TTA XXIX
And so, at last, to the meat of Tradewar – space combat! I say ‘at last’ because I’ve rather feared this section for some time now. Alright, feared is probably too strong a word. ‘Been apprehensive about’ might be nearer the mark. For the previous five sessions at least – and remember, that’s been over a year of real time – it’s been reasonably possible that we’d arrive at this juncture during the session at hand. Had the players/PCs made other choices and essentially skipped past the whole Yebab thing – which isn’t even the book, or even skipped past Annic Nova before that – which isn’t in the book, we’d have been here a lot sooner. Perhaps the last few sessions have been me trying to put off the fateful day! (Although the slowly learning Referee in me also notes that I like the players having the choice to do what they wanted rather than me driving it entirely.)
It’s not that I didn’t want to run it; you know me, I’m determined to see The Traveller Adventure through to the end. Though quite whether I’d have started if I’d known it would be as many years and as so many sessions is perhaps a good question. Good job I didn’t know. It’s more that I always struggle with combat. Partly because of all the rules (so I tend to reduce it as much as I can to ‘similar weapons/similar armour’ but mostly because, even when I’m playing and don’t have to know very much, tactically I’m very, very poor at having any clue as to what to do. (See particularly the TravCon report from a year or two back that included the section ‘Battle Royale’). In addition, it always seems to take an inordinate amount of time out of a game session (or even become the entire game session) for very little game time and very little role playing. And that’s personal combat. Space combat just seems to take that to the nth degree with even more details that need to be known. Not just ship details now, but crew details. And then missiles… don’t start me on missiles which don’t even act in the turn they’re used, but have to be tracked between turns! And it seems even slower; more like wading through treacle. Of course that’s probably my fault for not tackling it more often and for not knowing the rules like the back of my hand.
Now I know there are probably Referees who eat this kind of thing for breakfast and have streamlined it and manage it slickly; there must certainly be gamers who only do this and love miniature space ship battles. I know this. At boarding school, to pass rainy afternoons of free time on Sundays, I invented some very basic rules for space battles with hundreds of drawing pins (the only reasonable material we had lots of to hand) ranged out across desks pushed together. So it’s not like I’m not interested in this kind of thing. I just find it difficult in a Traveller role playing context.
I may not be alone. Thinking back across many years of TravCon I don’t actually recall very much ship combat, as opposed to personal combat, in any of the games I’ve played. Of course, that might be because I didn’t choose the ones where it was happening. But from what I recall it’s not been common, even briefly as if it were almost in passing. Perhaps there’s a reason for that.
I also wasn’t sure that my players would be that interested. It’s not like they’ve been clamouring for a bit more ship-to-ship action in the half decade we’ve been playing. Yes, that’s right. Come the beginning of February I happened to notice as I was preparing, we’ll be celebrating our five year anniversary for The Traveller Adventure! 30 sessions next time. Dead on an average of every other month.
All that is by way of admitting also that I’ve never actually run any ship combat anywhere as a Referee. Whether it’s just not come up or I’ve actively avoided it I’m not sure. But chalk one up to another bit of evidence I’m still a newbie Referee!
If The Traveller Adventure is good at one thing, however, it’s taking the Referee and players on a tour of Traveller rules and adventure opportunities. There’s a bit of everything: personal combat, ship combat; bureaucracy and secrecy; bar fights and tree felling (!); heists and rescues; wilderness and orbitals; encounters, animals, psionics. I like that about it. The variety and the exploration of different aspects. I think this is the main reason it’s considered so iconic.
