Aslan Route 28: The Second Most Valuable Thing

Previously, on the Aslan Route... The crew of the Macavity are breaking into a centuries-old survival bunker for the ultra-wealthy on Ergo. The defensive robots would rather they didn’t...

Ergo, 1107 Week 10

Before the swarms of metal spiders can reach Our Heroes, Mazun blows one group away with his shotgun and Dr Matauranga deploys his “Wide Area Cauteriser” (i.e. flamethrower) to burn the second group. When the mech attached to the spiders emerges cautiously from a side room, Rex lets rip with his laser SMGs and cuts it down. Vila is still scrambling up the slope through the crevasse and back to the ship, where Troisei is awaiting developments; she has people for this sort of thing, namely the crew.

Moving forward brings them to the central common area, obviously used as a canteen, meeting hall and so on. Three other exits lead to accommodation suites, but they are bent on reaching the central computer and deactivating the robot guards. Matauranga points out the various robots, Mazun comes up with a cunning tactical plan... and then Rex shoots everything that moves.

Slightly off to one side, a lift shaft descends into the gloom. Not trusting the lift, which is probably controlled by the same computer sending robots after them, the crew descends using the handholds set in the side of the shaft, Mazun in the lead. One of the ancient handholds gives way under his weight, and he falls the rest of the way, fortunately suffering no more than bruises. Conscious now of the risk, Dr Matauranga and Rex descend more cautiously, reach the bottom without further incident, and help Mazun dust himself off.

Making their way from the lift shaft deeper into the complex, Dr Matauranga calls to mind his earlier research on the Ergosian nuclear war and the plans of the wealthy to survive it, and advises Mazun on the likely verbal codes to gain access through the blastproof doors. This takes several attempts, as the computer finds it hard to make out what Mazun is saying over the gunfire and snarls behind him as Rex deals with the next wave of robot spiders.

Entering the main control room, they quickly close the door again behind them, and survey the dusty chamber. A mech is wired into the largest console, wearing an odd headpiece.

“Please stop shooting,” it says, “For I am the Second Most Valuable Thing.” It goes on to explain that it spent an indefinite period deactivated and buried, was woken up by bunker construction, went back to sleep until the nuclear exchange cracked open the bunker, and then took over the defence robots, which it has been using to build itself a spaceship to leave the planet in search of its colleagues.

Leaving the Matauranga Collective and the Second and Third Most Valuable Things to catch up on history since the days of the Ancients, Rex and Mazun search the lowest level of the complex and quickly find the treasure vault. This proves to have a two-man access mechanism, operated by turning two widely-separated manual keys simultaneously; one key is in a nearby office, and they realise the other keys must be held by the bunker’s clientele. Said clientele prove to be dead from various causes in the accommodation suites, but none of the team have much in the way of scruples and the remaining keys are quickly recovered from crumbling skeletons and dusty rooms.

Now that the fighting is over, Vila scampers back down to join in looting the place. They recover a wide range of objets d’art, recreational drugs, paintings, a stamp collection, precious metals and so forth and ferry it up to the ship in a number of trips.

Meanwhile, the Matauranga Collective and the Second Most Valuable Thing have reached an agreement; it will join them on their travels, and the robots will help the crew load up the supplies and parts it has been collecting. It hasn’t got very far on building its own ship and is happy to commandeer – errm, sorry, take passage on – the Macavity. It considers its new home very primitive, and discusses potential improvements with the Collective; clearly, a science bay focused on genetic research is the place to start, and it starts work on a swarm of robots to help it convert a couple of staterooms into a laboratory.

Troisei, who is currently chartering the Macavity, asks to be taken to Cordan, which suits the rest of the crew, especially Mazun, who needs to report in to his handler – sorry, local factor – Prasad.

Fast Travel, 1107 Weeks 11-16

The Macavity stops at Sperle long enough to sell off the artworks and specie, then moves on to Exe where it sells the recreational drugs. While in the Exe system, Mazun persuades the Android Liberation Front to get Captain Cash to relocate them to the bunker on Ergo and fix it up – Dr Matauranga has eyes on it for his obligatory secret base.

On Cordan, Mazun introduces Prasad and Troisei to each other, and since each of them, for their own purposes, wants to establish a good trade connection, that goes well. Vila remains on board to avoid unwanted entanglements with the local underworld and supervise the stateroom conversion. Unknown to Dr Matauranga, he installs simple mechanically-triggered bombs on the robot swarm the Second Most Valuable Thing is using for the work, while in parallel Mazun upgrades the anti-intrusion protocols on the ship’s computer, in case the SMVT decides to take control.

Mazun then sidles off to a secret meeting with Prasad, who is in reality his IISS handler. Mazun explains that Dr Matauranga now has in his possession two Ancient devices, and he intends to gradually adjust the Macavity’s course to take them towards his cover ID’s homeworld of Batav, where he will hand over the devices to Imperial researchers as per standing orders. However, this may take some time, as all the members of the Matauranga Collective are smarter than him, and he will have to move carefully. Prasad agrees this is the right move; having spent two years embedding Mazun as an asset in the Hierate, he doesn’t want to risk blowing Mazun’s cover for the sake of two artefacts of unknown purpose and value.

The crew is now on Cordan and considering moving towards Torpol along the Florian Route, since Prasad earlier asked them to ensure that Prince Hteleitoirl’s clan takes over garrison duty there to guard against a resurgence of the Fury; they have persuaded Troisei that unless someone specifically asks about her relationship to Prince Hteleitoirl, who tried to overthrow the government a few years back and later married her sister, there is no need to draw it to anyone’s attention.

None of their current tasks are especially urgent, so the crew are taking a few days on Cordan to relax and shop, while Troisei discusses trading options with Prasad.

