"You got your Star Trek in my BattleTech!"
"You got your BattleTech in my Star Trek!"
Two tastes that go... together?
Right click for big said:
I've been getting back into a Trek mode for
reasons and instead of what I'd rather be working on I ended up with this, the 15th(!) iteration of Spark Age. My brain sucks sometimes. Most of the time, actually, but this is not the correct venue for that.
Anyway. I'm showing this one off just because it looks pretty good - I'm quite pleased with how the map came out on an aesthetic level, even if the content is blithering nonsense.
There is lore, though it's more than a little incoherent so I will summarize: The Star League falls as usual but instead of the Great Houses keeping shit intact through three Succession Wars things devolve into a more generalized anarchy as people with grudges and Mechs start popping up everywhere and the Houses just can't keep up and the whole thing just pops like a jostled souffle. Less Third Century Crisis and more Bronze Age Collapse kinda deal. (As a Spark Age thing this is where the megalomaniacal mad scientists with the doomsday weapons come crawling out of the woodwork, but I don't know that you really
need that for this particular scenario, just... ride the collapse down further and a little faster.) So things fall apart so hard that interstellar travel stops being a thing for a generation or two. Fast forward to near the end of this period, and some bright young soul digs a copy of
The Economics of Star Trek out of a neglected archive and has a revelation. That revelation being "Hey, our primitive ancestors figured out how to make this work without even good interplanetary technology, just primitive things like diesel engines and the Nintendo Entertainment System. We may have fallen from the peak of the Star League but we're still doing better than
that! We can make this work!" And so they do, and we're off to the races.
Also at some point warp drive gets invented. In a Spark Age context that's the fault of equally-inspired Sparks but it doesn't necessarily
have to be. Trying to keep at least some options open here. Warp drive has its limitations but also some upsides - it's generally slower (at least in Warp 2-10 TOS scale) than KF-plus-dropship but you can flatpack a functional drive into just about anything from a mid-size APC to a monster cargo convoy and still have like 80% of the ship left over for things like cargo. Also, if
you have warp drive and subspace sensors and your opponents
don't you can do some real asshole tactical Picard Maneuver shit by pairing warp-capable Mech transports with jumpships. Which, you know, I can't say I haven't idly speculated on a BT SI character armed with a warp-capable dropship becoming the sort of spoopy legend who hits targets before the jumpship even appears at the jump point.
But that, dear reader, is a tale for another day. Once I've got the other thing in hand, perhaps. Anyway, that's the map. Hope you like it, I'll be happy to answer lore questions with half-assed top-of-my-head nonsense if you have any.
xoxo,
Uncle Fun Tyrant
