Arion 1-02: Imperial Entanglements

Previously, on the Arioniad: Arion has accepted a contract to take some luxury goods from Jewell to Emerald. He does not know that the factor he dealt with concealed something in the crates, nor that a third party wants them back. Now read on...

Jewell, 007-1105

By the time Phillips' erstwhile interrogator gets to the starport, makes his way to the right hangar, and bluffs his way inside, Arion is five hours into his outbound leg.

"I wouldn't want to be Phillips today," he mutters to himself under his breath. Come to think of it, it's not going to be much fun being him, either; the boss is not a forgiving sort. Maybe he can divert the worst of it onto Phillips? Worth a try.

Jumpspace, 008-1105 to 014-1105

Two days out of Jewell, the power plant drops into standby mode, and the diagnostics tell Arion the main fuel pump has failed.

"Stupid piece of smegging..." he yells at it, belabouring it with a wrench. It glugs in protest, then starts working again right away. The power plant spools up to normal output once more, and Arion makes a mental note to replace it with the spare at the next stop, then replace the spare. It doesn't matter how good the warranty is when you're in another dimension entirely.

Emerald, 015-1105 to 021-1105

Protocol dictates taking a full day to approach and land, or take off and jump, so there is time to exchange gossip and information with other vessels. A freight hauler called Golden Harvest alerts Arion to the fact that the local Customs officials are being unusually thorough; that doesn't worry him as he's done nothing wrong.

His lack of concern changes when the Customs inspectors find something in his delivery.

"What's this?" one of them asks, holding up a bag of white powder.

"Some sort of white powder, obviously. I don't know what, I didn't know it was in there."

"You expect me to believe that?"

"Look, officer, that's a sealed container, if you check its log you'll see I haven't opened it. There's no way for me to tell what's inside, that's deliberate to stop inflight theft." The officer knows this full well, but Arion spends most of that day, and the next, explaining it in multiple different ways to various officers while their colleagues go over the Dolphin with a fine-toothed comb. Unable either to find any evidence, or trust him, they reluctantly release him after the legal limit for detention without charge, but impound the ship pending 'further investigation', which he suspects will take a long time. His cargo is confiscated, so his hoped-for profit evaporates; he'll be lucky if he doesn't go broke, and can only hope the opportunity costs aren't compounded by fines.

He spends most of 018-1105 in the starport bar, being watched by plainclothes customs officers, which attracts the attention of some local vigilantes who reason that if the local police are watching him he must have done something wrong. He manages to avoid getting into a brawl, largely because he is under surveillance and the vigilantes don't want to take any chances with starport Customs. That suggests to him that something approaching the rule of law is still in force locally, but all the same, he retires to the scout base attached to the starport for safety.

He is still there on 020-1105 when a young Navy Lieutenant walks in, dark-haired, with an alert expression and a natural grace to her movements which catches his eye. Her nametag says GIRMA.

"Arion Metaxas?"

"Yes, how can I help you?"

"You can take me and my cargo to the Navy base on Jewell, stat."

"I'd love to, but Customs impounded my ship."

"The Navy will deal with that. This is urgent."

"All right... how long will dealing with it take?"

"Less time than it takes us to get to the hangar. As I say, it's urgent. Do you have anything you need to pick up?"

"No, all my stuff is evidence, so it was impounded with the ship. Do I get paid?"

"You get your ship released, restocked and refuelled. That do?"

"Perfect. Lead the way."

Mechanical View

The context at the start of this episode is that Phillips has concealed something in the cargo, and has revealed this under interrogation by a couple of rough types. We don't know who they are, or why Phillips did this. Arion has not yet taken off, but will do soon. (Context matters if I need to fall back on One-Page Mythic, so it's helpful to understand it.)

We begin by drawing a card for a travel encounter as per SWADE p. 144, and get a five of diamonds. Arion does not have an encounter that day, which tells me that the goons sent to recover the shipment don't manage to intercept him before he lifts off, and while there is bound to be traffic around Jewell, none of it is dramatically interesting today. (Most games have you roll for who you meet first, and then how friendly they are; SWADE reverses that order, I suspect because it's a generic ruleset and encounter tables for every possible genre would have expanded the book enormously.)

