Traveller General--Ziru Sirka Edition

bump before bed

>Anybody who walks around in TL 14 armor is going to be suspect to a lot of questions and glances.

It's definitely a "time & place" thing. While it may be legal, on most worlds you aren't going to walk around on your daily errands carrying an ACR and a pocket full of grenades without attracting some major attention.

"Combat Armor" is essentially a good hardsuit. Good stuff in a fight but you aren't hauling heavier weaponry. If you want to be the walking tank you go for Battledress.

In a war zone you'll see Combat Armor or Space Armor often, but it will raise eyebrows and alarms most other places.

Tell you player that maintenance is going to be a money pit and he might leave it in the closet most of the time.

Manic board tonight...

If a weapon has a negative modifer for heft or recoil, what does that mean? Most are in the positive (thus indicating their penalties when applicable)

Which weapons are they?

>Sorry to hurt your feeling but it didn't, snowflake.
Wow, what a fucking asshole you are.
>b-b-b-but this is Veeky Forums I can do what I want!
Look how that's worked out for you, chuckles

In the Central Supply Catalogue off the top of my head...
Cutlass is like -1 and the rapier or stiletto is -2.

In reply to

>snowflake.

Brutal

Is Traveller 5 playable yet?

Yes, but you'll still have some work to make it easily so.

lightweight or easily maneuverable weapons that are not handicapped, like a small blade would be, by size, so they are actually easier to hit with than usual.

Right, thanks for helping with the ruling.

>he doesn't let his players open carry
SHALL

jump

Reminder that Lucan did nothing wrong.

Worlds have a Law Level stat. This isn't D&D.

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where's that pic from, Power Projection Fleet? The Full Thrust Traveller variant. I am unsure if it's in the archive

bump

anyone ever get a character that ended up as pic related?

The Atlantic goes back to CT Fighting Ships.
This pic popped up in recent discussions of Mag's work.He does some nice renditions,

cool

How do you run a traveler campaign? I'm kind of lost when it comes to games that don't involve dungeon crawling. What do you usually do?

First and foremost: Combat is highly lethal, to all parties involved (no pun intended)

Patrons can ask the players to do something. Provide information or equipment.

The default approach is covered nicely by the episodes of Firefly. Honest merchanting barely covers the bills, so you take odd jobs, seek unusual paths to cargos, and have random passengers pull stupid shit.

You can certainly use the same Quest-Reward structure that fantasy games frequently depend on. The Pathfinder Adventure Paths can be interpreted for a space game with a change of details in many cases. Dungeons become office buildings, installations, and palaces. Quest givers can still be nobles, towns, companies, guilds, or panicked parents. Rewards can still be money, stuff, and connections, but should rarely be wanton loot, at least in civilized areas.

Another one from Mag.

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Only a freakin' genius like Mag could take that old pen&ink illo from "Leviathan" and come up with a 3D illo that works.

People have tried creating deck plans for the Shivva design for decades and now Mag has given them something better to work with.

For those of you fascinated with the Empress Wave, this illo is WHY it's called the Empress Wave. That's a representation of what Strephon and the psion Jonathan Crocker perceived at Longbow II. Both described what they saw as more like a "pause" or moment in a movie where nothing happens rather than a still photo.

jump

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Who is Mags? Where can I find more of his work? Traveller Mags only brings up...well, travel magaznes

I don't know much about him. He's Japanese, uses the name "magmagmag" at COTI, occasionally asks rules questions, and occasionally posts his work.

I don't know if he has a blog or other site. I also don't know where the find his work other than COTI. Sorry.

damn

bump

how come i havent seen a Trav thread in days?

Black Globe Generator was on, I suspect.

I thought someone else would make it

WE

hmm...could I (theoretically) use mag's 3d renders to make a traveller mod?

bump

And sometimes a couple days off helps participation when a new General does start.

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This thread is going down the death route again. Seem past couple generals have been like that. I wonder why?

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And yet this thread is three days old.

Sometimes it's just the flavor of the week. Other times the OP image isn't the right one to catch attention.

>Other times the OP image isn't the right one to catch attention.

Those ones are pretty short lived yes. I don't understand why those people can't just use the traveller logo or a variation like this one's. It's much easier to find that way rather than some generic space image.

Which is why I use the search.

I've also just lost a thread, even when it was supposedly on page 6 (for example) and I knew the OP to look for. Not sure if I'm going blind or there is some bug that people don't notice.

>Other times the OP image isn't the right one to catch attention.

I think that's a big part of it. Folks in the PDF Share thread noticed a drop in posts whenever they change their OP images.

that is a traveller image though

They were talking about the OP images used in previous generals and not this particular one.

do you have a favorite non-imperial ship style anons?

Aslan with Droyne a close second.

