Six Traveller Campaign and Adventure Ideas

It's tough to plan a Traveller campaign concept ahead of time. Character creation isn't completely random, but it's close enough that any given idea might easily run aground on an ill-fate dice roll. Luckily, that same character creation will usually give you more than enough ideas to hang a campaign on. Mine's been largely shaped by the one player who stuck a 12 in Social Status and then went on to get three boosts to the attribute when he mustered out of Noble. My original ideas about them being an unruly crew of rogue's and scoundrels quickly moved over in favor of this Duke Marlow Burrin's political aspirations, and the campaign's been better for it.

That said, it does help to have some idea of the shape of the campaign, even if it's conceived at the table during character creation. (And with help from the players; incorporating their input can make them fiercely loyal to the game.) The Mongoose Traveller book has a few campaign ideas to start with, but here's a few more specific ideas to help get you going:

The Love Boat: The characters are of the mostly respectable sort, the players enjoy a little interpersonal intrigue, and the ship's outfitted for a pleasure cruise. Pick up passengers, take them interesting places, and inevitably get dragged into their weird personal problems. One week the crew gets hired to find evidence of adultery, the next, they're outrunning bounty hunters and learning too-late about a passenger's criminal past.

The Voyager Knock-Off: Mis-jumps are a hazard in any game, and if you want a short-ish campaign with a set end point, a really bad mis-jump makes a good option. Stranded in an unknown part of space, all the characters want to do is get home, but they're broke. Adventure (and hilarity) ensues. You might work with each player to come up with a specific reason why everyone wants to get home now (Mary Jane will marry another man! The family farm will be repossessed!) or you can leave open the idea that they'll decide this part of space isn't so bad, and settle down into a comfortable existence as traders or freelancers. (And, simultaneously, a more long-term campaign.) The best part of a game like this is it gives you an excuse to throw in a lot of really strange stuff, to keep up the idea that the gang is far from home.

Space Ship Rockstar: This works just as well in space as it does with vampires. The crew is a band (famous or not) "on tour," hopping from planet to planet and holding concerts as they go. There's a couple of different approaches that would make this adventure-worthy. The band could be the Scooby Doo type, always getting involved in trouble on the way to, from, and at the venue. Or the game could focus on the trouble they go through to get paid: all those backwoods planets always have something that's got to get fixed before they'll have the promised cash on hand. Perhaps the most promising option is that the band is cover for another activity, whether it's bounty hunting, trouble-shooting, or smuggling.

Home, Sweet Home: There's no reason your players have to be the itinerant wanderers with a spaceship. Instead, they could be in charge of a space station themselves. Every week, they deal with a different batch of weirdos coming through, causing problems for quiet folks. This also gives them the opportunity to get a lot more involved with whatever the local problems are. Other variations on this option include all the usual possibilities of an urban campaign, (detectives, local politicians, or plain old adventuresome trouble-starters) set in a city that's a major hub of space-trade to allow for lots of Traveller goodness, or even a wilderness exploration game, where the players have been tasked with mapping and taming a wild planet.

The Lost Civilization: Whether it's alien or ancient human, exploring the ruins of another time spread across a sector or subsector makes for a good unifying hook for an exploration and study-based game. They might have been tasked with it by a higher authority, or simply gotten curious; either way, an interlocking series of ruins, with plenty of mysteries to uncover and solve, can be very engaging to a certain type of player. This one plays pretty well with a lot of other more general concepts, too; just drop in a ruin every so often, in between their other adventures.

Big Game Hunter: Travel to distant planets, track down the most exciting local wildlife, and kill it. (Or escort some rich nobles with plans for the same.) Another one that could fit inside a regular campaign without much difficulty, this one could work as a campaign on its own if the players like the idea of developing reputations as some of the best and most dangerous hunters in the galaxy. Beyond just coming up with new and more interesting critters, there's a number of variations that would make this kind of mission interesting: perhaps the creatures are protected by the Imperium for some reason, worshipped by the locals, or more valuable alive than dead. The crew might be tasked with recording the creature's rarely heard cry before they bag it, or have to discover the fates of the last group of fools to go after it. This would also be fun to reverse: perhaps the characters are a far-future version of Greenpeace, out to stop hunters (and other sorts of interplanetary despoilers) by any means necessary.

Permission to Fail

It's weird how things work out sometimes. I'd originally planned for the Mongoose Traveller game to just last for one semester. Plan was, I'd be wrapping that game up around now, and then start a new game (maybe Vampire, maybe Encounter Critical) next year. I didn't have a clear idea of how the Traveller game would end, but I figured that was something that would resolve itself.

