Into Sector23! A Traveller Game Starts!
One of my gaming goals for 2023 was to run and play some "classic" Traveller. By "classic" I mean the 1981/1977 rules, without the GDW Imperium setting. Just like our AD&D game was creating a whole new world that was complex and constantly generating new threats and opportunities, would Traveller "out of the box" do the same?
I started with a series of world and sector generation activities which I called #sector23. I went a little nuts generating details but then I realized that wasn't the goal. The goal was to set up a situation and see if anyone found it grabby enough to get into. I pumped the brakes on further world-building and just got right to asking the AD&D players (and others) if Traveller gaming was of interest. Plus I wanted to leave a lot of room for other referees to jump in, and not feel as if they were ruining anything.
Interested folks started to generate characters. It was quickly clear to us that while scout PCs were the easiest branch to qualify for, it was also the deadliest. The PC "graveyard" was filling up and we hadn't even hit the first game! Eventually, we started to hit on some survivors. The viable PCs were a couple of scouts who mustered out with ships and even a B social status lesser noble with his lawyer.
I am not a fan of published adventures. They tend to hamstring the game into a pre-determined ride where there are no real choices. Novice DMs and referees will shy away from making their own stuff out of fear they'll be backed into a corner when their "version" of the game skews from what the published adventure says should happen. Using modules is the best way to make sure you never grow as a gamer.
Published adventure can still be useful away from the table. If you are like me then ideation is not a natural skill. I will rip off published adventures or maps or situations. I just jettison the setup, the tedious narrative manipulations, the "the party should go here" crap. This is all relevant to the initial situation I presented to the payers. In late December or early January there was a discussion in Rick Stump's Don't Split the Party discord about salvage operations in Traveller. Surely there might have been something published that gave guidelines? I could only find 1 thing, a published adventure from the 1977/1981 era, "Salvage Mission."
I won't dive into too much detail but I will highlight one of the worst bits of advice I have ever seen for any referee.
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| Good grief. |
Why would a referee need to manipulate anything? Oh yeah, that's right, when you don't trust the game's actual rules and procedure to generate anything interesting. It's a damning piece of evidence that even early on the Traveller scene was careening towards the narrative material treadmill.
In a nutshell the situation is that a ship went missing and on board was a lot of hard currency perhaps millions worth of credits. Even that raises an interesting point about classic Traveller - money still is based on material that acts as currency. Down with the digital central bank! Some revent editions have this annoying habit of trying to retrofit the rules to "make sense" for the current year. Computers don't make sense because they take up a whole floor? Easy solution: rewrite the assumptions about the computers. This is weak. Instead, I wanted to lean into the assumptions of classic Traveller.
See, the point to me is that Traveller, like AD&D, doesn't have the goal of faithfully recreating realism. The point was to emulate the fiction that inspired it. And like AD&D, there is a body of fiction that Marc Miller read and enjoyed that was the basis for Traveller. It wasn't like modern fiction. Space travel was not easy or cheap. The hazard of travel was part of the adventure. Every world was potentially a situation where the players might run into insane societies, robot civilizations, aliens, and perhaps even supernatural phenomena.
The players agreed that the missing ship and the treasure hunt was interesting enough to go for it. I was fully prepared to go in any direction. Would Traveller support this? I had tables for daily events (like legal entanglements, rumours, and encounters) and felt like after 80+ sessions of AD&D I would be ready.
The player first started by organizing their mission. They had 2 scout ships, neither of which was initially armed. After much discussion, they realized that the software costs were staggering! Without the navigation software, they would have to rely on jump cassettes. To save money, we agreed that they could slave the navigation from one ship to another, as long as the ships were nearby and going in the same direction. Even the ships weapon systems, as meagre as they were, were limited by the lack of good targeting programs. Classic Traveller computer use was brutal. And this was an important key in understanding why trade, which seemed to easy to get rich in later versions was not nearly as sure in this version. Suddenly travel was dangerous and risky, even with their ships!
After making 2 J-2 jumps, and refuelling at scout bases, they made a final J-1 jump into the last known system of the missing ship. The system was a class "E" world, and the planet itself was barely out of the 1800s with muskets and handmade clothing. Landing at the starport, which was a barren strip of dirt next one of the larger towns the players learned that the missing ship never landed on the world. So where was this ship?
The patron who offered the lead on the mission provided a device that would trigger a transponder for the missing ship within a certain distance. All the players had to do was be close enough to trigger the device. I tried to convey just how _big_ the volume of space was in the system and that an exhaustive search by constantly firing the device might still take _years_.
The players debated jumping around to different systems, which to me didn't seem to be any better a search option, since even those other systems might be just as empty and take a long time to search. Even more so, the players realized that there was no way to buy more jump cassettes. They had spent a lot of money on the cassettes needed to arrive in this system and back and hadn't any more. They lacked the needed software to create new jump routes back!
The players knew they had to narrow the search area. They realized that the missing ship was likely to refuel at a gas giant, so they looked there for a week. They also realized that the nearby asteroid field to one of the gas giants would be a good hiding place. But it would still take weeks and weeks to conduct the "ping" search. That was time they didn't want to spend, as they were already almost 3+ weeks into the campaign.
But the players being devious and sneaky convinced me that they could rig the device to increase its range. That an electronics-5 skill ensured a hasty throw vs an improvised difficulty (I threw a 2d6 to get a difficulty), and they beat. I described the completely illegal and unsafe power modification done by the crew had increased the range of the device by an order of magnitude.
The ping located the target transponder and probably the ship! It was merely hours away from the asteroid belt. We had been playing for a while and wrapped up there.
Some observations about the way the charts are laid out in the 1981 rules: they are terrible. I was constantly flipping back and forth to work out different events. To do: reorganize the tables in a coherent way and use little colored stickies to find them faster. Things we didn't get to work with: personal or ship combat. Maybe that will happen next time? The players still have to locate the actual ship, perform whatever salvage operations they can, and then make it back to "civilization." We'll see!
In the meantime, with these PCs 3+ weeks into the game, there will be a pocket of time where they will be out of immediate play. This will give us the chance to really go crazy with a new set of PCs and try something utterly different!
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