Pirates of Drinax - GMs thread

[J. L. Brown]

I'm not happy with 'System Attitude' and 'Standing' and 'Pirate Response Index' and 'Reputation' and 'Infamy' and 'Faction / Asset value' and all the rest all being separate things -- I feel like there ought to be a single tool to track attitudes towards 'Drinaxi Unification / Establishing the New Kingdom' and other people, groups, and agendas. Instead there is a hodge-podge, and if a referee wants to keep another half-dozen balls in the air then they can add as many of these different, contradictory systems as they want.

I like the granularity of 'Standing', but the way it is actually described (especially the implied instantaneous omniscience of the Imperial Powers) seems poorly executed.

My inclination is to start with 'spider' plots, or something similar. Each individual, or group, or system, or Aslan Clan, or great imperial power has a spider plot reflecting how it feels about certain issues or entities -- or maybe two, one for 'attitude towards others' and another for 'attitude of others toward'. The players are trying to undercut other powers while increasing the opinion/influence of The New Kingdom. It would be a nice bonus if the new system also incorporated or aligned with the three-digit 'political stance of potential members systems' from 'Finale'.

[Edit:] Maybe each system or entity has a unique basic spider plot of 'things that matter to me' -- security, trade, technological progress, population or economic growth, 'respects our traditions', etc. Every other entity that it is aware of / cares about fills out a copy of this spider plot -- or charts their own data on the same spider plot as others but in a unique color. As a general rule, the area of the filled in portion of the spider plot is a 'strength of positive sentiment towards' -- so NaHu systems have a plot where the Imperium has a smaller area filled in, whereas a CsIm system has the Imperium filling in a somewhat larger (representing a stronger positive feeling or relationship) area.

Part of diplomacy is figuring out what each system has as axes on their unique spider plot; and potentially shaping the regime to add to, delete, or redefine those axes.

[Edit of the Edit:] Perhaps the axes should not be expressed as an absolute value, but as 'percentage of agreement on topic X'. Two different regimes which strongly value 'destroy all post-1600 AD technology and live in harmony with nature' might have a negative attitude about technology, but since they both have a high degree of agreement, their 'technology' axis towards each other is quite positive. [/Edit of the Edit]

[/Edit]

 

[Hootenheimer]

A question for @Hootenheimer and any other GMs who are running Drinax for a "we're not really into this whole piracy thing" group: did you still use the Standing and port status systems as printed, or did you rewrite them to fit? (Or just drop them entirely?)

My approach is almost if not identical to what @Endie did, down to having a GM Prep Spreadsheet of Doom™ that tracks the System Attitude in each system, which represents how a planetary government or a people feel about Drinax generally rather than their attitudes toward piracy. I mostly kept the initial values the way they were, though I might have made an adjustment or two if a system felt entirely out of line with that new goal.

Reputation, Infamy, Faction and Asset values, and Pirate Response Index I haven't tracked numerically. I have loosely tracked them narratively with written notes about the capability of factions and the relationships the party has with those NPCs and factions. I do have a sheet in my Excel workbook for Pirate Response Index but because my players aren't doing much piracy it hasn't gotten much use.

 

[Endie]

Here are a few more update posts from recent weeks as I (gradually) catch up to where the campaign currently stands:

• https://drinax.net/borderland-run-4/ - this continues the Borderland Run series of adventures, as the crew of the So Much For Subtlety and their reluctant, Aslan passenger attempt to mislead their pursuers by meandering around the Wildeman and Voidsedge Clusters. They had solved the mystery of Captain Envai's Cavern (finding an abandoned Sindalian base that had later been used then stripped by pirates). Next, they travel back towards Tyokh via Cordan, where a representative of Baroness Lux approaches them about a political conflict she would like their help in at some point. They're on the clock, so they say "maybe later" and move onto Exe where they spend a lot of time in a bar talking to other spacers (this was an RP-heavy session). Next it is Falcon, where they provide assistance to another ship pirated by the "mercenary enforcement" ship the Bayern.
• Versions of the same events from Krrsh (their somewhat whole-hearted Vargr crewman) - https://drinax.net/borderland-run-4-krrshs-version/ - and by Sharyl, the Aslan marine who has been a handy way to demonstrate Aslan culture to them - https://drinax.net/borderland-run-4-sharyls-version/ The players still seem to love both the NPC versions and the NPCs themselves. Also, the latest INS news stories to reach them: https://drinax.net/borderland-run-4-ins-news/
• I also posted the stats for the ships that the crew have so-far gathered - https://drinax.net/fly-the-broad-pennant/ - this includes one ship they gained later, so spoiler alerts on that one...
• In https://drinax.net/borderland-run-5/ the party meet the enemy of Dr Parsifal: the fellow-scientist who had copied the work of Dr Parsifal at university then betrayed him. This tied in so well to Dr Nazif from JTAS that I simply had to use him. I roleplayed him as condescending to Dr Parsifal, and it worked a treat: the player now loathes Dr Nazif and has been plotting non-stop to gain his revenge ever since, with increasingly outlandish plans involving imaginary stolen shiploads of clones. The party then met the crew of the Seskehalen and worked out, rather too late, that one of the crew - Zira Loft - was psionic: what did she know of their secret, Aslan cargo? The So Much For Subtlety's crew was also hired to deal with a pirate gang which had stolen a small cargo of Lanthanum ore and which was now hiding on Ergo, so there was a change of plans... At Ergo, the Travellers are subjected to a lengthy powerpoint slideshow from the ruling barons. Again, I've included the latest INS stories to reach the SMFS: https://drinax.net/borderland-run-5-ins-stories/
• https://drinax.net/borderland-run-6-policing-ergo/ The next session was a classic raid scenario on Ergo where the party hit the headquarters of the Black Arrow gang.
• Finally, I created an audible podcast version of events thus far for the players. They loved this, as it really showed the scope of what they had done in the campaign thus far. They also appreciated that it made them sound far more capable and blessed with more foresight than might perhaps be considered to be the case: https://drinax.net/borderland-run-6-the-podcast/

