High and Dry: 567-908

[paltrysum]

I'm considering running "High and Dry" for a group of people who are new to Traveller and roleplaying in general. While going over the adventure, I was trying to think of ways to make the stopover at 567-908 more interesting when I made the connection that the system is the same one featured in CT Adventure 10: Safari Ship. Has anyone else noticed this and/or incorporated some of the elements of the CT adventure? The planet is the homeworld of the Shriekers and based on the data in the adventure, is also host to a rather vibrant ecosphere.

 

[JMISBEST]

Sounds interesting

Any troubes on it or ideas for putting troubles on that planet that, if its in The Trojan Reach, the characters could resolve to add it to Drinax, even if they deliberately caused it for the sole reason of leeverage to add the planet to Drinax

 

[ochd]

Has anyone else noticed this and/or incorporated some of the elements of the CT adventure?

I did notice this, but only after I had already run High and Dry

The way I read it, the stopover on 567-908 is written in to perhaps lure the players into a false sense of security, so that upon arrival at Walston, the expectation is that this is another humdrum backwater world where nothing much is gonna happen. So putting in a side-quest on 567-908 might undermine that particular mechanic.

Dan.

 

[paltrysum]

When I ran "High and Dry," the 567-908 visit had my players scratching their heads, as in "What was that for?" They seemed to find it boring and I can't blame them. I understand the mechanic, and certainly any ref has to have the trick up his sleeve wherein not every encounter is action-packed lest the players should be suspicious and paranoid all the time. But if I run it again, this time for newcomers to the game, I think I'll spice it up somehow. Perhaps the troublemakers who previously owned the High and Dry may have visited it...and left their mark. :shock:

How that will relate to the Safari Ship adventure I do not know. Hence my thinly veiled query to the traveller public to get some ideas.

 

[Linwood]

Maybe just a casual side comment from one of the locals. “No, nobody stops here for long. Not much to do. Although there was that safari ship a few months back. They looked like they’d found something out there. But I don’t think it ended well for them....”

 

[Epicenter]

The way I read it, the stopover on 567-908 is written in to perhaps lure the players into a false sense of security, so that upon arrival at Walston, the expectation is that this is another humdrum backwater world where nothing much is gonna happen. So putting in a side-quest on 567-908 might undermine that particular mechanic.

Dan.

This is just my experience and all gaming groups are different ...

But in my experience RPGs are essentially the edited highlights of a journey - a journey with the humdrum parts taken out. My players (and myself) feel that if I'm bothering to detail a location and drop into "roleplaying mode" from "charts and tables mode" then there's a situation that needs to be addressed by the players (or the players will go into RP mode signaling they want to address a situation). If there's no situation and none to really develop, players tend to be bored and frustrated and will spend large amounts of time in the humdrum place looking for something to do - given my groups only meets once every week or two weeks, spending an entire session on an humdrum world to lull the players just doesn't work. At this point in my RPGing "career" I feel one of the trade-offs of this RPG meta is that it is very difficult (or impossible) to really model how real people fall into routines and can be surprised -- but making them play out visits to humdrum worlds doesn't work.

 

[tolcreator]

I sort of rebelled at the line "Nothing of interest here". This is a whole world, a whole system! If your campaign is say, a sandbox of the Bowman Arm, this is one of the dozen or so worlds in your campaign. I felt it was very wrong to just write it off like that. I guess the adventure just wanted to get the PCs moving along to the main plot, but still. Good idea to drop another adventure in there.

 

[mac40k]

I want to run H&D as a prelude to Pirates of Drinax, so am thinking of moving it to Exocet in Tobia subsector. It's volcanic, close to the Imperium, but also Drinax, so transitioning should be easier than the default location. Bonus is not having to deal with the layover on 567-908.

 

[steve98052]

I sort of rebelled at the line "Nothing of interest here". This is a whole world, a whole system!

Even a system that consists entirely of uninhabited airless worlds has things of interest to someone. There might be wreckage of ships destroyed in the Third Frontier War that would be valuable to some historian somewhere. There might be the remains of a mining operation abandoned 600 years ago, complete with the frozen bodies of people who died of a long forgotten plague. There might be resources worth enough to mine even in an out of the way place. There might be someone's old pirate booty, lost because the pirates were killed before returning for it. The system's star could be interesting in some scientific way, even if superficially it looks like every other red dwarf in the region, and even if it is ordinary, there are things about it that would be useful to research that relies on aggregation of information about a large number of ordinary stars.

Add atmospheres and life to worlds, and they become more interesting in all the ways that the diversity of life can offer.

Add sophonts to a world, and then it becomes interesting as a place for friendly and hostile interactions with its occupants, business, politics, arts, and study of every sort of social science.

There are no completely boring systems.

However, when player characters are playing through a specific adventure, they're probably not going to want to examine the slime-dwelling, arsenic-tolerant colonial organisms that are thought to be potential treatments to prevent a recurrence of the irontree blight of 672. They're going to want to know whether there's anything on the world that can advance the adventure they're working their way through.

So, instead of, "Nothing of interest here," a world would be, "This doesn't seem to have any obvious ways to to help you get the #3 grav plates on Deck 2 replaced."