Now here I am, getting set to run another semester of it. (At least.) That's not a bad thing; I'm doing it because the players enjoy the campaign, and there's still quite a bit left to wrap up just on the plot threads that are already going. I still don't feel like this is going to be one of those games that lasts forever (could be, but some of the players are already talking about doing something different someday, though they're still having too much fun for someday to be soon) but it's kind of nice to see it go a little longer than planned.

And if it hadn't, that would have been okay, too. Intending for the game to be short (though not building it in to the premise) helped it get this far. There were a couple of points earlier where I was frustrated with the game, and would have considered shutting it down then and there, except that I knew that it was only going to run until the semester ended anyway, and then I could be done with it. Now that I'm there, it's good enough to keep going, but it wouldn't have gotten this far if I hadn't had permission to end it in favor of something new when I got to this point.

Sometimes the Game Master Tweaks Back

Last Friday we had this semester's second-to-last session of the Mongoose Traveller sandbox game. (Last session of the semester was on Wednesday: we moved from the usual date due to finals.) A fun time was had by all; the players got up to enough hijinks that I didn't even need to use the pirate attack scenario I'd whipped up. (Got to use it last night, though. Very impressed with Mongoose Traveller ship combat.)

One of those hijinks got me to thinking. In brief, or something like it: one of the characters, Alice Dice, is a pirate, ruffian, and sex fiend. (Before the campaign started, she'd slept with all the male PCs, and with several important NPCs in the female PCs backstories. Blame the event tables.) Lately, she's been sleeping with Zane Archer/Sir Dave Bowman, space accountant/ship engineer who is terrified of her.

At one point that night, Alice brought a (male) rugby player back to the ship and suggested to Zane that they have a threesome. I'm pretty sure her player (my roommate, incidentally) thought this would be funny, and would freak out Zane, me, and the rest of the table. A typical player antic: she was looking for a reaction.

But Zane turned out to be rather more enthusiastic about the idea than she'd been expecting, which brings me to the point of this story: Game Masters like getting a reaction out of the players just as much as players like freaking out the GM. Now, sure, it fit the character, and I also wanted to make a broader point about the setting and society. But I also knew it'd throw her and the rest of the party for a bit of a loop, especially the player explaining to her that "guys are less open to that than women are." And that's an opportunity too good to pass up.

The Traveller Sandbox Starts to Self-Organize

One of the players in the Mongoose Traveller game has finally designed his own ship. I was waiting for this to happen: usually in any given group there's at least someone who likes to do a little building and tweaking. And the ship design rules in Traveller pretty much beg to be used by just such an enterprising player, because while there's a pretty extensive set of pre-made ships (enough to get up and start the campaign without stopping to design your own) players tend to have their own ideas about what's "optimal."

I encourage players to do stuff like this. Every game of serious length that I've run they've ended up making something. I've had players design personal hideouts, come up with new races, research new spells, stat up loyal follwers, and create new character classes. It helps put a personal stamp on a campaign, and encourages the players to invest in the game and the world.

In this case, it seems to be a sign that the campaign is maturing -- and not just in the usual way, where the players get used to each other and their character settle into a comfortable dynamic. The players have started to take control of the campaign themselves; I'm no longer having the trouble I did a couple sessions back where every session was a struggle to constantly generate new happenings. They're doing things now: making plans, coming up with theories, and having adventures.

It's gratifying, because it's a sign that my experiment in a more sandbox-y style of campaign is paying off. I've never been much of a campaign writing kind of a referee, but I do usually start a game with some idea of an overarching storyline; a villain or two at the very least. This time, though, I didn't have anything immediately obvious going into it, and I knew that Mongoose Traveller was built for a more world-oriented style of play, so I decided to go with it. Things were rough for a while, but now I'm starting to see the real appeal of sandbox style play: it's fascinating to see all those separate plot threads start to knit together into something coherent.

Thus, the ship. The player in question has always had a vague idea of what kinds of goals his character, Duke Marlow Burrin, had in mind. (To challenge KordCorp's control over the subsector.) But now that the campaign is coalescing into a more recognizable form, he has a much better idea of how specifically he's going to achieve those goals, and the ship ties into that. And maybe more importantly, he and the rest of the gang seem to be getting much more attached to their characters, and thus more willing to invest in the world. It's a very encouraging sign.

