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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tom B1" data-source="post: 7908539" data-attributes="member: 6879023">If you've ever seen early Traveller (the LBBs - Little Black Books), there were a lot of patron driven adventures and a surprising number of those were either criminal (my group was never too interested in being criminals, but it must have been popular as there were plenty of examples in the Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society and in the book of 1001 Patrons (or was it 101?)).And a mechanical step in most patron adventures was a small D6 table that gave a variety of possible outcomes/twists: 1d61-3 all is as represented4 the patron is a corporate spy trying to obtain the information the player's are to get and will have a handful of gunmen waiting to dispose of the team once the patron has the information (no loose ends)5 the patron is part of an organized criminal syndicate trying to obtain the information for the purposes of blackmail and if the players succeed, they may be offered further work from the syndicate6 the patron is planning to use the distraction caused by the intrusion (he knows there are alarms that the characters are not aware of) which will draw the attention of all nearby law enforcers, he will break into a nearby warehouse and steal several pallets of auto riflesThe way most of the jobs in the TV series went, they were either criminal or had additional complications and betrayals... very few genuine honest bits of work and those mostly not paying much. That's a lot like Classic Traveller's early skeletal patron adventures.Also, no aliens - early Classic Traveller if I recall had rules for animal encounters, but not much of anything for alien encounters - the universe of Traveller from the LBBs (which significantly preceded the Official Traveller Universe aka the Third Imperium) didn't really give you rules to create or describe sentient aliens, just alien fauna. Many Traveller adventuring groups have played in Free Traders kicking around the margins of larger polities and in areas with low tech, varied planets and governments, and not a lot of central authority (unless you went to the Imperium). That reminds me an awful lot of how they treat the central government and the outer worlds in Firefly & Serenity.One thing though: Even if JW played Traveller and it gave him some interesting notions to massage, change, expand, alter and to add his own ideas to, that's not quite like basing Firefly on Traveller, at least not in a very close-coupled sense. There's enough variation and enough differences that you'd have to at best say 'Loosely based on' or 'Inspired by' instead. Traveller is my favourite game. We always played small groups of retired military and other sorts knocking about the universe with only themselves to depend on. Recently, a Kickstarter finally brought us adventures in active service and a campaign system to support those sorts of adventures, but before that, it was all retirees and folk with some money or a ship-share or maybe a Traveller's Aid membership which gave you a ship ticket every month or so. Traveller was always about travel. It was about seeing the variety of the universe and having exciting adventures in fantastic sci-fi locations. In that respect, it's also spiritually akin to Firefly - they just want to keep flying because none of them seem the type to settle down and they've a home with their shipmates.</blockquote>

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