I ran a one-on-one session for my teenage daughter this afternoon. It was fairly slow, as it was her first real time playing (she's joined in once or twice before in low-grade AD&D one-shots), and so she doesn't have well-developed creative instincts. The slow pace did give me a chance to reflect a bit on the decision-making process.
She generated a PC, a 34 year old noble with UPP 96568B and seven skills all at rank 1: Admin, Bribery, Gambling, Engineering, Jack-o-T, Ship's Boat and Cutlass. She started with CR 150,000, a cutlass and a couple of high passages. He name was Dame T_____.
I generated a starting world, Kuros, with a Class C starport with a Scout base, and otherwise 8B3-658 with TL 6. Govt type 5 is a feudal technocracy - my daughter knows about feudalism from history classes and I explained that technocracy is government by experts: with a corrosive (B) atmosphere the million-odd (pop 6) inhabitants of Kuros live in domed cities and cavern complexes, with the technical administrators in interlocking relationships of service provision. I explained a bit about the Imperial Interstellar Scout Service (ie they are responsible for surveys and communications across the Imperium) so she could understand what the base was.
My daughter read the rules for law level 8 and saw that she wouldn't be able to carry her cutlass with her. So she paid for a dagger, a coat (jack), a cold light lantern and a length of cable (maybe inspired by Sam Gamgee? she read LotR not that long ago). I asked her what would bring her to Kuros, and she decided that she was there on a diplomatic mission, to see what she could do to help a world that seemed relatively well-administered but not very nice to live on. (Shades of Princess Leia?)
I rolled on the random patron table and got a barbarian result, but wasn't sure how to bring that in straight away. So I started things at the starport.
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Dame T_____ had arrived on Kuros aboard the free trader Yorik, and was now passing through customs and passport control. "Anything to declare?" She declared her cutlass, and asked if it was possible to store it at the starport. I said yes, CR 10 for the first two weeks and the same per week after that. Otherwise the reaction she rolled for the customs official was indifferent, and her Admin check was a success meaning no complications with her paperwork, and so when she was asked her business and explained, the official responded "Another do-gooder!", stamped her passport and let her through. I had her deduct CR 100 for a week's accommodation at a nice hotel.
We discussed without playing through the details of her making an appointment to see Deputy Director Vu (I made a couple of random rolls on the Bureaucrats list in Supp 4 Citizens of the Imperium and settled on number 3, who is rank 5 (Executive) and hence the Deputy and not the Director). The appointment was in several days time, and so in the meantime she wandered the domed city getting a feel for the place. My daughter asked what it was like and so I made up a description - plastic and stone structures, with not too much metal due to the corrosion from the inevitable leakage into the dome, hence relatively low-rise; no internal combustion vehicles due to the need to keep the air in the dome clean, and so some electric-powered public transit and otherwise a lot of walking. She asked about the streets, which I said were paved with bricks and stone. We also talked a bit about the economy of Kuros - I knew it had world tags Fl (non-water fluids) and Ni (non-industrial) and so explained that most sophisticated manufactures are imported and that the main export is relatively exotic primary resources.
I decided to treat the time leading up to the meeting as a single day for encounter purposes: I had her make one law level check to avoid harassment, which she failed, so the police hassled her to explain her business but didn't arrest her (there was probably a successful Admin check in there); and I made one check which came up 5, and the follow-up rolls indicated 7 Marines.
Before acting on the encounter roll, we had a discussion about bribery and I sketched the mechanics of the Bribery skill. I suggested that she might have bribed the officials to bring her cutlass into the city, and that she might have bribed the police not to hassle her. But she was worried about potential backlash - somewhere during the session, either at this point or not too much later, she observed that all she had going for her was her good standing as a noble of the Imperium, and she didn't want to risk this by being caught in a bribery scandal.
I then activated the encounter I had rolled. I told my daughter that she could see an Imperial Scout vessel landing at the Scout Base. In my head I knew that a Type S Scout ship has 4 staterooms, which can hold a pilot plus 7 others at double occupancy, but I didn't explain this to her. I just told her that she could observe a squad of Imperial Marines, wearing their uniforms and cutlasses at their belts, disembarking from the vessel. I explained that Marines have a thing for cutlasses. She didn't ask exactly how she could see what was happening at the starport, but my thought was that in a low-rise domed city it's not too hard to get a good observation point for checking out the starport. She decided to go and see what the Marines were doing - at the starport she was initially refused entry as she was not travelling, but she told them she wanted to check on her stored cutlass and (with successful Admin again) was allowed in. She asked if it was the same official as the one who had admitted her when she arrived, and I said it wasn't, but she could see that official on duty not far away.
