Free Traders Setup Part 9: Trim the fat

 

You’ve now seen the thought and prep work that went into creating the setting; in all, probably about 20 hours’ effort, which is more than usual for me. I can get away with such limited preparation firstly because I’m using existing games and real-world history to do the heavy lifting for me, and secondly because I’m not writing a saleable product, and therefore don’t need to explain things that will be intuitively obvious to my players or myself.

Here’s what the players will get as their handout, which is also pretty much everything I will take with me to sessions except for the character sheets, dice, and a few pages pages of quick reference. Behind the scenes, I’m using the Stars Without Number world tags and adventure seeds to prepare adventures, but the players don’t need to know that.

-o0o-

THE PITCH

From Firefly to Futurama, free traders are a science fiction archetype; a bunch of scoundrels on the make, in a ship just big enough to carry them and the McGuffin from patron to doublecross.

You’re Sinbad the Sailor, Marco Polo, Han and Chewie. You’re the crew of the Solar Queen or the Pride of Chanur. You take on anything that isn’t safe enough, legal enough, or profitable enough to interest the big shipping lines. Someday, you’ll make that one big score that lets you retire in style; but for now you need a fast tongue, a fast gun hand, and a fast ship.

RULES: SAVAGE WORLDS

• Available Arcane Backgrounds: Psionics.
• Available Races: Android, Human (the default), Rakashan, Saurian. Androids may swap Asimov Circuits for another Major Hindrance with GM permission. Rakashans and Saurians hate each other, and are both by turns mercenaries and bandits.
• Languages: Are boring. This is pulp SF, everyone speaks English.
• Cyberware: It’s all about the trappings. You levelled up and improved your Strength? Sounds like muscle implants to me, chummer…

THE FARSIDE ROUTE

This is your standard run; carrying robots and weapons from Uppsala to trade with Kiev for foodstuffs and rare metals, or Lygos for luxury goods (artworks, databases, fabric, jewelry, spices and wine).

Uppsala
(Varan Federation)
Theocracy, Unbraked AI
|
Ladoga
Sealed Menace, Trade Hub
|
Novgorod
(Colony of Kiev)
Colonised Population, Preceptor Archive
|
The Seven Portals
Alien Ruins, Warlords (Rakashan pirates)
|
Kiev
(Imperial Ally – for the Moment)
Oceanic World, Pilgrimage Site
|
Cherson
(Celestial Empire)
Exchange Consulate, Trade Hub
|
Lygos
(Celestial Empire)
Regional Hegemon, Trade Hub

These are just the most important stops on a single major trade route. Expect more worlds to appear temporarily during adventures; they’re always there, you just don’t often have a reason to step outside the starport bar when you visit.

The stretch between Novgorod and Kiev runs between star systems too far apart for normal hyperdrives; fortunately, some long-vanished alien race seems to have had the same problem, and left hyperspace portals bridging the gaps. Ships must fly a predictable course to use these portals, which makes them a favourite hunting ground for pirates. The usual method is to go as fast as you dare, in the hope the pirates can’t match vectors before you jump.

-o0o-

And there I’ll park it for the moment. Normally I would run a solo adventurer through the setting for a while to bed it down and flush out unexpected issues; but I’m very busy at work this year, and haven’t really got the time to do that.

The Future is Here

“The future is already here. It just isn’t evenly distributed yet.” – William Gibson.

I have seen the future of roleplaying PDFs, and it is EABA v2. Check it out.

Essentially, it lets you roll dice, update character/vehicle/NPC sheets, track wounds and treasure, draw maps etc. all inside the PDF reader on a tablet (or a desktop, but seriously dahling, how 20th century!). I especially like the dice roller, which inserts your last die roll as part of the header – things like Dicebook are promising, but the dice roller gets in the way of reading the text; not so with EABA v2.

You can download a free quickstart version of the rules here with all those snazzy features in, to experiment.

Free Traders Setup Part 8: Kiev

Aha, the last stop on the Farside Route heaves into view! Kiev’s early history is unclear, but if was an outpost of the Khazar empire (and possibly Magyars) a couple of centuries before the game’s time frame.

I’ve already established the Magyar-equivalents as Savage Worlds Saurians, so I’ll go with the Magyar theory, and lace Kiev with Saurian architecture, whatever that looks like. I’ll worry about that later, I can use the random architecture tables in Stars Without Number.

About a century before play begins, Kiev was taken over by the Rus and became the centre of their fledgling state. In (2)968, the Pechenegs (Rakashans) laid siege to the city.

Kiev is full of lakes, rivers, and whatnot, so I select Oceanic World as one tag. If I were feeling especially radical, I could dig out Traveller Adventure 9: Nomads of the World Ocean. Hmm. Come to think of it, I could scrap the Farside Route and just lump the planets from old Classic Traveller adventures together to make a subsector…

Stay on target, Luke.

Yes, Obi-Wan. Kiev has a number of sacred sites which draw pilgrims, and assorted cultural locations, so either Pilgrimage Site or Preceptor Archive would work for the other tag. I’ve already used Preceptor Archive so I’ll go with Pilgrimage Site, possibly the Saurian ruins.

