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https://bundleofholding.com/presents/TravExplorations
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Nov 8, 2022 07:44
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e: /\/\/\ my elderly gen x player sent me that last night. an incredible deal We ran the second session of character creation last night and wrapped it up. Absolutely wonderful. The Navy doctor (graduated with honors) The Marine who got into the wrong duel and retreated back to the comfort of their family's wealth The career Agent that retired as Assistant Director The Archeologist turned Thief And the Noble who fled their insane Disney (literal) World who went Broker and then Rogue on their trip across the Galaxy All players hit near their initial ideas for characters but with connections to each other and also so much more history baked in now (including buying back a lost eye). They will be arriving on Drinax split between a lab ship (stolen) and free trader ship. Age range is pretty uniform. One character is 34, one is 42, and the rest are 38. No one kept pushing too much once the aging mechanics started to come into play. Excited to take the campaign to the point where they will need to roll on the aging table again (once every 4 years game time) Determining the skills package at the end of character creation was a really cool collaborative process. Framed as "your choice will tell me what kind of game you all want to play," they narrowed it down to Explorer after about 30 minutes discussion. Astrogation, Electronics, Gun Combat, Medic, Pilot, Recon, Stealth, and Survival. The party as a whole has at least one character at a level 1 skill in each of those. Tells me they'll be pushing the boundaries of the Trojan Reach sector -- Pirates of Drinax includes detailed info on all 16 subsectors of the Trojan Reach sector. It will be interesting if I have to go beyond that. One of the characters got to a skill level 1 in Jack-of-all-trades, that rear end in a top hat. Another has 3 in Advocate and Streetwise. Daredevil Traveller edition lol
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Nov 9, 2022 05:23
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Question on Drinax -- What have people done with Travellers that walk out of character creation with their own ships, when getting a ship specifically stated out for piracy from the very beginning is a central part of the entire campaign? Ship Shares can go directly into The Harrier Repairs (I really like the expanded repair concepts in The Drinaxian Companion; I think it will keep the Harrier in focus to the party's adventures for most if not all of the campaign), but I can't find anything on starting ships.  The Core Rulebook says the party shouldn't start with more than one ship, so everyone else who gets a ship should get a 25,000Cr pension. I could just do that with both Travellers that have ships. Or just encourage them to at least keep their ships on Drinax because they wont be particularly helpful in pirating. One ship is a far trader and one is a lab ship. That said, both have significant mortgages with them, so it also shouldn't be hard to convince players to instantly convert these liabilities into built in pensions. I could at the very least take a second pass after their first outing when they realize how a single simple adventure takes weeks and weeks. Planning to start with The First Prize, a tutorial mission out of the Drinaxian Companion, that looks like it does a really good job of laying out a few guidelines for how to successfully pirate for many many years. (then the rest of the campaign will be tempting the Travellers to break all of those guidelines) Unrelated, one player went hard hard hard into a medical officer career and The Harrier has no room for a medical bay. excited to see how that plays out over time e: oh, it's on Page 7 of the Trojan Reach book. Travellers do not receive ships through Benefit rolls (the Traveller will receive D3 Ship Shares instead) and use Ship Shares to upgrade the battered old Harrier. Easy enough! fosborb fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Nov 13, 2022 |
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Nov 13, 2022 04:23
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Yeah just means they get a couple of upgrades out of the gate.
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Nov 13, 2022 06:17
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I would allow ship shares to be sold as well. At 40% of the shares value. It's still a lot of money.
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Nov 13, 2022 14:48
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My players are now discovering the wonderful world of space bills.
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Nov 23, 2022 21:34
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fosborb posted:
this also happened to my group, it was very funny when they realised and ended up having to clear junk off the big common room table to do their surgery on. Unfortunately Ihatei! didn't really land for my group and the campaign stalled - I should have taken the hint and waved the other hooks harder.
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Nov 23, 2022 22:06
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I have a question about trade routes in Mongoose Traveller that I haven't seen an answer for anywhere. The rules state: "Trade routes link worlds that have strong commercial ties. Consult the Trade Route Worlds table– if any pair of worlds matching the two columns lay within four parsecs of each other, and there is a Jump–1 or Jump–2 route between them, then mark a trade route connecting those two worlds." That text is from Cepheus, but it matches what's in the MgT2E book. Does this mean the worlds should have a trade route even if the shortest jump route was very indirect and would go through like 16 systems, or does the route itself actually need to be less than four parsecs. The former feels wrong, but it's how I would interpret the rule as written.
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Nov 23, 2022 22:29
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xiw posted:this also happened to my group, it was very funny when they realised and ended up having to clear junk off the big common room table to do their surgery on. There is also an adventure where the players are supposed to chase someone through like 13 jumps based on finding a brochure, I would not have run that one unchanged
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Nov 23, 2022 22:38
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chglcu posted:I have a question about trade routes in Mongoose Traveller that I haven't seen an answer for anywhere. The rules state: Yeah I'd add 'reasonably direct' to the line above. However it's also a great hook, e g. signing up with an explorer who's convinced there's a point mass that will turn 15 jumps into two and make everybody millions of credits selling aldravian insanity emeralds or w/e, or trying to work out how someone else is managing to do it
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Nov 23, 2022 22:42
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chglcu posted:I have a question about trade routes in Mongoose Traveller that I haven't seen an answer for anywhere. The rules state: I'm not sure if you ever played Elite Dangerous but there were certain trade routes in that game too. Mostly what you can and should do is suss out or make certain systems have specific items based upon their Universal Profle. An ag world could export tobacco and the nearest high population world could import the tobacco. Not every trade good can and would be made at all star systems even if the UP would suggest otherwise.
