GT Traveller Seed 1

[Blue Ghost]

I have a lot of concepts meant as adventures for this game which will not see the light of day, so I'm going to post a few here before I move on to greener pastures.




GURPS Traveller Adventure seed 2


Location; Solomani Rim
Sol Subsector
TERRA
Hex 1827
Osaka Metroplex
Japan Administrative Zone
Takashi Laboratories


The whir and hum of the sporadic night grav traffic and the glow of the mile-high high-rises in the distance lends an aura of mystique as you and your team lay crouched in the shadows. You managed to hack the security system with help from local law enforcement, who are watching from a distance. Your special security status of the IISS doesn’t give you carte’ blanche to enter anyplace with impunity, but you have enough clout and authority to observe a suspected terrorist cell.

The Solomani are divided upon many issues, but the unifying dogma of Terran supremacy has caused many a involuntary-suicide bomber to wreak havoc in a variety of urban hubs throughout the sector, and indeed domain. And with tensions on the rise between the Solomani Confederation and Imperium, terrorist activity is on the rise.

Word of a particularly insidious plot involving genetic research with exotic bacilli has Imperial Naval Intelligence and the IISS on edge. You’ve traced the plot to here, but it’s all circumstantial. No concrete evidence of anything, much less how the virus is to spread, is forthcoming. But all indicators point to a high-energy research laboratory in the Asian Pacific Island territories, commonly known as Japan on Terra.

You make your move, and barge in with weapons drawn. There is no resistance, just the clinical glow of fluorescent light panels lining the ceiling. You go further in, and come across double sliding security doors. Beyond you see an undulating sheen of energy coursing between two wall sized emitters. You hack the lock, burst in to find a group of individuals with crates. They run for the boxes, grab what they can, and then leap into the energy field as you enter. Each is labeled with a system and a number of cities.

A fire fight may ensue at this point. After the fight is over, you discover that each box contains deadly bacteria, and that the energy field before you is a portal. There is a control panel, but only a highly trained physicist will be able to discern them.

Actions?

 

[atpollard]

That was a very interesting premise for a mission.

 

[Blue Ghost]

test post

*edit*
Hmm, editing posts not working? Second test.

*2nd edit*

It works Thanks to whoever fixed this.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Just a quick note here, originally I was going to write seeds based off of the GURPS supps, for some true "proto Traveller" scifi, but apparently the GURPS people were several steps ahead of me by about 20+ years with their Infinity Cops (IC) organization in Alternate Earths.

That, and even though AEs got some pretty cool parallel Earths, it brushes up against current events and racial politics, which might be cool for story telling and gaming, but probably hits too close to home for verboten territory for the forum. That, and "time travel" tends to be a no-no for Traveller.

But it's cool, because there are plenty of other GUPS supps. Having said that, I have Interstellar Wars, but that deals with pre or proto-Traveller era stuff when the Earthmen were fighting the strange abstract alien empire in Imperium. So, it's a bit before the CT era, which I'm not all that familiar with.

Anyway, I just felt I had to put that out there. I really do enjoy writing, and I do have a passion for all scifi warsims and RPGs, or at lest the decent ones that tickly my fancy. So I hope to share a few concept before taking a hiatus.

 

[Blue Ghost]

That was a very interesting premise for a mission.

Sorry I didn't respond earlier. After all these decades I understand the game's basic premise. Ergo I'm posting in like vein, as opposed to reaching for more traditional and fantastical scifi.

Thanks for the compliment.

p.s. apparently I have to open a new fresh window of Win10 to post in the GURPS section. Strange.

p.p.s. test edit, …. cookies tossed … test post.

 

[Blue Ghost]

GURPS Traveller Adventure seed 2


Location; Spinward Marches
Vilis Subsector
ARDEN
Hex 1011
Subterranean Complex 24x



Lit buildings in what would be skysrapers connect the concrete and paved surface with a boulder encrusted rocky ceiling stalagmites meeting stalactites. And what would be a perpetual night is otherwise lit by street lights in Arden’s best kept secret, one of its many underground holding pens for undesirables—those who cannot or will not accept government total authority and control of their lives.

