Recently I've been re-reading my Classic Traveller books, and yesterday I GMed a session. It's the first time I've played Traveller for at least a couple of decades.
One of the distinctive things about Traveller is its use of random generation to deliver content and flavour. For PC generation, I had written up some tables that were pretty close to the original ones (from Book 1 and Citizens of the Imperium), but with a few of the newer skills overlaid.
My collection is Books 1 to 8, Supp 2 and 4, a few adventure, The Traveller Book (an early-80s single volume re-release of Books 1 to 3 with a few updates), and MegaTraveller books 1 to 3.
I generally don't like MegaTraveller much - it replaces random PC gen with too many skill choices, which somewhat defeats the purpose of the system; and it has a uniform task resolution system that I also don't like (I think it increases rather than reduces fiddliness). But one change I do like is the introduction of a "special duty" line on the basic PC generation tables, which allows extra skills rolls. I did include that on my tables.
We approached PC generation in a fairly leisurely fashion, and with only one copy of the charts to go around. So we did it term by term, with everyone seeing how everyone else's PC was doing, until we had two characters each for the three players. (I was re-reading some advice from early White Dwarf - I think by Andy Slack - which suggested 2 PCs per player, and it was good advice, at least for our group. It worked out well.)
Of the seven PCs generated, only one died during generation (necessitating generation of another PC for that player). That same player would have had a second PC die too, except that We were using a rule that if you fail your survival roll by 1 - which he did - you can muster out instead with a shortened (2 year) term and a -1 penalty to the roll for special duty.
In preparation for GMing, and to give my charts a test-run, I had generated about a dozen characters of my own (and I've hung onto these as potential NPCs), but PC gen was much more fun in a group. Each character really does unfold with a story. We ended up with the following PCs (sheets attached):
Given that all the players had submitted to the randomness that is Traveller - and had got a pretty interesting set of characters out of it - I had to put myself through the same rigour as GM. So I rolled up a random starting world:
So what did all that mean, and what were the PCs doing there?
I christened the world Ardour-3, and we agreed that it was a moon orbiting a gas giant, with nothing but a starport (with a casino) and a series of hotels/hostels adjoining the starport (the housing for the 6,000 inhabitants). The high tech level meant that most routine tasks were performed by robots.
Roland, having left the service and now wandering the universe (paid for by his membership of the TAS), was working as a medic in the hospital, overseeing the medbots. Vincenzo was a patient there - the player explained that Vincenzo had won his yacht in the casino, and the (previous) owners had honoured the bet but had also beaten Vincenzo to within an inch of his life (hence the failed surival roll).
Xander, meanwhile, had been marooned in a vacc suit in open space - but Traveller vacc suits have limited self-propulsion, and so he'd been able to launch himself down to Ardour-3 (burning up his vacc suit in the process, but for some parts which he sold for 1,500 credits - his starting money). He was hanging out at the starport looking for a job and a way off the planet.
Tony was also at the starport, working as a rousabout/handyman (no technical skills, but Jack-o-T-3) - and it was decided that he was the one who had bought Xander's vacc suit gear and fitted it onto a vacc suit that he modelled himself (paid for out of his starting money).
Glaxon and Methwit, meanwhile, were at the casion - Glaxon getting drunk and Methwit keeping his ear to the ground, having been sent to Ardour-3 as his final posting.
With the background in place, I then rolled for a patron on the random patron table, and got a "marine officer" result. Given the PC backgrounds, it made sense that Lieutenant Li - as I dubbe her - would be making contact with Roland. The first thing I told the players was that a Scout ship had landed at the starport, although there it has no Scout base and there is no apparent need to do any survey work in the system; and that the principal passenger seemed to be an officer of the Imperial Marines. I then explained that, while doing the rounds at the hospital, Roland received a message from his old comrade Li inviting him to meet her at the casino, and to feel free to bring along any friends he might have in the place.
