We were a bit thin on the ground gathering for Part XVII of The Traveller Adventure. With our Gvoudzon player feeling 3 years has been enough Traveller for him, we’ve lost our amateur thespian. To be fair, his other roles – acting, lighting and sound – for his drama group add up to quite a demanding effort three times a year. Lily, our archaeologist, has caring issues at home and has had to drop out too which is a shame as she’s been one of our most enthusiastic role players. I’ll probably write elsewhere about the little grief that such loss is. Meanwhile, our Captain had long known he couldn’t make the session. Come the day itself, our newest player – who’d taken on Pilot Kunal back at the end of Wolf at the Door – had a sick daughter and had to cry off. Although, on the upside, he’d so enthused about the whole experience in the presence of a new School of Computing member of staff that she may join us for subsequent sessions.
That left just J playing Fred our gun bunny, D playing Adma the medic, T playing Tess our engineer and myself. But that promised more facetime for everyone and I was reluctant to cancel on the night – despite the fact I was struggling with something of a bug that’s got into my chest. Not so much because of the preparation I’d done, but more because of the arrangements a couple of folk have to make to be there and for those that knew that this was most likely to be something of a key session. Difficult, difficult, difficult. But on we went. Oh, Adma’s player also took the Loyd character sheet to keep in mind and Fred was joined by Kunal. So two of my players were keeping an eye on a couple of characters so I didn’t have to remember everyone. I kept Lily and Gvoudzon in sight. Egon is still unconscious in his stateroom – more of which later.
In fact, it was a good session and lots of bits were resolved. After the raucous session in the pub before Christmas because the function room was in use, we were glad to be able to retreat to the quiet of upstairs once again. With drinks in hand and food orders soon on the way we gathered our thoughts and reminded each other that last time has seen the successful rescue of Lisa Fireau at the clifftop villa back on Aramanx. Lily had successfully blown the doors off (no prizes for guessing there were Michael Caine impressions), Gvoudzon had taken some serious injury, Kunal had done some ace piloting/gunnery. The crew had got in good with Fireau and Oberlindes – although having said that, Fireau wasn’t overly impressed that they’d not waited for his arrival. Still, as it had turned out well and he was being reunited with his daughter, it was hard for him to be really livid.
I’d made the decision in the intervening time to move them along to Junidy (from Aramanx) and conduct some trade in the off time between sessions. (You may recall that way back we tried doing some trade in the actual session and while they’d found it interesting enough once, no one felt it was fun enough they particularly wanted to make a feature of it. That may be my fault in somehow not making it engaging enough as a role playing experience rather than a roll playing thing.) This did cause a little more debate than I’d imagined about whether they wanted to undo that and play from Aramanx. I’d also Jumped them via an empty hex, then Feneteman and then another empty hex trying to replicate exactly the kinds of decisions they’d made previously. The rather risk averse engineer feeling empty hex Jumps were more likely to avoid trouble. So I was a tad surprised it was the engineer looking at other routes up to Junidy. I suspect that that was more to do with feeling a loss of agency however and that was a lesson to me. Meanwhile one of our newer players – not too used to Traveller – was looking at Zykoca and wondering just how bad it could be. Why not go that way just to see what’s there and why it’s Red Zoned? I managed to reel off a list of typical reasons the Imperium has for such zones and the others persuaded him it wasn’t a good idea. Still, it might have been interesting. Not that I had anything prepared.
To help them feel the 4+ weeks up to Junidy weren’t totally blank, I’d kept all my trade rolls from Aramanx and Feneteman and revealed the highlights and lowlights (the double 2s and double 6s for a start). This had Captain Loyd getting into a fight with a Low Berth passenger. In Loyd’s absence, everyone decided he’d got too handsy with a female who’d decked him which was totally in character. Meanwhile, looking for major freight Fred had been mistakenly accused of theft and spent the night in a cell.
[Rules Question: It’s not clear to me whether the MgT1/MgT2 trade rules require you to make the rolls for each type of passenger and each type of freight or whether one does for all?]
In addition to this, I had various news items. Using the opportunity of eliding over four or more weeks, I could begin to introduce the news items of Tradewar which we’re heading towards to get that kickstarted. I had a few other items as well as I usually try to mix it up with plot related news and other stuff to keep the players guessing. A bit. I suspect that for any alert player paying attention the styles of the items and/or where I’m reading them from ought to make it pretty obvious what’s ‘real’ and what’s filler. (On Feneteman they heard that there might be a new application of lanthanum in battery tech to extend their life and on Junidy a woman was accused of burning her husband to death after taking out an insurance policy on him; along with the XIIIth iteration of an art and cultural exchange between Dandies and humans which was getting good reviews.) I don’t lose too much sleep over it though. We go long enough between sessions that if they remember anything at all I feel I’m doing well. In actual fact, although I’ve long done this, p.110 of TTA (p.116 of A:TTA) says “they should be interwoven with other events (and should not, at first, be accorded any particular special significance). The Referee may wish to add to these reports, with stories of other incidents.” It is possible I learned the technique from reading this many years ago, although I kind of feel it’s ‘obvious’ as well.
