Pirates of Drinax - GMs thread
- Thread starter Sven2300
- Start date
So my group wrapped up the first part of Shadow of Sindal and headed back to Drinax. Along the way they attacked and stole a Vulture Class salvage vessel operating illegally (no transponder) in the Hilfer system.
Back on Drinax they encountered Prince Richter Grehai at the Court of King Oleb finding the Princes talk of a defensive alliance a good idea they agreed to work with his movement sharing information on Aslan Movement.
At court they also found that a problem was brewing. An enemy of one of the travelers a Baron at court was publicly speaking against them claiming that they were using the Kings kindness to benefit themselves instead of
the People faced with this and needing to boost their reputation the crew decided to sponsor a hawk Race through one of the ruined cities on Drinax They also planned a Gala for the rich and powerful showcasing foods art and
entertainment from the worlds they and Princess Rao hoped to entice to join Drinax.
A grand Street festival for the less Noble would be held with free food and drink.
Meanwhile the Group also met with Prince Harrik now Regent of Asim to discuss plans he had to increase food production on Asim as well as Harrik seeking their support to block a faction at court that hopes to get King Oleb
to begin Parceling up land on Asim and hand control of it over to the Nobles of the Court. Harrik opposes this as confiscating the land from Asimi landowners and Farmers and handing it to the Nobility would start a civil war
one that Drinax would not benefit from the travellers agreed to investigate who among the Nobility could be persuaded to oppose the matter.
Meanwhile word reached one of the Vexpexer members of the group that recently the Camp of his tribe had been attacked by raiders and a number of people taken prisoner. Including his mother and younger brother while his father
was among the dead.
Back on Drinax they encountered Prince Richter Grehai at the Court of King Oleb finding the Princes talk of a defensive alliance a good idea they agreed to work with his movement sharing information on Aslan Movement.
At court they also found that a problem was brewing. An enemy of one of the travelers a Baron at court was publicly speaking against them claiming that they were using the Kings kindness to benefit themselves instead of
the People faced with this and needing to boost their reputation the crew decided to sponsor a hawk Race through one of the ruined cities on Drinax They also planned a Gala for the rich and powerful showcasing foods art and
entertainment from the worlds they and Princess Rao hoped to entice to join Drinax.
A grand Street festival for the less Noble would be held with free food and drink.
Meanwhile the Group also met with Prince Harrik now Regent of Asim to discuss plans he had to increase food production on Asim as well as Harrik seeking their support to block a faction at court that hopes to get King Oleb
to begin Parceling up land on Asim and hand control of it over to the Nobles of the Court. Harrik opposes this as confiscating the land from Asimi landowners and Farmers and handing it to the Nobility would start a civil war
one that Drinax would not benefit from the travellers agreed to investigate who among the Nobility could be persuaded to oppose the matter.
Meanwhile word reached one of the Vexpexer members of the group that recently the Camp of his tribe had been attacked by raiders and a number of people taken prisoner. Including his mother and younger brother while his father
was among the dead.
Ursus Maior
Banded Mongoose
Yesterday I digged out my old "Pocket Empires" for T4. Has anyone ever tried to manage empire-building for PoD with Excel (or similar software)? I really want a computer assisted solution for macro and world building events with a randomness factor, so the story remains surprising even for me as a GM. Sure, players come up with surprising ideas all the time, but it's not often they think out of the boy (talking about my players here) or (can) use levers big enough for large scale effects.
So, I'm looking for help regarding how to run pocket empires with an office programme. I'm hammering T4 Pocket Empires into Excel now, but other solutions might be fun, too.
So, I'm looking for help regarding how to run pocket empires with an office programme. I'm hammering T4 Pocket Empires into Excel now, but other solutions might be fun, too.
GamingGlen
Banded Mongoose
Having a player just roll up a character with rank O6 (navy) and SOC 15 I came up with the brilliant idea of making him the new duke of Sindal (all 3 Imperial worlds.. hah!) and the coronation eve party will be where all the characters meet. The event will have some thieves try to steal the "crown jewels" of office, shown at the party and are mere trinkets (none are the Crown Jewels of the Sindal Empire). This will also allow some of the overly numerous enemies and rivals to be dealt with (I dislike that so many can be gained in character generation but I digress).
