Arion 1-05: The Turn of the Screw

"The first turn of the screw pays all debts."

Mongo, 1105 Week 7

One of the tradeoffs for the perks of being a detached duty scout is that the Service can decide to re-attach you at any time, and in short order Arion finds himself called to the scout base, reactivated, and given orders to load a cargo for Hollis and get it there, stat, but without passing through Zhodani space.

"Why me?" he asks.

"You've got a Gagarin-class detached duty scout. It has the extended jump range, so it doesn't have to follow jump-2 routes or pass through Zhodani space. It's also not part of our official complement, and nor are you, so I don't have to reschedule Klono knows how many ships and their crews to fit in a rush job."

"I had plans," Arion says, plaintively.

"Well, if you can't take a joke, you shouldn't have joined."

Jumpspace, 1105 Week 8

Arion and Mr Osheen are in the hold, checking the power supplies to their cargo, as they do on a regular basis on this trip.

"Why are we carrying three people in low berths?" asks Mr Osheen.

"It'll take us nine months to get to Hollis," Arion explains. "Sending someone from Jewell to Capital would take more than two years. The Imperium wants to maximise the return on its training investment, get as much productive lifespan out of people as it can; so for longer trips it sends them in cryosleep. It's a lot cheaper than high passage, too."

"Then why not install low berths in our ship permanently?"

"Partly to save money, partly because space is at a premium on small ships, and partly because when you wake someone from cryosleep, they might die; low berths you can transfer from ship to ship mean you don't have to wake them so often, you can hand off the berth rather than wake the people, move them to a new ship, then freeze them again."

Mr Osheen digests this for a moment, then asks hopefully:

"If any of our passengers die, may I consume their bodily fluids for nourishment?"

"Probably best not to. Check with me first."

"You never let me have any fun," Mr Osheen complains.

Arion ignores him and wipes condensation from the low berth viewports with his sleeve. He gazes thoughtfully at his passengers.

"Why do you do that every time?" Mr Osheen asks. "They always look the same."

"This one I don't know," Arion says, gesturing at the leftmost berth. "This one is really cute, and I'm shallow like that," gesturing at the middle berth. "And this one," he says, looking into the final berth, "This one is Major Sheng. Now why is she going to Hollis? Come to that, why are any of them going to Hollis?"

And if getting them there is urgent, why couldn't they go through the Consulate and get there that much faster? That suggests the Service doesn't want the Consulate to find out about them, let alone have a chance to pick their brains. And sending three people instead of a message suggests there is something special about those people. He has never met the other two, but he knows Major Sheng.

Major Sheng is a slightly built artistic type who is also expert in military tactics and hand-to-hand combat, with side hustles in firearms and combat medic. Major Sheng is light enough that you could pick her up in your arms and carry her off easily, pretty enough that you'd want to, and lethal enough that doing it without her consent would get you folded, spindled and mutilated. Major Sheng is the sort of person you would want as a bodyguard or head of security for someone important. The man? The woman? Both? Probably the woman, he thinks, if only because Sheng could follow her into any gendered areas they might encounter, like freshers.

He checks his commlink. Only another 35 weeks to go. He has questions about his cargo, questions he knows will prey on his mind at least until he delivers them to Hollis, and probably long after that.

"If you can't take a joke," he reminds himself, "You shouldn't have joined."

GM Notes

It's been a minute, eh, Arion?

This is me setting up the next phase of the Arioniad. For those of you watching the Indiana Jones-style red line creeping across the Traveller Map, Arion's route is Jewell, Lysen, Utoland, Digitis, Edinina, Quare, Thanber, Faisal, Bael, Fessor 3119, Fessor 3020, Reidan 3021, Reidan 2822, Reidan 2623, and finally Hollis. That's 20 jumps over a 34 week period, and he has to invoke the Gagarin class' extra Jump-1 capability 5 times. An ordinary scoutship would have taken much longer, or had to go through Consulate space.

Major Sheng is Army character 2 from Supplement 1: 1001 Characters, because I can pull that off my reference shelf and pick the first character with the right rank faster than asking questions and rolling dice, and we've already established that Arion knows her well. I like to design my PCs, but I also like NPCs to be somewhat random so that I don't fall into the rut of using the same archetypes all the time. (He hasn't been introduced to the others yet, so no need to detail them yet.)

So, what's going on here? Well...

Setting: Jewell Subsector is not gelling for me. There are mountains of information generated about the Spinward Marches by multiple publishers, and even more authors, over the last half century. And it's highly detailed, but at the same time inconsistent. And even if I'm not using it, I know it's there and it preys on my mind. And if I do take my players there, as I originally intended, they will look at the masses of detail in the Traveller Wiki and expect it to be true. I can't cope with all that, so Arion needs to move. Until recently, this would have meant a change of setting or even game, but I am trying to control that urge, as it is counter-productive. Fortunately, Charted Space has the Foreven Sector, which is a rigidly defined area of doubt and uncertainty. I can drop PCs into it, and everything their players know about Charted Space remains true - or at least, as true as it ever was - but I can create worlds and local factions without being beholden to anyone or anything else. Even better, I can change my mind multiple times about whether I play in the official setting or not, and hop over the sector border to deal with that whenever I feel like it. I wish I'd thought of that 15 years ago, it would've saved me a lot of trouble.

Product set: I get antsy when I am not working from the minimum possible product set. I always need a core rulebook, a tailored setting guide, and character sheets. But I have a cycle where I gradually add other things, then get upset about the amount of stuff living on my hard drive and in my head rent-free, and want to burn it all down and start over. The cycle duration is getting shorter as I get older, and I've just shifted into a burn-it-all phase again.

Solo oracles: Classic Traveller is a slice of life game, in which ordinary people live ordinary lives punctuated by moments of world-shaking intrigue and stark terror. And Solo supports that very well. And that's all well and good, but at the moment I am looking for all killer, no filler; pulp adventure in the vein of Indiana Jones or Star Wars, which SWADE supports very well. This is why you will shortly see me shifting over to some of Richard Woolcock's oracles as an experiment.

Let's be about it.