DickTurpin
Banded Mongoose
I am planning a new Traveller campaign and am wondering if some of my ideas are too grand (and others too small) for the average Traveller player. Fine-tuning will happen with the players’ input, but I wanted to get opinions from a broad spectrum of players and GMs alike before I spend too much time planning the details.
I do not want to risk giving away too many details of the planned campaign, but a little background will help you see where I might be going with this. . .
A lost world has been slowly rebuilding for hundreds of years and has recently reached the early stellar stage. Several years after they begin mining their asteroid belts, some miners begin reporting strange sensor contacts that do not respond to hails. Belters and their ships begin disappearing. A few destroyed mining ships are found adrift among the asteroids. Explorations of the asteroid belts and outer planets uncover no signs of others living out there – it appears that they are suffering raids from outside their star system.
At the campaign start, it will be necessary to find out who is raiding, where they came from and find some way to stop the incursions. The other ships are higher tech than the world can currently produce and the gap must be closed as soon as possible if the world is to survive. As more information is uncovered the true scope of the danger is eventually revealed. . .
As I currently envision the game there will be aspects of Trillion Credit Squadron, Pirates of Drinax and Secrets of the Ancients incorporated into the campaign. I want it to be mostly a sandbox style game, with themes of technological advancement, infrastructure development, and finally interstellar war as a backdrop. As you can see, there could easily be too much going on; deciding which aspects should be emphasized and which relegated to the background is driving me crazy so I would appreciate any help you could give.
Please comment (both positive and negative) on whichever of the following would interest, or appall, you the most.
A) Fleet battles: Players act the part of commanders of large interstellar warships. Pirate hunting, space battles, and interdicting/capturing/bombarding enemy planets from orbit would be some of the missions they undertake.
B) Privateers: Players are the crew of either a single small armed ship or possibly a tiny handful of such ships. Missions could include disrupting supply lines, raiding enemy planets and installations, scouting, smuggling people and goods onto or off of enemy planets, and occasionally acting as courier or escort for small, high value cargoes.
C) Explorers: Players would travel around, exploring and mapping new star systems. Discovering new resources, finding potential basing locations, scouting enemy systems, exploring new worlds and investigating anomalous sensor readings, locating new allies, ferreting out enemy incursions or bases would be among their assignments.
D) Researchers: Players would try to develop new technologies to give their star nation an edge in the ongoing conflict. Investigation Ancients sites, reverse engineering alien artifacts, exploring ancient ruins of lost civilizations, or studying the technologies of newly discovered alien races and adapting them for human use could all be possible activities for researchers.
E) Spies: Infiltrating enemy strongholds and ferreting out enemy plans and secrets to gain the upper hand. Hunting enemy agents, developing information networks, stealing state secrets and the occasional assassination or act of sabotage would be among the spy’s list of responsibilities.
F) Military: Capturing or destroying the enemy’s ships, bases, and infrastructure. Players would be officers responsible for storming and capturing enemy starships, going on commando raids against important facilities, capturing (or eliminating) key enemy personnel, recruiting and training cadres of resistance fighters, defending bases from attack and sometimes participating in huge ground battles to secure or defend valuable terrain would be their duty.
G) Traders: Paying for all the research, exploration, and huge war machine takes an enormous amount of money and Traders keep the supply of money and resources flowing in. “Buy low and sell high” is the key to a successful career in interstellar trade, but there is so much more needed than merely turning a profit. Locating and procuring and delivering critically needed resources in a timely manner, opening up new markets for your world’s goods, finding and recruiting scientists, engineers, and workers to expand your world’s infrastructure, cornering the market of rare materials to deny them to the enemy, and sometimes fighting off pirates of commerce raiders are required as well as keeping a steady supply of credits flowing.
H) Salvagers: Interstellar wars leave massive fields of debris cluttering up the space lanes, someone has to clean up the mess and there is nothing wrong with turning a bit of a profit as you do so. In addition to general salvage there will be search and rescue missions, salvaging and repairing relatively intact ships, gleaning still useful supplies and materials, or maybe even finding something that has been drifting, dark and silent, out there for thousands of years. . .