Tags: Oceanic World, Pilgrimage Site.

End Game

In the absence of any players, I find myself re-reading my oldest Traveller rulebooks – the 1977 Little Black Books. To my current eye, Book 1 – Characters and Combat – is the most dated of the three original LBBs.

But, the thing about character generation in the 1977 edition of Classic Traveller is this: It’s the end game.

Fresh out of character generation, the typical PC is in his late 30s or early 40s. He’s the same age as Conan was when he seized the throne of Aquilonia. He’s done the spacefaring equivalent of all that dungeon-crawling crap, served his time in the trenches, and now he is ready to concoct "daring schemes for the acquisition of wealth and power", as Book 3 put it.

Comparing the weapons skills statistically to the other game we all played at the time, Original D&D, we see against an unarmoured target at optimum range, the hit probability for expertise level 1-2 (which covers most characters) is roughly equivalent to a D&D fighter of 4th to 6th level. Expertise level 3 is about the same as a 7th to 9th level fighter, level 4 to 10th-12th level, and level 5 to 13th-15th level.

9th level for an OD&D fighter (Traveller expertise level 3) is when he builds his castle and starts playing the Game of Thrones. In this regard, CT is more like contemporary FATE-based games like Spirit of the Century and Diaspora, in which the PC begins the game as good as he will ever be as far as skills go, and improves in other ways – power, wealth, influence.

EXAMPLES

Conan is about 5th level ("he had already taken wounds which would have killed any four normal men"), so in CT terms would have Sword-1. Given his Strength of 12 (at least), he’d get another +1. Against an unarmoured opponent at optimum range, he hits on a 2; that’s every single time. He’d hit a stock NPC with Sword-1 and Mesh ("the mailed chief of Akif") on a 6, 72% of the time; untrained NPCs (-5 to hit and +3 to be hit) are as grass before his blade, he can carry on hitting them every time, indefinitely, even when fatigued.

A character with Dexterity 8 and a telescopic sight already has +3 to hit at very long range (over 500 metres). He only needs to roll an 8 to hit an unarmoured target, so expertise level 3 or better guarantees a hit every time – there are no automatic failures in CT. If the target is in Cloth armour, that drops to hitting on a 4+, or a mere 92% of the time. Note that with 3D damage and the first shot rule, if he hits the average NPC, they are incapacitated, no ifs, ands or buts. There’s your world class sniper, right there, and interestingly he corresponds to the 7th level D&D fighter I’d use as a template for Olympic-level archers in that game.

-o0o-

So, in the 1977 flavour of Classic Traveller, expertise-1 is Conan. Expertise-3 is more like Jason Bourne or the Batman.

I wish I’d understood that at the time, and been able to convey it to my players through exciting descriptions. Oh well.

What CT ‘77 Got Right

Holidays, babies and exam revision have removed my regular group from play for a few weeks, so today you get another rant instead of the usual Monday evening game report.

I’ve already mentioned that I prefer the subsector generation rules in the 1977 edition of Classic Traveller to anything written since. The same is true for several other areas:

ENCOUNTER TABLES

These grew increasingly complex as the rules developed over time; that’s especially true of ship encounters. I have never felt the need to move on from the originals.

ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS

The concept of generating critters by ecological niche was brilliant. The rules created beasts which worked the same mechanically whatever they looked like, with appearance and habits assigned by the referee. If he (or she) didn’t feel like doing that, the game lost much of its atmosphere but you could still play.

I still remember the PCs hunting 30-ton pouncers in AFVs. Man, that was nuts.

STARSHIPS

You have the basic stock designs, and a very simple system for building variants. Initially I spent a lot of time designing ships and house-ruling new ship systems, which was fun, but eventually I came around to the viewpoint one of my players put forward: The ship is only there to transport the PCs to the next scenario. Starship design grew increasingly complex for the next few editions of the rules, and for me at least, it stopped being fun.

As the number of stock designs increased, the ship encounter tables grew more complex too. See comments above.

INTERSTELLAR EMPIRES

There aren’t any. Nor do you need them.

At first I felt they were necessary to explain who was handing out thirty million Credit starships to retired scouts of good character, but consider this: A population 8 world with an average per capita GDP of Cr 50,000 (about the same as the contemporary USA), which spends 2% of its GDP on its armed forces (unusually low in the modern world), has a total defence budget of about a hundred billion Credits per annum. If half of that went on starships, and was spent so that an even amount of money (somewhere around 9 billion) was spent on each of the six types of standard starships, that one planet would could buy roughly 250 scout ships per year, and assuming upkeep is 10% of purchase price, the total scout fleet could be over 2,500 Type S for that one planet alone. If you say that one person per annum qualifies for the constructive possession of a ship, and that person just happens to be in the party, it seems plausible. Perhaps originally the President’s daughter wanted a ship, he signed it into law to get her one, and the bureaucracy never got around to repealing that law…

What about all those scout and naval bases? Well, if the planet has the technology and population to operate them – say TL 10+ and Population 7+ for the sake of argument – then they belong to local forces; otherwise, they belong to the nearest planet with those capabilities which already has bases (if it doesn’t have a base itself, it probably doesn’t project power abroad either). It’s easy to envision some sort of subsector-wide agreement for scout services allowing them to refuel at each other’s bases; that actually amplifies the argument for some scouts being spies, as you now need to spy on each other’s scout bases as well.