[Rules Question: Has anyone bothered with the Plotting Communications section of Tradewar? This seems a massively complex way of saying, very very roughly, messages will propagate out from their origin world a little bit slower than a parsec a week. Or am I missing something? I dutifully worked out transit times for the messages until my head span and I was well ahead of anything the PCs were likely to get to in an evening’s play, but I can’t help feeling a simple parsec count would give me the weeks until the message arrived as a ‘close enough’ rule of thumb? Anyone able to tell me what the advantage of the book system is?]
There was also news from much further afield, District 268, that caught Fred’s attention – a follow up to the story last time about Stinford Glass being mobbed and tried for killing his girlfriend psionically (See _See How They Run_ if you’re interested in the detail of this). Now, Fred was hearing, there were protestors with placards saying “stupidity is not a crime” etc. This was to a) remind them about psionics and b) try to get a separation in player/PC thinking about intelligence/education and psionics. A previous attempt to examine Egon medically on a TL C world had done lots of physical tests and drawn a blank; lots of mental tests and drawn a blank; but despite the odd reaction of two local doctors, hadn’t gone ‘further’ to consider psionics. Which at the time, I just let be. (At the time, Adma had complained that as a fellow professional, the two doctors would include him in their deliberations. At the time I just had to shrug and say ‘that’s how they treat you’, but it was nice this evening to be able to explain to Adma’s player, at least, that of course they didn’t know him from Adam and would be very reluctant to talk about psionics in front of him or with him.)
I also prepared a ‘thing’ for each player who’d come (there didn’t seem much point in doing them for those that weren’t there!). For Tess the engineer I had another d666 event from the (non-Traveller) What’s Wrong with the Ship series of six d66 tables. This time it was a ‘forward starboard airlock decontamination system is flooding intermittently’ which gave her something to fix and gave everyone a worry about what liquid exactly was flooding. I also gave her a note saying that she’d found herself sitting on the toilet roll sofa (it’s a long story if you’ve not been following these write ups) in engineering, not quite aware of the last few minutes/hours. (Her choice whether she revealed this to the others). Fred was expected to put in extra stewarding as the only High Passenger they found at Feneteman was Llinos, the Llellewyloly (or Dandelion) with the fabulous hat they’d previously had to turn down for passage because they were going the other way. I still thought she might be a nice way of introducing the PCs to their next stop. I decided it wasn’t totally unreasonable that she was still heading that way and that they could run into each other again. Fred’s stewarding wasn’t going that well, however, and getting other PCs to help out with task chains actually made things worse. So by the time they’d arrived at Junidy there were definitely complaints about the food being put in and Fred was off to buy some ready meals as a ‘cheat’ (more of which later). I publically told Adma that Fred had been found a bit dazed in the crew lounge not quite aware of last few minutes. Adma’s ‘thing’ was a reminder they were healing more quickly than expected – Loyd after being knocked to the deck by the low passenger, Fred after cutting himself accidentally. But Adma was also reminded about Egon being unconscious and that these additional ‘brown outs’ looked suspiciously similar in his view and seemed to have no other physical cause.
Anyway, that was a catch up and our teaser for the night’s episode…
Our food server was a bit mystified by the whole thing. And I’m not sure that that improved as four of us jointly tried to explain to him what was going on. World maps of Feneteman (just to show that a map doesn’t always mean that something’s afoot!) and Junidy didn’t seem to help. He backed out as quickly and cautiously as he could…
… and so, at last from my point of view, we were onto The Psionics Institute. And I can talk about it. It’s been hanging over me for nigh on three years now! It felt like a huge weight lifted from my shoulders. It’s been a low level stress for a long time. Although just before we get there, if anyone’s actually tracking this, you’ll know that it should have been a chapter or two ago and we’re not quite going in order. This is because, after Wolf at the Door, Captain Loyd – for reasons best known to himself – decided to take a medical cargo back to Zila and forgo passengers and more cargo waiting to go coreward in the sector. Anyway, that meant that we tackled Zilan Wine before hunting down the Psi Institute. Not sure it mattered really although it might have done if they’d been declining more quickly.
