I'm afraid this is a bit of a hodgepodge of plot review, game catch up, meta commentary, questions; tenses & styles; addressed to my players, TML or others; written immediately after or 18 months after; not proof read or edited for style or clarity. You’ve been warned!

You will probably want to have a copy of The Traveller Adventure or at least a map of Aramis subsector in the Spinward Marches handy to make sense of some sections.

I've put in the dates that we played in case any one can do better with TML searches to see if I have missed anything.

The Traveller Adventure – Duke of Buckingham, Portsmouth

Cast:

Captain Loyd Kitman of the March Harrier, male, merchant trader and lovelorn lothario – Carl A., a School of Computing lecturer who patiently puts up with a shelf of librarians

Tess Davies, female, quiet and punctilious engineer – Ted H, a TravCon regular who happens to live within shouting distance of Portsmouth and is our only other non-librarian and only experienced role player

Fred Squeaker, male, ex Army 7ft tall balding teetotaller, has very beautiful cousin the captain once dated – Jane P one of our cataloguers and now a regular at TravCon

Fox Hogan, male, former Marine Captain, fitness fanatic and rather vain, employed as deckhand/engineer’s mate on the Harrier; now deceased after accident on Pysadi (see Part IV) – Emily W, enquiry desk guru and glorious leader of our alternate month Library book group.

The Marine Captain is straight out of The Traveller Adventure but Emily never felt much ownership of him, which is why he was killed off and replaced by Lily (see below).

Adma Lewes, male, former rogue enforcer, medic on the March Harrier, cut up about not being able to save Fox from head injury on a TL4 world – David B my assistant librarian who looks after @uoppenguin amongst many other things. Adma was played as an NPC until David joined us in Part VIII.

Egon Trilby, male, gunner and former merchant marine, very good natured and an animal lover – Denise N, loans team, unfortunately had to drop out due to a change in shift patterns, so now Egon is a very quiet NPC [reasons]

Gvoudzon, male, vargr emissary with a nice line in multicoloured waistcoats and natty capes – David S, map librarian and amateur thespian

Lily Lee, female, archaeologist originally working passage from Pysadi where she’d been doing research, now hired on formally to help Captain Loyd with Admin and brokering rather than because she’s rather attractive – Emily W as above

Other NPC crew:

Kunal Dins, female, pilot and former scout

Brett Martinson, male, native Pysadian woodworker whose wife had died. He wanted to leave the world, a Harrison Ford lookalike also working passage since Pysadi but has now left the March Harrier on arrival at Aramanx.

Tess, Fred and Lily are their players’ own creations, the rest (UPPs and skills) are straight out of The Traveller Adventure although no names or personalities are provided. The TTA characters were randomly assigned on the first evening except for Gvoudzon we/I had selected David S to play as I knew it was a big part and we thought his amateur dramatic experience would help with that. Plus the book actually gives him some lines at his introduction which I’d given to David S to learn.

Alert readers will note at the start we had all the ladies playing male characters, one guy playing a female character and more women than men in the group!

For much fuller details of them all (except for Fox and Brett), see their write ups in Two Days on Carsten.

Next session (March 2018) we hope to have another School of Computing lecturer join us for the first time. No decision yet on what character he plays or how he’s introduced if not Kunal or Egon (or even Bannerji).

5.2.16 I. Aramis Part 1 (chapter: Leedor on Aramis)

Aramis A6B0556-B A Ni De Cp

For our first session, Gvoudzon’s player couldn’t make it so we couldn’t get to his introduction too quickly. Not a problem as the players are virtually all new to Traveller and some background and warm up was inevitable.

New Year celebrations in full swing in Leedor on Aramis and we heard the Holiday speech of Marquis Leonard Bolden-Tukera from the palace. (He kept it short and to the point which was a relief all round). The PCs selected three hotels between them according to social standing and/or whim.

