Ship Card minor update

I made a minor change to the ship cards on the Wiki.  The Commercial Vessels document had a mistake in the Fuel, Cargo and Maneuver Drive ratings for the "Far Trader" vessels, I've changed the document there to the correct ratings.

Andrew comes to Heroni

Having mustered out on Rhylanor,  Yes Paul, Roland McGintley and Jax Tyvoid were recruited by Baron Carlo Fossi to join an expedition to the more backwater half of the Rhylanor Subsector.   Baron Fossi is on a mission to survey his family’s holdings in the subsector and search for business opportunities, now that the Fifth Frontier War has come to an end and things are settling down.  The Baron has decided to use one of his family’s Far Traders,The Countess Cassandra, for this leg of his trip.  Yes Paul signed on as ship’s engineer, Roland McGintley as the pilot on The Countess Cassandra, and  Jax Tyvoid as a bodyguard for the Baron. 

One  evening in orbit around Belizo, the baron charts a course for a jump to Heroni.  Roland is a bit puzzled, since Heroni is a dead-end, nowheresville of a planet, with no water, no gas giant and a joke of a starport.  The Baron says that he has a deal worked up with a man named Ace Nubunto to collect a package of ancient documents from the starport on Heroni which will allow him to lay legal claim to the planet, ousting the Ling Standard Products fief-hold.

Recruiting

The rules for recruiting employees are as follows:

RECRUITING

1. DECKS: There are 5 decks of NPC’s for use as potential Employees.

GREEN:  mercenaries—with an Army Background

RED:  mercenaries---with a Marine, Sailor or Flyer Background

PURPLE:  thugs---with a Rogue, Barbarian, Pirate or Assassin Background

YELLOW:  ship crewmen---with a Scout, Merchant or Navy Background

BLUE:  specialists---with a Doctor, Scientist, Bureaucrat, Diplomat, Hunter, Agent or Entertainer background.

2. RECRUITNG SKILL: GENERAL SEARCH:  To look for employees, requires 1 week of active arrangements, and the response is based on the Tech level and population of the world.  The search requires at least 1 character with Recruiting Skill 0+ to pursue it full time, and only one attempt is made per firm, unit or ship per week.  Multiple characters cannot make multiple attempts, but can apply their skill bonuses separately.

Very Low Population:  if the population code is 0,1,2 or 3 then recruiting is going to be on a role-playing basis, since the players can actually meet everyone who’s there.

Low Population:  if the population code is 4 or 5, then draw one card per point of recruiting skill from each deck after one week of work.

Moderate Population:  if the population code is 6,7 or 8, then draw 1d6 cards, plus 1 card per point of recruiting skill,  from each deck after one week of work.

High Population:  if the population code is 9 or greater, draw 2d6 cards, plus 2 cards per point of recruiting skill, from each deck after one week of work.

Low Tech:  if the Tech level of the planet is 4 or less, treat it as a Low Population world, regardless of actual population.

3. TARGETED RECRUITING

If a character has Recruiting Skill, he can attempt to find a specific employee, instead of making a general search.  He rolls a Recruiting roll equal to 12 minus the Population code of the world.  If he succeeds, he may search a particular deck and pick out 1 card of his choice per level of recruiting skill.

4. OTHER SKILLS:

Streetwise: may be used in place of Recruiting, but character only may draw from the Purple Deck.

Liaison: may be used in place of Recruiting, but character only may draw from the Blue Deck.

Carousing: may be used in place of Recruiting, but character only may draw from the Red Deck.

Steward: may be used in place of Recruiting, but character only may draw from the Yellow Deck.

Leader: may be used in place of Recruiting, but character only may draw from the Green Deck.

Next Session Priorities

It seems that next week, the players priorities are:

1) Getting the fudge off of Heroni
2) Finding the dirty bastard who sent you to Heroni
3) Finding the dirty bastards who currently have the Festivus
4) Seeing  if Dorkon can be revived (probably Rhylanor is the closest place with an adequate hospital)
5) Finding the parts needed to fix the totally awesome Death Ranger
6) overhauling the weaponry in the Death Ranger locker
7) Informing the finance company that the Festivus was stolen (not a problem if Dorkon stays dead)
8) Avoiding prosecution for murdering a starport administrator and hijacking the beat-up free trader.

Besides #1, I don't know in what order you consider these to be important.