She approached the Marines, and I decided I would roll their reaction: snake eyes, signalling violent hostility. I told her that she recognised the Lieutenant in charge of the squad - Lt Valentino - and asked why he was so angry towards her. At the same time I also checked out the pre-gen Marine on one of my photocopied lists (I think this one is from The Traveller Book) - that one is 26 years old with no rank, so I added 2 years to make him 28 and gave him rank 1, which also added one to his handguns skill (but left his Cutlass-2 undisturbed). I told my daughter than Valentino was 6 years younger than her. She said that they had known one another growing up, but when she came into her inheritance he became angry because he had to work hard and go off to join the Marines while she (at least in his eyes) just swanned about. I asked her if she was carrying her cutlass which she'd wanted to check on, and she said yes, and so Valentino came up to her and eyeballed her and made a snide remark about her cutlass. She said she'd been training. He told his squad to form a ring - I explained that they wouldn't be fighting to the death, just first hit. Normally Traveller doesn't use initiative but rather simultaneous resolution, but in this context I decided to us the first-draw rules. Valentino's DEX was only 5 but he won the contest (of 2D + DEX) and so got the first strike and rolled a hit (very easy to get 8 on 2D rolling with +2 for rank, +2 for short range and +3 for cutlass vs jack). I didn't bother to roll damage but described her jacked as obviously marked where he had struck her.
As Valentino then led his squad off, happy to have humiliated Dame T_____, I told my daughter that the other customs officer - the one who had admitted her on her arrival - came up and offered to buy her a drink. She accepted - later on she asked what sort of drink (alcoholic or not? she was worried about being impaired) and I said it was non-alcoholic and a bit like the blue milk that Luke drinks in Star Wars, made with an ammonia-based fermentation process. (I don't know much about ammonia or about fermentation - nor does she - but was looking for chances to reinforce a sense of the world's corrosive atmosphere.)
I rolled for another random Bureaucrat on the Supp 4 list and got a 22 yr old Clerk with SOC B and Admin, Liaison and Leader-1. She introduced herself as Cara, and asked what the fight with the Marines was about. My daughter retold the story. Then Cara (as played by me) explained that she was also a Dame by birth, but that her family, which had ruled another complex called Illos about 400 miles away, had been removed by Imperial decree when she was a girl, to be replaced by technocratic administrators. So she (Cara) had had to study administration and now was working as a starport officer. Dame T_____ expressed sympathy. Cara asked her to put in a good word for her when she met with the Deputy Director, and she promised that she would.
We cut next to that meeting. Given that things were moving at a fairly slow pace I didn't want to play that out in any detail, and so handled it mostly via narration of a successful but relatively uneventful meeting. I described Deputy Director Vu as looking relatively fit (reasonable STR and Brawling-1) for her 46 years, and good company (Carousing-1) but not obviously talented (INT 6, I think, but SOC 9). Her third skill was Vehicle-1 and so I had her offer to take Dame T_____ onworld (ie outside the dome) in her pressurised air/raft. My daughter confirmed that this must be an imported luxury item. She accepted the offer.
First they travelled to inspect a liquid metal mine. Asked about the atmosphere I said it was cloudy, and slightly yellow-orange in the sunlight - but there was a sheen of silver as they approached the mine. Asked about the temperature outside (as indicated by the gauge on the dashboard that my daughter presumed would be there) I said warm (due to greenhouse effect) and higher in pressure than earth, but not terribly so - the miners were wearing protective suits and oxygen tanks, but not vacc suits or similar gear to protect against significant pressure. After describing this, I said that Vu took them on the scenic route back to the dome. And that as they were flying along there was a loud bang as the air/raft was shot, causing a breach which allowed in the outside gases and knocking Vu unconscious, meaning that they crash landed.
