Pre-made Traveller adventures you liked?

[Cymew]

In the discussion about Anomalies in the T4 folder the thought came up that I consider most adventures I've read for Traveller to be fairly bland and hard to get enthusiastic over.

Many are very generic, and the plots often not that interesting. The GDW adventures especially made me yawn, since so many were just a big starship and some notes about what they are used for.

So, what pre-published adventures have gotten the steam pressure up for you, and made you feel like sitting down for a session at once?

I will start with my one big exception. Lords of Thunder by William Keith Jr, from MTJ#4, made my mind swirm with ideas and possibilities. I just had to use it for a campaign!

 

[alanb]

The Sky Raiders trilogy, of course. Indiana Jones in space - woo hoo!

The Argon Gambit had potential, although it was underdeveloped.

I've looted Across the Bright Face for its setting, although the scenario itself was a snorer.

Kinunir has potential to be rewritten in light of the Norris/Santanocheev power struggle. As published, it was another snorer, though.

Leviathan was cool enough that you might us well disregard all and any canon that clashes with it, and just play it.

Of course, it's more a campaign outline than an actual adventure, and you are still going to have to fill in the details. If you have trouble with that, Leviathan itself isn't much use. Once you get past that, just head on down to (a certain world) and start building your empire...

Hmm... It might be worth moving some of the other scenarios into the Outrim Void...

 

[aramis]

Shadows, Across the Bright Face, The Traveller Adventure, Mission on Mithril, Twighlight's Peak, and Adventure 0.

All really good stuff.

Signal GK is one I enjoy, but it has lead to too many character suicides....

I've looted from most of them, tho'.
Currently, I'm running shadows transplanted to Wypoc/Lanth, with a subtle change in motivation: The Baron Wypoc asked the players to look into some mysterious disappearances... and of course, the complex shoots them down!

 

[kafka47]

I still like to run Knightfall as being one of the best Traveller adventures out there in print. Like the Traveller Adventure, it had a lot that you can hang onto whilst moving the storyline along. Odyssey from QLI is an interesting twist for an adventure. Part of the problem is that real adventures tend to fall into stereotypes very quickly and to keep things lively one has to have a constant reference that everyone can relate to...and in the absence of really good Science Fiction out there, the reference is gone...so we get a pastiche of adventures that really rely upon the referee to flesh out.

I have had high hopes for "In the Black". Q. MJD, do you plan to release this under the Avenger line or still wait for QLI to come back online? Also, there is some work being done around Starfall which looks promising.

 

[wordserpent]

Levithan was my all-time favorite, but it required a lot of homework on my part as the referee. I liked Horde/chamax plague for it's aliens-esque plot. MJT4's Gateway campaign looked incredible, unfortunately I never got to run it for anyone.

Other neat adventures were "Dagger at Efate" in which the PC's could end up with their own Merc cruiser, mission on Mithril, Shadows, Exit Visa (which the players seemed to run into in some form or another quite often) and the Hard Times campaign.

 

[Pickles]

All the LBB adventures were fairly vague, admittedly, but they seemed to work fine in all our games. My campaigns have tended to be charcater-led, in that a lot of background flavour came from the characters' business and political dealings (shenanegans, I called them).

The adventures provide the hardest bit, the plot. Legwork is just legwork, especially before home computing made pretty full-colour handouts compulsory ...

 

[Vargas]

Death Station: I think this is an excellent introductory adventure.

Safari Ship: I ran this for a group and they had a great time with it.

Shadows/Annic Nova: Both were pretty good 'dungeon crawls' I ran a lot of years ago.

 

[mike wightman]

The Traveller Adventure.

Twilight's Peak.

Leviathan

Nomads of the World Ocean

Safari Ship

Murder on Arcturus Station

Signal GK

Argon Gambit/Death Station

Chamax Plague/Horde

 

[robject]

Shadows.

The Kinunir.

Twilight's Peak.

Leviathan.

Chamax Plague.

Safari Ship.

Mission on Mithril.