I don't recall any specific information about Imperial officials but if any where mentioned I'd appreciate a refresher. Also, the retired admiral/new duke will be disappointed that the only naval assets for the subsector is one understrength CruRon stationed at Realgar.
Other interesting character bits are: a Darrian entertainer that got censored and went into law (Advocate 3). I decided that the "censoring" was due to HER, a human, dancing the Aslan male-only dance "Eight Claws of Honor" years ago. The Aslan delegation at the coronation party will be outraged she is performing there and will demand a duel of honor. Another character with Melee (sword) 6 will most likely be her champion, or another with Melee (unarmed) 2 who has a cybernetic arm. A scout, with an almost crippled old scout ship (-10% hull, thrusters damaged, hard to repair), ended up at the same place when his crew bailed on him (they actually are some of the thieves and managed to steer the scout to come to Albe where the coronation is to take place). He recently found there's some secret info buried within the scout's computer about "crown jewels". He doesn't have the necessary Electronics (computer) skill to retrieve the rest (I think I mentioned this before). None of the current characters do, actually, so there's another NPC I'll have to generate (muhahaha).
We haven't yet had a real Traveller session, just character creation during down time of our Pathfinder campaign. I'm still planning some nefarious schemes. :twisted:
I don't recall any specific information about Imperial officials but if any where mentioned I'd appreciate a refresher. Also, the retired admiral/new duke will be disappointed that the only naval assets for the subsector is one understrength CruRon stationed at Realgar.
Other interesting character bits are: a Darrian entertainer that got censored and went into law (Advocate 3). I decided that the "censoring" was due to HER, a human, dancing the Aslan male-only dance "Eight Claws of Honor" years ago. The Aslan delegation at the coronation party will be outraged she is performing there and will demand a duel of honor. Another character with Melee (sword) 6 will most likely be her champion, or another with Melee (unarmed) 2 who has a cybernetic arm. A scout, with an almost crippled old scout ship (-10% hull, thrusters damaged, hard to repair), ended up at the same place when his crew bailed on him (they actually are some of the thieves and managed to steer the scout to come to Albe where the coronation is to take place). He recently found there's some secret info buried within the scout's computer about "crown jewels". He doesn't have the necessary Electronics (computer) skill to retrieve the rest (I think I mentioned this before). None of the current characters do, actually, so there's another NPC I'll have to generate (muhahaha).
We haven't yet had a real Traveller session, just character creation during down time of our Pathfinder campaign. I'm still planning some nefarious schemes. :twisted:
Does anyone other than me find the fact that the harrier has a single missile turret instead of say a triple missile turret or a missile barrette? It carries an extra 12 missiles so it’s got 24 missiles it can fire one at a time. This ship was a raider it’s a warship why would they design it with a single turret? This just doesn’t make sense to me
I would go with a triple laser turret - for PD that the Harrier is rather lacking and for precision crippling of the victims' subsystems.
According to the Books, both 1st and 2nd Edition, there are some capital ships that could be appropriated / acquired! Torpol has a Gionetti class light cruiser, although with how damaged a Jump Drive is up to the GM. Potentially by bringing Torpol into a reformed Kingdom of Drinax (which doesn't have to happen at the end), that Gionetti could easily drop straight into the PC's laps. Likewise, according to the 1st edition Borderlands supplement, The Duchy of Requille on Umemii has an old Imperial Armoured Cruiser + a few old / obselete Destroyers being refurbished at a secret out system base. The same supplement also tells how precarious the Duchies economic situation is! Judicious piracy could also force the Duchy into a reformed Kingdom of Drinax, bringing the capital ships with it!So full disclosure: Personally I have no problem with players having a capital ship... each... or even several... each. If I really need a bigger stick the Imperium will always have more and bigger ships. But that's not how I like to handle it. Instead if I'm the referee I prefer to let the ships become their own challenge, where do you get crew... can you trust said crew or are you going to be looking over your shoulder for a mutiny constantly? Want to see players fully embrace Epicenter's comments in another thread about compartmentalization, watch a group that has a capital ship with a crew of a few hundred that they don't trust... suddenly everything gets compartmentalized! What about logistics, where do you get more missiles? Repairs and refits? You can't do that with a 10,000 dT+ ship at just any port. In games where that was where things went the players (or me in a few games where I was playing and got to have such) spent a lot of time building infrastructure, negotiating deals for parts and support, recruiting (and even setting up crew training) and so forth. Instead of having such a ship ending the campaign it launched a whole new one with its own set of challenges and problems to be solved. If you've a mind for it it can be an interesting change of pace from being stuck in 200 dT Free Trader named the Serenity with everyone arguing over who gets to be Mal (except me, I wanna be Jayne :lol: or the doctor, or Shepherd... there still so much we don't know about his back story).
