Additional 'Pirates of Drinax' Related Publications? Worth It?

[DeHammer]

So I was cruising DriveThruRPG and noticed that there's a bunch of smaller PDF publications for the various 'missions' mentioned in the PoD books. For instance, there's a separate 'Friends In Dry Places' publication you can pick up. There's also another book with apparently more info on the Harrier Class ship.

So I'm guessing that the large three book volume of PoD doesn't include all of this info? These expand on what's in PoD in some way? Are they worth picking up in addition to PoD?

 

[Endie]

So I was cruising DriveThruRPG and noticed that there's a bunch of smaller PDF publications for the various 'missions' mentioned in the PoD books. For instance, there's a separate 'Friends In Dry Places' publication you can pick up. There's also another book with apparently more info on the Harrier Class ship.

So I'm guessing that the large three book volume of PoD doesn't include all of this info? These expand on what's in PoD in some way? Are they worth picking up in addition to PoD?

View attachment 7193

No.

Just get the Drinaxian Companion, which is well worth it and contains those extra adventures (and more).

Edit: it also contains some very MJDish subsystems like the base construction rules, which in true MJD fashion are clearly untested and dodgy at best. But his add-on adventures like Revolution on Acrid and the Cordan Conflict are great.

 

[agentwigggles]

I also advise not running pod as your first game as a gm.
Its like learning to juggle via learning to unicycle. Its just making it more complicated for no real gain.

Also for whats it worth PoD got really popular. So it got more books. Nothing in the other books is really dire. They're just nice to have.
I really like the flavor of the Sindal Officer sword.
The base building rules, are functional, though I really do love that equipment functions as a manhour multiplier. I think thats a really worthwhile way to handle it. Even though it does imply you can dig out a base on a astroid with shovel.

 

[rinku]

Power Shovel.

Also, just because a shovel is a work multiplier for moving soil, doesn't mean it's one for moving regolith. Use the appropriate equipment for the task at hand.

PICK and shovel, on the other hand...

 

[Endie]

I also advise not running pod as your first game as a gm.
Its like learning to juggle via learning to unicycle. Its just making it more complicated for no real gain.

Also for whats it worth PoD got really popular. So it got more books. Nothing in the other books is really dire. They're just nice to have.
I really like the flavor of the Sindal Officer sword.
The base building rules, are functional, though I really do love that equipment functions as a manhour multiplier. I think thats a really worthwhile way to handle it. Even though it does imply you can dig out a base on a astroid with shovel.

People always say that about not running PoD first. I'd not run or played anything in Traveller since 1986 when I kicked off my first PoD campaign and it worked amazingly (now I'm running two more Traveller campaigns, one of which is PoD and the other of which will be, since the players have heard of it and are keen). Admittedly, I was a very experienced GM in multiple other systems (my D&D campaign has been running since 1986, so happy fortieth to it...).

A couple of weeks of really good background reading and starting with Marooned on Marduk or the like and you're golden. On the other hand, one of my mates (highly experienced Traveller GM) tried to run PoD last year and it lasted two sessions: he'd not done the reading and he didn't have a spreadsheet. If you don't want a massive spreadsheet (or similar, structured electronic aid) then don't run PoD: it's pretty vital. If that appalls you then don't do it!

 

[Endie]

On the base building system, I say it is dodgy and untested because it clearly hasn't been read through, let alone played.

The first example given is the landing field. 400 tons of construction but what are the dimensions? Is it road-construction depth meaning it's 20m by 40m (tiny)? What volume of ship will it support? It says tons but it must mean dtons. Anyway: 40,000 person work hours for 400 tons of construction. Remember that figure for a minute.

More egregiously, the second example given is to bury and connect a couple of pre-existing fuel tanks for fueling a starship. It says 100 tons but lets again be generous and say that it means dtons, instead. 50,000 hours of work for a man with a shovel: 250 days. OK, that's fine: it's a little on the long side but moving all that dirt with a shovel and a wheelbarrow then moving it back is going to take time.