GM Notes

I thought that a running battle against robots would become boring quite quickly, so we shifted to a Dramatic Task to get them down into the computer room before the robot swarms overran them. That worked pretty well, although I'm now considering adding a Dangerous Dramatic Task where failures result in Bumps & Bruises or even Wounds, as Mazun falling down a lift shaft (Athletics Critical Failure) should really have injured him.

I suppose I'll have to decide what the Most Valuable Things want soon. I got the idea from a Challenge or Travellers' Digest magazine in the 1980s, or maybe 1990s; I can't remember which one or what it was they did.

I’m running out of adventures along the Aslan Route, so I’ll start expanding the area of operations shortly, to make use of the worthwhile adventures in the Trojan Reach sector which we haven’t played through yet.

Mazun's player pointed out that what lies beyond Torpol could be anything I want, and doesn't necessarily have to have anything to do with Charted Space. I'm considering that.

Retrospective Review: Traveller 2300 / 2300AD

When it's over, when it's done
Let it go
- The Bangles, Let It Go

Third in the sequence, here's a look back at 2300AD, which I ran for some two decades, first in its own universe, and later using other settings, most notably the Official Traveller Universe.

The game picks up the setting of Twilight: 2000 and advances it 300 years, with humanity now recovered from that war and exploring systems within 50 lightyears of Earth, interacting with half a dozen alien species as it does so. As part of game development, GDW staff took part in a strategic wargame, playing through that 300 years as the rulers of countries, and this shows through in the detailed politics and history of the setting.

Core Mechanics

Roll 1d10, apply modifiers, meet or beat a target number to succeed.

Where it went a bit strange was damage, which required you to roll for hit location,  then deduct the toughness of the armour from the penetration value of the weapon, then roll against the remainder to get a type of wound whose severity depended on the hit location, with different wound types inflicting different penalties on future actions. I could see what the designers were trying to do, but it was a lengthy and complex process.

The Editions

Traveller: 2300 (1986). The game appealed to me for several reasons, chiefly that Traveller's technology was - apart from jump drives - rooted in a 1970s worldview, and a decade later SF and actual technology had both moved on; Traveller: 2300 felt like the future in a way that Traveller no longer did, and as extra materials were released that felt more true. Using actual 3D starmaps also helped - I remember during one session taking the players outside and pointing into the sky, saying "You're now moving from that star to that one". However, this edition had two major problems. First, while it used a variant of the DGP task system from MegaTraveller, it neglected to change the target numbers to reflect the use of 1d10 rather than 2d6. Second, there was no method for improving skills or characteristics once a PC mustered out, although it wasn't much work to add one. (The second edition would correct both of those, although the self-improvement mechanism only addressed skills.)

2300AD (1989). This fixed the problems with the first edition, added lots more background information, and changed the title to avoid confusion with mainstream Traveller. The tagline changed from "Mankind discovers the stars" to "Man's battle for the stars", perhaps to reflect that the published adventures largely focused on the war against the Kafers in the French Arm. There was more detail on aliens, which for the most part actually felt like aliens rather than people in animal suits with a zipper up the back.

2320 AD (2007). This version was an alternative setting for Traveller20, which I never saw, bought, or played; it came out around the time I was starting to move on from 2300AD.

2300AD (2012). Another alternative setting, this time for Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition. I know it exists, but that's all I know.

As you can see, the setting hung around for decades after the game engine passed out of general use, and there seems to be a consensus that it should now be treated as the variant Traveller setting it was originally taken for.

Pros and Cons

Credible and internally consistent setting, especially the colony worlds and the technology, with built-in factions, politics, and aliens. The setting had four major areas by the end, each suited to a particular type of campaign; Earth for cyberpunk adventures, the French Arm for military ones, the American Arm for law enforcement and criminal scenarios, and the Chinese Arm for those wanting to pit themselves against a transhumanist terrorist conspiracy.

The star system and world generation systems hold up surprisingly well even today, although recent astronomical observations show that a lot of stars aren't where we used to think they were, and if you use the latest locations the trade routes get seriously mangled.

Good rules for NPCs, with four different levels of combat competence and card draws for personalities. I carried on using those for a long time after I stopped playing the actual game.

Complex and time-consuming character generation. This had good points, such as the basic skill levels every member of a career began with and the option to take a second career before starting play, and bad ones, such as the strange way skill points were spent during character creation, which was not the way skills were improved in play. It was also entirely possible to create PCs who had no languages in common with the rest of the party, which could be entertaining.

No playable alien races. PCs were all humans of different body types which gave modifiers to their physical attributes, although later when I used the game for Traveller proper it was easy to say that aslan were mesomorphs, vargr ectomorphs, and humans normal. This approach simplified character generation, and also allowed each alien race to have a secret to uncover (which alien PCs would have known from the start).

Changes Over the Years

The game as I knew it only lasted through two editions, so these are more about how I used the game than how it changed over time. The second edition was a solid improvement on the first, but the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook felt like an attempt to cash in on the then-popular cyberpunk game market rather than something that grew naturally from the setting backstory; it didn't really fit in.

I adopted the second edition for all my SF campaigns, and used it for Ringworld and Stargate campaigns as well as several in the Official Traveller Universe.

The main thing I eventually felt it lacked was some sort of point-buy character generation, so I built a system for that. By the time it was ready for use, though, people already had well-established PCs, so though I was happy with it, it was never used in anger.

My Future with 2300AD

2300AD is still the game I have run the most, even more than Traveller, although I expect Savage Worlds will edge past it into first place eventually.

However, I haven't touched it since the early 2000s, and I can't see myself returning to either the game or the setting. For me, it was the best RPG of its day, but that day is now over.

And as The Bangles observed, when it's over, let it go.

Aslan Route 27: Buried Treasure

Previously, on the Aslan Route... The crew of the Macavity has rescued the ship's doctor of the Macavity from local gangers allied with the pirate Hroal Irontooth. During the raid, they found what can only be described as a treasure map leading them to a spot on Ergo...

