“You let a robot think for itself, and next you’ll have the Compact crawling up your ass.”
overheard in a market on Shadir
The Array is a cluster of stars, outside the plane of the ecliptic around a nearby spiral galaxy. More than a hundred thousand star systems are located within the Array, many of them inhabited.
There is indigenous life in the Array, but Outsider life (including humaniti) came to the Array through mysterious means, over 30,000 years ago. For whatever reasons, almost all technology was lost to those early inhabitants. Populations arrived at and came up on various worlds, most being forced to adapt to alien environments, but none achieved TL-2, until thousands of years later. Jump technology wasn’t invented until humans had occupied the Array for almost 20,000 years. Earth is no longer even a memory in the game. Also, in the Array there are no alien sophonts, so various populations of humaniti are the inhabitants throughout.
The interstellar mapping is 3D, and the setting is unique, but in most other ways we’re using MGT2E with some reference to Marc Miller’s T5 stuff (world hexes) and Cepheus when useful. For the sector maps, it’s 3D, but we have the concession that no two stars can be at the same x and y (one above the other), so that these maps (of which there may be a lot) can be printed.
We’re not using political source books from Charted Space, though some of the ships are being assigned to Array kingdoms. It’s pretty faithfully Traveller in play, just in a unique setting. The Imperial Encyclopedia is generally applicable when the information is setting-agnostic, and not about interstellar mapping, and subject to referee approval.
If we were selling this, we’d create and commission only actual art, but we’re not. I’ve used Canva and AI Image Generator for art, not as official parts of the setting, but just intended to keep the site from appearing too dry. The only ‘canon’ content you see here will be text, Traveller forms, maps, and labeled graphics, as well as some labeled original art.
Update: Three of us will be running campaigns in this setting. Wayne and I have started our games, and we will have a separate page for each of us. The Array-opedia is in progress, and we’ll shuffle our ideas into a hyperlinked reference.