Back to Traveller after a very long break

[kafka47]

Has anyone here been the referee or a player in the traveller adventure? I have it and have read it and I really enjoyed the story line. If you have, can you sum up your experience?

I think it is a great start up if you have a face to face group. Like many others here I have not had that kind of game in a long time. I am currently running several players on a CT play by email game and I have to say I probably look forward to their moves more than they do mine. I really love this game.

Not the new Mongoose one...but old CT one.

It was very successful but required that you stay at least one chapter ahead of the players at all times. Sometimes, it was two or three sessions per chapter other times, they managed to do two in a single night.

I found that once our favorite Vargr was killed in a melee (crap, what do I do I thought...but then the player came to rescue and generated another character who was a Secret Agent/Other who had some knowledge of the Vargr, as the backstory was that he was trailing the party for some time and the other players brought her up to speed). I also found the need to make it more cinematic in parts especially the space battles.

Also, I inserted more red herrings, such as players losing the March Harrier in a Saracc tournament and having make foes of a major crime lord but after rescuing his daughter owed them a debt of gratitude. This led to the recovery of the March Harrier...however, do you know how hard it is get blood stains out of the carpet of a Fat Trader...

 

[Vargas]

Yup, Death Station. It makes an excellent "bring the group together" adventure.

I also just adapted it to Thousand Suns for my non-Traveller playing group.

 

[madmike]

Well, I thought I had six months to organise this, but the group have completely surprised me with their enthusiasm.

Spent a great Friday night with two of our group generating their characters. They had a blast, echoing the fact it like a game session, as the last time either of them played Traveller was back in 1980. James has a scout pilot who received a ship with a muster out roll and Grahams character is an ex navy/merchant engineer.

As the first Traveller session is within the next three weeks depending on everyone's schedule, my wife and I rolled three more characters up over the weekend. Scout-navigator, marine "master at arms", and a merchant line bureaucrat. One more character to go and I will pass them out at random to the other four in the group.

Death Station will be the first scenario.

Thanks everyone for suggestions, tips etc.

 

[Khan Trav]

Mike, thanks for sharing with us. I would like to hear how it goes. Cant be there myself but I like good CT. You have taken us this far after all.

 

[madmike]

Friday night was the first Traveller session I refereed in over 20 years. As expected, I made mistakes and the group made mistakes

We spent the first hours going over the setting, rules, equipping the party and discussing the combat rules. That done and lubricated with a couple of bourbon and cokes, I launched the party into a quick pre-scenario scene setter that involved a confrontation with a group of Solomani separatists, dirtside.

I am using "Death Station" as the first scenario for the party with the added twist a group of Solomani separatists attempting to also get their hands on the new experimental combat drugs so central to "Death Station".

The players were rather shocked at the lethality of Traveller combat and it was their fortune that I rolled poorly. The separatists were lousy shots and were using poor weapons.

Highlight of the night was the ships medic drilling a separatist through the heart with her autopistol whilst he was in partial cover. A pair of sixes on her roll was pretty hard to ignore. The ships crew have a new found respect for their medic, my wife's character. I used the old WD rules enhancer, "On Target" for hit locate tables.

Post game discussions centred around being prepared for any form of combat, including avoiding it. I repeated that Traveller is not Runequest and involves far more that blasting away at all and sundry. I think they got the message

"We need to plan more".... Nick - character is ships navigator

"I need power armour".... Mark - character is ships security officer

"Bloody hell! The medic has a customised autopistol?"....Anthony - character is ships administration officer

It won't hurt a bit! ".... Lorraine - character is ships medic (to John, character is ships gunner, who took a flechette round to the thigh.

James and Graham (ships owner and ships engineer) "I think we will stay in the ship"

"Can I have a gauss rifle?" ships security officer

With all that discussion, I am hoping that the party will be less gung-ho now and will settle down a bit using their brains rather than their trigger fingers.

Promising start all round.

 

[Khan Trav]

I like it, the crew sound like fun! I appreciate the response Mike and hope to hear more. Awesome for sure and how lucky are you that you got your wife to play Traveller?

 

[madmike]

My wife has been RPG'ing for a while now. She enjoyed D&D, likes Runequest and is now quite enthusiastic about Traveller. She is more happy when the rules are not complex.

The ships crest of ISS Warthog. Created by Graham, the evening before our first session. He did up a couple and popular choice amongst the players was the crest shown below.

I have a great bunch of players. We have been gaming together since high school, our busy lives permitting.

 

[Dragoner]

Wow, that is awesome, you should post it in the gallery!

 

[Khan Trav]

I have a description for nose art for a Pirate Gazelle Class CE. JackRabbit (CE-13718)

IMTU a group of pirates ended up with her and renamed her Teki her nose art is a stylized Samurai in traditional armor holding a sword above his head. If someone could whip one of those up for me I would appreciate it.

 

[Max_Writer]

Very cool. I love it when artists play in my games.

 

[madmike]

Graham can be a hoot oft times. He asked me for the Warthog's deck plans last night.

