I've done the huge sector style, pre-setermined with 5 notebooks. It's a lot of fun, and most of it doesn't get used, but you get respect from players who are detail hounds, as you have it all covered in your own personal IMTU Canon.
Lately, I have been cosidering the following:
Episodic, moment by moment.
Give them a Ship. Merchie, Scout on Detached, Merc, whatever.
Tell them there is an Empire. It controls all space with large mile-long ships. Nobles etc. Or whatever else you had in mind, if you are not going with Classic Setting. I have played Traveller as Star wars, And as Aliens, and as Dune, and as near earth, struggling colonies dystopia in 2440 AD. Whatever flavor you want. That's the beauty of Traveller.
Episode 0:
Generate Characters.
Give each PC a goal, or force the player to give them one, and also:
a recurring enemy and
a deep dark secret.
Make sure each one has a good background, that ties the above to one or more characters on the ship.
Expanded Megatraveller / GURPS Traveller works okay for this, but I also like to use TFG Heroes for tomorrow, with a grain of salt / moderation.
(People who have used HfT verbatim, and have generated totally unplayable zombie aliens who lost their nads in a nuclear reactor accident after escaping the misanthropist lesbian proto-culture generation ship that fell into orbit around a dying star 4 centuries ago know what I am talking about.)
Gen up the rest of the crew, and give each one a photo clipped out from a magazine, that reflects the NPC's look, and personality. Or use pics of an actor, that you see as portraying them in your "Traveller Television Series"
(I do this with PCs, also)
Episode 1:
Give them a task: Deliver X cargo to planet Y.
Assume the crew already know each other, or are recent hires to the ship (not too many). Interact with the crew, playing a bit of each NPC in turn.
Throw some danger at them, like a light pirate attack, a micrometeorite punture, power loss, or something else that takes some light use of skills or some ingenuity to get through.
Have that situation suddenly get really complicated, either by something that they messed up on, or didn't think of.
Pick what seems to be thier favorte NPC to this point, and kill them off in a quick, messy way, thus letting them know that space is dangerous, and hinting that no one has plot immunity.
Soon, exhausted, they arrive.
Planet Y is a desert world, where microcompter chips are cheap. Some guy at the tail end of Episode 1 offers them X Mcr to deliver a load of said chips to:
Episode 2 - An Urban Hell Cyberpunk-type world.
This place also has a large pharmaceutical factory, where they need plants from
Episode 3 Jungle world.
Etc.
All the while adding in details, as you go.
If you need a 2000 ton gigantic cargo ship, you draw it out and worry about the details later.
If you need a spaceport, you rough sketch it out and worry about the details later.
if you need an npc, make him or her up, play them to the hilt, and write up a character sheet later from the nottes you have kept from your post-its.
If it gets to episode # 4, you are doing something right, make some notes, and draw some deckplans, and a planetary map or 3, and plot out a short arc of story episodes 4, 5, 6. Make sure to include some of the stuff you set up iun episode 0, to either hit someone or the whole crew with their nemesis, or someone's secret is revealed.
If it is not going anywhere:
- Keep the group, and go to BattleTech, Cyberpunk, D&D, 7th Sea, Conspiracy X, or Star Trek, and come back to Traveller when interest wanes in one or any of those others.
- Find new or different players or seek a different group.
- Take a break, and play, letting someone else Ref for a few months.
- Take a break from gaming for a while, reading sci fi books for new ideas, and observing the author's storytelling techniques and style.
To me a game is and should be like a film, or TV show.
It usually takes a few episodes for the thing to gel into something you can work with, and characters as initially designed, might need to be changed, or adapted into something else.
I recall one campaign, the players wanted to be smugglers, and mercs, working for the good guys. One Gent had Turret weapons-3, medical-1, when two members of the party got wounded. He climbed out of the upper turret to do first aid. 10 episodes later, he was a paramedic, of sorts. 10 episdoes after that, he was working on becoming a surgeon. So, with all of the above, be flexible, as it is interactive storytelling.
I also have it set up, where players can portray NPC for certain scenes, where say the Captain needs to negotiate with a team of merchant brokers, and none of the rest of the crew are really necessary. The Captain plays himself, and the Brokers are given rough guidelines as to what they are looking for from the deal. This way nobody is bored, while the GM talks to the Captain's player in a one-to-one.
The benefit is that sometimes the player likes this "Broker" character more, and finagles a way for them to get onto the ship, as a backup or Main # 2 PC for that player.
Of course, not all gropus or players will like or be able to deal with this, but it is knid of neat as a GM, when a player approaches you on the side and says, hey is it possible for us to meet that broker guy again? I'd like to play him. So, they meet him in a bar, by "Happenstance" and they get a new episode out of it. Or a fun one-shot encounter. Or sometimes, they drop their main PCs and become "Brokers" for a while, wheeling and dealing, setting up meetings, trading, etc. trying to get that whole buy low sell high thing going.
Infinite stories are possible. Even a changes of a single planet can lead to a whole new style of campaign. War-torn or Post-apocalyptic?
Exploration, or action/adventure? Noir, or Cyberpunk?
It's all there. That's how I am thinking lately about new Traveller Campaigns.