I do not want to risk giving away too many details of the planned campaign, but a little background will help you see where I might be going with this. . .
A lost world has been slowly rebuilding for hundreds of years and has recently reached the early stellar stage. Several years after they begin mining their asteroid belts, some miners begin reporting strange sensor contacts that do not respond to hails. Belters and their ships begin disappearing. A few destroyed mining ships are found adrift among the asteroids. Explorations of the asteroid belts and outer planets uncover no signs of others living out there – it appears that they are suffering raids from outside their star system.
At the campaign start, it will be necessary to find out who is raiding, where they came from and find some way to stop the incursions. The other ships are higher tech than the world can currently produce and the gap must be closed as soon as possible if the world is to survive. As more information is uncovered the true scope of the danger is eventually revealed. . .
As I currently envision the game there will be aspects of Trillion Credit Squadron, Pirates of Drinax and Secrets of the Ancients incorporated into the campaign. I want it to be mostly a sandbox style game, with themes of technological advancement, infrastructure development, and finally interstellar war as a backdrop. As you can see, there could easily be too much going on; deciding which aspects should be emphasized and which relegated to the background is driving me crazy so I would appreciate any help you could give.
Please comment (both positive and negative) on whichever of the following would interest, or appall, you the most.
A) Fleet battles: Players act the part of commanders of large interstellar warships. Pirate hunting, space battles, and interdicting/capturing/bombarding enemy planets from orbit would be some of the missions they undertake.
B) Privateers: Players are the crew of either a single small armed ship or possibly a tiny handful of such ships. Missions could include disrupting supply lines, raiding enemy planets and installations, scouting, smuggling people and goods onto or off of enemy planets, and occasionally acting as courier or escort for small, high value cargoes.
C) Explorers: Players would travel around, exploring and mapping new star systems. Discovering new resources, finding potential basing locations, scouting enemy systems, exploring new worlds and investigating anomalous sensor readings, locating new allies, ferreting out enemy incursions or bases would be among their assignments.
D) Researchers: Players would try to develop new technologies to give their star nation an edge in the ongoing conflict. Investigation Ancients sites, reverse engineering alien artifacts, exploring ancient ruins of lost civilizations, or studying the technologies of newly discovered alien races and adapting them for human use could all be possible activities for researchers.
E) Spies: Infiltrating enemy strongholds and ferreting out enemy plans and secrets to gain the upper hand. Hunting enemy agents, developing information networks, stealing state secrets and the occasional assassination or act of sabotage would be among the spy’s list of responsibilities.
F) Military: Capturing or destroying the enemy’s ships, bases, and infrastructure. Players would be officers responsible for storming and capturing enemy starships, going on commando raids against important facilities, capturing (or eliminating) key enemy personnel, recruiting and training cadres of resistance fighters, defending bases from attack and sometimes participating in huge ground battles to secure or defend valuable terrain would be their duty.
G) Traders: Paying for all the research, exploration, and huge war machine takes an enormous amount of money and Traders keep the supply of money and resources flowing in. “Buy low and sell high” is the key to a successful career in interstellar trade, but there is so much more needed than merely turning a profit. Locating and procuring and delivering critically needed resources in a timely manner, opening up new markets for your world’s goods, finding and recruiting scientists, engineers, and workers to expand your world’s infrastructure, cornering the market of rare materials to deny them to the enemy, and sometimes fighting off pirates of commerce raiders are required as well as keeping a steady supply of credits flowing.
H) Salvagers: Interstellar wars leave massive fields of debris cluttering up the space lanes, someone has to clean up the mess and there is nothing wrong with turning a bit of a profit as you do so. In addition to general salvage there will be search and rescue missions, salvaging and repairing relatively intact ships, gleaning still useful supplies and materials, or maybe even finding something that has been drifting, dark and silent, out there for thousands of years. . .
