Traveller General

>what are Traveller General's suggestions for curbing excessive player wealth bubbles without being a railroady dick? One good pirate attack on a ship can cause millions of credits of damage.
Try tempting them into a too-good-to-be-true deal and having it burn them somehow.

Beyond that, I do think speculative trading is way too reliable as a source of income. Anyone with a decent broker mod who's willing to run the numbers on the buy/sell mods will make buckets of money with little issue.

>I do think speculative trading is way too reliable as a source of income.
I wonder if making it an opposed roll would help?

Honestly I'd say the best way to deal with this is from the bottom-up when you're world building.

One way of doing it would be having so much bulk transportation that 5 guys tooling around in a rust bucket can't really eat into the big boys profits

Another would be to assume that very few worlds are so specialised such that importing stuff like common ores or food is profitable. This means that interstellar trade normally deals in luxuries and speciality goods, of which there isn't a high supply or demand.

Yet another is to have a setting that's more inimical to free trading. Planetary and Stellar Governments want their cut in tariffs, which can easily eat into a Free Trader's profit.
Trying to circumvent these costs through favours to officials should constitute an adventure in of itself.

Another method could be the lack of a major interstellar currency. This means that Planet Alpharus may take small amounts of Planet Betatron's credits, but the amounts that are important to Free Traders are unavailable. This mean's the player's money is tied up in local credit, and the only way to spend it is either on-world, or on goods to ship to other worlds.

Feel free to mix-and-match the above ideas till you get what you want

Also, I stole a lot of this from pic related, a trader supplement from Stars Without Number, which can be found here:
mega.nz/#F!3FcAQaTZ!BkCA0bzsQGmA2GNRUZlxzg!KFlUgAgI

>having so much bulk transportation that 5 guys tooling around in a rust bucket can't really eat into the big boys profits
It should be neighborhood dependent. Is it worth running a 10000 bulk freighter out to some podunk just to catch the spillage, or let the local shipping agent put that excess 100 dtons of GreenGrain (TM) on whatever ship is passing by before it expires? PC traders are already assumed to be working around the edges.

Aye, fair enough. It definitely was my weakest proposal

How big are traveller space ships? Because a tipical 200dt one is massive, like what I would expect of a spaceship of around 800 to 1000 tons.

Are Traveller space dtons analogous to real life water boat dtons?
I've been looking up similar sized boats to get an idea of the scale

Okay, it turns out I was completely wrong
freelancetraveller.com/features/shipyard/tonnage.html

It still works, but you need to do a bit of maths

No. 1 displacement ton is the volume taken up by 1000kg (1 ton) of liquid hydrogen, which is the primary fuel for the setting. This is 14 m^3 at 33K.

Some groups neglect the merchant skills and prefer to make flyboys and space marines.

IMO a group striking it rich is a great opportunity to try out a different kind of game. Instead of bidding on cargoes in the starport, they can start thinking about staging a coup on a primitive world and setting up a banana republic.

>first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the harem of green space women

Oh, I suspect the big guys would love to corner markets with so much bulk freight that the little guys move on. And in some areas that might even work. Either the little free traders take up even more fringe cargos or move to new territories.

But the big guys have to fly on schedule, full or not. It would be a natural side effect of really big contracts. As businesses and economies evolved, either the factories will want to open the back door to keep their inputs and outputs maxed, or the big shippers will find that some of their runs are hemorrhaging money, or a bad mining accident or growing season chokes out a supplier, or...

Economies like this will acquire fringe shippers eventually, unless FTL is so rare and expensive that only the big guys even have access. Then the money corrects the problem, until colonies die because they can't afford the rates, or a tech revolution puts FTL in other hands, or...

They are "hydrogen displacement tons" as this user describes It's a little counter intuitive, but it is more about portioning out the internal volume of the ship (since anything that isn't filled with hardware is probably fuel or empty cargo space).

Anyone else annoyed that the 2e core book references High Guard so often, even for something as basic as the power generation mechanic?

