LYs! The solution I would use for mapping a game star system is to only worry about the colonized stars. (If you’re playing a hard SF game.) Going off into the frontier is not something you do on a whim, especially with the space equivalent of a tractor-trailer rig.
Although in Classic Traveller that’s less of an issue than it might be in other examples — CT always allowed jumps to & from “empty” hexes, so if all you had was a J1 drive, you’d jump half-way, land in empty space, then make a second jump to your final destination.
Most space-based Civilisation-style strategy games use a 2D starmap; even if it were practical to make a 3D map it would lead to poor strategy games because empires would have indefensible boundaries, and centres too close together. (Luckily for Earthly emperors, the surface of the Earth is basically 2D.)
I can see how the opposite might apply in an RPG – indeed it would save tedious travelling.
That said, unless you are simulating the real galaxy, 2D might be the more pracical option, and gamers worth their salt would surely quickly learn to ignore the discrepancy. (Hey, maybe the hyperspace system built by the Ancients depends on a 2D discontinuity in the fabric of space…)
Slightly (or very) OT, but what I’d really like to see is a fully 3D implementation of Traveller’s Mayday space combat — turn- and vector-based. You’d need to work out rules for changing facing & thrust in multiple axes, and you’d probably need a computer interface to track & display everything, but calculating vectors & distances would still just be a question of basic geometry.
@8: Yes, and some people knowing about a brown dwarf that others don’t is a plot point in some of the books.
@11: Except in the first incarnation of Traveller, jumping used all of your fuel unless you had an extra-cost gizmo installed. No, that doesn’t make a lick of sense.
@14 — I think that gizmo would be called a “stopcock”? Or a “valve”? I’m pretty sure that my first copy didn’t have that rule; or I just didn’t notice it because so many of the supplements & adventures were already ignoring it.
There were a few games that tried other approaches to 3D star maps. Lynn Willis’ Godsfire (originally published by Metagaming in 1976) had seven smaller sub-hexes inside each hex, arranged in a diminishing spiral to visually indicate seven different Z-coordinates. (Willis used the same idea in Holy War a few years later.) Redmond Simonsen tried another approach using nested boxes with Z-labels in Worldkiller.
@16: I’m not the only one who remembers Holy War?
(All those red lines indicate hexes that, due to negative space wedgies, are adjacent to each other. Try negotiating that map.)
I’m starting to think that the simplest solution might be a 2D map where every pair of syatems (at least, every pair that’s spannable by whatever flavor of hyperdrive you’re using) is just connected by a line showing the actual distance. Which, now that I think of it, is a bit like what Cherryh does in the Chanur books and in 40,000 in Gehenna, I believe?
I think a number of us have tried their own experiments with mapping various games and science fiction books. Alistair Reynold’s Revelation Space is particularly easy because Reynolds does adhere to real-world astronomy, thus the path of the story lines can be easily mapped. Niven is more difficult because there is not a lot of detail about the actual flight paths being discussed and some of the star names are inconsistent and he doesn’t observe celestial mechanics in his books. For example, in Protector the approach of Phssthpok’s ship is specifically described, and the dates are specifically described, but the positions of the planets on those dates don’t line up with their descriptions in the books. I did try to map it though:
2D traveller is particularly difficult and I made a number of attempts to 3dify the game space:
including the local reachable volume:
For 2300 I also tried mapping the reachable play areas given the limitations of the drives
and the overall volume of near human space:
Other projects: I tried to locate the original position of the Puppeteers Home World (impossible) and Ringworld (impossible).
For gaming purposes, printed maps are not very useful and more useful these days (or even back in the 1990s or late 1980s) would be the map data distributed in some kind of computer readable format. Most of the effort here was in ingesting game map data into something computable – the real world astronomy data (Gaia DR2 and everything in simbad) is much easier to automatically import and plot.
#9: Using modern data, with Jump 2 you could go Sol->Barnard->Ross 154->IRAS 18090-2608->CD-46 11540 at which point you have 10 other destinations within 2 parsec
I been playing tabletop RPG for 40 years and many SF RPGs including Traveller and 2300AD. For a decade or so I been working on my homebrew setting the Majestic Stars. I used Astrographer 3D from NBos with all the starts within 120 light years loaded.
The issue of gamability comes down to two major alternatives that depends on the nature of FTL travel. These alternatives also depend on somewhat realistic method generating star system.
