[soltakss]

OK, that should get some people's attention.

What I mean by this is that Sci Fi settings which rely on space travel generally don't have detailed world writeups.

Look at a Fantasy World like Glorantha or Alternate Earth. Each country is written up, each culture is written up, each major town and many small villages are written up. People travel between towns and villages, between countries and cultures. So, you need detailed writeups.

Now, look at a world-hopping Sci Fi campaign.

All you really need is to know where the Spaceports are, what race/species is in charge of the planet, what species is native to the planet and what the planet is famous/useful for.

Look at some Sci Fi films/series. Star Wars describes part of Tatooine, briefly sketches the other worlds and never really stays in one place long enough to warrant a description. Star Trek treats planets as settlements with empires/federations/dominians made of many planets, none of which are ever really described. Babylon 5 has descriptions of each world but never cities on each world. The same can be said for series such as Blakes Seven, Farscape and Space 1999.

Even Sci Fi Novels very rarely describe individual worlds. Dune is perhaps an exception, but that only concentrated on a few worlds. Asimov's books rarely described a single city in any detail. I can't think of a series of space-hopping books that describes a city or a number of cities in detail.

Part of the problem is that a planet such as Earth has 6 billion people, hundrd of thousands of towns and cities and many cultures. Other Sci fi worlds would be as complex, perhaps more so. Even describing a single city is too much - imagine bringing out a supplement describing London, Los Angeles or Mexico City in any detail. It just isn't worth it.

So, Sci Fi Settings don't need detailed world descriptions. What they need is something like Cthulhu Rising that has sketches of each planet and uses the planets themselves as settlements with travel between them. In any setting with thousands of planets, you will have lists of planets and what the are useful for and that's about it.

After all, Sci fi Settings are not really about individual cities but how the PCs interact with different planets and empires.