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Diaspora was written by a bunch of people who love Traveller, but also love indie games where players share narrative control with the gamemaster. So they took Fate, the game system that Spirit of the Century and the Dresden Files RPG are built on, and they wrote a hard science fiction game that's very Traveller-like, but with all of the player possibilities they love about other games intact.
The book is dense — 270 pages. That seems like a lot, for a setting without a setting; unlike Traveller, where nearly every square centimeter of the galaxy has been mapped, planned out, and described in some sourcebook or another, you build your universe from scratch. It's easy enough to do, with Fate's aspect system. Everything from planets to alien races to spaceships to weapons can be described with aspects. The high page count is because the authors went to the trouble of giving you ladders and suggestions on each and every possible element, so that everything fits together smoothly and keeps the hard science feel. If you're well-verse in Fate you might find it unnecessary, but it's helpful. If you're not familiar with Fate, the high page count and amount of information provided may seem incredibly daunting.
Disapora gets me excited. You can recreate the Traveller universe with this, sure, but you could build almost any science fiction universe from it. It's simply a matter of how far you want to bend the definition of "hard science". You could do Battlestar Galactica with it, Serenity, even Star Trek or Star Wars if you really want to allow some hand-waving pseudo-science and fantasy into the game. It deserves to be this generation's Traveller. If only hard science fiction were a more popular genre.
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