Traveller General - Bizzare Bazaar Edition

>Speaking of ancients, what bullshit do you pin on them in ytu?

Nothing important, just a few archaeological sites that show "hey, this starfaring species existed back in the dinosaur days".

that's the most restrained I've ever seen them used

Doesn't work if the players insist on planets with names and coordinates, tech levels, locations.

At least include examples of suitable locations in the OTU or whatever Cepheus uses for a setting.

How garbage should a starter spaceship be? How garbage is too garbage?

>garbage
It's called "character"

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

FUCKING TRAVELLLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER

I'm glad now all of that shit would fit on two touchscreens.

Does anyone have any advice for Mongoose 1e Chargen?

every time I see this, I spot something new

Yeah, but it'd all be hidden inside a single hamburger menu, sixteen layers deep, and god help you if you tap the wrong thing and get lost in there.

>not having neuro-networked AI (which has lovingly taken care of you since the day you were born) manage all the nonsense that our feeble brains can't handle and/or have a chance of accidentally breaking

1970s futurism is fine and all, but really, a multi-million credit TL11+ ship should have enough AI hand-holding to prevent shit like accidentally pressing bad buttons from happening in the first place.

>wanting an AI to second guess you all the time and give you what it thinks you wanted instead of what you asked for

Touchscreens are a fundamentally poor interface and you can't patch that with nannyware.

>you can't patch that
Sure you can. Instead of physically touching something, just have your neural-integrated AI do that thing which you intend (including refusing to do so if, in its judgment, it is something that is harmful to you). Human foibles are the problem, after all.

Also, showing your age, gramps.

Then why bother to have a touchscreen if you have an AI?

And just because kids today are used to eating garbage doesn't make it stop being garbage. Get your tablets off my lawn, you little shits!

>all the slowness of a phone with all the portability of a small painting

Modern military aircraft have these buttons which are themselves little screens, which change to show different options as you navigate menus, forget what they're called.

>Windows XP

I feel safer already.

Didn't the Navy run a pilot program back around 2005 to replace their VMS based systems with a special Windows version Microsoft developed for them, only to cancel the fuck out of it when the test carrier had to shut down for like a day because it fucked up?

In defense, that screen is from a hovercraft. As far as the other, you got me. Sounds like something we'd do, though.

Let's just call them "fancy optimus maximus keyboards".

It's XP because the whole thing is built around working with it, upgrading to 7 or 10 would mean rewriting a lot of horribly specialized software from scratch.

Shoulda stuck with VMS ......

>Then why bother to have a touchscreen if you have an AI?
Context sensitivity. Regardless of the AI we would make to help us, we are, at the end of the day, still products of our evolution, so building something that elicits a tactile response is useful.

A quick example: the vast majority of the photoreceptors in our eyes (90 million out of a total of ~95 million) are completely bleached (and produce no information-containing signal) in daylight and are only used in early dawn/twilight hours and for peripheral vision. Of the remaining 4.5 - 5 million photoreceptors that can see color, much of the 'encoding' of the data (in terms of cross talk down to bi-polar cells) is ONLY activated by motion.

We all experience the sensation when a small animal moves in the brush; when it was still it may have been difficult to detect (although our eyes do take in the sensory data, it's mostly ignored by primary visual cortex because it's not salient), but once the animal moves, your brain registers it immediately.

So this is a product of our evolution as predatory animals and thus if you are building an AI to compliment it, you have to that into account. So, for instance, in the real world, AI vision is shittacular at identifying a person who gains a bit of weight or ages a bit, which the human brain is exceedingly good at, but is very good at processing an enormous number of similar-looking people and differentiating between them (humans are AWFUL at this and can really only remember around 12-16 'archetype' faces in its memory, which is why people stereotype others as 'looking all the same' if they don't interact with them often.)

>a tactile response

But that's the worst part of a touchscreen's usability, they have no tactile response. I mean, that and the poor accuracy of pressing stuff with your fingers forcing designers to have to fold menus up several layers deep just to accomodate suitably oversized buttons.

Time and time again I'm reminded that nature is both a weird and a beautiful thing

that it is

Cepheus doesn't have a setting to the best of my knowledge

No default setting, but several have been published.

what's the best published setting in your opinion for Cepheus engine?

What're psionics like in your traveller universe, anons?

They don't exist, because I don't need space-muslims blowing things up with their mind.

I said psionics, not zhodani user

In the past? pic related
Now? half of them are scared of being like the Mind Lords, a small bit want to be Mind Lords, and the rest Just Want Some Godsdamned Peace And Quiet.

