I decided to run a drop-in campaign of Classic Traveller that will go through at least the summer, and we’ll see if it still works once school and activities kick back up. I decided to go this route because getting a group together for Braunstein was tough, I wanted to run an actual campaign, and I didn’t want to ask for a commitment. With all the classic BroSR re-innovations of 1:1 time, high player agency, etc, I started going forward with the campaign.
In our first session, a friend and I each rolled up characters. After losing three characters to the dangers of military service, we managed to get our starting characters. My friend’s PC is known by his nickname from the Marines: “The Professor”. In addition to having good combat skills, he was quick to learn leadership skills as well which translated into a officer rank with a few promotions. However, his special talent for picking up advanced science caught the notice of the Marines, and the Professor earned his moniker by mustering out with an F for his education stat, having spent most of his later service racking up multiple PhDs across a wide range of scientific fields. My character, the Professor’s younger cousin, was an Air/raft mechanic and operator in the Army.
These two characters mustered out on the planet Newport, which is home to many military bases, and a common mustering out location. After spending a week searching for a patron and not getting involved in random encounters, the pair was approached by a group of researchers from a mega corporation on the nearby world of Gander. These researchers presented The Professor with an opportunity. They wanted to recruit the Professor to be the Director of Research on a 400-ton research vessel, tasked with finding new materials, resources and technology that could be exploited by the mega corporation.
So ended our first session.
In our second session, we put together the ship (using the research vessel from “Citizens of the Empire”), calculated expenses, determined an operating budget and rolled up the initial crew, as well as the planets which were within a 2 hex radius. We decided to go first to Gander to refuel as we intended to visit the most interesting-looking planet: A vacuum world with no starport and a population of 100,000 at a medieval tech level and a captive government, exact details TBD. We loaded up and cargo and middle passage passengers and set off for Gander. At present, the ship has made it to Gander and is unloading cargo and crew.
For the third session, a friend from out of town and I started with a fresh pair of characters. The characters we ended up with were Army buddies, neither good for anything but combat. We found a peasant patron, who asked us for help with the local protection racket. Upon meeting the mob boss, he agreed to lighten up on the peasant but wanted us to work for him patrolling the slums on Gander.
In our first week of patrolling we came across some researchers walking around with some equipment scanning the neighborhood. They weren’t interested in talking, and the boss wanted us to leave then be. The next day, a big shot corporate executive and his entourage were walking around, closely examining the slum. They wouldn’t talk to us, and our boss didn’t seem to care. A few days later, we found some traders who were very excited to tell us about how the mega corporation that owned Gander (which is mostly just a domed city with 1 million people) had decided to clean up the slums as it was a waste of resources spent maintaining the dome, and were seizing the land and selling it off to create a new mixed use development. We ran off and told our boss.
Our boss was extremely upset to learn we knew about the redevelopment plan. He was getting rich off of it, and couldn’t let us get away while knowing about it, and he immediately attacked us. We were unable to escape, and even though we were at an advantage in numbers, our assailant had a dagger. In the first round of combat, I, with an advantage in brawling managed to land a blow on our former boss, but suffered an attack that left me knocked out. My friend managed to go back and forth till both were weakened, but in the end my friend was knocked unconscious as well. Our throats were both slit, and our bodies left in a dumpster.
At least the researchers will see news reports of an exciting re-development plan and a grisly unsolved double-murder when they arrive on Gander!