ISO A4 format - Freelance Traveller

Fifth Imperium(Continued from page 3)tried to impart everything to the players at once, I‘dlose them. So, I introduced just a little bit of themassive Traveller background at a time.In the first week of play the players met someVargr and I revisited that race now and againthroughout the campaign to further explain and detailtheir culture. A pair of Aslan appeared, oneweek after another, halfway through the campaign‘srun in weeks #12 and #13. The Zhodaniand the K‘kree were mentioned in the backgroundfrom time to time, but never actually took centerstage. For most of the game, I kept the adventurespretty straight-forward, but toward the end of thecampaign, I started talking about the politics of theMarches as well as the politics of the Third Imperiumoverall.I think my strategy of slowly releasing informationworked well: the players got to gradually learnabout the rich background of Traveller at an appropriatespeed.If I pick up the game with Season Two in a fewyears‘ time, I‘m sure I can build on that background.7. Travelling can create real campaign challenges.Being that the name of the game is Traveller,I felt somewhat obliged to keep the PCs moving… and as I learned over time that makes for achallenging campaign model. Most notably, it wassomewhat difficult to raise the game up above thelevel of episodic plots (think: Star Trek: The OriginalSeries). Settings usually just didn‘t repeat,while I always had to question whether it was believableto meet NPCs again. Even running plotarcs required thinking in original ways.For the first part of my campaign I used thechasing-someone-across-space plot arc, which is afine enough one, but it gets repetitive and youreally can‘t use that trick very often. My secondtwo plot arcs were simpler ones, of the things-thathappen-while-heading-to-a-destinationtype. (I suspectit‘s the most common travelling plot arc inTraveller.) I would have liked deeper plot arcs, butat least these held the game together, as I‘ll talkabout shortly.If you want some more ideas about how to cre-4ate plot arcs within the constraints of a travellinggame, I‘ll point you to the excellent Dumarest ofTerra books by E.C. Tubb. Not only are the booksfull of great plot hooks for Traveller, but they alsooffer two good continuing campaign arcs: searching-for-some-lost-thing(in the Tubb novels, Earth,but the same plot is used more than once in Travellerliterature, usually with people hunting fromplanet to planet for some lost technology or else alost ship) and being-chased-by-someone (in theTubb novels, Dumarest is always hunted by theevil Cybers), which you‘ll note is the flipside of myfirst campaign arc.Whether you use any of these ideas or not, Imainly want to note that figuring out travellingstory arcs can require a different sort of thinking.8. Sometimes visiting can be more interestingthan travelling. My favorite adventures of the campaignwere the initial three weeks spent on Nexine(which was partially based on the Nomads of theWorld-Ocean adventure) and the one-week returnto it at the very end of the campaign. That‘s becausethoroughly developing a setting can create amuch deeper adventure than just travelling throughit.Mind you, this needs to be done as spice—notas the main course—if you want to stay true to a―travelling‖ game, but it‘s nonetheless somethingthat I highly suggest as a part of such a game.My campaign was really loosely shaped and soI was only able to create a returning setting like thisby creating a nexus of plot hooks there. I think thatdeveloping them all out of the core characteristic ofthe planet (water world) held them together well,making it obvious why all these adventures happenedat the same place.I also had a second repeat setting in my campaign:Mora, which is a hub of trade in theMarches. That sort of repeat setting would probablywork well in any Traveller game.If I do return and run Season Two of this campaign,I‘m going to think harder about building acouple of return settings into my original campaigndesign (probably by picking the planet that theplayers are actually stationed out of and a couple ofnearby planets that should draw repeat visits due totheir trade connectivity, their tech level, or other(Continued on page 5)