Next I make a Science roll to calculate the hyperspace jump; 1d6 with a Wild Die, and with a 2 Arion fails, but he can try again, and on the reroll he gets a 5, success. A critical failure would have meant a misjump. I often don't bother rolling for astrogation, since it rarely helps develop the story.

Now we have a week in jump, so I switch to Solo, where I need to roll for In-Game Reactions (p. 19) and Onboard Events (p. 56). The reaction is a 6, followed by a 3 to determine what kind; Arion loses his temper. The onboard event roll of 4, 2 says a fuel pump fails. Arion makes a Repair roll to fix it; the die aces twice, so he rolls a 17 - success with three raises. Those two look made for each other, so I merge them.

Then we're in a new system, so I draw cards for seven days' worth of encounters. Wow, this is going to be a busy week...

• Jack of Diamonds. A ship encounter on approach, treasure; most likely some useful information. I roll on the Solo ship encounter tables (pp. 49-44), but use the card suit instead of the Ship Reactions table (Solo p. 45). This is a 3,000 ton large transport called the Golden Harvest.
• Queen of Clubs. An obstacle on the first day groundside; maybe that's what the information was about. Solo World Encounter (p. 58) 6, 5 - legal trouble, logically that should be about the hidden cargo. I roll Persuasion for Arion to talk his way out of it and get a 4, just barely.
• Three of Diamonds. Nothing.
• King of Hearts. Neutral or friendly strangers. I roll on the Solo World Encounters table (p. 58) and get 6, 4 - meet a potential Contact; reaction roll 4, so if we meet again Arion must roll 4 or less on 2d6 to get help from them. Who are they? The Colourful Locals table (Solo p. 38) says they are vigilantes.
• Queen of Hearts. Neutral or friendly strangers. World Encounter 3, 5 - courier job to next location; that sounds like a patron; Patron Table Solo p. 59, roll 1, 1 - naval officer. I select Navy NPC 10 from Classic Traveller Supplement 1 for speed, the first one with a suitable rank, and die rolls tell me this is a female Lieutenant whose most notable feature is her youth, called Kamla Girma. I could roll randomly for a destination, but reason that a Navy officer is most likely going to a naval base, and the closest one is Jewell. I decide to shuffle the dates around a little for the sake of the story, and that it makes most sense if Customs find something in his cargo and impound the ship, but the patron springs it for him.
• Five of Spades. Nothing.
• Five of Hearts. Nothing. That would have been a ship encounter when leaving.

GM Notes

I think I now have the full set of tools for this game. The base rules, as shown last time, include the SWADE core rulebook, Zozer Games' Solo rules to add features for solitaire play in a Traveller-ish universe, Trader Voyages, and One-Page Mythic to fill any gaps. I'm considering whether to drop the SWADE card draws for encounters and just use Solo, it's a bit clunky to switch between them in mid-encounter. I'm also thinking about dropping the Classic Traveller Supplements for NPCs, since I should be able to do that with Mythic.

This week, I'm adding two more products: Moon Toad's Gagarin-class scout/courier, and the 1st edition Mongoose Traveller campaign book Tripwire. In honesty, the details and deck plans for Arion's scoutship very rarely come into play, but I do find they help me visualise the narrative; further, the Gagarin has jump-3 capability, and that is essential if you want to stay inside Jewell subsector but still have access to all the worlds. Likewise for Tripwire, the descriptions of worlds don't feature that often, but when they do, it's less effort to look them up than make them up, and for this season of the Arioniad minimum effort is my watchword.

The underlying conceit of the Arioniad is that the simulation hypothesis is true, and Arion is being run through various universes by an extremely advanced civilisation, partly as a science experiment and partly as a pay-per-view action adventure serial; so the fact that world descriptions and other aspects of the rules and setting change periodically is actually explained by the narrative itself.

That pleases me.