Tim's Tornado

I just had an amusing idea.   I did the Tim's Tornado solo adventure because I had all the stuff for the asteroid assault all ready and it seemed a shame to waste it.  But now, maybe through the summer I'll just have Tim's Tornado follow the PC's around, getting hired to clean up the messes that the PC's make.  We could even run short TT adventures during the regular session if it's convenient.

I don't need you, I can do this act alone.

Since Bob and Jason decided to skip the chance at 150,000cr for assaulting the asteroid base in session 1, and since I had 2 NPC's who were capable of attempting it and had been present for the chance, I decided to see if they could do it.

Baron Church and Sgt. Griswald each had a fairly large credit balance so, they pooled 120,000cr and recruited 9 employees to form "Tim's Tornado".  I'll send everyone a log of what happened, and put it on the wiki as Rhylanor 3.

Honestly, they were almost massacred.  3 of the 11 had mortal wounds, and they were about to be swamped by 12 or so bad guys with much better weapons.

 In fact, gunnery and Forward Observer were the two key skills,  They entered the base by landing on the asteroid by surprise and then creeping up to the entrance and using Forward Observer to direct a missile to blow the door in, and then to blow the inner cargo door in too.   But, having 2 crappy accelerator rifles and 6 cutlasses is no match for a crap load of laser carbines.   The captain then sees that the bad guys are clumped together by the entry hole.  He orders the back-up pilot to rush the ship's boat right over, fired a Sand Caster and shreaded the bad guys.  My freaking glob!  a sand caster in personal combat is just completely murderous.  If you are in the danger space and not in some very sturdy vehicle (not even an ATV will do), you are just dead. 

Also, having a first rate doctor is really nice, they recruited one by good fortune, and he saved all the injured troops.  Dr. Hakamora may only be Medic-5, not 7 like our own Dr Spurlock, but that still gets the job done.

I also saw one more time how melee weapons may be useful, but the fact the enemy gets a "return fire phase" with guns before you can hack, and that hurts.

Behind the Screen, Rhylanor Express #2

I'm still ambivalent about the multiple characters.   There are good things and bad things, and I can't quite decide which is better.  It was nice to have a variety of skills, but it seemed like a bit of a mob, and the focus wasn't nearly as tight as it had been in session #1.

The main adventure was actually, for once, based on an adventure I found online called "Dismal Luck." I had to change some features, move it from the Solomani Rim to the Spinward Marches, change a few details to match the sector and planet details.  I had to change some of the combat details to match the Striker based system I'm using, and also decided to change a few names to make them more pronounceable.  (For example, Bigsby's name in the original was much longer and much more French).  Luckily, Heroni was just as much of a butthole of a planet as Dismal was in the Solomani Rim, so it was easy to put the adventure there.

I enjoyed the Hobos and how everything with their exploding barrels of gunpowder worked out.   It was just so wrong that your ATV, running noisy, managed to surprise the first group who were cautiously concealed in the mountains, but bad luck can't always fall only on the PC's I reckon.

I was a little surprised when the security dude killed Dorkon.  I had assumed he had picked up some cloth armor or a vacc suit by then, but apparently not.  Without some armor, shotguns are super bad.

It is going to be interesting to see how you manage to get off planet.   I suppose the easiest thing would be if Andrew happened to roll up a guy with a ship and happened to wander by.  But, that probably won't be the answer.

Belters and Hunters

I was making up some NPC cards for potential employees.   I do have to say that Belters and Hunters kind of suck.   They both get piles of levels in a peculiar skill (Prospecting and Hunting respectively) and I think that these two skills are of limited appeal.  I suppose the upside to both careers is that it is really easily to get a ship without working too hard, but mostly all a Belter is likely to be able to do in a game session is use his vacc suit really really well.

Flyers and Sailors weren't really necessary.   They are part of the Planetary Defense Forces of a world (otherwise called the Army) and Army characters get a lot of chances to get Vehicle skill.  If they choose "Watercraft" or "Aircraft", boom, you have a Sailor or Flyer. 

When I was making some potential ship crewmen, I noticed that Navy characters (the Space Fleet guys) are really good at everything on a spaceship, except actually flying the thing.   Your best chance of finding a Pilot is going for a Scout.

