In my last report, we had started a new Classic Traveller campaign. This is my first campaign I’ve run as a DM, so this is a learning experience for me as much as entertainment. Here’s a brief re-cap: my friend and I are doing a campaign where other people who are interested in playing can drop-in and drop-out for any given session, and we’d work them in. We’re taking a big inspiration from the solo campaign that Jon Mollison/“The Joy of Wargaming” ran, and applying his principles to our campaign. We’re also using general bro principles: 1:1 time, rules as read, and minimum prep. There’s also some The No Prep Gamemaster thrown in for good measure.
Recap
Play began with our research vessel landing on the planet Gander and unloading cargo and passengers during downtime. A new player joined the session and rolled up a character. The one who survived was an undistinguished Army vet named Joe. Joe started looking for a patron and rolling encounters off of the encounter table. Joe failed to find a patron and ran into a dozen guards—then rolled snake-eyes on the reaction table. Bad news.
After a missed punch, Joe was knocked out and dragged off to prison. We decided that since Gander is a small planet of ~300,000 citizens, this police beat-down made the news. My PC, Brock Simpson, recognized Joe as a member of his unit. They were both in the Army, both had mechanical and vehicle skills, and both mustered out within the same month. Brock went over to the police station, and they weren’t happy to see him either, but Brock managed to evade combat. The third PC, “The Professor” the eminent research scientist and former marine, decided to step in and negotiated a settlement deal that saw Joe released.
The Professor and Brock bought equipment for their expedition while the Joe convalesced on our research vessel. To finish off the session, we took off from Gander and jumped to a new and mysterious planet dubbed Essen.
The next session was just our clubhouse of two. Thanks to the July 4th holiday, there was an extra week of downtime to account for. The one-week travel times in Traveller lines up nicely with 1:1 time, because it is often pretty easy to figure out what your PC is doing during downtime: hanging out on the ship. But, with this extra week of downtime, we decided to spend it topping off our fuel tanks at the gas giant. Our subsector (as far as we have explored) has very few opprotunities for buying refined fuel, so using unrefined fuel is a risk that we need to take.
We knew Essen was going to be an interesting place; it is a small, vacuum world with 100,000 residents living under a captive government with 1700’s technology and without any sort of spaceport. Brock and the Professor got equipped for their first true expedition, donned our vacc suits, and took the air/raft down to the dome. As we walked up to the dome’s airlock, we were greeted by guard who immediately attacked us. Thanks to our captain’s tactical skill, we avoided being surprised, and got into some good-old Traveller combat. This would be our third combat of the campaign, and having lost the first two, we were nervous. After rolling up stats on the guard, and equipping him with a weapon, everyone closed for a melee in our vacc suits. Brock only had his fists, but the Professor is skilled with a cutlass, and the guard had a blade. The guard came for Brock first, and after a round of everyone missing, the Professor scored a huge blow with the cutlass, knocking the guard unconscious, who we then killed. We stowed his vacc suit in the air/raft to bring back with us to the ship.
That one guard was all the resistance that we ran into, and entered the dome. We saw the nice, European woodland. We followed a nearby dirt road, not encountering anyone until we reached a small village. In the village, we encountered a group of thugs, who were intrigued by our arrival. They explained their situation and insisted we help with their escape. At this point, I had formed a notion in my head about doing some sort of Escape from New York style adventure where we found a way to turn the tables on the captors, and there would be some secret that would have been a big boon for our research vessel’s mission. However, the Professor wasn’t too interested in going down this route, so we showed the group how to access the dome’s infrastructure, and went back to the ship. That’s how things go with total player agency.
Back on the ship, we got to planning, and ended up generating a large number of planets without feeling any great draw about what to do next. We decided to jump to another planet to be ready to go next week, but we spent some time discussing what we thought our characters ought to be doing, and how to make that work in Traveller using its various systems.
Principles That Elevated Our Game
Rules-as-Read (RAW)
Most people would be inclined to fudge the rules or dice rolls when the new guy with his new character made a series of unfortunate rolls that led to being on the receiving end of police brutality. For us, it was a great case of sticking to our guns. Let the dice work their magic, and follow it wherever it leads, don’t fudge rolls or make things easy on yourself. This is important discipline for the group as a whole when there isn’t someone who is strictly the referee. Sticking to RAW, even when it sucks and is completely unfair to the new guy with his brand new PC, allows the game to become interesting and forces the players to think about how to resolve the situation.
