dungeon23 sector - a plan for the next four weeks

I was sick on Saturday and instead of doing anything active, decided instead to create a star sector for Stars Without Number on my reMarkable. This is quite a relaxing process, at least I find it so, not too demanding but still a bit creative, perfect for when your head is full of snot and virus but you are still bored. It goes something like this:

1. Take some hex paper and set out an area of 8x10 hexes;
2. Roll 1d10+20 for the number of systems in the sector;
3. For each system, roll 1d8 and 1d10 for where it is, and then roll 2d100 on a table of "system tags" for two qualities of the system, or at least its inhabited planet(s). You can also roll for atmosphere, temperature etc. at this point, but I find that part quite dull so save it until later.

You can read the whole sector generation procedure in the free version of SWN - this contains the complete rules here, and in fact almost all the rules in the full version generally.

The importance of rolling by hand

This sounds like a process that could be automated, and the rolling of numbers and plotting of star systems certainly could be, but there's an important benefit to doing it gradually by hand - each time you roll new tags, you think about them, by themselves and in the context of previous tags. For instance, as I rolled up the top left quadrant of this sector, I started to get a lot of tags about war, which immediately put the system at 0201 with "refugees" in context. That might be done just by looking at the overall map since they're clustered spatially, but, say, 0306 which is a "regional hegemon" exists in the context of 0108 which is a "rising hegemon". Roll the second and you immediately think about the first.

I think this is also true for any iterative random generation system. I have certainly found it so for Dungeon23 weeks, when I've used such things. Having existing context for random content sparks you to find meaning in it.

The sector

Here is the sector map, with polities/regions marked out with highlighter colours:

One advantage of drawing it on the reMarkable is that you can use layers, so if I wanted to I could export without notes, or even just the bare map:

...and if there was a need to add, say, common space lanes, I could do that on a new layer without overwhelming the existing one or having to redraw the basic layout on a new piece of paper.

So what's this got to do with Dungeon23?

Having rolled up the systems above, I ran out of energy, but it occurred to me that there are 26 sectors here, which is almost one per day for four weeks, leaving a couple of days free for extra planets, stations, or anomalies. Why not do a system a day? Generate more details, write up some basic history, something interesting about each system, build up the sector with an overall view of how systems interact (or don't).

One small issue is that the right hand page is a bit wasted this way - it would normally have a map - but I imagine I can find something to do with it. Extra details, encounter charts, explanations of plots, maps of stations, faction diagrams. For the first week I've reproduced the map on a mini hex pad and written up an index of systems, tags, and days. So I'll see how this goes. I've never written up a whole sector for SWN before, so I expect there will be some lessons learned.