A successful check on STR indicated no damage from the landing (I think this particular sub-system is adapted from the Ship's Boat skill rules in the 1977 version of Book 1), but 4 points of damage (to DEX) were suffered from corrosive gases. My daughter looked for oxygen and suits - I called for a check based on INT, which failed and so she took another 4 damage (this time to END) before she could get a suit and oxygen for herself, and oxygen and a protective blanket at least for the unconscious Vu. She looked for an alarm/comm-type button on the dashboard but failed another INT check and so couldn't find one. Meanwhile someone in a suit was approaching the crashed vehicle, carrying a heavy gun (a light assault gun, as it happens, but I didn't use the official label) - this was my barbarian patron, number 13 on the Supp 4 list because that one has Gun Cbt-1 and also Tactics-1, which made sense for someone who was shooting down an air/raft.
My daughter asked whether the person coming to the vehicle looked like a rescuer or an assailant - I said that the gun looked like the sort of thing used to shoot them down, but the person was pulling at her to come (no communication through protective suits). She asked whether there were others and I made a roll and said about half-a-dozen in total - so she decided to go with them rather than fight, especially as she also had the unconscious Vu to look after. They did not go very far overland - they were near to a cave complex entered through a sealed door like a pressure tent. It was clear that, inside the complex, it was possible to breathe normally and so Dame T_____ removed her protective suit like the rest of them. She asked her captors/rescuers what was going on, and with a reasonable reaction roll they told her their story.
The name of the cave complex was Qualoc. There were other places like it on Kuros. The oxygen in them was produced by spores that took in some of the atmospheric corrosive gases and emitted oxygen (I was just making this up - my chemistry isn't strong enough to know what if anything this might actually be; I also said that there was some sulphate byproduct creating a somewhat pungent smell in the caves). They explained that once - hundreds of years ago - the atmosphere of Kuros was breathable but that the Imperium had encouraged the increase in the corrosive element in the atmosphere to support the primary resource economy on the planet. Not all those in charge of Kuros had agreed with this policy, but they had been displaced - most recently, about 15 years ago, the hereditary rulers of Illos had been replaced by an appointed Director who was fully on board with the Imperial policy. The people of Qualoc wanted to restore the atmosphere. They had contacts in the domed city, who supplied them with rations and other goods, though they lived pretty frugally, and they had heard that Dame T_____ was here on Kuros to help. So would she help them, for instance by taking their case to the Emperor? (Some readers may see hints of Dune and/or Total Recall here. My daughter has not read Dune nor seen Total Recall.)
She thought about this, and expressed her sympathy, but also said that she thought that persuading anyone to help them would require explaining how it would be in their interests - eg was the primary industry economy going to be replaced by a tourism-based one? The people of Qualoc explained that they weren't so interested in those economic matters - they just wanted their atmosphere back. Dame T_____ agreed to help. She then spent a couple of days repairing the damage grav module on the air/raft (using her Engineering and Jack-o-T skill - I set a roll o f9+ as required, checking once per day). I narrated - by stipulation without any particular reference to the healing or poison rules - that Deputy Director Vu was in a stable condition but still hadn't regained consciousness. Once the vessel was repaired Dame T_____ (again using Jack-o-T) flew it back to the city. She made a successful check to have her story accepted - that they had had an accident and a crash, which had knocked Vu unconscious, and it had taken her two days to repair the damage using the limited tools on board. Vu was taken to a hospital.
She then went back to the starport to speak with Cara again. Cara was cagey, though (a 6 on the reaction roll) and so wasn't going to share information about whatever connections she might have to Qualoc. Then their meeting was interrupted because the police arrived to take Dame T_____ off to assist them with their inquiries - as I explained, once Vu woke up she described the gunshot, which my daughter had not allowed for in her version of events. As she looked around, as well as the arriving police she could see a ship's boat on the tarmac of the starport. And (I told her) she knew that the Yorik had not long ago taken off, as starships work on a week-or-so of turnaround, and it was just a bit more than a week since she had arrived. My daughter asked if I was telling her to make a run for it (with her Ship's Boat skill) and I shrugged my shoulders - it was up to her, and I was just describing what was there. (Of course my description was given having regard to the character!) She decided not to run, as she thought stealing a vessel and being a fugitive would not be good for her standing. So she went with the police. But a successful check (reaction followed by Admin, I think) allowed her to persuade them that she had been telling the truth (as she experienced it) and hadn't been covering anything up. So she was not detained for very long.
