My regular group gets together in central London most Monday evenings to play RPGs. We wanted a change of pace after a fairly long run of D&D 5e and since it was past due for me to GM I pitched 'science fiction and space pirates' (with the Pirates of Drinax campaign from Mongoose in mind) to the group. This piqued enough interest that we agreed to run a session zero (actually it ended up being two session zeros since one player couldn't make it to the first one) to do some character creation, set the scene and maybe kick off an initial bit of action to get the ball rolling.
Veil's player had an ally to spare, so he spun up 'Leonora'4 - an Aslan trader in livestock - who Veil had dealt with in the past when she was on buying trips to Asim. We had a little bit of roleplay around convincing Leonora to come in on the deal and I ruled that this would give them an effective Broker-2 for any speculative trading they did while docked in Khusai, so then we broke out the trading rules to work out what they could get for the luxury goods they'd brought and how much they needed to pay for the purchase of 20 dtons of rare earths and 10 dtons of consumer electronics so that they weren't dead-heading on the way home. The PCs also took the opportunity to go shopping while they were in port - the Aslan of Khusai are a bit twitchy about helot rebellions, so they don't sell weapons to humans (even honorable, non-Helot offworlder humans) but they picked up some shiny new vacc suits and the like.
Having invested some time in establishing a half-way convincing paper trail, the players then returned to Drinax, offloaded their speculative cargo for a nice profit and sold their moody spare-parts to Captain Silvestral for 80 cents on the credit, clearing a tidy MCr2.24 of piratical profit.
There was some side-talk about us all playing live-action Elite at this stage in the proceedings and it was noted that recruiting an NPC with Broker skill to serve as Purser should be a high-priority task.
Having given the trading rules a bit of smoke-test we were done with the session, but I did have time to tease upcoming events - which will be an opportunity to test out the combat rules when the PCs are contracted by Chief Galx to defend a Vespexer settlement from Sunchaser raiders.
Backstage
He might look somewhat unlikely, but Brigadier Torquil Darling is probably the most book-legal character we produced during these sessions. The other three were originally done as we tried to get to grips with the Cepheus Engine and then converted across to MongTrave 2e, so it's entirely possible we got something wrong in the process (particularly as drink was being taken). Torquil was rolled up in front of the rest of us once we'd refamiliarised ourselves with the rules and is as far as I can tell entirely legit.
Two of these characters (Torquil and Semi) rolled up TAS membership during chargen, which doesn't really fit with the situation on Drinax. I've ruled that they have membership of a Drinaxi officer's club which comes with similar benefits, the high passage tickets will be 'strings pulled to hitch a ride on a Drinaxi vessel'. If they make it as far as Imperial space maybe they will discover that they have a reciprocal membership with the TAS.
In terms of how we played, this is all still training wheels time so I'm not pushing the PCs particularly hard. The prize they intercepted in Torpol system could have fought back for instance, but it was late and I wasn't across the space combat rules so I just ruled that the Floriaman showed its belly as soon as it was threatened. I have some backstory justifications for why they were so easy to knock off that may emerge later on, so I'll say no more on the subject here. Similarly they got a very generous price for their loot once they sold it to Port Captain Silvestral as I wanted to give them something for putting the effort in to setting up some provenance for their stolen gear. They won't be getting such rich paydays in future once they settle into the rhythm of the pirate's life.
I have some thoughts about money which will probably warrant a dedicated post at some point, but for now I'll just note that while we are using imperial credits as the currency of account in this game, the various systems of the Trojan Reach all have their own monetary systems and currencies which are only convertible at a substantial discount. We will be keeping track of the cash the PCs have on hand in each system and the players will soon discover that the most efficient way they can move wealth between different systems is as cargo.
Finally a note to self - print off the cargo tables from the core rules before we do any more trading. Reading them sideways on a tablet that keeps flipping between portrait and landscape orientation as you tilt the screen is a pain in the backside.
[1] I just coined this term as I was writing this. A 'Floriaman' is a large cargo vessel that works the Florian trade route - by analogy with 'Indiaman'.
[2] Even if we assume that Drinaxi society is extremely militarised they're not going to have more than a couple of thousand active duty personnel, which would be 5% of their population, with perhaps a similar number again of sepoys recruited from the larger population found on Asim. Given that this character got to rank 6 during chargen I thought it entirely reasonable that he was the top ranking marine in Drinaxi service.
[3] Semi should perhaps be renamed Milo Minderbinder.
[4] During the game, this character was 'Leo' and played as male but on reflection, given the gender roles in Aslan society, this character should be female.
