advice for refs
- Thread starter flykiller
- Start date
By all means do just that, but remember that the OTU is there to help and not handcuff you. The OTU is a crutch, not a cage.
Take the OTU and make it your own. The OTU is tofu, season it and change it to your liking.
Traveller not supposed to be a trivia contest between you and your players. If your players say that OTU Book A says B about Planet C, you simply remind them that you all are playing in Your Traveller Universe.
YTU may have much in common with the OTU but it is not a carbon copy.
That's a good start. I made extensive use "slush piles". I had stacks of pre-genned NPCs, ships, rumors, plots, you name it. I'd fish out what I needed, introduce it, and then keep track of the "who, what, where, and when". You can read about that and lots of other better ideas from better GMs in this thread.
As I've already tried to explain, you don't have to keep track of it all. You can use as much or as little of the OTU as you wish.
The Sim Sala Bims in your game are what you say they are and not what the OTU says.
Play the game. Don't sweat canon.
Well Rhag, one thing that pops out about your concerns in the previous post is the jump you are there content flow.
You have a whole week on that jump. Plenty of passenger interaction/small stories/seems small but becomes big thing reveal-rumor-enemy-ally, and the occasional hijack attempt/cargo is not what it seems/space or ship threat.
Then you have the starport. Same sort of actions but things that can happen on or around the planet.
It can be rescue the kittenvarg in the tree to Ye Olde Barfighte to Big Stuff- plenty of satisfying stuff
I made my players describe a pet or robot they have with them, and an ex-romance partner, just so I had material on tap.
Then if say 2 of the 4 are busy with a main branch of the story, I can have the others do a small story, and one plays the NPC pet- or the ex-!
Another can be a contract or ship charter that keeps the party within a few systems for a duration- long enough to buy you time figuring out the next world over.
You have a whole week on that jump. Plenty of passenger interaction/small stories/seems small but becomes big thing reveal-rumor-enemy-ally, and the occasional hijack attempt/cargo is not what it seems/space or ship threat.
Then you have the starport. Same sort of actions but things that can happen on or around the planet.
It can be rescue the kittenvarg in the tree to Ye Olde Barfighte to Big Stuff- plenty of satisfying stuff
I made my players describe a pet or robot they have with them, and an ex-romance partner, just so I had material on tap.
Then if say 2 of the 4 are busy with a main branch of the story, I can have the others do a small story, and one plays the NPC pet- or the ex-!
Another can be a contract or ship charter that keeps the party within a few systems for a duration- long enough to buy you time figuring out the next world over.
creativehum
SOC-14 1K
May I suggest: Start Small.
The lure of the OTU is the way it is huge. It stretched across countless subsectors. Has politics back at the Core, and on the frontier of the Zhodani borders. There are 16 subsectors in the Spinward Marches alone...
I am going to suggest you don't get lured by all that glitter.
Even in the sprawling potential of the The Spinward Marches it is possible to start small.
I am going to pose a question: "How much do you really need to get going?" I think the answer is, "Less than you think."
TRAVEL
It is possible to start the game without a ship. Not only might the Players not end up with a character with a ship, but you as Referee might simply declare that the PCs can't start with a ship.
There are several good reasons for this. First, getting a ship serves as a terrific carrot for the PCs. They might get one for services rendered on the behalf of a noble, a planetary government, a corporation, and so on after several adventures.
Second, it keeps the movement of the PCs somewhat limited at first. Not because you are forcing them or railroading them into particular situations and trapping them... but simply because in the implied setting of early Traveller makes traveling between the stars a big deal.
For example traveling between the stars is expensive.
If we look at the average expenses per Book 3 we find:
Ordinary Living thus costs Cr4,800 year.
High Living is Cr10,800 per year.
Meanwhile, this is how much it costs per jump to travel
High Passage: Cr10,000
Middle Passage: Cr8,000
Low Passage: Cr1,000
Most people can't afford to travel, and for those who do it will each up an incredible amount of the resources. And, again, those travel rates are per jump. If you are planning on traveling three or more jumps then you are spending years of living expenses.
