Unturned Hovel

Classic Traveller Will Fix your Soul (AAR)

I have recently fallen down the Classic Traveller rabbit hole. I think about UPPs in my free time, design spaceships in my mind, and play the character creation minigame to imagine the stories of the folks it churns out. I hope to try and convey how much this game has grabbed onto my mind and refused to let go. I wrote this when I touched down on Mato the first time when doing solo play. I also scribbled this map.

Mato - A787545-C

An A class starport and intense terrafroming has attracted waves of immagration across the Inner Band. A fledgling democratic government is being being pushed around by massive multi-system corporations. A recent election of a tough on business president has things tense.

The continental plates were meant to be together but an oversight has the the two islands separated by a fierce sea. Power resides in Ridha, and those on Gefjonas feel neglected. mato

Solo Play Prep

I have been playing a solo campaign of Traveller for the past few weeks. The setup is a group of 3-4 depending on if any crew members are dead trying to make enough money to stop relying on passage tickets. I have kept the party confined to a handful of worlds that I usually take a handful of patron missions on before having to flee due to the heat getting to be too much. I have posted a few of the patrons I encountered during these solo sessions. Traveller feels very unique in how applicable your solo games can be to prepping the worlds the players will go to.

Starting out I didn't have any procedures for mapping out the planets. I was drawing whatever continents looked okay to me and creating adventure sites as patron sites called for them. Chaoclypse has released a procedure for generating locations on a planet that I recommend! Though I did not use it for these AARs, I have used it in sessions since and it really does add a lot to exploration.

I rolled a scientist patron and from my description of Mato I figured they'd be curious about different biomes for animal life here since it's been recently terraformed. My party decided to scout out the ocean, the hills outside of Ridha, and the tall peaks to find animals to document. From the starport they hired a team in the capital of Ridha and rented an air-raft. The hills and mountains were first, and other than some inclement weather and a chance encounter with a massive herbivore that was using its tentacles to drink moisture from the ground water in the hills nothing of note happened.

When we got to the ocean I rolled a reaction roll for the ocean to see how violent it was. Double ones... So crashing waves and filled with nasty creatures I figured. On the sea I hit a roll for 10 bandits... The reaction roll was very positive so I interpreted that as them being on the verge of capsizing. The waters were rough so when the bandits got aboard our air-raft the captain asked why they were out there. Using my map I reasoned they were from the other continent which has been neglected. They were starving and broke which is why they turned to commercial fishing. I brought them back to shore. Our crew was fairly broke too and didn't have much in the way of helping...

At the end of this session I had added to my initial prep:

Group Session Prep

I didn't prep anything in addition. I didn't roll the patron ahead of time. In the words of this stellar article, I trusted the game to function out of the box and it did.

Group AAR

Party

The party found themselves dumped on Mato after a job gone wrong on a neighboring world. A class A starport was a welcome reprieve from the stresses of the world and they decided to live it up. The first week passed with no interested parties. But during the second week someone noticed the pair and approached. The reedy man introduced himself as Klein Larsen and he needed some muscle for a job. He had a bomb that he wanted planted at a nerve center for the large companies in Mato which have been carving apart the country. The party accepted and were given a concealed bomb in a briefcase.

Getting it through customs would be tough so they paid a fellow Traveller to pay another Traveller to sneak it through. The reaction rolls and law checks were a success and the suitcase was left on the other side for them. Though the pair started to wonder about how the bomb worked and went back to the starport to find an explosives expert. Coming out of the starport Lors was hassled by security for talking with one of the travellers they paid to get the briefcase across. He had assaulted some people the night before while very drunk saying two kind angels provided him his safety. Lors claimed to not know him any more than having bought him a drink. Captain Ren Bauer was around and for a small fee agreed to look at the bomb. He wasn't sure about the payload but mentioned it could be nuclear. The pair soured at this news.

Heading into the capital to meet one of Bauer's diplomat friends in Ridha, they concocted a scheme to approach the diplomat about a strange man who approached them for a salvage job and gave them an extremely powerful bomb. Diplomat Minister Sir Nicolas Davies was troubled when he pulled up the security feed footage. The man who had approached the crew was a notorious terrorist who was responsible for the bombing of a naval yard in Ariathe. He has also been targeting worlds with terraformers to blow up the control centers and turn the atmosphere corrosive. Davies puts the starport into lockdown.

