First contact adventures

[Ben W Bell]

So my campaign is a Scout service campaign, Milieu 0, and the players are exploring into a sector where there is another leftover empire from the fall of the Rule of Man. No worries. However I don't want all my adventures to be about this new empire, I want they also to be about exploration and recontacting lost worlds. So I've written quite a few adventures, but am looking for filler adventures as well. As a result I'm looking around everywhere at published adventures, all systems and all sources.

I'm noticing a severe lack of adventures around first contact, exploration etc that don't require some element of charted space and known planets and systems etc. With the exception of the pieces that come in the Deepnight Revelation series of books. Is there really a lack of such an obvious pure new world and new species contact adventures, or can I just not find the wood for the trees?

 

[Spinward Flow]

Here's an easy one for you, made up on the fly while reading your post.

A ship ... drifting in space ... for all intents and purposes, a derelict ... ripe and ready for salvage.
That's your adventure hook.

There shouldn't BE a ship (of that type) out here ... and yet, there it is ... cold, dark, powerless, lifeless ... drifting.

After that, the sheer number of possibilities becomes almost endless.

• How long has the ship been adrift?
• Can it be refueled?
• Can it be powered up?
• Does it have jump drives?
• Any crew remains still aboard? Low berths on emergency battery power (that could fail Soon™)?
• How OLD is this ship?
• Who built it?
• What was it doing HERE where it was found?
• Is the orbit it's in stable? Meaning if the PCs go away and come back, will they be able to find it again? If no, they better do what they're going to do RIGHT NOW and not wait...

Searching for the answers as to the provenance of the ship could be the scaffolding for an adventure in and of itself.



Basically you can use the "ship in a bottle" as the first breadcrumb for launching an adventure that is a sequence of events. Like you said, your PCs are going to be Scouts, so coming across the unexpected like this ought to provoke some kind of interest in "getting to the bottom of the mystery" that can go in all kinds of directions.

You can even start with the "spooky haunted house ship" angle at the beginning if you like, before transitioning your story into being something else (especially once they can turn on the lights inside).

If you begin with a seeming anachronism (nothing like this ought to be out this far...) you've got an easy hook to snare your Players on and kick off your campaign as they begin the process of tracing this ... curiosity ... back to its origins and start to uncover the tale of how it came to be where they found it.

 

[Ben W Bell]

I've already done an adventure like that, and old generation ship from a long dead alien species that they came across in a decaying orbit. I may be able to tweak on another one at some point, but I'll need to wait a while so it doesn't seem like there's only a few different plots. While yes going out there in a Milieu setting is going to come across many many dead worlds and ships, I'm trying not to make it every adventure.

Since it's slightly IMTU I could try and work HIver or K'kree first contact into it. The players aren't versed in Traveller lore, so giving them some interesting aliens to interact with would be good. They've already woken up some Droyne sleeping for 250,000 years, but don't realize what they are.

So thanks.

But yes there's still the question, did Traveller in all its history really not publish many real frontier/completely unknown/first contact adventures like this?

 

[Spinward Flow]

But yes there's still the question, did Traveller in all its history really not publish many real frontier/completely unknown/first contact adventures like this?

LBB A1 is kind of a bit frontier trying to find the Kinunir in the (at the time) unfamiliar Regina subsector.
LBB A2 is backwater world Vanejen/Rhylanor/Spinward Marches based off the main trade routes with some dodgy research station action.
LBB A3 ... is a pretty spooky story about Twilight's Peak ... which is the haunted house on the hill (and under the hill).
LBB A4 honestly IS a frontier exploration adventure to set up trade in the "uncharted territories" rimward of the Spinward Marches.
LBB A6 is the expedition to Zhodane.
LBB A8 is Prison Planet ... and just figuring out exactly where the prison IS (and how to escape from it) is a significant challenge.
LBB A9 is Nomads of the Ocean ... sounds pretty frontier to me.
LBB A10 is Safari Ship ... which amounts to "touring the frontier for trophies!" (in effect).
LBB A12 is Secrets of the Ancients. 'Nuff Said™.
LBB DA1 contains Annic Nova ... the original "Ghost Galleon" of the Traveller setting.

A lot of those adventures "went places" that hadn't be previously well explored prior to the adventure being written back in the CT days.

 

[kilemall]

LBB A1 is kind of a bit frontier trying to find the Kinunir in the (at the time) unfamiliar Regina subsector.
LBB A2 is backwater world Vanejen/Rhylanor/Spinward Marches based off the main trade routes with some dodgy research station action.
LBB A3 ... is a pretty spooky story about Twilight's Peak ... which is the haunted house on the hill (and under the hill).
LBB A4 honestly IS a frontier exploration adventure to set up trade in the "uncharted territories" rimward of the Spinward Marches.
LBB A6 is the expedition to Zhodane.
LBB A8 is Prison Planet ... and just figuring out exactly where the prison IS (and how to escape from it) is a significant challenge.
LBB A9 is Nomads of the Ocean ... sounds pretty frontier to me.
LBB A10 is Safari Ship ... which amounts to "touring the frontier for trophies!" (in effect).
LBB A12 is Secrets of the Ancients. 'Nuff Said™.
LBB DA1 contains Annic Nova ... the original "Ghost Galleon" of the Traveller setting.

A lot of those adventures "went places" that hadn't be previously well explored prior to the adventure being written back in the CT days.

Which then begs the question- if you publish adventures primarily on the frontier aren’t you destroying the frontier in the process?

 

[Spinward Flow]

Which then begs the question- if you publish adventures primarily on the frontier aren’t you destroying the frontier in the process?

Once it's charted, it's no longer Terra Incognita.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Which then begs the question- if you publish adventures primarily on the frontier aren’t you destroying the frontier in the process?