Everyone wears the same drab gray colored garment. Men and women mingle, even cohabitate, but only with authorization from Surface Authority, the bureau that runs the underground holding system. Your team was sent here for a routine intelligence gathering mission under the guise of collecting system data. But the patrol captain of Arden’s local navy didn’t like you not wanting to grease his palm with a small bribe of several ten-thousand credits. Hence he impounded your ship and sent you off to be processed by Surface Authority, and never to be heard from again as you were to be sent to the holding system in which you find yourself.

But through skill and happenstance you managed to escape, but only to escape to a prison transport bringing supplies to one of the very subterranean prisons which you were trying to avoid. Hidden amidst mattresses and linen, you witness your wheeled truck pass through several security gates (hydraulic controlled massive sliding metal doors) as you descend down a huge tunnel with a smoothly paved road.

You overpowered the guard who oversees unloading of the truck, and escaped into the downtown region of the prison, which is where you now find yourself as you peer out an ally and look at the incredible feat of engineering that is a high tech underground prison-city. The surface is only better in that you can see the system’s sun, but beyond some selection in foods and areas to call a residence (with government approval) conditions really aren’t much better.

On the plus side the world has no real army, just a huge police force that acts as an army when needed, but armed only with sidearms and the occasional longarm or even rarely energy weapon. But you need to first escape, avoid or overpower any security patrols, then get back to your ship and leave this forsaken world.

Actions?

 

[Blue Ghost]

The following is a much tweaked opening of an adventure I tabled to Marc Miller and a couple of other people. Ultimately it was supposed to be a time travel adventure, but it was here that I learned that Time Travel is not part of the Travellerverse. Which was cool, because this isn't the entire adventure, just the opening of it. Note that the arcology is supposed to be based off of one of Paolo Soleri's circular arcologies that has something like three or four tiers. without going into too much detail the players were to be witness to the final battle, and experience the history of the arcology, and how it related to the Imperium. Anyway, this is only a sample of the opening, again which I've modified to fit into the GURPS Traveller framework (no assassination, no Fifth Frontier War, but hints of the Empress wave). I hope some find this interesting and helpful, or at least entertaining.


GURPS Traveller Adventure seed 3


Location; Star’s End
Nyridea Subsector
Zeshkha
Hex 0624
Unknown ruins midcontinent along the equatorial zone



The Emperor lives, and war has been averted. Tensions have been relieved to the point of the Zhodani allowing limited Imperial surveys of their worlds and systems. The truth is both Zhodani and Imperium send ships, agents, and other intel gathering devices and personnel to collect all the data they can on one another. But here the Zhodani are, for whatever reason, trying to put a best foot forward, and have revealed a jump network they created to a little visited world the Imperium calls Zeshkha.

Zeshkha was a world of interest to the Zhodani, but with the Consulate in crisis about some threat coming from coreward, they seem to be willing to allow freer access to their space. As such the hidden J-route to Zeshkha is now revealed, and you and your team have spent many months system hopping within Zhodani space to get to the route in your long range scout ship.

You spend several more weeks hopping from way station to way station, taking on fuel and life support unsure of what you’ll find. You exit jump and approach the one habitable world that from a distance appears to be a water world. Upon closer inspection it is a nearly featureless world that has huge craters, some forming atolls as a nearly global wide ocean washes upon muddied shores.

One region is still relatively dry with a rocky surface (again, damp with a thin layer of water perhaps a centimeter in depth) that has a single multi-tiered arcology that is predominantly concrete, but with streaks of rust brown staining the surface. Oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, water that is mostly saline in nature, but with clouds and occasional precipitation replenishing what few fresh water caches there are in valley lakes and rivers wending through mountains and crater rims.

