Starting a new Traveller Campaign

[houlio]

I'm going to start a new Traveller (Mongoose Edition) campaign for our group next semester. I'm wondering if anyone here can give me some good tips about running a Traveller game for someone a little inexperienced like me. I'm mostly having problems thinking of fitting rewards for doing things. I tried a few adventures over the summer, but I ended up giving the PC's too much money.

Another problem was that almost everyone in the party (I think 3 out of 6) decided to go with the marine career track, and two of them rolled "armor" on the muster-out benefits, choosing combat armor. This made them extremely tough in combat.

Another big problem I had was that the computer programs seemed a little ridiculous, especially in that they could basically mimic any Int- or Edu-based skills.

For my campaign next semester, I'm planning on generating my own subsector, and changing the tech levels, making TL12 the highest commercially available stuff (being rare in the frontier sector they are more than likely going to start in), and anything higher than that being artifact or military prototype grade stuff.

So, if any of you have any Traveller expertise (or good experience for that matter), like what books or rules to use, would you mind sharing?

[FelixG]

Well, one way to fix your money problem: Give them a base.

The key is to make the base a junker to start with, the asteroid mining base from Beltstrike works really well, then you gut most of it and leave it a dialect.

The players come across it with pirates or some such using it as a base of operation, they clear it out and a friendly NPC could suggest they keep it and work from there, or have it as part of their reward for the mission "Pirates stole this, we already replaced it but its too much of a threat to leave in their hands, if its still intact when you are done with them you can keep it!"

This gives them a sink for their money as they can upgrade it, get it running again, crew it ect. This also gives a convinent hub for missions, they could go looking for work or once their rep spreads people could contact them to do work and then you could introduce the tickets system from the Merc handbook.

Just a few ideas to get you started!

[Earthwalker]

Give them part ownership of a ship that they can work to pay off a full share.

The people with the majority share take a set percentage of all money they make shipping cargo. The players can then save up thier money to try to buy the whole ship off.

Along the way they will be taking none shipping jobs to earn money on the side to pay off the ship faster.

This worked when I was playing as we made good money on cargo runs but most went to the silent partners. Our main income for us was the private deals that were were using to save up to own the whole ship.

[FelixG]

Give them part ownership of a ship that they can work to pay off a full share.

The people with the majority share take a set percentage of all money they make shipping cargo. The players can then save up thier money to try to buy the whole ship off.

Along the way they will be taking none shipping jobs to earn money on the side to pay off the ship faster.

This worked when I was playing as we made good money on cargo runs but most went to the silent partners. Our main income for us was the private deals that were were using to save up to own the whole ship.

What kind of ship did you guys have? I am fond of the corsair myself

[Earthwalker]

What kind of ship did you guys have? I am fond of the corsair myself

To be honest I really can't remember. The Navy boys kept the thing flying and got us to the destination. I turned from marine to ships accountant, having to balance the books and make sure all the lies we told the ships silent partners matched the the money they got. As well as making sure the captain and I got the "correct" shares.

[Telok]

The last game I ran used FFE [Frontier: First Encounters] as a basis. That worked very well in that it gave me a mapping program, simplified ships, familiar stars , and piles of premade background to work with. Obligatory link -> http://www.jades.org/ffe.htm

The issues I ran into were hyper-focused characters, capturing and selling ships, reality blindness, and the cyber revolution. Please note that I ran a modified version of the absolutely classic Traveller.

I whipped out a little Visual Basic program to make that normal 12 careers, I used it alot for NPCs but almost nobody else touched it. Two of the guys liked the advanced stuff from Mercenary and Trader, and I had to stop that pretty fast. The advanced books are really for creating a whole party of characters from that book and running a themed game around that career. Those guys got more skills and at higher levels than the general characters. On the other hand they also had a much smaller spread of skills. For example, the army guy couldn't do anything but shoot and drive a truck after four terms, but he had 3 to 5 levels in his skills. He felt really left out when the party was doing anything except personal combat because he couldn't do anything else. Traveller is one of the few games where being a generalist is useful and being insanely specalized in one field isn't as useful.

Be aware and prepared for a radical shift in your game if your players figure out just how profitable snagging a decent ship can be. I had to deal with people hiding in jettisoned cargo and disarming missiles to use the warheads as breaching charges. It worked both times, just not quite how they anticipated. Still, a single successful capture of a pirate ship has the potential to leave them rolling in cash. After that I swindled them out of over a million credits and they barely noticed. Just have enough money sinks and slap a couple of zeros on the end of the bribes they have to make. It won't really muck with the game much and it is kind of funny to see them wrestle with being [i]almost pirates.

Reality blindness... I blame this mostly on D&D. People who come from WFRP, Cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu and such games won't have as much of this problem. Bribery, DNA collection, planetary computer networks, handheld computers everywhere, interplanetary YouTube, modern police practices, the fact that you can [and need to] hire lawyers for some things... After a little while their grey-market mercenary reputation for collateral damage started to catch up with them, they never did realize that there were two different sets of people after them assassins AND bounty hunters. They never tried to bribe anyone [I did mention it as an option] and only hired a lawyer to get another ship [landed at the same spaceport as them] labeled as a pirate so that it was legal to shoot them. They did retain the lawyer to deal with the aftermath of that too, for some reason they didn't expect the police to get involved in piracy and laser fire in the middle of the spaceport [then they wanted to keep the ship afterwards too].

Other realisim problems can be nobody in the party having navigation, engineering or mechanical skills. Players trying to fight two military ships of twice their tonnage with a transport armed with a mining laser. Failure to comply with legal authority [and big lasers] for contraband searches. The best solution I found for those was skilled yet cowardly [in relation to players] hired crew. In retrospect the engineer ought to have shut down the engines and cut power to the weapons as soon as she heard that the Imperial Marines were going to be boarding in a few minutes. I suggest your NPCs be a bit paranoid and hack the ship communication channel to listen in and stop some of the more suicidal player plans.

Cyberware, drugs, robots, these things can cause issues. Classic Traveller didn't deal much at all with them except for the robots. Depending on your players they may or may not come up. I only had one drug addict, mostly because he had a starting strength of 2 or 3. I ended up making a spreadsheet for the robots, this led to some interesting developments. You can make some nasty assassin droids, and a combat robot with manual controls and an enclosed seat makes a nifty warbot. Be sure to figure out just how tough civilian aricars are, they will shoot military grade vehicle lasers at them.

It's lots of fun. Just stay loose and keep track of their enemies. Eventually between player high-jinks and people trying to kill them you wont have to worry too much about a plot, it writes itself.

[FelixG]

To be honest I really can't remember. The Navy boys kept the thing flying and got us to the destination. I turned from marine to ships accountant, having to balance the books and make sure all the lies we told the ships silent partners matched the the money they got. As well as making sure the captain and I got the "correct" shares.

Dont you only have a set time to pay off the ship before the whole thing comes due though? I remember in the game I played we had 10 years to pay off the ship then the whole of the ship was due.

Lucky for us we managed to capture another ship through shenanigans with the airlock that the GM never thought of on our 9th year and were able to sell it off for the balance left on our ship and were able to net a small pleasant profit :smallbiggrin:

[houlio]

Thanks for the replies everyone. I don't have much time to look through anything right now due to finals coming up, but if I can remember, I'll come back with some of my plans and ideas when I'm able.