I made some 2300ad maps of earth if anyone cares

post more! I love this shit!

2300 deserves more respect than just 'Hard Science Traveller'

Good to see that poland finally caught Lithuania

Sure

how'd you make these, and are you basing it off of cannon, or your own story?

Only thing I know about 2300 is 'related to traveller, and really cool, weird aliens'

I just got blank maps of the world and drew over them. They're all based off of the canon maps given in the 2300ad Earth sourcebook (I'm just remaking them because the Earth sourcebook maps are reaaaally messy and not very nice to look at.)

Ok, thanks user

Has anyone posted the new Pirates of Drinax mega-campaign for Mongoose 2ed?

there's a new one?

>Venezuela
Well know I Know this is a fantasy setting

Yes. And it even already has a thread about the errors it contains on the MgT message boards. So it appears to suffer from typical Mongooses editing shittyness.

Here's more 2300ad if anyone wanted it

thank you user

A starter ship should fit what you want the PCs to be able to reach and be capable of doing when they get there for the first several sessions. After that the ship should be whispering in the Captain's ear about that next repair or upgrade. A ship that meets every need and is in good working order needs to be shot at occasionally.

The checklist is not just decoration, and explains a few things the text is poor at.
I usually allow the basic skill roll on the term a PC fails out of a career, because failure is educational.

like the Millennium Falcon, as an example of a junker that works juuuust well enough it's not a health hazard?

???

Also as a note it is VERY hard to get the borders just right please don't kill me

Nice maps.
Also, reading about it few threads back I started to read Hammers Slammers and damn, that's some good military sci-fi. (even if it isn't all about shooting guns) Why isn't it more popular?

I guess to top it off I'll post the 2300ad near star map.
Too bad I'll never use any of this stuff because there's no one to play 2300ad with,
and even then I'd want to rewrite a bit of the setting to be more cyberpunky, so to say

>it isn't all about shooting guns. Why isn't it more popular?

There's your answer user, in my experiencem most of the people I've met who're into military sci-fi are just there to drool over the space guns

How many terms are too many terms? Is there a maximum age?

4-6 tends to be about the maximum, and 'until you die?'

So if you managed to get an early roll of the Lottery roll in Cosmopilite, got a million dollars, then got a doubled Noble benefit roll right after it, and went for Anagathics, and due to the right stat spread managed to get about 36 terms, uh, what then?

congratulations, you've officially got the best luck, and you've probably got a loooooooooooooooooooong list of enemies

Seven enemies, three allies, no contacts or rivals because they all died or became enemies. Nearly died once, only actually forced out of a career twice so far due to failed survival.

Do I just stop at this point, or what? Do I just see how long the ride goes?

It's your choice user, but remember, things can and probably will come back to bite you in the ass once the game starts

Like, the primary problem I'm concerned about is someone seeing this and just telling me to fuck off, but the entire thing is rolled up in a public page.

What do I actually do to determine who my allies/enemies are? I've never actually done that before.

use the game's rolls as a basis? what version are you using? my only experience is with mongoose

Mongoose 1e, at present. I've built like 1-2 characters before this, but those were with people standing by. I'm... at least relatively sure that I've actually got things correct? I'm just still new as hell to this.

oh yeah, then it should tell you 'gain (as an example) naval officer as your enemy'

Nah, most of them were like "Gain 1d3 Enemies and 1d3 Allies", I just rolled higher on enemies almost every time, and then several events either killed or flipped allies.

Do humans in Traveller use any particular style of naming?

then pick something that sounds like it'll make a good story
I know Sword Worlder's use vaguely 'not Nordic' sounding names

Last time I looked at the map I saw a Third Space French Empire some place, I'm assuming many of them have French names.

I think that's 2300, user

That was on travellermap.com, and probably not canon.
IIRC it was inside Solomani territory, somewhere bottom right of Earth.

wiki.travellerrpg.com/Third_Reformed_French_Confederate_Republic
Ah shit, it's canon.

I'm going to try running classic Traveller soon for two players, but I'm still reading through the core rule book. I have very little experience GMing, but I have a particular kind of game in mind. I'm interesting in building my own setting for a sandbox where each planet is its own little ecosystem of adventures that are largely disconnected from each other.

I was hoping for some recommended Sci-Fi inspiration. I like the genre but I actually don't have much literature or media under my belt and I'd like to have more, especially if they can be digested fairly easily. Also, are there any recommended homebrew fixes/splats I should know about for this version?

