Hi everyone

I've been a bit remiss in getting this posted.  I'd written 95% of it and then went on holiday for a week (no time and less wifi) and then was busy picking up the pieces after that time away from work and then got sick which I'm only just getting over now really.

However, I've had a day off today and it's been #1 on my to do list.  So here, it is.  I didn't actually think anyone would notice but as I've actually had a query today as to whether I had posted it or not, I should say thank you for the interest.

For those who've not been following along, this is the 18th session of The Traveller Adventure I've been running in a Portsmouth pub for various work colleagues (and A.N.Other) every other month.

As ever it's a bit rough and ready and may not make much sense, but if I spend any longer on it, you'll never get it.

Hope you enjoy it

tc

TTA XVIII

Our 18^th evening in a Portsmouth pub playing The Traveller Adventure.  Well, it depends how you count.  I’ve written previously about how I added a session on Carsten when we got there and by popular demand of the players when, at the end of the first evening, I announced we’d be moving on, added a second evening because they so wanted to visit the mine tour I’d told them was being advertised.  These two sessions became Two Days on Carsten which has some fun scenes and one of my favourite NPCs.

 

Aside from that, we’ve stuck to the book although some chapters have taken us more than one evening.  Leedor on Aramis took us three, Pysadi took us three, Wolf at the Door took four.  But we’re new to it all and sometimes just enjoy living in the setting rather than necessarily only working through the text.

 

Anyway, last time we’d started on some of the news reports that kick off the Tradewar chapter and worked through The Psionic Institute chapter – fairly rapidly for us!  (Yes, we took that last chapter out of order because the Captain chose to chase off after an unlikely cargo which led into Zilan Wine before we’d dealt with the psionics issue.  But it doesn’t really affect things; maybe Egon was in worse shape mentally than he might have been otherwise.  By now I was playing him as comatose in his stateroom.  Following the evening with the psionic institute the PCs (and the players) now know that the mental difficulties, which have seriously affected Egon and were beginning to affect others, were caused by the squeedles picked up in our very first session rather than the anolas which we’d left behind on Pysadi.  We did revisit the debate about maybe keeping the squeedles for their healing properties (see my last report) and working out a way of protecting the characters against their debilitating Intelligence effects.  But over medic Adma’s protestations, offered rather briefly at the end of last session, he was again over-ruled.  Tess was rather of the opinion that it would over her dead body.

 

Captain Loyd, or more strictly his player, hadn’t been with us for the last session, so we used the pre-meal time to catch him up on the events of last time and tell him about the whole psionics deal.  The roll he was to make regarding his psionic potential was getting bigged up and the bigged up again and finally the moment came in the catch up for him to make his roll.  And the food arrived…

 

In the end, he was old enough (with a -6 DM) that his psi score was as disappointing as everyone else’s save the engineer.  But we may return to that.  They’d decided it wasn’t worth stopping for ‘training’ and that they’d continue with the merchanting.

 

We had hoped a new player would be joining us after one of our departing players had enthused to her so much.  Mostly thanks to that and wanting to give her an ‘introductory’ session rather than throw her in at the deep end of the multipart plot of The Traveller Adventure, and partly because I’m still not confident about space combat, I’d made the decision to write another side adventure rather than get straight into Tradewar.  The latter requires a bit of time to pass in any case.  Also, the characters have been cooped up in the ship for quite a while making various Jumps so I thought it would be good to get out in the fresh air for a bit.  Or at least what passes for fresh air on Junidy which has a very thin atmosphere.  It always seems a shame not to spend a bit of time on a world; racing onto the next without even stopping to pick the dandelions; sorry, tick the Dandelions off a bucket list of races to meet.  Finally, I’d come up with an NPC passenger called Llinos who had been turned down as a passenger way back (when the Captain made the odd cargo choice) and had been taken on as a passenger subsequently as they jumped to Junidy, but there’d been little interaction with her, so I’d thought it might be fun to write something about her back on her homeworld.

 

Llinos you may recall is a Llellewyloly, or Dandelion.  By the time I’d named her – obviously taking inspiration from the race name – she just had to speak with a Welsh accent.  To give her a bit of character the PCs already knew she wears fabulous hats.  Now she’s back on Junidy – having given up on her dreams of striking it rich mining lanthanum back on Feneteman – she wants the PCs’ help.

 

Having drawn a world map for Junidy (I don’t think there’s anything official or out there on the web), and having noticed that several of the PCs have seafaring skill as a background skill, I thought it might be fun to have something of a maritime adventure.  We’ve not done anything like that before so that would be a change of pace as well.  Plus, I could draw on various bits of two years at sea myself to give some verisimilitude to my imagined descriptions.  Slowly a plan formed to have Llinos need a ship’s crew to help her fulfil a cargo contract out in the eastern islands. She’s turned the lanthanum stake and gear she’s sold off into a the price of a high tech sailing ship that’s the envy of all the other Dandies.  The crew of Dandelions she was expecting to rely on had got to the quarter final stage of a singing competition.  Rather unexpectedly.  The March Harrier crew, she knew from a week in Jump space with them, had some nautical skills, and what’s more hadn’t made any disparaging remarks about Dandies in the entire time she’d known them.  Well, not to her face anyway.  She was offering the standard ship crew salaries for a month for five days work – two days out, a day making deliveries amongst some very small islands, and a couple of days back.  Paying that much wouldn’t give her any profit but at least she’d keep her contracts.  Besides the PCs might well pick up trade goods at much better prices than in the starport.