The first question to answer was what rules to use - I had a hardcopy of the core rules for Mongoose Traveller 1e but having only one rule book at the table didn't seem practical to me (we're all about having PDFs on tablets these days), so I decided to try out the Cepheus Engine, the clean-room reimplementation of the Mongoose 1e rules done by Jason Kemp of Samardan Press.
We had a good time for the first part of the evening doing character creation, but we ran into enough niggles and head-scratching 'what does this mean?' moments during chargen that we decided that we weren't going to continue with the Cepheus Engine and instead we'd belay being cheapskates and spring for some Mongoose 2e PDFs.
To start with we had two characters worked out fairly quickly:
Semi Gonefar [UPP: 4CC996] (5 terms)
Key skills Mechanic and Melee (Blade) both at 2, plus a bunch of other skills at 1. A Vespexer from the surface, Semi joined up to get away from backward attitudes back home. As befits a veteran of the Survey (Drinaxi version of the scouts) he has use-right of a 100t ship, which I ruled wasn't jump-capable any more because the Drinaxi aren't in a position to be giving out starships to just anyone - but if he could get spares and some drydock time that can change.
'Lucky' Val [UPP: 28C8A5] (4 terms)
Key skill is Pilot (Spacecraft) 3 plus a bunch of other skills at 1. Val ends up as the XO on the ship (which is the traditional billet for a Harrier pilot) and is another Vespexer who finds the high-falutin' ways of many Drinaxi a bit hard to take. She was on a ship that misjumped into Aslan space once and had to hitch-hike back - since then she has had a thing for Aslan and was hooked up with Kaisyl for a while (perhaps she still is... it's complicated). She's got some enemies and allies that we'll need to fill in as the game progresses.
Since we had two characters who had some time in Survey, I framed an initial scene where these two were hired to crew Semi's ship for an in-system salvage job. This was to intercept a derelict Drinax Harrier which had been detected by astronomers of the Scholars Tower as it made its closest approach to Drinax Prime and was now headed back out into the black for another hundred years, do an initial survey of the wreck and then recover it back to Drinax highport for refit and/or cannibalisation.
This they did without too much trouble, although once they refueled the derelict and got basic systems running again they discovered that there was a VI (virtual intellect) hosted on the ship's computer that would only give them minimal access sufficient to return to port.
By the time we'd done that our third character had been finalised:
Veil [UPP:B78744 (Psi:C)] (4 terms)
Key skills are Telepath 2 (plus all the other psi talents at 1) and Melee (Blade) 2. Veil's player wanted a psiker (there's always one), so that's how we discovered that the Scholar's Tower are screening the population of Asim for psi talent and then training the prospects they find to become covert operatives for the crown. Veil is on the crew as Oleb's insurance policy against the chance that the other PC's decide that they like being pirate lords more than restoring Drinax to its rightful place in the stars.
With a third PC on deck we were in a good place to have a scene where King Oleb pitches his plan for raising hell across the Trojan Reach, building up Drinax through selective piracy-*ahem*-privateering and then refounding a pocket empire that will be powerful enough to cut a deal with whichever of the two major powers in the Reach decides to make their move first. This caused a bit of surprise amongst my players ("Wait, you mean we're going to be the space pirates in this campaign?") but everybody was game, so it was time for the repaired Harrier (re-christened Who's On Comms? - hence the title of this blog) to break orbit for a shakedown cruise.
With a third PC on deck we were in a good place to have a scene where King Oleb pitches his plan for raising hell across the Trojan Reach, building up Drinax through selective piracy-*ahem*-privateering and then refounding a pocket empire that will be powerful enough to cut a deal with whichever of the two major powers in the Reach decides to make their move first. This caused a bit of surprise amongst my players ("Wait, you mean we're going to be the space pirates in this campaign?") but everybody was game, so it was time for the repaired Harrier (re-christened Who's On Comms? - hence the title of this blog) to break orbit for a shakedown cruise.
Backstage - we didn't have our fourth player at this session, so we ruled that his character was going to be the Drinaxi aristo who was a blood relative to the ship's last commander and so had persuaded the ship's VI to grant the crew command access. I narrated that this character was present on the cruise, saying 'make it so' in the background whenever the players took a decision.
Cut to the PCs lurking in the outer reaches of Torpol system waiting for suitable prey and rolling up a heavy freighter with minimal morale on the encounter table - I ruled that this was a ship was Floriaman1 which had made an astrogation error and precipitated out of jump at the 100-diameter limit of one of the gas giants in the outer system and was boosting for the safety of the main world as quickly and quietly as possible.