Grab the Rule 68A pdf from the Archive. Skim through The Traveller Adventure, there's a lot of good advice. Citizens of the Imperium is awesome, as is Traders and Gunboats. If you want robots, use the JTAS version.
Other than that, steal bits and pieces from wherever.

It was quite popular back when it was nearly alone in Military SF, but its Vietnam vibes (war is shitty, win or lose) in the early stories don't sell as well *now* compared to all the winning the more recent stuff does. Once the MilSF writers started to channel the MachoFic Gun Porn there was no attention left for actual good writing.

A lot of H.Beam Piper is now out of copyright, I think. Good reading there.

You can get a lot of mileage out of the Patron system, though I might recommend grabbing the Mongoose 1e core book for its Patron tables to help with motivations and tasks.

Another source of assistance outside of Traveller is the D20 based Stars Without Number. Flip past all the system specific stuff and head for the Referee's advice and campaign building guide.

>You can get a lot of mileage out of the Patron system, though I might recommend grabbing the Mongoose 1e core book for its Patron tables to help with motivations and tasks.

Classic's 76 Patrons is an excellent alternative. 76 patrons with plot seeds, each with about 3-6 variations.

Absolutely. The variations structure of 76P is a useful thought process to learn in general. At such an early stage, however, i would look at as many tools as possible and see which ones resonate.

Firefly has pretty much got your entire spectrum covered

it was based on traveller IIRC?

Not totally-for-sure 100% super confirmed, but yeah, it was based on a Traveller campaign.

scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/13668/is-joss-whedons-firefly-based-on-the-traveller-rpg-he-played

thanks user

I love how it looks like Donegal seceded. Guess they built their own Las Vegas after all

Seriously though, 2300ad is pretty cool.
My current TU is heavily based off it by way of Alien

Would it be acceptable to make a Zhodani a Not!Dune type? (I.E. vaguely middle-easternish, arabian prince kinda thing)

2300 continues the universe of Twilight 2000. No relation with Traveller except that it has starships, and even their FTL is completely different.

I guess GDW stuck Traveller on 2300 initially so that it would sell better.

I blame Ringo and his military pornography.
Well, the entire suite of "we always win, easy" really started after Desert Storm, with a generation that never really grasped the reality of WW2, Vietnam, and Korea. To them, Desert Storm was the ideal form of war, brought to us by technology that made the primitive combat conditions of those previous wars something to be never seen again.
Then WoT started, and about 2005 we started losing that idea when people realized that there's a reason we call it an "urban jungle"...

Just remember: if your advancement roll is lower than the number of terms you've spent in that career, you have to muster out that term, even if you got promoted.
Of course, I've never seen rules for what happens if you make an advancement roll at Rank 6 - I just roll another skill, like you're supposed to do with promotions.

Also, the entire sector of Reaver's Deep, which had... Reavers, AKA partially insane raiding warlords, especially during T4's M0 setting.
So I'm pretty sure I narrowed down the sector, milieu, and edition of play.

Ringo?

enlighten a poor fool, user

John RIngo, one of the not-as-awful military SF writers in Baen Books' jam-packed stable of awful military SF writers.

Oh, that guy, who I vaguely remember reading about, have some more military sf

alternatewars.com/Fiction/MilSF_Listing.htm

has it right, Ringo is not as bad - after all, Ringo has seen actual combat. The problem is how his politics inform the plots of his books. It's why I never really noticed Weber doing the same thing, since I started reading them both at the same time.
Their novels are the best when they stay the hell away from politics. (and Ringo did have the contract to write the first-contact history of Schlock Mercenary, until Howard realized just how political John is when he's not trying to include it...)

Now, what I need is more old-school pulp. Picked up Andre Norton's Star Guard a few days ago and discovered where my tastes lie, alongside the Vorkosigan series. Any suggestions? One of my local bookstores has an entire aisle of old pulp sf.

Heinlein, but I'm a fag who'll shill for Heinlein at any given opportunity

caveat: Your game, your character

The Zhodani nobles (the only ones who wear turbans) range from localized community types to big picture meddlers. A desert world could produce a local populace a lot like the Fremen, but isolation and cultural drift is not something the Zhodani want to have happen, so the Fremen thing will be more of an overlay on the Zhodani baseline.

>I blame Ringo
Ringo is a symptom. The drift of SF into mindless bulletry started in the mid-90s as S.M.Stirling started to inexplicably get book contracts and a horde of unknowns began to bleed and butcher poor helpless thesauri in the quest for combat writing that didn't drag. As most of them couldn't write non-combat either, they failed, but kept getting published.