I decided to hand-write the NPC cards (just Stats, Skills, terms and service), since I had fair number of colored 3x5 cards.  My printer doesn't print on 3x5 cards for some reason, only 4x6 or better.   I have 5 mini-decks now:  Green --army guys,  Red---marines, sailors and flyers,  Yellow--ship crew: navy, scouts, merchants,  Blue--specialists:  doctors, diplomats, bureaucrats, scientists, agents entertainers, and hunters, and Purple:  goons:  rogues, pirates, barbarians and assassins.

For most of the mini-decks 3/4 of the characters are fresh 1-term guys and 1/4 fully developed characters from Supplement 1 or Supplement 4 (with Special Duty rolls added and level 0 skill levels added).  The Blue deck is all fully developed characters.   So, if we need to recuit mercenaries or ship's crew in the future I should be ready.

The Multiple Character Question

In Bob's comment on the last post, he brought up the idea of running multiple characters in the campaign, and how he was sort of on the fence about it.   Well, you don't know how close I was to telling you guys to run multiple characters on Sunday.  I ended up just letting you share Jimmy Saxobeat.   Near the end, I did give you the opportunity to use your other characters, but you ended up using the two pre-gens instead.

I am really torn about the whole multiple-character question.  On the one hand, a variety of skills and talents is very helpful in Traveller, and the characters are pretty fragile.  Everyone is only a snub pistol shot away from death.  On the other hand, running multiple characters is injurious to the role-play across the board.

If everyone is really interested in running multiples, let's give this a try.  Next session we'll let everyone play their three characters and see how it goes.  That way all 9 characters will be connected and part of the same team.  If it works just fine, we'll keep going, if not, we'll find a way to return to a single character.    We could even work out some sort of compromise where you can "tag in" and "tag out."

In the long run, having a PC and "employees" (i.e., henchmen) works out better than multiple characters, because the players don't forget who the story is about, where the focus lies.  Nevertheless, your characters are sufficiently distinct to at least give it a try.

Behind the Screen, Rhylanor Express Session 1

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.

The News from Skull

TRAVELLER NEWS SERVICE

SKULL-LANTH UPDATE

001-1111

ROBOTIC IMPROVEMENTS INCREASE FACTORY OUTPUT

The installation of robotic equipment has significantly improved the out-put of the electronics factories across the planet.   The increase in out-put should significantly improve the current accounts situation and allow an increase in food imports.

NO PROGRESS IN RIGELLIAN FEVER OUTBREAK IN DOME 32

The quarantine continues in Dome-City 32.  The train network continues to remain sealed in transit through the contaminated city.   It has been positively proven that the Rigellian fever does not come from contact with our recent wave of immigrants from Victoria.   The joint declaration of the Dome Elders has strongly condemned any ethnic violence against the immigrant community.

DELGADO TRADING SKULL PROFITS SHOW LARGE QUARTERLY DROP

The balance sheet for Delgado Trading, our Mega-corporation trade partner, has fallen dramatically this past quarter.   Delgado has cited a spree of unexpected cancellations by Skull electronics suppliers, but the newly formed “Planetary Unity” block of the Council of Elders has dismissed this as corporate propaganda masking a series of bad marketing decisions by Delgado officials.

Welcome to Skull

I was looking for a good planet on the Spinward Marches map, and then I found one called "Skull", at that point the search was over.   Here's a summary about the wonderful world you'll find yourself mustered out upon.

Location:  Skull, Lanth Subsector, C-2237C7-9  Poor. Non-agricultural.  Naval Base

Library Data:  Skull is a barren, desolate planet with a very thin atmosphere, tainted with heavy metals, requiring respirator and filter mask combination to breathe outside.  There are two small oceans, which are stagnant and have a very high metallic content.   At the South Pole is located a Naval Base, home to two cruiser squadrons and a marine battalion.  All the people live in one of a hundred city-complexes.   The greatest proportion of each city is located underground, but the best properties are located in above ground domes.  Because the atmosphere seals are so important, the possession of all firearms, ammunition, explosives, and energy weapons are strictly forbidden and it is a major felony to be caught with such weaponry.  The planet is ruled by the Council of Dome Elders, a self-selecting committee of one individual citizen from each recognized dome city.  The Elder for the Dome acts as its governor and also as its representative on the council.   There is a chairman who runs all meetings and handles formalities with foreign dignitaries.  The chairmanship, however rotates every 6 months, in a fixed scheme.

What is it like on Skull?

