Moving PCs from one adventure to next.

[Shadowblayde99]

I've just started running traveller adventures and am trying to figure out why the PCs would travel from the location of one published adventure to another.

Example: if one adventure is in District 268 and the next is in Lunon then Regina, travel time between adventures could be 6 weeks or 8 and heavens above if the GM has the next adventure take place in solomani space ...... By the time you've done 4 or 5 adventures, a year might have passed and the PCs are older.

Is this to be expected or do GMs just hand wave time between adventures? Or do you often move the location of adventures..... which brings its own problems if using the Traveller map?

Thanks.

 

[Reisender]

I've just started running traveller adventures and am trying to figure out why the PCs would travel from the location of one published adventure to another.

Example: if one adventure is in District 268 and the next is in Lunon then Regina, travel time between adventures could be 6 weeks or 8 and heavens above if the GM has the next adventure take place in solomani space ...... By the time you've done 4 or 5 adventures, a year might have passed and the PCs are older.

Is this to be expected or do GMs just hand wave time between adventures? Or do you often move the location of adventures..... which brings its own problems if using the Traveller map?

Thanks.

Well, single adventures are not campaigns. They are meant to played as standalones or are fitted into campaigns by the referee.
As for campaigns, it depends on your group and preferred playstyle.
Examples:
1. Trade-Campaign: Players visit world according to their trade route.
2. Freelancer: The players go where they expect to get something out of it, mostly money. They can hear rumors or can be send somewhere by somebody.
3. Military/Mercenary Campaign: Players follow conflicts (and profit).
4. Employees: Players work for a company or organization and are send wherever their bosses wants them to go.

 

[ColinD]

Check in with your players. If they are down for travel to get to the place and have some dice rolling. You could use the the Trade rules if they have a ship and maybe give a possible skill point for study or some new connection.

You could also change the adventure so it fits nearby.

This is if you want to keep it in the 3rd Imperium and Travellermap.

 

[Vormaerin]

I would move the adventures, not the characters, if the distances are that large and you want to run them consecutively. Just because Nomads of the World Ocean says it takes place on Bellerophon doesn't mean you can't put it on some other water world near where your characters actually are. Otherwise, put other adventures in between that lead from where you are to where you want them to be.

 

[JustEastOfTheEdge]

Lots of options

(1) Choose pre-made adventures that are designed to fit into a longer chain
(2) Choose 1 or 2 you like the best , and then DIY from there (see below),
(3) Change the adventures' settings. Very few of the locations are important, and often come down to a lab or some city that could be anywhere. It if needs, say, a vacuum ice world, then just make it a moon of a world your players are near, rather than the main world. But if this would mean changing the setting drastically from say Zhodani to Solomani space, then I wouldn't bother, as too much effort.

 

[Saladman]

By the time you've done 4 or 5 adventures, a year might have passed and the PCs are older.

Feature not a bug. (This is also why I don't use the book training rules and just scale it against 4 year terms.)

Time skips are perfectly reasonable. In the full game you'd fit published adventures in around trading missions and one-off encounters like pirates and patrons. Although I've come to realize not everybody played the full game, not even in Classic. It's still the default framing device, and it bears thinking about what else to change when you change that, or when the players (reasonably) decide they're not interested in the trading game.

I once sketched a campaign centered around the crew and drifters aboard a Heavy Freighter. Let the GM pick the route, handwave the cargo and trading game behind the scenes (except each crew gets a whopping 1 dton of cargo space if they want to use it), and run episodic adventures along the way. Never actually got to use that one, but it's an option if your players aren't into running their own ship.

 

[NOLATrav]

I’m in the move-the-adventures camp. Nomads of the World Ocean is one of my favorite adventures and I moved it to a water world near Tobia in the Trojan Reach. I changed the Megacorp from SuSAG to GeDeCo and left pretty much everything else the same, but even that isn’t really necessary.

And remember that Travellermap tells you how many other worlds are in a given system in addition to the Mainworld. So you don’t have to necessarily find an exact match, you could place an adventure on a gas giant moon somewhere, or a world outside the habitable zone or what have you.

If you want to run something that really is location-specific then I’d second what was mentioned earlier, develop a string of low-impact adventures that gradually gets your crew to where you need them to be. These could be good for developing hooks from the characters’ enemies and allies or their backstories. And you can also gloss over a few jumps here and there and narrate past a string of boring worlds.

But space is big and every jump takes a week so even if you were confined to a single subsector you could still spend quite a lot of time moving from adventure to adventure.