 

I was fully prepared for the players to not bite at this and we’d press on to the events of Tradewar however unprepared I felt, but they were happy enough to go along with it.  Ironically, our new player was a no show.  I’m hoping she might yet come next time.  As ever, our ever risk averse engineer chose to stay on the ship and act as emergency rescue in case things go wrong.  Not to mention wanting to do a stem to stern examination of the starship in the aftermath of getting rid of the squeedles to the psionic institute.  In a private conversation on the way to the bar to refresh drinks I did check that she knew that this was where the adventure was and that she might be left out if she didn’t join in.  But we’ve been here before and with good comms to keep her involved and my handy list of What’s Wrong With the Ship tables of problems, there’d be plenty to keep her occupied.

 

My other fear was the perennial problem of why not just fly the March Harrier over to the destination with the cargo aboard?  There’s only so many times you can run the Pysadi solution of ‘the law doesn’t allow it’.  I had a couple of solutions, neither of them totally adequate: the non-charismatic dictatorship of humans running the planet discourage flaunting their higher tech levels in front of the TL3 Dandies; and secondly the destination islands are very small and basically just rocky outcrops, so there’s nowhere to land.  Yes, you could probably ‘land’ the March Harrier just off shore in a grav assisted hover while you unloaded onto small local boats, but where’s the fun in that.

 

It did come up, but my first excuse was sufficient and the players seemed happy to buy into the scenario.  I can imagine other groups might have other ideas.  (My other back up plan was to allow the ‘inshore unloading’ with the Harrier but then have the adventure happen in some inter-island segment on board the sailing ship which might have worked).

 

So, off the crew went to a spaceport with a maritime port where Llinos’ ship The Astrid was berthed.  They met in a chandlery which I’d been having ideas about for a couple of months as a possible ‘locale’ where adventures could start.  Based on a local treasure trove of a shop near where I live.  My idea was that this would be where they’d encounter rumours and news items as well as having a chance to tool up.  (I did have some local bars as well although they never even needed to hit them!  The Duke of Regina’s Head seemed to cause some mirth from those with minds that think like that.  Although I really finished them off by saying, as the food arrived, that I needed to clear my junk off the table.  No really, I have books and papers and folders and dice and more books…  Ah well.

 

I offered lots of rumours as they overheard snatches of conversation in the aisles and so on.  Mainly so I could drop in a couple of crucial ones: One about sea monsters being spotted and one about metal dolphins.  Of course, it didn’t take much for the players to pick those out and start focussing on krakens and a general fear of that kind of thing.  Awwww.  Not even a couple of dozen sessions and I’ve taken newbie players and turned them into typically paranoid Travellers!

 

Oh, and as well as the rumours, a news item I put in there.  Junidy has finally been upgraded into the Imperial charts as TL11 (from TL9).  This was my easy way of dealing with the discrepancy in tech level between the classic Traveller version of TTA and the current data for the world.  Not that the players really noticed or cared.  It made me happy and gave a little detail that felt real.  Along with my picture of a Llellywyloly (courtesy of the lovely colour creation on the Traveller wiki – although we had to imagine a hat), I also had a picture of a high tech sailing ship (well TL 9 or so at least).  That seemed to get them in a nautical frame of mind.

 

The chandlery, of course, I had to call Bing’s.  Although only one of my players got the reference and that took about ten minutes so it was quite funny watching the light slowly dawn on her face as she twigged and asked if there was a coffee shop next door.  We decided there was.  The Ventral Port or some such said I trying to riff on Central Perk.  The Blowhole seemed to be preferred however as they were still full of monsters and whaling etc (thanks to the ship picture) and the cruder minds liked the slightly rude connotation after all the merriment regarding the Duke of Regina’s Head.

 

As for tooling up, this is always interesting.  Not helped by two mistakes.  I gave our newest player an equipment list from the Core Rulebook.  Well, I thought I had.  After a few minutes of looking at it with increasing puzzlement he returned it as useless.  I then realized I’d given him an equipment list from the Dilettante’s supplement.  Which for these purposes is indeed useless.  Once he had the right thing, he was drawn by a sonic stun gun.  Which was a relief, because I’d implied that a large store behind two locked doors at the back of the chandlery had pretty much any weapon they could want.  Forgetting that Junidy is law level D.  Well, I came up with a couple of answers to that – firstly Llinos was familiar with getting licences by virtue of being a native and secondly, as they were heading out to the relative ‘wilds’ of Dandelion country, the government might be much less willing to care very much what weapons got taken out there.  In actual fact the players didn’t abuse the opportunity (though I could have lived with them doing so) and after discussing a deck mounted harpoon gun for Fred’s heavy weapon skill, instead armed themselves with fishing gear, a new cheese grater for the March Harrier, and the aforementioned sonic stun gun.