>colonies die because they can't afford the rates
Why would you want to kill your customers? Or stop competitors from picking up the slack without an expensive trade war?

on that note, has anyone ever had a group try to ship freight with a big corporate shipping company to make a profit?

I've always imagined travellers as "importers" rather than bulk freight types.
>I want you to ship my great great grandfather's Pontiac Firebird to Betelgeuse
>Let's get a few pallets of these ugly ceramic figures and sell them as ancient alien artifacts

>I do think speculative trading is way too reliable as a source of income.

This exploitability was a problem with core trading rules in Classic Traveller, too, though in my opinion, MGT's version exacerbates the issue with its generous broker skill.

Fortunately, Traveller is very modular, and you can replace the trade system. If your players are really into the trading, maybe look at CT's Merchant Prince trade rules, which revamped and expanded them, making it both more interesting and more challenging, or look at the GURPS Traveller system in Far Trader, which I hear is the best trade system of any of the editions. I don't know how easy that would be to bolt on to MGT, offhand. MGT has a Merchant Prince supplement, too, but I've not heard anything about whether it's any good or works when pressed hard.

They are truly massive, this one is the equivalent of a 600 dton.

Makes sense! If anything, Traveller is very generous. At least half of that volume must be fuel, drives, sensors, and a powerplant, even with Traveller's magic fusion drives.

I assume that a full immersion VR rig and a lounge with full surround video walls must be standard on ships.

Also, Battleship Yamato only has 5% of the dtons as a Sylea Class Battleship

I'm looking to feature ancient tech as a major theme in a campaign.

I've already mined Stalker/Roadside Picnic. Anybody got other ideas?

What are you looking to do with it?

Basically feature them as the object of an interstellar "gold rush". Stalker in space, basically. If you can find an artifact that will keep a university in research grants for the next 300 years or bring back the son of a megacorp CEO, you can cash in big time (or end a civilization).

>in my opinion, MGT's version exacerbates the issue with its generous broker skill.

Looking over the rules again to refresh my memory, it's not so much the broker skill itself, which works roughly similarly in CT's Merchant Prince and MGT.
CT has a bigger variance in price per level of skill, but MGT also adds your INT or SOC stat mod to the equation, bumping it up more steps on its table, and removes the +4 cap that CT places on it.
On a related note, Classic NPC brokers take half the price increase they get you as pay (5%-20% at Broker 4+, while they get you 10%-40% on the actual value table) in CT, while MGT makes NPC Brokers far cheaper. (they take 1%-15% at Broker 6, and get you from 5% to 30%, or 75% on a max roll, with just skill. It doesn't say if NPC brokers get to use their INT or SOC mod like players, which would bump it up further)

Really, the big difference is the fact that MGT is more generous overall with skills, meaning it's a lot more likely that you'll have a really good broker on your ship. The advanced generation rules in CT's Merchant Prince are more generous than the CT's basic chargen rules, yet MGT continues that trend and hands out skills like candy.
(Of course, it also penalizes you pretty harshly for not having a skill, so that's more a difference of design philosophy.)

Actually, the biggest culprit is probably the bell curve they put on the results table. With enough positive modifiers you can push the price up to 400% in either direction, which is crazy.
Trade ought to be difficult enough that players have to adventure to make the bills, rather than just be rich bastards who don't have to do anything. (Although, that's a legit campaign too)

Well, if they're generally hanging around the same place, you could have corporations or a Trade League (think the Hansa) which has hitherto gone unmentioned begin to take an interest in them and try to do obstructionist, tariffy shit to them.

Also possible if they're in a smaller puddle is that you could have a war break out, and introduce not only a moral dilemma that their most profitable goods may now contribute to mass murder, but the possibility of privateers with letters of marque empowering them to hunt trade vessels coming after them.

If you want to at least ground them for a while or change the tone of the campaign up a bit by force, you could have a prefab adventure drawn up initiated by a planet they land on coming under quarantine.