So, inevitably, we come to ship combat and because I’d been aware that we might get to it for the last howevermany sessions, believe it or not I’ve done simulated combats of the ships involved (again, trying to keep it limited) before each session. Usually spending a couple of hours covering sheets of paper with turns and dice rolls as I try to work how it works, how to keep it streamlined and tight, how to keep it interesting for the players and not just a series of dice rolls. To that end I’d decided to go with the Mongoose 2nd Edition rules as they seem to offer more options for role-playing. You may recall that we started this campaign under 1st Edition rules and are now a bit betwixt and between as I thought the Trade rules were improved (I’m no longer quite so sure about this) and the little personal combat we’ve run I’ve done under 2nd Edition so I would have a clue for TravCon (although they’re not too much different). I like some of the skill revisions, but hate others (thinking that Science and some others are too broad and I’m not overly keen on the way so much gets lumped under ‘Electronics’). It’s not helped by one of my players having a certain antipathy to 2nd Edition and whenever the subject comes up telling me to junk it. I’m not unsympathetic to that view but feel committed to making the best of it that I can for writing and TravCon purposes. [1] Anyway, this choice was to have Consequences which I didn’t foresee. Also, despite all this practice, I still didn’t feel confident about the rules, still didn’t feel I really ‘got’ them, and still wasn’t sure I could make them fun. On the upside, I was relatively confident that the March Harrier was likely to survive the situation as I understood the set-up.
So, as usual we’re still virtual, and it’s Tess, Jane, Carl, Jim and myself via WebEx and a side order of Discord. We have Captain Loyd Kitman, Engineer Tess Davies, wannabe-steward Fred Squeaker and brand new on Sensors (and any required translation work) Ghazan Davidson. As NPCs we have pilot Kunal Dins, medic Adma Lewes, gunner Egon Trilby, archaeologist/explosives expert Lily Lee, Llellewyeloly stevedore Phlo and whoknowswhat Gvoudzon.
So fearful of the combat was I, that I decided, perhaps foolishly, that I’d warn the players I had struggled with this for several sessions and that they should feel free to let me know if they weren’t having fun and we could just skip on to the ‘next bit’. Of course, that was a mistake, there was an immediate discussion about whether they could stretch matters out so that we didn’t get to the combat in this session either! It would have been very easy as you’ll see below. I was actually very tempted…
Last time we’d got started with the TradeWar chapter. Leaving Yebab to try a very quick three Jumps up to Aramanx by carrying a cargo of water to refine between the 2nd and 3rd Jumps with no stopping. The idea was to meet Oberlindes as soon as possible, as his communique had requested. Oberlindes wasn’t there on the orbital station due to ongoing TradeWar attacks by Tukera, but Arrlanroughl took over a briefing of the players about the situation and whether they were willing to get involved. [This gave me a chance to display once again my little stamp sized sketch of Arrlanroughl doing the briefing which – given my complete inability to draw – I’d become rather fond of, basic though it is.] After some initial scepticism they’d decided they would get involved and Arrlanroughl explained The Plan. The March Harrier with a fake transponder would become ‘bait’ at a secret Tukera deep space rendezvous point Oberlindes Lines has fortuitously come across and together with a Patrol Cruiser and back up Free Trader. The three ships would attack passing Akerut freighters as they Jumped in to refuel, they would take the crews prisoner and assign skeleton crews to take the freighters off their hands. The Plan would work for about three weeks until Jump information caught up with Tukera and it would no longer be safe to remain at the deepspace refuelling point.
[I’ve possibly made this a little a bit clearer than I feel it is in the actual adventure text. For example, it’s not clear what’s supposed to become of quite a number of rather sizeable Akerut freighter crews (there’s some low berth capacity but not enough, there’s no clear areas – except for individual cabins – on the freighters that could be turned into secure areas, there’s not enough capacity on the three ships involved); it’s not clear why the Patrol Cruiser isn’t spotted along with the March Harrier and give the game away far too soon despite the March Harrier’s transponder; it’s not clear how quickly/likely the Akerut freighter captains were likely to surrender or fight on (I gave them a range of responses)].
One other thing we tackled before we started proper was some additional characteristics. Those who know the newish Traveller Companion – which I still have to correct from thinking should be ‘Referee’s Companion’ – will know that it suggests Luck, Morale and Sanity as possibilities. Now I could see a particular use for one of those at least in the situation we found ourselves in but rather than unsubtly suggesting rolls for just that, plus the chances of one 2D roll being a bit poor, I thought we could do all three. Allow the players to distribute three 2D rolls as they saw fit – giving a bit more room for manoeuvre in how they saw their character – and save the other ones for later should the need arise. Remembering that everyone but Tess had rolled really poorly for PSI I was even willing to toss that into the mix too. (We’ve not used them of course due to lack of training since they were established in the Psionics Institute chapter). Although as Jim pointed out – given all the PC ages – it wouldn’t really matter. Everyone bar Tess availed themselves of this. It will be interesting to see if it comes up in what we have remaining in TTA. But it’s possible we may go on afterwards.
