Classic Traveller - One-Shot

Yesterday we played some Classic Traveller and it was good. About an hour of CharGen, two hours of play - took a while to make characters (one character was initially called Space Hero n°5 until it finally got to Mustering Out without dying), probably too long - will use generators in the future. Or APIE...

click to see the crew

 

What Happened

• Coming out of Jump Space from Castille, the Crew felt everything shake and horrible meat noises from the cargo hold. Something went wrong and the two hundred heads of cattle they were bringing to Picasso got squashed. They spent a week approaching the ISS Picasso while scrubbing meat and blood off the hold, and eating all sorts of beef-based meals to avoid having to skip on supplies costs.

• Turns out the inertial dampeners had glitched out and needed to be fixed. Maybe that happened because the Captain, Lt. Colonel / Lady Tera Gersimm, had been casually avoiding annual checkups to save on repairs costs. It'd take a day to get it fixed, and the crew needed money fast. Jan bullshitted a customs inspector to avoid extra fines due to the potential health hazard of rotting meat still jammed in parts of the hold.

• Jan called a local friend, Baxter Woolsworth, who might have a job for the crew. The spacer was happy to meet back with an old friend and figured the crew of the Rake was there for business, getting to the point once they reached a safe bar to talk shop.

• The job would be quiet hush-hush: Baxter said he didn't know much except that the client, a redhead fancy lady, was probably some noble. They'd go pick up a small cargo on the Typhon Ice Hauling Facility, in Picasso's planetary rings, and bring it one jump away to the Victory, a drifting black market in hollowed out asteroids, where they would receive their payment. In a pinch, they agreed.

• After a day of lounging about waiting for the repairs to get done, they went down to Picasso proper in about twelve hours to sell the frozen meat for cheap, covering for the few days they'd spend on Picasso and not making any profit. Then, they got to Typhon.

• A small mercenary crew waited for them in a shady corner of the docking bay. They didn't have much to say, except that some Navy Patrol officer had been asking questions and poking around recently. Calling himself Hercules Jean-Emmanuel Perdrieux. The crew didn't make much of it, and left with the cargo for a week of regular travel before they could get in Jump Space.

• The week went as usual, routine training, drills, maintenance and hobbies. They inserted the jump cassette into the ship's computer, double-checked the coordinates and parameters, and JUMP.

And waited another week, in Jump Space, where there are no stars and you always feel uneasy when looking out, as if the Abyss is staring back.

• Then they arrived somewhere that was definitely not the Victory space. Instead they were close, much too close for jump space, to a massive red world and its red moon. Surrounded by hundreds of derelicts. The nearest one's lights flickered on and off - The Alexis.

And that's where we stopped.

GM Notes
• I think there were two dice rolls. A reaction roll when bullshitting the customs inspector, and the Jump roll. I had planned a secondary adventure in the event of a misjump, and was pretty happy we'd use it.

• I'm quite happy with the management of in-game time this session. Lots of compression and skipping about to get to meaningful choices or at least somewhat flavorful IC interactions. In two hours, nearly a month passed, with scenes taking place on four different days.

• I'm getting the hang of running sci-fi, I think, mostly thanks to playing in The Revenant Sector game. 

• I kind of wish Any Planet is Earth was an easiest sell as Classic Traveller was, getting players was as simple of going "hey I'm running Traveller" around gamers, with about one day notice.