In preparation for the session I had generated a few worlds - one with a pop in the millions and a corrosive atmosphere; a high-pop but very low-tech world with a tainited atmosphere (which I had decided meant disease, given that the world lacked the technological capacity to generate pollution); and a pop 1 (ie population in the 10s) world with no government or law level with a high tech level - clearly some sort of waystation with a research outpost attached. (File with world details attached.)
Given that I had these worlds ready-to hand, and given that the players had a ship, I needed to come up with some situation from Lt Li that would put them into play: so when Roland and Vincenzo (just discharged from medical care) met up with her she told the following story - which Methwit couldn't help but overhear before joining them!
Lt Li wondered whether Vincenzo would be able to take 3 tons of cargo to Byron for her. (With his excellent education, Roland knew that Byron was a planet with a large (pop in the millions) city under a serious of domes, but without the technical capabilities to maintain the domes into the long term.) When the PCs arrived on Byron contact would be made by those expecting the goods. And payment would be 100,000 for the master of the ship, plus 10,000 for each other crew member.
Some quick maths confirmed that 100,000 would more than cover the fuel costs of the trip, and so Vincenzo (taking advice from Roland - he knows nothing about running a ship) agreed to the request.
Methwit thought all this sounded a bit odd - why would a high-class (Soc A) marine lieutenant be smuggling goods into a dead-end world like Byron - and so asked Li back to his hotel room to talk further. With his Liaison-1 and Carousing-1 and a good reaction roll she agreed, and with his Interrogation-1 he was able to obtain some additional information (although he did have to share some details about his own background to persuade her to share).
The real situation, she explained, was that Byron was itself just a stop-over point. The real action was on another world - Enlil - which is technologically backwards and has a disease-ridden atmosphere to which there is no resistance or immunity other than in Enlil's native population. So the goods to be shipped from Ardour-3 were high-tech medical gear for extracting and concentrating pathogens from the atmosphere on Enlil, to be shipped back to support a secret bio-weapons program. The reason a new team was needed for this mission was because Vincenzo had won the yacht from the original team - who were being dealt with "appropriately" for their incompetence in disrupting the operation.
(I had been planning to leave the real backstory to the mission pretty loose, to be fleshed out as needed - including the possibility that Li was actually going to betray the PCs in some fashion - but the move from Methwit's player forced my hand, and I had to come up with some more plausible backstory to explain the otherwise absurd situation I'd come up with. And it had to relate to the worlds I'd come up with in my prep.)
The PCs stocked up on some gear - combat and non-combat related - and we made some rolls for the content of the ship's locker. Methwit also made sure that they stocked up on a high-end medical kit with good pathogen analysis and vaccine-development capabilities - "just in case".
Then they headed off: Vincenzo was master of the vessel, Glaxon piloted it, Roland did double duty as engineer and medic while Tony served as engineer and steward (it is a noble's yacht after all). Xander was taken on as Vincenzo' bodyguard, and Methwit was clearly the mission leader, given his extra briefing from Li.
The distance-per-time chart showed that with 1G acceleration it would take them about a week to travel beyond 100 planetary diamters of the gas giant for a safe jump. An encounter check showed a scout ship - Lt Li's ship passing them with its 2G acceleration, and sending a brief "good luck" message - but nothing else happened en route to the jump point.
A jump-1 took them to Lyto-7, where Vincenzo decided to engage in some commercial speculation and paid 30k+ credits for 5 tons of ambergris-like substance (taken from the deep-sea creatures the researchers were investigating). (Because they were using refined fuel, and they had an engineer on board, the checks to avoid misjump and drive failure succeeded automatically.)
Another jump-1 took them to Byron, where Roland (with Admin-1) negotiated their entrace without having their papers or cargo checked too closely. Their ship not being streamlined, they needed to ferry their goods down to the planetary surface; but they wanted to use their own small craft (a yacht comes with a ship's boat) rather than a commercial service, so as to keep their cargo under wraps. Methwit (with Recruiting-1) was able to find a ship's boat pilot on the station orbiting above the on-world starport, but (the roll being pretty bad) she was taking her "day off". So Vincenzo used his Bribery-1, and an offer of Cr 700, to persuade here that she should revisit her timetable. And so they flew down to the surface of Byron, parking their boat and cargo while heading to town via the monorail to await contact. At about this point, Methwit briefed Roland on the true situation - that they were part of a bio-weapon development scheme. Thankfully for the mission, Roland seemed pretty relaxed about that.