She then went to see Cara again but learned she was on sick leave. So she decided to try and find other Illos sympathisers in the city. I decided that this was Streetwise, and with no rank would require a 10+ check. The check failed. Meantime I was rolling encounter dice at one per day, and on the fifth day got an encounter - a riotous mob. So as the attempt to find Illos sympathisers was going nowhere, I described civil unrest breaking out. When asked why, I narrated the following: during her stay in the city there had been a news story about some sort of issue around the allocation of mining rights. It hadn't seemed that important - an in-fiction reason to explain the real-world fact that I was only making it up now! But it had now turned into a bigger issue around corruption - which fed into the early sense that Vu's position was not earned entirely on merit - and the people were in the streets. (In my mind I was thinking of contemporary Lebanon.) I described picketing of government buildings, and also said that there were miners who were stuck at the mines as the normal transit arrangements had been disrupted.
Dame T_____ decided that she would go back to the mines. I said that she would need to hire a vehicle and driver, and so she went to the relevant part of town. On the way she encountered the mob - but rolled an 8 for their reaction, and so I said that as she passed by where they were looting shops goods were being handed around, and someone passed her a transistor radio. She took it and added it to her equipment list. I then chose, with a bit of dice-rolling help, a Hunter with Vehicle skill of the list in Supp 4 to be the driver and guide. This particular Hunter (number 32) has SOC A, and the reaction roll (rolled by my daughter) was a 12 - enthusiastic friendship) so I decided that the driver Fiero was Cara's older cousin, and recognised Dame T_____ and was ready to take her to the mines for a very reasonable rate: "Let's start with CR 100 down and see how we go!" A comparison to rates for hiring a car in Australia, and noting that there was a driver also, led to my daughter agreeing to this. But another encounter roll, and another riotous mob, raised a new problem: some of the demonstrators had taken control of the gate out of the dome, which also helped explain why there was the problem with the miners. Dame T_____ decided to try and see what could be done. I said that she could see one of the Marine troopers from Valentino's squadron standing by. She went to speak to the trooper, who explained that she was just an observer. Then I decided to shake things up a bit: a message came through on the trooper's communicator, which she took, and then she announced "This city is now under Imperial martial law!" She fired two shots from her revolver into the ground, to get the mob's attention, and then told them to disperse. In a law level 8 world unused to gunfire in any context that had the intended effect, and the crowd dispersed. Dame T_____ took advantage of this to open the gate herself. I called for a roll of 6 (given her Jack-o-T) to open the gate, and the roll was 5. So I said that she could open it OK, but had some trouble with the details of the mechanism which meant she couldn't set the auto-shut properly, meaning that corrosive atmosphere leaked into the dome. When I asked if she wanted to take advantage of the resulting confusion to have Fiero drive them out, she said yes - and so they left the city in Fiero's tracked ATV leaving others to sort out the fiasco with the gate.
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That's where we left things. This was something of an experiment from both the RPG and the family dynamics perspective, and so I don't know whether there'll ever be a second session.
As I said things went quite slowly. Some of this was due to interruptions of having to do regular household stuff, and due to interjections from my other daughter working on her science project. But it was also because I found it much harder to provoke an inexperienced player to action then I'm used to. And she very much wanted to play a political campaign - from the outset she was on a diplomatic mission, and more than once she reflected that her PC's main strength was her social standing and influence - but that turns out to be fairly challenging for someone who's working with a pretty limited knowledge of politics and economics, and with a pretty limited knowledge of political/spy genre fiction.
I was happy that I was able to frame situations that brought her skills into play, in actuality (Admin especially saw a lot of use, unsurprisingly given the general thrust of play) or potentially in the form of options deliberately not taken (Bribery, Ship's Boat), with Gambling as the one exception.
It wasn't as dice-driven as some of my Traveller play - in particular the patron encounter was the result of hard and deliberate framing on my part - but I would say that it certainly wasn't a railroad.
When I was my daughter's age I played quite a bit of Traveller but always had trouble making it click. I think I can now see why: while mechanically it's pretty straightforward (moreso than AD&D, I would say, which I played a lot of at that time) the themes are tropes are more sophisticated, and so in that way it's more demanding on the participants than AD&D. (And more demanding than I would imagine a Star Wars game to be.)
