Recruiting in Drinax Campaign

[PsiTraveller]

Just looking for advice from the hivemind here. My players are going to be ramping up their crewing needs as they hire/coopt/ally with pirate groups and systems. They will need a source of pilots, engineers, mechanics and marines to ramp up their piracy efforts.

Where did you have your players recruit from? Mainly Theev? or somewhere else?

 

[Askold]

Our group has recruited from all over, even from whatever planet they happen to be on when they need more recruits.

Theev and Drinax are good sources for recruits. Theev because you can get people with experience in being pirates and more importantly you may find a pirate crew with a ship of their own looking to join a bigger group. Drinax is valuable because you can easily get people whose loyalty is higher than average. Granted that Drinax does not have that many recruits available and the ones from groundside are less likely to be trained in valuable skills, but there are still at least few people willing to join.

The Merc book has good rules for handling recruiting and we actually have spent weeks (ingame time) setting up a recruiting campaign and going through candidates.

 

[PsiTraveller]

Well with the release of adventure 9 the person in charge of boarding actions wants nothing to do with any skyguard recruits. They may have high tech gear but they are 'foppish and unworthy of combat' (paraphrased and cleaned up from his rant)

My group is going the trade and diplomacy route, but military action will occur. They want a good crew for any ships they get.

I have given them some recruits from the Scholars tower for engineering and repair. To me it makes sense because the Scholars tower helped put the thing back together. So to the Tower it offers some hands on experience on a high tech ship.

The other issue I have is the Gardener of worlds approach will need an even larger workforce if you want to have a significant impact on a system, or group of systems. You will need engineers, designers, architects, miners, factory people and a host of logistical support if you want to bootstrap a system to help defend against the Aslan threat.

 

[Putraack]

I used some of the recruiting rules from Mercenary to work up a number of potential recruits per world.

I rolled to see what kind of specialty they might have, and their skill level.

I ended up writing a page for each system they've visited, or are likely to visit, with cargoes available, recruits available, info available, possible encounters, and so on. I find putting data like that together in one place helps me fit together a story, and that can feed whatever else they might learn or do in that system.

 

[Morningkiller]

I modified the recruitment rules a bit for drinax.

Basic recruitment was 1-6 days and roll Leadership + Int/Edu (Social Standing not so important for pirates).

The base difficulty was determined by the port attitude as per drinax.

Every point of effect gave a recruitment point. A single random crewmember cost one recruitment point. Additional points could be spent to improve either the quality of the crew or to give some wiggle in terms of the roles available. Max 2 points spent on each category.

We did up some unusual jobs and rules for cross-trained crew too.

I bodged a program for it while I was learning java. Not really finished but can spit out random humans with gear handily enough.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lcrusgx2z18hmq5/TravellerNPC.jar?dl=0

spreadsheet here

https://www.dropbox.com/s/h0d037n2czt5qk6/Traveller%20recruitment.ods?dl=0