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Traveller-like movie crowdfunding
Apr. 12th, 2025 02:55 pmThe Voyage of the Chimera movie team is in the middle of crowdfunding a second movie, Ashes of the Chimera, and they have a trilogy planned out.
https://seedandspark.com/fund/ashes-of-the-chimera
What? You have no idea who I am talking about? Not a surprise. This is a small indie group we found by accident. I watched their initial movie with Liana - while the acting was rough, it was surprisingly Travelleresque. Like, woah. (In case you do not know, Traveller's an oldschool tabletop role playing game (TTRPG), in which the rules were minimal and the world development was basically amazing. It's been through many iterations.) Liana never played any Traveller variant and still found it extremely engaging despite the "hey we made a movie" actor/director feel. They managed to create a hard SF story that had depth. Watch it (it's a good distraction!) and then maybe contribute to the sequel. Time is short.
While seemingly taking pains to avoid copying any Traveller TTRPG series IP (or perhaps just riffing off the same roots as Traveller, maybe especially the CoDominium series from Pournelle, and the Mote offshoot with Niven), the storyline is as much or more Traveller as a Gregory P. Lee, Swycaffer, or Chadwick "not Traveller, wink" story. Production is interesting - the first movie had a $20K budget and was almost entirely filmed on greenscreen - they did a remarkable job with the look and feel given that. Actors and director are early days in their careers, and it shows, but the story, hard SF setting, and internal storyline consistencies make the setting come across as real. A lot goes (thankfully) unexplained, where you can tell whatever is being mentioned has meaning to the characters, probably from a world-building doc for the people involved (much like in Firefly's immersive setting). Honestly, based on all their posts/content, I do not think these folks realize they are doing a classic Traveller adventure. The effort to make an official Traveller movie has had... travails. It's never happened.
Several (Traveller and scifi) storylines and tropes are here. The young noble whose family bought him his commission (obligatory Traveller, "at least he survived character generation"); a starship that's not in great shape; a privateer-like mission; a fading pocket empire; complex planetary societies; competing factions; experimental systems that got stuck onto a rustbucket patrol ship because it's expendable; the submarine-like feel of ship operations; political overtones coming from well above the characters' league; a computer that most certainly is not an AI and probably-wouldn't-be-allowed-to-be-one; the possibility of a mis-jump and what happens if you do; even a little hint of Virus (a Traveller New Era thing), maybe; and the plot-line mission to look for mysterious ships-reported-in-the-void-between-stars.
I'm not associated with these guys at all (found the movie on a random AMZ prime search for hard SF movies). I have pledged to this new campaign of theirs because there just are not enough Traveller-like scifi movies out there. It doesn't have the budget of a Firefly obvs, but with your help it could still get done. The tech to produce movies is advancing SO FAST. They already re-released the original (still free) with improved audio. Go watch it and then maybe contribute to the sequel. Time is short.
https://seedandspark.com/fund/ashes-of-the-chimera
What? You have no idea who I am talking about? Not a surprise. This is a small indie group we found by accident. I watched their initial movie with Liana - while the acting was rough, it was surprisingly Travelleresque. Like, woah. (In case you do not know, Traveller's an oldschool tabletop role playing game (TTRPG), in which the rules were minimal and the world development was basically amazing. It's been through many iterations.) Liana never played any Traveller variant and still found it extremely engaging despite the "hey we made a movie" actor/director feel. They managed to create a hard SF story that had depth. Watch it (it's a good distraction!) and then maybe contribute to the sequel. Time is short.
While seemingly taking pains to avoid copying any Traveller TTRPG series IP (or perhaps just riffing off the same roots as Traveller, maybe especially the CoDominium series from Pournelle, and the Mote offshoot with Niven), the storyline is as much or more Traveller as a Gregory P. Lee, Swycaffer, or Chadwick "not Traveller, wink" story. Production is interesting - the first movie had a $20K budget and was almost entirely filmed on greenscreen - they did a remarkable job with the look and feel given that. Actors and director are early days in their careers, and it shows, but the story, hard SF setting, and internal storyline consistencies make the setting come across as real. A lot goes (thankfully) unexplained, where you can tell whatever is being mentioned has meaning to the characters, probably from a world-building doc for the people involved (much like in Firefly's immersive setting). Honestly, based on all their posts/content, I do not think these folks realize they are doing a classic Traveller adventure. The effort to make an official Traveller movie has had... travails. It's never happened.
Several (Traveller and scifi) storylines and tropes are here. The young noble whose family bought him his commission (obligatory Traveller, "at least he survived character generation"); a starship that's not in great shape; a privateer-like mission; a fading pocket empire; complex planetary societies; competing factions; experimental systems that got stuck onto a rustbucket patrol ship because it's expendable; the submarine-like feel of ship operations; political overtones coming from well above the characters' league; a computer that most certainly is not an AI and probably-wouldn't-be-allowed-to-be-one; the possibility of a mis-jump and what happens if you do; even a little hint of Virus (a Traveller New Era thing), maybe; and the plot-line mission to look for mysterious ships-reported-in-the-void-between-stars.
I'm not associated with these guys at all (found the movie on a random AMZ prime search for hard SF movies). I have pledged to this new campaign of theirs because there just are not enough Traveller-like scifi movies out there. It doesn't have the budget of a Firefly obvs, but with your help it could still get done. The tech to produce movies is advancing SO FAST. They already re-released the original (still free) with improved audio. Go watch it and then maybe contribute to the sequel. Time is short.