The flip side is that I think it can give a new player a better sense of what RPGing can aspire to than the sort of AD&D I was playing back in the mid-80s.
She generated a PC, a 34 year old noble with UPP 96568B and seven skills all at rank 1: Admin, Bribery, Gambling, Engineering, Jack-o-T, Ship's Boat and Cutlass. She started with CR 150,000, a cutlass and a couple of high passages. He name was Dame T_____.
I generated a starting world, Kuros, with a Class C starport with a Scout base, and otherwise 8B3-658 with TL 6. Govt type 5 is a feudal technocracy - my daughter knows about feudalism from history classes and I explained that technocracy is government by experts: with a corrosive (B) atmosphere the million-odd (pop 6) inhabitants of Kuros live in domed cities and cavern complexes, with the technical administrators in interlocking relationships of service provision. I explained a bit about the Imperial Interstellar Scout Service (ie they are responsible for surveys and communications across the Imperium) so she could understand what the base was.
My daughter read the rules for law level 8 and saw that she wouldn't be able to carry her cutlass with her. So she paid for a dagger, a coat (jack), a cold light lantern and a length of cable (maybe inspired by Sam Gamgee? she read LotR not that long ago). I asked her what would bring her to Kuros, and she decided that she was there on a diplomatic mission, to see what she could do to help a world that seemed relatively well-administered but not very nice to live on. (Shades of Princess Leia?)
I rolled on the random patron table and got a barbarian result, but wasn't sure how to bring that in straight away. So I started things at the starport.
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Dame T_____ had arrived on Kuros aboard the free trader Yorik, and was now passing through customs and passport control. "Anything to declare?" She declared her cutlass, and asked if it was possible to store it at the starport. I said yes, CR 10 for the first two weeks and the same per week after that. Otherwise the reaction she rolled for the customs official was indifferent, and her Admin check was a success meaning no complications with her paperwork, and so when she was asked her business and explained, the official responded "Another do-gooder!", stamped her passport and let her through. I had her deduct CR 100 for a week's accommodation at a nice hotel.
We discussed without playing through the details of her making an appointment to see Deputy Director Vu (I made a couple of random rolls on the Bureaucrats list in Supp 4 Citizens of the Imperium and settled on number 3, who is rank 5 (Executive) and hence the Deputy and not the Director). The appointment was in several days time, and so in the meantime she wandered the domed city getting a feel for the place. My daughter asked what it was like and so I made up a description - plastic and stone structures, with not too much metal due to the corrosion from the inevitable leakage into the dome, hence relatively low-rise; no internal combustion vehicles due to the need to keep the air in the dome clean, and so some electric-powered public transit and otherwise a lot of walking. She asked about the streets, which I said were paved with bricks and stone. We also talked a bit about the economy of Kuros - I knew it had world tags Fl (non-water fluids) and Ni (non-industrial) and so explained that most sophisticated manufactures are imported and that the main export is relatively exotic primary resources.
I decided to treat the time leading up to the meeting as a single day for encounter purposes: I had her make one law level check to avoid harassment, which she failed, so the police hassled her to explain her business but didn't arrest her (there was probably a successful Admin check in there); and I made one check which came up 5, and the follow-up rolls indicated 7 Marines.
Before acting on the encounter roll, we had a discussion about bribery and I sketched the mechanics of the Bribery skill. I suggested that she might have bribed the officials to bring her cutlass into the city, and that she might have bribed the police not to hassle her. But she was worried about potential backlash - somewhere during the session, either at this point or not too much later, she observed that all she had going for her was her good standing as a noble of the Imperium, and she didn't want to risk this by being caught in a bribery scandal.
I then activated the encounter I had rolled. I told my daughter that she could see an Imperial Scout vessel landing at the Scout Base. In my head I knew that a Type S Scout ship has 4 staterooms, which can hold a pilot plus 7 others at double occupancy, but I didn't explain this to her. I just told her that she could observe a squad of Imperial Marines, wearing their uniforms and cutlasses at their belts, disembarking from the vessel. I explained that Marines have a thing for cutlasses. She didn't ask exactly how she could see what was happening at the starport, but my thought was that in a low-rise domed city it's not too hard to get a good observation point for checking out the starport. She decided to go and see what the Marines were doing - at the starport she was initially refused entry as she was not travelling, but she told them she wanted to check on her stored cutlass and (with successful Admin again) was allowed in. She asked if it was the same official as the one who had admitted her when she arrived, and I said it wasn't, but she could see that official on duty not far away.