If any of your players are ex-scouts, you could have a mission come down from the scout corps for them. Really, their backgrounds could play into any number of quests; got a grizzled veteran? Have something come down involving an old war-buddy. Scientist? An old friend from University asks for a favor. The time constraints on such a mission would probably put a damper on trading.

And then again, there's always just letting it happen, to some degree. Players are supposed to amass wealth and power, it's part of the fun. As the ships they purchase get bigger (or their fleet gets bigger, if they decide on quantity) there'll be more challenges that crop up. Maintenance gets harsher on larger (or more) ships, and you invariably need more crew. You might not come out of jump in the same place, if you're a "fleet". Even in the case of only slightly bigger ships, the crew ratings you need to run the ship effectively can rapidly exceed the number of PC's you have, opening up possibilities for betrayal and mutiny. As their assets grow, they may want to sink money into insuring those assets, which represents another recurring cost, and not a modest one either--but one they may want to pursue anyhow.

Do you think it would be more efficient to have fighter assets that have both atmospheric and space capabilities, or to have dedicated assets for both?

I'd say separate assets for both, simply due to the vast difference between atmospheric combat and space combat.

However, you would probably need some sort of spaceplane/shuttle to gain aerial superiority and provide ground support during the initial stages of a planetary invasion.
Something that has purely atmospheric weapons but can survive re-entry

>separated by exactly 100 posts

I read an Atomic Rockets article that described interplanetary/interstellar combat going something like this
>Attacker arrives in defender's system and they slug it out in deep space/high orbit
>defender has a strong advantage, because they can plink at enemy ships from ground stations, and can field lots of cheap defense platforms
>If the defenders do not surrender, the attacker mops up any combat ships in the system
>usually both sides come away with heavy losses
>the Attacker can't possibly field a large enough force to pacify a whole civilied planet, so their only option is to slag the whole planet from orbit (which would presumably destroy whatever they came to conquer)
>winner and loser both agree that slagging a whole planet does no one any good, so the defender surrenders to preserve their civilization, and the chance to conduct a rebellion against any forces the conqueror garrisons on their planet

Hah! I didn't even notice that about the posts, that's neat.

I guess that makes some sense as to how things might go. Ortillery weaponry is really played up in the fluff as being terrifying, and a conventional airfield is already vulnerable as is. Even if you had a heavily fortified underground silo launching aerospace assets by way of long tunnels, you can only camouflage that so well, and once orbital assets know where that is they can probably just drop ortillery on it until it's a new inland sea.

Usually separate, because aircraft tend to be a lot cheaper than even a cheap fighter.

Conversely, if price isn't that much of a concern (or you're sneaky with your maths), and you're playing in MgT 2e which has dogfighting rules, then having a 10 or 20 dton fighter is quite a good option (you'll have a -2 modifier when taking on vehicles, but can start at any speed band (read: out of vehicle weapon range) and deal ridiculous damage).

Pro-tip: If you're using MgT 1e spaceship construction rules, don't be fooled by putting a Thrust 6 gravitic drive onto your fighter craft. It's just too big and heavy, and requires a Power 6 reactor. Instead, pick a small gravitic drive (2 or 3g), and its accompanying small fusion drive (2 or 3 power, respectively). Then add a very fast reaction engine (Thrust 14! at 20 dtons). You'll get high endurance for normal cruising, and, because you don't need a high power reactor, plenty of fuel load to fuel your ridiculous thrust 14 during combat. As an added bonus for saving all that weight that would have been taken up by that massive gravitic drive, you'll probably have room enough to take a 5dton barbette.

So whereas a pulse laser turrets deals 1d6 spacecraft scale damage, a 5dton railgun barbette deals 3d6.

Can someone link some NPC stat blocks for Traveller 2E? I can't find them anywhere.

>Why would you want to kill your customers?
The mind boggles, but that was also an economic model that Traveller doesn't normally do.

I don't think anyone has done the "1001 Characters" thing for MGT2 yet, but it's not like NPC stat blocks need to be complex.