You land a mile or two away from the arcology, and note the single boulevard (itself antiquated and crumbling) is lined with what appears to be the rusted hulks of alien tanks and armored personnel carriers. Indeed you see the skeletal remains of individuals in a relatively high tech armor that is millenia old holding weapons of a military design, all of which is similarly stained with rust and erosion, but otherwise intact, though the weapons are rusted beyond use.

Blast marks, bullet holes from full automatic fire, the gates of the ground level tier of the arcology have been breached, tanks with gaping explosive holes in their armor and turrets, more skeletal remains of dead tank crews, and the closer you get to the gates the more the apparent the carnage. Humans, males upon careful examination of the remains, died locked in mortal combat. Traces of severe radiation which has long since dissipated are apparent. Some leaving scorched marks upon walls and the military vehicles, even individual soldiers, obviously the result of laser weapons. Other burns are from some kind of burst or explosive weapon that released massive amounts of radiation, again all of which is gone save for the result of the release of massive amounts of energy.

But humans? Out here? This old—not just centuries, which might be explainable, but over ten- thousand years old? What happened here? And why are you picking up energy readings from the heart of the arcology?

Actions?

p.s. here's the image I wanted to use. or rather the city as an arcology by Paolo Soleri. I contacted his estate about using this particular concept for this adventure, but they never replied.

The bottom section is where all the shops and social stuff happens; outdoor concerts, cafes, artisans, manufacturing. The upper levels are for residential, business, R&D and government.

 

[Blue Ghost]

The following was inspired from a Half Life addon map called “Timelines”. It speculates about what Earth would be like if the Nazis had won the second world war by absconding time travel technology from someone from the future, or some such. There’s a section of the map where you go investigate a pyramid on a world that has lost its atmosphere. Or it was an ancient world that had succumbs to some kind of catastrophe, and the people who lived there (it’s not clear what species they were) only left their ruins, but with no hieroglyphs or other pictographs. It’s also partially inspired from a Dr. Who story arc entitled “The Pyramids of Mars”, where, as you can guess, the Doctor and his companion deal with an invasion of a race that visited Ancient Egypt, and of course he has to thwart them. This adventure seed is based off all those and Roland Emmerich’s B-flick “10,000 B.C.”, with the huge pyramid complex. The players had a simple task of rescuing some noble’s daughter before she is either married to a cult leader and / or sacrificed at some ancient alien altar. Pick your poison.



GURPS Traveller Adventure seed 6


Location; Solomani Rim
Esperance Subsector
Vegan Autonomous District
Any arid world with an ancient pyramid complex.


The ancient wedding melody resounded throughout the stone temple with high vaulted stone arched ceilings. A priest in ancient ceremonial robes looks up and spreads his hands out in a gesture asking the heavens to bless the forth coming union.

You and your team watch from gaps in the ancient roof, and count the several dozen ceremonial guards, armed mostly with spears, save for the half dozen near the alter that have ACRs at port arms. That, and the generator humming away in the distance powering the lights bolted to the ceiling throws off the ancient heir in favor a contemporary mimicry of what might have been. That, and whoever built the pyramid complex were not human, so there’s that.

The bride in question needs to be held upright and guided along the central path leading up to the altar. She appears woozy, or more likely drugged. There is some murmur among the literally captive audience of cult followers who are dressed in another mimicry of ancient garb; men in shorts and sandals on the hot portion of the world, women in full flowing linen gowns, again with sandals. The guards have a kind of gilded armor covering their chests and upper part of their legs, but again sandals—regardless of how they are armed (whether rifle, spear, or short sword).

What you assume is the groom awaits her at the altar with the priest chanting some incantation (checking your portable computer shows it to be gibberish he just made up, but the effect on the crowd is palpable). As she ascends the final steps the altar the groom, adorned in gilded armor encrusted with jewels, pulls his chrome mirror polished short sword.