I was persuaded, by someone with a lot more role playing experience than I have, that a better way of managing the rolls was to allow the three rolls but as 3D rolls and pick the best two. Hmmmm, even my limited statistical ability could see that that was a bit more generous, and who’s in charge here anyway?! But I went with it and we added those stats to character sheets. [Remind me to do the NPC rolls before next time.]
I did have a list of actions/questions for the PCs at this point, but managed to miss one of them. It came up later and we had to decide it at the time. It would have been better had we put it in here. Ah well.
So, there were a couple of weeks while Oberlindes Lines saw to the March Harrier’s annual maintenance which was part of the deal and was nearly due in any case. [Slight aside into TML as I discovered I’d missed the fact there are supposed to be monthly maintenance checks as well under Mongoose 2nd Edition rules. How do people keep all this in their head at once?!.] This gave the players the opportunity to further tool up, prepare and occupy themselves until the three ships Jump out to the deep space rendezvous point. As I’d posted the cost of missiles and sandcaster cannisters to the Discord channel, this had been spotted by everyone. This clued them up that ship combat was coming, perhaps no bad thing, and launched quite a discussion about firstly the fact that missile prices had considerably increased from 1st Edition (and also from Classic Traveller) and the merits or otherwise of MgT1 rules vs MgT2 rules. The more it went on, the more I became convinced that maybe I should have stuck with MgT1 rules for space combat. However, all my notes and all my practises had been with 2nd Edition (and for once it is relatively different), all my ship stats and so on had been for 2nd Edition. I just couldn’t switch. Physically or mentally. In for a penny…
One thing I had prepared for was an idea from Tess at the end of the previous session to add a third turret to the March Harrier. Originally it has two dual beam lasers – which have never been fired in anger. At least not in the game time we’ve played out. The idea was to persuade Oberlindes Lines to pay for this although I thought it more reasonable that it would be under the same conditions as the computer upgrade – Oberlindes to pay everything upfront and maybe 10% of the cost, the March Harrier crew to pay back the rest as and when. The idea was to put in another double turret with a sandcaster and missile rack. So having avoided missiles like the plague in all my rehearsals I was at least forewarned that they’d be added to the equation. There was quite a discussion about where to locate the turret (and some looking through MgT2 rules & High Guard, MgT1 and classic Traveller sources to see if any deck plans actually show them. None of us could find anything along those lines. The two turrets the Harrier already has are port and starboard, we decided the other two hardpoints which the 400 ton ship allows could be ventral and dorsal. There were some advantages to both but the clincher was the fact that if was ventral then any reloads of missiles could be directly from the cargo bay which would be much more convenient that messing about with them through the passenger lounge or something!
That led neatly into actually purchasing missiles. I suspect that I could have made a lot more of this, but aware of time, I treated it as a fairly ‘ordinary’ thing. Law Level 7. Seems reasonable – especially on a balkanized world. We also discussed being able to buy higher than TL7 missiles. (Aramanx being TL7). The Captain had a hankering for Decoy missiles. I’d come up with a rule of thumb when Ghazan had been tooling up with computer hardware for his translation work that prices would double for every couple of TLs difference. Decoy missiles are TL9, so Cr700,000 instead of Cr350,000. (Yes, we had the High Guard list which offers more options). Now here, of course, another factor came into play. How much money does the March Harrier have in its kitty? To my shame I’ve NOT been keeping up with the accounts of the ship. [But see recent TML posts on the maybe being a mistake in any case and perhaps just tracking debt and leaving the money making to players after all.] Ever since we ‘backgrounded’ the actual trade of the game – except when a cargo becomes relevant – I’ve been aiming to do it in the background and managed the first few months of the year they’ve been going but have rather lost sight of it now. I had foreseen the question at least and decided that maybe Cr2,000,000 would be reasonable given the prices in front of us. My suspicion is, however, given how easy it is to make money under MgT1 and MgT2 rules, that it could be a lot more. But then there’s incidental expenses and other stuff. I don’t know. Two million seemed to be accepted. I really should work out something proper and in this I feel I did let the players down somewhat. (I always laugh at the bit in the rules that says “We recommend that for most campaigns, referees hand over this entire chapter [Trade] to the players and simply let them get on with it…. Letting the players handle all their own trading allows the referee to concentrate on his own adventures, perhaps quickly revising the next section or prepping a new encounter while the players work out what they want to trade next and where. It also encourages the players to consult star maps and read planetary descriptions which helps immerse themselves in the setting.” Well, I can dream.
