Vyborg campaign: Why Vyborg was chosen

By: (lahtinen@ee.tut.fi)
Campaign for Traveller

While the very first Traveller adventures were enjoyable, the characters itself were quite shallow. The characters used to be basically nobodies from nowhere, who just got together for the adventure. Eventually the lack of character background become quite annoying. While a player could generate a character whose homeworld is, for example, Regina/Regina, we could not really know what kind of environment that character is used to, which kind of dialect he speaks, which kinds of clothes he wears, etc.

The worst possible example of a Traveller character is a sterile string of attribute numbers and few odd skills, with no background to explain who he is, and where did he come from. In order to avoid this, we needed a completely developed homeworld, where we could get highly detailed cultural background.

In 1982 GDW published supplement 10, The Solomani Rim, which gave short description for each subsector of Solomani Rim sector. When I was reading this book, a name in hex 1540 caught my attention. A solar system in lower edge of Capella subsector was named Vyborg. "Vyborg" is english translation of "Viipuri". Viipuri is the name of a large town in former Finnish Karelia, in area that was conquered by Russians during second world war. Even today, over 50 years after the war, the loss of Viipuri is still a bitter memory, and some people are still saying, that we should take it back in the next war.

In 1982 Terry McInnes wrote the Languages in Traveller article in Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society magazine. This article was re-published in 1983 in "The Best of the Journal, volume IV". According to this article, Vyborg is a pure ethnic world, inhabited by finnish speakers.

For a group of Finnish players, an "pure ethnic" Finnish planet was a perfect place as homeworld. Once the planetary data was generated, it was very easy to determine many small details about the local population, culture, language, etc.

In 1992 Atoll published The Gene Wars Chronicles which contained World Builder datasheets and rough planetary maps for a few major systems within Solomani Rim. GWC gave much data of genetic uplift, the Simian project and Solomani Biodroids. An interesting note in page 15 sidebar states that "Today the only remaining biodroids thrive in Vyborg system, where Solomani party has virtually no power."