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

[wintertraveller]

The PoD campaign is such fun. Don't fear running it if your players are willing and able to cooperate driving the story. It is a campaign that can inspire new players and that inspiration and desire to play will overcome any game or campaign mechanics learning. If players love what they are playing, they'll pull information instead of the referee having to push. Try this campaign for a bit and then restart and try it again. It will be a whole new experience each play through. It is the best campaign setting. It has some opportunities for further improvement, but the wrinkles are minor in contrast to the genius open world benefits. This is worth reading. (PoD writer's site) Few of the campaign blogs seem to end up focusing on piracy.

 

[Endie]

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.

I did wonder if perhaps you didn’t know about Reft or the Rift Adventures that @mavikfelna and I were talking about.

And most people I’ve read about and spoken to about successfully running PoD (and that’s now a lot!) run one or more adventures beforehand. It works far better with a less abrupt intro that gives a more natural reason for Oleb gambling on the party. If the Travellers have achieved absolutely nothing then the suspension of disbelief is trickier as to why the fat lad in the crown is handing them the most valuable asset in his dying kingdom.

 

[wintertraveller]

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

I agree with this advice but it is not required. The "First Prize" introductory PoD adventure in this book is well worth the cost of the whole supplement. It's like adding a chapter to the whole campaign.

 

[wintertraveller]

PoD is heavy with side systems that are only found in PoD.

This is true.

I've used the side systems as guides, cherry picked the best bits that seemed interesting, and ignored some with no harm to the campaign. I like the rules for looting ships of everything not nailed down. For the most part, I've ignored the faction standing as a mechanic but kept the concept for flavor as broad reputation. The need to fence loot keeps PC wealth from being destabilizing.

 

[wintertraveller]

Oleb/Rhoa plan is stupid.

Yes, they are ridiculous. That's been fun. So many choices...

 

[NOLATrav]

The PoD campaign is such fun. Don't fear running it if your players are willing and able to cooperate driving the story. It is a campaign that can inspire new players and that inspiration and desire to play will overcome any game or campaign mechanics learning. If players love what they are playing, they'll pull information instead of the referee having to push. Try this campaign for a bit and then restart and try it again. It will be a whole new experience each play through. It is the best campaign setting. It has some opportunities for further improvement, but the wrinkles are minor in contrast to the genius open world benefits. This is worth reading. Few of the campaign blogs seem to end up focusing on piracy.

Thank you for the link to Gareth’s site

 

[Endie]

Thank you for the link to Gareth’s site

I'd highly recommend a couple of other blogs that you can read that show some ways that a PoD campaign can go. Of course, yours will be very different: that's the joy of Pirates of Drinax. But they're great preparation.

- Andy Slack was writing for Traveller from at least 1981, and I imagine even earlier, although he now uses Savage Worlds to run Traveller campaigns. That being said, his PoD blog at https://hws3.wordpress.com/category/vault/the-pirates-of-drinax/ is the best account of a Drinax campaign on the web that I have found
- @Kulthea (who posted on this forum for a bit) kept a blog at http://piratesofdrinax.blogspot.com/ for his campaign, which contained some very detailed accounts. His account goes up to the Finale episode although he said that the campaign continued afterwards

(There's also my own one, which is in progress https://drinax.net/ if that helps at all)

 

[Vormaerin]

There is nothing especially egregiously hard about running Pirates of Drinax. The advice to not start that as your first foray into Traveller is not about anything specific to PoD. It's generally sound advice about long campaigns for any game system. It's just generally not a great idea to sell your table on a concept that will take a year or three to resolve before you know that you will actually enjoy the game itself.

It doesn't matter whether we are talking Pirates of Drinax or Masks of Nyarlathotep or The Great Pendragon Campaign or whatever. It's usually a good idea to get some exposure to the game and what it does and doesn't do before launching into something with the kind of prep and commitment a long campaign expects.

That doesn't mean it won't work out for some groups. Just that it has a significantly higher failure/burnout rate than getting some complete stories under your belt so everyone knows if they like the system and understands how it works before diving into something longer.

 

[Endie]

WotC posted data on how long the average D&D campaign lasts, and while I suspect that the number of fresh-faced newbies means that it skews low for D&D, it probably won't be vastly so.

It essentially suggested that you're talking months, not years. So most of the real classics (the ones @Vormaerin mentions, or The Enemy Within, or the Dracula Dossier) will simply not be completed by the average party. They may well have great fun, but people lose enthusiasm or want to try the next thing or have kids or move to another city or become spree killers. Life comes at you pretty fast.

Me? I've been hugely lucky in having campaigns that run for years (or in one case, several decades). But I'm a completist who got lucky with his players. And I had to marry one of my players to keep her around, which is clearly an extreme option not available to everyone.