We did, eventually, get back to actual actions. The Captain, who’d been training during their three quick Jumps also kept up his gunnery training. He also had, I thought, the rather nice idea of getting the three ships crews along with all the skeleton crews they’d be carrying together in a meeting hall on Aramanx orbital station as a meet and greet and morale thing. It may have been because I’d given the names of the four skeleton crew captains the March Harrier would be carrying and he’d noticed that two were female. I’d only ‘named’ them at the last minute thinking it might possibly come up but I certainly hadn’t developed their stats/skills or their crews. This was probably an oversight. Anyway, in the spirit of Traveller equal opportunity, I had named two of the Captains as male and two as female. Of course, I was so focussed on the upcoming combat that I didn’t foresee the very obvious consequence of this arbitrary decision. Yes, out came the Loyd’s Ladies/Lily’s Lads tables. Whereupon we established that one of the ladies was rather attractive and one rather plain amongst the other details we determined. [Remember, these tables are built for Loyd, so the odds of coming out ‘plain’ are quite small!] Capt Kitman immediately homed in on the former one and her ‘response’ roll was quite positive, so there was an opportunity for some chatting up. Which he immediately took.
This function, I was interested to note, was actually for some 70 odd people. If you follow the book they soon mounts up I realized as I made notes and named various ones. The Plan of Oberlindes is not a small affair. The crew of the March Harrier (10 of them) + 4 skeleton crews of four, the crew of the Patrol Cruiser Guardian (9) + 3 skeleton crews of four and two extra, the crew of the Free Trader New Horizons (4) + 4 skeleton crews of four. In actual fact I had the Free Trader short a steward because in desperation at suspecting it was worth having this information to hand but not really wanting to create sixty people, I’d turned to BITS’ 101 Starcrews to save time. There’s only one Patrol Cruiser, so that’s easy and for New Horizons I plumped on a Free Trader crew that was short-handed. As an aside, I quite liked that I also now had a bit of flavour for each crew and I would have liked to have had a chance to explore this further and to have played around with this – perhaps in the Captain’s function. But I realized that time was pressing on and there was still lots to cover, so perhaps rather stupidly I didn’t get into this. (Although I did have NPC Kunal seen more than once in the company of Own Tullock as I thought it was time she got out a bit.) Also perhaps a missed opportunity for role-playing – although it would have strayed well outside the book – was the Captain’s question about whether he was picking up any bad vibes from the crews as individuals or as crews or between the crews. I thought this was rather brilliant and might, with some forewarning, have invented a niggle or two for him to explore and/or get paranoid about. On the spot, however, I decided the players didn’t need any more encouragement to think the whole scheme was a bad idea and they should walk/run/Jump very quickly in the other direction. As I say, however, perhaps a missed opportunity and certainly a great question.
Loyd’s other action was to check up on his SMGs which, despite a complete lack of skill, he is very obsessed about, or proud of, or curious regarding; or whatever. You may recall that during the events of Wolf at the Door Egon suffered from some friendly fire from these. You may also recall that Tess has removed the firing pins from them and stored them very safely somewhere in engineering. Loyd wanted to examine the two weapons and rolled the only natural 2 of the evening (not even counting the -3 unskilled penalty). We decided he didn’t even notice the pins were missing and thought they were in fine shape.
Ghazan was spending time with Phlo – picking her brains on language and so on. I had him give me a couple of rolls (one for each week) from which I determined she was quite up for it for a bit and then her interest began to wear rather thin. Ghazan – along with Fred as well – were also continuing their vacc suit training. With some mixed success. At one point, in a speed drill, Ghazan managed to put on his helmet backwards. Fred’s still cursing not having found time or place to have one specially tailored for his rather large frame.
