[Traveller d20] The Traveller Adventure:Memoirs from the Crew (updated 1/12!)

I am running the Traveller Adventure from classic Traveller and it really works well with T20 rules. Improvisation is very easy. I also started the adventure 9 or 10 years from when it is supposed to start (1114 v 1104/5) after the 5th Frontier War.

So now, on with the tale!

from The Traveller Adventure: Memoirs of a Merchant
Captain...and His Crew
---Traveller's Aide Society Press, 1116

Leedor on Aramis: 001 to 013-1114

All our trouble began with that stupid Vargr!

You know, I just wanted to spend a quite two weeks on Aramis while our fat trader, the March Harrier underwent her annual maintenance. The Doc and his wife were taking a vacation from the rest of us surly louts to catch up on their marriage. Kigu' was overseeing the work on the ship. The rest of the crew were on holiday--paid of course. Looking back, maybe I should have made myself unavailable as well.

You would think that grown men could stay out of trouble, but what do you expect from a bunch of ex-grunts. The two weeks would have been uneventful and even boring, even with the spectacular crash of the Akerut freighter Mammoth and the subsequent villification of their very incompentent engineer, Jelika Chan, and even with Holiday celebrations with the Marquis waving to us from the balcony. The excitement would have been Lou, Tito, and I gambling at TAS. Of course, I am sure we are now blacklisted.

It all would have been routine, but then Gvouzdon walked into our lives. About day two, Vincent and Tito first saw our troublesome friend. He was getting kicked out of the local museum for causing a stir like most Vargr are apt to do when they don't get their way. Later that evening my heroic crew intervened in the break up of a mugging. Surprise! It was the Vargr!

I would have walked on or at least called the authorities. Ex-military takes things into their own hands, I guess. Doc tells me that he was pretty messed up when they brought him in. Vincent suffered some cracked ribs, but the thugs got away. Predictably, Doc wasn't too upset. I'm sure Rani was. I would have been. He's always been a sucker for a lost cause. The rest of us, thanks to the events that occured, have joined the club.

Even after he bit Lou in some weird Vargr power play. Even after Al smacked him across the snout with the but of his ACR, they didn't throw him out. So much for the captain being the authority on his ship. Lou and Al, amidst my protests, even broke into the museum to steal this brooch that the Vargr said belonged to him. So now we're in a heap of trouble, and we're not (rather we can't) going (go) back to Aramis anytime soon. It gets worse.

The last day Lou, Tito, and I were relaxing at TAS. Gvouzdon tagged along. Bad idea. I was lucky to get out of there with my life!

Tito saw the trouble at the entrance to the lounge first and informed Lou. We checked for the Vargr. He was missing. Lou rushed to the fresher. I heard two BANGS! and a howl or growl, and then a blood-curdling scream.

It was surreal: Baron Tito rises to his full height and brandishes his pistol. The thug at the door runs with Tito chasing after him. Lou comes out with a bloody Gvouzdon in his arms. The Vargr's mouth drips blood...(Lou later told me that Gvouzdon had torn out the thigh of thug #1 before passing out). I gagged. Then I heard two more gunshots from outside.

Lou said something like, "Let's get out of here!"

I radioed Kigu and Al back at the ship to start prepping for a quick take-off. Fortunately, the transfer and cargo loading had gone smoothly and my crack crew had already gained permission to leave etc, etc. As if they had predicted trouble...

Anyway, we ran out of TAS. I saw Tito drop some heavy creds on the cowering maitre d' and we took off towards the shipyards. Outside, I saw a heavyset, older gentleman standing over the body of thug #2. Two holes had been blasted in his chest. I made a command decision.

"Need a ride offworld?" I motioned to the body.

Mr. Atari (that's what he said his name was) shrugged his shoulders.

"Let me just get my things."

"Meet us at Berthing A17!"

Then I hustled after Lou and Tito.

**

Dude met us and we took off, placing the Cause-or-all-our-trouble in a low berth. I really, really thought seriously about jettisoning him into space once we headed towards 100d, but I think I was too stymied by the other surprise.

Rani, at first to my joy, had found a high passenger to add 10K to our coffers. She said he was an old friend of her's and the Doc's. Great, I thought, another Vargr. It was worse.

Epetlatl is his name and he's a ******* Zhodani! I haven't taken my psionic shield helmet off since I found out.

I think I'm losing control of my crew!
======

First officer's addendum:

The captain had to be sedated shortly after take-off. Apparently, the events at the TAS hostel, our new high passenger, and the dialog with the custom's cutter, which Baron Tito handled splendidly, was too much for Captain Lenard. Dr. Chevalier gave him something to calm down.

*All place names, world data, etc are borrowed from The Traveller Adventure by Marc Miller for inspiration in this campaign log; copyright 1983 by Game Designer's Workshop

Man, this brings back memories. I ran this adventure monthly for years, torturing my players all the way through it. It was probably the best adventure campaign we ever had. I'm glad to see someone else running it and am looking forward to seeing a lot more.