1) FTL travel range is near infinite compared to the map.
In this case space is like the vase reaches of the Pacific Oceans. And amid the thousands of atolls (stars) there are only three dozens islands (inhabitable or resource rich) that are worthy of interest.
2) FTL travel range is limited like 2300AD 7.7 ly limit or Traveller 10% of volume must be hydrogen Jump fuel.
In this case the best way of dealing with 3D space is through a graph or subway style map of links and branches. The proximity of different stars trace out a web of connections that form routes of travel. The scarcity of interesting system in #1 is still present but the routes mean less interesting system are being visited and possibly exploited as well.
The limitations of FTL means that off branch travel is rare or non-existent thus the 3D coordinate system can be ignored in favor of a graph.
One of the hand waves of Traveller’s 2D maps uses this reason for why it is 2D. It not a true representation of space but a representation of the how things are inter-connected through jump drives.
The problem with the subway map approach as representative of distances and connections in jump space rather than in real space is it becomes obvious that there is something special about Earth. The closer you get to Earth, the more likely it is that jump space distances will match real space distances as the stars relate to each other.
You can always have something like range is limited by the ability of the ship to provide life support and FTL “propulsion”, which will limit range but not to a specific, absolute number
Michael McCollum publishes a 3D star map of known stars within a 25 light-year cube centered on Sol. It only uses the Gliese near star catalog because in 1998 the Hipparcos data wasn’t available.
The stars are displayed in five “layers” that are ten light-years thick.
http://www.scifi-az.com/the-astrogator-s-handbook.html
@15 there is a vector based 3D space combat game, it is called Attack Vector: Tactical, with a simpler version called Squadron Strike. It has 3D facing for weapons strikes as well.
http://www.adastragames.com/squadron-strike/
http://www.adastragames.com/attack-vector-tactical/
A couple of thoughts about that coin with a picture of the entire Milky Way galaxy on it (I presume – not a streak across the sky like we see from here if we get far enough away from street lighting, which I haven’t really):
1. Who took the picture and where were they at the time?
2. Did the coin have a big bump in the middle?
3. Not to mention being very heavy in the centre… but that’s another story.
Small niggle: GDW was Game Designers’ Workshop, another games company, along with SPI, whose demise I mourn. I have played and owned all the games mentioned in Mr. Nicoll’s engrossing article and footnotes (as well as most of the ones mentioned in the comments). Hmm, time for the Tor SF Gaming Interest Group to spring into being?
This whole star map thing is pretty much a moot point until somebody comes up with an inexpensive way for you to generate a 3-dimensional hologram in the privacy of your home.
And while we’re getting our geek on, not only are you going to need 3 dimensions, to plot the locations of stars, everything you’re mapping is moving — Not just the objects in a star system, but the stars themselves. Even in the infinitesimal time spans of human lifetimes, if you leave a star and then come back to it later, it’s not going to be exactly where it was when you left it. In addition to calculating x and y coordinates, you’ve also got to calculate relative motions.
@13 For what it’s worth, a vector combat system doesn’t necessarily need a 3-D modeling sytem. If you have two combatants, that equals a 1-axis geometry (a line); if you have three groups of combatants, that equals 2-axis, or a plane. In either of these cases trying for 3-d movement doesnt add anything.
@22. Diaspora solved the subway map problem by giving none of the star systems recognizable names. Hell, given its “Cycle of Civilizations” theme, any of them could be a renamed Earth.
@27 naturally I think those of us who plot the stars out in RPGs in 3d do so in 4d as well: https://youtu.be/Sxr-24LT3pg (for example, this the approach of Oumuamua to the solar system which is held in the center of the volume) over 1.5mya. Within a period of 100 years there’s some motion among the faster stars, but not too much. Barnard’s star will move about 0.047 ly (~3000 AU) in that time. For Traveller 2300, the precision of the near star list is limited to 0.1 ly at best, meaning about 210 years are needed for Barnard’s Star to change its position enough that the NSL would have to be updated. That said, it’s it would have to be updated for the time difference between now and the time period of the setting.
@28, unless the two combatants can only thrust in a single direction as well, the three dimensions are needed. You can’t rotate or translate the frame that you want to use as the colinear or coplanar frame and allow it to remain an inertial frame.