The whole "rounded organic flowing" aesthetic really sets the Aslan apart and has so since CT. Droyne styles weren't really seen until GT but they're wonderfully funky.

aslan are cool, never seen a droyne ship

GT has a few and there's one in TNE too.

anyone have a favorite version of the sword worlds books? I like mongoose's book more than GURPS, GURPS Sword World's book is too...Cold War-esque

One of the first, from a MegaTraveller adventure in Challenge 66.

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Hey Traveller General. If anyone's around, I've got a question for you.

How do I ease myself and my players into this game? I'm an experienced GM, but I've never really run anything quite as "logistical" as Traveller. My one short attempt a few years back was fun, but it was also the only time I ever needed a laptop with multiple spreadsheets open to run a game... I'm not quite sure I was ready for it.

The obvious answer might be to ignore the crunchier aspects of the system, but if I were going to throw all that stuff out I might as well just run another game anyway. I want the true Traveller experience, and I'm considering getting a group together in the new year, so I'm wondering what I can do to make things go more smoothly this time.

Any resources you can point me toward? GM tools, discussions, primers, whatever. Any advice for a relative newbie learning how to make stuff like ship maintenance, travel time, trade, economics, etc... fun and accessible?

check the archive for the 'differences between traveller versions' and 'traveller primers' read through them first, and also bolt on SWN's faction system if you intend to sandbox campaign, because it is magnificent, don't use all the canon, you'll only ever drown in it, pick and choose what you need, don't go too hard, too fast, remember there are consequences, and a sector or two is really all you NEED to have it should be good for years, there, I think that's...most of the (no pun intended) general consensus

Save most of the crunchy stuff for session start, or between sessions. For example:

One week = one world. At the end of a session, assuming the PCs are leaving it for another, get them *into jump* so they can't change their minds on you.

The time until the next session is spent on what you want or need for that session and world, including, if they are trading, the details of the brokers they'll use to buy and sell. No need to pause during game while you figure out what the broker has. You already have stuff with prices.

To be safe, roll up two brokers per world. Name them and/or their companies. Ideally, you and your players will take care of the selling and new purchases in the first half hour, then you can move on to the things they do while searching for, arranging, and waiting for those cargos. In a fantasy game this would be "downtime", but in Traveller this is PRIME time. They've made the roll, so you and they know the brokerage process is going to take a week. At this point "what do the rest of you do?" is the active question.

Some will beg off a day or two with maintenance, but if the world is one they've visited before, you can encourage prior contacts, favorite dining spots, etc. All of which are possible hooks themselves, or locations to be approached by that trope of both fantasy and Traveller, the quest giver. Traveller calls them "Patrons", and if you find a table for generating random Patrons, this is what that gets used for. Rich, poor, desperate, or crooked, patrons offer money or later favors for services rendered by the out-of-towners. What those services are runs the entire gamut, but the tables should help.

PCs will agree or not, the job happens on their terms OR NOT, and sometimes the best consequences arise from turning down a job and having it or something similar land in their laps anyway.

Job done, successfully or not, the PCs board their now loaded ship, set their destination, and push the Jump button. Repeat.

This doesn't mean that in-jump time is downtime either, though. If you have an RP heavy crew, jump time is seven days of improv theater, low comedy, and interactions with any passengers you might have taken on. The success of this sort of thing is strongly dependent on the RP skills at the table, but hijackings, creatures loose in the hold, and space madness can be more about the dice. Obviously there is no need to make every jump crazy, but the occasional memorable week trapped on a ship in jumpspace is worth doing.

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This all sounds like solid advice. I never considered how easily the structure of travel in Traveller lends itself to the chunking of a campaign into discrete episodes per planet. I do intend to run this game in a mostly sandbox fashion, as I'm coming from OSR D&D and a lot of the appeal of Traveller to me was the possibiltiy of oldschool, player-driven exploration and adventure.

If there are any particularly great resources out there that I should know about, by all mean point me in the right direction. I'll definitely be checking out SWN too, as it's been on my radar for a while.

QUESTION: How do people feel about the Pirates of Drinax campaign (for Mongoose Traveller, I believe)? I imagine I wouldn't make the adventure modules the main focus of my game, but the Trojan Reach sector seems like a decent place to set a campaign about ragtag freebooters. Is it worth picking up?

>Pirates of Drinax
As with the other Mongoose attempts at an "adventure path" its a bit linear. Mining it for resources is certainly a good start, though.

The area around Drinax is great for such things by design. The nearby Imperial border (upper right) is already a remote frontier, so you don't get a lot of Imperial meddling in the wilds. The Aslan to spinward (left) are more likely to chase pirates around, but the frontier between them and the Imperium is a couple dozen worlds with a total population of North America between them, and most of that is on one world. Lots of room for shenanigans.