Traveller Plans: Taking Advantage of the Summer Hiatus

Things I want to get done this summer for the Traveller game:

• Map out the rest of the surrounding subsectors, in preparation for the inevitable misjumps, and so I'm ready if and when the campaign gets less focused on the Kordovia subsector.
• Detail a bunch more planets. There's a number in Kordovia that I haven't sketched out yet, and I'd like to do at least the major planets in the neighboring subsectors as well.
• Clean up the planetary notes I already have. Each one has somehow developed it's own unique format; I'd like to standardize their presentation a bit, move everything that's in my chronological notes pertaining to a particular world to its entry, and iron out each world's timeline.
• Update my NPC list. I have a bunch of notecards, but they currently only cover about half my NPCs. At the very least, I need to get all of my NPCs written down and accounted for. I'd also like to get a hold of a card box and some manila dividers, so I can organize the cards by world, for easy use in play.
• Update the campaign wiki. I have one, but I stopped using it after doing the session recaps became too much of a chore. I'm not sure I'm going to start doing recaps again, but it would be nice to get at least some kind of "Season 1: the Story So Far" general recap for the whole campaign done. If I'm really feeling ambitious, I'll wiki-fy all my planet notes and NPCs, but to do that I'd have to decide if I wanted it to be a player resource (and thus censored of secret details) or a way for me to keep track of my notes.
• Make up a better calendar. At least get some holidays on there or something. Both Imperium-wide and planet specific; there are a few planets that I know would have some really entertaining festivals.
• Get a little bit more of the setting fleshed out. This is really the least important item on the list, but it would be good to give some though to this at some point. I have a few sketchy ideas on this score already, but they mostly pertain to historical backstory. Details, for instance, on Imperial politics could be useful to establish.

How I Prep For Traveller

Most of the notes for the planets in my Traveller sub-sector look something like this:

Dori Danu 0408 B78A456-11 ST NI Wa

Very little physical violence, so conflict takes the form of espionage and elaborate power plays between the ruling families who control the world's aerodomes and algae farms.

A little smaller than earth
Dense atmosphere
Almost entirely water
41,142 citizens
Feudal technocracy
Banned: all firearms except shotguns and stunners; carrying weapons discouraged, TL 11 items, computers
Early stellar -- first true AI
500 Cr. Berthing costs

Peaceful -- physical conflict is almost unheard-of. The culture produces few soldiers and diplomacy reigns supreme. Forceful characters will be ostracized.

Famous for Danuvian rubies, which are so rare that exporting them is illegal.

Minor captive government -- The Shimmering Sky is an odd, drug based cult with mysterious initiation rituals, but it doesn't seem to be a source of trouble.
Minor company/organization -- ShinyHappy Algae, the major (but not the only) algae processing interest on the planet. It's run by its founder, Nila "Happy" Emmerson (no one knows what happened to her partner, Nick "Shiny" Frost).

First, I generate the UWP, and since I'm using Mongoose Traveller, number, strength, and type of factions, and then a cultural quirk. I write out what each entry in the UWP means below, since I haven't memorized all those charts yet and it helps when I'm describing the world to the players.

Then, I look at that and the quirk, and try to come up with a theme for the world, and a one or two sentence description based on that. Dori Danu's theme would be something like "decadent water world where conflict is social;" other themes in the subsector include "religion based on Marvel comics," "ancient Egyptian-style ruins," "Dune rip-off," "robot farmers," "plutonium-peddling Cthulu worshippers," "pretty much like Tortuga" and "everyone worships whales."

A lot of the time, that's really all I'll need to run a decent game, particularly now that the characters have their own goals going on. A lot of times what they'll do is ask me for a list of the passengers on their ship and what they're up to, or go to a bar to pick up rumors, either just in a general way or about specific people. The theme gives me enough to go on to generate that kind of thing.

For a while I was also generating a list of missions/rumors, but that was really too much of a crap-shoot to be helpful. It ended up giving me a bunch of random little things to manage, rather than making the sessions more interesting. Now that I have a better handle on the rhythm of the game, I'm probably going to start generating one or two "NPCs of interest," people who can provide some service to the PCs or have some interesting issue attached to them. That way, there's something obvious and interesting to return to, and possibly get integrated into the ongoing saga of the campaign, without giving me a bunch of pointless little details to manage.

Thoughts on Campaign Complexity

I tend to have a hard time describing my campaigns to non-participants. You'll note, for instance, that my "recaps" here tend to focus on a few key issues, often mostly out-of-game or otherwise technical in nature, with very little discussion of any events outside of the specific problem I'm having. If I did more than that, it would quickly turn into pages of material.

The Traveller game has already gotten to the point where it would take several paragraphs just to fully discuss their current mission, and explain why everyone's going along with it, how they got it in the first place, and where they're going from there. A complete explanation of all the different goals they have bubbling on various burners would take weeks.

It's ridiculous. But it's not unusual, for one of my campaigns or for roleplaying campaigns generally. This one doesn't even involve all that much history; it wasn't unusual in Is This Fair for a complete update of the campaigns current status to require repeated references to events that happened in two distinct time periods, one thousands of years prior to the start of the campaign, and the other around four hundred years previous.