SOLO PLAY

There were only the vaguest of guidelines for this, but there were also enough random tables that it could be done, hanging a campaign off the spine of interstellar commerce – keep dicing up characters until you get one with a ship, use the others as crew and other NPCs, then take your ship and crew around the subsector trading and dodging pirates.

… AND WHAT CT GOT WRONG

Of course, it wasn’t perfect; but then, the expectation in the 1970s was that you would use the rules as a starting point, and tinker with them.

There was no point-buy option for character creation. Players, including me, often had a specific character concept which the dice disagreed with. If I want my dreams crushed by random events outside my control, I don’t need to play a game for that, thank you, the real world is more than adequate. To be fair, in 1977 no other RPG really had that option, and you could always house-rule it in.

Combat was clunky; actually, it was OK except for the separate range and armour die modifiers. That was in line with the way D&D theoretically worked at the time, although I never played with a group that used the armour modifiers; but RPGs now have moved towards using range as a modifier on "to hit" rolls and armour absorbing damage. That is much better in my opinion, but again, no RPG in 1977 really did that. Traveller didn’t really catch on until Mongoose Traveller came out in 2008, although obviously the GURPS and Hero versions had that option.

Ship combat should have used range bands like personal combat. Starter Traveller adopted this idea after a few years. That bugs me less now, as space combat doesn’t appear very often in my games.

-o0o-

I really wish I had worked all this stuff out in the ‘70s, you know; my games would have been very different, and cooler. Still, we all had fun, so close enough.

Free Traders Setup Part 7: Ladoga

Another multi-ethnic prosperous trading settlement! I suppose it should have occurred to me that all the top-level stops on the Farside Route would be trading hubs of some sort. If I’d thought of this before, I’d have just said all of them are Trading Hubs and dug out two other tags for them. Never mind.

The dominant group is the Rus, who we’ll meet again in Kiev and elsewhere. What else has it got? Well, in the early 11th century, not a lot, apart from huge barrows with dead kings inside them, including the legendary Rurik – mind you, he’s been dead for about 250 years at this point. Sometime within the last 20 years, Erik Hakonarson set fire to it during a raid, which most NPCs the players encounter will remember.

Meanwhile, what about that second tag? Tomb World would reflect the barrows, but it’s hard to reconcile with Trading Hub. The tag ought to reflect what else I know about the place, which means fitting in with the barrows. Well, these are roleplayers, they will expect something evil in the tombs, why disappoint them? Sealed Menace it is.

Tags: Sealed Menace, Trading Hub.

Review: The Yellow Bone Legion

Here’s the latest free download from Sine Nomine Publications, an expansion for the Red Tide setting for Labyrinth Lord. It looks like there will be a series of these under the shared title of Black Streams, in the same way that Stars Without Number has web supplements jointly named the Mandate Archives.

It’s an 8-page PDF detailing a new character class, the Walking Ghost, a kind of semi-undead warrior which reminds me a little of the Harrowed in Deadlands.

Setting aside the front cover and the OGL license, we’re left with 6 pages. The first three are an atmospheric backstory explaining the dire straits which led humanity to raise its own fallen as undead warriors during a desperate war against goblinoid foes, how they did this, and the guilt which led them to eliminate all records of their shameful deed.

The remaining three pages respectively describe the class itself, plot seeds for Walking Ghost antagonists (also usable for other intelligent undead), and the Black Tree (the evil artifact used to create this new type of undead, long thought destroyed, but we know better, don’t we?).

The class is essentially a cleric with no spells, but is compensated for this by several special abilities, which I won’t go into to avoid spoilers as the class seems intended for use as an NPC antagonist as well as a PC, who might not initially realise he is one… I will, however, say that they are interesting, and include both benefits and potential weaknesses.

The plot seed generator consists of three tables, on which the GM rolls to determine the revenant’s dark goal, the special advantage he will use to attain it, and his base of operations. As an example, three quick die rolls tell me that my potential villain is bent on exterminating the last descendants of a family that wronged him, that he is supported by followers of the Hell Kings who will help him in exchange for his allegiance to their cause, and that he hangs out in a remote mountain monastery devoted to the cold powers of death. I could have a lot of fun with that.

The page on the Black Tree explains how it works, the constraints it operates under, and several options for the harsh price its owner pays for using it.  There’s also a short section on how to adapt the Walking Ghosts to settings other than Red Tide.

As ever, Kevin Crawford manages to pack a lot of useful gaming material into a small space, and the price can’t be beat.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5. Goes into the hopper for the next fantasy campaign I run.