Contact took six days. (A six on a roll of one die.) In the meantime, Roland found Vincenzo a broker to help sell his goods, and (even after broker's fees) Vincenzo made a tidy profit of about Cr 15k. Unfortuntely Vincenzo then went out to find a casino, only to learn the hard way that gambling is illegal on Byron - and he had to pay a Cr 120 bribe to the two police officers who informed him of this fact to get them to leave him alone.
The session ended at the point of contact, with the PCs heading back to the starport to transfer the "cargo" to the contact's free trader. Hopefully we'll get in at least another session or two over the next couple of months, to find out how things resolve. (And given that Methwit has Wheeled Vehicle skill, and the yacht comes with an ATV, and two of the PCs have vacc suit skill and the party is equipped with five vacc suits, I'm pretty committed to finding some way to get the PCs out in either the corrosive or disease-ridden atmosphere with nothing between them and near-certain death but their ATV and some vacc suits.)
Given that this is a 40 year old system, I think it holds up really well. (Although the original generation rules give very low-skill PCs - whereas I thought the addition of the special duty roll made our PCs, even the ones with only a term or three, interestingly well-rounded.) We did't have any combat yesterday - and Traveller combat is ridiculously brutal, hence the need for two PCs - but the rules for social encounters, dealing with officials, and the like all worked smoothly. The only source of complaint was from Vincenzo's player - "I didn't want to play an accounting game!" An abstract resource management system would probably make the experience of running a starship a bit smoother.
The other thing that I was struck by is how bleak the default setting of Traveller is. The chance of dying during low passage transit is 1 in 6 for an ordinary person (1 in 12 with proper medical personnel overseeing the process). That's really high, and yet the rules are full of starship with low berths and passenger tables that show plenty of people willing to pay to travel in them. So the impression one gets is of worlds full of poor people willing to face a really high risk of death in order to travel to worlds that offer better propsects (but only 1 jump at a time!), while nobles lord it over the populace in their ridiculously expensive yet largely pointless intersteller yachts.
And this bleakness came out even in the worlds I generated - who would want to live in the universe of Ardour-3, Byron and Enlil?
For what it's worth, I recommend this system.
One of the distinctive things about Traveller is its use of random generation to deliver content and flavour. For PC generation, I had written up some tables that were pretty close to the original ones (from Book 1 and Citizens of the Imperium), but with a few of the newer skills overlaid.
My collection is Books 1 to 8, Supp 2 and 4, a few adventure, The Traveller Book (an early-80s single volume re-release of Books 1 to 3 with a few updates), and MegaTraveller books 1 to 3.
I generally don't like MegaTraveller much - it replaces random PC gen with too many skill choices, which somewhat defeats the purpose of the system; and it has a uniform task resolution system that I also don't like (I think it increases rather than reduces fiddliness). But one change I do like is the introduction of a "special duty" line on the basic PC generation tables, which allows extra skills rolls. I did include that on my tables.
We approached PC generation in a fairly leisurely fashion, and with only one copy of the charts to go around. So we did it term by term, with everyone seeing how everyone else's PC was doing, until we had two characters each for the three players. (I was re-reading some advice from early White Dwarf - I think by Andy Slack - which suggested 2 PCs per player, and it was good advice, at least for our group. It worked out well.)
Of the seven PCs generated, only one died during generation (necessitating generation of another PC for that player). That same player would have had a second PC die too, except that We were using a rule that if you fail your survival roll by 1 - which he did - you can muster out instead with a shortened (2 year) term and a -1 penalty to the roll for special duty.