                Skull is a planet you wouldn’t send your mother-in-law to, even if you lost a bet.  Most people live in crowded underground quarters that are both cramped and stinky.  The corporate big-wigs live like school teachers or insurance salesmen do on decent planets.  Nowadays things are even worse, every where you go you are accosted by homeless immigrants (know as orange-heads because of their orange skin tone) constantly trying to get you to buy all sorts of worthless crap. (The orange-heads are from the Red-Zone planet Victoria, and their orange skin pigment comes from their adaptation to an atmospheric taint).

Character Generation

I could do Traveller Character Generation all day long.  I've always loved it.  That being said, I have never seen such a run of bad luck for survival rolls in my entire life.  I mean Marlon failing a survival roll of 3+ on 2 dice!   Bob, losing every character he tried, and these not even in the really high risk careers like belter or scout.

Marlon ended up with one really cool ex-army Colonel, and two punks.   Jason ended up with 2 excellent characters, a Flyer, who had a long career, but couldn't get past the first officer rank (pilot); and a Diplomat.  The diplomat was fascinating, since he started with a 2 intelligence, and Jason was just diplomating him as a sort of laugh, but by the end of mustering out, his Intelligence had risen all the way to 6, and he was over-maxed on his total skill ranks.

Unfortunately, I didn't achieve my goal for the session.  Since I don't know what Bob is going to play, I don't know whether the parry will begin with a ship or not (neither Jason nor Marlon's characters have a ship to start).   I don't know which adventure idea to fully flesh out.   I guess I've got plenty of time to work out something that won't matter for next time.  Oh, my, having to spend amply free time playing with Traveller stuff, woe is me.

Space Combat Tutorial

I think people got the hang of the Space Combat (a mix of LBB #2, Mayday and a few extra details from Megatraveller and High Guard).   Bob's an old pro, and everyone else got the hang of the vector movement really quickly.

SPACE COMBAT TUTORIAL:

Imperial Side: (Bob)  
X-boat Tender (3 turrets, carrying an X-boat, and a Scout Courier);
Patrol Cruiser (4 turrets, carrying a ship's boat).

Outworlder Side (Jason and Marlon)
Zhodani Patrol Frigate (6 turrets, carrying a ship's boat)--Marlon
Varge Corsair (4 turrets)--Jason

Goal:  when an X-boat appeared out of jump space, the Imperium must retrieve the passenger and jump him out system, or the Outworlders must capture him and jump him out.

The Battle:
The Vargr swung far left, the Zhodani swung far right, the Imperials slowed down and crawled straight ahead.

The ships never got to close range.  The Zhodani's computer advantage was huge and allowed him to knock out the maneuver drive of the X-Tender.   It was only then that the Tender launched protective sand which defeated most subsequent attacks.   A huge pile of missiles were launched at both Outworlder ships.  The Zhodani frigate maaged to intercept them all, while the Vargr was pummeld by a large number of impacts, which battered it badly, but didn't cripple or destroy it.

When the X-boat finally appeared, the Patrol Cruiser's ship's boat was in excellent position, but the Zhodani frigate crippled it and captured the X-boat, winning the day.

LESSONS:  I think everyone picked up the combat system really well.  I thnk we all know what to expect from a space battle in the future (by which I mean the next time we have a space battle in game, not 5000AD). 

 If I wanted to re-balance the encounter, I should have replaced the Patrol Cruiser with a Mercenary Cruiser,  the Merc Cruiser has a Computer-5, which is only 1 less than the Frigate's Computer-6, rather than the 3 less of the patrol cruiser.   The Merc Cruiser would have meant a lot more guns, so perhaps adding a second Vargr would have made the whole thing more square.   The Impies could have beaten the Frigate, but it would have imvolved getting to close range before swamping it with missiles.

I'm still slightly unsatisfied with the missile fire aspect of things.   I don't like having to keep track of what ship fired the missiles, as well as the target.  I also need a more elegant way to track missile impact time.  Bob thought there should be a way to out-run missiles, and perhaps he's right.  Maybe ships with 6-G acceleration can make some sort of pilot roll to escape.

Ground Combat Tutorial

The ground combat tutorial scenario was a lot of fun, I got to use my Bag of Clowns miniatures, and the poster making feature of my photocopier to create deckplans.

GROUND COMBAT TUTORIAL:

Scenario: defend the ship from axe-wielding clowns.