She approached the Marines, and I decided I would roll their reaction: snake eyes, signalling violent hostility. I told her that she recognised the Lieutenant in charge of the squad - Lt Valentino - and asked why he was so angry towards her. At the same time I also checked out the pre-gen Marine on one of my photocopied lists (I think this one is from The Traveller Book) - that one is 26 years old with no rank, so I added 2 years to make him 28 and gave him rank 1, which also added one to his handguns skill (but left his Cutlass-2 undisturbed). I told my daughter than Valentino was 6 years younger than her. She said that they had known one another growing up, but when she came into her inheritance he became angry because he had to work hard and go off to join the Marines while she (at least in his eyes) just swanned about. I asked her if she was carrying her cutlass which she'd wanted to check on, and she said yes, and so Valentino came up to her and eyeballed her and made a snide remark about her cutlass. She said she'd been training. He told his squad to form a ring - I explained that they wouldn't be fighting to the death, just first hit. Normally Traveller doesn't use initiative but rather simultaneous resolution, but in this context I decided to us the first-draw rules. Valentino's DEX was only 5 but he won the contest (of 2D + DEX) and so got the first strike and rolled a hit (very easy to get 8 on 2D rolling with +2 for rank, +2 for short range and +3 for cutlass vs jack). I didn't bother to roll damage but described her jacked as obviously marked where he had struck her.
As Valentino then led his squad off, happy to have humiliated Dame T_____, I told my daughter that the other customs officer - the one who had admitted her on her arrival - came up and offered to buy her a drink. She accepted - later on she asked what sort of drink (alcoholic or not? she was worried about being impaired) and I said it was non-alcoholic and a bit like the blue milk that Luke drinks in Star Wars, made with an ammonia-based fermentation process. (I don't know much about ammonia or about fermentation - nor does she - but was looking for chances to reinforce a sense of the world's corrosive atmosphere.)
I rolled for another random Bureaucrat on the Supp 4 list and got a 22 yr old Clerk with SOC B and Admin, Liaison and Leader-1. She introduced herself as Cara, and asked what the fight with the Marines was about. My daughter retold the story. Then Cara (as played by me) explained that she was also a Dame by birth, but that her family, which had ruled another complex called Illos about 400 miles away, had been removed by Imperial decree when she was a girl, to be replaced by technocratic administrators. So she (Cara) had had to study administration and now was working as a starport officer. Dame T_____ expressed sympathy. Cara asked her to put in a good word for her when she met with the Deputy Director, and she promised that she would.
We cut next to that meeting. Given that things were moving at a fairly slow pace I didn't want to play that out in any detail, and so handled it mostly via narration of a successful but relatively uneventful meeting. I described Deputy Director Vu as looking relatively fit (reasonable STR and Brawling-1) for her 46 years, and good company (Carousing-1) but not obviously talented (INT 6, I think, but SOC 9). Her third skill was Vehicle-1 and so I had her offer to take Dame T_____ onworld (ie outside the dome) in her pressurised air/raft. My daughter confirmed that this must be an imported luxury item. She accepted the offer.
First they travelled to inspect a liquid metal mine. Asked about the atmosphere I said it was cloudy, and slightly yellow-orange in the sunlight - but there was a sheen of silver as they approached the mine. Asked about the temperature outside (as indicated by the gauge on the dashboard that my daughter presumed would be there) I said warm (due to greenhouse effect) and higher in pressure than earth, but not terribly so - the miners were wearing protective suits and oxygen tanks, but not vacc suits or similar gear to protect against significant pressure. After describing this, I said that Vu took them on the scenic route back to the dome. And that as they were flying along there was a loud bang as the air/raft was shot, causing a breach which allowed in the outside gases and knocking Vu unconscious, meaning that they crash landed.