 

[Uqbarian]

Another random question: an Aslan heavy bomber shows up at the Battle of Drinax. Stats aren't needed for the adventure because of the abstract naval combat, but just out of interest, are there stats for this type of ship in any of the Aslan books?

 

[mavikfelna]

Another random question: an Aslan heavy bomber shows up at the Battle of Drinax. Stats aren't needed for the adventure because of the abstract naval combat, but just out of interest, are there stats for this type of ship in any of the Aslan books?

I swear I've seen an Aslan bombardment ship recently in something but I can't find it at the moment.

 

[J. L. Brown]

Another random question: an Aslan heavy bomber shows up at the Battle of Drinax. Stats aren't needed for the adventure because of the abstract naval combat, but just out of interest, are there stats for this type of ship in any of the Aslan books?

There is nothing like an Aslan 'Heavy Bombardment ship' (that I can find) in 'Core', 'Companion', 'High Guard', 'High Guard: Aslan', 'Aliens of Charted Space #1', 'Ships of the Trojan Reach', 'Deep and the Dark', 'Spinward Extents', or the 'JTAS' up through volume 18.

Maybe I have missed it.

 

[Uqbarian]

There is nothing like an Aslan 'Heavy Bombardment ship' (that I can find) in 'Core', 'Companion', 'High Guard', 'High Guard: Aslan', 'Aliens of Charted Space #1', 'Ships of the Trojan Reach', 'Deep and the Dark', 'Spinward Extents', or the 'JTAS' up through volume 18.

Maybe I have missed it.

Thanks, that sounds pretty thorough!

I picked up Clans of the Aslan as an early Christmas present to myself, and it's not in there either.

I might just cobble one together based on a Sakhai-class (EDIT: Ships of the Reach, pp. 92–5), swapping out the bays for orbital strike equivalents.

 

[Endie]

I swear I've seen an Aslan bombardment ship recently in something but I can't find it at the moment.

A specific Aslan bombardment ship appears in Finale in PoD, although there are no actual stats for it. Might it be that?

 

[Terry Mixon]

Found this on the interwebz and thought of all of you.

 

[Endie]

Another year, another batch of updates on the party's progress through the Trojan Reach, culminating in the first addition to the nascent Kingdom of Drinax.

The Travellers left Ergo and flew back trailingward to Falcon to effect ship repairs and to sell their cargo. This began to move them into close-to-the-edge territory regarding the deadline to return Hteilotorl to Tyokh, so I was hoping that they were keeping count. It did, however, raise the Borderland Run misdirection index substantially, meaning that almost nobody now suspected them (except for the psionically-informed crew of the Seskehalen). The party then headed to Sink for the confrontation with Hteilotorl's suspected betrayer, via Ergo once more. After a weird set of requests from Brother Singer of the monastery on Sink. a heist scene ensued at the Iuwoi intel agent's estate, followed by an ambush as they climbed into orbit.

The party were caught in a gravity well, easily-caught on sensors, and jumped by two ships, but they still fought the Harrier's systems very poorly, and this fight was one more critical hit away from them ending up crashing on the surface. https://drinax.net/borderland-run-7-girls-girls-girls/ for the full update: this one covered a lot of ground.

However, the next session was even more packed, and was perhaps the most successful session I've taken part in for decades: the Travellers made their way (in their battle-damaged ship) to The World, where they met with Hteilotorl's friends and comrades. I think MJD put this in as a last chance for less engaged parties to find out wtf is going on with their passenger, but this group were already very engaged in that aspect of the story, although still thoroughly baffled by the details of alien, Aslan thinking. There was an ambush in the decaying station concourse, followed by a dinner of honour for Hteilotorl.