Actions?

p.s. the pyramid complex is either the one from 10,000 B.C. or a sprawling pyramid complex done by an artist on DeviantArt: I can't remember the name and am too lazy to look up the link, but you essentially have two rows of smaller pyramids with a larger set of pyramids leading to a lake with a mountain range in the back ground. The pyramids are the double angle pyramids with the sharper "steeple" portion being the upper half, and the lower squat portion being the lower half, with steps.

p.p.s. here's the DeviantArt image; https://www.deviantart.com/elminino/art/Heightmap-Empire-660173996

 

[flykiller]

these are fairly good, thanks.

 

[Blue Ghost]

I debated a little about whether to post this, but, I already wrote a screenplay about an explorer group reaching the objective, and posted it on a screenplay website for critiquing. That, and I tried contacting the late architect Lebbus Woods about using his “The New City” for this adventure, but again, he and his estate (after he passed) never replied. And again, this is just a story seed to get you started to write your story with your PCs, so I’m not too worried about plaigurism … though maybe I should be … I don’t know. I have this fully scripted out as a complete adventure, and I even asked Ian Stead to do some city planning, but we lost contact and I think he got busy with other work. The destination in question has a secret which will appear highly menacing, and the adventure was designed so that several PCs might be lost or die. But, enough about that, here’s the abstract and seed.


Location; Any domain
Any Sector
Any Subsector
World; Earth like, but with vast lush green forests covering the planet, roughly 75% covered by oceans and caches of fresh water. Very mountainous.

Your team lands on a world that is green and blue with lots of mountain ranges and valley. Some crater shaped. No marvel since this system has more than one asteroid belt, and both are more dense than usual. But interplanetary collision phenomena is not your priority. Let that astronomers charter their own vessel and do whatever mining companies do to exploit regions rich with mineral wealth.

No, you are here to investigate “space legends” of a lost city. But not just a lout an alleged “ghost city”. You roll your eyes and chagrin as you read various reports or people vanishing for days, weeks or months on end, and emerging somewhat bewildered, but otherwise in okay health. The native fruits are hit or miss in terms of nutrition. Some are potentially poisonous, or rather non-nutritious (not poisono0s per se, just eating enough will block your metabolism and starve you if you don’t watch out). Water comes in two varieties ocean salt and mountain borne fresh, some of which pools in valley lakes before meandering down to and spilling into the ocean shores.

Your ship descends into the tropical region. Scanning the world shows nothing abnormal. No man (or alien) made power that you can detect. In fact, you can’t detect much of anything until you do a subsurface scan, at which point you detect buildings, or geometry that strongly hints at being post industrial architecture covered by soil, earth, rock and growth. Too far down for you to investigate, especially with your measly survey kit. You didn’t bring any tractor nor grav excavators with massive shovels. Too bad. Next trip maybe if you can get the funding.

But you’re not here to find buried cities, but a city that is a “ghost”, if you will. Odds are the clown who stumbled on this world over the decades (or even centuries) just fell into a pit and then created the legends that enshroud this world.

You find your landing site. A nice area with rock and carpet like grass with a fresh water stream snaking down from a craterous mountain range. Several days or surveying and you see nothing. Then, as you and your team are walking through a light wood, you come to a clearing.

REFEREE; ask for marching order now.

Just as you enter what appears to be a grassy valley surrounded by mountain timber lining another crater wall that constitutes the valley, your point man vanishes in a flash of brilliant blue-white light. You call to him, be there is no response.

Actions?

p.s. I couldn’t find a good pic nor a link that would work with the forum’s software. Do a search for Lebbus Woods’ “The New City”, and you’ll see the cover of a book on his concept of a city designed with “deconstruction” in mind. In fact I think he may have started that trend, though I’m not sure. But if you can find the full front-back cover, then you’ll see the panoramic shot of the city with grav apartments, and buildings that are melded into the local landscape. Thanks for reading.

 

[flykiller]

not sure why this occurs to me but you could call it "galt's gulch" ....

 

[whartung]

What exactly makes these seeds GT specific?

 

[kilemall]

One form of 'backstory time travel' could be achieved by wafers. Plug in a wafer, players play through backstory of history as though they were there, and either they really were the people recorded in the wafers and what they 'do' is what happened, or the wafers are on 'alternative choice game' mode and lets people play out what happened or what modern wafer game companies/education systems THINK what happened.


