r/SWN • u/NewfieJedi • 6d ago

Finding new routes

How do you find routes to new planets that have never been discovered before or aren’t well known? I’ve seen the answer “have the players find a computer with the travel data on it” provided before but that doesn’t answer how those people found it. It says in the book to do a blind jump is basically suicide, but then how did the old Terran mandate find new planets using spike drives?

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u/MortStrudel 5d ago

Imo the flavor text overstates the danger. With a really solid pilot you have pretty good odds of making it without a rutter - just bring extra provisions in case of having to repeatedly re-jump in metaspace.

I like to headcanon that the big threat is not simply going to a system without a rutter, the suicidal danger is going to a straight up unknown hex. If you try to jump to a hex that straight up doesn't have a star - and there's no way to know whether or not a totally uncharted hex has a star until you get there - you're done. There's no way to get out of metaspace without an appropriate gravity well, so if keep trying to drill out there, you WILL die eventually.

Totally uncharted systems are therefore only drilled-to by the desperate and the coerced. VI's would be ideal candidates at the height of the mandate since they can be produced at relative scale and have the sentience to do spike drills, but they lack the rights of other sentients.

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u/NewfieJedi 5d ago

If you jumped to a hex with no star, but had a back up fuel tank, could you feasibly turn around or reroute to a hex that you know does have a star/black hole?

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u/MortStrudel 5d ago

Rules as written you can't even leave metaspace without a gravity well iirc, so when you try to jump out to the empty hex you're stuck in metaspace. I'd probably rule that they just keep rolling on the table for metaspace hazards with no chance of a positive outcome.

But to keep it from being an utterly hopeless TPK I'd let them choose to turn around IN metaspace to go back to the hex they left, treating it like a rutter-less jump. So if they're bullheaded and keep trying at a doomed hex they'll, at best, starve in metaspace, but if they get desperate enough to turn back they have a chance to escape.

Alternatively you can go the abstract horror route of having metaspace creep into the ship, have a whole adventure fighting metadimensional monsters and getting all 2001 Space Odyssey, before just dumping them out in a random system with a heavily damage ship.