Thinking of starting a traveler game

[bestialwarlust]

I'm currently running an OD&D game but in the past few years I've developed an interest in running a sci fi game. I've looked at different rules sets and at one point was seriously considering stars without numbers as it looks really solid. Then I remember traveller. And after doing some research I whittled it down to either classic or mongoose. I've settled on the mongoose version for now as everything I've read it seems to be nearly the same as classic.

I didn't want to use any established setting as I wanted to use a more "realistic" setting I was starting to develop our universe until I stumbled across spice's publishings Outer veil setting. The setting already developed about 80% of what I was doing. So to save me some work as I don't know how long this game will last once I started it Outer veil seemed like a good choice. For flavor setting and feel I wanted a firefly like game so that show will influence a lot of my game, no aliens, little to no psionics, etc....

So has anyone here run a CT game or the mongoose version? If not what other version did you run and what was your focus on the game? I'm going to try run a a lot of smuggling, trading with some combat. But I don't plan on most ships having guns except for military and "illegal" mods to ships.

So tell me about your games if any

[battlebrotherbob]

I'm a CT guy. Tried various other versions and other games. CT keeps calling me back. Nothing really wrong with MongT. I just have so much CT stuff and did not see the need for the changes Mongoose made.

Adventures are tough. Most of my experiences in the past were linked packaged adventures or a failed attempt at a merc campaign . I've been slowly putting together another campaign. Thisis based loosely on some Old West tropes. Also staying with a small universe. Nothing but the 3LBB. I'll post more as things develop more.

[barrataria]

I came to the game with MegaTraveller, and I'd use it again if I were to run a game. I've played in a Mongoose Traveller game and that was fine too. I'd probably find it easier to use MgT than Classic if I had to run a game tomorrow. Whichever will be fine; I believe MgT falls down on their extremely high book pricing.

The MT game I ran in high school was more or less what you outlined. My players ended up with a noble and a rogue, of all things, and the noble ended up with a yacht as a mustering-out benefit. So there was a bit of mucking around with smuggling, a hijacking, etc. I didn't pay much attention to the rest of the Imperium, we stayed in a single sector in the Spinward Marches.

It's a great game, no matter what version you play (although isn't there a d20 Traveller? Seems like a version I'd stay away from).

[bestialwarlust]

The buy in price is high I ended up getting the MgT on amazon a lot cheaper. I found the CT for sale on drive thru so I bought book 1 so I could compare the original to MgT since the mongoose version was supposed to be real close to the original. Indeed it seems pretty compatible but there are differences of course. I like both version of character creation for different reasons. On one hand I like the quick career roll ups of the original, but on the other hand I do like the more detailed background roll ups of the Mongoose version.

As with OD&D I like CT's less emphasis on attributes. Both versions have their draws.

[Finarvyn]

I first played CT back in the 1970's and still have my black box full of black books. I've owned other editions over the years but don't play Traveller enough so I think I got rid of most of them. I like the simplicity of the original over any of the other versions, but agree that the Mongoose one is a lot easier to find in stores.

[Torreny]

The latest jaunt I took, as a sort of introduction to CT for friends, was a Blade Runner-ish setup mish-mashed with elements of Outland, and then went it all went Aliens in short order (when the Synthetic Life terrorists let facehuggers loose). Almost everyone died gloriously.

Havenèt seen the Mongoose version, but if itès like CT, thatès aces to me! Ièd love to join any game you get going.

Actually, Iève been thinking of proposing a CT PbP on the board for a while now. Donèt know if Ièm ready for the logistics of it however. And, for those wondering, I want to tackle the idea of making a role-playing experience out of the X-Com Initiative. Poking around for clues of aliens with a snub-nose is just too ootaboot an idea.

[coffee]

I unabashedly love Traveller (well, the concept of Traveller I have in my head anyway). I just haven't played it much. Mostly because the games I get into don't last long, and they seem to suffer from two main problems: lack of focus and over-expansion.

Lack of focus simply means that the referee and players aren't on the same page when starting. What I commonly see happen is somebody has an adventure (such as Judges Guild used to produce) and then everybody rolls up their characters randomly -- even if they don't fit in that scenario. This can be dealt with by a discussion before playing.

