On 5 May 2020 at 12:01, xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:

> On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 6:04 AM shadow at shadowgard.com (via tml list)
> <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
>     On 30 Apr 2020 at 18:48, Cian Witherspoon wrote:
>
>     Be one hell of a place to misjump to. and require a lot more than
>     the 36 parsec max in the standard misjump tables. As I've noted
>     before, an evil GM could have the "destroyed" result on the
>     misjump tables instead to the ships to someplace too far away to
>     make contact with home.
>
>
> Or something that looks that way at the point they arrive at least. It
> could be reasonable to give them some mechanism to come home
> eventually (an alien jump gate or something).
>
> Otherwise despair might be the only sane response.

Well, when this was brought up years back, it was suggested that
there was something "special" that caused the "catastrophic misjumps"
to all come out in the same general area. Sort of a Sargasso of space
effect.

so that means there'd be other survivors out there.

>     One of the Magellenic Cluds? One of the globular clusters orbiting
>     the galaxy (that's actually not a good place as there stars are
>     likely to old to have usuable planets).
>
>     But just imagine the PCs reactions when their ship misjumps and
>     comes out 500 AU or more above an alderson disc.
>
> I once had a misjump take the play group *into an entirely different
> TU*.
>
> I did, but barely, resist the urge to make it a 'Mirror Mirror' style
> of universe where the Zhos were the good guys, the Imperium was a dark
> place, and so on. Goatees would be popular with Imperial officers. And
> edged weapons. But I just made it a different universe entirely. I let
> them communicate after a bit of study and EM sampling and some time
> building the language DB for their local area.

Any idea from some of Andre Norton's stuff could work here too. In
several books she mentions instances of early ships coming out of
hyper *centuries* after they went in.

That'd just be a nasty way to kill off the party, but if you allow a
misjump to have different duration *outside* than inside, you could
dump players in the future. Or as one former list member did in some
stories, have them wind up in the past.

> These kinds of situations remind me of the original Buck Rogers novel
> (before the movie and TV stuff)

Ah yes, Armageddon 2419. suspended animation via some strange
radioactive gas.

Variantions were used by Gene Roddenberry in two pilots and a third
show that succeded. Genesis II, Planet Earth, and Andromeda. All have
the protagoi=nist (one Dylan Hunt) wind up in the far future after a
wartime accident.

The first two had him undergoing a suspended animation test at a base
in the Carlsbad Caverns when a war broke out. The third happended
deep in space near a black hole.

> and of movies like the Planet of the
> Apes where you arrive at someplace you know, but it isn't much like
> the place you knew.

The book version of Planet of the Apes had an ending that was both
different and the same.
--
Leonard Erickson (aka shadow)
shadow at shadowgard dot com