Fred meanwhile is doing some shopping to make sure there’s enough food for all these people he’s got crammed into the passenger staterooms. You won’t be surprised to hear that he double checked toilet rolls were sufficiently stocked but also made absolutely clear in his order that they only wanted 40 packs this time, not 40 tons. [I was soooo tempted….] He also decided he was going to cater the Captain’s function. With canapés at least. He realizes it’s a big job and enlists Phlo as an extra pair of hands. Well, an extra two pairs of hands. Phlo is actually quite keen to help out as she’s finding the Llellewyeloly language lessons with Ghazan a bit repetitive. (We had a nice moment, in my opinion at least – particularly given that I came up with on the fly, where she tried to explain that the sign for the verb ‘to go’ changed depending on the ‘level’ (i.e. the social standing) of the speaker and listener. Ghazan (or Jim?) gamely tried to get his head around this but when we got into a discussion about what kind of sign might be used for speaking to Emperor Strephon he got his revenge by asking me how/whether the signs ‘progressed’ and could simply be ‘added to’, as the Dandelions of course had never had need to speak to such an exalted personage.
Fred, left with all the washing up of the function, asked for volunteers. Ghazan and The Captain couldn’t step back quickly enough. Poor Fred. But Tess offered to help and Phlo and Gvoudzon did as well I determined by dice roll.
Eventually everyone was happy that they’d done everything they could. The March Harrier was all spangly clean from annual maintenance with a computer upgrade and the new turret. Four missiles were purchased and two sandcaster loads (so, 40 cannisters in total). The Captain (with an inexperienced player) had fancied a nuclear missile or two until we pointed out they were illegal and reminded him that was how they’d left Bannerji in the lurch when they’d left him on Aramanx a few months previously with an anonymous note left on a public board about possible radiation leakage in his hold. So that idea got nixed fairly swiftly. The new three-setting fake transponder was installed (but I’d forgotten to ask where)
Into Jump space, so time for some more PC actions. More training (gunnery and vacc suits). More of Tess doing engineering stuff and Adma doing Medic stuff. Fred and Phlo stewarding and on call in the night for any toilet emergencies… Fred was trying to work out in the gym but not (rolling a 4) as assiduously as he might have liked given all the other plates he was spinning (vacc suit training, checking all their doubled up passengers had sufficient toilet roll etc). A few days in and in no uncertain terms does he get Gvoudzon, not doing a lot else, to help with the laundry.
There was also some discussion around the order the skeleton crews would be deployed as they decided to keep the two best gunners till last so they could help out with the March Harrier’s turrets. (Egon is skill 3, so put him in a turret but otherwise they only additionally have Fred who I’ve long threatened to allow ‘Heavy Weapons’ as Gunnery -1 rather than the -3 unskilled. (I had prepared a couple of gunners that Arrlanroughl had offered them back at Aramanx but they’d soon seen that the skeleton crew folk would do. I hadn’t wasted much time as I’d used the online generator 1,000,001 characters, but I did notice that the two I’d picked, the first two actually, had some interesting sounding backstories in their term-by-terms that might have been fun to explore.) (Of course, after the fact it occurred to me that these could have just been the gunners that were being used from the skeleton crews but a) I’m a bit slow like that and b) there wasn’t really time to get into this). (I’m fairly sure that anyone else running this chapter wouldn’t have even bothered having named people here at all. Wise Referees that they are! I do go overboard at times.)
The other thing the PCs/players did was decide on a shift rota for watchkeeping for the duration of The Plan with Kunal, Loyd and Ghazan – the only three with sensor skills – all doing eight hours in rotation with another to support them (Lily, Egon and Gvoudzon respectively). Tess was really helpful here and over in Discord posted a nifty table which detailed everyone and what hours they were on duty, awake, and asleep. That was helpful. They also decided on a fake ship/captain name. Meet Captain Vaughn of the ‘Albatross’. (Actually, now I think about it, we didn’t actually remember to sort this out until we met with the first Akerut freighter, but that was fine.)
