After last post’s disappointment and risk of stagnation, we played another seven sessions of our Traveller campaign before a team party kill ended the journey of Doc Hawkins and his research team. Given that previously I was worried we wouldn’t make it more than another session before calling it quits, this outcome made me feel extremely good about my first true TTRPG campaign which was a big learning experience and incredibly fun. I will give a brief summary of what I did to right the course in the campaign. I’ll give a quick recap of what happened, and talk about where things will go from here.
After our first few weeks of exploring Traveller’s rules and doing a few random encounters, I had given the players too much and they had become too conservative. The first thing I sought to do was introduce Braunstein elements. We had a new guy joining us for just one session while he was in town, so I encouraged him towards exercising agency as a player, and making his appearance unforgettable. I also decided to use elements from pre-made adventures to spice things up. I made these choices for a couple of reasons, but the big one was that the random encounter table wasn’t really enough to make Traveller fun and engaging. Traveller needs a plot and a story, it isn’t like AD&D 1e where you are playing out tactical wargame scenarios. Braunstein is really the best way to get that engagement, so that was my first choice. Adventures can also be engaging, but I’m lazy, so I picked a few I thought looked fun and randomly chose one to adapt into our campaign.
So, to get started I rolled between a couple options, and ended up using the “Annic Nova” adventure. This was a good choice because it is a pretty easy adventure, and made a good starting point. Better yet, we had a new player joining for the session. The story I cam up with is that the company which owned and paid for the party’s research vessel wanted them to rendezvous with a salvage team and work together to recover the Annic Nova for the company. A guest was playing with us, and I let him know privately that I didn’t think his character was really the type to spend his whole life working on a salvage team, and that he should be on the lookout, because there was going to be an opprotunity to make a big score. I didn’t have a plan, I just wanted him to be looking for his opprotunity and to be bold in taking it.
We spent the evening working through the various levels of the ship, turning systems on, and slowly figuring out the mystery of the ship. Over the course of the evening, more and more of the NPC’s crewing the RV got brought over to the Annic Nova. Our new player took this opprotunity to make a bold move. He led his salvage team off the Annic Nova and back to the RV via the air/raft, and stole the RV, leaving the main party abandoned on a derelict ship. This turn of events surprised everyone, and shook them from their conservative ways. After a week they were able to get the ship fully functional again and decided to make a bold choice. Instead of chasing down the stolen ship, and remaining as good employees of the megacorp, the party decided to embezzle as much money as possible from their employers, and take off on their own.
The party bought new supplies and headed away into a brand-new sector in the pursuit of adventure. Unluckily for them, their adventuring career was short lived. Their first port-of-call was a mostly-robotic shipyard above a toxic planet. There had been some seismic activity on the planet, and the foreman of the shipyard offered a robot in exchange for confirmation the area was safe. This led into the second adventure, “Shadows”. Whilst exploring the pyramids, the first party to enter were overwhelmed by critters, with only one person escaping. The rest of the crew of the Annic Nova joined him, carefully avoiding the giant energy weapon shooting down anything flying near the pyramids. This group made it through most of the pyramid. One member was knocked unconcious in an encounter and was dragged back to the pinnace. Another slipped on a cable and fell down a shaft, severely injuring himself. The final two party members were killed by giant bat-aliens just as they entered the room where they would be able to control the pyramid complex and get out safely. Unfortunately for the two injured party members, they were eaten by the local fauna.
Thus ended the adventures of the crew of the RV Faraday and Annic Nova. There was one element I forgot to mention. Once the RV had been stolen, in the following weeks the corporation owning the vessel found out about the heist. Shortly thereafter they learned Doctor Hawkins had flown off with the Annic Nova. A co-worker was intrigued by our campaign, so I let him play as captain of a patrol cruiser, seeking to hunt down these two vessels. Unfortunately, his investigations never lead to a PvP encounter that I was hoping for.
This all worked together to create a compelling campaign. If not for the demands placed on my fellow dads and myself on weeknights, we would probably have just started a new party and continued playing. As it stands, we are going to take a break and re-engage once the school year settles out. One thing I have learned from this (as well as games I have played online), is that neither myself or the people I play with in person are inclined towards the “theater kid” aspect of RPGs. As we decide what to do next, either with Traveller or another game, it will probably lean heaviliy on some combination exploration, problem solving and wargaming.