campaign premise for short-run adventures

[steve98052]

The best gaming group for me is one that plays weekly, with the expectation that quite a few of the group are irregular participants. To accommodate that group structure, the usual session is designed to be either a single session or just a few. Often those short-run adventures are part of a longer continuity, but with the expectation that players present one week aren't necessarily there the next week.

I'd like to add Traveller to the mix, so I'm trying to work out a Traveller campaign premise that works well with short adventures, recurring characters, and the type of players who are in the group. This group generally doesn't take things too seriously. (For example, in the superhero campaign that the group sometimes plays, there's a character named Gecko-man, with superpowers of clinging and a very stretchy, very sticky tongue attack.) They favor light rule sets; Savage Worlds is about as crunchy as the group likes to go.

So, here's my campaign premise:

• The patron is Baron Irene von Hefry, who served with distinction as a Scout in the Internal Exploration branch. As a noble, her background is part of her Library Data back-story. Although Irene has gone away to Capital to represent her grandfather's interests in the Moot, her passion is the Museum of Improbable Technology on Hefry, where she gathers and displays technological artifacts that show impressive use of limited technology from worlds that lack more advanced technology. One of her favorite artifacts is a glass-bottom sailboat constructed from an observation bubble from a starship that had been abandoned on a low-tech world.
  
  As a patron, she has placed a somewhat run-down yacht in the care of the party, with instructions to acquire more goodies for her museum, as well as following up on various things she found interesting during her Scout service. The party has a reasonably rich expense account at their disposal, but it's under the supervision of Antonio Hefry a rather officious accountant back on Hefry, who insists that expense records be supplied in both print form (sent by courier services) and ordinary electronic communications. If the party makes money by trade, rather than spending out of the expense account, they don't need to bother explaining things to Antonio, but if they have a good excuse (and they're on a world where bank infrastructure allows them to draw from the expense account) they can spend like a noble.
  
  Irene is the daughter of of Baronet Mikey von Hefry (who served as a Scout mainly in the Express Boat Service, because Isaac didn't think he was good enough for the Navy, where the rest of his siblings served) and Commodore Eshi (a commoner who served mainly in Assault Fleets), and grandson of Sub-Duke Isaac of Efate, Admiral, retired.
  
  Note: In my Traveller universe, it's fairly common low-population worlds for citizens of a world to adopt the world name as a surname, rather than having family surnames -- not because everyone is eventually related and one surname becomes dominant, but just because on a low-population world there may be enough distinct first names that people don't need much more than a first name, maybe with a professional, ancestral, or characteristic disambiguation ("Antonio the Accountant", "Antonio son of Lucinda", "Antonio Red-Beard", etc.).

I would provide pre-generated characters for players who have a character concept of their own.

I don't have any specific adventures worked out yet; I want to make sure the premise was workable for the short-run, rules-light group before I dig in too deeply.

So, a few questions:

• What can I do with this general premise to make it most suitable for my short-run, rules-light group? (This is of most interest to me; I already have ideas on the other points.)
• Does anyone have suggestions for a game system to use? (I'm thinking about Fate Accelerated and Savage Worlds.)
• What sort of pre-generated characters would be good for this premise? (I figure I'll use my Mongoose Traveller books for character generation, then translate into the rules in which we'll play.)
• Does anyone have suggestions for specific adventures, such as technological artifact MacGuffins, things Irene flagged for further investigation in her Scout journal, and general "anything that happens during travel" interesting things?

 

[DickTurpin]

a. Unless you figure out the details before the game, trade (including freight and passengers) should be minimized as it can take a lot of time to get through. If the players are flying a yacht then there is not much space for cargo anyway so this should not be a major limitation.

Keep fights small and fairly infrequent. Having a lot of opponents or a very tough one can drag combat out.

Having scouts or informants scattered around to actually locate the macguffins and sent the info back to the players can save time and get the characters focused on the retrieval mission right away. Alternately, you could have a session where the group mostly works on tracking down rumors or stories of possible artifacts to generate a list of things to go after in other sessions.

b. The Traveller rules will work great for this kind of game. If you don't want the players to have to learn a new game system then just pick one they already know.

c. You will need a Pilot (Merchant, Navy or Scout careers), Engineer (Merchant, Navy, or Scout), and Investigator (Agent), and Security (Army or Marines). Depending on the number of players, you might also want a Rogue, Medic, Scholar, and even a team "face" character to interact with the locals.

d. Lots of possibilities here; Irene's journal could be an awesome source of possible items, Informants like mentioned above can serve the same function. Complications can be civil unrest on the target planet making the item's location a wazone, or locals being concerned about environmental damage from removing the item (possibly it was located in a facility that was sealed off to prevent the spread of radiation, toxic chemicals, plague, invasive pest species, etc.) The item may have mystical, religious, or cultural significance to the locals who will resent the players messing with it. Damage to their spaceship on a very low tech planet could have the characters themselves needing to find a creative workaround for a high tech part which would be an interesting reversal of their normal missions.