Pic is from CT's 1001 Characters. It isn't difficult to map the very specific skills of early CT to the broader skills of MGT on the fly.

Actually, those stat blocks look pretty similar. I bet translating them wouldn't be that difficult. Thanks, user.

The only big difference is that MGT gives a lot more skills. When a CT character has a skill, it generally means he's exceptional, while in MGT it generally means he's competent.
(Luke Skywalker had a total skill list of "Pilot-1" in CT. He was a little inexperienced, but still a pretty hot pilot, able to bullseye those womprats.)

You might want to bump up their skill list by a point or two when going to MGT. Adding another skill like Athletics or something will make them a little more on par with the Mongoose PCs.

Speaking about skills in MGT, would it be a good idea to make the (EDU+INT)*3 cap on skills harsher to curb skill bloat a bit?

Or would it be better to use a rule I read somewhere where it takes (total of all skill levels) weeks to learn a new skill?

Or possibly change the weighting of different skill levels? Like Pilot-1 counts as 1, Mechanic-2 counts as 4, and Medic-3 counts as 9?

If Skill-3 is supposed to be expertise (right?) wouldn't it make sense that it'd take a really intelligent and educated person to be an expert in many fields?

It was just INT+EDU under late CT.

Weeks = current skills total is the standard rule in MGT1 (right at the end of the skills chapter).

Weighting is a slippery slope. I wouldn't.

SOME skill levels are a good thing. On the other hand, getting about a 3 is almost game mechanics breaking, so it should be difficult.

I think the thing about total of all skill levels plus the desired level you wish to train your specific skill to (total skill levels + rank of skill to be trained) is the convention on things, and it seems pretty fair. Sure, it might seem like the PC's could learn a lot and become OP, but it would very quickly become necessary for them to either skim over large swathes of time--enough to invoke aging penalties and other nastiness--or realize at some point that they've cut off some avenues of learning which might have been valuable to them because they've imposed a huge learning curve on themselves. Like if they suddenly realize they have no skill in vacc suit, but that it would take them a year to get to skill-0 because they've been careless in which skills they wanted to learn. What a really wise (read: powergamey) strategy would be is to start with barely any skills at all at age 18 and just pick up every skill you can at 0, since rank 0 skills count as 0 weeks, not 1. Start with few enough ranks in few enough skills, and you could technically learn rank 0 in everything in 0 weeks, though that'd obviously be a That Guy move.

I suppose you could put a cap in if you really wanted to, but I might advise linking the cap to the stat associated with the skill instead of just EDU. To put it in more realistic terms, some skills just aren't linked to book learning at all; you could be a really dumb guy but great at scrimshawing because you put time into it and your manual dexterity is good.

Aye, the learning curve seems like a good idea. Maybe have rank 0s count as 1/2? I think there's a rule to that effect in some edition
The only thing about the modular nature of Traveller is that you can forget where you got a given rule from

As to a an associated stat-based cap I don't think that'd be a good idea given that it ties skills to a specific stat you know? Unless you do something like your Mechanic cap is the higher of your INT or your EDU, but that could get complicated quickly.
That said you have a point about it not making sense that smart guys have more room for athletics, so maybe a cap isn't a good idea,

>Maybe have rank 0s count as 1/2?
Skil zeros are intended to count as zero. Otherwise the high EDU PC who got a bunch as a teen but didn't convert them to positives later gets hosed.

Got a question for my fellow GMs. I am GMing a Traveller campaign with a Firefly vibe- everyone is stuck in one system, no FTL, lots of trade with sub-c ships.

PCs are currently inbound to a grey-market asteroid hub. Now, in addition to the normal transportation of goods, they have a briefcase. They were contracted by the corrupt mayor of one of the major cities on the main planet to transport said briefcase, locked and the seals unbroken, to the asteroid.

Here's the thing: I don't know what to do next. It was sortof improved, and now I don't know what to do. I mean, I could just make the drop off go without a hitch, but wheres the fun in that?