This caused a mild panic at the starport and the army was called up to restore order. The crew rented an air-raft to find a place to store the bomb while they were away. They drove to hills (which I played in a few days prior!) and found a cave. Larsen was getting impatient and told them that they would get picked up by a starship after the bomb went off and avoid any trouble at the starport. They had Bauer make a fake bomb to sell the plant to Larsen but just as Bauer finished some of Larsen's men came to collect the crew and the bomb. They drove to the target, the Center for Atmospherics Control. They took the fake bomb to the back to prepare it and called Davies while they were setting up. They told him the general area the starship would be touching down. Davies said he'd send interceptors. They crew plants the bomb but a security guard walks out and fires at them. Lors catches a round in the armor and then they talk the guard down, and recruit him to help sell the fake bomb. They run around the corner shooting wildly. The gunmen in the car though gun the guard down. They peel off!

Two military police air-rafts pursue. Each car trades barrages of bullets and laser fire. Two of the gunmen get hit and die instantly. Slape yells at the driver to weave between buildings and one car smashes into a skyscraper and the other slows down to avoid a similar fate. They rush and rush to the pickup zone. They get there and Larsen is there with some other gunmen. The starship winks down and Lors and Slape are crestfallen; the interceptors are nowhere to be seen. They even go so far as to fall off the loading ramp to waste time, but Larsen and his men help them into the ship.

Once inside they begin to take off. Slape sees one chance to get revenge for all the dead Navy men. He mag dumps Larsen when his backs turned. Bedlam in the loading bay. Troops unload SMGs and Laser Carbines at Slape and Lors. Lors throws open the door, Slape grabs an EVA jetpack, and Lors grabs onto as they fall out the door. As Lors falls though a laser bolt hits him square in the back, melting flesh and bone and knocking him unconscious. Slape struggles with the jetpack and the weight of his unconscious friend as the interceptor's finally arrive and begin an onslaught of missiles on the fleeing starship. Shrapnel hits Slape and he falls unconcious too... Though some miracle the jetpack slowed them down to be within just inches of certain death. They both wake up weeks later in a hospital to be awarded the bounty for having killed Larsen.

Traveller's Sauce

All I rolled at the start to kick off this wild adventure was a terrorist patron who rolled a good reaction to the players. The rest came to me from my map, the two paragraphs, and my own experience of the world. I never felt that tension to get it right or be afraid of presenting something that didn't fit the tone. The ideas, characters, and issues all stemmed from me and my understanding of Mato. At times in a dungeon game there can be a bit of pressure to make sure what you're adding is congruous with the rest. But I didn't feel that with Traveller. The daily encounters, the law encounters, the animal encounters, reaction rolls... they all contribute to this comprehensive spark of creation when running a Traveller adventure. As soon as I rolled Terrorist I was making connections to the struggle between the government and the corporations. All these connections snowball as play picks up inertia.

There were times I used the reaction roll as a way to decide how an event happened, like the traveller who they paid a few thousand credits to get the briefcase through customs. He rolled a 2, so all that money going to his head made him go a little bit crazy. The Law encounters added two of the most tense parts of the encounter when Lors was pulled aside and when the guard busted them planting the bomb. These tools for potential make Traveller feel very kinetic in play.

We all live in fear of the "improv dungeon", but at no point did it feel like any of the adventure arose from fiat. The encounters and decisions all came up organically from the prep and reinforced my understanding of this world.

A big part of what helped me is how solo play friendly Traveller is. It suggests solitaire play in the book! I have struggled with so many different games for solo play, but have found it so relaxing to roll up worlds, patrons, and then see how the crew solves whatever problem the patron has. And all that solo play can be used directly for your prep with no alteration. It's honestly very thrilling to have players stomping through an area you were a player in just nights before.

I sincerely implore every GM out there to try and run Classic Traveller out of the box. Write up a few paragraphs, get some characters together, and roll up a patron encounter. You'll feel that same magic I did.