But that's 25% longer to move 100 tons of volume out the way, stick some fuel tanks in and then cover them than to build a landing pad, which is 400 tons: four times the volume moved plus pouring concrete etc (and a lot more if you look at the art for the example!)

That's literally just the first two in the list and they really don't make sense. Others are worse.

And yes, I know what happens on this forum: people try to make up outlandish reasons why digging a hole and filling it back in is harder than moving four times as much material and manually mixing and pouring the cement to fill it (I have had to mix cement in a wheelbarrow a couple of times, when my mixer was bust, and it is brutal work). But you have to work comically hard to make those figures work.

Edit: for those about to do the Bike Shed thing and chime in without having read it: these figures are all the basic ones for one man with a shovel. Machinery is covered as a multiplier.

 

[agentwigggles]

Poeple say it, because there a none zero number of new to traveller, with new to traveller player that want this to be the first merry go round.
Its just making it harder then it needs to be.

 

[Endie]

People say a lot of things!

I would go so far as to say that it's the only brilliant, large Mongoose Traveller campaign. Ancients and Deepnight in particular are flawed. Why encourage someone to play an inferior campaign? Asking them to make their own campaign from scratch rather than using a published framework that incorporates over a dozen prepared adventures is not easier, for all that you get the odd Grog saying "I did it like that back in 1978 and it did me no harm".

Singularity and Cluster Truck may join it there as go-to recommendations, over time, although Singularity is far from an easy introduction to the game and doing it first strikes me as missing out on the chance to wow players with how different a universe it unveils: people playing it first will just think "oh so Traveller has lots of high TL singularity stuff going on..."

So yeah: I always say run Marooned on Marduk, Flatlined/Death Station, High and Dry, Last Flight of the Amuar, Hellworld Heists (a great mini campaign) or even Islands in the Rift (although it also needs effort), or some combination thereof to get the feeling for the system and the unverse. Then sure: straight into Pirates of Drinax.

 

[agentwigggles]

I wouldnt really suggest anyone new to the system and to the game world to dive into any of the longer format campaigns. Despite all of them being fairly flawed. Like PoD, doesnt actually solve piracy being tedious job and all its actual story missions doesnt involve piracy. Deepnight has issue of not telling the GM when to time skip and implies that you should really go system by system even if there nothing in them worthwhile. And Ancients was expanded to 3 books but each book was also written to be a self contain adventure, so it doesnt quite link up as a cohesive whole as it could be.

Me in particular, I suggest doing one of the adventure lines, like Rifts or Core adventure line. You can buy the next adventure when needed. So there way less cost going in. Way less investment in game length. Way less unstipulated prep and infrastructure work for the GM. Lets you actually just get comfortable with the game system, and the game world.

If for some reason, I had to be forced to suggest one of the long campaigns. It would be Ancients. They start off as typical traveller games. They dont require making character especially designed for the campaign to make it work. It can actually serve as a pretty alright introduction. Its does a pretty alright job talking about the Ancients and ancient relics and builds up to stuff.
Where as Deepnight is fairly atypical set up with deep isolation working in a huge taskforce, and PoD kinda tossing a gm into the deep end for the amount of optional stuff to track that shouldnt be player facing.

 

[Condottiere]

Start off with a one off, with pregenerated characters.

 

[Endie]

Like I say, run a few of the Reach Adventures then run Pirates. I'm currently running a newbie group through Islands in the Rift to get them to the Reach then it's a pirate's life for them.

People on this forum make it out to be this horrendously difficult campaign, which has become this received wisdom that people parrot even when they've never actually run it. It is not: once I organised myself (nothing to do with being good at running Traveller and all to do with Excel) it became the easiest campaign I have ever run. It almost runs itself as this glorious sandbox.

I'm sorry that your GM has not made piracy fun for you: both sets of my players to have done it love it, although one group has decided that for profit, pirating pirates is far more profitable. My suggestion to someone who struggled to make the pirating fun is to remind them that it's kind of a replacement for taking passengers in a classic campaign: a way to introduce a stream of fun and interesting NPCs and situations. Although I do suggest altering the fence percentages or else your players will disappoint poor Oleb by playing Speculative Traders of Drinax, instead.

