Played my first Mongoose Traveller game ever yesterday. Before that they have all been Classic Traveller games and I havent played that much out of lack of opportunity more than anything else. My son of 9 has recently got into MgT and has been generating his own creatures. He has always been interested in drawing and designing monsters etc so it came naturally that he would start using these rules to generate some using the animal creation rules as a guideline, after showing interest in watching me with the books over the last few years. He did get some of the charactersitics a bit mixed up and needed some help with the intelligence and skills (which admittedly are very vague in the rules), but I think hes got the hang of it now.
So we spent a good three hours playing a game - it took him down to a basically barren garden world via a patron provided ship, in order to capture two prize animals for supplying to a zoo (no disintegrations!). He is travelling with a guide and a security guard that have also been provided by the patron - they will get him to the general area where the animals frequent, then it will be up to him to track them down. Its a 30km walk through jungle and swamp etc so will take him 2-3 days (and probably 2-3 sessions) to get there and there are plenty of surprises thrown in like river crossings, sinking sand and cliffs etc not to mention ruins and other areas with resident animals from his list. He seemed to enjoy it and did well, only the security guard was slightly hurt by 'the angry birds in the ruins' and they managed to get through the ambushing killer crocs in the swamp relatively well.
So I am starting to think about the final meeting. These prize animals are 'Fanglashers' that use their tongues to pull characters to close range where they can claw them with their large rear clawed arms (they are six-limbed), I might add some 'shock damage' into that grappling as well! I was half thinking about perhaps introducing a surprise - so maybe the animals could inhabit a labyrinth, or there might be a delay taking the animals via air/raft back to the ship whilst the character have to fight off the rest of the angry pack for an hour?
Anyway if anyone has any interesting ideas I am open to suggestions.
But yeah I really enjoyed it, was really good to play Traveller finally, and I have learned a lot from a recently bought 'Gamemastering' book about how to flesh out campaigns etc and improve role playing. I need to work on my decriptive narrative though I think - sometimes its too easy to concentrate on the rules and forget that the players cant see inside the referees head - so I will have to spend more time describing things in more detail.
But hopefully he will be a young Traveller in the making - he is getting my v1 books when I get the v2 stuff shortly so it could be the start of a life-long interest in role playing I hope.
So we spent a good three hours playing a game - it took him down to a basically barren garden world via a patron provided ship, in order to capture two prize animals for supplying to a zoo (no disintegrations!). He is travelling with a guide and a security guard that have also been provided by the patron - they will get him to the general area where the animals frequent, then it will be up to him to track them down. Its a 30km walk through jungle and swamp etc so will take him 2-3 days (and probably 2-3 sessions) to get there and there are plenty of surprises thrown in like river crossings, sinking sand and cliffs etc not to mention ruins and other areas with resident animals from his list. He seemed to enjoy it and did well, only the security guard was slightly hurt by 'the angry birds in the ruins' and they managed to get through the ambushing killer crocs in the swamp relatively well.
So I am starting to think about the final meeting. These prize animals are 'Fanglashers' that use their tongues to pull characters to close range where they can claw them with their large rear clawed arms (they are six-limbed), I might add some 'shock damage' into that grappling as well! I was half thinking about perhaps introducing a surprise - so maybe the animals could inhabit a labyrinth, or there might be a delay taking the animals via air/raft back to the ship whilst the character have to fight off the rest of the angry pack for an hour?
Anyway if anyone has any interesting ideas I am open to suggestions.
But yeah I really enjoyed it, was really good to play Traveller finally, and I have learned a lot from a recently bought 'Gamemastering' book about how to flesh out campaigns etc and improve role playing. I need to work on my decriptive narrative though I think - sometimes its too easy to concentrate on the rules and forget that the players cant see inside the referees head - so I will have to spend more time describing things in more detail.
But hopefully he will be a young Traveller in the making - he is getting my v1 books when I get the v2 stuff shortly so it could be the start of a life-long interest in role playing I hope.
