[Sotff] STL-only Diaspora?

[Kenneth Coble]

(Allow me to preface my on-topic remarks to briefly say that I thought
I'd sent a followup to the nice messages from both Brad and Toph about
rejiggering the Cluster generation mechanic, but it looks like it got
hung in my draft box and never got mailed out.  Apologies!)

As for the non-FTL idea - I'm just a fellow player waiting to get his
hands on a copy of the book, but I think the STL idea can be quite
interesting.  The fictional examples that come to my mind the most
quickly are:

-the Ultranauts/Lighthuggers from Alistair McReynold's "Revelation
Space" books, who are (as their name indicates) very, VERY fast STL
ships traveling between a limited number of inhabited worlds; the
semi-closed nature of their trading circuits could easily be modeled
with the Diaspora Cluster rules

-the Cheng Ho, a slower (and more 'organized') STL trading flotilla
mentioned in passing in Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep" and
covered in somewhat more detail in his "A Deepness in the Sky."  They
do have some semi-regular trade routes, but there's more of an
open-ended nature to their organization, with splinter fleets chasing
off to try and find new planets to trade with periodically.  While
this might not make an exact fit to the current Diaspora Cluster
model, you could probably roll up a largish Cluster to represent their
core trade routes, and periodically roll for a new planet, linked at
least to the previously-existing planet the expedition jumps off from.

Either end of this axis could be interesting to play in - I'd
explicitly thought about using Diaspora as a Ultranaut/Lighthugger
emulation, as it seems like it would work out quite well.  I also
agree totally with Brad's statements about considering the amounts and
types of change that you and your players will want to examine at each
leg of your trips.  There's lots of interesting ramifications for
change along any or all of the planetary attributes, whether you're
using fast-FTL like the Ultras (with travel times measured in decades)
or slow-FTL like the Cheng Ho (been a lot longer since I read those
books, but I'm thinking their travel times were in centuries).

In any event, it's a great idea, and I'll be interested in seeing
anything you work out about it!  When the book gets here one of the
first things I've planned on doing was the aforementioned Ultranaut
pastiche - I'll be happy to share anything I come up with along those
lines with the whole list.