Finally Getting to Play

I finally got to reading the Dumarest of Terra series and saw the world behind the rules that I had known since 1980 or so. Traveller was a game I had read but had never played, aside from an unsatisfying “explore the strange alien monument” scenario that came with the box set that I purchased. I had Star Wars and Star Trek as fictional references and strained to see how those could provide the background for playing the game. Now I know that Traveller was about travellers, people trying to make their way in a big, unfriendly galaxy. I finally understood the emotions and the longings behind this evocative illustration from the rulebook I had as a child.

The Mongoose Traveller Second Edition rules book hews pretty closely to the rules I read years ago, with improved graphic design and more detailed illustrations. But there is something about the clean line art from that older text that fits its streamlined rules, much less complex than later elaborations like MegaTraveller or Traveller: The New Era.

Players Meet and Exceed Expectations

I have come to know my players’ characters through play. They are a practical scout ship captain with scar, a bum leg, and medical debt, a devil-may-care retired naval officer, a special-forces vet from a backwards mining planet who is looking for something other than a life of violence, and a charismatic rogue. The players managed to create characters that fit the original call for players while also transcending it.

One of them obtained an ally during character creation so I rolled up a space barbarian-turned traveller named Nibor Kezkud who is, essentially, the woman in that evocative picture above. The characters do not fall into any stereotyped derived from media, thankfully. They are all curious and open-minded individuals who are making the most of the opportunity that they have found to roam about the planets I generated for play.

I had spent decades pouring over the details of the “Third Imperium” setting that was not part of the original rules but which has been at the center of Traveller fandom for a very long time. I used to strain to imagine which parts of this vast setting could be shoehorned into play. But if I just decided to take a leap into uncharted space and create a setting of my own. And I am learning about it as my players explore it. We are all curious about the fictional meaning behind the numbers that describe each of the planets generated by the rules.

Overcoming Railroading Temptations

The procedures allow for detail-rich planning but the text does not give the familiar GM-ing tips about establishing a narrative arc for a campaign, or creating scenarios with a 3-act structure like a film. Instead, you generate a “subsector” containing a number of planets by rolling on a series of related table. These are the planets that the travellers can explore as they wish. I gave the players access to all of the details I had rolled up so that they could start thinking of where they wanted to go. And they were spoiled for choices. The Mongoose rules seem to produce denser subsectors than the original rules do.

Having a detailed map and basic planetary data ready to go really helped character creation. Players don’t have to specify their planet of origin during character creation but all of mine spontaneously picked out the planets they thought best fit the character they had rolled up.

The rules also involve specification of the political factions that the dice determined are on that planet. I did not play attention to those factions until the second session of play involving the planet Arachas. The game has procedures for generating patrons who offer opportunities to the characters. Ours had comissioned them to survey and collect samples from the unusual life forms and biosphere of an innocuous-seeming backwards world in a forgotten corner of the subsector.

The rolls that generated the patron and her mission also generated a complication: space marines. The bare outline of the mission had to be fitted into the subsector I had generated. Just whose space marines were going to get in the players’ was was left unspecified. So I just decided that the Julanu Domain had sent a small detachment to Arachas to do a little gunboat diplomacy. Some of the characters had criminal backgrounds and I decided that the Julanu were going to be on the lookout for valuable items that had been stolen from the planet Udnay, a crime in which one of the characters was implicated but who was not in possession of any stolen goods. The space marines had no right to inspect the players’ ship when it showed up in Arachas but they tried to bully the crew into giving themselves over to inspection. The crew didn’t accept this illegitimate intrusion into their business and bluffed their way through. I didn’t have to engineer interstellar intrigue or political tension — the procedures and the players’ choices generated them.

The players’ defiance of Julanu overreach was just one source of drama. Their night out on the town got them involved in an encounter generated by the game’s encounter and reaction tables. There was supposed to be a group of protestors so I turned to the list of factions and their relative influence that I generated during subsector and planet generation:

• Notable, significant support Hunters 9
• Obscure, unpopular Modernizers 3
• Minor, some supporters Anti-Traveller 6
• Notable, significant support Church of the Pines 8

I had only the vaguest notion of who these factions were. They were just evocative names I had come up with. The planet was a “feudal technocracy” and at that moment of play I determined that the “Modernizers” were a movement of the lower classes determined to get technology out of the hands of the elite that administered it, and to create schools where the people of the planet could learn how to remake and reinvent the high-tech machines the planet’s colonizers had gifted them.

The players encountered all sorts of inhabitants on the planet during their travels to parts of it that I had no idea they would be interested in visiting. One contingent took their grav sled to the poles where one of them had an encounter with ancient technology that responded to him in an unexpected way. This led me to decide that the tech on the planet responded to people with latent psionic abilities and that the dashing naval officer was one such person. This then made him a target for the anti-traveller faction that wanted to make sure no offworlders used their planet’s mysterious psi-tech. Another trip had the players encounter members of the hunter faction who were involved in a strange ritualized hunt where the Julanu commodore was present. The characters also visited the hacienda of a friendly contessa with whom one of our crew had a brief but poignant romance. At each of the randomly-generated encounters the players made choices that involved them in local affairs while they were completing their mission.

They wanted to get off the planet without the big ships of the Julanu confronting them. So they came up with an intricate scheme to get the Hunters and Anti-Travellers turned against each other, and to get Commodore Elektra involved too. The characters departed the planet with the patron’s mission completed, unmolested by the preoccupied Julanu, and with the contessa forever in the debt of a charming lover who had turned her enemies against each other. I had been sceptical that I’d get meaningful sci-fi adventure out of a randomly generated survey mission on behalf of a cosmetics tycoon (!) interested in the government of a distant planet, where there would also be some kind of encounter with some planet’s space marines. My one mistake was trying to weave in the backstory of one of the NPCs to the problems the characters were having. With Traveller, there is no need for the GM to strain to link encounters and character exploration to some grand vision of the setting.

I felt the urge to wrap up the story so we could move on to another planet. At the back of my mind I was apprehensive that the players were getting bored with their prosaic mission. T’m so glad that I just took a breath and let the players go “off course.” Had to keep reminding myself that there was no course for them to follow. I hadn’t planned one and there was no need to create one. The crew of the Severance have to get back to their patron at the opposite end of the subsector but have decided to visit the home of one of the characters first. Again, I heard that voice saying “get them back to the plot involving the patron.” There is no plot. They will encounter what they encounter and do what they want. They seem happy with that and I don’t know why I keep thinking that I have to imagine something they would enjoy EVEN MORE, and induce them to drop what they are doing.