There are some interesting articles over on the Freelance Traveller pages, including nasty things to keep in mind especially on Pysadi Look for stories by Ken Bearden.

wsclark said:

nasty things to keep in mind especially on Pysadi

Click to expand...

Was the pun (my italics) intentional!?

Thanks for the encouragement. One thing I love about Traveller is the load of web resources out there...and the gearheadedness!

I will definitely browse that stuff.

BTW, I haven't heard from you for a while. I was really enjoying your Kalamar adv log. I saw that it hasn't been updated since August!

from The Traveller Adventure: Memoirs of a Merchant Captain...and His Crew
---Traveller's Aide Society Press, 1116

Astrogator's Log: Aramis

My shoulder is still sore from where Gvouzdon bit me. Poor Vargr. Even though he is a bit rash, I still like him.

I have to document for my own records the strange case of Roet Bannerji captain of the Wolbutn. I have a very strong feeling we'll run into him again. Call it good old Vilani Intuition. Algesh' and Kigu' agree. We found his wallet. It had the strangest itinerary. We returned it and then he leaves offworld right away leaving us hanging at dinner. It gets stranger. The next day some Naval Intelligence guy trying to be all slick tries to hire me to spy on B. I saw right through his cover story. I have run into too many Intel in my time especially on ?????.

I recall saying to him:

--Mr. Giilaan, the Imperial Navy might still sign your paychecks, but it doesn't sign mine. Make me a better offer.

Fortunately, unlike most Naval Intelligence, he was quick. So now we see if we run into Bannerji again.

Also, unlike the rest of the crew, I believe the brooch that Gvouzdon wanted so desperately to recover, is more important than it seems. Tukera was looking for it. Algesh' and I found a note stating such. Not even Kigu' could figure out if there was more to the jewelry than what was obvious, however. While Gvouz' recovers, I am holding on to the brooch.

Next stop Natoko.

The absolute best place to start for Traveller resources would be The Traveller Web Portal. You can find the Freelance Traveller Pages from there as well as a wealth of other sites.

As for my story hour, I am way, way behind. I was writing them up at lunch time at work, but work got so busy that it fell to the wayside. The group is still playing and we are on the verge of finishing the trilogy of adventures. Actually, the group is at the point where they are going to confront the evil wizard Daresh to destroy the Coin of Power she has.

The only problem is she has taken over a castle and all the lands belong to the owner. She is in the process of conquering the adjacent lands using gnolls, hobgoblins and flying hobgoblins (she created). The castle that need to assault lies about a half mile from a large woods, which is where the group is. It is also on a plateau, covering the entire 200 x 300 feet of the top. The plateau is 550 x 450 feet in size and rises up to 75 feet to the flat area covered by the castle. The is a camp to the east of the main gate that has an estimate of 400 gnolls. There is a shanty town to the south that has hobgoblins in it (they don't know there are 200 women and children there). There are 12 guards at all times patroling the ramparts between the 8 towers. They have seen 2 patrols of 10 gnolls each come from the west gate (opposite the woods where they are and the only other gate into the place) about every hour or two.

What they don't know is each tower contains another 10 gnolls and there are a total of 200 gnolls inside the castle walls (including the towers). They are at the point (the 6 of them) of planning what they are going to do. We have been playing on Thursday evenings for about 3 hours each session. I have arranged with everyone to perform this climatic battle on Sunday March 2nd. We will be starting about 10AM and going to the finish (probably around 5 or 6PM)

I am planning on this being a really special event. We usually play in our dining room on the table there. I am not going to allow them into the room when everyone arrives because I'm am building the castle to scale from paper models from worldworks (which I found mentioned in the General forum). The castle itself will be as wide as the table (42") and almost as long (62"). Also, the keep itself inside the castle walls will be built from my collection of Master Maze dungeon pieces, all four floors as well as the roof and dungeon below. This will all be sitting on top of a green flock mat from geohex as the base. I have 36 pre-painted minis of orcs from Dwarven Forge that I'm using as gnolls for the setup as well. All of this will be in battle scale, 1" = 5'.

Now, as I mentioned, I'm not letting them see this at first. I want to surprise them. When they first arrive, they need to finalize their plans. So, in addition to the above setup, I am making another scale model of the entire area around the castle, including the castle on a 36" round table in my den. This is where they will plan their assault. I will have the plateau shown as well as the castle, the shanty town, the gnoll camp and trees. I'm going to use my kids lego bricks to build the castle. The scale will be 1" = 32'.

I'm really looking forward to doing this, I just hope I can finish it in time. I will get back to the writeups soon as work has finally calmed down and I'll have time again to write them up.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to more of this adventure.

Bill that all sounds great!