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Nov 24, 2022 02:14
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Andor is having an outsized influence in our Pirates of Drinax campaign. oh this is your origin planet? yep, going to have some plot hooks about that 
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Nov 27, 2022 08:05
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When I started this thread, I expected to provide more follow-up posts about MegaTraveller and the Imperium, but got distracted with other things, including a solo Traveller campaign that I posted about, but in the meantime I started a Traveller campaign. It started out as a one-shot game via Discord as an alternate when the DM of our AD&D game wanted to take a week off, but the other players liked it so we've continued to turn it into a campaign. I set it in the standard Third Imperium setting using 2nd Edition Mongoose rules, with a game starting in 1102. I started playing Traveller in 1983 and it was my most frequently played (or run) game until about 1992, then I mostly stopped gaming for about 20 years, aside from short attempts to revive my old high school Traveller campaign with GURPS Traveller. So it has been about 20 years since I ran a Traveller campagin. Because my gaming group are big fans of drive-in/grindhouse cinema and classic sci-fi adventure (including some local indie film production, sich as a sci-fi epic that has something of a Traveller feel,  Planet of the Vampire Women, and we share some interests in music. So, the campaign is sort of a musical adventure, featuring an androgynous 2-meter tall naval engineer turned professional-grade lounge pianist, a former Scout gone bad who did some prison time with a cybernetic arm and a strong interest in experimental synthesizer noise (but not much talent), a marine battledress-commando medic from Rhylanor who once sang with a Llelleywloly choir, and a one-eyed barbarian prince from the TL 2 world of Bicornn where life included court, pageantry, diplomatic training, a steel stringed instrument/weapon called a Krvnsmashr, and battling giant semi-intelligent spider creatures. They had enough ship benefits or ship shares mustering out benefits to justify a ship, but since all of the players were completely inexperienced with Traveller (except one who only knew it as the game where you can die during character creation) so I wanted to give them a chance to warm up to the game universe.The campaign started in District 268 on the rimward end of the Spinward Marches sector, while the ship they were due was located on Regina, months' travel (and a dozen expensive starship tickets) from the group. To make enough money to make passage to their craft, they got a contract to repossess (off the books) a mercenary cruiser on behalf of the bank that financed the ship before the owner skipped payment. If that sounds familiar to readers of the old Keith Bros. Traveller adventures, it's one of the adventure seeds from Gamelords' "Lee's Guide to Interstellar Adventure." I used that and other Keith products for the first few sessions, which have a very old-school "anyone could die at any time" gaming style, but with a cinematic edge to the proceedings--while Traveller is known as a game of scientific calculator crunch, I prefer to run it like a beer & pretzels game, with game sessions structured like episodes of a somewhat light-hearted but often extremely violent science fiction TV show. The pianist emerged as the group leader due to their charisma and musical skill; to repossess the mercenary cruiser, they created a distraction--an audio system set up to play a recording of the pianist's new song, which was really catchy and a great hit in the lounge of passenger liners that the PCs took while on the trail of the repo ship. The distraction was so successful it caused a spontaneous conga line of the passengers in the spaceport, preventing the guards from noticing the ship being stolen. The ship was successfully returned to the bank, who not only offered to carry the loan for their own ship, they'd provide high passages sufficient to get the PCs most of the way to Regina. That started the campaign. A lot of the subsequent adventures have introduced the players to the MG2e rules (which, like many other Traveller iterations, are mostly iterations on the MegaTraveller task system with a few tweaks) Imperium setting and the game world, some of its settings, aliens, governments, and other institutions. It's a little weird explaining this game-world that I know entirely too much about (I stopped running Traveller but mostly kept buying old supplements and occasional new rule sets) but they seem to be enjoying it. As indicated above, the game's a little more cinematic than the usual "murderhoboes in space" doing crimes for money (patron encounters) or "having a job in the 57th Century" calculator-intensive merchant prince" campaign. In addition to their desire to reach their ship, the mercenary captain the players had repossessed the mercenary cruiser from had found their music, and claimed it has his own, releasing it as his own work and becoming a huge hit, to the point where their own song is usually played in the departure lobby of most starports they visit. So they also wish to appeal to the Imperial Sector Copyright Court on Regina to sue the heck out of the cheapskate mercenary who stole their music! After a few trips on passenger liners, they hired on as crew to a mostly-disgraced minor countess of Adabicci with a luxurious yacht that vaguely resembles Jane Fonda's shag-carpeted and fake fur pillow lined starship from Barbarella and a vague resemblance to Sophia Loren circa 1985. It's also fun to run my first Traveller campaign in 20 years.
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Dec 6, 2022 08:06
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Jetrock posted:they hired on as crew to a mostly-disgraced minor countess of Adabicci with a luxurious yacht that vaguely resembles Jane Fonda's shag-carpeted and fake fur pillow lined starship from Barbarella and a vague resemblance to Sophia Loren circa 1985. lol this is exactly one of my players 
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Dec 7, 2022 01:14
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Best Traveller game we ever played was initially based on an idea I had about Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun - we were four shipwrecked sailors trying to reunite and get back to our ship via Father Inire's Mirrors, but everyone had individual, random missions we wrote out that had to be hidden from each other. It was fantastic. It went on for months, we all took turns refereeing it - for the hidden mission thing we just pretended we hadn't seen our own missions when we were GM'ing and basically played a rule that our character was "away" doing whatever their mission was. Back then in the mid 80s I was a real Gene Wolfe nerd - my mate Mike and I did most of the heavy lifting with the world building but the weird thing is, when my dad died, we cleared out his house like you do and I found a lot of my old games stuff including the Traveller books and our notes from the campaign and I've got to say, if I still played Traveller today, it would without hesitation be the first campaign I fired up.
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Dec 13, 2022 23:42
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In one of my games i have a character who's a female Aslan history nerd and it's great to invent wrong details like how Napoleon's reputation for skill with artillery is just a human distortion out of shame because it was actually Josephine, his wife, who commanded his artillery while Napoleon took all the credit, an example of the cultural barbarity of the Solomani. Napoleon had a second wife, Marie Louise, who handled his home affairs.
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Dec 14, 2022 19:25
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first ship interception and boarding of the Drinax campaign is going to happen next session   They've been waiting, like, 2D+4 days for this I honestly can't believe how quickly it took me to start a spreadsheet for this game. anything else i couldn't possibly give a poo poo and would handwave the bookkeeping, but i love the "eh, this will usually take about..." and tracking privately how long that actually will take, and story telling along the way of unanticipated delays, sudden breakthroughs, acts of god, etc. that explain why the average time it took didn't actually happen. so good.
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Dec 15, 2022 05:29
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fosborb posted:but i love the "eh, this will usually take about..." and tracking privately how long that actually will take, and story telling along the way of unanticipated delays, sudden breakthroughs, acts of god, etc. that explain why the average time it took didn't actually happen. so good. I have a fond obsessiveness for Traveller. Something about these rules makes me want to be absolutely precise in filling out every blank on a character sheet or ship sheet, every credit accounted for (including berth and air taxes!) and every contact logged. Where I rage in reality against filling out loan documents and tax forms, I will gleefully fill them out to see how close I am to getting space rich. I, too, roll 168+/-10% to see the exact figure on jump space duration and love every calculator app I find online for plugging in /things/ to get calculated results. Any other game I’m hand waving durations, cost of goods, and whatnot. But for Traveller? I’m counting significant figures every time.
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Dec 15, 2022 18:32
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Everyone who knows about Traveller has probably already started watching this Glass Cannon series but just in case you haven't: https://youtu.be/_5ESEkFoOdE?t=43 Entitled "Voyagers of the Jump", referee Matthew Capodicasa welcomes players Sydney Amanuel, Skid Maher, Alicia Marie and Seth Skorkowsky to a new Traveller adventure.
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Dec 15, 2022 23:31
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The other day I was wondering "what the hell was that rpg where you could die in chargen?" I remember downloading some janky rear end version years ago... and it was Traveller, & I ended up binging a bunch of Skorkowsky's youtube stuff on it and then checking for a thread here. One thing he recommended was going to https://rpgsuite.com/ to check out how to build a character and it was surprisingly fun (the software is still jank lol, at least on my machine). It's a huge benefit imo that creating your character is itself a minigame. sebmojo posted:also there is nothing funnier than everyone watching someone try to make a hardened space marine and end up with some kind of one-legged interstellar sous chef. I started off wanting a gentleman of education and rolled too dogshit to be able to live so I was like "gently caress it these two good rolls are going into int and end, the nearly-ok ones are in strength and dex, straight into the army as a no-hope deadbeat" and came out with a really cool dude who had like 5 in energy weapons, a bunch of other pretty decent seeming skills at 1 and 0. Got forced out at lance corporal with no injuries but a strength implant, a cool backstory, and a bunch of money at 30. Wanna take this dude thru the death station & steal the whole thing, except all he can do is shot gun good and hope to half rear end everything else.