This means that if the PCs don't have a ship yet and want to travel, they'll need to earn money on high risk/big payoff adventures. (This is one reason why they'll want to get a ship of their own!)
Second, the ships available to PCs at first will be J1 ships. This means that even if they can Travel they won't be able to shoot all over the galaxy at first. Moreover, most ships in Book 2 have jump capabilities of J1, J2, or J3. Even getting across a subsector is a big deal.
Which brings us to...
GEOGRAPHY
Once upon a time someone had Traveller Books 1-3 (and maybe Book 4), Supplements 1 (1001 Characters), 2 (Animal Encounters), and 3 (The Spinward Marches)... and that was it. And it was fine. People played the game and it was fun.
In Supplement 3: The Spinward Marches one found several about eight pages worth of text describing the background of the Third Imperium and the sixteen subsectors of the Spinward Marches. I would suggest going smaller than that.
Pick one subsector to start with. Let's look at the Regina subsector:
Let's assume, as the book itself suggests, that you start on the world of Regina, where the PCs have gathered and meet after arriving in the Spinward Marches.
Notice that there are several worlds clustered around Regina within Jump-1 of each other. (Other worlds, while nearby, are two parsecs away... out of reach for J-1 ships at 2 parsecs.)
This is by design. The game is built for a Referee to sketch out a subsector and have that subsector be useful for many sessions of play because of the mix of ship types and jump drives available. (The 1977 edition of the rules stated: "Initially, one or two sub-sectors should be quite enough for years of adventure (each sub-sector has, on the average, 40 worlds), but ultimately, travellers will venture into unknown areas and additional subsectors will have to be charted.")
So I would recommend zooming in on a subsector rather than the whole of the Imperium.
And I would recommend zooming in even further ...
Imagine that map above is your map for the start of the campaign. Notice how that map seems manageable. But see how much potential is there. Fourteen worlds, all of which can be reached by a Jump-1 ships. Yet traveling from from one end to the other (Knorbes to Yori) will take five months... and longer if adventures take place along the way. (And adventures should take place along the way!)
Moreover, the area is full of hotspots: three Amber Zones and one Red Zone.
Still, a single world (let alone fourteen!) can be daunting. Which brings us to...
STARK AND SIMPLE
In Stars Without Numbers Kevin Crawford suggests that a Referee should never prepare more than he needs for the next session, or if more, only things he's having fun preparing.
I think that's a good benchmark.*
Something to think about then is what do you need for the Players to have a good time? Yes, you need details of culture and politics. But how much politics?
In this essay on Planetary Governments in Traveller, Marc Miller wrote this about the Government type in the UWP:
I think in this quote Miller is warning against becoming obsessed with details beyond the scope of the concerns of the the Player Characters. Yes, we want context for our worlds, we want consistency. But those qualities serve to give us what we need. And what we need are elements of setting that the Player characters can interact with.
Which bring me to...
PLAYER FACING
I think of the term "Player Facing" when I'm thinking about this stuff. Player Facing is all the stuff (the places, the objects, the people, the organizations) the the PCs can interact with. The guy who want them dead. The secret organization that is trying to steal the thingamabob. The patron who wants them to find his daughter.
Think about the images and factions and characters you want to present to the Players. (Remember what I wrote about using index cards in a previous post.) Make the images and ideas bold and strong. Make them things that the PCs can interact with.
This city has clothing woven by strange spiders in amazing patterns that glitter as the large red sun sets. The spider factories are at the north end of the city and compete in an annual festival. There's an industrial haze in the distance where massive mining vehicles cut their way across the landscape and often stop as troops battle swarming creatures. At night the prayers of the religious faithful echo across the city's towers -- sung by members of religious people who settled here centuries ago and are now a smaller and smaller percentage of the population and seem are rumored to be growing in anger at their loss of power.
Okay. I have enough there to make things happen. All of that is stuff the Player Characters can interact with.
