Category: Traveller (Page 2 of 4)

We’ve talked about setting up an informal Traveller Organized Play for members of Dicehaven who play one-shots in our home games or elsewhere. Here’s a brainstorm on what that might look like.

Organized Play Basics

Character Creation — Players create characters per the normal Mongoose Traveller 2e rules. Characters can be created either as a group or outside the game depending on the circumstances and GM guidance.

Story Setup — Player characters are mercenaries aboard a Free Trader starship owned by Delta Horizons, an intergalactic megacorp that contracts skilled workers to do exploration, security, bounty hunting, transportation, and other odd jobs. Players are expected to follow relevant Imperial laws and act for the common good and for the betterment of Delta Horizons.

Subsector Location — The events of organized play games usually take place in the same subsector as any ongoing campaign.

Missions — The GM of organized play games gives the crew of the week of a given Free Trader a mission from Delta Horizons.

Money — Expenses are not tracked and are assumed to take play ‘off-camera’. Although any character debt or other story hooks that came from character generation are in full effect, players don’t bother to track ship shares or do other accounting.

Ship, Expenses, and Salvage — The specific Free Trader ship and its name may very from game to game. Delta Horizons provides the ship and takes care of all reasonable expenses during missions. Any treasure, derelict ships, or the like are given over to Delta Horizons for processing and salvage.

Retiring Characters and Multiple Characters — Players can choose to retire a character at the end of game. Players can also have multiple, active characters in different organized play games.

Rewards

Story Hooks — The events of organized play games are assumed to take place roughly contemporaneously with any active Traveller Campaign. Therefore, organized play Traveller Games can become (1) news items which campaign characters can hear about, or (2) story hooks (for example, villains or factions which remain after the organized play game is ended) which campaign characters can encounter.

Study Period Reward — For each game the player plays, if their character survives, that character earns a successful Study Period (page 52 in the core rules), no EDU check needed. The character may use the Study Period per the normal rules (for example, to level up a skill) subject to the normal Limitations and Exceptions listed on page 52 in the core rules.

Possible Reward: Inspiration Points — We could choose to create Plot Points / Inspiration / Bennies, such that each time a player plays an organized play game, in addition to the Study Period, they also get a point which they can use as a bonus, perhaps as a (1) reroll, once per game, (2) a +1D bonus, once per game, and/or (3) a Boon once per game. These points could be used in non-organized play games, so that each Organized Play game you play would give you a mechanical benefit in a normal Campaign Game.

I posted over on the Traveller forums regarding how best to deal with Combat Armor. Feedback was that best attack against Combat Armor is to use Gauss rifles or Heavy ACRs with AP ammo. Gauss rifle is already AP5, and with AP ammo that becomes AP9, heavy ACRs are not quite as good but cheaper.

In our case though, Laser weapons are made for boarding actions, low recoil and not too destructive to the ship. So our best bet on a ship like we were on would be Laser Rifles instead of Laser Carbines.

Gauss Rifle

On Aug. 4, Mason ran a great game of Traveller, a erstwhile one-shot that will segue into an ongoing ‘B’ campaign he is thinking of running.

It was an amazing game! We used 15mm miniatures and a ship map sized to 15mm scale. We also used some transparent templates which proved very useful for blast and movement measuring.

Rebels had stolen the INS (Imperial Navy Ship) Wolf and Orion. Our mission was to retake the Wolf.

Combat rounds were fast and furiuos — averaging about 6 minutes per combat round. We did discover that combat armor makes you nearly invincible if you only have laser carbines attacking. We’ll need to rethink our strategy (maybe using laser rifles with backpacks or something else) for any future battles with this amazingly tough armor! Our fight with Combat Armored opponents lasted 13 rounds and about an hour and 20 minutes. During that time we had tons of action though — folks diving for cover, using smoke grenades, multiple grappling attempts, knocking weapons out of hands, recovering weapons, throwing people around, hacking doors, intimidation and carousing, and negotiating with rebels who had started a self-destruct mechanism. It was great fun!

My favorite moments:

• John giving a long time speech describing his verbal intimidation attempts to get an opponent to stand down, only to realize he was a -3 (untrained) for intimidation, then suddenly switching to his carousing skill: “Hey, on second thoughts, how about we stand down and grab a beer?”
• Stan having a Vacc Suit hyperventilation episode from character generation, then realizing that we had a big EVA to get to the target ship. Lots of hyperventilation roleplaying, exacerbated by failing multiple Vacc Suit rolls and nearly missing the target ship altogether.

— Stan

The heroes are given a lead from Hedley Trump to run a high-paying safari trip. The tables are turned as the supposed naive big-game hunters are actually bent on hunting the most dangerous creature of all: the heroes themselves! Waking up after being drugged, the heroes have only a repulser field and a lone dagger and are on the run, being hunted by laser-pistol armed opponents. A breakthrough happens when the heroes find a way to convert their repulser field generator into an EMP which they use to temporarily level the playing field. In a gruesome melee battle with spears and daggers, the heroes finally prevail.

Now the heroes have plans to take the dead bodies to confront Hedley Trump, on whose office wall hangs a treasured Marine saber once belonging to Sgt. Major Prins’ family. What will happen next?

The heroes are tasked with hunting down a mega-rhino creature which doesn’t show on IR sensors. After camp setup and recon, they encountered it during the night. The extensible tail whip took John’s character and smashed him into a tree where the creature then proceeded to head-bash him. That left a headache!

Between a Mega-Rhino and a Hard Place