Yes and no.

Yes, because it's no longer a blank map.

No, because it can be exactly as much of a frontier as canon wants it to be. Eventually it'll get explored in canon (or the alt-canon that arises from play in the setting over the course of in-universe time), but until then it can be "unexplored" by fiat.

The problem with, say, A4: Leviathan is that it had "frontier" that was only "unexplored" because nobody had written up those subsectors yet. In-universe, if things worked consistently with technology and transportation as laid out in the setting, that region should have been explored long since.

The process for generating "unexplored space" should result in regions that would not have been explored yet (biased toward low tech, low pop density, and/or distant from "civilization"), or have been cut off by war or civilizational collapse to a degree that previous information about it ranges from unreliable to nonexistent. This would probably vary significantly from Traveller's standard worldgen, at least for the civilization-related UWP components of pop, gov, law, TL, and starport type.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Foreven sector (left almost entirely blank, as a referee preserve) is an example of both of these things. It's "unknown" because Travellermap -- and the canon sources from which it's derived -- don't have anything mapped for it.

In Your Traveller Universe, there's a pretty good chance that as of 1105IE, the institutions in Five Sisters (spinward/rimward corner of Spinward Marches) have a fair idea of what's in Unrnian Subsector (trailing/rimward corner of Foreven), and a somewhat less clear picture of the subsectors surrounding Urnian; and maybe not much beyond that.

As a referee starting out, you don't have any idea what's there until you roll the subsector. Your players can only know what you tell them about it, once you've generated it. But as people in that tract of space, their characters stand a good chance of knowing even if the players running them don't.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Another thing about the Spinward Marches: They were supposed to be "the frontier"! ("There's an Imperium. It's big, it's awesome, and it's way over there -- you won't be playing in it") And under the assumptions of LBB2 -- ship tonnages capped at 10kTd (maybe 12k if you extrapolate a bit), low interstellar traffic, and especially LBB2 second edition making high Jump ranges dependent on (relatively) big ships and thus high TL -- that was plausible. Then came High Guard, and (if I understand it correctly) GURPS Traveller's deconstruction of the trade rules such that it became clear that there was a lot more interstellar trade and traffic than had previously been supposed, and it wasn't really "frontier" anymore.

Borderlands, yes. Frontier, not so much.

 

[mike wightman]

The Spinward Marches ceased any pretense at being a frontier when they said it has been settled by the Imperium for a thousand years...
as to the question of exploratory adventures, no with the possible exception of the adventures presented in the Alien Modules.

 

[Ben W Bell]

Thank you all for your responses. Sometimes with Traveller there's the wealth of archive material that it's hard to sift through it all. There's some stuff mentioned above that I think I can use as inspiration and modify for my campaign, convert from slight frontier to literal unknown. Some stuff may work, some doesn't when you enter a system no ship has been to (or at least is supposed to have been to) in at least 1500 years.

 

[mike wightman]

The thing is if you use Traveller as it was presented in LBB1-3 you can build your setting one world at a time, one subsector at a time. So every game can become one of discovery.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Foreven sector (left almost entirely blank, as a referee preserve) is an example of both of these things. It's "unknown" because Travellermap -- and the canon sources from which it's derived -- don't have anything mapped for it.

In Your Traveller Universe, there's a pretty good chance that as of 1105IE, the institutions in Five Sisters (spinward/rimward corner of Spinward Marches) have a fair idea of what's in Unrnian Subsector (trailing/rimward corner of Foreven), and a somewhat less clear picture of the subsectors surrounding Urnian; and maybe not much beyond that.

Note that if you're basing a campaign out of the Five Sisters/Spinward Marches with the explicit intent to explore the "uncharted territory" of Foreven sector using IISS characters, you're going to want to limit the tech level involved to the TL=9-10 (LBB2.81 standard drives) and/or TL=11-12 (LBB5.80 custom drives) range, simply because the tech levels and starports available in Foreven sector are not going to be TL=15 "everywhere" you look.

The most plausible "base of operations" for a group of IISS characters would be out of Karin/Five Sisters/Spinward Marches since it has the only Scout Base in the subsector (aside from Gohature, which is little more than a TL=7 pre-interstellar agricultural world). A substantial amount of Foreven sector can be accessed/explored by use of Jump-2, with only the occasional "need" for a 3 parsec range (which a slightly modified Type-S Scout/Courier could manage with a collapsible 2 ton fuel tank installed in the 3 ton cargo bay, with the remaining 1 ton being used for life support consumables reserves giving 150 person/weeks of endurance).

Depending on the nature of the intended exploration mission (specifically, exploration as opposed to survey), one option would be to swap out the 4 ton air/raft berth for a 4 ton Workshop: Telescopes for use as a mobile sensor platform to explore with. However, for ground survey missions where the intent is to "get down in the weeds" dirtside, the air/raft berth would make more sense.

 

[agorski]

I'm noticing a severe lack of adventures around first contact, exploration etc that don't require some element of charted space and known planets and systems etc. With the exception of the pieces that come in the Deepnight Revelation series of books. Is there really a lack of such an obvious pure new world and new species contact adventures, or can I just not find the wood for the trees?

It seems that Scout SOP is to Red Zone the world and establish an observation post instead of initiating contact.

 

[Spinward Flow]

I'm noticing a severe lack of adventures around first contact

You rarely get a second chance at a first contact situation (or words to that effect).

My point being that first contact circumstances have a "shelf life" of sorts, after which you won't get a mulligan for a do over. So first contact situations are highly transient events that aren't exactly repeatable. Each and every single one of them is a unique scenario.

Although, if you don't mind borrowing from a recent sci-fi show example ...

 

[Vargr Breath]

The Keith brothers did a First Contact series. You can get them in the Apocrypha III disk.