I'm sure that there are some campaigns which don't develop such labyrinthine complexity, but it strikes me as a general tendency of such things, if only because there's half a dozen people all contributing their input to the thing that will someday resemble a plot. The basic challenge of integrating four or five separate backstories and character motivations into a coherent whole, which a campaign does by default (though a good referee will guide it towards a stable state that doesn't shortchange any one character or group of characters in favor of another) accounts for a great deal of complexity all on its own.

But a lot of it comes directly from the game master's side of the screen. This has been particularly true in my current campaign, but it's true in a general way of most roleplaying campaigns: I generate a lot more material than I will ever reasonably use, most of it in the form of offhand references, minor NPCs, and hooks the players don't bite. This is just a normal part of negotiating the divide between player and game master; I don't know exactly what they'll be interested in, so I make more than I need, and they'll be more interested in some things than others, so they'll notice less than I make.

Sooner or later, though, some of that material that doesn't immediately get used will come up again. Either the players will remember what I'd intended as a one-off incident and attach some significance to it, or I'll reason that something that happened a couple of sessions ago has a neat connection to what they're doing now. There's a continual process, negotiated between me and the players, of generating material, reacting to it, creating a story to explain it, and then generating more material based on that story.

The Trouble with Traveller

Friday's session of Traveller was a little on the disappointing side. Not that it wasn't fun -- for me, and Duke Burrin's player. But the rest of them mostly sat around and watched, occasionally engineering their own antics.

This unhappy circumstance was theoretically a product of necessity: they'd misjumped at the end of last session, and were a good half a dozen parsecs away from where they wanted to be. That many jumps means a lot of trading and a lot of accounting. But I need a better way to handle these long stretches of dice rolling and calculation necessitated by so many jumps in a row. Especially since, in our current system, it takes much longer than I should because I'm constantly getting interrupted by other, more interesting things that one or two of the other players are doing -- which then just shifts the "me and one player are having fun" problem to a different part of the table.

One way to handle this would be to have some "interesting" things pop up along the way, and the last time they misjumped that's exactly what I did. But with the end of the semester fast approaching, carrying with it at the very least a significant campaign hiatus, I didn't want to distract too much from the multitude of goals they already have. More action would have been more interesting, but it also would have meant significantly delaying their arrival at the original destination (where they hope to pick up some clues as to the location of Athene's fiancé, and perhaps learn some more about the various KordCorp resistance movements they keep running into) -- perhaps even until next year.

It would also be possible to eliminate misjumps entirely, but I think it's important to have at least that possibility present. The crew has taken steps to reduce the probability of a misjump, and that's good, but I wouldn't want to eliminate them entirely. At the very least, they give them a reason to go off and see parts of the subsector, and surrounding subsectors, that they wouldn't otherwise go to, and I believe it's important to maintain an element of danger in space travel. Particularly considering that it's one of their main activities, it's helpful to have a bit of tension during that process.

Still. The current situation isn't acceptable. Burrin's player has suggested that he write an automated program to do most of the trade table stuff, which would help. I'm also thinking that next time this happens, I'll try to handle most of it by e-mail rather than taking up table time.

At Star's End: Session 6

So tonight's game, sadly, contained no actual frogs. I tossed in a line that would have led in that direction, but the moment wasn't right. They did, however, end up naming an NPC after him, so that was good. Next week there will be frogs, I think. And I've got plans to run my megadungeon for the first time tomorrow night, so Arneson-ian goodness still awaits.

That NPC, incidentally? The weirdest thing that I've ever had a group of players do. (Normally I don't do the whole "tell me about your campaign" thing but I have to get this out there.) He's Zane Archer, a convict and accountant who for typically complicated reasons has been tooling around with them for basically the whole campaign. Tonight, Duke Marlow Burrin (the captain) and Alice Dice (the crazy pirate who's slept with everyone) threatened his life and implied they were going to send him back to prison, on account of a "treasure" that he'd somewhat stupidly mentioned. Then Burrin (for, again, excessively complicated reasons) changed his mind, decided to hire Zane, but because he's not technically out of prison had to create a new identity for him -- which included changing his name to Dave Bowman, knighting him, and convincing him to get plastic surgery, so now he looks like Johnny Depp.

(Emily, Alice Dice's player, was very surprised later when she discovered a "David Bowman" in the copy of Fight On! she was perusing while Burrin was busy space-accounting.)

In other news, they've now got enough money that they don't have to constantly scramble for enough to pay the mortgage on their ship, and to start playing with speculative trade a little bit. Which is good, because they've now got a number of non-monetary interests developing, so it's nice that they can afford to go a little out of their way occasionally.

