Organizing Sci-Fi Realm like Battletech or Traveller

[Mettius]

I'm running a Battletech:A Time of War RPG, and am just getting ready to give Realmworks a whirl again.

I'm wondering how best to organize things "structurally"? I'm mostly referring to parent/child relationships and tags.

Goals:
#1 I'd like to be able to eventually build out a nice skeleton for anyone to use (assuming appropriate permissions are obtained), AND to be able to painlessly modify things to support the state of the universe for different eras.

For example: In the Battletech universe there are various factions which control regions of space and the planets in them.
The highest level container object as material is typically presented in universe are at once a political/government and region. Examples: The Periphery, The Draconis Combine, etc.
Planets are next in the hierarch I would think, and then things on those planets such as cities, towns, forests, oceans, etc.

But depending on the era, many of those planets change hands, cities are destroyed, etc.

#2 I'd also like for things to feel better tied into the game universe. The "Other" game system type which I must use seems to be very fantasy game centric.

Should I be creating new custom categories or tags and hiding the default ones? Or replacing them?
For example: The default "Adventure Area" tag domain is rather fantasy feeling: "Area, Building, Cavern, Complex, Dungeon, Fortress, installation, Other, Ruin, Temple".
Sure some of them are useful, but Dungeon seems out of place.

Class/Role is another. I would want to populate this with things like Mechwarrior, Aerospace Pilot, Technician, etc.

Military Organization: The list as is works OK, but I'd rather replace it with all the various canonical ways units are organized in the Battletech universe. "Lance", "Level I", "Star", "Trinary", etc.

Any tips for those who have already been there done that?

 

[kbs666]

I'd start with either system neutral or other and customize as needed. Other as you point out is still pretty fantasy oriented so you might have less "waste" in a system neutral realm.

As to modeling the campaign, the top level structure should be the various factions. below that would be solar systems or planets, depending on how detailed you want to get.

You might find uses for the adventure area topic. A battletech RPG may not have classic dungeons but there will be times when the party has to explore a particular area in or out of their mechs and the adventure area is the topic meant to model that sort of thing in RW.

For military organization, just like everything else, add what you need.

 

[Farling]

To make the structure friendly to future imports from other places, it is best to use the official categories as much as possible.

Perhaps in one of the world building PDFs (or maybe I read it elsewhere), it says that the preferred organisation for topics for describing a world is purely geographical boundaries.

In a highly political campaign, political boundaries could change so much that you would keep changing the parent of region topics to reflect the current political boundaries.

The suggestion was to use relationships to indicate which political faction(s) currently controlled each of the geographical areas.

 

[Mettius]

Farling, the only issue with that is the Geographical and Celestial "Places" Geographical Region Tags are pretty different (and seem to be more specific) than a political region Bay, Body of Water, Asteroid Belt, etc. vs Colony, Country, Empire.