It’s hard to dodge an oncoming missile when you can only move directly toward it or away from it.
@27 – I think 3D visualisation in the home is a solved problem now, although I don’t have virtual reality equipment. I saw home computer wireframe graphics in the 1980s; it wasn’t zippy but it existed.
I owned both StarForce and Outreach; the problem I always had was finding anyone who had the intestinal fortitude to sit down and spend a day or more playing them. I managed this a few times with StarForce, which had a simplified version of the game that was acceptable to non-fanatics. (I loved its star map; it inspired me eventually to write a 3D star chart program for my Apple II in BASIC that could display 300 (or was it 3,000? I can’t remember) of the nearest stars and allowed you to flip back and forth between the night sky from Sol and from any other location.)
I was able to play Outreach exactly once, with a friend and my brother. It took us three hours to set up the initial game. On the very first turn, the galactic core exploded and destroyed all life in the Galaxy; end of game. I never managed to convince them to play again.
I had a friend who mentioned playing Outreach only for his side to encounter and get assimilated by an NPC entity….
Yes, 2 combatants with beam weapons just needs a line, 2 combatants with a single missile (or 3 combatants, or 2 combatants and a planet or other fixed reference point) needs a plane, and anything else technically needs 3-dimensional space.
I remember hearing about Ad Astra — I’ll have to check it out in more detail.
@34 if the rules allow thrust in any direction, even for two objects you will need something other than a line or plane. You can rotate the line to keep both objects colinear, but then you have to adjust the momentum that each object has as well, as I mentioned before. Inertial frames can’t be rotating.
Though admittedly many space combat games ignore such things
I have fond memories of SPI’s UNIVERSE (though I never played it, just repeatedly checked out and all but memorized my local library’s copy around the time I was 10). It was the first time I’d ever encountered the concept of the z-axis. I had a lot of fun calculating three-dimensional distances. I was a weird kid.
For computer games, Spore’s Space Stage did a pretty good job of having three-dimensionality; it probably reduced the scale of the galaxy by some horrific factor, but I remember being frustrated trying to get to stars that looked close but where actually just a little too far away for my current jump drive.
The Chanur map had Earth “thataway” off some edge. And yeah, it was sort of subway style, with a note that adjacent seeming stars might not be, though her ships actually jump between stars.
Bujold’s Nexus uses a natural wormhole network, so actual star location is mostly irrelevant, though a couple are familiar names (Tau Ceti for one) and Beta was colonized by STL. I don’t recall Bujold ever providing a map but many people (including GURPS Vorkosigan) have assembled their own out of provided descriptions; ‘centers’ tend to be Escobar, Komarr, or Tau Ceti (never seen in the stories, but apparently mentioned a lot as a through point), with Earth as a network backwater near the edge.
Crest of the Stars has a hyperspace that is literally 2D (ships need to generate a bubble of 3D space to exist), simplifying both mapping and hyperspatial battles.
2300 ad had a huge influence on my sf and now, maps. Most of the action in the (Caine Riordan ) universe is, to a lesser or greater degree, driven by the consequences of the astrograpic realities out to 150LY from Sol.
Speaking of Cherryh’s universe . . . there was a shareware program floating around years ago called “ChView” that was specifically designed to visualize her star systems in three dimensions. You could also input your own imaginary (or real) locations.
From a quick Google search, I’m not sure there’s an up-to-date version of the program. I never quite got it working right, but the idea was there.
I have played space board games only twice in my life but I love the maps; especially the 3-D ones. The StarForce map is to me the best. The stars are colored so that you can easily tell if they are in the top or bottom part of the map space. Although that still leaves a lot of uncertainty to the height, there are Z coordinates printed next to each star. The 2300 map used a system that tries to separate the space z coordinates by showing star symbols that have different sizes at 5 different levels. The size differences, however, are so small the stars are hard to tell apart. I have created a map that uses a graphic system that tries to improve on this. You can figure out the distance between 2 stars with just a ruler if you are so inclined. You can see it on my site at astrocarticslab.
This is the map for the Ten Worlds setting used for Attack Vector, as a WebGL map
https://starmap.cuthalion.ca/
You can turn off links, see how the map expands over time, and zoom in and spin and rotate.
And if you have two units with vectors that aren’t constrained to the same plane, you need three dimensions to handle vector movement,