Inurin, 1107 Week 08

Mazun takes Captain Cash aside and sounds him out on his attitude to sentient robots and AI. Cash’s attitude is that he is a trader, and their money is as good as anyone else’s, beyond that he has no strong feelings. Mazun explains the group’s contract with the Android Liberation Front, which will be difficult to keep going with Troisei aboard, due to her… specific views on the aslan code of honour and local laws. Therefore, he hands over that contract, location details and recognition codes, to Cash, who will make stops at Tech-World and the hidden ALF base in the Exe system.

Ergo, 1107 Week 10

Outside the starport enclave, Ergo is a dump, with a total population in the thousands scattered across a radioactive wasteland (a legacy of the nuclear exchange in the 800s intended to settle who got the revenue from GeDeCo’s new starport; as it turns out, that would be “nobody”). Here and there are cannibal tribes who can’t quite manage to build steam engines and the odd pirate base.

Mazun knows Ergosian, as you never know when you might need to make a deal with the odd cannibal tribe, and so does Dr Matauranga, who finds it convenient to keep notes in a language which is not widely known.

They know where the bunker is, so they park the ship nearby and approach in the air/raft.

The bunker entrance was once protected by some kind of structure on a low hill, but it’s hard to tell what; a nearby ground burst flattened it, and at some time in the intervening centuries, a small river has appeared, flooding much of the approach.

The crew's portable sensors are showing possible enemy forces submerged in the river and standing in the woods. Dr Matauranga assures the rest that while radiation levels are unhealthily high, they should be fine if they limit their exposure to a few hours, and anyway he has a new anti-radiation treatment he wants to try out. Parking the air/raft to the south-east of the entrance, they approach on foot, with Vila flanking left to get line of sight on whatever is lurking in the woods.

This proves to be some kind of cargo drone, which Vila’s electronics determines is pinging something nearby on a low-power radio band. His guess is that it is dormant and not especially vigilant, so he sneaks up one side of the hill. Rex moves to join him, while the others wait to see what happens.

Vila decides the tiling conceals blast doors and a lift shaft he should be able to get open, so starts moving in to do that. Unfortunately, this results in three war mechs emerging from the river and making for him at a fast clip; these are over four metres tall and brandishing ancient gatling lasers.

Vila is still carrying the SMG he liberated on Inurin, and falls back to join up with Rex, firing a short burst at the lead drone as he goes; the bullets bounce off in a dispiriting fashion. Rex, however, lives for this stuff, and has an overloaded laser SMG in each hand; the hail of bolts drops the lead mech handily.

The entity they have dubbed “the Chicken”, a tactician extracted from the swamp hive mind on Sink, offers to take charge of the Dr Matauranga Collective (this currently consists of the Chicken itself, the Third Most Valuable Thing, and three versions of Dr Matauranga, who usually vote together and thus gain control, all sharing his brain). When asked what it thinks they should do, it suggests watching how the mechs kill Rex and Vila, so that it can gather enough information to formulate a plan.

While the various Mataurangas are in conference, Mazun is thinking ahead and climbs back into the air/raft to start it. The physical shell of Dr Matauranga follows him, looking distracted, and gets in.

Vila makes a dash towards the air/raft, but Rex’s blood is up and he stands his ground. The surviving mechs open fire on the air/raft, perforating it in a variety of places both important and otherwise, which gives Rex a chance to burn down a second one. Vila reaches the air/raft as it lifts and scrambles aboard with an assist from Dr Matauranga.

Rex is still howling and firing, so Mazun slides the air/raft towards him. He can’t climb aboard with a laser SMG in each hand, and is not going to drop them for anyone; but he has thoughtfully put on a harness for just such an occasion, and Vila and the Doctor grab him by the straps and haul him aboard. With the air/raft listing to port and crabbing sideways, they make good their escape and return to the ship.

Moving the Macavity cautiously towards the bunker, they blast the cargo drone as it tries to drag the mech carcasses into the lift shaft (which is where Vila thought it was). The lone remaining mech seems to have gone back into the river. Whoever or whatever is inside the bunker decides there’s no point leaving the life shaft open so they can drop missiles into it, and closes the lid.

A thorough scan with the ship’s sensors reveals the general layout of the bunker; below the surface structure is Level 1, a square floor about 35 metres on a side; below that is Level 2, which is cruciform and about 100 metres across the arms; and at the bottom is Level 3, again about 35 metres on a side. The levels are spaced about 15 metres apart, connected by a central lift shaft. The northern section of the cross-shaped Level 2 has partially caved in, allowing access from a surface crevasse.

They consider options at length, feeling they need to move quickly before another group comes to see what they’re up to, so after a quick break in which Vila makes running repairs to the air/raft and Rex wonders aloud whether Vila could dismount one of the Macavity’s gatling lasers and fashion a harness for him to carry it, they descend.

Dr Matauranga asks nicely if the team could avoid doing too much damage to the base as it is exactly the sort of place he would want to retire to, to continue his experiments away from prying eyes. Once he has a sufficient number of suitably-trained catgirls, of course.

They make their way into the crevasse and pick theirr way 30 metres down and perhaps 100m horizontally through the rocks until they slide down the last few metres of dirt and rubble into the north section of Level 2. They can see a corridor leading off to the central section, they can hear noises up ahead on the right in some of the rooms, and Vila’s signal sensors can pick up a lot of short-range radio traffic; whatever entities are making the noise, they are in constant communication with each other and with something or someone on Level 3.

As they advance into the section, the two noise sources closest to the corridor emerge. Each is a swarm of cat-sized metal spiders some three to four metres in diameter, moving in concert towards you. They appear to have no ranged weapons, but some of the tools built into their limbs look disturbingly sharp and can probably do someone a mischief.

Vila decides that first, perhaps someone should stay with the ship in case the team needs to make a quick getaway, and second, discretion is the better part of not being exsanguinated, and turns to make his way back up the slope and out of the complex.

The rest watch as the metal bugs surge forwards.

To be continued...