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Dec 27, 2022 11:02
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The group I'm running with the Secrets of the Ancients is fairly diverse in backgrounds. We have the captain who was a merchant that essentially inherited the Free Trader. With her two ship rolls on retirement she only owes the bank 50% of the mortgage. The pilot who was a naval graduate that ended up being drafted into the army. And after being kicked out went into the ISS. He's also the ships medic too. The steward who was drifter and then a merchant later on. The real merchant in the group who is a Vargr Dilattente. That is kind of like the Super Speeders guy and owns two yachts he leases out to other nobles. We have the lifer naval engineer. And his buddy the droyne engineer named Chirp (DMNPC) who never leaves the ship even though he's a super powerful psionic. Last but certainly not least we have our Star Marine who after 16 years retired to be ship security. My play group while never having played Traveller before. Have jumped in with both feet. The guy playing the pilot / doc even went so far as to buy the Beowolf model. His son is the Star Marine. The Steward's real life daughter is the captain. So my group ranges in age from 15 to 56. I'm also printing up all the deck corridors and hallways on my 3d printers. Just need to paint the air raft in the A-Team colors.
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Dec 27, 2022 21:34
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so i was loving around with the map and it's absolutely insane. An example where somebody did some really wild poo poo: find Zhodane and then just keep scrolling coreward through some empty sectors. but an example that confuses me is checking out Uerrgno:  This is not the garden world i was expecting at all! The imperial survey doesn't mention it being meaningfully locked. After poking around my theory is mapgen decided that, based on the type of stars in the system, this planet needs to be in a very close orbit to be habitable. Which means tidally locked, and the way it always seems to do tidally locked planets is to give a 1000km band of normal temps and then crank the poo poo out of the east and west poles. On the night side it's a perpetually brutal but not-Antarctic -40° and +700° on the day side!  Plus it's tech 4, they've barely got electricity, but there are several archologies sprinkled around to hold the population.So... I was like "well this thing is clearly bullshitting me here" except... maybe it's not. I can see two obvious ways to make this into a garden world: First is Map Actions > Remove Twilight Zone. This I guess makes sense because this is a binary system, right? Even if one side is locked to its star, there's still the second to keep things circulating around, and irl planetology isn't really going to give us a really great idea of how such a planet would look anyway.  Then you can go thru and maybe ditch the arcologies & cities and say the population is evenly distributed thru all these rural zones. Wham bam done. It will even autoadjust the numbers to indicate it's got globally cool and stable temps all across the planet. OR Keep it locked. Looking it up on the wiki, the first archologies do in fact come out at TL4 -- in the form of underground cities. IMO, this changes things, def keep them in the other version, I like the idea of cities under the farms in that one. Here we'll keep the concept of the second sun moderating the temperature somewhat, and suddenly these insane doom hemispheres aren't so bad. Yes, there's a giant ice cap and wide deserts, but maybe it's more like the deserts are arid in a pleasant way, and it's only the baked lands that are genuinely dangerous without protection, maybe only at certain times, like when both suns are up. You've got cities on the cold steppe that live off of herds that eat space lichen and hardy grasses, and arcologies bored into the ice to harvest rich marine life. You've even got some bucolic rural areas still. Except for these temperate areas, they habitually build downwards on this planet. There is a "dark" side where it never gets enough light to melt, but isn't always fully night because of the other star. The "light" side alternates between perpetual dusk and dangerously bright. or something totally different. What do goons think? -- As for the mapgen itself, drat. Either I'm easily impressed or it's pretty awesome. I've noticed it tends to put the noble estate, which I figure is the seat of government, fairly far away from the downport, but really it seems kind of random where it puts anything. And what actual resources are intended to be on these resource tiles here on Uerrgno? The mapgen page says all it has are alloys and information, so??? I do like how it always has some exotic tile though. 4/5 would gen again. I got some concepts of what to put on those. It seems to pull data off the wiki to determine some info that isn't included in the survey data, which makes it want to lock a lot of planets that aren't tagged as locked -- maybe this is just some oversight when these systems were first put together? The whole drat thing did come out drat near half a century ago, after all. Thats pretty much two whole tech levels  If there's a way to generate planet surfaces, which I assume is in a core book or something somewhere, is there also a way to generate entire systems? Kinda disappointed I missed the bundle of holding sale or w/e that happened in november, I have a cool idea i want to mess around with but i don't wanna slam down like $100 on pdfs rn. I suppose it'll come around again eventually.
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Jan 3, 2023 16:10
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So my Traveller campaign's rock & roll tour continued this weekend; after a variety of adventures including fighting off a Scout/Courier turned pirate ship with an unarmed yacht (aside from an ex-Marine with a couple of tac missiles using the ship as cover), a rap battle/dance-off at a Vargr nightclub, and a concert for an audience of dolphins on a water world, Lalo, the ship's engineer/concert pianist, got an urgent message from their homeworld of Tureded: a recently arrived militaristic religious cult has set up camp in the valley of their mother's farm, and is making moves to take over all of the surrounding farms! Even worse, Lalo's brother visited the fanatics to try to convince them to leave people alone, and was taken prisoner! The PCs sprung into action, using some recently earned funds to hire the services of a mercenary team whose ship they had rescued on the way insystem a few weeks earlier, two fireteams of grav bikes equipped with rapid-fire pulse lasers and tac missiles. I also introduced a new player as a mercenary who hired on in response to the PCs' call for mercenaries--but, due to the absurdly high risk mentioned in the ad, he was the only other person to accept the job. The adventure was adapted from an old William H. Keith adventure from Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society #21, "Homesteader's Stand," involving a small farmer unwilling to relocate being threatened by a group of 50-60 fanatics. I decided to up the stakes, making the farmer the mother of one of the PCs, and instead of a platoon sized force with automatic rifles, I made it a company of infantry supported by a mixture of trucks, fast attack vehicles, a few APCs, and a pair of TL-9 "Striker" class grav tanks. While our Traveller sessions generally include combat, I hadn't tried running a large battle, which faced the additional challenge that we play via Discord and I haven't really had the time to figure out how to use RollD20 or other online means to create combat maps, move tokens, or otherwise set up a more formal wargame map that's really needed for a large battle--back in high school or college I would have used a session like this as an excuse to bust out my Striker miniatures and a huge battle-board, I had to do most