Doing It My Way - Freelance Traveller

Fifth Imperium
(in age if not technology). It‘d be easy to place
such a World in the outskirts of the Imperium, such
as in the Spinward Marches—or even in the backwaters
of a more civilized system. Combine that
with frenetic action and constantly escalating danger
and you'll have a great start to an adventuregenre
adventure.
Searches for lost artifacts of the ancient past are
another closely related subgenre that would work
well with Traveller. Though these could be TL 16
artifacts from the Darrians or the Vilani, it‘d be
more pulpish if they are ancient, mystical items
from the even further past (though one must suspect
that they eventually have some technological
basis).
Traveller References. GDW didn‘t tend to go
in this direction in their adventures. Shadows is a
fine example of an adventure about exploring an
ancient culture, but it was more of a dungeon crawl
than a pulp adventure. Some of the FASA adventures
feel more pulp-y to me, particularly Uragyad'n
of the Seven Pillars, but I think that's more a
matter of setting than genre—which suggests that
setting is very important to your presentation of
genre adventures.
Other References. The pulp adventure genre
has been treated well in recent years and so there‘s
plenty of places you could go to for material. I
think that any of the Indiana Jones movies could be
fine background for Traveller adventures, but
they‘d require some obfuscation due to their popularity.
I‘m also fond of Alan Moore‘s Tom Strong
books, though they trend more toward super-heroes
at times. If you go back to the hey-day of pulps,
you could use just about anything that suits your
fancy, and that‘d have the advantage of being material
that your players probably aren‘t familiar
with.
The War Genre
The war genre of course centers around the activity
of war: taking territory, spying on the enemy,
and (unfortunately) destroying the morale of enemy
civilians. It also focuses on a number of themes:
brotherhood, loyalty, courage, patriotism, and
(unfortunately) xenophobia.
The Traveller universe itself offers plenty of
places to tell war stories. To start with, you have
any number of balkanized governments. Even if a
world isn‘t government level 7, there might be
competing populations. The battle between natives
and corporations is a constant one in the universe
of Traveller.
Moving up to the next level, you can have wars
between planets. They might be fighting over some
supposedly neutral resource or over some ancient
wrong, whose specifics are long-forgotten. Beyond
that you have wars between interstellar governments.
In the Spinward Marches, the Darrians and
the Sword Worlders are always at each others'
throats, but it‘s the Fifth Frontier War (1107-1110)
which will offer the best opportunity for wartime
stories.
And, there are plenty of them. The PCs could
be mercenaries coming in to help one or the sides
or just to train them. You‘ll probably have more
meaningful stories, though, if one or more of the
PCs is actually a member of a world or state that‘s
at war. Will they run arms for their home country?
Fight? Does it put two members of a PC group at
odds?
If you don‘t want the depressing day-to-day of
wartime, then you can use it to send off PCs on
auxiliary missions: to retrieve some info or some
object that‘s crucial to the war effort, to save some
general, or to negotiate a peace with some thirdparty
who must stay neutral, lest the good guys
(whoever they actually are in wartime) be overcome.
While playing with any of these plot threads,
just be sure to include wartime action: gunfights
with agents from the other side; the need to save
populations caught in the middle; and the patriotic
desire to keep those flags flying!
Traveller References. The classic Traveller
corpus is full of great wartime adventures set in the
Fifth Frontier War. Background material and an
Amber Zone can be found in JTAS #9, which announced
the war. GDW‘s Expedition to Zhodane
and Broadsword are adventures set in the middle of
the War. FASA offered their Fifth Frontier War
adventure in Ordeal by Eshaar, while QuickLink
Interactive published an unfinished series of
(Continued on page 10)
9