GM Notes

Motivation decreases, sloth increases, so I went into this session thinking "Let's mash up Boppers, Pickle Rick from Rick and Morty, and Billionaires' Bunker and just see what happens." I spent a few minutes adding a couple of new monsters in Roll20 and deciding what maps to use, then we were off.

The Cash Cow and the Android Liberation Front will now fade into the background unless the party takes action to reactivate them. Intentional or not, that was a good way to write them out.

Vila is not actually cowardly, but he is cautious, and as his player can’t make the next session it’s convenient that he withdraws to the ship.

We discussed options for changing the game from SWADE to something else. More of that over the Christmas break, but the consensus was that we shouldn’t change anything mid-campaign and should wait for the start of a new one before doing anything so drastic, if we do it at all.

Sunshine Blogger Award

The Michlin Guide has nominated Halfway Station and others for a Sunshine Blogger Award; I didn't know about those, but apparently this is "peer recognition to bloggers who bring positivity, joy and creative content to the blogging world". Goodness. Well, that is very pleasing; thank you Shelby! I'm glad you enjoy it.

This manifests itself as Shelby posing questions for me to answer, and then me nominating other blogs and posing questions to them. Let's be about it.

Q&A

Q1: What method of passive entertainment do you spend the most time with? I.e. reading, movies, episodic series, games. Why? What makes it so much better than the others?

A1: Reading, definitely. It broadens the mind, entertains, and distracts me from periodic bouts of curmudgeonly grumpiness. My diet is split between hard copy, ebooks, and audiobooks, and includes a lot of gaming materials.

Q2: What are your three favorite genres? I.e. Action/Adventure, Horror, Mystery, Crime, Drama, Musical, Comedy, Science Fiction, Fantasy, whatever. Give me a few examples of your faves within the three genres you picked.

A2: Only three? With examples? Well, in that case:

• SF: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester; Babel-17 by Samuel R Delaney; The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold; Accelerando by Charles Stross; The Winds of Gath by EC Tubb. See also Appendix N.
• Fantasy: Let's take Conan and LOTR as read; The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch; The Dying Earth quartet by Jack Vance.
• Non-Fiction: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond; Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal; Factfulness by Hans Rosling.

Q3: Consume entertainment socially or solo, and why?

A3: Mostly solo; my location and availability aren't compatible with social entertainment consumption.

Q4: Why do you write a blog anyway?

A4: Writing for an audience helps me frame and clarify my thoughts, it's a low-effort creative outlet, and hopefully it's interesting or entertaining for my readers.

Q5: Other than writing a blog, what are your creative outlets these days?

A5: Sadly, gaming and writing a blog about that are pretty much it. I used to play guitar, but my fingers aren't up to that any more.

Q6: What's your stance on “AI” use in creative fields?

A6: Ambivalent. Like a lot of contemporary life, it's ethically questionable, but it's convenient for some use cases and increasingly hard to avoid.

Q7: It's time to make your own movie, whatever you want. Who is your dream cast (at any age)? IE younger Marlon Brando, older Al Pacino.

A7: I think Earl Dumarest should have a series of movies. I'd start by making The Winds of Gath, with this main cast: 1980s Harrison Ford as Earl Dumarest. Late 1990s Arnold Vosloo as Cyber Dyne. Contemporary Scarlett Johansson as the Matriarch of Kund; might have to add some wrinkles in makeup for that. Contemporary Karen Gillan as the Lady Seena. 2000s Ben Kingsley as Brother Benedict. 1980s John Lithgow as Prince Emmened.

Q8: What is your favorite era for use as a setting in a creative project, either as a creator or a consumer? IE 1920s Chicago, French Revolution, Republican Rome. Why?

A8: The future, as imagined by Golden Age SF (which for me is the 1940s to 1970s); because it has hope, optimism, and a frontier to explore. We seem to have lost all of those lately; or maybe I'm just getting old.

Q9: You're holding an “expense is no object” extravaganza of a party, which five celebrities must be on your guest list? Tell me the funniest thing that happened at that party.

A9: Sandra Bullock, Henry Cavill, Anna Kendrick, Viggo Mortenson, Keanu Reeves. Viggo turns up with some roadkill and wants to start a fire in the garden so he can cook it and eat it. (If you know, you know.)

Q10: It's your birthday and you can have any live music you want, living or dead and at any age, because you're rich and famous and everybody loves you and this is a fantasy. Who do you get to perform?

A10: Slade as they were in 1980 live at the Reading Festival. There are better bands technically, there is better music, but the energy and good vibes at that gig were the best I ever saw.

Q11: Change the ending of any well-known story, from any medium. Which one, and how? Example, Hamlet: nobody dies, and only the bad guys are punished. King Hamlet the Younger and Queen Ophelia rule happily ever after because they are neither borrowers nor lenders. Polonius is proud.

A11: Star Wars. No additional movies are made after 1983; only Episodes IV, V and VI exist. I might unbend far enough to allow Rogue One and Andor to exist.

Nominations

I don't actually read that many blogs on a regular basis, but I nominate:

• From Poland to America for the writeups of a Twilight: 2000 game I wish I'd played in. (I have happy memories of working in Łódź in the real world.)
• Seed of Worlds for the analyses of gaming data.
• the180fantasyproject for the brick maps and general pulpiness.
• Uncanny Worlds for the solo game reports.

My Questions for Nominees

1. Why did you start blogging, and why do you keep doing it?
2. Why did you choose the blogging platform that you use?
3. Why a blog, rather than a YouTube channel or a podcast?
4. What are your favourite games and gaming genres, and why?
5. What game is criminally overlooked and should be more widely played? Why?
6. What RPG mechanic should be more widely known and used?
7. You're suddenly placed in charge of your favourite game and can make any changes to it you like,  money is no object. What's the game, and what are the changes?
8. You assemble your dream team of RPG authors to work together on a game, setting and campaign tailored just for you. Money is no object, so it can have any components you like. Who are the authors? Describe the game they produce.
9. What is the best size, or size range, for a gaming group?
10. What are your main interests outside gaming and blogging?