of the session "theater of the mind" style. The session started out with the triumphant return of Lalo to their homeworld, where they were already a minor musical celebrity, including a homecoming concert. As an olive branch of peace, Lalo had invited Lord Jerfed, leader of the cultists, to attend the concert and talk about how to resolve the situation peacably. Instead, Lord Jerfed had his computer team hack into the PA system at the concert to berate the PCs and concert-goers, and then sent in his grav tanks to strafe the concert (held in an outdoor amphitheatre.) The group made a quick exit and rode to the family farm, where Lalo's mother, a traditional Vilani shuglii, prepared them a feast. For non Traveller grognards, a shuglii is a chef in Vilani culture, enormously important because, as humans brought to an alien world, none of the planet's indigenous life is edible without extensive and careful processing. Traveller canon doesn't say very much about Vilani food other than its extensively processed state, so I assume Vilani cooking depends heavily on chemical transformation and fermentation--pickling, distilling, and long-term storage. Also my personal IMTU (In My Traveller Universe) Vilani food varies from quite delicious (especially preserves, candies & fermented beverages) to technically edible gut-wrenching (the example I used for the players was "Imagine lutefisk with a coating of Vegemite.") This provided a nice comedy/bonding moment for the players, including the new guest player; I also assume that fans of traditional Vilani cooking often adapt other cultures' poisonous/inedible plant & animal life to create new recipes, and are always highly suspicious of fresh, unadulterated food; presumably, the family winery used highly poisonous berries converted using traditional Vilani methods to produce a wine of great sweetness and subtlety. Because the PCs and their squad of grav bikes were massively outnumbered and outgunned, they had to use some careful planning to successfully combat a company sized force. Another bit of swag gained from the previous adventure was a pair of starship turrets with lasers and missile launchers, but they could only find five missiles. Using a pair of grav tractors from the farm, the mechanically minded players did some A-Team style welding montages turning the farm equipment into technicals, while the more combat/scouting oriented players did careful surveys of the surrounding terrain and the cult's compound, located close to the family farm but separated by a river running through a steep canyon. They also learned that a Fat Trader class cargo ship was expected to land at their compound in three days, whose landing path took it right over the family farm, and composed a plan to draw out the cultists, save Lalo's brother, and not get shot full of holes in the process. Two members of the party, Fairweather and pEnnis (the p is silent) infiltrated the cult by volunteering to join the church, after doing some of their own crafty stuff and making cool cult robes from bits found in Mama Lalo's rainy Wonday morning craft closet, and searched the compound for Lalo's brother. The Bike Team took positions on the far side of the compound to race in and extract the prisoner and their infiltrators, assuming that shooting down their supply ship would draw them out from their camp in the direction of the family farm, where the grav-technicals were located. The linch-pin of the plan appeared when one of the players noted that there was only one road between the cult compound and the farm, which crossed the river and its canyon--which meant there was a bridge across that canyon. Drop that bridge, and the only vehicles that could reach the farm were those two nasty grav tanks! Problems arose when the grav bike team's demolitions expert had trouble setting the charges, and the player assisting her, Reese, the ex-Marine medic and the most proficient gunner, had to stay much longer than expected at the bridge setting the charges--by the time they were finished, the Fat Trader was coming into view. Lalo, who had Gunnery skill at 0, had to take control of one of the turrets and hope they remembered their gunnery training. Once the shooting started, the cultists sprung into action quickly, launching the grav tanks and scrambling their troops into trucks and ATVs, leaving Fairweather and pEnnis in their groovy cult robes relatively free to sabotage the base's communication system and liberate the prisoner, but not without an armed struggle with a reluctant guard. Laser fire from the technicals managed to hit the Fat Traders, but by the time it went down it was so close to the camp that the ship plowed through the front gates of the camp, inadvertently destroying a large portion of the cultists' vehicles. Even with all this chaos going on, several cultists heard the gunshots from the characters freeing prisoners and surrounded the front door of the building--fortunately, pEnnis noticed them and threw out a stun grenade to discourage closer investigation while Fairweather looked for other exits upstairs on the building's second level. Escape required a leap from the second story, but Fairweather noticed an armored limo driving past the building heading for the back exit, presumably the personal ride of cult leader Lord Jerfed, and managed a sweet acrobatic leap onto the roof of the limo, while pEnnis and Lalo's brother took a painful but non-fatal plummet off the roof onto the ground, just as the grav bike team swooped in to assault the semi-abandoned compound. Despite not being able to get back to the technicals in time to shoot back, Reese and the cycle mercenary were able to function as forward observers, guiding in missiles from the turrets using a laser carbine and distracting them with rockets that, while incapable of penetrating tank armor, kept them distracted in the semi-suicidal way that infantry without antitank weapons are supposed to do when fighting tanks. The tankers, distracted by the grav cycle and conflicting demands from their leader to either fly out to the farm and destroy the weapons that shot down the ship and return to the encampment; missiles took out one grav tank, while a laser hit to the belly armor of the second ended the air battle, and left the cultists without weapons that could cross the river. The cultists, abandoned by their leader, scattered in all directions under fire from the grav bikes, presumably to try their luck gaining the sympathies of the typically well-armed but poorly-organized farmers of Tureded whose homes they had been threatening for months. The players bound their wounds, gathered their dead (two of the bike team were shot down by the base's defenses) and celebrated with Mama Lalo's homemade wine and slices of poisonberry pie. Overall, the adventure was well-received; lacking a big tactical map wasn't as much of a challenge as I thought, since my players are more roleplayers and actors than wargamers; keeping the game narrative, focused on player action, and shifting perspective between scenes to keep players engaged, helped a lot. I'm still going to try to research easy ways to do tactical maps using RollD20 or other methods in case we have another game that ends up being more of a dungeon-crawl or other map-intensive event. I'm increasingly impressed by my players' creativity; while I tend to be more of a "railroad' GM with specific things I want them to do vs. an open-sandbox approach, they often find creative solutions I hadn't thought of, like dropping a bridge to limit enemy movement. I also realized I just really enjoy most of the adventures produced by the Keith Brothers; the first few I ran were from their "Wanted: Adventurers!" and "Lee's Guide to Interstellar Adventure" books, which are really not much more than 2-3 pages of vague outline that leave a lot of details to the imagination of the GM--which also means that they're far more readily adaptable to versions of Traveller produced 40 years later with somewhat different game mechanics and play styles.
