It’s those natty Traveller dice that keep calling to me. Every time I walk past my desk, just seeing them there makes me Jones for another trip to Known Space.
Last weekend I was pretty sick – laid low and largely house-bound. It was bad enough having to miss the scheduled online D&D game, for which I am Dungeon Master, but it was made worse by those bloody dice on my desk. Eventually, in my weakened state, I gave in.
Traveller was my first SF roleplaying game. It is also one of my top three favs of all time. It started with Classic Traveller, of course. Today, after a week of agonising over which edition to play with, I have plumped for Mongoose Traveller.
And we’re going to be pirates!
The Pirates of Drinax
If you’ve not discovered this gem of a campaign module, then get yourself over to Mongoose now and download it – for free!
In short, it’s a sandbox-style sub-setting for the Third Imperium that sets the players up as pirates operating under a letter of marque. There a nine adventures to play, plus a wealth of cool stuff on how to run the campaign more loosely in the Old School sandbox approach. It’s ace!
Give your players a beat-up old TL15 starship and let loose! It’s nicely written and contains useful sections on randomly determining pirate prey (starships with cargo, generally) and then running pirate encounters. Perhaps Gareth Hanrahan’s finest work.
The ONLY fly in the ointment is that, to set it as written, you need the Aslan Alien Module too.
Character Creation
Last night, having not played for well over 2 years, a friend and I sat down to create characters. We’re going to run the opening of the campaign as a whole-day gaming session later in the summer, so I need pre-gens.
Six characters, fully detailed and narratively linked in under 4 hours is good going. We were on a learning curve too, as neither of us is very familiar with Mongoose Traveller. That said, it was (as many have told me) easy to implement and very straight-forward to play.
And that’s the cool thing about Traveller: character generation is a game unto itself, and one that creates interesting characters.
We’ve got a little bit of everything I like from the Third Imperium: a psionic Duke as a captain, his sidekick ex-Marine Baron aide, a crazed Vargr, an outcast Aslan, an engineer, and a pilot.
Ready to Play
Last night was a blast but I can’t wait for the first session. I hope that I can tempt my buddies into playing the first adventure in the summer. From there, I hope that they’ll want to find out how it ends for the crew. Will they be captured and executed for piracy… or will they rise as privateers for the ascendant Kingdom of Drinax and earn fortune and fame?
As Referee, I need to pull together my notes and re-learn the system. But that’s no chore. The campaign module provides most of what I need, and I get to tinker and customise it to fit my style. This is the thing I love about RPGs: you get to make the adventures your own.
I’m pretty much ready to play… now all I need are some players.
Game on!