I’m well aware that some Referees consider the whole anola and intelligence degradation due to their psionic ability a large flaw in The Traveller Adventure. I vividly recall one Referee who was contemplating running it at TravCon a while back saying, “yeah, but I’d cut out those b!**£% anolas”. I kind of see where they’re coming from although perhaps I’m a bit more sanguine about the whole idea. I mean we readily take Jump, anti-grav, AI, etc, etc – and even psionics themselves – pretty much for granted and this doesn’t seem such a stretch for science fiction. But perhaps it’s more the role-playing problems…. Anyway. You may recall that one of my goals has been to run TTA pretty much ‘by the book’ although I’ve not been a slave to it. I’m happy to go off piste, happy for PCs to make their own decisions, but nor was I particularly going to toss stuff out just because it was difficult (witness the Zilan bureaucracy for example).
If you’re really been paying attention you’ll be aware of two features of our particular version of TTA. Way back in episode I, when Egon was still being played by Denise who had to leave us soon after, he was being played as quite an animal lover. One of the reasons, I think, that there was a crew outing to Escanil Park back on Aramis. He’d tried to buy a creature from the park following that little tour but either there was nothing suitable as a pet or nothing the park was willing to let go of. All was not lost however, as Fred had discovered an infestation of squeedles in the galley and instead of killing them, Egon had persuaded the crew to allow him to keep those as pets. Tess, our worldlywise long time Traveller player, as engineer, had insisted on building the most secure terrarium for them you’ve ever seen. [Meta background: Fred’s player Jane had actually knitted some squeedles at lunchbreaks in the Library so we could see them – six inch long carrot shaped worm like things. There may be photos. Brand new to Traveller she’d for some reason been taken with the idea of inventing her own animal. I was quite happy to fit them in.] Egon initially cared for them and eventually, when he was incapacitated, Fred took over responsibility for their feed and care down in a quiet corner of engineering. EVERY SINGLE EPISODE since then, I’ve been sure to make sure they got a mention although generally I didn’t have to worry about forcing that because Jane took a motherly interest in them channelled through Fred.
Why did I not want to lose track of them? You may have guessed months back.
Because when we got, a few months later to Pysadi and did the whole thing with chopping down the howood trees, encountering the anolas, getting tied up with the church, rescuing Loyd who’d been taken ‘hostage’ etc, it was unanimously agreed that the anolas were NOT coming with them. Now, I’ve long been promised by my only Traveller familiar player and by Jane who in a fit of enthusiasm bought a copy of Aramis: The Traveller Adventure when we started out on the campaign that neither of them know the plot, or are reading ahead of the game, or in any way want to spoil it for themselves. And I do believe them. But there’s always the chance that something ‘leaked’ through. Intentionally or not. Particularly as Fred so took against the anolas pretty much from the get go when everyone else was cooing over them. Personally, I just blame myself for not sufficiently emphasising the comfort and pleasure the PCs are supposed to get from them. It’s difficult. Anyway, I resisted the temptation of somehow forcing their hand with regard to the anolas and whether or not the players rather than the characters knew anything about them, I let them leave them behind.
But of course, in the months following that episode, it occurred to me that I had an easy solution… just give the psionic powers to the squeedles; albeit in a much more understated way as they aren’t quite so ‘all over’ the PCs.
Now I should say that I spent a loooong time considering this. Should I just toss out that whole aspect of The Traveller Adventure and accept the anolas weren’t going to be a part of it, therefore the psionic bit wasn’t? Was this fair on the players? Did it ‘work’ in the game? The most frustrating thing was that I couldn’t really ask anyone. I didn’t even dare mention it here on TML just in case it’s being read by any of my players as I did think that it would be a great secret if I did go ahead.
Eventually I decided to go with it, made the rolls for the intelligence loss and was intrigued that completely at random Egon was going to get hit every month – meaning he’d deteriorate first and fastest. By this time, he was an NPC. And he’s caring for the squeedles. So it seemed perfect. In for a penny… Anyway, for those of you reading that hadn’t guessed months back, that’s why he’s been comatose for a couple of episodes or more. And why the others are beginning to show similar symptoms – particularly Fred.
My slow build-up of a problem however really needed to come to a head in this session and that seems to have worked brilliantly. Adma was definitely back on the case of finding a cause – especially now that they were back at a high tech world. Because – a couple of sessions back – I’d deliberately asked everyone where they kept their howood carvings (given them as a gift at the Baraatsu homestead on Pysdadi), there was a fair bit of suspicion around that. Could the howood somehow be influencing them? Interestingly, they were also suspicious of the anolas still because they remembered the weirdness of the religious lot and the whole connection with howood. So they were running library searches on howood, anolas and then finally someone mentioned psionics and they were making that connection and running a search on that which allows the Psionics Institute chapter to get kickstarted and presents all their options. [Bit of an info dump which I couldn’t see a way around. Did consider actually trying to write the Report of the commission but I couldn’t face it as it’s long and I’m not sure what it would have added.]
