 May 18, 2016 - 3:49pm | Well, I don't have any such thing. I've been working on a modified version of Zebs merely because there are some things in it that are OK. Joe Cabadas |
 May 18, 2016 - 4:45pm | Look in Damune Run and for info in Warriors of White light I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 18, 2016 - 5:01pm | Look in Damune Run and for info in Warriors of White light The Dark Side of the Moon also presents some different timeline information than Zebs, though it doesn't give exact years. Joe Cabadas |
May 18, 2016 - 6:02pm | Started a thread to work on a non Zebs time line here: (In the time line project- it seemed appropriate) I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 May 18, 2016 - 6:43pm | http://www.starfrontiers.us/node/1319 That's wht I incorporate for my players, but it's a far stretch from what the writers had in mind for the Frontier. But that's what they get for leaving it open for GM development.  |
 May 18, 2016 - 7:05pm | Thanks for the suggestions. I notice that none of you mentioned the timeline information in the article "The Volturnus Connection" from Dragon, which is what set me off on this idea. |
May 18, 2016 - 9:59pm | Thanks for the suggestions. I notice that none of you mentioned the timeline information in the article "The Volturnus Connection" from Dragon, which is what set me off on this idea. Sorry, I should have mentioned that one too. What I don't like about the Dragon magazine's timeline is if you wanted to use the Volturnus adventures as your starting point, the Dramune Run occurs before Volturnus, so unless you have time travel, there's no way any surviving characters -- if the players want to continue -- would get to that adventure. Joe Cabadas |
May 18, 2016 - 10:35pm | Thanks for the suggestions. I notice that none of you mentioned the timeline information in the article "The Volturnus Connection" from Dragon, which is what set me off on this idea.
Well there are levels of canonicity. Primary sources will be the rule books. Secondary sources: module. Because stuff in the magazines was often presented as optional you have to assign the magazines a tertiary status. Zebs is a special category and requires a decision to use or not. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 19, 2016 - 4:24am | Since it uses entire different dating, I'd say so. I need to go over Dramune again it seems. I don't remember seeing any dating. I'm almost 100% there aren't any actual dates in the core books, at least I've never seen any. |
 May 19, 2016 - 4:31am | Also keep in mind on the dates given in the modules the TSR editors sometimes missed the use of GST. I know one has a 12th month and the game specifically states there are only 10 months. I will look through my notes as I am making an OCD Timeline and this time around I put in notes to myself about where all info originated, chnages I made and why... "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
May 19, 2016 - 4:38am | I believe Dramune Run, WoWL, and Crash on Volturnus all have history data, Dark Side of Moon too now that someone mentioned it. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 19, 2016 - 4:44am | Implications on a non Zebs timeline from Basic Game rule book: 1. home worlds could very easily be within the Frontier. The statements in the basic game do not demand homeworlds that are elsewhere. 2. Not all of the colonies are members of the UPF; the wording is "many" not all. 3. Star Law's authority is not recognized on all worlds (see implication #2) 4. The sathar destroyed outpost and colonies on the edges of Frontier. Slow build up not the sudden invasion of Pale system depicted in Zebs. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 19, 2016 - 5:34am | Yeah, I'm seeing the conflicts in the TL now (and realizing just how little attention I was paying to the source materials originally). The Volturnus issue could easily be solved by knocking 5 years off all the dates in "Volturnus Connection". Hate doing it, but it definitely don't fit as is. |
May 19, 2016 - 5:39am | I've been a big proponent of rehabbing Zebs but... I have to admit Zebs may have created more problems than it solved. (Cue Shadow Shack). I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 19, 2016 - 6:22am | So far I haven't found AD to be insurmountably bad, but it's early going. I'm making a spreadsheet of events as I find them noting year, event, and source. |
May 19, 2016 - 8:21am | From memory there isn't a lot in the Dragon, Polyhedron, and Ares archives that speaks to history and society though there is some, namely Lay Over at Lossend, the ambush adventure set on Lossend, The Volturnus Connection and potentially a few other sources. My initial reaction would be Dragon mag articles and etc are presented as optional material so leave them out but they do color in a few corners of the frontier so would it be a problem to in clude them in the Non Zeb's history project? I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 19, 2016 - 8:42am | I already plan to include them, esp those that are fully canon, like those by Cook, Eastland, et al. BTW: fun fact I just picked up on: humans have been in the Frontier at least 4 centuries around the time of SW II. |