You gotta share how it all goes down.

You wouldn't happen to have a digital camera to take pictures and then attach them, would you?

No, I don't. But some of my players do and I'm going to ask them to bring the cameras with them. I also have another friend who can do photo touch ups so that a few of the minis that are not painted can be.

I'm going to be real busy this coming week. In order to build the castle, I need 64 pages of print-outs, cut and glued together. I would love to do it behind my wife's back (since she is one of the players) but I don't think I will be able to Maybe I'll enlist her help as well as my son and daughter. At least I have most of the planning done at this point, now I just have to put everything together.

It should be great, especially since this campaign has been running so far for about a year and a half. Well, enough about me, I'll return you to your story hour.

I really want to see how the engineer is played. My best friend played him in our campaign as a scottish man (not like Scotty from Star Trek!) who happened to have a fetish with sheep. He managed to get into lots of interesting trouble from time to time.

the engineer is an 'ol crusty...you gotta read his bio in the Rogue's Gallery (check out the sig!)

Kigumishi Mamu is his name. Fixin' Jump drives with duct tape (TL-9) is his game!

story thaw-out

from The Traveller Adventure: Memoirs of a Merchant Captain...and His Crew
---Traveller's Aide Society Press, 1116


Natoko to Patinir: 021-039:1114

(Due to the continued deterioration of the Captain Lenard's sanity during these last few weeks, 1st Officer Algeshshakirkhi Khudelamishikhar has taken over log duties and together with Luudakirurikek Gaakhir have assumed joint command of the ship)

First Officer's Log:

Well it looked like a good deal, but it was not. If I return to Natoko, I will certainly have a conversation with that broker. Luu talked me into upgrading our ship so that we could have "longer legs". In effect, we purchased a poor man's jump-2. Those fuel tanks even take away cargo space!

To use the old Solomani expression, "He played us." to haul cargo for free in exchange for "giving" us these tanks. The result: we had to buy twice as much fuel with a nearly empty hold.

On this last trip from Natoko to Patinir we lost 120,000 Imperial credits!

And we made dire enemies.

I am beginning to agree with Captain Lenard. All our trouble started with Gvouzdon. I can not overstate what has become an irrefutable fact. As we head towards the Trojan Points here in the Patinir Belt, we are only a jump or two ahead of Tukera. We have learned thanks to the incredible help of our new Ship's Security Officer, Mr. Atari, that Tukera have sent the Vemene on our trail. We learned that the men we killed on Aramis were household guards for the Marquis of Aramis. The Vargr is a wanted being probably throughout the subsector.

Atari and Dr. Chevalier are proposing to do all they can to change transponder codes and signals once we reach port, but that will only delay. Vincent reported that on Natoko, a Tukera fast courier Wasp was brimming with Tukera agents. Fortunately, he did not engage. Atari caused a ship and station shut down as we left, but again that will only delay the inevitable. They also tried to infiltrate my ship....

[a pause]

I had to use extreme prejudice to stop the invader. Kigu' has promised me that all trace and evidence has been incinerated, but we had to scrub the lounge for nearly a week to remove all the blood. By the Great Mountains of Khushan! This just adds to my list of worries. Thank the Maker for the shugilli!

Even though he has pushed my buttons and tested his abilities at our expense, Epetslatl has "joined" the crew. Like Baron Tito, he is a paying passenger and apparently has the wealth to continue on board, like the Baron.

The incident happened in the lounge, which is fast becoming action central on board. Epetslatl tried to cause me to fear, a concept foreign to my people. Fear is a disease! Instead, his experiment encited an adrenalin rush. I was in the Zhodani's face in no time. No wonder their commando's feared us!

Vincent was there by my side, quickly drawing his cutlass. Epetslatl, with a thought tore it from his grasp and buried it into the bulkhead. Mr. Atari, who had quickly become the Zhodani's friend, pulled Epetslatl back and Baron Tito calmed me down. I gained a respect for the mind-controlling Zhodani noble that day.

Thus, the lastest incident has gave me tremendous pause. The faulty calculations of our astrogator, Luudakirurikek Gaakhir caused us to misjump. It was a horrible, gut-wrenching experience that gave all of us uncontrollable nausea and many of us vomited and wretched the whole time. In the daze and confusion, Epetslatl barged into the bridge crying, "She'll kill us! She'll kill us all!"

Then he shot Luu. Fortunately, the laser blast only tore into his shoulder (and not the one that the Vargr had bitten). We quickly subdued the Zhodani and placed him in a low berth. When we exited jump, fortunately within the Patinir system, the chronometers reset and Luu proclaimed that his brilliant plot had save us three days. Wiping the meal of the day from our vacc suits and instrument panels, we all glared at him.

It is a good thing that Luu does not get lost in real space also.

Woot!

Mr. Atari indeed...I wonder who that is...