Traveller: World Tags, An Introduction...

Good Afternoon, All:

If you've ever taken the time to look through Stars Without Number by Sine Nomine Publishing, you have probably considered applying the concept of World Tags to your own Traveller campaign. These tags are similar to trade codes, and provide a number of suggested elements to inspire adventures and flavor elements. After a brief description, each world tag suggests 3-4 adventure items in each of five different categories: Enemies, Friends, Complications, Things and Places. As you can see, these are fantastic for the Referee running his or her campaign in a sandbox style.

There's a number of existing world tags in Stars Without Number that already apply to Traveller trade codes, of course, but there are still many more that need to be addressed. For your reference, the following table captures my thoughts on how Stars Without Number world tags relate to Traveller trade codes. Empty cells indicate that no appropriate world tag exists for a given trade code.

Traveller Trade Codes	Stars Without Number World Tags
Agricultural
Asteroid	Heavy Mining
Barren	Tomb World
Desert	Desert World
Fluid Oceans	;
Garden
High Population
High Technology	Flying Cities, Major Spaceyard
Ice-Capped
Industrial	Heavy Industry
Low Population	Outpost World
Low Technology	Primitive Aliens
Non-Agricultural
Non-Industrial
Poor
Rich
Water World	Oceanic World, Seagoing Cities
Vacuum	Bubble Cities

Obviously, upon review, trade codes aren't adequately covered by world tags, and so there would need to be quite a few generated to cover the bases. In order to capture the flavor of Traveller, particularly that of the Azri Drakara setting, I'm going to explore the concept of creating "world tags" for Traveller worlds.

World tags are not open gaming content, and as such, they cannot appear in any published work in the original format (due to trade dress issues) or using the text found in Stars Without Number (due to copyright issues). For my purposes, I will provide suggestions in the following categories: Allies/Contacts, Rivals/Enemies, Targets, Locales, and Challenges. It covers the same range of information, but is distinct enough to avoid trade dress and copyright issues. The work I'll create here is inspired by Stars Without Number, but I just want to avoid any legal issues that might come about in pursuit of this goal.

Looking Forward To It,
Flynn