May 19, 2016 - 10:15am | We should probably try and sequence the order of events, my guess is the dates where kept vague on purpose by TSR. "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
 May 19, 2016 - 10:29am | I have no interest in any aspect of Zebulon's Guide. I reject the notion that a plague happened to destroy the home planets of every space-faring species, just so these wouldn't have to be detailed. I personally think the designers intentionally kept the matter of home worlds and time vague so referees could make up their own stuff. Most TSR staff at the time always played games this way; they didn't like being spoon-fed setting details. They gave us just enough to guide us into making the setting our own. Based on the references in SFKH0 and SFKH1, it seems that the Frontier epoch is the founding of the United Planetary Federation. ("PF" pre-Federation). It can't be the time that the Four Races entered the Frontier ("pre-Frontier"), because the Leotus line has been on the throne of Clarion for nearly 400 years in SFKH0. SFKH1 takes place in the year "61," so unless that's abbreviated (e.g., "1961"), in that module it's been only 61 years since the founding of the Federation. The Knight Hawks rules also say that the Frontier is preparing for war again in the "decades following the First Sathar War." 61 years would nicely correspond to decades; nothing else would. Also consider the modest improvement in ship technology since the war, including the development of Assault Scouts and Battleships and the phasing out of Heavy Cruisers—this is plausible given about 60 years. Regarding the matter of homeworlds: it must be the case that either Humans come from Theseus and Dralasites come from Fromeltar, or they come from worlds near those systems. Both modules are very careful to tiptoe around this, leaving it vague. Since the planets of these systems are described as "colonized" in Alpha Dawn, I believe it is the case that Humans simply colonized Theseus first, and Dralasites Fromeltar first. They colonized these systems from worlds not on the map—from other sectors. And since the rule books are very, very silent on the nature of other sectors, it's likely that all this tiptoeing is so that the writers don't have to do this work for you themselves. Thus, there must be a sector adjacent to the Frontier where the Human home world is, and where Humans are still expanding outward, but where the Four Races don't mix, or mix less. Ditto for the Dralasites, and probably ditto for the Vrusk and maybe even the Yazirians. And if you want to suppose this, you're either going to have to tell your players, "Shh! I haven't done that yet," or you're going to have to do the work and explain why the doings of those sectors have had little impact on the Frontier, at least as far as the official rule books go. (Are those systems part of the UPF? Do they have their own Spacefleet ships? What parts do they play in the Sathar wars? Why aren't they accounted for in the rules for the Second Sathar War?) I believe the authors always considered the setting in the rule books to be only a starting-point. You're supposed to do lots more work than they have. They're just trying to give you an idea of how it's done. |
May 19, 2016 - 10:34am | P.S.: Imagine the Frontier Sector is a rectangular block, and imagine other sectors are blocks of the same size. Now imagine the Frontier is the center of a superblock three-by-three-by-three. That's twenty-six sectors adjacent to the Frontier whence the races could come and which the referee can detail for exploration. |
May 19, 2016 - 12:33pm | You know by using Zebs we had a cut and dry Frontier. No lost colonies. But the Basic Game History tells us that the sathar destroyed several outposts and colonies on the edge of the Frontier. So there is a host of planets out there with ruins just weighting to be explored. Most people in the Frontier might never had known about an outpost thus the PCs might stumble upon it accidentally. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
May 19, 2016 - 1:44pm | We should probably try and sequence the order of events, my guess is the dates where kept vague on purpose by TSR. Now, that's the ticket! A referee probably wants a general history of the large, overall events that will impact the frontier, but you don't necessarily need to put a specific date next to it. It could be something as simple as, the Frontier was founded X number of years ago. A colony got started on planet such and such followed by colonists heading off to such and such system. But a lot depends on how you want to structure your campaign. The blow by blow years of the Second Sathar War tend to bo things down, especially if you want the conflict to occur much earlier than the 80s FY. It's much like D&D... or AD&D or Gamma World... to each their own, but the game tends to follow a similar structure. Joe Cabadas |