Also, you might consider a 'one-off' scenario to start with. It's not a campaign, so any mistakes/misconceptions can be handled without ruining everything. It gets people into the mindset of the game, and provides plenty of opportunity for discussion of what they want the campaign to be like.

Over-expansion happens when someone loves the game immensely (my hand is up; anybody else?) and has to buy everything that comes out for it. Nothing wrong with that per se, but if you decide that everything is in play, you get characters of widely varying abilities and an indigestible mass of data for new players to cope with.

I would recommend starting with the basic set of whatever rules you choose. Either Books 1-3 of Classic (or the Traveller Book or Starter Traveller -- essentially the same thing) or the basic Mongoose Traveller book. That way, everyone has the same options and nobody needs to 'keep up' with the supplement 'arms race'. (Note that this limited rules phase needn't extend past the 'one-off' mentioned above; some people just really love their supplements and I say more power to them!)


That was my CR 0.02 on the matter.


And I, too, would love to play if you do run something here.

[bestialwarlust]

Dec 20, 2013 9:16:23 GMT -6 coffee said:

I unabashedly love Traveller (well, the concept of Traveller I have in my head anyway). I just haven't played it much. Mostly because the games I get into don't last long, and they seem to suffer from two main problems: lack of focus and over-expansion.

Lack of focus simply means that the referee and players aren't on the same page when starting. What I commonly see happen is somebody has an adventure (such as Judges Guild used to produce) and then everybody rolls up their characters randomly -- even if they don't fit in that scenario. This can be dealt with by a discussion before playing.

Also, you might consider a 'one-off' scenario to start with. It's not a campaign, so any mistakes/misconceptions can be handled without ruining everything. It gets people into the mindset of the game, and provides plenty of opportunity for discussion of what they want the campaign to be like.

Over-expansion happens when someone loves the game immensely (my hand is up; anybody else?) and has to buy everything that comes out for it. Nothing wrong with that per se, but if you decide that everything is in play, you get characters of widely varying abilities and an indigestible mass of data for new players to cope with.

I would recommend starting with the basic set of whatever rules you choose. Either Books 1-3 of Classic (or the Traveller Book or Starter Traveller -- essentially the same thing) or the basic Mongoose Traveller book. That way, everyone has the same options and nobody needs to 'keep up' with the supplement 'arms race'. (Note that this limited rules phase needn't extend past the 'one-off' mentioned above; some people just really love their supplements and I say more power to them!)


That was my CR 0.02 on the matter.


And I, too, would love to play if you do run something here.

I agree with the idea of a one off, I normally do that whenever I run a new game to get everyone into the mindset and introduce the new rules. This gives then a chance too see how it plays and make adjustments or new characters if they need to. I did grab CT recently from drive thru rpg and I've been reading and comparing both. They both have good stuff. I'm not a supplement person and what I've seen of the MgT supplements none of them catch my eye everything I need is in the core. CT there's a few there also. I'm hoping the game will go well as I've never had the mindset until recently to run sci fi. Having never run an old school sci fi game I can't say I'm particular to either version. Though I'm not one that has to have everything follow one mechanic as MgT does. I do like the character creation in MgT it has a little bit more than CT, with the life events and mishaps. But I find that fun and so did my GF she's already rolled up 3 characters for a game we haven't even started


Unfortunately running here wouldn't really be possible only because of time and I'd hate to inflict my mediocre gm'ing skills on others.

[krusader74]

Traveller is part of my "holy trinity" of rpgs, along with D&D and Call of Cthulhu.

I have the classic traveller (CT) box set with the LBBs as well as the CD-ROM from FFE that has pdfs of all CT material. CT is the second rpg I ever bought (D&D was my first). Back then, my friends and I wanted to roleplay Star Wars. We didn't use CT's setting. Instead we created stats for light sabres, wookies, star destroyers, the planet tatooine and so on. I only came to appreciate CT's own Third Imperium setting later in life.

Back in 2008 I bought mongoose traveller (MGT). I have the hard cover rulebook as well as the pdf from dtrpg. The SRD is free from the mongoose website. There are a couple of web-based versions of the SRD here and there. There was a great pdf version of the SRD on mediafire, but it vanished. There's also the last version of the playtest version of MGT still on the mongoose site (google for the link).