Anyway, that said...
Getting a capital ship... legitimately. If you're campaign is in the Imperium its probably not happening. There seems to be a general prohibition against this and against private ownership of anything over 2000 dT which frankly I've always thought was silly (one of these day I'm going to finish my Traveller to Fading Sun setting conversion, I love the setting but I hate the VPS rules. That setting with the Traveller rules though just rocks). Bulk freighters should be like modern super freighters, big container carriers that literally are as big as a battleship (say 200,000 dT) and while I think there is one example of such in one supplement somewhere, Traveller seems to have kind of a schizoid attitude about such ships... sometimes its okay, sometimes not. Then again, a lot of the OTU seems stuck in pre High Guard when 2000 dT was the biggest thing possible so there's that.
But outside the Imperium there's no Imperial law stopping anyone so its more a matter of logistics and where do you get one. As we've already covered, one does not steal from the Imperial Navy... period. I think Drinax presents a unique situation where the Imperium would be willing to provide some older ships precisely because in this case it benefits the Imperium in the long run by giving them the buffer state they want and helping solve a long term issue with regards to the Aslan (there's a case to be made the Imperium might even be looking for a good excuse to do so). But they are not going to give up brand new TL 15 ships, no way no how. They'd also try to talk Drinax into taking more smaller ships with less focus on more than one or two big ships, because the Imperium knows their big problem will be the ihatea which means swarms of ships and they'll need a fleet flexible enough to deal with that. Lots of smaller ships is better for that. They might even be happy to help your one player make his heavy fighter dream happen, fighters are a good way to deal with ihatea troop ships. Who knows, they might even offer up some help with training crews and so forth, maybe offer to supply them with spare parts and munitions... not out of the generosity of the big warm heart of their new pal the Imperium but out of pure self interest. If you're crew is trained by Imperial cadres they're also indoctrinated by them, and if you get most of your spare parts and munitions from the Imperium that just adds to the dependency. It gives the Imperium control while keeping the whole mess and inevitable conflict with the Aslan at arms length. In short, they're setting Drinax up to fight a proxy war with the Aslan. Drinax ends up another client state and possibly one day even voluntarily becomes part of the Imperium as another Duchy... its the long view. (And that kids is how great great grand dad founded our fine and noble family and we eventually became subsector Dukes in the Imperium. Tell it again grandpa... especially the part about how great great grand dad was pirate, that's the best part! Oh, alright kids, one more time and then off to bed with you. ::read that in a Peter Jurasik / Londo Mollari voice for full effect:
There are some ports in the Borderworlds area that have the potential to produce big ships. Tech World, Drinax and Strend all have the technology but not the infrastructure. Infrastructure is more than just a starport, its the industry producing all the components that get assembled at a starport shipyard. Tech world lacks the manpower and industry, it could make up the manpower with robots (which it seems to have, it just needs LOTS more of them) but still lacks the industry. Strend has more manpower but its questionable how much industry they have. Drinax just has the tech, but neither manpower nor industry and no viable way to make up for either. Both TechWorld and Strend might be good stops for automating parts of your ship as well.