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Jan 12, 2023 06:11
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I like the heavily cooked foods concept, there are irl cultures where raw food at all is considered super gross and not a meal or even really food -- eating salad is not even eating, I read about this woman who had to basically buy leafy greens at a market and secretly hide in her room so nobody knew she was eating disgusting raw trash. Traveller seems like the kind of system where you could set up all kinds of interesting situations. -- I grabbed the $1 pared down corebook and it seems a little bit slapped together tbh. Some editing errors and some things that are a little confusing. A good example is if you look in the gear section there are options to get computers and software. Hypothetically if you wanted you could put together a private com network that has some different features, but the numbers don't seem to make too much sense to me. Suppose a player had a scientist character and spent all their 10k starting creds on this kinda stuff, with the idea that maybe the group could be stuck on a planet with no ship for a while, so having communication infrastructure is going to be important, right? It seems like half of the options are obsolete and pointless out of the gate, unless you are looking at buying them after chargen, or unless I missed something about how you can only buy items up to a certain TL during character creation as well as only being able to use 10 kCr at the start. If you wanted to set up and use the most basic expert system possible, you'd need to the expert skill itself, the smart interface, and an intellect, right? So that's 3 bandwidth and at least going to require a computer/3 and 4100 credits total? A wafer jack has a smart interface and an intellect, and can take 1 expert system at a time, which could be up to bandwidth 2, right, this is just written kinda unclearly? And if a character had a computer/3, then in order to change the expert system they would have to physically uninstall the old one and install the new one? If you had computer/5 and the software you could use 3 bandwidth for the smart interface & intellect 2, then you have enough room for 2 of the bandwidth-1 expert systems running at the same time, right? So you basically need a mega huge computer to run anything really complicated, or somehow set up multiple computers running only one expensive expert + cheapest intellect at a time each on their own. In this case phones would have the option to connect to secured networks at comp/0, and maybe get an intrusion 1 or security 1, they're just too small for anything better. At least anything that has any amount of computer can hold a database and has basic security. It seems like even basic translation software also requires the smart interface + intellect to run... so you might as well splurge on the good translator if you're already getting a comp/3. Altho you could potentially cram an inexpensive translator into a comp/2 to save about 1kCr. For transceivers the numbers are pretty wild, normally prices seem to go up with tech level, but here both prices and capabilities are all over the place. Laser and some of those radios seem pointless unless you were going to make the call that radio needs an actual noticeable obvious antenna or dish connected to it to work, but laser does not (but maybe it needs line of sight?), and if it doesn't have any integrated computer then it doesn't have any kind of security and can be listened into. You'd still be nuts to not jump on the highest possible tech version of what you're looking at getting, unless you need a 10,000km range. My gut says that if the PCs wanted to they should be able to connect an expert system computer to the transceiver (maybe with a roll) and let the whole party access it via their phones if they have connectivity. And, if their mobile comms are TL10 then they should even be able to transfer databases back to that computer if they wanted. Another thing is that some items have multiple TL versions that seem to have mechanical impacts -- the toolkits for example -- but I don't see any guidance on how to adjust the prices, there's no chart entries for some of these. A science kit seems basically impossible to use as written, unless you're trying to reinvent the wheel. Literally. Probably I would scrap or modify the way this works pretty heavily. Are these good calls, how would any of you make a judgement on this? Is this generally in line with the kinda stuff people do?
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Jan 12, 2023 17:27
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SniperWoreConverse posted:so i was loving around with the map and it's absolutely insane. Once upon a time I read World-Building (Science Fiction Writing Series) which I highly recommend as a method for creating more cohesive and internally consistent solar systems than the Traveller system. So I wrote some code and created detailed planetary specifications for the 49,000 solar systems in the Traveller Universe. Looking at Uerrgno the results also don't make any sense (billions of sophonts living on a planet with a pase temperature of -33C whose surface is 70% water in the form of massive ice sheets?) What we are seeing here is the results of a random planetary generation system that has only the most minimal sanity check for consistency (Yes, with the original Traveller rules it was possible to have a ice world orbiting a blue supergiant star in the inner orbital zones) and poking too hard at the results makes the whole house of cards fall down. So what ends up happening is that the jagged inconsistencies get smoothed over with a slurry of roleplaying descriptions that fly in the face of the actual world stats, because who is actually go through and check all 49,000 systems for accuracy and consistency? Traveller is designed for hopping from one system to another with whatever system present being recast into whatever necessary to move the plot forward and/or keep things interesting. Notice that there is zero provision from hopping from an asteroid belt to the mainworld in-system. In any but the smallest systems, the L4 and L5 Lagrage points (where asteroid belts would most commonly be found) are most efficiently reachable by a sub-jump-1 and a week in jump space. As opposed to ~16 days (using Earth to Jupiter as an example). And yet there is no discussion of inner system travel to resolve this situation. On my list of things to do IMTU was to build a brand new universe using the World Building system to create internally consistent systems, but my group has moved on from Traveller for now so it isn't likely to happen any time soon.
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Jan 12, 2023 18:48
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I'm gonna post a huge thing that's prob tl;dr. But sorta what Agrikk was saying, there's no provisons for jumping from belts to mainworld -- i've only got the cheapo basics and it has a simple chart for some simple example distances, but idk even if you can astrogate your way to specifying an insertion point into a system? I'm taking it a small section at a time and haven't exactly pored over the entire thing, which is a fraction of the actual corebook. -- One thing that I think's interesting about Traveller is that there's a lot of info about everything, charts and cruft that seem intended to make things realistic, but it's not really that realistic and can't be -- we don't know extremely huge amounts about exoplanets and other systems. There's this tension between crunching the numbers and making sure you can scoop fuel and all this kinda stuff, and the other side of just jumping & hurtling around having cool adventures. It's almost self defeating, but I think these opposing ideas can be synthesized into a cool campaign. I'm interested in having a loop where you hit a system and need to accomplish a set of goals within a certain timeframe. If you miss the cutoff and don't abandon the remaining goals you're risking the whole thing, but some creativity can keep your head above water and maybe even you start coming out ahead. Basically my first impulse as soon as I heard about the death station (  ) was to steal the goddamn thing. The consequences are that you'd have some really powerful and motivated enemies, and depending on the group your travellers might not be able to do more than barely keep the thing slapped together long enough to get out, and at this point almost everything is against you completely. The ship is half way to falling apart, anybody who interrogates the transponder is likely to realize it's stolen (and if you mess around too long they'll be guaranteed to know), it has no armor and can't fight and can barely maneuver even if it did have a gun. It's probably haunted with psi reflections or whatever the quirk is that old ships can get.This is a case where every drop of fuel and individual credit really could be a big deal, and keeping everything together is a lot of the adventure. A lot of repairs etc take time, not everyone is going to have the skills to work on it, and they might want to do something else in-system that can still contribute in some way. It'd be valuable to have goals in each system that let every PC contribute. And this is a fairly big ship, like 4x bigger than the classic scout and more complicated to operate. You have a ton of options and liabilities with this thing. -- So when I'm coming up with different concepts sometimes they sorta self-assemble into an idea. If the players end up with this kind of ship, this "drat, too much ship for what we can handle" but at the same time "drat, we might not be able to recruit crew and have no money