And this session reminded me that I really, really need to get my notes in some kind of coherent order. My NPCs in particular are a mess -- there are several that are just names on paper, and we'd been on a several week long break until last week's session so my memory can't pick up the slack. This campaign has a lot of NPCs, all doing minor but important things, and my usual system of "if they're important, I'll remember why" isn't cutting it.

Overall, this campaign is really starting to come to life. I spent the first few sessions kind of throwing things at the party, and now enough things have started to stick that it's getting really interesting.

Calling All Traveller Refs

I keep hearing about how easy Traveller's combat is. For the most part, I agree -- particularly that it's fast, which is nice for someone who's used to running post-1992 editions of D&D. But tracking damage and attendant modifiers for NPC has been giving me a bit of a headache, especially when I'm handling several different NPCs, as I am wont to do in combat. There's three different bins that damage needs to go into, and all the bins do different things.

I've started using a hit-point-esque system, where End+Str or End+Dex, whichever is greater, gives me hit points and then the remaining attribute gives me how far the character can go into negative hit-points before dying. That makes it hard to keep track of changing modifiers, so I handwave it. ("Eh, he looks pretty messed up, -1 to attack.") This works out okay, but I'm worried that I'm missing a more elegant or classic solution.

Fellow Traveller refs, I seek your wisdom! How do you handle NPC damage when you're tracking it for several NPCs at once?

A Brief Session Report

Last night's game went smashingly well. They fought flaming topiaries, stole a Lamborghini, and got their Captain stuck in a hospital under heavy guard.

Two factors: one, I pushed on them hard, and they pushed back. None of this "we have five missions, how can we do as many of them at once?" nonsense. None of the wandering around, waiting for me to do things that typified some of the earlier sessions. Not that they weren't fun, but it was beginning to stress me out.

No, this time, the conference room they were in exploded, they had to fight their way out, and suddenly it's all schemes and plans. They do something, I react, they react to me, and everyone's happy. And I think I struck a good balance between "giving them stuff because it's cool" and "arbitrary challenge" -- I did a fairly good job of responding to their plans with problems, but not such serious problems as they couldn't overcome.

The second factor was the absences of the player who up until this time has dominated the game. He's a Duke, he's the Captain of the ship, he's the most experienced roleplayer, he normally GMs, and he's got a fairly forceful personality even outside the game. This was the first time the rest of the gang has been in charge of making the plans, which was a very good thing, and produced a much more balanced pattern of involvement than we've had so far. Hopefully, their newfound confidence will continue even once he's here again, but otherwise I'm going to need to talk to him about toning it down a bit.

Minor Perils of a Combat Light Game

No Traveller on Friday, which was both fortunate and unfortunate. It's been three weeks now since we played, but we were missing two players, I wasn't totally prepped, and it was the finale of Battlestar Galactica. (I don't watch it, but one of my players does.)

I feel bad about cancelling a session like that, especially since it's been so long since we played, but I wasn't feeling totally confident about running that night, and there were enough other factors that I had a decent excuse. The fact that I was kind of glad that we didn't play worries me, but I think things should be okay once I've put my evil plan into action.

One thing that's been throwing me off is that the tempo of this game has been different from what I'm used to. Part of this is just that there's the whole trading aspect of the game, and so it's got it's own rhythm, apart from anything else that's going on, and that's taking some time for me to learn how to manage it. But I've also been noticing that the game moves a lot faster than I'm used to; they get a lot more done, and "getting things done" a lot of times means leaving for a whole other planet.

Some of this is just that I haven't (cranked up the adventure) yet, but there's also just been a lot less combat. They avoid combat, and when combat does start I tend to just wing it rather than break out the books and risk getting a bunch of bored looks because I don't have the rules totally down yet. In D&D, and in most of the games I've run so far, if things are dragging a bit or if I need time to think it's totally permissable to bust out the Monster Manual and ambush the players with a bunch of monsters to get some breathing time, or fill space until the end of the session.

Not so much in this game. Partially it's because it's Traveller, and there's a different paradigm. Partially because the game's a lot more social. Partially because we don't all know the combat rules by heart a million times over. (At one point, I even had the 3.5 grappling rules memorized. I have an unwholesome love for those grappling rules. I don't see why everyone hates them.) Whatever the reason, though, it's hard for me to adjust to not having that buffer.

Tweaking the Campaign

So I'm thinking about doing a reboot of the Traveller game. The last session was kind of painful and stressful in places, and I still haven't done the session re-cap for it. I don't want to make any serious changes, mind. I'm just not quite happy with the pattern that we're settling into, and I need to do something about it before running the game becomes a major drag.

