Federation and Empire

The Meta-Setting of Thousand Suns

One of the aspects of Thousand Suns I’ve always been most proud of is its use of a meta-setting rather than a strict, canonical setting. As I explained back in Chapter 14 of the 2011 rulebook, a meta-setting is

is a flexible outline of a setting, in which certain details have been provided, along with lots of “blank spaces,” and whose final shape and content is entirely up to each Game Master. Another way to look at it is to think of the meta-setting as a large canvas onto which certain shapes and figures have already been drawn but whose colors, shading, and fine details are left entirely up to individual GMs.

I chose this approach for several reasons, but the biggest comes from my long history with Traveller. Now, let me be clear: I adore Traveller. For many years, it was my go-to science fiction RPG, and much of my earliest professional writing was for Traveller articles and products. There’s no denying that Thousand Suns owes a lot to Traveller, a debt I’ve never shied away from acknowledging.

However, Traveller also illustrates why I embraced a meta-setting. Over the decades, the game became more and more tightly bound to its iconic example setting, the Third Imperium. While you can still run Traveller in a setting of your own — and I have — since 1987’s MegaTraveller, every edition has been closely tied to that enormous, ever-expanding encyclopedia of Imperium lore. I love that lore and my familiarity with it helped launch my writing career. Yet the sheer volume of detail can be overwhelming, even intimidating, to newcomers. It’s telling that GDW eventually tried to reset things with Traveller: The New Era, in part to reduce the burden of mastering so much canon just to play.

With Thousand Suns, I wanted to take a different path. Rather than presenting a single, fixed setting, my goal was to give Game Masters a toolkit for building their own. At the same time, I recognize that many GMs appreciate guidance. They don’t necessarily want to be left entirely to their own devices. That’s why Thousand Suns provides a skeletal framework of a setting with just enough structure to inspire, supported by plenty of examples and options to choose from.

This framework includes elements and terminology that remain consistent no matter which options a GM embraces. The result is support material that’s both flexible and neutral, yet still rooted in the imperial science fiction tradition that inspired the game. It gives GMs the best of both worlds: a strong foundation to build on and the freedom to make the setting entirely their own.

Even with a meta-setting, some Game Masters may still feel they need more guidance. That’s why, at one point, I envisioned a support product for Thousand Suns that I dubbed Federation and Empire. Of course, I couldn’t use that exact name — it already belongs to Amarillo Design Bureau’s classic Star Fleet Battles wargame — but as a working title it perfectly captured what I had in mind.

The idea was to give GMs tools for one of the biggest choices in running Thousand Suns: deciding the nature of the Terran State, the game’s catch-all term for the main interstellar government. Is it a democratic federation or an aristocratic empire? While there’s plenty of room for variation within each model, these two archetypes dominate the traditions of imperial science fiction. Think of Alan Dean Foster’s Humanx Commonwealth on the one hand or Asimov’s Galactic Empire in Pebble in the Sky and Foundation on the other and you’ll see the sort of spectrum I had in mind.

Now, the reason I wanted to publish a supplement called Federation and Empire was that I thought it’d useful to provide an entire book of more detailed examples of both federations and empires to be used either as-is or as inspiration for Thousand Suns Game Masters. Furthermore, I’d tap as many established RPG writers as I could to write these examples, encouraging each of them to use their own imaginations to come up with something truly unique and interesting. The goal, of course, was to provide a little more “meat” for the skeleton of the meta-setting while also giving creators I knew an opportunity to show off how flexible the concept of the meta-setting was.

Now, I never got very far with this idea. I didn’t even reach out to potential writers to gauge their interest. However, as I turn my attention to the second edition of Thousand Suns, I find myself thinking more seriously about the kinds of support products I’d like to create beyond the ones already in development. Something along the lines of Federation and Empire — whatever its eventual title — still strikes me as a strong candidate. It would highlight what sets Thousand Suns apart from other science fiction RPGs while giving GMs a practical, inspiring resource to shape their own campaigns.

More than that, I’ve always loved seeing what others do with my work. One of the great joys of this hobby is the creativity of its players and referees and a book like this would give me a front-row seat to that creativity in action.

So, I’ll put the question to you: is this the kind of product you’d like to see for Thousand Suns? Your thoughts will go a long way in helping me decide where to take things next.