to do it anyway" situation, then there can be a set of NPCs who would be willing to fill the missing roles, but for a price that isn't money. Working backwards from this point the players would need a gray market patron, essentially. Shady, but not clearly morally reprehensible like whoever set up the death station itself. Maybe kind of respectable and upstanding morally, but for sure not legally. Or, if you don't want the death station, you can have this patron trick the travellers into ripping off a different ship like some huge luxury yacht so that "Oh shucks it's actually an extremely felonious larceny you all did! Welp I'll cover for you no problem, I'll take care of you, you'll be rich and in the clear when this is over, we're all in this same boat after all." Totally possible to rope the PCs into something that they can't exactly handle on their own without it really railroading them. Another back-development is that if you want to "start" with the players in possession of the death station, one route to that would be that skilljacking adventure that takes place in Neon > traversing across Chosen or Neon or whatever planet to a more main mining camp > Death Station. Dalgee Hahsh is helpfully here to give the PCs a way out! I really like this idea of starting with the skilljacking and proceeding to death station, I think this is something Skorkowsky did and it seems very smooth and well integrated. You could modify the death station drugs to also have an amnesiac component to them, like it's max level anti-ethics designed to dope soldiers into going ultra berserk and being extremely effective super soldiers but have them also not get really terrible pstd from it. It also plays into part of the mechanical loop I'm aiming towards, where you have at least 1 ground level goal per system, along with your other in-system goals. In this first prologue part it's to survive the crash, recover and get across the planet to where you're offered a way out via the death station's patron. But what a twist oh no it's super terrible and the players should be motivated to just say drat the consequences and screw the man, we're stealing this ship. And if I went through all this time setting up a cool character and picking out all my rad futuristic gear and everything just to have it immediately stolen, I'd be pissed about it -- and here Hahsh is involved with me getting screwed over like this!? He was never our friend at all! The whole thing's a sicko setup! If the players can escape with the stolen ship this sets up a time limit. If they hang out in a system for too long, they'll get busted. They need to keep moving, but also keep the ship together and hidden if they can, but it will be extremely difficult to do this with such a small amount of crew and no starting resources. They can be approached by our ambiguous patron who is sincerely willing to help if the PCs help them, and as a gesture of goodwill can help them get their starting gear back. They've got their own party, basically a second group that doesn't really have the skills that the PCs have, but both groups working together can be dramatically more effective. This sets up the dynamic where you constantly have stuff happening on the ship -- all these NPCs have their own agendas, which often align with the PCs, but they all have hidden agendas which might be at odds with each other and with the PCs. Because you have such a large ship there's plenty of narrative space for this to happen in. What is our gray patron's goal? A sequence of jumps to find something personally important that is dancing just out of reach. The PCs have a ship that will do the job, and if they pull their weight, they will be rewarded. They botch the job and they will get crushed by the authorities even without the patron's ire. Carrot & stick. We now have this dynamic where being in-jump is not really downtime, because the NPCs are doing their thing aboard ship and there's a big chart of the bs they pull -- the NPCs need not to be managed, but kept on good terms with the PCs. They have their own squabbles and problems that aren't really going to spiral into anything fundamentally dangerous. There's the higher stress phase of being in normal space where you can get busted and have to decide if you want to move quickly or carefully. -- I feel like unless there's a player who's an actual scientist the systems matter only in that they're plausible and "reliable-ish." What you see is what you get, you got your fuel sources and your planets with known qualities. You can take a look and make coherent decisions -- that's the real point of having any of this, isn't it? I think a heavily schematized ("schematicized?") system map might be the best option. Let's look at Uerggno as described by travellermap:  This seems like it's basically a ripoff of the Voyager probe maps, which I love. But what would be more useful than all this would be a representation of distances, not in AU but in travel time and possibly some danger rating, which is what matters for the players. You jump into the system and doing a skill chain with a sensor scan and consulting the library and astrogating or whatever, you can see what routes between what objects would be good or bad, or long or short, or especially go or no-go. I have this idea of a flipped version of the jump skill chain, where once you get in you have the crew do a set of rolls that determine that the travel time between ABC is going to be XYZ, so what these maps should provide is a base travel time which is modified by how good the travellers understand what the hell they're doing. There's an old Roman Empire era map that shows different parts of Africa and India as well as different parts of the emprie, but it's entirely schematic and everything is described as distances and times via road or boat. I think this is what in-system maps should look like. They didn't care if the route from Egypt to Numidia was 1000 miles, they cared about how many days it took to arrive and sell your loot for fat stacks. A map needs to be useful for what it's use is, and for travellers the important info isn't the exact astrodynamics but the functional distances, how much time to land, how much time to get to different locations, what dangers there might be, like interdiction or corsairs or whatever. And with the death station you might want to park the ship wherever is safest and use the pinnace to do your interplanetary work, so you need to jump into the spot that is closest to safety and security, or at least obscurity. I would want to add an upper layer above the line of planets that shows how much travel time it will take before it's safe to jump "up" -- out of system to the wider bigger conceptual level. Or turn the whole thing on it's side so that it is portrait shaped like most pages in books, and the "out" direction is towards the page edge. This kinda matches up with how planet maps work, they're often tilted longwise. You have your megahuge conceptual level which is all of charted space and the general political scene, then your huge level which is the sector, then your big level which is a subsector and it's scene, then your medium level which is what the hell is going on in any particular parsec and any space combat -- where the PC actions can directly start having in-person direct effects, then your small level of what is happening on a specific planet and long traversals on foot or by vehicle, and then your personal level which is inside a particular station or ship or person-to-person sized ground encounter. The maps add up but the parsec level is kinda wonky for it. I can visualize a NES era final fantasy style random encounter causing a ship combat event, but I think the parsec level is the least worked on in Traveller, at least from what I can quickly google. The interplanetary but not interstellar scope could be super interesting if you set it up right, imo. Somehow the old rolls for what Uerrgno turned out to be is basically ideal for my campaign concept: you have a highly populated planet that can't provide solutions to all your problems because of its tech level, but it has an extensive ring system which is a great place to hide a ship, and it has a big populated moon where you can do some interplanetary trading for a few bucks on the side, and a neat storm world that might be a fun place to meet up with your new patron. And it's not even that far from a good place to steal a ship. You can go death station or there's a high tech world maybe two jumps away that should be able to belt out something cool that can tie the first part of the campaign together. IMO the strict stats etc are going to have to be dumped. They can be a good starting point that gives a seed for good and interesting settings, but they're not quite there yet and haven't synthesized crunchy functionality and narrative requirements. There's a new book of the Mongoose era that is all about building systems and sectors and subsectors and all that, but I dunno if it really pulls it off or not. Looks cool, but I'm goin for absolute minimum requirements. --
 i'm gonna ruminate on it for a minute. I think I want the NPCs to be aliens, but apprehensible and fairly friendly.
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Jan 14, 2023 00:32
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Dandelions. No campaign is complete without the Llellewyloly. And I would love to play that campaign. My favorite moments in a campaign is when you are hopelessly outclassed and have to ask the GM, “okay. What’s in the room?” Basically looking for a table to turn into a club, or a silver charger to turn into a missile weapon, or a fork to pick the door lock, et cetera. Your campaign is literally, “Okay, what’s in this system?”