The problem I've identified, in my thinking about this over the last week, is that I'm not putting enough pressure on the crew. Traveller itself provides pressure, in the mortgage payments they have to make, and the potential for mis-jump and all the trouble that causes. But all that's lead to so far is "we go out looking for leads," or, "we ask the passengers we picked up if they have any problems." Which is something that I want to change how I'm handling; in the next session I'm going to see if I can make them work a little harder for that. I'd rather that they actually go out to specific places and talk to specific people, rather than just getting a list.

Anyway. Beyond "we need to make some money," they don't have any serious problems. The money motivation still just brings everything back to me; I still have to drive events in the session, or nothing happens. One of the players is a Duke, and as cool as that is in some ways, it's meant that they kind of ignore a lot of the "problems with the law" that the Traveller book seems to assume they'll have. That generates a certain amount of adventure in and of itself ("Hey! Let's negotiate a peace settlement between these two warring nations! They'll listen to us!") but it removes a default problem, and thus makes my life harder.

Oh, and the group has a tendency to split up. Which so far I've been sort of encouraging, but it really needs to stop, or at least get scaled way back. There's a lot of "I'm going to sit around and watch the other players doing stuff," and that's not good. So part of my motivation in making their lives harder is to give them a reason to stick together, and stop making me manage three different scenes at once.

None of this is to say that I'm not enjoying the game. The players are (for the most part) enthusiastic and involved, and while last session was rough in spots it also featured a religion based on Marvel Comic books and the cult of Wolverine, "the religion of what I was going to do anyway." It's still fun. But it's a brand new group, and it's a much more picaresque style of game than I'm used to, so I'm still tweaking the mix.

I have a pretty specific plan for what I'm going to do next session; I'd say more, but a few of my players read this blog, if only sporadically, so I'll wait until I've seen how it goes down. I'm not going to back off from the "no particular plot, just sutff happening on different planets" thing that I've got going in the game, but they have pissed off several people without really paying attention to it. So I'm going to cash in on that.

The Problems I Noticed Are Surely Outnumbered By Those I Didn't

Game night tonight, but I thought I'd squeeze in a little blog time in just the same, since I don't want to break the short little streak I've built up. I've been trying very hard to avoid the mistakes I made in my last long-running campaign (at least, the ones I noticed). This isn't a long list, but they were major enough to bug me.

First, the map and the history were both kind of incoherent. If I ever get around to running that sequel that some of the players keep bugging me about (which I am considering) I'm going to have to go back, redraw the maps, and rewrite the history, so it all conforms to my specifications. This is mostly a peeve; the players never noticed, so I'm not too worried about it if it happens again. I'm mostly dealing with it by avoiding detailed references to ancient history, which isn't too tough in a space game where the secret backstory mostly amounts to "some bad stuff happened, and then there was an empire." And Traveller has built in controls on maps. (The ones that matter, anyway. My planetary maps are still a mess.)

Second, and a much larger problem in theory but again, in execution, something that bothered me much more than the players, my last campaign fell prey to a bit of the ol' GMPC. I had one character who I put more thought into than strictly necessary, and had this whole "lost heir of an ancient empire" plot attached to him. In that specific case, it worked out okay because he spent most of his time getting kidnapped and rescued, one of the other (female) players really liked him, and tagging that plot to an NPC let me avoid playing favorites amongst the PCs. But still -- I'm avoiding world-saving plots in general this time around, just to bypass that whole issue.

Lastly, the largest actual problem with the previous game was that almost all of the plot revolved around two characters. The two active characters, with the most complete and hook-filled backstories, and the ones who really went around doing things, but still. I could have put more attention on the quieter characters, even if it would have been more work. Which is exactly what I'm doing this time around. Mongoose Traveller helps some; the two quietest characters both have hook-laden NPC relationships from character creation. (One of them is of the "secret mission" type, which honestly bugs the heck out of me but which I'll leave off complaining about for another day; it's something I can work with.)

The only problem with the way I've been handling things so far is that I've been leaving my two most active characters sub-plot and personal-villain-less, even though they do have those things in their backstories, because my attention has been on the quieter people. Which is okay, since they give themselves things to do on their own, but I'm still working on the details of the balance.

Anyhow. Should be a fun session tonight; I've done something mildly ridiculous with one of the planets they'll be hopping off to, so if they figure that out (and don't strangle me for it) I'll definitely have to post about it here. And I still don't think I've done justice to Trollsmyth's game, yet. But these are matters for another post. It's Friday! Go game!

Post-Apocalyptic Settlement Generation

Crazy idea I had the other day in class: hack the Traveller world development system for settlements in a post-apocalyptic game. (This isn't entirely an original idea; there was an idea going around a while back for Wanderer, a fantasy version of Traveller.) It doesn't track exactly, but with a couple of adjustments I think it'd work pretty well.