I'm thinking they arrive , go to the drop (a pawn shop/ fence), and the shop is closed, the proprietor gone. But to where? and what next?

Any suggestions, gentlemen and ladies?

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

You can let the delivery go off without a hitch, and let the silence worry the players more than any plotting on your part might.

You could have the receiver open the case out of their sight then bring it back a few minutes later closed up, with a similar amount offered to return it to the originator.

They could deliver it and walk away with their money, only to have the pawn shop explode a few minutes later.

You could have no complications for three or more sessions, then drag them in front of a spook who knows of the delivery and is ready to string them up... unless they help him...

This sounds like a great opportunity for a Pulp Fiction shoutout, where the proprietor opens it up, looks into its golden glow happily, closes it, and that's all you get.

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I have created one. There weren't enough insectoid races for my liking, so made one. "et skeret" highly loyal and emotionless methane breathers - excellent mercs and scouts/inflitrators inspired by pic related from Babylon 5

Use the random opposition from the core book, thats what all those tables are for, to help you randomly generate jobs and problems on the fly.

I rolled 15: so Local Authorities. Perhaps the PCs are suspected of spying, and the authorities need to search the briefcase... the PCs know they can't allow it because it will void the contract, so they have to use every ounce of charm (or bribery) to get out of the search.

If you can have a threat of the job totally failing, take it. The more pressure you can put on the PCs, the more they'll have to think and act carefully - and that makes for great sessions.

Dont forget those random tables, page 81 in the Mongoose 1e book and from page 86 in the 2e book. They're great for when you need a job on the fly.

I like the idea of an insectoid race. You got stats for them?

I will take your advice on the opfor. Thanks for the suggestion.

Yep I have rough stats for them:

RACE: Et-skeret
Methane Breather - requires controlled atmosphere or thin breathing suit
Goal Minded - Must complete contracts
Age similair to humans
+2 Dex, -1 Strength, -1 Soc with non et-skeret
Natural abilities:
Stealth-1
Melee-0
Scything talons: 2 natural claws - 2D6 damage each.

Example character "sk sklat":
pastebin.com/XUjM9rEU

This was an actual character from our campaign - a merc hired by the party to infiltrate and sabotage their enemies base. His name is pronounced almost without any vowels, just making clicking noises like "sk sklt".

These guys talk in insectiod clicks, and you have to put your hands over your mouth like mandibles and move them about to roleplay them talking. Obviously a universal translator kicks in after a few seconds of insectiod speaking, but it gives the players a good sense of what they're dealing with. Ideally if they can meet these guys in methane environments made for all the methane breathers, it will hammer home the difference of crazy aliens... ideally the PCs have to don face masks in order to enter these areas... just like babylon 5!

I did find another of my races too:

Xenilian: reptilian race
Soft spoken, hard working, neck frill expands when angered or frightened.

+2 DEX
-2 END
Aquatic - can swim up to 30kph
full gills, can breathe underwater and a variety of gasses, but can't deal with low pressure - anything under atmosphere 4 - thin atmospheres etc, will damage its gills.

Enjoy!

Cool, thanks.

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Speaking of races, here's a golden oldie

Still neat.

Here's someone's quick-and-dirty Mass Effect conversion from (IIRC) RPG.net's forums.

Why do Turians roll for psi? I thought they had less biotic potential than humans?
Are there even any Turian biotics in the series?
Barring Saren, but that was Reaper-magic and you know it

There were definitely Turian biotics, they were just conspicuously absent from the game. What's-his-face had a Turian instructor at that biotic academy.

There was that girl turian in one of the ME3 dlc that was biotic. I mean, totally understandable that it's been wiped from memory, given how terrible ME3 became, but she was there.

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Stars Without Number might have some ideas for you.

I know that the Engines of Babylon, Relics of the Lost, and Dead Names Lost Races and Forgotten Ruins supplements have bunch of lost tech artifacts in them. Dead Names also has an artifact generator in it.