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Jan 14, 2023 05:37
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holy poo poo alright yeah we're gonna need one
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Jan 14, 2023 14:13
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so poking around it seems the cheap core really does not explain what the hell is going on with computers at all. There are actually a lot of references to things that probably make sense in the full core book but are loose threads in the cheapo version. You don't need an intellect to run expert systems, you need an intellect if you want it to run expert system skills on it's own, autonomously. Given that, based on just what's in the $1 book, you can set up a translator a ton of different ways, on a half decent personal com, on a normal computer, wafer jack, whatever, it's less cumbersome than I thought. Computers could be a good way to scrape up a baseline of skill bonuses if you have cash to burn. Probably there's dedicated translation devices already in the core book or central supply catalogue, but I'm going for an extremely pared down the travellers have next to nothing concept, which makes slapping together something on your own more sensible. I guess you could try to socket expert skills into the ship's computer too, and have it patch over some gaps in the crew's skillset. And I would think you could do things like deactivate the ship's intellect to override it and assume manual control of everything in case of HAL9000 -- Check out this sweet son of a bitch i found on the wiki:  I think it would have to be updated and rearranged if you were going to make sure it fits the standard current rules, and i would compartmentalize it better, but i think it's a pretty rad base concept. A fuckin spaceship that has a cafe. Does anybody know of a good walkthru that explains how to make a ship from scratch? How to convert the stats to layouts, i mean
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Jan 16, 2023 20:32
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gonna triple post cause i went thru one of the old powershell text generation scripts I used for kobolds when doing cyoa & rpg threads and readapted it for traveller:  code:pre:Number of syllables: 69 VFVFIVFIVVFIVVIVIVFIVFIVIVFIVVFVFVFIVVFIVVFVFIVFVVFVFIVIVIVIVIVIVIVFIVVVFVFVFIVVFVFIVFIVFIVVFIVVFIVVFVVFIVIVIVFVVFIVFVFIVFIVIVIVFIVIVFIVFVFIVVFVFIVF Contains double vowels? True VFVFIVFIV VFIV VIVIVFIVFIVIVFIV VFVFVFIV VFIV VFVFIVFV VFVFIVIVIVIVIVIVIVFIV V VFVFVFIV VFVFIVFIVFIV VFIV VFIV VFV VFIVIVIVFV VFIVFVFIVFIVIVIVFIVIVFIVFVFIV VFVFIVF Contains final & initial consonants? True VFVF IVF IV VF IV VIVIVF IVF IVIVF IV VFVFVF IV VF IV VFVF IVFV VFVF IVIVIVIVIVIVIVF IV V VFVFVF IV VFVF IVF IVF IV VF IV VF IV VFV VF IVIVIVFV VF IVFVF IVF IVIVIVF IVIVF IVFVF IV VFVF IVF Replacing... urughz sors gzo aerr zu ogurrirr king kagul ka esuengong na uers kae oeghun rraga aesuk zagziguefoeghaengaluerrg ksoe a ueghzaeksok sue itsull kuz long gza eks gae aerr ko aerrghoe aek thaekadukhsu aeg khunoull naz zuekoukher llozoghz lluenguekh knae uegong gnaer The way I have it set up leads to extremely long words, like "VFIVFVFIVFIVIVIVFIVIVFIVFVFIV" represents a random vargr word that is 29 syllables long, which seems kinda excessive to me. I tried to figure out a way to neatly cut those down while still preserving situations where it generates words that have two consonants touching, but it was a pain in the rear end so I just had it break those as well. It kinda works but I don't like the look of it that much, and it isn't "canon" and couldn't even hypothetically create the names of some vargr planets. I might fix this by having it go thru and randomly reconnect very small words into larger ones. The way I converted the tables was also dumb because I couldn't quickly look up or think of how to get powershell's get-random to get weighted randoms, so I instead manually built weighted lists by duplicating entries. Annoying and has to be done for every single language you might want words in, but it works. A better way would be to have the script create these for you, and the sane way would be to have it use the frequency tables directly. There's also some other crap I'm not going to deal with, like it shits itself if you don't provide a number of syllables, it's not particularly efficient and will very obviously slow down on text blocks that are a few thousand syllables long. Maybe I should fix that or swap the static replacing label with a progress bar. I do think there is a way to use these tables to have your computer vocode what vargr supposedly might actually sound like. Because it gives a specific phoneme for each glyph, instead of jumping directly to text output you could potentially make it construct vocalization objects (or w/e they're actually called), and have it talk and text at the same time. If it sounds good you could build a neat kinda prop around this. ps: somebody get astral to make the timg version of text blocks already
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Feb 2, 2023 19:51
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definitely getting a better feel for using Roll20 for Traveller character portraits can be selected and a macro flips them to injured, unconscious or dead. they're a bunch of rollable tables on the map layer with TokenMod installed to handle the side changes via macro Using https://wwwtyro.github.io/procedural.js/space/ for background generation for each system Created a bunch of versions of icons with python which I have no experience in. My first use of Chat GPT. "write a script to crop all png images in a folder to a square dimension." Have all sorts of opinions now, but it sure did give me a simple workable script to do what I wanted. and then, trading calculator: https://travellertools.azurewebsites.net/Home/ and various alien names/sentences from Traveller: http://www.taunoyen.com/traveller/corsairwordgen2.html
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Feb 7, 2023 06:09
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continuing from the above post, it's also finally feeling like a Traveller campaign. First, holy poo poo, I missed the Patrons and Opportunities chapter of the Pirates of Drinax campaign book up until this session. A plot hook + reward for nearly every single planet in the Trojan Reach sector. Incredible resource to keep things moving So the Travellers are on a TL3 planet with an A class star port because they're on the trade route between the Third Imperium and the Aslan Hierate. They're looking for opportunities one last time before they go hunting a lead two jumps away -- they're planning to ambush an Aslan trader, space the crew, fence the cargo, and start their pirate fleet. Great way to start to get hunted, but they clearly don't realize that. While on station, over a station-wide alert, they hear about an urgent bounty on 4 ships that brought some sort of parasite with them from the planet. And so now all the players are thoroughly derailed trying to figure out what's going on with these ships. And they learned so many things! - the station security chief's overriding concern is to not get quarantined by the Imperium. It could last a hundred years and no one would care outside of everyone on the space station who would eventually have to go back down to the surface. - if they do this bounty, the station may start to turn a blind eye to some of their activities. they realize creating havens is immensely important. - the 4 infected ships are in system, and in system tasks can usually be done relatively quickly compared to getting out of the system which will always burn at least one week - 3 of the 4 infected ships were crewed by now dead humans. sometimes it's easier to just blow that poo poo up and move on than try to salvage a pirate navy out of it all - one of the 4 infected ships is an Aslan prince who is annoyed but not dead (physiology!), and if they save him, it may reflect well on the Kingdom of Drinax itself, and also that's a thing I'm clearly tracking as the Referee - hmmm... Aslan have different priorities compared to the human smugglers they boarded a month ago..... - "if we take an Aslan trader for our pirate fleet...... will it be noticed?" "can a bunch of humans crew it without getting instantly blasted out of the sky by other Aslan?" oh poo poo oh gently caress, this is pirates but also diplomats I expect that going forward there will be much less paranoia about being caught as pirates and much more paranoia about accidentally pissing of faceless impossibly powerful factions that sit on either side of this nonfederated stretch of space. however, this player group has people who sometimes testify at the United Nations, and there was definitely a level of suspicion that the 4 ships were dissidents that the planetary government wanted to "take care of" and they were using Big Scary Infection to get others to do it for them. I should probably just lean into that because I'm never going to convince them that every planet isn't Rwanda
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Feb 9, 2023 07:16
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Gareth hanrahan is my intense rpg man crush. The planet quests are really good, each one is easily a session or two.quote:however, this player group has people who sometimes testify at the United Nations, and there was definitely a level of suspicion that the 4 ships were dissidents that the planetary government wanted to "take care of" and they were using Big Scary Infection to get others to do it for them. I should probably just lean into that because I'm never going to convince them that every planet isn't Rwanda Oh wow that's an incredible hook, definitely do that
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Feb 9, 2023 12:36
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finally got to run a session that contained actual gun and melee combat. Selling combat drones they pirated from a routine shipment on the Tech World > Imperium trade lane to an Aslan would-be dictator on Arunisiir.  bit of a beginner course in combat. selling tech 12 on a tech 6 with a law level 0, and using their combat drones to help ensure the deal went through combat drones had 8 armor and 6d6+3 laser rifles against bleh armor and autorifles as one player put it tonight, in Traveller, all the enemies are mooks. And so are all the PCs.