The categories include:
Environment -- How livable the wasteland is around the settlement
Mutation -- How amusingly messed up the flora, fauna, and residents are
Population -- How many people live here
Territory -- How large a territory outside the settlement they patrol and control
Government -- The kind of government they have
Law -- How likely they are to shoot you on sight for various offenses
Tech Level -- How cool their toys are
Fuel Station -- How good their local gas station and repair shop is

They'd affect each other in much the same way Traveller world stats do. Currently I'd think Mutation is worse the less livable the Environment is, Population is higher in better Environments, Territory and Government both key off of population, Law is based on Government, and Tech Level is affected by a bunch of different factors. I'm also considering a "Religion" stat, because of the importance of bizarre degenerate belief systems in post-apocalyptic stories, but it would also damage the six numbers plus TL and Fuel code Traveller resemblance.

Lost Temple of the Laser Snakes

This whole dungeon kick I've been on lately culminated on Friday when I got my gang of Traveller characters to steal "the Jeweled Bird of Zi Amon" from a temple full of snake people. Good times.

I got to test out a bit of dungeon running in a situation where the entire campaign didn't hinge on it being interesting, and I thought it went rather well. Not something I'm going to make the focus of the campaign, but at least one player seemed to like it a lot, so I'll probably throw in similar activities from time to time. Perhaps not as straight up dungeon as this one, since he seemed more keen on the pulpy wackiness of it all, but definitely more artifact snatch 'n grab, as an occasional alternative to their political shenanigans.

It's strengthened my interest in running a dungeon as a full campaign, because I'm beginning to be more confidant that I can pull it off. I've had bad experiences running dungeoncrawls in the past, but I think I've gotten past the "a dungeon is a room full of things to fight" idea that caused most of my problems. With interesting rooms, and interesting reasons to head into the dungeon, it could work.

Players Love to Fail

The Traveller game I ran Friday was a smashing success. Lots of mad hijinks, and everyone's jazzed to play next time. They even managed to pay off the costs of their first jump, and are well on their way to making their monthly mortgage payment. (I mentioned that the game really ought to be called "Space Accountant," because we've never had so much fun keeping track of money.) The interested will find detailed descriptions of the game at the campaign website.

The game reminded me of one of the first things I learned about game mastering; one of the "secrets to my success," if you will. Players love to fail. Not consistently, not exclusively, and not crushingly, but the most memorable sessions I've run were when the villain got away. (Closely followed by sessions where they finally got the villain that kept getting away, but the point still stands.)

The key is making failure interesting. Having the villain escape is a pretty interesting outcome for a combat, since it gives the players a fun, straightforward goal -- get the villain! (Barring bullshit GM shenanigans, but most decent GMs know not to set up invincible super-villains. That's not cool.) Generally, players will accept any failure that opens up an obvious avenue for adventure, or that makes their situation dramatically and entertainingly worse.

Mine weren't, for example, super pleased when Nina botched her Medic rolls and let an at the time nameless NPC die, but later they found out that the NPC had been the daughter of the Warden of the planet, prompting a small "oh, nice," moment. Later, when Alice Dice failed her streetwise roll to find out where some escaped prisoners were hiding out, she was told that, "Arr, there are some prisoners hanging out in the woods! They'll probably be eaten by dragons!" instead of a simple declaration of failure.

And there are the usual reasons why failure is a good addition to a campaign. Failure gives PCs a sense of consequence to their actions. Their successes are meaningful because they work for them, not because the GM hands them out. But players also like failing; it's not just that their successes are sweeter once they finally do achieve them. (Assuming they have some hope of success -- there's no faster way to destroy a players interest in the game than to convince them that the GM is arbitrarily out to get them.)

Sure, they'll groan and throw their hands up when the villain gets away, or one of their best NPC buddies dies, or their character gets eaten by a dragon -- but those are moments when they're involved in the game, and those are the sessions that they leave ready for the next one.

The Excellence of Random Character Generation

Traveller character generation is a lot of fun. Maybe the best session of character generation I've had. Feng Shui was kind of a trip, too, and character generation for Is This Fair? went well, but this was a unique experience.

I went into it thinking that I was going to run a default Traveller game. A little trading, a little exploration, a little running for their lives; I didn't have any specific ideas about what I wanted the campaign to be like, and I figured that sounded fun. If the players really took to one adventure or another, I'd move the campaign in that direction, but to start with I was going to keep things standard.