In preparation for GMing, and to give my charts a test-run, I had generated about a dozen characters of my own (and I've hung onto these as potential NPCs), but PC gen was much more fun in a group. Each character really does unfold with a story. We ended up with the following PCs (sheets attached):
* Roland, who served 4 terms in the Interstellar Navy but never received a commission despite finishing a PhD (Educ D);
* Xander, a pirate who didn't even make it to Henchman status in 3 terms of service and ended up being denied "re-enlistment" - clearly this meant he'd been marooned by his piraticals shipmates!;
* Sir Glaxon, who started with Soc A and so "enlisted" as a noble, only to be denied re-enlistment after 1 term - the player tried for a roll of 6 on his one mustering out roll (to get a Yacht), but got TAS membership instead;
* Methwit, who had poor physical stats but good Edu and Soc and served as a diplomat - it quickly became clear (given his skill rolls) that his status as 3rd Secretary was a cover for some sort of espionage role, and after 3 terms the player decided there was no reason to hang around and risk aging rolls, so Methwit "retired" from the diplomatic corps to make himself available for a wider range of "irregular" operations;
* Tony, a 6 term Merchant who made it to 3rd officer, hung on in hope of further promotion but was not going anywhere (and hence had no hope of getting a ship in mustering out), and who spent his last 4 terms of skill rolls rolling to maintain his stats agaist the ravages of aging - his Str survived but his End still dropped, leading to the conclusion that he'd been dosing himself on some bad steroids;
* Vincenzo (Baron of Hallucida), the replacement for a belter who died in his first term (crushed between asteroids!), was rolled up last - with Soc B the player went noble to try for a yacht; this looked pretty unlikely when he failed his second term survival roll (by 1) and so had to muster out early with Gambling-2 and Bribery-1 his only skills, and just a single roll for mustering out benefits; but the die came up 6 and everyone cheered - now the group would have a ship.
* Xander, a pirate who didn't even make it to Henchman status in 3 terms of service and ended up being denied "re-enlistment" - clearly this meant he'd been marooned by his piraticals shipmates!;
* Sir Glaxon, who started with Soc A and so "enlisted" as a noble, only to be denied re-enlistment after 1 term - the player tried for a roll of 6 on his one mustering out roll (to get a Yacht), but got TAS membership instead;
* Methwit, who had poor physical stats but good Edu and Soc and served as a diplomat - it quickly became clear (given his skill rolls) that his status as 3rd Secretary was a cover for some sort of espionage role, and after 3 terms the player decided there was no reason to hang around and risk aging rolls, so Methwit "retired" from the diplomatic corps to make himself available for a wider range of "irregular" operations;
* Tony, a 6 term Merchant who made it to 3rd officer, hung on in hope of further promotion but was not going anywhere (and hence had no hope of getting a ship in mustering out), and who spent his last 4 terms of skill rolls rolling to maintain his stats agaist the ravages of aging - his Str survived but his End still dropped, leading to the conclusion that he'd been dosing himself on some bad steroids;
* Vincenzo (Baron of Hallucida), the replacement for a belter who died in his first term (crushed between asteroids!), was rolled up last - with Soc B the player went noble to try for a yacht; this looked pretty unlikely when he failed his second term survival roll (by 1) and so had to muster out early with Gambling-2 and Bribery-1 his only skills, and just a single roll for mustering out benefits; but the die came up 6 and everyone cheered - now the group would have a ship.
Given that all the players had submitted to the randomness that is Traveller - and had got a pretty interesting set of characters out of it - I had to put myself through the same rigour as GM. So I rolled up a random starting world:
Class A Starport, 1000 mi D, near-vaccuum, with a pop in the 1000s, no government and law level 2 (ie everything allowed except carrying portable laser and energy weapons) - and TL 16, one of the highest possible!
So what did all that mean, and what were the PCs doing there?
I christened the world Ardour-3, and we agreed that it was a moon orbiting a gas giant, with nothing but a starport (with a casino) and a series of hotels/hostels adjoining the starport (the housing for the 6,000 inhabitants). The high tech level meant that most routine tasks were performed by robots.
Roland, having left the service and now wandering the universe (paid for by his membership of the TAS), was working as a medic in the hospital, overseeing the medbots. Vincenzo was a patient there - the player explained that Vincenzo had won his yacht in the casino, and the (previous) owners had honoured the bet but had also beaten Vincenzo to within an inch of his life (hence the failed surival roll).
