“Mustering Out Blues” is what I call Traveller using the Pool, slightly hacked so that how many you credits you want to spend and how many you can get as payout is part of the action. I’ve been running it with three players in two-hour-long sessions online via Roll20 about once a week since the end of winter, when we gave up on a different game that wasn’t quite clicking for us. Mustering Out Blues has worked very well as a one-shot, but I am loving it as a campaign game, where we wander around the different worlds of the Mandala Cluster and see what trouble we can get into, and not always get out of.

One of the nice aspects of this kind of play is how the history of past sessions feeds into the current one. The PCs had returned to Traddi, the capital of the Cluster and a major interstellar transportation hub, after a disastrous outing to the robot world of Benni. One of the PCs had been killed by a laser eye-beam from a corrupt AI oligarch that looked like a giant floating eyeball, and the other two barely escaped with their lives (with the help of the dead character’s player’s new character, a space pilot on the regular Benni-Traddi run).

They also lost control of the mercenary company the disintegrated PC had been assembling, as the shifty first sergeant they’d hired took advantage of the situation and lit out with the troops.

Actually, it was more complicated than that: one of the surviving PCs held the company’s charter, and negotiated a regular dividend in exchange for letting the company keep its license, after circumstances brought them back together during the flight from Benni (this the result of a failure on the roll to jump from Benni to Traddi, which triggered a random space events roll, with the result of Distress Signal: the absconding mercenaries had their ship damaged during their escape, and needed rescue. The captain of the liner felt obliged to obey the Laws of Space, and told the pilot PC to take her in).

So back on Traddi after all that, the PCs are drinking in the starport bar, at loose ends and listening to rumors. One of the PCs keeps a diary:

We arrived in Traddi and starting looking around for a job. Tros may have been able to keep some of the money from the mercenary group but I never got paid for anything. I still had money but I was eating through it fast with the prices involved in traveling the space lanes and living rates at a starport. There was some talk about the colonists at Zatha not being happy about being under the direct command of the imperial naval administration. Can’t say I blame them much. But we don’t have mercenaries and going against the military isn’t a winning proposition. There was another rumor…But Tros ran across a merchant claiming to offer a great opportunity on Dreni. That opportunity being a noble title on Dreni but he was unsure of the estate and of course the status of the title since the planet has two sets of nobles, the natives and the imperials. Tros was nonetheless intrigued and agreed to buy the title if the inspection turned out well. The merchant agree on travel both ways and a modest fee to investigate the title.

So there was the next thing: go to Dreni, described in the Library Data as “an idyllic agrarian world,” check out this estate, and if it passed inspection—with the other PCs getting paid as inspectors—take possession “in fee simple” as a bona-fide landed noble. What could go wrong? Tros put the half a million credits the merchant wanted in escrow, and everyone got ready to go to Dreni.

DRENI Library Data Readout: Dreni (A864775-C SG Ag Ri) is an idyllic agrarian world. It was once a major independent interstellar power in the cluster, rivaling Hesides (Mandala 0606) for hegemony. During the wars of Imperial Annexation (ca. IY 950-970), the World Council declared in favor of the Imperium, and its allegiance was rewarded by the recognition of local noble ranks as Imperial titles and a great deal of planetary political autonomy. After the annexation, the acquisition of Drenian properties by Imperial arrivistes prompted a crisis that fractured the World Council and resulted in a patchwork of territorial claims and political alliances.

Tros decided that he would try to hire the old mercenary company, once Ugolu’s Ill-Bringers now Tanaka’s Tigers, given that he had a stake in them. As hard as he tried to negotiate his out-of-pocket price down, though, the mercenaries wouldn’t take less than a quarter-mil. Uh-oh, said the players, they must know something about this planet.

They booked passage to Dreni on the daily liner. The space pilot PC, Beuj “Bo” Andre, decided that he had anxiety when he wasn’t in charge, so took low passage in cryosleep while the other two PCs shared a stateroom. At the far end, Bo won the Low Lottery and picked up five grand, so things were looking up for him! He’d quit his job on the Benni-Traddi run when his boss wouldn’t give him a raise and joined up with the other PCs.