 

[agentwigggles]

Start off with a one off, with pregenerated characters.

That can work. Sure. Though the lifepath is often consider hecka fun. Not sure why I would advise new to traveller players to avoid it.

 

[agentwigggles]

Like I say, run a few of the Reach Adventures then run Pirates. I'm currently running a newbie group through Islands in the Rift to get them to the Reach then it's a pirate's life for them.

People on this forum make it out to be this horrendously difficult campaign, which has become this received wisdom that people parrot even when they've never actually run it. It is not: once I organised myself (nothing to do with being good at running Traveller and all to do with Excel) it became the easiest campaign I have ever run. It almost runs itself as this glorious sandbox.

I'm sorry that your GM has not made piracy fun for you: both sets of my players to have done it love it, although one group has decided that for profit, pirating pirates is far more profitable. My suggestion to someone who struggled to make the pirating fun is to remind them that it's kind of a replacement for taking passengers in a classic campaign: a way to introduce a stream of fun and interesting NPCs and situations. Although I do suggest altering the fence percentages or else your players will disappoint poor Oleb by playing Speculative Traders of Drinax, instead.

And I dont get why you would do a tutorial, when PoD has a tutorial. And it brings up narrative issues inconstiancy issues, which bother me. It forces key npc(s), whom you're suppose to listen to and be loyal to. It forces a suspension of my disbelief that I find incredulous. Oleb/Rhoa plan is stupid. Its a hail mary of a hail mary. Make sense for folks that are invested in Dranax to want to see it prosper again even if its plan that probably isnt going to work. The best option is to just run out of Trojan with the Harrier have trade it in for a paid off free trader or go get a merc license and enjoy being a star merc.

The first batch of characters rolled are going to be wrong, and therefore underskilled. The first batch of characters is always the most random. As no one has any system mastery to figure out how to make characters. Yea, RNG cant ever be eliminated but it can be directed better.

And dont infere what my experiences with the game is. Piracy has the same problem as it has with any gamified job. It eventually becomes tedious. You have 4 basic stories with piracy. Ambush. Chase Down. Sabotage. Q-Boat. Then we can add in the moral dilemma of knowing someone on board. Eventually the process for dealing with 3 of them become rote. The PC have a plan, they can implement well. Q-boat is combat, and that is always engaging because combat is fun and exciting and for spaceship, the always present risk of tpk.

And its very fun when you dont have that process figure out yet.
Passengers have similar issue, unless your table can spend hours doing improv with npcs. Not everyone cup of tea. With passengers you have Insufferable, Thief, Sabotage, Stowaway, Horny and Run Away. Stowaway is often thief or run away or sabotage. Ists different enough as there often an investigation then chase than confrontation. You also have Patron. Though I wouldnt include that as a story type. It just replaces the introduction scene with the Patron as being on your ship instead of somewhere else.
Those arent issues or even bad things, Just recognizing that some aspects should happen off screen and focus on what you find fun.

Pod is my favorite. Its just not beginner friendly.

 

[Condottiere]

A short adventure with pregenerated archetypical characters would allow a newbie to get a taste of the game, and what type of characters he'd like to play with.

Since it probably not be connected with the coming principal campaign, the results shouldn't matter, except in generating interest and excitement.

 

[Endie]

And I dont get why you would do a tutorial, when PoD has a tutorial. And it brings up narrative issues inconstiancy issues, which bother me. It forces key npc(s), whom you're suppose to listen to and be loyal to. It forces a suspension of my disbelief that I find incredulous. Oleb/Rhoa plan is stupid. Its a hail mary of a hail mary. Make sense for folks that are invested in Dranax to want to see it prosper again even if its plan that probably isnt going to work. The best option is to just run out of Trojan with the Harrier have trade it in for a paid off free trader or go get a merc license and enjoy being a star merc.

The first batch of characters rolled are going to be wrong, and therefore underskilled. The first batch of characters is always the most random. As no one has any system mastery to figure out how to make characters. Yea, RNG cant ever be eliminated but it can be directed better.

