In my Borlo campaign, my design of Faster Than Light (FTL) travel was very important, even though the players never left the planet's surface. How easy or difficult it is to get somewhere shapes the culture and game-play of a setting. I really liked the system. It lets you cross the galaxy in a month, but it takes weeks to get to any particular place. My favorite consequences include:
- It creates massive frontier areas where communication and transportation is possible but slow
- Travel times are unpredictable
- The ideal route for a merchant (or any other spaceship) is often to visit a new world.
These features make for good gaming: The PC's are often isolated from help or stodgy management, but if they need to leave a world, they can do so quickly. Colonization occurs in many places all at once instead of growing shell of planets that quickly go from one hundred to one billion people. How does it do this? I now present to you: the Borlo FTL system.