Knightfall looks pretty good.

 

[Border Reiver]

Twighlight's Peak

Rapid Repo (MTJ 3)

Prison Planet

Simba Safari

Sky Raiders' Trilogy

Arrival Vengeance (mainly for the overall campaign setting)

The Traveller Adventure

Broadsword

 

[Allensh]

One of my favorite published Traveller adventures was from Challenge #58, "Demon Dark". Very evocative of "Aliens".

Death Staion, Signal GK; both good. I ran Signal GK for GURPS Traveller and it worked quite well.

My all-time favorite published Traveller adventure is "The Long Way Home" (BITS version). We just had immense amounts of fun with that.

Allen

 

[Merxiless]

Across the Bright Face

Safari Ship

The Desert Environment

Wanted: Adventurers

The Mountain Environment

The Undersea Environment

 

[Commander Drax]

The Keith Brothers - Lords of Thunder, Follwed by The Flaming Eye (Awesome - excellent atmosphere),

Rapid Repo MTJ3 and amzingly - T4's Gateway (yep it shocked me too - but it was fun to play).

Then Knightfall

The rest I just made up myself

 

[Bob Weaver]

Trillion Credit Squadron #1

Shadows

Broadsword

Murder on Arcturus Station

Death Station

Night of Conquest

And from MT:
To Sleep, Perchance to Scream (Challenge #54)

Fun all!

Best Regards,

Bob W

 

[Whipsnade]

Cymew,

I can't think of any published adventure I ran 'straight ouot of the box', so picking favorites would really mean I'm picking those I plundered the most often?

I used the Double Adventures more often than the Adventures and some of those I never really ran as adventures. For example, I stole lots of bits from Prison Planet and Nomads of the World Ocean while never running the campaigns presented in the books.

Of the Doubles I plundered Death Station and Mithril/Bright Face most of all. I recently ran a heavily modified version of Bright Face at a minis gaming night. The game was more man-to-man combat than RPG session. The player's trek across Dinomn was reduced to the level of a scenario generator which provided the set-up for gun battles.

Among all of GDW's CT work, The Traveller Adventure was the product I came closest to running as written.

I never used any non-GDW products 'straight' either. For example, I ran all of the Keith's Sky Raiders trilogy but I set it in the Islands and the the vessel in question was a second Leoskalth generation ship that had failed to cross the Rift. (It was completed late and launched in the face of a Ziru Sirka attack. It suffered a major engineering casualty, never achieved even a fraction of c, and was abandoned within a few months.) The few times I used DGP's nifty Grand Tour adventures I didn't use the Four Knights. (I wish i could have used more DGP and MT stuff but that is when my RPG group began slowly breaking up.)


Have fun,
Bill

 

[kafka47]

Plundering adventures is half the fun. I wonder if anyone has done a Reverse Dungeon scenario. Taking the published scenario that everyone knows and then getting the players to play the opposite team - I was thinking of doing this with Knightfall where players assume the role of the Dulinor xenoarcheologist.

 

[Vargas]

Border Reiver and Commander Drax - You both list Rapid Repo as a favorite adventure, probably the first time I've seen this. What did you like about it?

Regrettably I've never gotten to run or play Arcturus Station; I've always liked that one.

 

[mak]

We really enjoyed prison planet and expedition to zhondani.

Leviathin was good too.

 

[Badbru]

I can't believe no-one has mentioned "Uragyadn of the Seven Pillars" yet. I thought that one was great, but then I'd just come from running twilight 2000.

I'd like to run through the Hard Times campaign as I like that one too.

Having much more experience with TNE, and a preferrence for it, not many of the old CT adventures appeal to me. And before anyone thinks that's a Flame, or Flame bait, it's not, ok.

 

[hirch duckfinder]

i really enjoyed twilights peak - that one had everything. also death station, research station gamma, argon gambit, across the bight face (with a few additions).

i've always wated to play or run divine intervention. now i've read it i suppose it would have be running it.

what is rapid repo?