The players made a stealthy intercept and gave the freighter a shot across the bows with their dorsal particle barbette, causing the prize to cut thrust immediately and jettison cargo modules unprompted, which non-plussed my players somewhat (they didn't know about the low morale score of course and had underestimated how intimidating a radiation weapon would be to a lightly shielded civilian vessel). Not satisfied with whatever rubbish might be in the spaced cargo canisters they instructed the prize to remain heaved-to and prepare to receive a boarding party. Veil and Semi went across to check cargo manifests and interrogate the prize's Fourth Officer along with a couple of extremely nervous deck hands. Being psychic, Veil quickly ascertained that the spaced cargo was a batch of jump-drive components and that the Deck Officer desperately didn't want them to ask about the mail they were carrying; so of course they broke into the mail store and carted off a couple of dtons of memory wafers and solid-state storage.
By now Val on the bridge of the Who's On Comms? could see that a ship had broken orbit from Torpol Highport and was thrusting hard enough to be in the vicinity of their little heist in half a day or so, so they bid farewell to their prize and spent the next few hours policing up the booty before jumping out for home.
That's where we left it for the first session zero, when we reconvened for our second session zero we had a fourth player to roll up the captain for our merry band:
Brigadier Torquil Darling (ret) [UPP: 265FFA] (8 terms)
Key skills are Gun Combat (Energy) 3 then Tactics (military), Survival and Medic all at 2 and a bunch of other skills at 1, but check out those mental stats - this guy is definitely the Hannibal Smith or Nathan Ford of the group. After an abortive stint in the naval component of the Star Guard, he found his niche in Station Security (the Drinaxi equivalent of the Marines) where he rose steadily to the point of being the C-in-C for the service2.
Clearly Torquil is an excellent candidate for running a long-term programme of economic warfare, alliance building and brigandage. The fact that he's a blood relative of the last commander of the Who's On Comms? is merely the pseudocherry on top of the cake as far as King Oleb is concerned.
After converting everyone's characters across to MongTrav 2e (and watching in awe as our new player ran Torquil through eight terms of prior service, only hitting an aging crisis on the last term) we reconvened the game and opened with the problem of how to fence the loot that they snagged last time sufficiently discreetly that Lord Wrax wouldn't feel obliged to stick his nose into the PC's affairs. High tech gear like starship spares tend to have lots of serial numbers and asset tags all over them (and indeed through them, woven into their molecular structure), so they couldn't just rock up to the repair docks at the highport and expect to get paid for their moody gear with no questions asked.
My players came up with a nicely convoluted plan to launder their swag - in short they approached the Port Captain with a hot prospect; they told him they had received word from a contact on Khusai that there was a consignment of jump-drive parts looking for a buyer but that they needed to move fast if they were to secure the deal. Could he front them some of the luxury gewgaws that are all over the Floating Palace which they could take to Khusai and sell to raise sufficient funds to purchase these goods? They would then make sure he was taken care of on the back end if he used his official budget to purchase the jump-drive components, which he could then use to recommission some of the hulls which were currently laid up in ordinary for lack of parts. It would be a win-win-win for him3.
Port Captain Silvestral was very taken with this idea and within 24 hours the PCs had several dtons of antique ophrim-wood paneling that had been stripped from the walls of the highport officer's mess and they were en route to Khusai - I took some time to have a scene where the PCs were boarded for a customs inspection as they were coming in to Khusai highport, just to emphasise that they were in a system run by the Aslan now. But other than their ship being an unusual model and heavily armed for a civvy (which didn't go unnoticed) they were carrying a legit cargo and had no criminal profile (as yet) so there wasn't any danger of serious grief.
Veil's player had an ally to spare, so he spun up 'Leonora'4 - an Aslan trader in livestock - who Veil had dealt with in the past when she was on buying trips to Asim. We had a little bit of roleplay around convincing Leonora to come in on the deal and I ruled that this would give them an effective Broker-2 for any speculative trading they did while docked in Khusai, so then we broke out the trading rules to work out what they could get for the luxury goods they'd brought and how much they needed to pay for the purchase of 20 dtons of rare earths and 10 dtons of consumer electronics so that they weren't dead-heading on the way home. The PCs also took the opportunity to go shopping while they were in port - the Aslan of Khusai are a bit twitchy about helot rebellions, so they don't sell weapons to humans (even honorable, non-Helot offworlder humans) but they picked up some shiny new vacc suits and the like.