I really like the MGT rules. They're like a streamlined version of the CT rules. We had a small group of 4 players that ran weekly sessions for about 6 months in the last half of 2008. We used the default Third Imperium setting, starting in Imperial Year 1105. We bought a ship (free trader type a) for 42 mega credits. Then we had to find ways to make our mortgage payments (180 kilo credits per month). We did this by transporting passengers and cargo from world-to-world and taking on odd jobs in between jumps. Near the end of the campaign we got a "letter of marque and reprisal" to fight pirates and take down an anti-imperium terrorist group.

Our GM kept us poor and always on the verge of missing our monthly bank payments. One time we had our cargo stolen and had to get it back from the mafioso. Another time we got shaken down by corrupt law enforcement.

There was a lot of accounting we had to do to manage the ship's finances. I actually used professional accounting software and kept a journal, a ledger and so on. I also made forms for (1) the ship cargo manifest, (2) the passenger manifest, and (3) an imperial calendar for time tracking.

We thought the ship-to-ship combat could have been streamlined/simplified a little more. It also required quite a bit of accounting.

We house-ruled our own experience point system, loosely based on the system from Traveller: The New Era (TNE). I can post these rules if anyone is interested.

If I were going to play Traveller again now, I'd still prefer MGT over any prior rule set, but I'd want to tweak ship-to-ship combat to make it easier. I'd also use mongoose's Judge Dredd setting for MGT, but that's my own personal preference. I love 2000AD comics. I just re-read Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 03 and now I'm re-reading The Complete Case Files 05. Lots of great ideas for rpgs in these volumes. The first quarter of volume 05 deals with various crime rackets in Mega City One:

• Body sharking - Like loan sharking, except the loan shark takes one of the borrower's loved ones as collateral and puts them in suspended animation (like traveller's low berths) until the loan is repaid. If any payments are missed, the collateral never wakes up.
• Perp running - Smuggling criminals off world to escape the Judges. Unscrupulous perp runners will sell the perps as slave labor to aliens.
• Chump dumping - Selling aliens high passage to earth, and then dumping them out the airlock during the voyage.
• Umpty bagging - Uncle umps umpty candy tastes so delicious it is as addictive as crack. Selling it was outlawed in volume 03. Now its sold illegally in MC-1 by the Jong gang.
• Blitz agencies - Hitmen for hire
• Psyking - Using people with psionic ability to commit crimes, like blitzing or a protection racket.
• Numbers racket - Hacking corporate computers for profit.
• Stookie glanding - Stookies are intelligent, non-violent aliens. Their adifax glands contain chemicals that prevent humans from aging. Criminals illegally factory farm Stookies in the Cursed Earth and sell their glands to rich citizens in MC-1.
• Mob wars - Volume 05 has a story arc about an alien race called the Mophioso that try and muscle-in and take-over all of MC-1's crime rackets. Mophioso are electrical in nature, need to recharge (rather than sleep), can shoot lighting bolts out their finger tips, and short-circuit when exposed to water.

2000AD comics have been printed weekly since 1977, and it's featured the galaxy's greatest writers and artists, so it's a cornucopia of great rpg adventure ideas. I recently purchased the Judge Dredd hard cover ruleset for MGT on ebay for $25. The pdf on DTRPG costs $29.

Back in 2008, I got the idea for a hard sci-fi MGT campaign. It was called "Splashdown." I never ran it, because my time was already overcommitted--at the time I was doing weekly games of Traveller, D&D and Warhammer 40K. Here is a brief sketch of the campaign:

Splashdown

Setting

Place

Fomalhaut, grid 1024, Dingir subsector, Solomani Rim sector

Time

The action starts in the year 3,000 AD (= IY -1516), during "The Long Night," roughly between the periods known as "Twilight" and "9PM." The Second Imperium (aka "The Rule of Man") is rapidly collapsing due to

• Piracy - The Solomani Confederation has lost control over the Imperial Navy, due to mismanagement and bankruptcy. Pirates sieze the opportunity to attack and rob defenseless trade ships. Individual worlds, increasingly responsible for their own defense, are becoming isolated. Trade is grinding to a halt.
• Xenophobia - The psionic races of Zhodani and Hivers, first contacted around 2500 AD, are becoming more widely known and their powers mistrusted and feared.
• Superstition - Specifically, Millennial hysteria of an apocalypse and an imminent Second Coming of Jesus. After all, the Psalms say a day of the Lord is 1,000 years, and the Gospels say Jesus rose again on the Third Day...
• Greed - With no Imperial trade regulation, opportunistic businessmen find it easier than ever to cheat and gouge their customers.