So, finally, at the deepspace refuelling point and I think a couple of hours had passed by now which only left an hour for any combat if we were going to finish by 10pm. We’d better get on.
Now, in preparation I’d pre-rolled all the ships that would appear and on what days – according to the directions in TTA. I thought time of day might become important so I had also fished out a never used D12 to roll the hour of appearance as well. What I hadn’t noticed that was the first three would all be during Ghazan’s evening shift. Ah well. That’s randomness for you. It also just so happened that in the first week of lurking in the middle of nowhere, only one Akerut freighter was scheduled to arrive. I probably should have made more of this tedious and on edge week – a perfect moment for the new Sanity characteristic! – but with time pressing I decided to move on. By this time I really couldn’t face not getting to some of the combat at least this time round.
So, in Jumps the ‘Giant’ with Captain Nasterook who wasn’t on my list of ‘surrender immediately’ captains. Arrlanroughl’s plan goes into action and the crew execute it admirably. Albeit with a lot of hesitation over when to first open fire. Once the Patrol Cruiser colleagues get in range they obvious do so, but the PCs wanted to maintain their façade of being Akerut for a bit longer so they don’t get shot at. I wonder what the Patrol Cruiser crew thought of that!
Now I suppose it would have been possible to do all this as theatre of the mind but in order to help with relative locations and so forth, as well as because I thought it would be more engaging, as well as because just a week or two ago I’d stumbled across some rather natty space ‘battlemap’ JPGs on DriveThru, I decided it would be more fun and perhaps help all concerned if I tried to actually show what was going on. In 2D of course. Although we use Discord, we’ve not yet tried a proper Virtual Table Top so the only real way I could think of doing this was via PowerPoint and sharing my screen via WebEx. Easy enough to throw in the colourful ‘nebula’ space backdrop I had as a full screen image and rather fortuitously that I had a PDF, also from DriveThru, of ship tokens which I’d bought and happily stumbled across at just the right time. I’d excised a Subsidized Merchant, Free Trader and Patrol Cruiser along with an Akerut courier (a Scout ship) and an as anonymous as I could find blocky thing to represent the Hercules-class freighters. There were even icons for a missile or missile group, a debris cloud and a ‘Jump point’. They might come in handy. Snipping them and pasting them all onto the PowerPoint wasn’t the prettiest thing I could have had, but it was all I have the ability and products to do.
A couple of snags with this immediately became apparent. Firstly, as soon as I’m showing the PowerPoint slide show, I can’t move anything which was a bit hopeless. (I’m sure there’s a way of having the slide show running and being able to see the slide set to adjust it on the fly, but could I get the three screens I was using and PowerPoint to play ball with this?! No. The only solution I could come up with was just to ‘share’ the PowerPoint screen itself before putting it in presentation mode. Not as ‘pretty’ but I could virtually fill the screen and it would do. The only snag was that having these all my icons on screen felt rather like it was giving the game away ahead of time. For a moment I’d though, ah, I can just put them off to the side of the display area, but of course, as I wasn’t in slideshow mode, they were still visible there! I then had the idea of running a second instance of PowerPoint with all the offstage images sitting ‘off screen’ (i.e. not the one I was sharing) and then cutting and pasting them in at the point they were needed. Not only did this have the effect of making them appear – as if by magic – out of Jump which I really liked, but it also meant that I could position them in the right place on their origin PowerPoint and they’d appear in that position on the ‘shared’ PowerPoint. As I doubt Microsoft ever envisaged this particular use of their software, I was rather pleased with how it worked for this particular purpose even if there’s probably much slicker solutions if only I’d find time to investigate VTT software.
Finally “Captain Vaughn” makes the decision to join the ‘Guardian’ in attacking the ‘Giant’ and it soon surrenders. We have quite a debate about what we’re doing with all the crew (and there are quite a lot of them on each ship – fifteen!) and IIRC they’re all stuck in low berths except the Captain who is locked in a stateroom on the ship to be taken away by the skeleton crew.