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Mar 7, 2023 06:25
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alright ive been working off and on (mostly off), and got what i think is an extremely jank halfass campaign skeleton set up alright, altho i have almost no art for it yet which is kinda lovely. Does anybody wanna help test it? The highly esteemed Dr. Sledj needs a team of "ok enough" interns to do some simple errands at the university of Hesaim:   imo this is a good spot to start because the kinds of people who would be scouts or scholars from the abridged rules would hang out in this system i think. I still only ever picked up the $1 ruleset + Death Station + Stranded, so these three cheap things would be all u need, basically. Or i plan on using stuff from in those things -- you won't really need anything tbh.
-- partly related, but the more that I play around with RPGSuite the less i like it for some reason. Maybe it's my lovely pc, but i find myself wishing i just had the goddamn pdf for the backgrounds it has. It'd be overall easier & faster, now that i have a good idea how is babby formed. & something that's completely insane that i was pondering is that the way AI is starting to solidify it seems like it actually may work sort of like how expert systems in traveller do. It's not structurally an "expert system" but they function similarly. Wild poo poo. e: recruitment: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4030205 SniperWoreConverse fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Apr 19, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 06:27
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Agrikk posted:Dandelions. SniperWoreConverse posted:holy poo poo My campaign's medic/gunner grew up on a planet with a Llellewyloly colony on it, and I added a bit of backstory that she sang in a combined Human/Llellewyloly choir, which gave her a permanent bonus at performing tongue-twisters. It provided a skill DM when she was called upon to compete in a rap battle with a Vargr dance crew a few sessions back.
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Jun 2, 2023 06:09
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SniperWoreConverse posted:so poking around it seems the cheap core really does not explain what the hell is going on with computers at all. There are actually a lot of references to things that probably make sense in the full core book but are loose threads in the cheapo version. Traveller's all about finding clever uses for standard-issue equipment, and special adventure-specific equipment--there's no experience points, so advancement is often about cool stuff. A while back, one of my players used some of their team's electronic gear to pass through a forest filled with remote-controlled mines operated by a demolitions expert in a hidden redoubt using a set of PRIS goggles, radio comm, and portable computer--he identified the location of the bombs and the redoubt via their own radio net and hijacked the detonation code so he could set off the bombs, including the supply of extra bombs kept in the redoubt. AI is pretty tightly controlled in the Traveller universe, but for the most part the game assumes that fully sentient AI is still not quite ready for prime time (with a few exceptions, and more than a few dangers, as some of the game's era settings explore quite brutally.) Mongoose is kind of notorious for typos, it's a little annoying but they print regular errata. I think the ship plan you printed is just a non-standard design for the bog-standard Type-M Subsidized Liner, except the hull size is wrong (should be 600 tons not 400.) The standard Type M looks very different, with a boxy main hull containing drives, cargo and bridge and passenger decks in a disc-shaped extension in front, as opposed to the flat, aerodynamic flying wing design here--that might explain why it has 10 tons less cargo capacity than the old-school Type M; the Third Imperium's a very big place (Charted Space even larger), and there are multiple designs for many seemingly "standardized" ship types. Passenger liners typically have features like cafes, bars, casinos, and other dining/recreation areas intended for passenger comfort. The latest edition of High Guard has lots of details and accessories to customize and personalize a ship, as part of its from-scratch ship construction rules. Converting stats to layouts mostly depends on knowing the volume of its components, and Mongoose ship designs include all those stats including the size and cost of all components of a ship design. Converting stats to layouts is based on volume in "displacement tons" of 13.5 cubic meters (1.5mx3mx3m), so 2 squares on the map (1.5 meters each) represent 1 displacement ton on 1 deck (assuming decks are a standard 3 meters high.) So a 10-ton component takes up 20 squares, and so on. The new core rulebook includes a stripped-down ship design system and stats for most of the game's most common ships, but High Guard lets you dive into the design with a high level of detail--although it's not as complex as some versions of Traveller, like the 1980s MegaTraveller ship design system, which was very scientific calculator heavy--sounds like you might enjoy it!
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Jun 2, 2023 06:38
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Yeah, depending what the players in my campaign get up to, they might end up bumping into a llellewyloly. All those lls, ws, and ys, gotta be Welsh. There's a setpiece i have planned that might be kinda neat. That custom type M is i think using some old or weird rules to make it fully aerodynamic and the new ones are for sure way more approachable. In fact they've already seen a similar one under construction and may or may not end up getting involved. But it's pretty clear that real AIs don't seem to be much of a thing. There's a book that has rules for building robots and even playing as em, but eh, seems like a lotta work. If there's a bloodbath and everybody gets killed maybe I'd revisit it. There's easy enough ways to get rerolled characters without having to resort to that. It's kinda weird that selling rules is the bread and butter, maybe that's more for the thinking about ttrpgs thread but i dunno i don't have the brainwidth to get into hypercomplex stuff all the time every time
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Jun 4, 2023 19:08
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Thankfully, Mongoose 2nd Edition isn't too brutally hypercomplex, just steer clear of Traveller5 entirely. Or The New Era, when rogue AIs basically pull a "Maximum Overdrive" extinction-level event on the game universe; the TNE vehicle design rules always seemed too daunting to attempt, but I appreciate that level of crunch. Pulling a Skynet hard reboot on the game setting excited me even less than the Rebellion.
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Jun 5, 2023 05:08
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Jetrock posted:Or The New Era, when rogue AIs basically pull a "Maximum Overdrive" extinction-level event on the game universe; the TNE vehicle design rules always seemed too daunting to attempt, but I appreciate that level of crunch. Pulling a Skynet hard reboot on the game setting excited me even less than the Rebellion. I like building spaceships and other vehicles using the MegaTraveller rules, but I’m also obsessive about making sure I have every slot on a character sheet filled in. But man, did my players HATE the New Era stuff. And yes, even more than Rebellion. We wanted to try TNE so we had their ship get hit by the virus and force everyone into sleeping berths to wake up Ripley-style eighty years later. The problem was the whole Star Viking Smash-n-Grab pseudo military thing wasn’t what a bunch of “spreadsheets in space” merchants and space businessmen PCs were interested in after all. So we ended up futzing with a Grandfather encounter to send them back in time so they could stop Archduke Dulinor from assassinating Emperor Strephon. The campaign became a kludgy mess for awhile and we all agreed that we should start a new campaign if we feel like a shoot ‘em up space marine campaign. it’s been decades and we haven’t yet found the desire to go back to TNE despite playing Traveller for another twenty years after that.
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Jun 5, 2023 20:07
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