Having invested some time in establishing a half-way convincing paper trail, the players then returned to Drinax, offloaded their speculative cargo for a nice profit and sold their moody spare-parts to Captain Silvestral for 80 cents on the credit, clearing a tidy MCr2.24 of piratical profit.
There was some side-talk about us all playing live-action Elite at this stage in the proceedings and it was noted that recruiting an NPC with Broker skill to serve as Purser should be a high-priority task.
Having given the trading rules a bit of smoke-test we were done with the session, but I did have time to tease upcoming events - which will be an opportunity to test out the combat rules when the PCs are contracted by Chief Galx to defend a Vespexer settlement from Sunchaser raiders.
Backstage
He might look somewhat unlikely, but Brigadier Torquil Darling is probably the most book-legal character we produced during these sessions. The other three were originally done as we tried to get to grips with the Cepheus Engine and then converted across to MongTrave 2e, so it's entirely possible we got something wrong in the process (particularly as drink was being taken). Torquil was rolled up in front of the rest of us once we'd refamiliarised ourselves with the rules and is as far as I can tell entirely legit.
Two of these characters (Torquil and Semi) rolled up TAS membership during chargen, which doesn't really fit with the situation on Drinax. I've ruled that they have membership of a Drinaxi officer's club which comes with similar benefits, the high passage tickets will be 'strings pulled to hitch a ride on a Drinaxi vessel'. If they make it as far as Imperial space maybe they will discover that they have a reciprocal membership with the TAS.
In terms of how we played, this is all still training wheels time so I'm not pushing the PCs particularly hard. The prize they intercepted in Torpol system could have fought back for instance, but it was late and I wasn't across the space combat rules so I just ruled that the Floriaman showed its belly as soon as it was threatened. I have some backstory justifications for why they were so easy to knock off that may emerge later on, so I'll say no more on the subject here. Similarly they got a very generous price for their loot once they sold it to Port Captain Silvestral as I wanted to give them something for putting the effort in to setting up some provenance for their stolen gear. They won't be getting such rich paydays in future once they settle into the rhythm of the pirate's life.
I have some thoughts about money which will probably warrant a dedicated post at some point, but for now I'll just note that while we are using imperial credits as the currency of account in this game, the various systems of the Trojan Reach all have their own monetary systems and currencies which are only convertible at a substantial discount. We will be keeping track of the cash the PCs have on hand in each system and the players will soon discover that the most efficient way they can move wealth between different systems is as cargo.
Finally a note to self - print off the cargo tables from the core rules before we do any more trading. Reading them sideways on a tablet that keeps flipping between portrait and landscape orientation as you tilt the screen is a pain in the backside.
[1] I just coined this term as I was writing this. A 'Floriaman' is a large cargo vessel that works the Florian trade route - by analogy with 'Indiaman'.
[2] Even if we assume that Drinaxi society is extremely militarised they're not going to have more than a couple of thousand active duty personnel, which would be 5% of their population, with perhaps a similar number again of sepoys recruited from the larger population found on Asim. Given that this character got to rank 6 during chargen I thought it entirely reasonable that he was the top ranking marine in Drinaxi service.
[3] Semi should perhaps be renamed Milo Minderbinder.
[4] During the game, this character was 'Leo' and played as male but on reflection, given the gender roles in Aslan society, this character should be female.
Thanks for the sessions so far, very enjoyable though it will take me a while to buy into the whole Traveller setting. I can see that it is still massively influenced by the science fiction at the first time of writing the rules (Foundation, Star Trek, Forbidden Planet) rather than the more recent extrapolations and I need to get into that retro vibe.
ReplyDeleteSome thoughts on Semi. He was born into the working class but picked out as a high achiever and set on a path to middle management, however an indifferent university outcome and a lust for adventure marked him out for a military career. Failing in his first choice he was drafted into Survey, where he was able to able to distinguish himself by surviving long months limping through the system on the ramshackle Drinaxi survey fleet.
The kind of fix anything gaffer tape mentality served him well when it came to finding a new career in the Merchant Navy however he had come to the service too late and whilst he flourished over the two terms he could see that there was no serious advancement to be had and he retired.
Semi is gay and with strong taboos amongst the clans of his Vespexi birthplace means that he has cut all ties with them and tried to build a new family in the floating courts of Drinax. He has a partner, another Vespexi expat who is a news anchor for a moderately high visibility channel and a set of close friends. They would not look favourably on his latest career choice so he is currently keeping it very secret.
Semi wears a diplo-vest under his carefully tailored wardrobe and carries the officers sabre that his rank permits. A casual observer will take the blade to be a flashy decorative piece but is has in fact an excellent provenance which a late addition basket disguises.