Do something like that fourteen times and your good to go.
With that in mind I really want to reiterate what Whipsnade said: Make it yours.
Don't get trapped by the official UWPs. The UWP World Generation system is there as a "prod to the imagination." If you know what you want don't let the UWP get in the way. Scratch things out, re-write them, come up with what you can't wait to share with your players.
So, to summarize:
- Remember that the mechanics and implied setting details are your friend. They limit the mobility of the PCs at the start of play.
- Feel free to focus in on one patch of geography of a cluster of worlds rather than thinking you are responsible for mastering all sort of information scattered across countless books written over forty years.
- Focus on what you need to play: The people, places, organization, creatures, environments that you can't wait to share with your players that the PCs can interact with.
- Make it yours. The early materials of Classic Traveller were there for you to have a good time with as you made them your own. You own nothing to the setting. The setting material is there for you.
*(By the way, Stars Without Numbers is a sandbox SF game set among the stars and very much like Traveller. The book has really solid Refereeing advice for running sandbox style games. The link above leads to a free PDF version of the game.)
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Graham2001
SOC-12
I've been working on a project for the Call of Cthulhu Wiki at Yog-Sothoth.com and it's led me to (re)read a lot of old gaming magazines, one of those was a 1981 issue of White Dwarf, which has one of those things people writing scenarios/running adventures seem to forget, namely that intelligent beings will act intelligently and Refs should be aware of that.
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That cannot be stressed enough. It's stated in the first three LBBs a couple of times that a subsector can provide years worth of adventures and that's absolutely correct.
Indeed. Whether they're buying tickets or have access to a ship, getting across something even as "small" as a subsector is a big deal.
Something that always bugged me in D&D and similar RPGs was how horses were treated as perpetual motion machines. Players would mount up and mosey along for thousands of miles without worrying about shoes, fodder, grain, water, or much of anything else. They'd even "park" them outside the dungeon for a week or two without a care in the world.
Traveller doesn't let players ignore ships like those horses are ignored.
It's going to cost your players 15,000 credits to "gas up" up that little old Beowulf. It's going to cost 20,000 to keep all the staterooms habitable for two weeks. They got to put aside over 37,000 for annual maintenance and they've got to come up with over 150,000 a month to pay the mortgage.
They aren't just going to lift off and keep jumping until they're far far away anymore than they could mount those horses and blithely cross Eurasia. They are bills to pay and an Imperium full of people with guns and lawyers who want those bills paid.
Precisely. "Only" fourteen worlds all within three parsecs of Regina and they're crammed full of possibilities.
- Regina is a gas giant moon and the duchy capital.
- Knorbes has an entire continent set aside as an alleged nature preserve.
- Roup is an overpopulated water world where food is worth it's weight in gold.
- Ruie is a balkanized world many of whose nations hate the Imperium.
- Dinom just experienced a workers' revolution against the owning corporation.
- Djinni is building a starport.
- Rech sees a lot of Vargr visiting to buy meats and other goods.
- Wypoc has a nasty atmosphere where protective suits are tested.
The "small" 3 parsec sandbox has dozens and dozens of sessions waiting within it.
A second endorsement for the free SWN PDF: it has tons of inspirational material and tables to generate "tags" for worlds, ships, factions, etc., all easily usable with any rules.
fly; I haven't read the entire thread, but one of the reasons the old D&D modules used to have their adventrues charted out or diagrammed they way they did, was because TSR realized that not everyone was a poetic wordsmith combination multitasker.
It's why you have the Player info written in colorful prose for the DM / Ref / GM / Controller to read to the players, and you have the "For Referees Only" part usually written underneath with NPC and monster stats.
One of the "flaws" with CT, or perhaps shortcomings (not really a flaw as such) was that the adventures, as presented, were pretty dry. And there wasn't any easy way to access flavor text for the Ref to present the players.
So it was that when I ran Traveller sessions I always laid on the description pretty thick, and let the players do as they pleased. If the adventure was Death Station, and they players decided they didn't want to do the job, or blow the living crap out of the lab ship, then that was their decision; i.e. roll whatever dice are needed, and suffer the consequences, good and bad.