I shall be watching for the answers...

Aslan Route 26: Doctor Cash

Previously, on the Aslan Route... Having sold Irontooth’s expected location and recognition codes to GeDeCo for them to pass on to their pirate hunters, the crew of the Macavity make their way to Inurin to rescue Linda Cash, ship’s doctor of the Cash Cow and wife of Captain Cash. However, since Cash is a hothead, they have no faith in him sticking to the agreed plan and expect him to head straight for Inurin himself...

Inurin, 1107 Week 08

The crew's take on Captain Cash is that regardless of their agreement with him, he is not the type to sit out the rescue attempt on his wife, and is likely to go off half-cocked. Therefore, in the hope of beating him to the punch before he messes things up, the crew of the Macavity move at best speed from Byrni, through the Ergo system, and on to Inurin.

Scanning the system on arrival, they find no sign of Irontooth’s Meatgrinder, but the Cash Cow has landed in the boonies in the territory claimed by the gang holding Dr Cash for Irontooth. Contacting the other ship, they learn that the engineer (Brian Cash, the Captain’s brother) is keeping the ship ready for a fast getaway while the Captain and steward have gone after the hostage; they arrived a few days earlier and Captain Cash used the time to figure out an exact location, or so he hopes. Brian shares this location with Our Heroes, and leaving Rex to keep an eye on the Macavity, the rest tool up, pile into the air/raft, and head out.

Arriving at the remote hilltop farm where the Doctor is (they hope) held captive, they park the air/raft in a convenient copse and sneak up on the farmhouse. While they are still making plans by text message, a hulking thug carrying a slung SMG ambles out of the farmhouse and sits down on the steps to smoke a cigarette in the cool evening air. Dr Matauranga remains concealed while Vila aims a stun gun at the thug; Mazun sneaks up on him around the farmhouse and kicks him in the head, hard; down he goes, and Dr Matauranga makes sure he will stay down for some time using his selection of pharmaceuticals. Vila thoughtfully appropriates his SMG.

Ground Floor: Cockroaches, SMGs, brutish tattooed thugs, going down...

Frustrated by his inability to take down the thug’s medical records, Matauranga removes his shoes and trousers, and slits his shirt open up the back, so that at first glance he seems to be wearing hospital garb. When he wakes up, he will no doubt hope that the photographs never enter the public domain.

The crew make their way into the house, and discover it is lived in but devoid of other life, unless you count cockroaches. In one corner, a stone staircase leads down, so they follow it.

Below the house is some sort of complex cistern network, apparently full of rainwater for farm use, although in Vila’s opinion the layout is excessively complex and probably intended for something else originally. The large supporting pillars have been hollowed out and repurposed as underground chambers.

Basement Floor: Gangsters, hostages, automatic weapons, going down...

They spend some time sneaking around, finding a pair of gangsters playing cards, one asleep, and four eating a meal and drinking in various rooms. The hostage, if present, must be in the one room they haven’t been able to access. Dr Matauranga removes the snoring gangster from the equation by sneaking up on him and administering a sedative, then takes his SMG and uses it as an impromptu dipstick to see how deep the water is. Even fully extending his arm, he can’t touch bottom.

They then agree a plan; Mazun and Vila will distract the gangsters at table by shooting them with automatic weapons, while Dr Matauranga leaps agilely across the canals to the presumed location of the hostage and frees her. Off he goes to get into position.

Just as Matauranga is steeling himself for the jump, a patrol of gangsters comes into view, walking past the dining room in front of Mazun’s and Vila’s guns.

"Go loud!"

Mazun has taken the law level of “all firearms prohibited except shotguns” literally, and is carrying a fully automatic close assault weapon loaded with 12 gauge all brass; he opens up, massacring everything he can see, namely the patrol and those diners he can get at through the western opening of the chamber. Vila notices Mazun has missed one and plinks away with his borrowed 9mm SMG, grazing them. The boss gangster, who has been expecting some kind of trouble, takes cover in a corner of the room; the other surviving diner decides she is not being paid enough for this and runs out of the chamber’s north exit, towards the stairs.

The card players react to the sudden appalling noise by grabbing their guns and charging towards it; unfortunately, this requires jumping across a canal, and they both fail to make the leap in the darkness, falling into the water with a splash no-one can hear over the gunfire.

Meanwhile, Dr Matauranga is approaching the east entrance to the hostage room, where he finds Captain Cash and his steward (and son), Tomasz, crouched by the door with their hands over their ears. Not wanting them to mistake his intentions, the good Doctor slaps a patch of fast-acting relaxing chemicals onto the Captain’s neck, calming him down to the point where he can just about walk on his own but sees no reason to shoot anyone.

Vila shoots the surviving patrol member, then goes on overwatch while Mazun runs north, then east, then jumps south over a canal. At this point he sees Vila lining up on something around the corner ahead of him, and steps around, using his backup weapon (a 12.5mm auto pistol) to kill the runaway diner.

While that’s going on, the gang boss decides if he can’t have the hostage, nobody else can either, and bursts into the easternmost chamber from its western entrance at about the same time that the Cash family and Dr Matauranga enter from the east. The gang boss squeezes off a couple of rounds, grazing the hostage, then decides honour is satisfied and legs it through the north entrance to the dining room. Dr Matauranga administers first aid to the wounded Dr Cash and oversees the family reunion – Captain Cash being remarkably unconcerned thanks to the earlier medication, which causes some friction, although as the first person into the room he will later claim that the Macavity’s crew are merely assisting him.

Mazun shoots the fleeing gang boss, rendering him unconscious; Dr Matauranga patches him up, gives him a stern lecture about shooting hostages, then injects him with a hideously addictive drug without telling him what it is. His future looks bleak.