Then one player rolled a twelve. I pointed at that he could automatically qualify for the nobility if he put it into Social Standing, which he promptly did. Five terms later, we had a character with a Social Standing of 15 and a bunch of Yacht share. Add that to the pirate who has slept with half the party, the drifter who wandered onto the ship in a drunken stupor, and the physician with a crush on another guy the pirate once slept with, and we had the makings of a pretty distinctive campaign.

They've all gotten very excited about the idea of running a "space cruise ship." They're planning on doing the usual missions and trade and so on, but they're also hiring several stewards and taking full advantage of their noble's Duke social standing. They've taken very well to the "jump and try to make as much money as possible before jumping again" standard Traveller game play and given me a great excuse to have all kinds of weird NPCs show up to bother them. I couldn't be happier.

And this, without any planning on anyone's part. We rolled some dice and came up with an entertaining explanation for the numbers. A most promising sign.

Traveller Game Starts Tonight

Not dead, just busy. Busy with school, busy with making my character for and playing in Trollsmyth's Labyrinth Lord game, busy with my Traveller subsector.

That last is coming along quite nicely, and is just about in playable shape. I've got all the worlds generated and named, the basic situation of the handful closest to the starting world detailed, and the starting world itself sketched out pretty well. I've also got the zillions of random tables that attracted me to Traveller in the first place, so I'm not worried about running out of ideas.

I expect chaos. Both good chaos, crazy ideas and wacky quips chaos, and bad chaos, "how does that rule work again and is it my turn?" chaos. Even if it ends up just character creation -- which it very well might, seeing as I've got eight people who say they'll be there. And even with a more manageable number, it's still the first session of a new campaign, with a new group, using a new system.

But it'll be fun. It's Traveller. I'm getting to play a game that's been on my run list for at least a year, and that I've thought sounded since I first heard of it. It will, at the least, be an adventure.

Planet KordCorp

Behold, the genius of Traveller!

KordCorp 0508 A445511-14 SRTI Ag Ht NI

A sleepy little world populated mostly by robot farmers, and that happens to be the headquarters for KordCorp.

NPCs of note:

Ted Kord, billionaire industrialist extroardinaire. Mostly too busy to bother with the PCs, but they very well might see a well-coifed man storming through the space station, surrounded by sycophants and aides.

Yeven Orthos, once the head researcher for KordCorp. He and Ted had a nasty falling out, and now he spends most of his time trying to drum up support for a takeover by people with "the real knowhow," him and his scientist buddies. Wiry little guy with messy black hair, and quite pleasant when he's not on the subject of Ted Kord, traitorous bastard.

"The Shining Star" would be easy enough to write off as a bunch of drugged up hippies, if it weren't for their unfortunate tendency to assassinate an important public figure every so often. There's a rumor going around that they get their instructions (and supplies) from some offworld interest, but most investigations into the matter end in unhelpful conversations in bars with shadowy figures you are never seen again.

Local Rumors:
1 Erdo Mitchel's robots have gone crazy!
2 The West River Boys, a bunch of no-good surly frog-ox rustlers, have been spotted at least once or twice in the hills to the north.
3 Rusty Sallone is looking for someone to ship something awfully weird to Goro. Comes in boxes and growls.
4 Sunday Jones ran away from his father (Stewart) a couple days ago. He's still looking for her, and worried that he'll try to hitch a ride with some offworlders and he'll never see him again.
5 There's some real shady guy wandering around town, says he needs a couple people he can trust to get a message offworld.
6 A couple lab-coated guys came downport a couple days ago, looking for something with scanners (wouldn't say what it was, so we couldn't help) and they haven't been seen since.

Locations:
Kordford -- the only thing approaching a city on KordCorp. Named for the leader of the original settlement, Elijah Kord, an age and a half ago.

Snake Eye's Saloon -- Run by the eponymous Joe "Snake Eye" Jefferson. Mostly the best place to pick up rumors in Kordford, but Snake Eye occasionally needs a job or two done, too.

"Speedboat for the lake of your imagination" indeed.

This is pretty much the extent of what I'm designing for each of the half a dozen planets that comprise the starting area of the campaign. Everything else in the sub-sector gets a paragraph, at most, until the PCs express interest in it. I'm good at winging it, and I plan to make use of that skill. And Traveller looks to have a lot of support for such shenanigans, with its spiffy random encounter tables and list of pre-statted NPCs.

This is the first time, though, that I've actually had to sit down and decide that I'm not going to obsessively detail everything on the map. Normally, that nonchalance comes naturally. I don't know if it's because I've gotten older or because Traveller hands me a subsector map to fill out, but I did feel an urge to go and detail every planet on the map, and put a lot more together for KordCorp. Not that I had any ideas to either effect, mind you. I just felt like I should drive myself crazy.