We did the next couple of ships (into the second week) with one surrendering immediately. The freighter crews by now completely filling all available low berth space (why didn’t we think to bring a cargo hold full of Emergency Low Berths wailed Tess!) they were eventually locking the crews in their own staterooms and shipping them out. Time was really pressing on though and I think we were past 10pm so I skipped one to get to the Vemene Scout courier. Some disbelief that it would even dare to think about standing up to the Patrol Cruiser but I played it that they were just trying to give the March Harrier – who they think is an ally – time to Jump. The March Harrier, sorry ‘Albatross’, is pretending to have Jump drive trouble which is why it’s here but it wasn’t long before they opened up on poor Captain Kamanassian as well and he surrendered to the inevitable as well. That meant I could present the comm message and the logbook info.
Now TTA is wonderful here, as it often is, in telling you what needs to be presented in some detail. But I remembered Zilan wine having a long expository bit at the start which outstayed its welcome with players despite being trimmed by myself. Last session we’d had Arrlanroughl’s very long and detailed briefing which I’d split into two parts to make more palatable and trimmed and it still felt too long. So I really didn’t want more of the same. It occurred to me, given the text, that these comm messages and logs would be read by the PCs if only they existed. So I’d decided – just that day in a rather hurried lunch break – to actually write the memo from the ‘Nebula’ and the two log entries from the ‘Titan’. With the addition of some extra material in the logs to make it less as if I’m just presenting the crucial bits. These I could then simply paste into Discord and let both the players and the PCs read them at leisure. IMHO this worked really well and certainly saved my voice. I quite enjoyed the creativity – even if I’m only basing it on the text of TTA – but I do think it’s the kind of thing that the book could have done as appendix handouts like the other couple of bits that are there. This is a bit crucial as info and plot goes, so I’m not sure why it’s not there. If I were ever to publish my ‘notes’ as Referee supplementary material for TTA, I’d definitely include this kind of sub-creation.
Anyway, the good news was that as far as I could tell – given how late it was becoming – these went down really well. As it was getting late and one of our number at least had said they were reaching the end as regards tiredness I just ‘assumed’ the Titan’s appearance and capture so they could have those logs as well and really enjoyed a bit of a break as I sat back and watched them unpick the texts they were reading. And, as players are wont to do, read more into some bits than I’d ever imagined was possible. For me, seeing them piece together bits of plot that their characters have experienced months back and the players have experienced years ago was a highlight of the evening. I had to give a prompt/recap or two – particularly for Jim who hadn’t been there, but important bits I’ve included in recaps so it was often the case that events were ‘remembered’ just as they should have been. Phew!
My only irritation with myself was that it was now after 10.30 and definitely past time to quit. A bit of goodbye and housekeeping meant we were another fifteen minutes. I should have kept better control of the time, or just called a halt earlier as I know several of us find it difficult to go on past 10pm and three hours of play. It was partly because it felt as if we were in the middle of things, it was partly because I just couldn’t bear the thought of holding this all in my head till next time, and it was partly because I was a bit hyper thanks to being in the UK’s third full lockdown and this being essentially the only social activity/interaction I have. Still, I felt it necessary to apologize to the players the following day as well as thanking for them for their patience with my ship combat inexperience and not making it all more interactive. I’d completely failed, for example, in the heat of beam lasers raking hulls to ensure I was allowing the role playing opportunities of non-gunners to have any bearing on matters. I’m sorry guys. Maybe next time.
I can’t believe there are only two chapters remaining. It seems all too little. Although knowing us that probably represents at least six session of play and another year… We’ll see. I miss the drive home with Tess after a session in the pub when she can tell me what didn’t work so well (and, occasionally, what did work), but we also give some slight thought to what might come after formally finishing The Traveller Adventure. Nothing, as I collapse exhausted? Someone else running something? Me, discovering I’m unable to give up the buzz despite the tiredness, continuing the adventures? Running something else from Traveller? The options are endless. But that’s for another day…
[1] Although the long standing rule that TravCon would use the latest version of Traveller rules (i.e. Mongoose 2nd Edition) was explicitly removed last year and Derrick J finally got to run a game with his beloved MegaTraveller rules! (See photo in the after-action write up.) Sad news, which I think is relatively public, is that TravCon this year doesn’t look as if it’s going ahead. :-(