AFAIK, this time period, though briefly summarized in the Traveller canon, is not detailed in any existing Traveller game system or supplement, which tend to emphasize the Third Imperium, its origin (Milieu 0) its high watermark (Golden Age), its downfall (Mega Traveller) and its aftermath (Traveller the New Era and 1248/Out of the Darkness). I think this lack of attention in the official canon creates a great deal of freedom to imagine a brand new setting that will take the players off-guard and keep them constantly guessing what's next.

Genre

• Disaster Thriller - The resourceful heroes must overcome their interpersonal conflicts in order to survive a shipwreck.
• Hard Sci-Fi - This is a given for any Traveller game. Everything that happens in this scenario, even apparently supernatural events, are given 100% plausible scientific explanations. The plot premise relies heavily on Time Dilation, Energy-Time Uncertainty (∆E∙∆t ≥ ħ) and Quantum Decoherence.

Plot

Splashdown uses a character-driven plot. All characters are pregens. A minimum of 4 players are required by the story. Up to 8 may play.

Each character has a publicly known backstory and goal. Each character also has a secret identity and secret mission. Gradually, these secrets leak out, putting the characters in conflict with each other. But they must put their conflicts aside and work together in order to survive a shipwreck.

The ship is apparently wrecked by a highly sensitive, experimental sensor, capable of detecting energy entering the Fomalhaut system, with an infinitesimal standard deviation:

∆ E = √(<E^2> - <E>^2) → 0

Collectively, the characters have the skills required to fix the ship. But they must go on a series of 12 Herculean tasks to recover the equipment needed to make the repairs.

A highly mysterious patron aids the characters, guiding them in each quest. He only asks in return that the characters help smuggle him off the planet, suggesting that the sensor responsible for the wreck wasn't setup to detect intruders, but rather to keep him imprisoned on the planet.

Theme

Appearance vs. Reality is the major theme. Nothing is as it seems:

• All of the characters have something to hide
• The mysterious patron maybe an alien, a god, a devil or an hallucination
• Time appears to be broken: The ship appears to have crashed almost 3,000 years in the past or maybe 222,0000 years in the future. Worse yet, time on the planet is nearly frozen. Other ships entering the system at the same time appear to have crashed at different times—perhaps millions of years prior.
• A ghostly version of the character's own ship appears to crash land, over-and-over-again, but in different places with different outcomes, before fading out of existence.

There are a myriad of plausible scientific and superstitious explanations for all of these effects, revealed as the story develops.

[kent]

Jan 19, 2014 5:25:41 GMT -6 krusader74 said:

Each character also has a secret identity and secret mission
...
A highly mysterious patron aids the characters, guiding them in each quest. He only asks in return that the characters help smuggle him off the planet, suggesting that the sensor responsible for the wreck wasn't setup to detect intruders, but rather to keep him imprisoned on the planet.

Interesting. Is there any connection between one character's mission and the 'patron'.

[krusader74]

Jan 19, 2014 12:19:07 GMT -6 kent said:

Jan 19, 2014 5:25:41 GMT -6 krusader74 said:

Each character also has a secret identity and secret mission
...
A highly mysterious patron aids the characters, guiding them in each quest. He only asks in return that the characters help smuggle him off the planet, suggesting that the sensor responsible for the wreck wasn't setup to detect intruders, but rather to keep him imprisoned on the planet.

Interesting. Is there any connection between one character's mission and the 'patron'.