Xander, meanwhile, had been marooned in a vacc suit in open space - but Traveller vacc suits have limited self-propulsion, and so he'd been able to launch himself down to Ardour-3 (burning up his vacc suit in the process, but for some parts which he sold for 1,500 credits - his starting money). He was hanging out at the starport looking for a job and a way off the planet.
Tony was also at the starport, working as a rousabout/handyman (no technical skills, but Jack-o-T-3) - and it was decided that he was the one who had bought Xander's vacc suit gear and fitted it onto a vacc suit that he modelled himself (paid for out of his starting money).
Glaxon and Methwit, meanwhile, were at the casion - Glaxon getting drunk and Methwit keeping his ear to the ground, having been sent to Ardour-3 as his final posting.
With the background in place, I then rolled for a patron on the random patron table, and got a "marine officer" result. Given the PC backgrounds, it made sense that Lieutenant Li - as I dubbe her - would be making contact with Roland. The first thing I told the players was that a Scout ship had landed at the starport, although there it has no Scout base and there is no apparent need to do any survey work in the system; and that the principal passenger seemed to be an officer of the Imperial Marines. I then explained that, while doing the rounds at the hospital, Roland received a message from his old comrade Li inviting him to meet her at the casino, and to feel free to bring along any friends he might have in the place.
In preparation for the session I had generated a few worlds - one with a pop in the millions and a corrosive atmosphere; a high-pop but very low-tech world with a tainited atmosphere (which I had decided meant disease, given that the world lacked the technological capacity to generate pollution); and a pop 1 (ie population in the 10s) world with no government or law level with a high tech level - clearly some sort of waystation with a research outpost attached. (File with world details attached.)
Given that I had these worlds ready-to hand, and given that the players had a ship, I needed to come up with some situation from Lt Li that would put them into play: so when Roland and Vincenzo (just discharged from medical care) met up with her she told the following story - which Methwit couldn't help but overhear before joining them!
Lt Li wondered whether Vincenzo would be able to take 3 tons of cargo to Byron for her. (With his excellent education, Roland knew that Byron was a planet with a large (pop in the millions) city under a serious of domes, but without the technical capabilities to maintain the domes into the long term.) When the PCs arrived on Byron contact would be made by those expecting the goods. And payment would be 100,000 for the master of the ship, plus 10,000 for each other crew member.
Some quick maths confirmed that 100,000 would more than cover the fuel costs of the trip, and so Vincenzo (taking advice from Roland - he knows nothing about running a ship) agreed to the request.
Methwit thought all this sounded a bit odd - why would a high-class (Soc A) marine lieutenant be smuggling goods into a dead-end world like Byron - and so asked Li back to his hotel room to talk further. With his Liaison-1 and Carousing-1 and a good reaction roll she agreed, and with his Interrogation-1 he was able to obtain some additional information (although he did have to share some details about his own background to persuade her to share).
The real situation, she explained, was that Byron was itself just a stop-over point. The real action was on another world - Enlil - which is technologically backwards and has a disease-ridden atmosphere to which there is no resistance or immunity other than in Enlil's native population. So the goods to be shipped from Ardour-3 were high-tech medical gear for extracting and concentrating pathogens from the atmosphere on Enlil, to be shipped back to support a secret bio-weapons program. The reason a new team was needed for this mission was because Vincenzo had won the yacht from the original team - who were being dealt with "appropriately" for their incompetence in disrupting the operation.
(I had been planning to leave the real backstory to the mission pretty loose, to be fleshed out as needed - including the possibility that Li was actually going to betray the PCs in some fashion - but the move from Methwit's player forced my hand, and I had to come up with some more plausible backstory to explain the otherwise absurd situation I'd come up with. And it had to relate to the worlds I'd come up with in my prep.)
The PCs stocked up on some gear - combat and non-combat related - and we made some rolls for the content of the ship's locker. Methwit also made sure that they stocked up on a high-end medical kit with good pathogen analysis and vaccine-development capabilities - "just in case".
