Thursday, May 17, 2012

Traveller session #1


Last night the exploration vessel Leviathan set out into the unknown with its crew of 55 and 4 civilian scientists.  Each player had one of the senior officer pregens and one or two characters rolled up using the original Traveller rules.  Yes, some PCs died in chargen.  The players rolled up a large number of ground-pounders (Army and Marines), which resulted in many PCs assigned crap jobs aboard the ship.  There are only so many starship gigs available for a dude whose best skill is Cutlass-3, so we ended up with several trained killers working as Cargo Handlers and Galley Hands.

Many of the extra PCs ended up serving most of the session as the landing party.  While the Leviathan and its shuttle scooped fuel from a nearby gas giant, the landing party would survey the mainworld of the system with the ship's pinnace, a term that provided unlimited amusement to the players.  

The first world explored (dubbed "Erebus") was an airless rockball with the remains of three domed cities, all bombed out. Under the largest they detected some trace emissions of breathable gases, so the party donned vaccsuits and descended below the street level.  That's when the morlocks jumped them.  It was a brief struggle, as the morlocks only had clubs and daggers while the party had a large array of firearms.  Pat's vaccsuit helmet was dented up a bit and a couple suits had to be patched quickly, but the morlocks were defeated.  A quick examination of some of the less laser-blasted bodies revealed small limpet-like symbiots on the bellies of all the morlocks.  These creatures oxygenate the blood in exchange for nutrients, allowing the morlocks to live in thinner atmospheres than normal humans.  A live symbiotic limpet is the only thing of value they found on the world.

The second system visited was more promising.  They found an earthlike world they named Wibbly.  Wibbly is inhabited by slowship colonists whose technology level had crept back to the stoneage due to lack of heavy metals, but they had a very successful neolithic civilization going.  First contact with the Wibblonians went reasonably well and some trade followed.  More importantly, vast deposits of petrochemical were found just under the surface.


16 comments:

  1. Very cool and sounds fun. So was it Wiggly or Wibbly?

    - Ark

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  2. Sounds fun! I need to play some Traveller now... (Starts rummaging through gaming materials.)

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  3. Anonymous1:33 AM

    Oh god.

    Test the symbionts to see their long-term effects on lab animals. Do they turn regular folks into Morlocks?!

    Also can they be rigged up to oxygenate a fluid that in turn oxygenates the air? Could be a nice biological backup to life support in an emergency. But you gotta test the air they put out to make sure they aren't screwing with it ...

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  4. supercool. Way more so than any Trav I played, all those years ago.

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  5. Nice! This is already my favorite online game report.

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  6. Awesome, though your Traveller makes me want to play Trek.

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  7. Are you running this at the game store, in private, or online?

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  8. Those poor, exploited Wibblyonianites. I bet they're getting centicreds on the credit unit for the value of those petrochemicals. For shame, encouraging the exploitation of aboriginals for the profit of an already rapacious capitalist system!

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    1. Actually I explicitly described the Imperium as hyper-capitalism in space. Exploiting and displacing native populations was a topic under discussion.

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    2. Anonymous1:28 PM

      Although we didn't do any actual exploiting. We just gathered as much information as possible to send back to our bosses. We pretty much washed our hands of whatever may come next.

      However, in the Wibblies' case, it could be a mutually beneficial relationship. T

      he planet's orbit was about 200 years away from turning it into a big ball of ice. Thus it's probably not a viable candidate for long-term mass colonization by the Imperium.

      There's no reason why extracting the petro-chemicals should interfere with the nomadic existence of the Wibblies, and greater contact with the Imperium will give them a ticket off the planet when the planet's elliptical orbit takes them too far from their sun to maintain their current lifestyle.

      --Col. "Chicken" Sanders

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  9. I've been eagerly awaiting your first Traveller report - sounds like it was a great session, with a lot accomplished and much fun had.

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  10. I can see some Rientsian twists going on there from the original adventure, bravo. This really makes want to play some Traveller.

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  11. How are you doing with the 'weapon vs. armor' part of the combat system? My players hated that.

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    1. I've got the old Traveller screen from Judges Guild so I can look that stuff up quickly. So far it hasn't been a problem.

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