If you haven't played in a while, then maybe hook up with some Pathfinder or D&D types to get your feet a little more wet before trying again.
Hope that helps.
It's why you have the Player info written in colorful prose for the DM / Ref / GM / Controller to read to the players, and you have the "For Referees Only" part usually written underneath with NPC and monster stats.
One of the "flaws" with CT, or perhaps shortcomings (not really a flaw as such) was that the adventures, as presented, were pretty dry. And there wasn't any easy way to access flavor text for the Ref to present the players.
So it was that when I ran Traveller sessions I always laid on the description pretty thick, and let the players do as they pleased. If the adventure was Death Station, and they players decided they didn't want to do the job, or blow the living crap out of the lab ship, then that was their decision; i.e. roll whatever dice are needed, and suffer the consequences, good and bad.
If you haven't played in a while, then maybe hook up with some Pathfinder or D&D types to get your feet a little more wet before trying again.
Hope that helps.
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If you cannot find d&d games local to you, http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/ has play by post games.
Here are the play by post parts of the forums.
http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=81
There are also campaign journals. They describe the actions and results, but don't go into dice rolls type details.
http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=26
Hope that helps.
Here are the play by post parts of the forums.
http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=81
There are also campaign journals. They describe the actions and results, but don't go into dice rolls type details.
http://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=26
Hope that helps.
In my Crestar world, AD&D first edition, the horses would be gone. Stolen or eaten by orcs or wild animals. They had to be fed and cared for to. While I encountered such refs who did as you say, I never gamed with them. I prefer my game world to be more 'alive' than that. Actions have consequences.
Ditto for my world- that was the main reason to have henchmen!
And horses were expensive!
D.
Travelling this world
I spent many years in the military travelling this planet. The things that make things memorable are the differences, the unexpected and the smell.
The first thing that happens when you encounter a new area is the smell! That different smell yells FORIGN right up the nose to the core of your brain. It could be the spices from the food stalls, the vegetation (Africa), the nearby body of water, The fish smell shoved up your nose (Korea). The dry sand (Saudi Arabia), or the huge number of animals waiting to be shipped or slaughtered (Iowa), or the smell of decomposing bodies in tropical heat that says “Get the xxxx out of here.”
The unexpected could be the government functionary shaking down arrivals at the customs desk. The level of law enforcement may be different than the UPP listed for that planet. “What do you mean I can’t carry my FGMP, the local laws say I can.” “No sir, the new revolutionary government is confiscating all weapons including any blade over 3 inches, now hand them over then through the weapons detector before claiming your luggage sir!”
I spent many years in the military travelling this planet. The things that make things memorable are the differences, the unexpected and the smell.
The first thing that happens when you encounter a new area is the smell! That different smell yells FORIGN right up the nose to the core of your brain. It could be the spices from the food stalls, the vegetation (Africa), the nearby body of water, The fish smell shoved up your nose (Korea). The dry sand (Saudi Arabia), or the huge number of animals waiting to be shipped or slaughtered (Iowa), or the smell of decomposing bodies in tropical heat that says “Get the xxxx out of here.”
The unexpected could be the government functionary shaking down arrivals at the customs desk. The level of law enforcement may be different than the UPP listed for that planet. “What do you mean I can’t carry my FGMP, the local laws say I can.” “No sir, the new revolutionary government is confiscating all weapons including any blade over 3 inches, now hand them over then through the weapons detector before claiming your luggage sir!”
Condottiere
SOC-14 5K
In terms of smells, it's usually the markets and the inhabitants.
Industrial and pollution are about the same.
Industrial and pollution are about the same.
Perhaps, but I can say from my two visits to Paris in the 90s that because of the abundance at the time of 2 stroke and diesel motors, the air quality routinely left me with a sore throat, something I didn't have in California ([in]famous for our Air Quality board), or New York city when I was there for several weeks.