And dont infere what my experiences with the game is. Piracy has the same problem as it has with any gamified job. It eventually becomes tedious. You have 4 basic stories with piracy. Ambush. Chase Down. Sabotage. Q-Boat. Then we can add in the moral dilemma of knowing someone on board. Eventually the process for dealing with 3 of them become rote. The PC have a plan, they can implement well. Q-boat is combat, and that is always engaging because combat is fun and exciting and for spaceship, the always present risk of tpk.

And its very fun when you dont have that process figure out yet.
Passengers have similar issue, unless your table can spend hours doing improv with npcs. Not everyone cup of tea. With passengers you have Insufferable, Thief, Sabotage, Stowaway, Horny and Run Away. Stowaway is often thief or run away or sabotage. Ists different enough as there often an investigation then chase than confrontation. You also have Patron. Though I wouldnt include that as a story type. It just replaces the introduction scene with the Patron as being on your ship instead of somewhere else.
Those arent issues or even bad things, Just recognizing that some aspects should happen off screen and focus on what you find fun.

Pod is my favorite. Its just not beginner friendly.

Luckily lots of us are perfectly capable of running it as our intro to modern Traveller, and we have great fun! It just takes the ability to GM, to extemporise, and to organise. The rules are a dawdle and the campaign story almost tells itself through the players' actions.

But yes, I agree that if your players are a bit crap outside of rolling dice, and find actual roleplaying hard, and if you can't come up with interesting characters, then of course a game based around piracy and privateering will suffer.

But please do go on and tell me more about why I didn't have fun and the campaign wasn't such a huge success that I wanted to run it twice more.!

 

[agentwigggles]

Players arent crap, because they dont enjoy improv or because they arent good at it. And GM arent bad because they dont have the free time or mental load to read between the lines. And campaign story always tell itself from the players action. Thats what make rpg games so engaging.

I never said you didnt have fun. I never spoke to you about your experiences. That wasnt the discussion. Nor was it about my personal experience. Or the experience Ive seen or been told about it. Its advise based on that PoD is heavy with side systems that are only found in PoD. And that learning a new system on top, is in general consider a bit of workload by itself. Its making it harder, when you (this is and was always the royal you), when you dont have to. Pod is expensive. There is less buy in to get to know the system and world.

 

[mavikfelna]

Players arent crap, because they dont enjoy improv or because they arent good at it. And GM arent bad because they dont have the free time or mental load to read between the lines. And campaign story always tell itself from the players action. Thats what make rpg games so engaging.

I never said you didnt have fun. I never spoke to you about your experiences. That wasnt the discussion. Nor was it about my personal experience. Or the experience Ive seen or been told about it. Its advise based on that PoD is heavy with side systems that are only found in PoD. And that learning a new system on top, is in general consider a bit of workload by itself. Its making it harder, when you (this is and was always the royal you), when you dont have to. Pod is expensive. There is less buy in to get to know the system and world.

It's also a poor fit for a GM and player just learning the rules. Start in the Rift Adventures and then transition to Drinax if you're comfortable with the load from those games and want a more challenging setting.

 

[Endie]

It's also a poor fit for a GM and player just learning the rules. Start in the Rift Adventures and then transition to Drinax if you're comfortable with the load from those games and want a more challenging setting.

That’s what I suggested but rather counter to the rest of his assertions he just hinted that First Prize is enough. I’ve found the Rift Adventures (2 of them so far, Deepnight Endeavour next, together with JTAS interludes like the ship in the lake on the way across the Islands) a great intro for a new group of folks on their way from Ilelish to Drinax).

 

[agentwigggles]

Dranax has a start. And a lead into piracy. Its slows down getting into PoD and its a hat and on hat.
And my gosh Ilelish is like over 2 year journey to Drinax. This isnt a complaint or a challenge. Just a super far away.

 

[CordwainerFish]

Ilelish is like over 2 year journey to Drinax.

Not if you cut through the Islands Cluster.