Archive linked in

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Alright Traveller General, I need some help. My campaign is set in the solar system 100 years in the future. The plot starts with the players being hired by some less than savory folk to acquire a piece of technology from a shipwreck in space-government space. The players salvage the thing and travel back to the station, only to find it destroyed. The campaign ends with a group of terrorists attempting to use the tech the PCs salvaged to teleport a ship filled with explosives directly into a space-government base to end their hold on the outer planets. I'm looking for a way to connect these two events, preferably one that involves Mars and or Venus. I'm grateful for any suggestions I get. Thanks.

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Mars destroyed the original vessel (the shipwreck) and set the whole thing up to start a war between space-government and the Venetians. You should watch the Expanse if you haven't already, great political intrigue within our solar system.

The Terrorists are Venetians but they dont realize they're being played by mars, and if the PCs can convince them going through with it will completely destroy their homeworld for no good reason, they might be able to work with them to try to find out what the hell mars is up to.

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I love this art style; it really feels like a wondrous far-off universe.

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always liked the Gazelle and that version is particularly neat

That's Angus McKie, artist for the TTA books. Incredibly inspirational stuff.

mediafire.com/download/z3dgxdd7z55h0kd/TTA Handbook - Spacecraft 2000 to 2100AD.pdf
mediafire.com/download/yhygvuk3963ujcg/TTA Handbook - Great Space Battles.pdf
mediafire.com/download/1xel3tu2td64zc6/TTA Handbook - Spacewreck.pdf
mediafire.com/download/q1vwvqtq9y6urqp/TTA Handbook - Starliners.pdf
mediafire.com/download/4zxvucxd81041mj/Terran Trade Authority RPG - Core Rulebook.pdf

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Looks pretty comfy, I love Traveller yachts. That big open viewing area up front reminds me of the safari ship.

On the subject of luxury, has anyone gone about putting VR/holodecks etc in Traveller?

Holographics are part of the setting, usually seen as part of a sensor rig on a ship's bridge or as the "screen" for a Hand Comp or military Tactical Box. (per Striker). Goggled VR is probably passe, and since the travel pattern is usually week on/week off, you aren't going to get a lot of long-term cabin fever that needs walk-around holo-reality.

>you aren't going to get a lot of long-term cabin fever that needs walk-around holo-reality.
Nonetheless you do have a certain consumer who is insanely rich, has a lot of free space, and bores easily. I could imagine high-end VR definitely being a thing.

Certainly. The solid holograms of Trek TNG and DS9 would be, I think, just getting started at TL16. That guess is based on descriptions of the Darrians and their flame sculpture.

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Damn, are there a lot of Megatraveller ship books like this?

In my imagination, any ship with a lounge has a video wall to give the illusion of more open space. Probably also one full immersion VR system, the use of which is rationed.

I imagine high tech, high population worlds have a large population of people who are basically VR couch potatoes, while the working classes either indulge rarely or avoid it like the plague.

Sadly no. This is a fan effort by a 3D artist in Japan. He did similar work on a version of the A2, and some on the Fer-de-Lance and a few others.

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A big window/display wall in just about any sip room is not a bad idea, and cheap in the scheme of things.

Nice, do you have more?

so why is there no pdf of mongoose 2e central supply?

I heard they've started watermarking their shit with the buyer's name, so it's understandable people would be reluctant to share

there's ways to clean pdf's, it's been actual months at this point

What's Veeky Forums's favourite Traveller character?
Or for the foreverGMs, who was your favourite character that one of your players played?

It's got to be a homebrew production, there are some blatant typos to go with the beautiful graphics (Imperiul, manuever, guunery), and some incredibly stilted writing.

??

He must be looking at one of the Mongoose books, maybe the Campaign Guide, which apparently went out without any proofreading. ("What the hell is a necronumnum?!")

Exactly. A small amenity that can alleviate claustrophobia.

I read another scifi story where the walls of personal compartments in an underwater hab were all mirror finish for the same reason.

Anybody got the playtest stuff for mongoose High Guard 2e?

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