A successful check on STR indicated no damage from the landing (I think this particular sub-system is adapted from the Ship's Boat skill rules in the 1977 version of Book 1), but 4 points of damage (to DEX) were suffered from corrosive gases. My daughter looked for oxygen and suits - I called for a check based on INT, which failed and so she took another 4 damage (this time to END) before she could get a suit and oxygen for herself, and oxygen and a protective blanket at least for the unconscious Vu. She looked for an alarm/comm-type button on the dashboard but failed another INT check and so couldn't find one. Meanwhile someone in a suit was approaching the crashed vehicle, carrying a heavy gun (a light assault gun, as it happens, but I didn't use the official label) - this was my barbarian patron, number 13 on the Supp 4 list because that one has Gun Cbt-1 and also Tactics-1, which made sense for someone who was shooting down an air/raft.
My daughter asked whether the person coming to the vehicle looked like a rescuer or an assailant - I said that the gun looked like the sort of thing used to shoot them down, but the person was pulling at her to come (no communication through protective suits). She asked whether there were others and I made a roll and said about half-a-dozen in total - so she decided to go with them rather than fight, especially as she also had the unconscious Vu to look after. They did not go very far overland - they were near to a cave complex entered through a sealed door like a pressure tent. It was clear that, inside the complex, it was possible to breathe normally and so Dame T_____ removed her protective suit like the rest of them. She asked her captors/rescuers what was going on, and with a reasonable reaction roll they told her their story.
The name of the cave complex was Qualoc. There were other places like it on Kuros. The oxygen in them was produced by spores that took in some of the atmospheric corrosive gases and emitted oxygen (I was just making this up - my chemistry isn't strong enough to know what if anything this might actually be; I also said that there was some sulphate byproduct creating a somewhat pungent smell in the caves). They explained that once - hundreds of years ago - the atmosphere of Kuros was breathable but that the Imperium had encouraged the increase in the corrosive element in the atmosphere to support the primary resource economy on the planet. Not all those in charge of Kuros had agreed with this policy, but they had been displaced - most recently, about 15 years ago, the hereditary rulers of Illos had been replaced by an appointed Director who was fully on board with the Imperial policy. The people of Qualoc wanted to restore the atmosphere. They had contacts in the domed city, who supplied them with rations and other goods, though they lived pretty frugally, and they had heard that Dame T_____ was here on Kuros to help. So would she help them, for instance by taking their case to the Emperor? (Some readers may see hints of Dune and/or Total Recall here. My daughter has not read Dune nor seen Total Recall.)
She thought about this, and expressed her sympathy, but also said that she thought that persuading anyone to help them would require explaining how it would be in their interests - eg was the primary industry economy going to be replaced by a tourism-based one? The people of Qualoc explained that they weren't so interested in those economic matters - they just wanted their atmosphere back. Dame T_____ agreed to help. She then spent a couple of days repairing the damage grav module on the air/raft (using her Engineering and Jack-o-T skill - I set a roll o f9+ as required, checking once per day). I narrated - by stipulation without any particular reference to the healing or poison rules - that Deputy Director Vu was in a stable condition but still hadn't regained consciousness. Once the vessel was repaired Dame T_____ (again using Jack-o-T) flew it back to the city. She made a successful check to have her story accepted - that they had had an accident and a crash, which had knocked Vu unconscious, and it had taken her two days to repair the damage using the limited tools on board. Vu was taken to a hospital.
She then went back to the starport to speak with Cara again. Cara was cagey, though (a 6 on the reaction roll) and so wasn't going to share information about whatever connections she might have to Qualoc. Then their meeting was interrupted because the police arrived to take Dame T_____ off to assist them with their inquiries - as I explained, once Vu woke up she described the gunshot, which my daughter had not allowed for in her version of events. As she looked around, as well as the arriving police she could see a ship's boat on the tarmac of the starport. And (I told her) she knew that the Yorik had not long ago taken off, as starships work on a week-or-so of turnaround, and it was just a bit more than a week since she had arrived. My daughter asked if I was telling her to make a run for it (with her Ship's Boat skill) and I shrugged my shoulders - it was up to her, and I was just describing what was there. (Of course my description was given having regard to the character!) She decided not to run, as she thought stealing a vessel and being a fugitive would not be good for her standing. So she went with the police. But a successful check (reaction followed by Admin, I think) allowed her to persuade them that she had been telling the truth (as she experienced it) and hadn't been covering anything up. So she was not detained for very long.
