Aslan Route 13: The Alley Cat

"The first rule of running a hexcrawl is: Never let the players know you're running a hexcrawl." - Baron de Ropp

Sink, 1105 Week 40

Checking with the abbot that he has nothing for them to deliver or pick up, the crew of the Macavity lift off from Sink bound for The World, where the Prince's boon companions have now completed their security contract at the starport. They are carrying an invitation from the Prince to his friends, offering them positions on his new landhold.

En route to the jump limit they encounter an aslan patrol cruiser looking for pirates, which asks for news from Sink; they report that an affair of honour has occurred between two groups of ihatei, but otherwise things have been quiet.

Jumpspace, 1105 Week 41

Sensor failures lead the crew to suspect they have a dead stowaway on board, but in fact one of the replaceable modules has failed, so Vila replaces it and all returns to normal.

The World, 1105 Week 42

The Macavity delivers Prince Hteleitoirl's offer to a mixed reception, ranging from joyful acceptance to muttered observations that his last adventure didn't go so well, and maybe better luck could be had elsewhere. All the same, the ship will have full cabins on its way back to Sink.

While the crew are loading and offloading cargo, a group of aslan approach the ship, and the leader addresses Captain Ashran - unusual as she is female and he is legally male. She and her entourage have no clan markings, and are clearly accustomed to violence. She confirms that the crew are associated with the Prince, and wishes to buy passage for two negotiators back to Sink, where they will make him a business proposition. Mazun figures their money is as good as anyone's, and agrees.

Later, he has a few drinks with the captain of the ship that brought her in - Captain Salma Hadi of the Chesterton's Fence, who has clearly seen better days; she and tells him that these are representatives of the Rea’a Hrilkhir, the aslan organised crime syndicate on Tyokh, led by Okheai, also known as 'the Alley Cat', and are not to be trifled with. The captain warns Mazun that the mob has effective control of the lucrative guide and interpreter market on Tyokh, and any guide or interpreter he hires there should be assumed to be reporting back to the mob.

While Mazun is digesting this, Governor Olc - the local ruler - approaches them and says he has a problem; the station's main fusion plant is failing, could he borrow their engineers to take a look at it? Overnight, of course, so that the locals don't start asking any awkward questions.

The engineers of both traders, plus a couple from an aslan survey vessel that chances to be in the system and the insatiably curious Dr Matauranga, are conducted through the depressurised ring section between the starport and the station proper. Vila speaks for all of them when he sucks air sadly through his teeth and says: "What cowboy put that in for you? Fixing it won't be cheap." The Governor explains that this is an original Rule of Man installation, and to maintain the inhabitants' belief that there is no universe apart from this decaying ring of crumbling corridors and hydroponics vats, the failing parts must not only be replaced but must appear identical to those already in place.

After extensive discussions which propose and discard multiple options, the crew settles on getting the mob to buy and install a new fusion plant from Tyokh in the depressurised ring section and run an extension cord through to the official plant. The Alley Cat explains to Governor Olc that he works for her now, and enquires how he intends to pay? She has him over a barrel, as without a functioning power plant things get cold and dark very quickly.

The Governor has nothing to offer but indentured servants selected from his population, which it turns out is how he was paying for the security contract. For their part in brokering the deal, the Macavity's crew fill up their low berths with hydroponics technicians for Sink.

Jumpspace, 1105 Week 43

A blindingly persuasive Captain Ashran gets the Alley Cat's emissaries to spill the beans; their offer is a simple one. They have money and muscle, both useful for a startup landhold with a security contract, and as they are composed of outcastes, what they want is a way back into aslan society - respectability, if you will. The Alley Cat proposes to bankroll the Prince's landhold and provide him with troops posing as wandering ihatei, including her own son; in return, the Prince will arrange for them to be adopted by Clan Iuwoi.

Sink, 1105 Week 44

Mazun and Vila seek out the Prince and Ellie respectively, due to their official genders, and explain the deal that will be offered to them. Vila, who has personal experience of this sort of thing, stresses that once you get involved with the mob, you never get out, and while initially what they ask of you is harmless, it will grow less and less honourable over time.

The Prince considers this at great length, and almost agrees; but in the end he declines politely, and equally politely the envoys tell him they will be back later with a better offer.

Meanwhile, we check in on the hydroponics technicians. They went to sleep in their own beds, were drugged and kidnapped, and woke up several weeks later in low berths in an unfamiliar place, surrounded by people they've never seen before and big furry demons with claws and fangs. If it were not for Dr Matauranga's tranquilisers, they might well have had a fit. The Prince is having none of this 'indentured servant' nonsense - a slave is a slave, and the concept offends him - so he frees them on the spot, and offers them employment and his protection as part of his landhold. The crew gently breaks the news to them that they can never go home again, so although the Prince means well, they have no real choice but to accept, and step out blinking into the Big Room with the Blue Ceiling, wondering what that warm yellow thing is up there.

The crew decide to take the mob envoys with them to Paal directly, so they don't have time to cause any trouble; the envoys are fine with this, as it will get them home faster than waiting for a ship on Sink. Ahoakhi asks them to deliver some reports and letters to Paal for forwarding to Tyokh. These include a situation report from the Prince to his father the Clanlord, warning him to be on his guard against the local mob.

Captain Ashran decides it is time to check in with his handler on Cordan, and notes that by the time the Macavity arrives there it will be time for the annual overhaul anyway, so they lay in a course to Tech-World, Exe and Cordan.

GM Notes

A short session this week as I was feeling a bit under the weather, but an eventful one nonetheless. The spotlight was on Mazun and Vila this time, so next session I must find some way to turn it on Rex and the good doctor.

Since I'm running both this campaign and the Arioniad in weekly 'turns', it simplifies things to acknowledge that in the writeup. Again, I had no real plan for this session, so I turned to Solo for some events; I rolled those up in advance for the first few weeks, and then winged it, using Solo, Mythic, and some actual physical dice. I'll try this for the next week or two, and if it's successful I'll use that going forward, and let the Fury plotline blossom or die on the vine as the players dictate. What I found this session was that the items I had rolled up in advance and had time to think about worked really well, but those I diced up on the spot did not - my improvisational skills weren't up to the task, at least not this week.

It was helpful to work through Solo, print out the tables I wanted to use, and put them in a binder in the order they come up during a game; Solo first gives you the tables common to all four campaign types it covers, then tables specific to each campaign, and the tables are often separated by explanatory text. This is a good choice for book size and layout, and works well on the initial read-through, but it results in a lot of page flipping at the table; as is often the case with RPG products, the order that is best for learning the product is not the best one for using it in play. Doing this highlighted for me that I've been missing out several of the encounter rolls; the week travelling should include two starport encounters and two ship encounters, I must fix that going forward. (As an aside, this exercise was the point where I finally rage-quit Adobe Acrobat for being unusably slow and continuously trying to sell me extra features and AI 'support' I neither need nor want. I just want to read the freakin' PDF, is that too much to ask? I installed Sumatra PDF Reader and haven't looked back.)

Another thing I am considering doing is abandoning the world writeups and just letting the players look up whatever they want in the Traveller Wiki. The last month or two have established that as GM or solo player, I don't really use anything beyond the world profiles. I never did that back in the day either, and that worked well enough, so maybe I should revert to that approach.

One thing I do enjoy is presenting the players with moral dilemmas and seeing how they react. With the best of intentions, the kind the road to Hell is paved with, they wound up handing over an entire world to the aslan equivalent of the yakuza (which they took to calling "the unpronounceable mafia") and becoming slavers themselves. They have not yet thought to ask why the Alley Cat wants Sink.

All of that will have consequences downstream.