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"Special Delivery" by William H. Keith

AlHazred

SOC-12
Knight
I'm considering using the scenario "Special Delivery" for my table when my players hit the Sword Worlds. It's a scenario Keith published in Far & Away issue #01, in 1990. I liked it enough it stuck with my when I originally read it, and on rereading it, it's not bad at all. It has some nice stuff for the players to figure out, and some interesting ideas for how it could develop.

One element that I would like help with is the "package." Obviously from the name, it's about the player delivering a package, and obviously the nature of the package should mess with the player characters -- it's a trope in Traveller gaming! In this case, the package is "Percy," an alien creature that's the pet of a noble on the destination planet. The destination planet (Gallerin, which I believe occurs nowhere else in Traveller) has strict import controls on livestock, and so a smuggling needs to be arranged. "Percy" is described as a one-meter tall vaguely humanoid creature weighing about 50kg, with short legs and very long arms, with no head but two eyestalks; when initially encountered, he's wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

There's a tiny image of Percy in the article, but for a creature that could, depending on the course of events, become a ship mascot, I feel like something larger and more detailed would be needed. Has anyone done a larger image of Percy? If so, can anybody share what they used?
 
Congratulations! I think you found a really obscure one. I can find almost nothing on this magazine. The only "Special Delivery" in my database is a T20 robot scenario in - where else -
T20 Robot Adventures.

I'm waiting with baited breath to find out what people with more expansive libraries have to say.
 
Oh, yeah, I feel like the magazines that should have been obscure, like the Traveller-devoted fanzines, have a good representation here. But one-offs from short-run but larger-distribution magazines, that weren't exclusively devoted to Traveller, those are really obscure! I'm trying to capture them here, but it's slow going!
 
Does the adventure suggest where Gallerin might be found?
No, it's meant to be a stand-in for the GM to replace with another system.

The adventure starts on Cantrip and ends on Gallerin "two or three jumps away". Much like many similar scenarios at the time, they never showed up anywhere else ever again.
 
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