Fan made creations are an inevitable and essential feature of roleplaying games. Whether it’s fan made adventures, new player or game master resources, play aids and tools, or fan led live-play events and cons. They are what keep games alive after they are out of print, and adds to and expands the ecology of all RPGs.
Over on the Expanse RPG Facebook community several fans continue to share their creations, some of which have made their way onto this site, and more that are in the works. Although, not everything can easily be shared here as a PDF or ZIP-file of jpegs.
That is the point of this post.
Ian Hayward is a long time member of the Facebook community, and regularly shares his creations on his own website, in the Facebook community, and other social media platforms. So, it is likely you have come across him and/or his work elsewhere. This is a community appreciation post, as well as a post to highlight the cool tool he has made and recently updated.
I like to make my Expanse rpgs immersive. So I use things like https://tabletopaudio.com soundpad.
Ian Hayward
Immersion is an important aspect of RPGs. What that entails for a specific group of gamers may vary. Yet, it commonly features music, and perhaps sound effects. If you play using VTTs there are numerous tools available depending on platform and your willingness to play around. At your physical gaming table there are also several options to include immersive elements (minis, maps, syrinscape, tabletopaudio, scents, lighting, and so on). Of course, players using their digital devices during play may be a faux pas in some groups, but for GMs it may be a necessary tool.
Ian is an active member of the community, and have for a long time been working on the travel and navigation aspects of Expanse RPG. The rules in the core book are probably sufficient for many, but some players and GMs like more detail and granularity. More realism if you will. Thus, Ian went to work and made an online tool in order to plot routes between destinations in the solar system on the fly, adding fuel as a limitation.
I found I was doing a lot of plotting of routes, so I thought it would be cool if the players could do it themselves, using web pages that looked liked ship screens.
Ian Hayward
His creation have been around for a while, and in order (I assume) to make it more user friendly and accessible, gave it a nice design update and some colours. The colours are reminiscent of the Rocinante in the Expanse television series, and provides an immersive element for your digital devices during space travel plotting.
He calls his navigation system for “Ship Displays” and they can be found and utilised here. The system consists of three displays. One called Dynamics, which is where you will get all the information you need about fuel consumption (not a feature in the official RPG, but useful nonetheless if you want to add that as a story element), velocity, delta v, distance, and more. You can even add days for coasting (useful for belters that cannot endure high-g acceleration as well as earthers, or to save fuel), and breaking it all down into detailed information.
The only limitation that I can see is that you cannot add custom locations. Although he also provides you with a xlsx-file (and one for Apple numbers) for offline use (without the nice colours and design) where you can add your own information and make adjustments (even, I assume, looking up data on the solar system to adjust the year, and thus distances between planets, if you feel like it).
The second display, Navigation 2D, is a 2D map of the route in relation to other bodies in the solar system, and it – like the 3D map (Navigation 3D, the third display) – are used to set origin, destination, and acceleration.
Personally, I must say that I’m very impressed by and love the 3D map. It puts everything into a nice perspective, and you can rotate and change the view of the map. Immersion achieved.
There are differences in travel times between what you will find in the core book and what this site will give you. This is because Ian’s system takes into account fuel consumption, among presumably other things. This will, as he notes on the website, increase certain long distance travel times. This can add tension and drama to your stories. I for one will make use of this in games that I run.
Ian has also made other tools, like the spin gravity calculator, that you can find on his site.
The Expanse RPG Fan Community 