Then it was on to Tyokh, where the party got to see just how rich even a minor Aslan clan was. By now, the group were emotionally hugely engaged - never let people say that Traveller can't do narrative and collaborative story-telling! On appearing in the court of the Iuwoi-ko, one of the party volunteered to die in Hteilotorl's place: the lingering confusion meant that the players (and their characters) believed that only a sacrifice of another life could free Hteilotorl from his sentence, so this was a big thing, and I had thought that they would be "you're on your own with this one, mate" after some ill-advised lawyering.

As it was, the player read the early moves of the conflict well, behaved honourably, and when the executioner threw the fight as per the adventure he luckily didn't get his head lopped off. This happened right at the end of the adventure and was actually really exhausting and draining, while the player most involved was almost dazed. https://drinax.net/borderland-run-8-the-executioners-blade/

Much kudos to MJD for writing an amazing adventure in The Borderland Run: it's an amazing framework which gives enough to be run alone but which really sings when expanded with further content. We got eight full sessions from it but I could have got another three with ease, had I not been aware of the pacing of the wider campaign.

There then followed two interstitial sessions, following up on delayed tasks, roleplaying a bit more on Tyokh and Drinax in particular - https://drinax.net/week-23-and-breathe-interstitial/ - and working with the Vespexers to bring the remaining major clans into a state of loyalty towards Oleb. We used the faster, semi-abstract, Vespexer minigame again for this which (used sparsely) the players claim to really enjoy. https://drinax.net/week-24-statebuilding/

The other major task in these sessions was planning and getting assets into place for the planned revolution on Acrid: their contact in the Acrid labour unions had warned that tensions were rising and that a spontaneous rising would occur some time early in the new year (1107) so they had to arm their troops that they'd had their NPC employees recruiting, finish their training and find a way to move them to Acrid.

There then followed the Revolution on Acrid - another MJD framework from the Drinaxian Companion - and this was a huge change of pace. The scenario does not really anticipate the players turning up with three-and-a-bit combat-capable ships as well as a strong company of light infantry, so we ran it partially with PC actions and partially as a wargame on a map. It was great fun: we used the Mercenary boxed set (with a few fixes that make it work better) and the players rolled spectactularly poorly for almost every fight, but their plan was good enough that they succeeded eventually despite a run of bad luck. I suppose a plan that survives friction is the goal... I posted the schematic we used as part of the update, showing the scene just before the government forces surrendered to the revolutionaries: https://drinax.net/week-25-viva-la-revolucion/

There are a bunch of other things there - Imperial News Service updates, NPC accounts etc - as other posts but I'll spare you the details.

 

[Endie]

One other thing that came out of the last few weeks: I had been finding it increasingly onerous to keep updating the location of all of the party's spies, employees, military units, spacecraft and of the player groups themselves. Excel works well for some stuff but is less good for this location tracking, and was especially hard for the players to follow who they had sent where.

So I set up a Miro board - as if I don't deal with that enough every day in work... - and it works a dream. You can use and share Miro for free at the intro tier, and this has revolutionised how we visualise campaign progress.



Edit: in case anyone else wants to try it out:

• Sign up at https://miro.com/
• Screencap a map and copy-paste or drag and drop it into the board
• I made tokens with https://thefatefulforce.com/battle-resources/token-creator/ which was also great for the VTT for the Battle of Acrid
• Drag and drop them onto the map, and resize. Miro is great when you resize as it'll show you visibly when an object is the same size as (or aligned with) other objects. You can speed this up by importing all the counters you want then selecting them all and resizing them together.
• Right-click and LOCK EVERYTHING INDIVIDUALLY! Don't select everything and lock it together: at the very least lock the background seperately from the tokens. Otherwise you'll drag the background by mistake (or worse, resize it) and end up fiddling to try and re-align it. Simply unlocking the object you want to alter or move then locking it again is easier, and stops players moving stuff around on you
• Share the board with the individual emails you want to have access. Don't just make it open and send out the link or Russian hackers will break into your kitchen at night and mess up your pots and pans.

I made little standings tokens of the various colours (from red for hostile to deep green for ally), which you can see top-right of each hex. I made small tokens you can see on the left of some hexes which denote holdings of multi-world polities (most obvious here are Drinax and the GDR). I then added tokens for spies, employee NPCs, ships, the two PC parties, and their military units.

The map shown above is for player use. I have a private one which shows more info and which has the real location of certain things that the party don't know becase even their ships move around, and hey: no Ansibles.