May 19, 2016 - 3:57pm | P.S.: Imagine the Frontier Sector is a rectangular block, and imagine other sectors are blocks of the same size. Now imagine the Frontier is the center of a superblock three-by-three-by-three. That's twenty-six sectors adjacent to the Frontier whence the races could come and which the referee can detail for exploration. There's been other discussions about the fate of the Core Four homeworlds on other threads such as this one: http://www.starfrontiers.us/node/6064 Also, in regards to what else is around the Frontier, there were some musings by spiritcoyote which I'll copy here: June 22, 2011 - 1:15am
I really like this idea; some spouted not-all-that-radical
thoughts: Joe Cabadas |
May 19, 2016 - 4:07pm | You know by using Zebs we had a cut and dry Frontier. No lost colonies. But the Basic Game History tells us that the sathar destroyed several outposts and colonies on the edge of the Frontier. So there is a host of planets out there with ruins just weighting to be explored. Most people in the Frontier might never had known about an outpost thus the PCs might stumble upon it accidentally. I do like that idea about destroyed colonies rather than the plague worlds. Zebs doesn't tell you everything. Now, besides sectors to the "north," "northeast," etc. around the Frontier, others have raised the idea of taking the 2d map and thinking about it as just a layer of 3d space. If say, all the stars on the classic map are on the "Prenglar plain of the ecliptic" -- i.e. within one, two, three, four or five light years on a Z-axis (up or down) from Prenglar, that could be one layer of the Frontier sector. You could have a layer above and a layer below the "Prenglar plain." Knight Hawks gives the cheat sheet for determining interstellar distances between stars on the 2d map: <!--[if gte mso 9]>
Can anyone provide me with the proper mathematical formula to determine the distance on a Z-axis? (I'm mathematically challenged, especially since I need batteries for my old scientific calculator). If the star in question is, say vertically 5 light years away, 8 light years horizontally, but 10 light years vertically (up or down) what is the distance? You could have hundreds of other systems up and down from the "Preglar plain." That's where some of the destroyed colonies could be at or where Janus is at or the host of fan-created aliens (in Frontier Explorer and Star Frontiersman) with their homeworlds. Just a thought. Joe Cabadas | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
May 19, 2016 - 8:13pm | I started sequencing the info a lot of info will be vague like these 10 colonies conifrmed to exist before X date. "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
May 19, 2016 - 8:32pm | Well, after exhausting most of my resources, here's what I have. I chose Dramune run as my "anchor point" for making any needed adjustments.
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 May 20, 2016 - 6:08am | @JCab747 to get the full distance in 3D you can just use that table twice. Use it once in the horizontal plane (i.e. check 5 vs 8 and get 9), then use that number and the value for the z axis (so 9 vs 10 gives 13). The exact formula is distance = square root of (x*x + y*y + z*z) So the exact answer for your example is 13.7 ly. Some rounding errors occur using the table twice but it's only going to be off +/- 1 ly. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
May 20, 2016 - 6:19am | @JCab747 to get the full distance in 3D you can just use that table twice. Use it once in the horizontal plane (i.e. check 5 vs 8 and get 9), then use that number and the value for the z axis (so 9 vs 10 gives 13). The exact formula is distance = square root of (x*x + y*y + z*z) So the exact answer for your example is 13.7 ly. Some rounding errors occur using the table twice but it's only going to be off +/- 1 ly. Thank you for providing help to the mathematically challenged! I'll see if I can create a 3d chart. Joe Cabadas |
May 20, 2016 - 6:19am | @JCab747 to get the full distance in 3D you can just use that table twice. Use it once in the horizontal plane (i.e. check 5 vs 8 and get 9), then use that number and the value for the z axis (so 9 vs 10 gives 13). The exact formula is distance = square root of (x*x + y*y + z*z) So the exact answer for your example is 13.7 ly. Some rounding errors occur using the table twice but it's only going to be off +/- 1 ly. Thank you for providing help to the mathematically challenged! I'll see if I can create a 3d chart. Joe Cabadas |
May 20, 2016 - 6:31am | Well, after exhausting most of my resources, here's what I have. I chose Dramune run as my "anchor point" for making any needed adjustments.
Good start "Never fire a laser at a mirror." |