Of course the Aslan have both the industry and the manpower (paw power?) and an alliance with the right clan might be a good source for ships, imagine Drinax tech at a Aslan shipyard producing a some strange blend of old Sindalian and Aslan designs. Course doing that would set off alarms in the Imperium since the last thing they want out of this is the Aslan ihatea armed with 200,000 dT TL 15 battleships and a friendly forward base... that's going from bad to WAY worse. Smart players might leverage that knowledge (if they figure it out) to further pressure the Imperium into supplying them with some nice toys, but of course the Imperium will attach strings to that. Its gonna be complicated any way you look at it and the Imperium is always going to look out for its best long term interest while maintaining as much control as they can. On the flip side the Aslan, at least a few wiser heads among them, likely view the Imperium in exactly the same light. The Imperium didn't get to be 10,000 worlds by not being expansionistic; and just as the Imperium doesn't want the Aslan expanding near their expanding borders, neither do the Aslan want the Imperium expanding in the way of their own expanding borders... its all about elbow room. So maybe players could take a page from Sun Tzu and play off three super powers (the Imperium, the Aslan and the Zhodani) for all the toys they can milk out of it while treading a very fine line between them. Good luck with that. If you REALLY want to play a dangerous game, deal with the Sword Worlds who do have the infrastructure and would simply LOVE to get their hands on some old Sindalian blueprints and technical schematics making them quite eager to make some deals. But that's gonna piss off a lot of people so... interesting times ahead. Or like the man said, choose your enemies wisely.
More creatively, players might go looking around for salvage. The old Sindalian Empire did have big capital ships and who knows what you might find if you dug through some historical archives and checked out some old naval battle sites... maybe a badly damaged 200,000 dT TL 15 Sindalian hulk that with some hard work could be repaired and brought back online? Or maybe not... maybe turns out to be a 30,000 dT TL 15 Sindalian light cruiser... but still... that's a sweet ship to score (and with the original oak paneling no less... they just don't build them like that anymore Viir). Course there's still that pesky problem of where do you get the spare parts, crew, munitions, etc. Setting up those deals through third parties and such could spawn quite a few adventures. Chasing rumors of such things could keep players poking around here and there with a salvage ship for quite some time. Especially if it sometimes does yield some usable ships, a few more Harriers, maybe some 800 dT gunboats, a 2000 dT frigate or something. Eventually they get a salvageable cruiser or battleship if you want to allow that and by that time they've also got a nice group of support ships and something resembling a fleet. They've also had time to figure out and solve some logistics problems, crew and marine training, etc.
For the really far out, go for robotics, then use that to do robotic mining, then robotic industry, and long story short you build a highly automated infrastructure ending with a ship yard capable of constructing old Sindalian designs from the keel up. That would be a HUGE undertaking but hey, if the players are up for it.Drinax likely has the tech for that, anything they lack TechWorld and/or Strend could fill in so its just a matter of taking it from dream to reality. Course there would be challenges along the way, and there might be some interested parties (like the Imperium, some Aslan, other polities in the area) who don't want to see that happen so lots of adventures to be had in the process whether it actually works or not. Be a heck of a story though. Just be careful of anyone who wants to install a planetary internet called Skynet... :shock:
In short, if you want a capital ship the options seem to be, talk either the Imperium, Zhodani or Aslan into supplying them (or the Sword Worlds if they're feeling like living dangerously). Find and salvage one with all the challenges that entails. Build your own but that likely means first building the entire infrastructure needed to do so. Other than that, I don't see much else in the way of viable options. Well, there is that one time a certain group in the 80's used a whole series of shell corporations to funnel materials, personnel and resources to a secret shipyard in the Glimmerdrift Reaches where they constructed a full scale battlestar (as in Battlestar Galactica)... all 12,000,000 dT of her... but that's just a crazy rumor. 8) :lol:
Those are my thoughts, YMMV (and probably will).