Each PC's background plus the clues I provide are meant to steer the player into believing he knows the true identity of the patron:

• The ship's skipper moonlights as a drug smuggler (secret identity). He was smuggling a large cargo of dimethyltryptamine on board the ship when it crashed (secret mission). The scenario is devised to give him reasons to believe that the party's experiences, including the patron, are nothing but a drug induced hallucination.
• One of the passengers is an industrialist who financed the experimental sensor responsible for the crash. He's hiding the fact that the sensor has another mode: that of a planetary defense shield. He'll be led to believe that the patron is a psyker, tricking him into revealing his industrial secrets.
• Another passenger is a singer and kabbalist (think Madonna). Because of the Millennial craze, Jews are once again being persecuted, and she's a crypto-Jew, hiding her faith from the public. She will have grounds to believe that the patron is Yah, the male aspect of God, now in exile, attempting to re-unite with His female aspect on earth, the Shekinah. She'll see the events as an allegory: The ship breaking apart is the Shevirat haKelim, the main compartment splashing down into a lake as Tivilah, the necessary work of repairing the ship as Tikkun olam, the return to earth as Teshuva.
• A Zhodani spy on board is secretly trying to learn about the industrialist's planetary defense system. He will believe that the patron and the weird experiences are the work of an anti-psi security firm hired by the industrialist.
• An anti-psi security agent hired by the industrialist will believe it's all a mind-trick of the Autochthones (indigenous species on Fomalhaut) who have psionic abilities and worship a god they call Cthugha.
• A science professor will believe the circumstances are due to quantum effects as explained in the plot sketch above. He will believe the patron is an Ancient, a master of quantum engineering.
• An engineer/mechanic passenger will believe his low berth is malfunctioning and this is all a near death experience.

My idea was that the crew/passengers are essentially Schrödinger's cats, existing partly in several possible states simultaneously (quantum superposition). So whatever conclusions the players make are all possible.

The sensor/defense shield is powered by the brainwaves of a creature the industrialist's scientists found on Fomalhaut. The creature was in a deep sleep and couldn't be awakened. The Delta waves emitted by the creature were very powerful and the scientists were able to harness them in order to make measurements of the total energy in a system very precisely. The patron may be some kind of mental projection of this creature.

When this creature awakes, the superposition of states will decohere in a thermodynamically irreversible way, and we will be left with only one Truth about what really happened. This is a life and death matter for the PCs. A bigger question is whether the PCs can figure out a way to influence the creature to produce a wave function collapse favorable to themselves...

[Falconer]

Jan 19, 2014 5:25:41 GMT -6 krusader74 said:

Traveller is part of my "holy trinity" of rpgs, along with D&D and Call of Cthulhu.

Yeah, I once had a thread at K&K asking what people’s “Big Three” RPGs were, and the clear favorites that emerged were D&D, CoC, and Trav, in that order, with RQ in 4th place.

[kent]

Jan 20, 2014 7:16:20 GMT -6 krusader74 said:

Jan 19, 2014 12:19:07 GMT -6 kent said:

Interesting. Is there any connection between one character's mission and the 'patron'.

Each PC's background plus the clues I provide are meant to steer the player into believing he knows the true identity of the patron:

Sounds like a Philip K Dick novel. The chance, however, of finding the right sort of players to discover if the premise is worthwhile or fruitful is nil, unless they are your own friends and you have trained them up as players. These are the only good kind of players IME.

I think because the scenario options are such scientific hogwash it would be just as suitable for a high level AD&D game, 8th-10th levels.

[krusader74]

Jan 21, 2014 3:33:51 GMT -6 kent said:

Sounds like a Philip K Dick novel.

Divine Invasion, Ubik, Man in the High Castle, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch were all in mind while plotting this scenario. The singer/kabbalist PC carries a copy of Divine Invasion with her.

Jan 21, 2014 3:33:51 GMT -6 kent said:

The chance, however, of finding the right sort of players to discover if the premise is worthwhile or fruitful is nil, unless they are your own friends and you have trained them up as players. These are the only good kind of players IME.

Location-based scenarios seem to be the norm. I successfully ran an event-driven Call of Cthulhu scenario once. But I never tried a character-oriented scenario. The players would need to be committed to role-playing, skilled at improv, literate, social, and imaginative. And not simply interested in rolling dice, killing monsters, gathering treasure, and gaining levels.