Or combine the two, play out the 'current understanding game' then later on the characters run across wafers about what REALLY happened.

 

[Blue Ghost]

My computer was hijacked during the server update, which resulted in several fake Window's Defender notifications asking for my Window's ID, slowed browsing, and other phishing scams. I spoke with Magnus about this, and apologize to the site and people who read my stuff. I had Norton do several scans, enabled it's Safe Browsing tool, tossed cookies, cleared browsing history, and a number of other things to give my computer a security shake down.

I have more adventure seeds, but am going to beg off for the time being because of this latest security concern. However, a couple more seeds I wanted to post dealt with an homage to Venus and an old Miyazaki film (Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind) I saw in early 80s via laser disk. I mish-mashed that with Peter Jackson's version of skull island from his take on King Kong, where megafauna savaged the crew going after Fay Wray.

Seed First; A world that has an exotic atmosphere that allows habitation in the upper "biosphere" where nitrogen and molecular oxygen give a breathable atmosphere, but below a certain altitude the atmosphere is fogged with poisonous compounds, hiding the remains of a tech level one civilization. On top of that, pirates are hiding in the poisonous depths, and your team is tasked with ferreting them out.

Seed Second was based on a concept I had inspired from the old Jeff Goldblum and Cyndi Lauper comedy, "Vibes". You team goes to a world with mountainous South American like Rockies / Andes mountain range, and there you confront a cult leader with enhanced psionic powers.

That's all for now. I'm taking a break from the forum for some time. Thanks for reading.

 

[whartung]

Learning Linux has got to be easier than dealing with that stuff you deal with.

Install Linux, install vm software, install windows on the VM for when you HAVE to have it, and simply leave it "off" the rest of the time. Then work on migrating to linux and then be done with it.

 

[Blue Ghost]

What exactly makes these seeds GT specific?

I was going to use some of the concepts I jotted down inspired by other GURPS books; Banestorm, Castle Falkenstein, Alternate Earths and others, but decided instead to get the main ones out there. Some are fully formatted adventures waiting to be published, others are merely in rough draft form.

Initially I was going to create a thread for each concept, which is why the title has the obligatory "1" in it, but I didn't want to spam the GURPS section with a bunch of different threads for each concept, especially since one thread would have been more appropriate.

If you get a chance, have a look at "Castles and Dragons", the adventure I wrote for the SJGames version of JTAS. Mister Miller has the maps, and I think he said he was going to include the maps on the disk. Anyway, the point here being that initially I wanted to publish a bunch of non OTU adventures as per Proto-Traveller. Adventures that could be played in one sitting, as per something like the old double adventures, didn't have anything to do with the OTU unless the referee wanted it, and were not really the scope nor scale of the regular adventures nor anything published by TSR for the D&D line.

I'm not going to do that now, and am pretty much done with it and the game. But I did want to give a taste of stuff that I think people could run with and enjoy in their own private gaming sessions without a full blown write up by me.

One form of 'backstory time travel' could be achieved by wafers. Plug in a wafer, players play through backstory of history as though they were there, and either they really were the people recorded in the wafers and what they 'do' is what happened, or the wafers are on 'alternative choice game' mode and lets people play out what happened or what modern wafer game companies/education systems THINK what happened.


Or combine the two, play out the 'current understanding game' then later on the characters run across wafers about what REALLY happened.

I contemplated the "wafer" concept (or something like it), but didn't want to imitate an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation, largely because I really do not like that show, and didn't want to appear as taking a concept from it. But the gist that I got from Marc Miller was that there could be a work around for the time travel thing, and a computer generated historic simulation is what came to my mind. If you're a TNG fan you might recall an episode where Picard lives out the life of a native on a planet … probe attaches itself to his cranium, and he has a life experience from it. It's one of few episodes I ever saw after Season 1. It's an interesting premise, but TNG really rubs me raw on a number of levels, and I don't want to pay homage to it in any way, shape or form.