Utilizing Random Tables
When we started playing our session where we arrived on Essen, we didn’t have answers to what was going on. Taking inspiration from The No Prep Gamemaster, I created a d6 random table of possible explanations for the odd planet UPP.
- Space Amish
- Enslaved Miners
- Reality TV Show/Social Experiment
- Penal Colony
- Refugees
- Tourist destination
I also created a table on who was really running things:
- Our employer (a megacorp)
- Our employer’s rival
- A government entity
- A university
- Eccentric rich guy
- An advanced AI
I rolled (in secret) that it was a penal colony run by an eccentric rich guy. That gave me a place to go with the narrative. Inside the dome was a full-on early modern LARP with all of the various prisoners forced to participate for the amusement of the rich guy, who is not actually present. We ended up not being able to take advantage of this, but it leaves something for future developments.
Delayed World-Building
When running without a dedicated referee, one of the things you need to do is to let randomness fill in as many blanks and possible, and only generate them as your PC would discover them. Our most common rolls in this game are rolling for encounter type and reaction rolls. We don’t assume anyone is friendly or hostile, it always comes down to a reaction roll. When we might meet someone, or have to figure out who we are going to meet, it comes down to an encounter roll. If things are outside of a player’s control, it is probably happening according to a random draw of outcomes instead of a planned encounter. This leads to an emergent and unpredictable story that is naturally engaging.
We broke from this a approach a bit because of the nature of our little party when I fleshed out what was going on at Essen. In hindsight, I could have done it differently by choosing to roll for different aspects as we encountered them, but it still worked out pretty well because of the structure of our party. My friend’s PC is the natural leader of the group as he’s the one with an F education, high military rank, etc. If I just let my character act as an NPC redshirt, it reflects the reality of the situation well. That way, I can lean a bit more into the DM side of things and the other PCs can make the decisions with limited knowledge.
Issues Encountered
Get-Along-Gang
Our first new PC, Joe, introduced an issue with Traveller that other bros have mentioned; the danger and economic realities of the game encourage a get-along gang. Ships are hard to come by and expensive to maintain, so once someone has secured one, they want to have other PCs helping to pay for it, and other PCs want to be a part of something exciting. Combat is also harsh and unpredictable. You want friends to gang up on enemies or serve as cannon fodder. Your Traveller PC, if they don’t start out as a combat machine able to fight in battle dress and wield high level weapons, isn’t ever going to become one. These all lead to characters banding together and sticking together.
Conservative Play
When we got back to the ship and the other player wanted to roll up a dozen planets, and then didn’t see anything that made him excited, I knew something bad had happened. Something that sucked enthusiasm from the campaign. As I said before, Traveller is a dangerous game for PCs, and I had bestowed on our team a subsidized ship, which made us extremely conservative. Every move might end the gravy train, so any move we made had to be for something extremely lucrative. In Traveller, the charcter creation, ship building & equipping, the world creation had been lots of fun. But once all that is done, the hook for continued play is a struggle for survival. Because of the way things had gone in the campaign, we had no reason to do more than the bare minimum to keep the gravy train flowing. No risking low passage to save some credits, no high-stakes combat to be able to afford a better weapon, etc. We don’t even have to worry about speculative trading for fuel costs. This was a mistake on my part, driven from a desire to explore the game’s mechanics and take advantage of a rare PC.
After thinking about it though, there’s a solution to get things back on track. I can create some scenarios which will restore the proper balance to the game through some randomly-determined detrimental event and see what befalls our group. For instance, if our stipend got cut due to corporate belt-tightening we would have to choose between stealing the ship and going without the stipend, so starting back from square one. If we get some more players into the mix, we can start throwing Braunstein elements into things as well to keep things interesting. For instance, in the “stealing the starship” route, maybe I can find someone to play as the repossession guy.
Wrap-up
As this campaign approaches the infamous 6th session, keeping things fresh and interesting is at the forefront of my mind. In the coming weeks, we will see if we manage to get past the post-honeymoon slump and into an engaging campaign. Stay tuned!