As the Macavity's crew have control of the battlefield, they search the various spaces, finding much that would be of interest to rival gangs, confirmation that this gang was dealing with Irontooth, and a data crystal he left with them for some unknown reason.

When cleaned up and installed in a firewalled VM aboard ship, this turns out to be a treasure map of sorts. It appears that in the runup to the (nuclear) civil war on Ergo, a number of the planet’s wealthiest families took themselves and their most treasured possessions to an underground bunker in a secluded spot. Sadly, it appears this was not as bombproof as they hoped; they are likely dead after many decades, but their treasure is believed to remain, protected by the natives’ inability to get at it and spacefarers not knowing where it is… until now…

To be continued...

GM Notes

Credits: Maps - Loke Battlemats. Tokens - Fiery Dragon, Runehammer.

Lack of motivation meant that five hours before kickoff I still had nothing ready. I have a couple of ideas for Ergo, but since they were on a timer - they had to get to Inurin before Irontooth figured out the Cash Cow is no longer responding to orders - I thought they'd go there first. So, we already have a mission objective; rescue Doctor Cash from the gangsters on Inurin who are holding her for Irontooth. Next, a location; I drew a spread of cards using a combination of The Scheme Pyramid and Modern Traps and Obstacles, mused on what sort of gang HQ-cum-prison that might be and selected a map from my collection of Loke Battlemats. In case they blindsided me and went exploring on Ergo instead, I made both sufficiently vague that by changing the MacGuffin they would work on either world. Thanks to the power of reskinning and trappings, I've been using the same handful of stock NPCs and monsters throughout, and I see no reason to change now, so no time spent on those.

I scattered some PEFs (Possible Enemy Forces) on the map, one of THW's best ideas; these are a fast, simple alternative to messing about with fog of war. I drew up a very simple encounter table for what the PEFs might be, allocated each card to a place on the map, and was good to go. Total elapsed prep time: 35 minutes.

Apart from Rex, this group doesn't like getting into fights, but I discovered in this session that they're happy to sneak around setting up ambushes. Then the light bulb came on; rather than basing my approach on First Person Shooters (like Half-Life), this group would enjoy First Person Sneakers (like Splinter Cell) more. Incoming paradigm shift...

Retrospective Review: Traveller

This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone...
Mayday, Mayday... we are under attack... main drive is gone...
turret number one not responding...
Mayday... losing cabin pressure fast... calling anyone... please help...
This is Free Trader Beowulf...
Mayday...

Here's the second of my game system reviews based on extensive play; in this case, 48 years of Traveller. I still get goosebumps reading that text from the box of the original edition, just like the first time I read it.

Core Mechanic

Roll 2d6, add modifiers, meet or beat a target number to succeed.

These days, the most common modifier is a character's skill level, but that introduces a problem, namely that each skill improvement significantly changes the chances of success and you can't do it often before you run out of road. Initially, this was addressed by making improvement very hard, but later additions deal with the problem by adding skill specialisations - to get the equivalent of Engineering-1 in Classic Traveller you now need to take at least four different skills to that level.

Damage varies between editions, but usually involves rolling damage dice for the weapon and deducting the result from the character's physical attributes. Armour might or might not soak damage, depending on which edition you're using.

The Editions

Classic Traveller (1977, 1981, 1983): My fondness for the 1977 edition is well known, although I think it missed a trick in not using range bands for ship combat - that was in the 1983 Starter Edition. The 1981 edition is perhaps the most popular "Classic Traveller", and updated quite a few areas of character creation and equipment, not always for the better in my opinion; it also shifted to a consistent use of the metric system throughout, rather than the previous mixture of metric for most things and Imperial for tabletop ship combat.

MegaTraveller (1987): Many hold this to be the best edition, but the approach of throwing every rule ever written for the game into one set of rulebooks didn't do it for me, and I really didn't like the Rebellion Era soft reboot of the setting. However, the task system was a great idea, if somewhat over-detailed, and a worthy addition to the game. I played this edition a little, but never really ran it as a GM; I found it bigger and more complicated than Classic Traveller without being any more fun.

Traveller: The New Era (1993): I tried very hard to like this, but failed. The hard reboot of the setting didn't do it for me; and converting the game to the poorly-named "GDW House System" - basically second edition Twilight: 2000 - nerfed all the fun bits of the game while introducing even more complexity and detail. My perception was that this was not so much a game as it was the "series bible" for a series of novels, and indeed there were some written. I did run this for a few sessions before switching to 2300AD as the game engine.

Marc Miller's Traveller (AKA "T4", 1996): I always felt this was released before it was finished; there seemed to be a lot missing, and a lot of elements which didn't integrate together well. This was the point in my gaming career where I shifted from "there's a bit missing here, no problem, I'll write something to fill the gap" to "Mr Publisher, I am paying you for this game and I expect it to be complete and consistent within its advertised scope". I ran this for less than a year before switching to GURPS.

GURPS Traveller (1998): At this time, I was playing and running quite a bit of GURPS 3rd Edition, including a game in the Stargate universe and an unusually large Traveller-related campaign set in the Dark Nebula during the Aslan Border Wars, with a huge story arc being pursued by multiple groups of face to face, play-by-post, and play-by-email players. Good heavens, that was a lot of work, but it spun off my contributions to Alien Races 2 and Alien Races 3, which I think were the last gaming materials I wrote for money, because around that time I stopped enjoying that.

Traveller20 (2002): I looked at T20, and liked some of the artwork and deck plans, but Traveller with a class-and-level d20-based system just feels wrong to me.

Traveller Hero (2006): I'm aware this exists, but I've never actually seen it. One gamer I know waxes lyrical about how wonderful the Champions RPG and its successor the Hero System are at every opportunity, and keeps trying to persuade me to try them; but for some reason, neither interests me.

GURPS Traveller Interstellar Wars (2006): I looked at this one, as I quite like this part of the setting; but it was intended for GURPS 4th Edition, and I'd checked out of GURPS a few years earlier. Having leafed through a copy, it seemed to be chiefly setting material which didn't interest me with no supporting adventures.

Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition (2008): I've played and run this, a little, but didn't much like it, for three reasons; first, dynamic initiative, second, the artwork, and third, skill creep - there are hundreds of skills, many of them specialisations of other skills. This had a kind of Open Gaming Licence which resulted in the Cepheus Engine being released as a clone ruleset, making it easier for third parties to produce content; that produced the kind of explosion in products we saw a few years earlier with the D&D OGL, exploiting the potential for Traveller to be used in a wide range of settings - something GDW never pursued, although Mongoose and the third parties did.

Traveller5 (2013, 2019): I bought the 2013 edition of Traveller5, and decided it wasn't so much a game as a toolkit for making your own SF RPG. My gearhead days are far behind me now, so the T5 PDFs languish on a CD in one of the darker recesses of my bookshelves. The chief impact this has had on my gaming is making the Traveller Map and Traveller Wiki steadily less usable at my table as they are gradually rewritten using T5, burying what I care about under mounds of detail I'm not interested in.

Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition (2016, 2022): I've both run and played this, and while I consider it an improvement on the 1st Edition, the galloping skills creep still puts me off; I'll happily play it, but I don't expect to run it again. The 2016 edition had no ship design rules in it, but it's been over 40 years since I used anything except the standard designs, so that wasn't an issue for me. I hated the isometric deck plans - useless at the table - but thankfully the 2022 edition did away with those.

Pros and Cons

If you know any SF RPG at all, it's likely to be Traveller. It wasn't the first, but it keeps chugging away, assimilating new ideas and game systems as they arise to better serve the needs of the collective.

Like most first generation RPGs, it's very simple to learn and teach. Most editions have random encounter tables and core gameplay loops which make them well-suited to co-op or solitaire play.

All editions are highly modular, with a core rulebook, and supplements allowing you to expand in the directions you're interested in - this started with Book 4, Mercenary, expanding the weapons lists and military character creation, adding mass combat and mercenary operations.

However, it takes a long time to create a character, and due to the lifepath creation method adopted by most editions, you have no guarantee that the resulting character will fit into the group or indeed be anything you'd want to play. Mongoose editions deal with this by handing out extra skills from a package tailored to the chosen campaign type, so that every PC has at least one skill that will be of some use.

SF is a broad church, and there are some things that are harder to do in Traveller than others. It was originally intended to emulate the Golden Age SF of the 1940s to 1970s, and it does that well; you can adapt it to cover cyberpunk, but AI, nanotech, and transhumanist Nu Space Opera get increasingly difficult to fit in without breaking the setting, if not the rules.

Changes Over the Years

In some ways, Traveller is more a setting than it is a set of rulebooks. The Third Imperium has a wide range of sectors of space and time periods in which you can run almost any kind of adventure, and you can interface with this core using any one of the editions. MegaTraveller broke the Imperium with a civil war, with the intention of creating more factions (which drive adventures) and borders (which are where adventures happen). TNE razed it to the ground to deal with how hard it was for new players to get up to speed with all the setting material. T20 and T4 (and later, GURPS Traveller Interstellar Wars) sidestepped the issue by picking times and places far away from the contentious bits. GURPS Traveller, and later Mongoose Traveller, took place in a universe where the Rebellion and subsequent Virus never happened, or at least haven't happened yet. Would that DGP and GDW had taken that path.

Setting aside forks of the game like GURPS Traveller and Traveller Hero, the core rules from GDW and DGP grew steadily more complex and less fun, with Mongoose trying hard to produce something that marries the look and feel of Classic Traveller with more modern sensibilities as to rules, and I think largely succeeding.

At its core, the game is still roll 2d6, add skill level, aim for 8+.

My Future With Traveller

I think this is where I get off the Traveller train, at least as a GM. I feel I am being steadily pushed out by ever-increasing levels of detail in both T5 and Mongoose 2nd Edition; I can - and have - taken a stand, saying that a specific set of products are considered canon for my campaign and anything else is what the PCs heard from a bloke down the pub and not to be trusted. This is easy to justify, as Traveller products are no more consistent with each other than they are with my vision of the setting; but I feel increasingly uncomfortable all the same.

If I were a hedgehog knowing one big thing, that one big thing would be Classic Traveller; in hindsight, every later edition has been a step away from what I love about the game.

Periodically I read through it and think "I want to run it again, but I'd have to change this bit, and that bit..." and what I had at the end of that wouldn't really be Traveller. My current approach is to run Traveller adventures using Savage Worlds. Is that still Traveller? I'm not sure. It feels like it to me, and the players still refer to my game as "Traveller", so maybe it is.

Regardless, scratch the surface of any of my SF games, and you will see Traveller shining through underneath. In some ways, I can never leave it behind.

Appendix N

This year I've seen a number of people posting their version of Appendix N, the list of fictional inspirations mentioned in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Here's my take on that, but naturally I'm looking at science fiction rather than fantasy, and out of the numerous works I've read, I'm focussing on those that have had the most impact on my gaming.