 

[steve98052]

a. Unless you figure out the details before the game, trade (including freight and passengers) should be minimized as it can take a lot of time to get through. If the players are flying a yacht then there is not much space for cargo anyway so this should not be a major limitation.

That's definitely a good point. I didn't mean table-driven trade anyway.

"You find six tons of electronics for sale at half the usual price. Do you want to buy with petty cash for speculative trade?" No.
"You find an agent who wants to deliver ordinary cargo from Regina to Efate at double standard rate, but everything is in cash, and you have to convince the customs agent not to look inside the container." Maybe.
"You meet a nervous looking Vargr who identifies himself as Thoefek. After some small talk, he whispers to you, 'I can hook you up with two gauss pistols, hand crafted by this traveling Droyne oytrip. They uses standard ammunition, but they're disguised to look like a matchlock blunderbuss. If you don't mind cleaning out the mess, you can even shoot the blunderbuss. But if you want them, you have to deliver a bottle of two hundred Blue Demons to the Minister of Experimental Medications, who obviously doesn't want the sub-duke to know he's been addicted to the stuff ever since it was invented. . . . No, I can't get you one for everyone on your crew. The oytrip only made ten of them, and they've sold the other eight already." Totally appropriate.

Keep fights small and fairly infrequent. Having a lot of opponents or a very tough one can drag combat out.

This is always a good plan, except when using rules that make combat fly. Some past groups I've played with lived for combat (one even voted me out for favoring negotiations over shooting), but this group would probably not even notice if an entire session passed without a weapon being drawn.

Having scouts or informants scattered around to actually locate the macguffins and sent the info back to the players can save time and get the characters focused on the retrieval mission right away. Alternately, you could have a session where the group mostly works on tracking down rumors or stories of possible artifacts to generate a list of things to go after in other sessions.

This is true, but I think the combination of Irene's Scout journal and one or more characters with social skills would allow the slow-moving parts of this to be skipped over.

b. The Traveller rules will work great for this kind of game. If you don't want the players to have to learn a new game system then just pick one they already know.

I agree that many flavors of Traveller rules work well for this. But I think it's probably easier to go with an extra-light system they already know. There are some that I think would be better than the ones I know best (Savage Worlds and Fate), but I don't think I know them well enough myself.

c. You will need a Pilot (Merchant, Navy or Scout careers), Engineer (Merchant, Navy, or Scout), and Investigator (Agent), and Security (Army or Marines). Depending on the number of players, you might also want a Rogue, Medic, Scholar, and even a team "face" character to interact with the locals.

I think I'd want all of the players to have at least some skills in the sorts of things that are likely to occur. If it would be a shoot-'em-up like the voted-me-out group liked, everyone would have to have combat skills, for example. But in this case, probably everyone should have at least a little in the way of "face" and investigative skills, specialized for different settings. They'd also need the necessary ship operation skills too, but a crew including -- for example, a Scout pilot who worked in low-tech first-contact during his or her service, an engineer who has archaic weapons as a hobby, and a medic who paid off student loans by patching up criminal gang members off the books -- would cover some necessary routine skills while working in some of the specifics to the setting.

d. Lots of possibilities here; Irene's journal could be an awesome source of possible items, Informants like mentioned above can serve the same function. Complications can be civil unrest on the target planet making the item's location a wazone, or locals being concerned about environmental damage from removing the item (possibly it was located in a facility that was sealed off to prevent the spread of radiation, toxic chemicals, plague, invasive pest species, etc.) The item may have mystical, religious, or cultural significance to the locals who will resent the players messing with it. Damage to their spaceship on a very low tech planet could have the characters themselves needing to find a creative workaround for a high tech part which would be an interesting reversal of their normal missions.

Good suggestions all around! Thanks.

 

[Hopeless]

A ship carrying new additions to her collection is waylaid en route to Hefry.

Your characters are asked to intercept the small trader which has been detected in orbit of the system they're currently in apparently left derelict in orbit to a planetoid near the asteroid belt.

Intercepting it is easy enough but the ship was tethered to the planetoid and emptied with no one left alive aboard.

Shortly after boarding an Imperial scout moves to intercept them and beams a broadcast revealing the Naval Commander is an old rival of Irene's aware of her collection and more than willing to impound the latest addition to her museum if they were still aboard.

The ship is promptly attacked by raiders hidden within the asteroid belt blowing up the Naval vessel and potentially marking your players as accomplices in the eyes of that rival so not only do they have to survive they also need to recover any information on the raiders let alone track them back to their asteroid base so they can recover the hijacked cargo and get back to safety or call in backup clearing their own names and returning Baron Irene's latest addition...

Game for that?

 

[steve98052]

. . . Game for that?

I like some of the ideas, but I don't think it would be a good fit for our group's short sessions. We usually only play for three or four hours, and splitting a combat into two sessions would likely be a bit disruptive to the flow of the action. But thanks!