And from there on, it ran pretty much as per the book. With three wrinkles. Firstly, I thought it might be fun to have customs board the March Harrier and do their usual checks but then want to know about what clothing the PCs might have with logos or visible trademarks that they were likely to be wearing during their stay. Immediate paranoia and caution from the more experienced players; less so from the naively enthusiastic Captain. Eventually, under questioning, Kunal I think it was admitted to having a shirt with a company name on it or some such and the players began hearing “Cr100” as a fee. Tess listened again and did a double take. “Did you say, they’ll *pay* Cr100?” “Yes,” says customs agent. “Why wouldn’t companies be expected to contribute something if you’re carrying advertising for them? Cr100 for a small logo or trademarked name. Cr500 for something larger.” [Ref note: I think these were the figures. It might be they were ten times lower, I’ll need to check my notes. Not quite sure how this would pan out economically for a populous world like Junidy. But hey ho, it seemed like a good idea at the time!] Anyway, this renewed an interest in what they might have on their clothing although Gvoudzon’s capes were deemed to be customised and special and probably not carrying logoes. Fred’s garments were mostly from his sister’s fashionwear and again not branded. But the Captain was held to have stuff with logos as was Kunal (and probably Egon although he wouldn’t count). My logic was that the government (it’s quite high law level on Junidy) might insist that corporations – planetary and larger ones – would pay into a fund that covered this kind of thing and perhaps use standard surveillance cameras to monitor actual wearing of declared clothing or some such. I’m not sure I’ve thought it through in great detail but it might well mean that there is a *lot* of ‘personal advertising’ going on like this. And sponsored social media output and the like. It might be hard to find any actual information in amongst all the ‘noise’. Anyway, it was fun messing with the players’ expectations and those present were definitely up for inflicting that scene on the other players if they’re hopefully back for next time.
Secondly, they immediately fixated on the psychology department of Junidy Uni being the best prospect for a Psi Institute and thus skipped my preparation for the other three possibilities: the ice cap, the islands (where Llinos was going to come in) and the mountain retreat. Ah well. I was tired, poorly and they seemed keen to get on – even though we had plenty of time.
Thirdly, without the anolas in tow, I had the psi folk looking into possible causes for the psi damage ask the crew about environmental issues. Shuffling of feet and mutterings about howood, but no one can come up with anything else. Eventually the psions conduct a search of the March Harrier whereupon they come across the squeedles and make the connection. The players and the crew are rather taken aback. That’s it… they’re out of here… no chance of keeping them on the ship any longer.
Which is perhaps unfortunate, as I’d been keeping another secret. I had decided way back, perhaps completely naively in my newbie referee skill levels, that perhaps it would be fairer on the PCs if the anolas/squeedles weren’t completely negative. I decided they also allowed healing at double rate which a) given the pickle the crew were getting into at the time in Wolf at the Door seemed wise and b) didn’t seem overly generous, but also gave a further clue that something was ‘afoot’ – which has worked well. So, immediately the squeedles are removed and the psi folk are warning the PCs that it may take a little time to fully recover the mental degradation, the crew are also being hit by aches and pains they’ve not had for a bit and ghost pains from past injuries – particularly Gvoudzon, hurt quite badly back on Aramanx.
I’d been prepared for them to come up with a scheme whereby they’d get the best of both worlds – protection from the mental but still benefit from the healing. But it wasn’t even discussed as a possibility. No worries; that’s their call and I’ll let them run with it.
I don’t know that there’s much else to add. Once again sickness perhaps prevented me from being on top form and I can’t help feeling I could have handled the discovery of the psi institute with a bit more mystery and player action. The session might have been quite flat – like rescuing the prospector back in the Patinir belt when I was also unwell – except that we got to such major revelations and also some metadiscussion about the whole decision making process as I’d decided whether to bother with the anolas/psi deegredation at all, that it was quite an interesting debrief. I’m not too sure how that will play out for those who weren’t there as presumably we’ll need to go through some of that again next time as a catch up. I’m also wondering if was *so* climatic that it couldn’t have functioned as an end to the entire campaign. Will the remaining chapters be something of a let-down or an anti-climax? Or will the ongoing undercurrent of Tukera being ‘behind things’ which I think they’re beginning to piece together, be enough to ramp that up once again and provide a suitable denouement? Once again, these are the kind of things I think I can only learn by playing through the adventure. Even now it’s quite hard to read chapters ahead of where we are and really see how they will play out in terms of the player actions and the feel of it.