 

[Endie]

I wrote up an update on last night's session here: https://drinax.net/week-26-revolution-on-acrid-2/

It was a pretty fun session, although a little disjointed: this is maybe to be expected when you have the players running two parties, one of which was dealing with problems of state-building and governance, while the other group were happily buckling their swashes and fighting pirates in space. The original party investigated PRQ using the records their swift coup had allowed them to secure, and boy did they find a lot. They also worked on how to crew the Acrid SDBs and invested in their success by sending a ship to Tech World to buy yet more androids.

The session was very expensive overall for the party: having been ambushed by an unwitting pirate disguised as a trader (who attacked because the Shinkiro, with its adaptive hull, was also disguised as a trader: I pictured the unlucky recurring pirates in the Asterix books) they took the heavily-damaged pirate ship and were delightedly counting their riches. However, between repairs, purchases and the hire of a mercenary cruiser for three months, they'll really only just break even on the session

I also got to introduce three new NPCs that I hope the party will be too interested in to let go. One of them is a Llellewyloly called Pleasantly Complex, and the other is based on Ray and his daughter from the TV series Mr Inbetween. The Dandelion in particular offers both opportunities and a clue to the Asim Foundation's doings...

Edit: it is telling about the way PoD campaigns go that in order to have some piracy going on in my Pirates of Drinax campaign, it takes NPCs trying to pirate the players.

 

[Uqbarian]

There then followed the Revolution on Acrid - another MJD framework from the Drinaxian Companion - and this was a huge change of pace. The scenario does not really anticipate the players turning up with three-and-a-bit combat-capable ships as well as a strong company of light infantry, so we ran it partially with PC actions and partially as a wargame on a map. It was great fun: we used the Mercenary boxed set (with a few fixes that make it work better) and the players rolled spectactularly poorly for almost every fight, but their plan was good enough that they succeeded eventually despite a run of bad luck. I suppose a plan that survives friction is the goal... I posted the schematic we used as part of the update, showing the scene just before the government forces surrendered to the revolutionaries: https://drinax.net/week-25-viva-la-revolucion/

I'd be interested in hearing more about your Mercenary fixes, if you don't mind sharing them.

 

[Endie]

I'd be interested in hearing more about your Mercenary fixes, if you don't mind sharing them.

I'm cautious about too much detail, given that there are a couple of people on this forum who love to derail into bad-natured argument and this thread has had only had two really bad episodes in forty pages (one of whom deleted his account, thankfully). I'm also not fooling myself that my version would work for everyone by any means, so there are plenty of things for people to quibble over but basically...

- A key thing is to be super-reserved about granting DMs to the players: a 2D6 system is very limiting and later stages can be trivial if the earlier stages are too easy. It's easy to get a runaway cascade. Be as generous or strict with NPCs as with the PCs.
- There are three rulesets for resolving combats in Book One. I ignore versions one and three and base outcomes on version two (on page 80)
- I drop the preparation phase entirely: it's unneccessary complexity and doesn't add a huge amount, narratively. Just reconnaisance, orders, combat then medical
- I use opposed rolls to resolve combat, where the NPC unit's combat roll is the target for the player's unit. For the effect, I still use the table on p.85 but a bare success with an effect of zero counts as a 7 on that table. So effect of -1 to +1 is a stalemate; effect of +2 to +4 is an advance; effect of -2 to -4 is a setback and so on. If I'm not explaining that well enough let me know.

That last bit was needed because otherwise the players will usually win, thanks to the huge list of ten types of DMs that are emphasised for them while the NPCs just get three. It's not even more complex than doing it by the book: my players are used to seeing a target number and effect as the way to know how they did, as in most of traveller, not a lookup on a table of outcomes.

I also have a fifth unit score: Medical. CBAS therefore becomes CBASM. It strikes me as daft that a unit with great ewar capabilities, or a strong set of pioneer engineers, technically gets good outcomes for after-action medical phase in the rules. I might expand this later, because frankly the support bit is fun to differentiate and it's a great way to grab more player money. Logistics is another area where I may add a separate score.

I always try to get as many of the DMs worked out in advance as possible. Given the complexity even with the simpler resolution system, speed trumps accuracy when it comes to the odd +2 or -1, and as long as you're happy narrating the outcomes convincingly I find I never get argument.

If I was writing the mercenary rules from scratch, myself, I would probably go down a simpler task chain route, but I would definitely stick to opposed rolls for the target number. Yes, it's a bit anti-climactic when the opposition totally fluff their roll but many engagements are a curb-stomp.

 

[wintertraveller]

Endie, it is a delight to read these Drinax campaign updates. Thank you for the posts, so very nicely done!

 

[Endie]

Endie, it is a delight to read these Drinax campaign updates. Thank you for the posts, so very nicely done!

Thanks for the feedback: I feel I missed the big rush of people posting about PoD back in 2018-19 in this thread, so I am aware that it's sometimes just me posting into the void a bit...