Our first real Traveller session was a cracking good time. The constant failure was of immense entertainment value. It was probably a very good idea that we were using non-lethal weaponry for the first few encounters. The crew managed to avoid the really dangerous areas, and the only casualty was do to side-line criminal activity.
Gear Notes:
The "Thud Gun" was a total piece of crap. It was supposed to be a piece of crap and lived up to its billing. There's nothing better for murdering unarmored chumps up close than a Snub Pistol, it's positively brutal. I had given the stats for Hand Stunner and Shock Batons (Chaka Khans) in ranged weapon format, when I should have given them as melee weapon format. It's not hard to work around, they're just clubs with superpowers added on.
Adventure Design:
We ended up doing two different adventures on two separate worlds. The longer one, "Welcome to Skull" or "The Adventure of Skull Laser Plot." was completely written up ahead of time, and ran to 6 or 7 pages. Much of it they avoided (never going to the deadly spider and cannibal dome; nor actively entering the enemy office building or asteroid base). But, they completed the mission and got paid.
I started by going to the "Drudge Report" website on June 4th, and found the most outrageous headlines on the page: "Robots take Chinese Factories to New Heights", "Swarms of Tarantuals invade an Indian town", " Man beheads wife, throws body parts from balcony" and "Zombie Summer: Gruesome cannibal attacks in Miami, Texas and Maryland". Then I found an interesting planet to start the campaign: an armpit on the Spinward Main, called Skull. Then I worked in a still-secret meta-plot element and then tried to work the whole collection together into a series of encounters that allowed the players to use a wide variety of skills.
The second advenure was totally unplanned: "The Adventure of the Equus Fishy Guns" was entirely spur of the moment. The players were on Equus, they were looking for work, we had a couple of hours to kill. I just went to the patron encounter list, rolled an "Arms Dealer", so figured the adventure was recovering lost or stolen weapons. Then I rolled on the random encounter table once for who had the weapons (Religious Group) and to whom the weapons needed to be delivered to (Bandits), factoring in that it was a water world and the adventure created itself.
I honestly don't know which one was more fun. It was a good time doing both of them. The depth and framework of the Traveller system is what makes coming up with adventures so enjoyable. It can be fun to pack in the details ahead of time, but the stats are really simple to come up with on the fly too (Bad guys have 7 in all their attributes and skill 1 in whatever it is they're supposed to do, done). It's also a fascinating feature that there's no difference between "Boss" type NPC's and ordinary schmoes, there's no difference between ordinary dudes on the street and PC's. I've always found that a particularly appealing feature of the game.
I found it interesting that we basically had no real combat gods in the session. It kind of forced us to think sideways to find a way through encounters. The one time we fought an equally armed and armored couple of opponents, we nearly had our butts handed to us in short order. It might've had a different outcome if we'd had better weapons, or hadn't been wounded. Or if the cop hadn't wanted to save his partner's life by surrendering.
ReplyDeleteI'm kinda on the line of saying...why don't we run multiple characters through out this game. We pretty much already did. I'd be interested in how the lives of my only three surviving characters rolls out.
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