#161

Oct 17, 2021

Work

Same as usual this week, making progress on the goal. Not really anything new to go into.

Books

The only books I read this week were Traveller rulebooks.

Gaming

I ran the first session for my new Traveller campaign this week. Normally we play fortnightly, but this week’s D&D game had to be cancelled; so, Traveller filled the gap.

It was a lot of fun! To make this more of a sandbox-style game, I gave them four missions from the beginning, given by the people they were getting their ships from:

  1. Deliver a group of scientists to a world four parsecs away, and pick them up a month later.
  2. Take some records to a different nearby world, two parsecs away.
  3. Survey worlds in this sector of space, reporting any discrepancies with they find with current survey data (an ongoing mission).
  4. Explore empty regions of space and report any newly-discovered systems (another ongoing mission).

The players took all four missions, which was a nice start. Two other player characters had a run-in with a religious weirdo, who gave them a leaflet about the evils of planets. And then they picked up as much freight as they could carry, and set off to complete mission #2.

On their way out of the system, they helped another ship having trouble with their engines.

After delivering the records, they blew up an asteroid (but were unable to salvage any of the rare ores inside due to having no cargo space left), stopped over at another starport and there collected some rumours, freight, passengers, and more jobs; and then made the trip to the planet the scientists needed delivering to.

So, after one session, they have several missions to complete and rumours to follow up on, and we’ve run through the basics of many of the rules in the game (skill checks, space combat (blowing up that asteroid), passengers, and freight). Not bad for a three-hour session.

I’m planning to approach this campaign by preparing lots of missions and rumours, and just giving out whichever ones seem appropriate to what the players get up to. If each session generates two or three sessions worth of new minor content to follow up on, then I have plenty of time to work in and run the big stuff.