As a mental exercise, let me present to you the Harrier's nastier cousin:
| Mass | Energy | Cost (MCr) |
Hull (Streamlined) 400t | | | 24 |
Basic Systems | | 80 | |
Stealth Advanced | | | 400 |
Armour Bonded Superdense 4 | 15,4 | | 7,68 |
M-Drive 6 (size reduction x2) | 19,2 | 240 | 48 |
J-Drive 2 (stealth jump) | 25 | 80 | 46,875 |
Fusion reactor (TL15) Power 480 | 24 | | 48 |
Fuel (jump 2 + 8 weeks) | 84,8 | | |
Fuel Processor (80 t/day) | 4 | 4 | 0,2 |
Bridge | 20 | | 2 |
Sensors (Advanced) | 5 | 6 | 5,3 |
Military Countermeasures Suite | 15 | 2 | 28 |
Holographic Control | | | 0,5 |
Sensor Station | 1 | | 0,5 |
Enhanced Signal Processing | 2 | 2 | 8 |
Medium Particle Beam Bay (accurate, size reduction) | 90 | 45 | 60 |
Triple Turret: Pulse Laser x3 (accurate) | 1 | 13 | 4,75 |
Missile Barbette | 5 | 0 | 4 |
Missile Barbette | 5 | 0 | 4 |
Computer/35 | | | 30 |
Jump Control 2 | | | 0,2 |
Evade/3 | | | 3 |
Fire Control/5 | | | 10 |
Staterooms Standard x 10 | 40 | | 5 |
Common areas | 4 | | 0,4 |
Cargo | 39,6 | Total: | 740,405 |
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This is not what you're after, I still do everything with paper and pencil. For the randomness factor though, I've used the yearly and monthly events charts out of Oriental Adventures in a Traveller campaign. Some events need a little re-skinning, but fewer than you would think.
I don't know T4 at all, so I've never seen Pocket Empires. Is it worth getting for a Mongoose GM who's not going to dig in to T4 mechanics to translate?
According to Chapter 1 Petyr Vallis has two of those souped up Corsairs, plus two Fiery Gunships. More than enough to trouble a Halaheike. Likewise for the PRC, I would replace the standard Type R and the two Vultures with three Type RQ ships from Book 3.
Ursus Maior
Banded Mongoose
Sorry for the delayed response, I've been absent due to real life events. T4 was a mess in many ways, but Pocket Empires always seemed to me like a good source for inspirations as a GM. I wouldn't deem it as being easily integrated into an ongoing campaign straight from the text, because it will drive a lot of your story line on its own.
Basically, it's a separate game, making Traveller into a 4X game, but without a ready to play on game board. Combined with a campaign supplement, such as Pirates of Drinax and other supplements thematically close to it, Pocket Empires certainly would enrich your game, at least for the GM. It could take decisions out of your hands, if that's what you like.
However, it would add many steps, which would have to be accounted for on paper. That would add a lot to your overhead, especially if you don't give your players control over some of the realms that play major parts in the stellar region. That's why I would like to have a digital solution for most of the table handling and dice rolls involved.
J. L. Brown
Banded Mongoose
Pocket Empires is very good; and almost all of the information needed to use it is present on Travellermap, or in the PoD books. It is VERY computation intensive ('crunchy'), and you will need to generate a 'Culture' score for every system. This is not too difficult, if you do not want to sweat the details by digging through all the published material for indicators of what the the culture score should 'actually' be. The original stat was generated with 2d6; probably with one or two small mods in a few cases. I have gone with approximating the starting 'Culture' score as (7- 'Economic Efficiency') which can be pulled from Travellermap. Culture can be changed by the players in a Pocket Empires game, but it is a slow and expensive process -- and high 'Culture' is both good and bad, depending on what you are trying to do. Pocket Empires uses a 'roll this many dice added together trying to get below a target number' mechanic which I ignore -- every task lists the appropriate difficulty rating of the task, so I just use the equivalent Mongoose difficulty and a 2d6 roll.
I would very much like to see the results of trying to put it into GoogleSheets, as I think that would be an amazingly helpful tool. I have toyed with something similar (trying to put the worlds of the Trojan Reach into PE & PoD terms into a spreadsheet), but my efforts are incomplete. Also -- beware the errata! It is easy to get neck deep into entering the relevant equations, only to find out that you have entered the old / broken / non-errata formula; and needing to go back and fix existing work can be daunting.