She then went to see Cara again but learned she was on sick leave. So she decided to try and find other Illos sympathisers in the city. I decided that this was Streetwise, and with no rank would require a 10+ check. The check failed. Meantime I was rolling encounter dice at one per day, and on the fifth day got an encounter - a riotous mob. So as the attempt to find Illos sympathisers was going nowhere, I described civil unrest breaking out. When asked why, I narrated the following: during her stay in the city there had been a news story about some sort of issue around the allocation of mining rights. It hadn't seemed that important - an in-fiction reason to explain the real-world fact that I was only making it up now! But it had now turned into a bigger issue around corruption - which fed into the early sense that Vu's position was not earned entirely on merit - and the people were in the streets. (In my mind I was thinking of contemporary Lebanon.) I described picketing of government buildings, and also said that there were miners who were stuck at the mines as the normal transit arrangements had been disrupted.
Dame T_____ decided that she would go back to the mines. I said that she would need to hire a vehicle and driver, and so she went to the relevant part of town. On the way she encountered the mob - but rolled an 8 for their reaction, and so I said that as she passed by where they were looting shops goods were being handed around, and someone passed her a transistor radio. She took it and added it to her equipment list. I then chose, with a bit of dice-rolling help, a Hunter with Vehicle skill of the list in Supp 4 to be the driver and guide. This particular Hunter (number 32) has SOC A, and the reaction roll (rolled by my daughter) was a 12 - enthusiastic friendship) so I decided that the driver Fiero was Cara's older cousin, and recognised Dame T_____ and was ready to take her to the mines for a very reasonable rate: "Let's start with CR 100 down and see how we go!" A comparison to rates for hiring a car in Australia, and noting that there was a driver also, led to my daughter agreeing to this. But another encounter roll, and another riotous mob, raised a new problem: some of the demonstrators had taken control of the gate out of the dome, which also helped explain why there was the problem with the miners. Dame T_____ decided to try and see what could be done. I said that she could see one of the Marine troopers from Valentino's squadron standing by. She went to speak to the trooper, who explained that she was just an observer. Then I decided to shake things up a bit: a message came through on the trooper's communicator, which she took, and then she announced "This city is now under Imperial martial law!" She fired two shots from her revolver into the ground, to get the mob's attention, and then told them to disperse. In a law level 8 world unused to gunfire in any context that had the intended effect, and the crowd dispersed. Dame T_____ took advantage of this to open the gate herself. I called for a roll of 6 (given her Jack-o-T) to open the gate, and the roll was 5. So I said that she could open it OK, but had some trouble with the details of the mechanism which meant she couldn't set the auto-shut properly, meaning that corrosive atmosphere leaked into the dome. When I asked if she wanted to take advantage of the resulting confusion to have Fiero drive them out, she said yes - and so they left the city in Fiero's tracked ATV leaving others to sort out the fiasco with the gate.
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That's where we left things. This was something of an experiment from both the RPG and the family dynamics perspective, and so I don't know whether there'll ever be a second session.
As I said things went quite slowly. Some of this was due to interruptions of having to do regular household stuff, and due to interjections from my other daughter working on her science project. But it was also because I found it much harder to provoke an inexperienced player to action then I'm used to. And she very much wanted to play a political campaign - from the outset she was on a diplomatic mission, and more than once she reflected that her PC's main strength was her social standing and influence - but that turns out to be fairly challenging for someone who's working with a pretty limited knowledge of politics and economics, and with a pretty limited knowledge of political/spy genre fiction.
I was happy that I was able to frame situations that brought her skills into play, in actuality (Admin especially saw a lot of use, unsurprisingly given the general thrust of play) or potentially in the form of options deliberately not taken (Bribery, Ship's Boat), with Gambling as the one exception.
It wasn't as dice-driven as some of my Traveller play - in particular the patron encounter was the result of hard and deliberate framing on my part - but I would say that it certainly wasn't a railroad.
When I was my daughter's age I played quite a bit of Traveller but always had trouble making it click. I think I can now see why: while mechanically it's pretty straightforward (moreso than AD&D, I would say, which I played a lot of at that time) the themes are tropes are more sophisticated, and so in that way it's more demanding on the participants than AD&D. (And more demanding than I would imagine a Star Wars game to be.)
The flip side is that I think it can give a new player a better sense of what RPGing can aspire to than the sort of AD&D I was playing back in the mid-80s.
