Renegade Merchant 4: Exploration 2

Within the fiction of Renegade Merchant, FTL travel is possible by first going outside the universe, into the Outside. The Outside is also the source of magic and demons, and it's a wild place, but it's the only way to get around in less than hundreds of years. 

The Outside has terrain of a sort, which means that certain routes and paths are safer and faster. Thus, while in theory one's maximum jump range is almost unlimited, in practice even explorers will prefer to make a series of shorter jumps along visible routes, like following paths in the forest.  

This means that a partial map of our setting might look something like this

So our most basic travel cycle is that players arrive in a new system, are informed of that system's jump routes, and then choose their next destination, repeating until they arrive in a system they want to interact with. 

At its most basic, this system offers a discrete choice (Do you take path A or path B) which is nice, and some information about the paths (length and danger), but not quite enough information to call this an informed or interesting choice. Let's layer some ideas on top of this:

1. Regions: In D&D and OSR contexts, terrain is a major clue about what you can expect to encounter on different parts of the map- An icy region will probably have ice monsters, for example. This is also an opportunity for players and DM to signal to each other about what kind of adventure this will be! SO I think it makes sense to provide group some nodes together into regions and have some of that information be public. Now when the players choose to go "West" they have some vague idea what that might mean besides that it's another jump further from home base. 

 

We can also assume that PCs will regularly pick up more specific rumors. IE "On the far side of the murder stars there's a long-lost colony that has advanced teleportation technology." We don't want to give away too many of these, since part of the fun of exploration is not knowing what you might find, but a handful can really help to get things going. 

Finally, we also have PC abilities and equipment that provide additional information. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that the Science Officer gets information about the jump routes of systems one jump away, and the Wizard can tell how many jumps to the nearest planet with at least a billion people. Combined with the maps above, this gives us a significant but incomplete picture:

-Jump route A is 7 weeks long, Danger 3, and has no jump paths except the one that arrives there. It's in the Land of 1000 Tombs. 

-Jump route B is 5 weeks long, Danger 2, and has lots of branching paths. It's closer to the Kingdom of the Ur but not technically in any particular region. 

-The nearest major colony is two jumps away. 

The PCs thus know that jump route A doesn't lead to a major colony, but might still be something interesting, and they can choose whether to spend time and resources jumping there to investigate the cosmic cul-de-sac.  

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I also think part of the game is that the PCs have access to trade ships in addition to their exploration flagship. Once they've convinced a new planet to cooperate with the Republic, they need to chart/clear the shortest/safest route possible to whatever planet(s) they want that world to do business with. This may require significant intervention on their part, since trade ships and their crews are significantly more risk-averse than the PCs.