Jan 21, 2014 3:33:51 GMT -6 kent said:

I think because the scenario options are such scientific hogwash

Solving the measurement problem or writing a Ph.D. thesis on controlling quantum information wasn't the goal. The aim was just a plausible sci-fi scenario. There's a big difference between plausibility and being "right" in relation to reality. In physics and chemistry, we initially get told this very plausible story about the temperature of a system:

• It's the average kinetic energy of the microscopic particles in the system: T = 2 K / (3 N k_B) where T is temp, K is kinetic energy, N is the number of particles, and k_B is the Boltzmann constant.
• It can't fall below absolute zero on the Kelvin scale.

These postulates are understandable, they're believable, and they're valuable in solving a lot of problems. But they're also hogwash. Anyone who studies physics long enough will get another formulation of temperature when they study thermodynamics:

T = dQ / dS where T is temp, Q is heat energy and S is entropy.

This relationship allows for negative temperatures (below absolute zero), a phenomenon observed in strong magnetic fields, lasers and black holes. This formulation has a greater scope, but at the cost of being more difficult to understand, accept, or apply.

When engineers build something, they invariably use an approximation of pi. So their calculations are hogwash. But it works (most of the time). And when modern mathematicians treat infinity as a completed whole, they're fooling themselves, and it results in hogwash like 1+2+3+...=-1/12, proved legitimately by analytic continuation of the zeta function or by Rumanujan summation (rather than the invalid proof featured on Slate last week).

So I'm not sure what's wrong with having some hogwash in science fiction or roleplaying, when we get it in science, engineering and math.

We could argue over details like whether a macroscopic object consisting of as many particles as a cat or a person or a planet could exist in a quantum superposition state, as I assume they could in this scenario. But there's no arguing that researchers have already put a small but macroscopic cryogenically-frozen tuning fork in such a state. And consciousness itself has recently been linked to warm quantum coherence.

So, whether or not its hogwash, it's still plausible. And it makes entertaining sci-fi.

On a more philosophical note, I find myself gravitating more to neo-pragmastism in my old age. I don't think formulas like T=dQ/dS represent things in reality in any relevant way. To be sure, there is a mind-independent reality. We just can't know it. It might be fun or profitable to think about. But it's ultimately a big waste of time arguing such-and-such a theory is "right" in relation to reality. A good theory will have some limited value in adapting to one's environment. But that's all. In short, all science is hogwash, but some of this hogwash is useful to us right now. And someday it will be superseded by slightly more useful hogwash. 

Jan 21, 2014 3:33:51 GMT -6 kent said:

it would be just as suitable for a high level AD&D game, 8th-10th levels.

Any chance you're alluding to "After the Storm" by Kopsiniss and Goshtigian? An AD&D module, 8th-10th levels, published in Dungeon Magazine #6, about a pirate and his ship, wrecked on some reefs in the bay.

I thought about doing "Splashdown" as a traditional location-based OD&D scenario or as an event-driven 1920's Call of Cthulhu adventure. Elements like spaceflight, other worlds, aliens, futuristic technology, paranormal abilities, and parallel worlds (or in this case, quantum coherence) certainly crop-up here-and-there in fantasy (D&D) and horror (CoC), but they're the norm in sci-fi, so Traveller seemed the most suitable choice.

[kent]

Jan 22, 2014 4:43:34 GMT -6 krusader74 said:

Jan 21, 2014 3:33:51 GMT -6 kent said:

I think because the scenario options are such scientific hogwash

Solving the measurement problem or writing a Ph.D. thesis on controlling quantum information wasn't the goal. The aim was just a plausible sci-fi scenario.
...
So I'm not sure what's wrong with having some hogwash in science fiction or roleplaying

You misunderstood my point - "I think because the scenario options are such scientific hogwash it would be just as suitable for a high level AD&D game". I took for granted the description 'scientific hogwash' was not debatable and was suggesting AD&D would provide a suitable vehicle for the scenario. I am familiar with themes of bending reality and confusing players with metaphysical problems which are enjoyable aspects of high level gaming for me. There is no clean distinction between fantasy and sci-fi but your scenario strikes me as a fantasy with a veil of science jargon for flavour. Just an observation.

[eris]

If someone wants to run a Traveller game here, I'll certainly play!