 

Finally, they were climbing aboard and sailing out of port.  I had a couple more pictures for them.  A lovely research vessel at anchor with a KuTera logo on the side which I’d knocked up a few minutes before leaving work for the pub.  Something off the internet with my words stuck over the top in the correct colour.  Looked nice.  The only snag is that it will have to be redone if I ever publish the adventure.  No one spotted the KuTera word clue, which I’d deliberately made sure they’d seen written down, but they may do yet and fans of TTA may be ahead of me.  But they learned (or knew) that it was a smallish company doing bioresearch into the transport possibilities of the large whale-like sea creatures that rumours had mentioned as chagic whose hunting season started soon.  They also saw its logo.

 

One thing I hadn’t realized as I sketched out ideas on a day off the day before and the bus the following morning, was the of the three PCs that have seafaring skill, none of them were actually present for the evening.  I toyed with various options but in the end just reassigned the skills to the three players with PCs on the sailing ship (ie. all but the engineer who’d stayed behind).  The easiest ‘explanation’ could be that the skilled characters were each assigned an unskilled one to buddy through some basic training.  In a further effort to encourage ‘getting off the starship’ those three were also allowed to add one point to either strength or endurance for the restorative effects that the fresh air was having on them after getting rid of the squeedles.  Just temporarily for the next few days.  They seemed to like that and I didn’t get the objections I expected from the engineer who is our only experienced role player.

 

But with skills, go tasks, so I had them do ‘stuff’ on the way.  The Captain wanted to have a go at the helm and actually rolled well for once, so under Llinos’ supervision he took that on in between bouts of fishing which were much less successful.  (Llinos, naturally enough, in the winds on deck, has switched from her fabulous hats to fabulous fascinators which are more securely attached.)  Fred is testing out his culinary skills in the gimballed environment of the ship’s stove.  He’s determined to develop his Steward skill.   Fred’s player also gamely volunteered when Llinos noticed a gull had nested at the top of a mast while they’d been in port.  Someone had to go up and clear the bird and nest.  That gave us some fun climbing the mast and then a small battle with the gull protecting its eggs.  Soon the bird has been waved off and the nest and a couple of eggs were smashed on the deck below.  In the process however, Fred had picked up a couple of injuries which down on deck Adma could deal with once he’d used the sonic stun gun to shoot the now rather angry mother right over Fred’s head.  I held my tongue while one player rather obsessively worked out the angles, the distances, and how much clearance there was above poor Fred’s head… <sigh>

Now somehow, in the melee of the recap earlier and the discussion about whether they were going to keep the squeedles or not, and then food arriving, I’d managed to miss the fact that Adma’s player had decided his character had secreted a squeedle in one of his pockets.  All the players had cottoned on to this, but none of their characters had.  Nor had I.  So it worked out quite well that I was inflicting some cuts and gull damage on Fred because his player could note that Fred was healing more quickly and give player an excuse to ‘notice’ the squeedle.  We made this an opposed roll with Adma’s Deception skill and it was a dead heat so for the moment that’s unresolved.

 

Then it was on to the meat of the adventure and I won’t write about that in that much detail as I might save it for TravCon next year and perhaps a future publication.  Briefly, they ran into a half sunk shipping container (and have yet to find out what’s in it which we’ll deal with next time – I’m trying to think of the most surreal or funny contents I can – any offers?), started sinking themselves and at that point were ‘attacked’ by a very large squid.  They’re just in the process of trying to attack the squid to deter its attack when a) an even bigger one appears behind it and b) they twig that the ‘baby’ squid is trying to save them by stopping the sailing vessel sinking.  It’s bitten off more than it can chew and mother is now helping out.  They limp into port and Llinos introduces them to the small Dandy community.

Now there were a couple of things that I was rather pleased with in this last part of the evening.  Firstly, it was quite fun messing with the trope of ‘sea monster’ and exactly what was going on.  I feared the worst for my baby squid but fortunately the PCs aren’t too gung-ho and looked into the things eyes.  Secondly, although I carefully cleared the pictures I’d shown them earlier in the evening off the table, for once they must have been paying attention.  I had a leathered old Dandelion fisherman (fisherdandy?) tell tales of a metal dolphin (no prizes for their immediate making this out to be a submarine of some sort), but he vaguely described the logo on the side of one he got close to and the connection was made.  I don’t think we’re the most subtle gaming group with regard to plot and clues and the like – partly because no one takes notes but mainly I suspect because our sessions are two months apart.

 

Anyway, the evening drew to and end, we’d reached a suitable climax of sorts where they’d pretty much done everything I had planned and ‘worked out’ much of what little plot I had.  So I was just going to wrap up with a few words about what was going on and move on to Trade War next time.  Oh no.  Just like back on Carsten there were cries to continue.  “There’s definitely something going on…”

 

It was good to hear that they were so engaged so now I’d better sit and write up some more complexity and a bit more plot so we can continue on the Astrid next time and see what develops.