Now I am wondering if he is recreating the Manhattan Project in the powerplant chamber

 

[rancke]

The ships crest of ISS Warthog. Created by Graham, the evening before our first session. He did up a couple and popular choice amongst the players was the crest shown below.

I trust the in-game artist wasn't working from a live model or that the model had a quirky sense of humor. I wouldn't care to use someone with that amount of firepower as the personification of anything named after a warthog.




Hans

 

[madmike]

The other option was a stylised warthog head. The group selected this one.

The origin of "Warthog" came from the caption/owner player rightly deciding high value cargo was the only option with such a small cargo bay. He has a quirky sense of humour, so named the ship "Truffle Snuffler", then a few days later decided that it sounds a tad too feminine. So "Warthog" was born.

 

[madmike]

Well I referee'd my first real scenario (Death Station) in close to 25 years last Friday night. this was what the lead up the previous session pointed to.

Tensions and intrigue were high throughout the session. Flickering lights, dark areas, decomposing bodies cats and dogs living together etc etc....

An encounter with two of the mutated crew/scientists scared the crap out them as well. Increased dexterity meant they were extremely hard to hit, with only the Ships Surgeon coming to the rescue again, bringing the last one down less that 2m from the party. These fellow's increased strength would have caused havoc if they had reached melee range.

Then.....then...

The player character - engineer suggested the party retreat to a drive pod and use engineering controls to flush the ship of air.

OK says I, formidable task as you do not have either the lab ships captain's and ships engineer's codes to do that. Once that was over, I could keep 'em worried.... :smirk:

Graham rolled a 12 (12 - 7 + 4(eng) = 9)...

OK, air flushed.....sigh.....

Conclusion: Expect the unexpected!

Good session, great fun. They got paid by the Lysati Laboratories rep and are now off to Camden to replace the air filtration system on Warthog.

Lovin' this

 

[BytePro]

Sounds like a great time had by all (plans not withstanding )!

 

[nats]

The player character - engineer suggested the party retreat to a drive pod and use engineering controls to flush the ship of air.

OK says I, formidable task as you do not have either the lab ships captain's and ships engineer's codes to do that. Once that was over, I could keep 'em worried.... :smirk:

Graham rolled a 12 (12 - 7 + 4(eng) = 9)...

OK, air flushed.....sigh.....

Conclusion: Expect the unexpected!

A follow up to that could be having them arrested by Imperial Police over the incident that caused tons of new experimental combat drug on the station to be ruined by being exposed to a vacuum! Or they could be followed by Solomani agents who suspect the characters of having some of the new drug on their persons. Could be a good background theme that overlaps with their next few adventures. Maybe they could have to make a deal with the police to frame the Solomani for the incident for political reasons which could get them into all kinds of trouble later on....make them really regret that course of action in the following sessions. They might think twice about being so rash again

 

[rancke]

The player character - engineer suggested the party retreat to a drive pod and use engineering controls to flush the ship of air.

[...]

OK, air flushed.....sigh.....

Conclusion: Expect the unexpected!

There weren't anyone on board that the authorities might consider innocent bystanders? I could definitely see a murder trial looming if there were. For that matter, the PCs might find it difficult to prove that the infected crewmembers were beyond help and thus fair game for mass extermination. Especially if one of them had been the favorite son of a local bigwig.


Hans

 

[madmike]

I examined both the legal AND political ties to the adventure.

Legal has been discarded as Lysani was conducting experiments on live human subjects. Gadden has no law level either, being a mining outpost.

But, however, I am going to keep a Solomani separatist thread running. They are not so happy as they wanted the drug perfected for use by their operatives (terrorists). Might make them a tad more paranoid when "near misses" occur etc.

 

[Whipsnade]

The player character - engineer suggested the party retreat to a drive pod and use engineering controls to flush the ship of air.

Absolutely incredible! I had a group of PCs the same thing back in '87 or '88! It's nice to know that players haven't changed that much.

I ran a modified version of Death Station as part of an Active Duty IISS campaign. The players chose characters from a pre-generated group I'd prepared and then got to customize them a little. They crewed a Suleiman in the Trin's Veil subsector for about a year and a half of game time while I put them through a mix of modified classic adventures and home-brewed stuff.

The players came up with interesting back stories. There was the New Guy, the Guy Waiting To Get Out, the Gung-Ho guy, and so forth. The player running the courier's "commander" riffed on the character's high SOC decided the character would be a "tuft hunter" angling for a knighthood and he played that aspect of the character very well. So well in fact that I was able to predict the PC's decisions well enough to use him to "steer" the group where I wanted them to go.

Because an IISS courier crew is more skilled and has more goodies than a collection of ne'er-do-wells scraped up on a backwater mining planet, my version of Death Ship was ginned up a little. The commander PC quickly lost his temper when the flashy rescue mission turned into an ugly, wound filled slog and decided to vent the lab ship to space. I goofed when, as a NPC, and trying to dissuade him, I commented on the plan being "simple". I still remember what the PC said:

"Simple? I like simple. Simple works."

Of course, one of the victims blown into space was a relative of the noble who could have helped the PC gain the knighthood he was after.