Then they headed off: Vincenzo was master of the vessel, Glaxon piloted it, Roland did double duty as engineer and medic while Tony served as engineer and steward (it is a noble's yacht after all). Xander was taken on as Vincenzo' bodyguard, and Methwit was clearly the mission leader, given his extra briefing from Li.
The distance-per-time chart showed that with 1G acceleration it would take them about a week to travel beyond 100 planetary diamters of the gas giant for a safe jump. An encounter check showed a scout ship - Lt Li's ship passing them with its 2G acceleration, and sending a brief "good luck" message - but nothing else happened en route to the jump point.
A jump-1 took them to Lyto-7, where Vincenzo decided to engage in some commercial speculation and paid 30k+ credits for 5 tons of ambergris-like substance (taken from the deep-sea creatures the researchers were investigating). (Because they were using refined fuel, and they had an engineer on board, the checks to avoid misjump and drive failure succeeded automatically.)
Another jump-1 took them to Byron, where Roland (with Admin-1) negotiated their entrace without having their papers or cargo checked too closely. Their ship not being streamlined, they needed to ferry their goods down to the planetary surface; but they wanted to use their own small craft (a yacht comes with a ship's boat) rather than a commercial service, so as to keep their cargo under wraps. Methwit (with Recruiting-1) was able to find a ship's boat pilot on the station orbiting above the on-world starport, but (the roll being pretty bad) she was taking her "day off". So Vincenzo used his Bribery-1, and an offer of Cr 700, to persuade here that she should revisit her timetable. And so they flew down to the surface of Byron, parking their boat and cargo while heading to town via the monorail to await contact. At about this point, Methwit briefed Roland on the true situation - that they were part of a bio-weapon development scheme. Thankfully for the mission, Roland seemed pretty relaxed about that.
Contact took six days. (A six on a roll of one die.) In the meantime, Roland found Vincenzo a broker to help sell his goods, and (even after broker's fees) Vincenzo made a tidy profit of about Cr 15k. Unfortuntely Vincenzo then went out to find a casino, only to learn the hard way that gambling is illegal on Byron - and he had to pay a Cr 120 bribe to the two police officers who informed him of this fact to get them to leave him alone.
The session ended at the point of contact, with the PCs heading back to the starport to transfer the "cargo" to the contact's free trader. Hopefully we'll get in at least another session or two over the next couple of months, to find out how things resolve. (And given that Methwit has Wheeled Vehicle skill, and the yacht comes with an ATV, and two of the PCs have vacc suit skill and the party is equipped with five vacc suits, I'm pretty committed to finding some way to get the PCs out in either the corrosive or disease-ridden atmosphere with nothing between them and near-certain death but their ATV and some vacc suits.)
Given that this is a 40 year old system, I think it holds up really well. (Although the original generation rules give very low-skill PCs - whereas I thought the addition of the special duty roll made our PCs, even the ones with only a term or three, interestingly well-rounded.) We did't have any combat yesterday - and Traveller combat is ridiculously brutal, hence the need for two PCs - but the rules for social encounters, dealing with officials, and the like all worked smoothly. The only source of complaint was from Vincenzo's player - "I didn't want to play an accounting game!" An abstract resource management system would probably make the experience of running a starship a bit smoother.
The other thing that I was struck by is how bleak the default setting of Traveller is. The chance of dying during low passage transit is 1 in 6 for an ordinary person (1 in 12 with proper medical personnel overseeing the process). That's really high, and yet the rules are full of starship with low berths and passenger tables that show plenty of people willing to pay to travel in them. So the impression one gets is of worlds full of poor people willing to face a really high risk of death in order to travel to worlds that offer better propsects (but only 1 jump at a time!), while nobles lord it over the populace in their ridiculously expensive yet largely pointless intersteller yachts.
And this bleakness came out even in the worlds I generated - who would want to live in the universe of Ardour-3, Byron and Enlil?
For what it's worth, I recommend this system.