The full concept, as it stands now, is more for a full length novel with lots of subplots, but writing "romances" or "bromances" or whatever regarding people's emotional attachments to one another, is not my forte. That, and that kind of stuff doesn't lend itself to good plot driven scifi, which is what this was going to be. A lot of the adventure regards the players puzzling out how to get from point A to point B while crisis C and mystery D loom in the background.

The adventure based loosely off of Lebbeus Woods' art, like this one, had an element of intrigue that was more tangible than the Soleri adventure (for lack of a better term). And the Lebbeus Woods' art is more or less a social commentary on the ramifications of warfare, and the misery and destruction it brings about, which was in tune with the adventure.

Sorry for not replying earlier, but I was really in a foul mood (as usual). I probably won't be coming back for some time.

Have fun!

 

[kilemall]

TNG first season was sucky. It found it's legs later on. I do profess to be a bit surprised at people getting angry at it, pretty innocuous as scifi goes.

 

[flykiller]

I have more adventure seeds

looking forward to them.

 

[Blue Ghost]

looking forward to them.

Well, I'm pretty much done with posting more. But, I'll share this concept. One of my favoi9te scifi fantasy artists is Michael Whelan, and he has a lot of credits to his name. Too many to mention, but the image found on this link entitled "Armenia" sparked a concept. It's more conventional scifi than Traveller, and is along of what I was going to call my "city series" set of adventures, but it could easily be a setting for a proto-Traveller or original-flavored Traveller adventure.

Here's the image link; https://www.michaelwhelan.com/galleries/armenia/

The concept dealt with visiting the fallen city in the background during its hay-day, much like one of the previous concepts. But the story didn't deal with the cities fate, but rather a more prosaic mystery that dogged some of the locals. The hero's job (or the players if I had published it in adventure format), would have been to solve the mystery, and then return to their own "reality" / "time" / whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

I first came across the image in the … mid or early 90s, and bought Whelan's book of art at that time. The thing that interests me is that this is, to me at least, obviously a grav city that had come to ruin somehow. How that happened could be explained any number of ways, and didn't interest me. What I found interesting, and what I might have written about was the culture that a main character, or the players, would have encountered once there.

I hope that helps. I really only come here to see my readership. So I hope this bonus post has been helpful.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Final Seed

This one was supposed to take place on Bellerophon, but I got it mixed up with the "wedding in the pyramid complex / cult" seed.

You are in a Susano-oh class undersea miner. Think of the massive tracked carrier that ferries rockets at Cape Kennedy / Cape Canaveral to launch areas, only it travels an undersea network of roads. You are there to investigate a series of sabotage incidents that have caused loss of life and property. Chief suspects are rival companies vying for mining rights on the ocean floor, and various unions, or even rival unions, notably Belters Local 16 who see undersea mining as cutting into their profit margin.

The other day the captain skirted a portion of the road network over looking an abyss. The week before that you were attacked by a "kraken" that resembled a prehistoric mosasaur with multiple appendages, and perhaps nearly equal to the size of the miner. A few electric shocks and it scurried away, but damage was significant though reparable.

Just as you and your team of undercover agents sit down for the evening meal in the miner's mess as deep watery ocean steel black presses all around your vehicle, the gentle rumble of the miner's treads is interrupted by a bump, then another bump, then a series of bumps.

Water from a razor thin crack violently sprays into the galley. Before you know it, the water is already as deep as the souls of your shoes...

Actions?

p.s. I actually have this one scripted our and ready to print, but again, it's not going anywhere, so here's the seed for it. I think that's the last one I have. Sorry for the necromancing.

p.p.s Here's a link to the image of said Kraken; https://www.deviantart.com/elmisa/art/Kraken-275185089
Note, I actually made contact with the author, and he agreed to let me use the image in an email exchange, but I've lost interest. Anyway, enjoy adventuring and enjoy taking on this critter (for whoever wants to stat it out).