PCs then met up with their broker on Aramis, a bwap called Weekea-da. This has probably been my most successful NPC to date (pity I peaked so soon!) with his arm flaps and tongue flicking out, general enthusiasm and often lapsing into Bwap word/phrases. “Bakaka!” “Welcome!” He’s arranged their annual maintenance, will look for passengers and cargo, gives them some tourist info and reminds them to pay their air-tax. Tourist info included brochures/flyers/advertising for: a Palace Tour, Mine Tour, Cavern Park concert, Museum of Aramis, Escanil Park, local library, Downtown (including theatres), shops, church services and wimprat racing. I thought about knocking up things for each of these (or many of them) as actual physical handouts but decided against it as being far too much work. [Weekea-da also appeared as a broker in See How They Run at TravCon 2017. I needed a bunch for that game and he was too much fun to pass up. Plus why reinvent the wheel. Jane and Ted were both playing in the game and as soon as I flapped my arms and stuck my tongue out, they knew what was coming. It’s the first time I’ve ever introduced an NPC to a round of applause… and some bemusement from the other players].

The players weren’t grabbed by everything I had on offer but this was probably the most sandboxy thing I’d done as a newish referee and certainly gave them their choice of what to do, but with virtually all new players perhaps gave them a bit too much freedom. Still, they were interested in the Escanil Park animals, the Museum (fortunately! I don’t think I led them on that), the wimprat racing and Tess hit the library because she wanted to find a fix for the life support “noises” in one of the cabins which I’d thrown at the only experienced player early on to give him/her something to play with. [Note: there’s no better way to ingratiate yourself with the referee than to take him upon a library visit!) The wimprat racing was interesting as, along with every other ‘attraction’ save the museum and park, I had nothing prepared. I decided it was a really lower class thing in a dingy, dirty pub in a cheap part of town. I think I was channelling a scene from a [modern, not Conan Doyle] Sherlock Holmes novel I was reading in which Holmes and Watson end up in a pub with a pit for dog fights.] Fox Hogan, however had gambling skill and wanted to bet on the races (small scrawny rat like creatures in transparent “tunnels” round the edge of a crowded room). I wish I’d had a betting mechanism for this and odds and the like. Making it up on the spot and just doing ‘wins’ and ‘losses’ by what felt right from Fox’s dice rolls seemed less than adequate.

News item: Pojub Publishing have just released a new work on Vargr/Aslan religious beliefs. Some commentators expect it to be as controversial as previous publications. (See Supplement 16, p.124)

News item: Ore prices: Bauxite (aluminium) up 1.5; allanite (lanthanum) down 1 point.

The Escanil Park visit was fun as I had raided a whole bunch of classic JTAS critters and a couple of my own creations (like the besar from Into the Deep, no.5, http://www.reaversdeep.com/index.php/downloads). I divided them up into real and holographic, as per TTA, and scattered them round the park which I had a rough sketch of. The PCs wandered through the park and enjoyed either having the INT/EDU to know which were real and which were not, or not wanting to know and just enjoying the experience. I had some other patrons in the park – like kids and couples – reacting in different ways. Egon asked the park keeper if there were any animals for sale as pets as he was keen to have something to keep him company in Jump. Several were either too expensive or not for sale or not appropriate, but he did have some squeedles that he doesn’t have any use for. At the end, as they left, a Crested Jabberwock hologram leapt out and “swallowed” Fred in the manner of the Jaws 19 hologram in Back to the Future 2. Fred suitably shocked, everyone else suitably amused.

Back on the ship Tess builds the most secure squeedle terrarium you could possibly imagine. Grognard player paranoia at work as she (the character) and he (the player) were totally convinced there’d be an infestation of the things before you could say ‘March Harrier’. The thought hadn’t even speculated about the possibility of crossing my mind… ;-)

News item: Slidewalk breakdown – Wallside. But Western slidewalk construction now two weeks ahead of schedule

The Musuem visit went pretty much as per the book. They wandered round, they looked at pretty much everything, rode on the simulator in the atrium, and I had a chance to fill in some blanks about the nature of the wider universe they were in (well, the Third Imperium at least). IIRC we finished the session at the point where Gvoudzon was due to do his lines.

Weekea-Da has lined up 200 tons of textiles (150 tons of Tukera uniforms for their personnel on Natoko, 50 tons of fabric) and 1 mid passenger: Juf Ximinder a Tukera employee.