Stan Darsh:  marine with combat armor, ACR and cutlass:  (Marlon)
Rick Turtles:  army captain with combat armor, SMG  (Andrew)
Eneri Jamison:  merchant with laser pistol, combat armor  (Bob)
Bill Redbone:  other with snub auto, combat armor  (Jason)

Location: a non-functioning Subsidized Merchant parked at a star port.
Enemies: 50 Bozite cultists in mesh armor with battle axes

Summary:  Turtles was on the upper deck, Darsh, Eneri and Redbone were on the cargo deck, when the rear door and starboard cargo door were blown open and the clowns rushed in.  Eneri was alone near the bow and was surrounded by a dozen clowns.   Darsh and Redbone were almost surrounded, but withdrew to a side corridor.   Darsh put aside his ACR and switched to cutlass and made an excellent defense for himself.  Redbone stood in the corridor and brutally blew the head of one clown after another as they came down the corridor one at a time.   Turtles gets to the opposite side access hatch and drops his grenade down onto the clowns, wounding a few, but only knocking one out of the fight.  He then begins a constant barrage of SMG bullets down the ladder way, with the clowns only rarely getting an axe attempt when he had to stop to change magazines.

Things start to look bad for Eneri.   He takes 2 light wounds and 1 moderate wound, and is only 1 END for exhaustion.    He's too wounded to get any hits with his laser pistol, and is surrounded and cornered by a dozen clowns.   So, in desperation, and counting on his combat armor, he rolls his demolition charge onto the deck and activates it only a meter or two from his feet.  It kills or seriously wounds all 12 clowns, and doesn't scratch Eneri himself.  The tide has turned!

The clowns keep trying to overcome the cutlass, come down the corridor to Redbone and climb up the ladder for another 2 turns, but finally they fail morale and flee.  Only a dozen or so escaped out the rear door. 

LESSONS:  I think everyone got the point about how the penetration and wounds work,  There is still a little confusion about what numbers go for what roll, but everyone appreciates the joys of autofire, the horror of explosive rounds, and some of the melee details.  The turn sequence went pretty smoothly, except I kept wanting to skip the player's return fire phase before the melee attack, which they would quickly remind me about.

The Turn Sequence track play aid I made was crucial and kept the game flowing smoothly.  Man a Snub pistol really is just the best thing for making things dead in shipboard combat.  I was really pleasantly surprised about how the melee weapons worked.  The Battle Axe has the best penetration of all the weapons, but nevertheless, against a guy trained with a cutlass it's hard to get a hit.

Update

I've put a couple of quick reference sheets for ground and space combat onto the wiki.

http://www.lordsofhack.com/traveller/doku.php?id=document_page
I'm getting seriously jazzed.

Adventures

I've been working my way through a lto of old Traveller adventurers, and have noticed a few things.  First of all, they are remarkably low on plot.  The adventurers are mostly ship deck plans, subsector space maps and rumors and patron encounters.   Most of the details are just left open. 

Second of all, most of them are remarkably low on action with the exception of the two I actually bought back in the old days (Broadsword and the Chamax Plague), which are just chock full of action.  There are almost no space battles at all.  Broadsword has one big space battle, and Leviathan involves wandering around in a big merchant cruise, loaded for bear, with the possibility of stumbling into hostile spaceships.

There are also a bunch of neat adventures and adventure seeds online.   I'm in the process of stichting together an online adventure with one of original adventures, with an overall background plot suggested by an episode of MST3K. 

From my tests, I'm thinking that the actual adventures might go quite a bit differently than our typical campaign.  There might end up being fewer gun fights overall, since they can be so deadly.  Space battles might be preferable since they aren't so lethal, even if they are much more expensive.  I think its better to have flunkies involved if you want to have lots of gun battles..

My plan for Sunday is still:
Step 1) several test scenarios in space and ground using pre-gens.
Step 2) create characters
Step 3) I'll have a shorter  adventure ready to go (one that can be used whether the PC's have a ship from character gen or not). 

Character gen is not time consuming.  I'm even thinking that we may roll 3 guys each, choosing the best one.  If the test scenarios go quickly, then we may get a significant amount of adventuring in.

Oh, one more thing.   I think I've finally found a use for a pair of "averaging dice" I bought years ago.  These are 2 d6's which have no 1's and no 6's, instead they have two 3s and two 4's apiece.  Its normal to roll 2d6 for ability scores in Traveller, and I'm thinking of allowing the option to use the averaging dice for those who fear getting low rolls.