They were met at the starport by a Drenian aristocrat named Dariush Rastegar. He represented the Conciliation faction, pro-Imperial native nobility. Off in the distance they could see the place called Shehar Bonyad, or Foundation City, which resembled nothing so much as a gigantic tree-shaped city, with great gnarled roots, a fluted trunk, and a miles-wide canopy made into dwelling places. They learned that the original colonists had used some sort of organic biotechnology to literally sow their homes into the soil, which then grew into structures. Shehar Bonyad was the first and greatest of these. Space vagabond diarist PC Wesley Kane rented an air/raft and headed straight for the city.

But the estate to which Dariush escorted Tros Tenih and Bo Andre was closer to the starport in the Dareh Pishgam (Pioneer Valley). Called Vila Rostik; it was a smaller tree-dwelling, only mansion-sized. Not many such were left, making Vila Rostik an important part of Drenian cultural heritage, Dariush told them. Tros wondered whether the place would make a profit.

The signs were positive. It was surrounded by well-tended orchards, fields, and pasture land, and the local experts Bo Andre hired to give the place itself a going-over gave it a glowing bill of health. Tros met the major domo or saghi of the estate, a woman named Sima Karimi and went over the books with her. The accounts were good, but he learned that Sima used to work for her uncle Eshmaeel Karimi, and that the Karimis held a competing claim on the property. He was influential but widely disliked.

Meanwhile, Wesley Kane was trawling the seedy side of Shehar Bonyad. He learned about the factions among the aristocrats of Dreni, which included Arriviste, off-world families who’d bought their titles after the Annexation but remained fundamentally Imperial in outlook; Conciliation, natives who believed in accommodating and emulating the Imperium; Reconciliation, natives who wanted to restore the titles of displaced native nobility, and Cultivation, arrivistes who’d gone native and become more Dreni than Dreni in their sympathies. Learning from Tros about the competing claims to Vila Rostik, he went down among the roots to learn what he could and met Sohrab Hashemi, an armiger.

ARMIGER Library Data Readout: A planetary mercenary available for hire as bodyguard or enforcer in the skirmishes on planet Dreni. They are armed with laser swords that project continuous beams of coherent light several hundred meters, and wear thick plates of ablative armor. Many belong to the military social stratum displaced in the aftermath of the Unification.

Wesley learned that the Hashemi family believed that they had been illegally disenfranchised when the title-holder gambled it away, which is how the merchant on Traddi got hold of it. Wesley proposed that Sohrab should become Tros’s castellan when Tros left the planet, as he inevitably would. I rolled randomly for the NPC’s response using a little Roll20 macro:

Armiger: “Wesley Kane, you say I should become the lapdog of some off-worlder? I completely disagree!”

Sohrab was so insulted, in fact, that he challenged Wesley to a duel. Wesley tried to run away, but he was cornered and told laser swords at dawn in the field outside the city. Bring your second. He took off for Vila Rostik and told his friends what had happened. Wesley decided he would have to go through with it. He asked Sima a bunch of questions. Could he hire a champion? Yes, but it would be a stain on his honor. Who was the best swordsman she knew, and could maybe give him a few pointers? She told him that if he were envisioning slashing blades at close quarters, he should think again; Drenian “laser swords” projected continuous beams of energy to great distances; a laser duel involved standing there in ceramic armor and holding steady while the other’s beam vaporized your protection ablatively. Wesley shelled out for high-quality arms and armor, and everyone went out to the dueling ground.

Then it was laser swords at 100 paces, and Wesley turned and took aim—and the other guy blinked! Sohrad lost his nerve! He stepped aside, forfeiting the duel. Wesley won! Sohrab was a poor sport about it, and vowed that Wesley Kane had made an enemy for life! The crowd that had assembled to watch thought that this was poor sportsmanship, and after Wesley staked them all to a round of Vila Rostik cider he’d brought for the purpose voted him a capital fellow.

As a coda, Bo Andre wrote to the Travellers Aid Society to complain about the inaccuracies in the Library Data entry. Idyllic? Not when the place is lousy with laser swords. The action was a success, so he took a die and I narrated:

TAS: Sir–we loved your letter. We would like to hire you to write Library Data, starting with an update on Dreni. Please contact us!

The picaresque charm of all of this is delightful to me. I am thinking about ways that Drenian biotechnology might feed into or maybe lie under the political tensions surrounding Vila Rostik, and looking forward to seeing how all of these interpersonal dynamics might shake out. And it might be fun to see the PCs trying to run the farmstead a little. What if Vila Rostik had a pool, and you had to take action with it when you wanted to know how your investment was doing…? Hmm.