• Poul Anderson: The Polesotechnic League and Flandry stories, covering trade pioneers (civilian scouts) and Imperial intelligence respectively. Together, these form the bulk of Anderson's Future History, and are notable for the focus on solving puzzles; they had more influence on my earliest Traveller campaigns than anything else. Also consider The Star Fox, a yarn of interstellar privateering.
• Christopher Anvil: Mind Partner, a short story which was one of the original inspirations for Arion's strange meta-narrative; the others were Nick Bostrum's Simulation Hypothesis and my periodic dreams of other worlds, when on waking I briefly wonder which is the dream and which is reality.
• Isaac Asimov: The original Foundation series (the collapse of an interstellar empire) and Robot stories (the Three Laws of Robotics and how to circumvent them), which were not originally connected. I'm not as fond of the later sequels.
• Iain M. Banks: The Culture novels; space hippies with really big guns, meddling with other civilisations - it's for their own good, honestly. Megastructures, AI, strange weapons, weird aliens; start with Consider Phlebas. Also consider the stand-alone novel Against a Dark Background; mind-linked combat teams and the Lazy Gun, a super-weapon right out of Looney Tunes.
• James Blish: The Cities in Flight quartet, of which my favourite is Earthman, Come Home. Gives a good feel for the scale of the galaxy; follows the adventures of a flying New York City as a migrant worker among the stars, providing industrial and research services to backward planets. My copy includes an appendix offering a handy guide to Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, in which Cities in Flight was rooted and which I used to sketch out the timelines for my own campaigns, back in the day.
• Lois McMaster Bujold: The Vorkosigan Saga. This one has a bit of everything; soldiers, spies, weird societies, clone doppelgangers, interstellar politics, even a Regency-style comedy romance involving a sex change operation at one point. Can be read in any order, but start with Shards of Honour, although it's not the first, nor does it have the hero of the saga in it. Bujold is very good at writing from a male viewpoint, and the main protagonist - a crippled dwarf tactical genius - is unique.
• John Brunner: Interstellar Empire (explaining how you could have a galaxy of planets at wildly differing tech levels), The Shockwave Rider (cyberpunk before it was cool), Stand on Zanzibar (overpopulation, TVs that use CGI to insert the viewer into the story, a US-China war, mind-programmed assassins before they were cool, and lots of other plausible near-future stuff).
• C.J. Cherryh: The Alliance/Union universe, especially Merchanter's Luck (in which various factions help the protagonist for their own purposes), Downbelow Station (warfare among colonies), and The Pride of Chanur (the closest thing to Traveller aslan in fiction). To my mind this is the fictional universe most like 2300AD.
• James S.A. Corey: The Expanse novels and short stories. Hard SF with interesting takes on building an interstellar empire, vanished precursor aliens, and FTL travel using jump gates.
• David Drake: The Hammer's Slammers and RCN stories, dealing with mercenaries and naval personnel respectively. The protagonists of the RCN novels are definitely PCs. Drake's writing is also a masterclass in taking older stories - such as the Odyssey - and reskinning them for SF.
• William Gibson: The Sprawl Trilogy; Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive. Cyberpunk done right.
• Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (powered armour troopers and the rise of a relativistic civilisation), All My Sins Remembered (high-tech espionage).
• Robert A Heinlein: Starship Troopers (powered armour troopers vs arachnids, and a militaristic society); Citizen of the Galaxy (free traders among strange cultures); The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (revolt in a lunar prison colony, and AI before it was cool).
• Frank Herbert: Dune (political machinations and factions in an interstellar empire); The Dragon in the Sea (SF submarines); Hellstrom's Hive (a very strange human society). I'm not as fond of the sequels to Dune, and having read one of the prequels, I wouldn't touch the rest with a laser rangefinder.
• Murray Leinster: The Med Ship stories (an unusual take on scoutships, their lone pilots, and the societies they encounter).
• Linda Nagata: The Red: First Light (corporate armies and the most credible take on a friendly AI I've yet read).
• Larry Niven: The Known Space stories, most famously Ringworld. Megastructures, weird aliens, strange human cultures. Chaosium's Ringworld RPG was such a good implementation of this setting that authors writing stories in the universe were given it as a "series bible".
• Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: The Mote in God's Eye. The definitive story of first contact with aliens, with lots of detail about interstellar navy life.
• H Beam Piper: The Future History, including the short story collections Federation and Empire. Best known for Little Fuzzy (first contact with creatures like ewoks) though my personal favourite is Star Viking (I suspect the inspiration for Traveller's feudal technocracy government type and the Sword Worlds in the Spinward Marches).
• Jerry Pournelle: The Future History stories, especially the ones about Falkenburg's Mercenary Legion. The History covers a thousand years of warfare, politics and sociology, and has multiple spinoffs written by others.
• Christopher Rowley: The Vang Trilogy - Starhammer, The Military Form, The Battlemaster. If you've played the Halo games or read/watched The Expanse, you might wonder whether the creators had read the Vang books.
• Eric Frank Russell: Next of Kin (lone scout taken prisoner schemes against his captors), Wasp (interstellar saboteur).
• James H Schmitz: The short stories about Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee, all set in the Federation of the Hub; they are periodically collected, and there's also a short novel, The Lion Game. These are about psionics, espionage, and strange societies; Schmitz is unusual for the era (1960s) in having strong female leads.
• Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash. Cyberpunk done right again, arguably even better than William Gibson. Interesting take on a balkanised planet, and a very memorable supersonic cyborg dog.
• E.C. Tubb: The Dumarest of Terra novels. This is as close to Traveller as fiction gets, at least the pre-Third Imperium Traveller of the late 1970s. Often criticised because it takes Dumarest 30+ novels to find Earth, but that's missing the point; his quest is simply a reason for him to move on to the next planet and the next story, much like Star Trek's five year mission.
• Jack Vance: The Demon Princes quintet (a saga of revenge against crimelords lurking beyond civilised space), the Planet of Adventure quartet (marooned scout wanders across a multi-species planet to find a way home). Adam Reith of the latter series is the quintessential interstellar scout.
• Peter Watts: Blindsight. A first contact story which asks some big questions about intelligence and consciousness, and comes up with some disturbing answers. Also the ship's captain is a vampire. This was a major influence on my Dark Nebula campaigns.
• David Weber: The Honor Harrington novels, at least the first dozen or so; I lost interest eventually. Interstellar navy, marines and politics; unusual in that the titular heroine begins as a navy Captain and rises into the nobility, Hornblower-style narratives usually start the protagonist as an Ensign and follow his climb to Admiral. Many, many spinoffs.

I've only scratched the surface of the vast clade of genres which is science fiction, but these are the ones which have influenced my games the most. What would you add to the list?