Tweaking SOTA ... [heavy on the spoilers]

[alex_greene]

I've always been disappointed by both the original CT Secret of The Ancients and the Mongoose Secrets of The Ancients. I also have a tendency to fly off script whenever I get my hands on any published adventure module. The scripts I run are much more interesting, and don't rely on "And then robot assassins appear!" "And then a giant ship appears!" and so on.
I've always wondered how I could write up

Spoiler

Grandfather's Infamous Monologue

. I could condense it down to the following.

Spoiler

Hi. You know The Ancients? I am the Ancients. The Droyne call me Grandfather. I know, I look like a human to you. Look, really long story short. I've lived for more than three hundred thousand years, hopping from body to body. I've been inside this human for eight hundred years. I know, she's got a weird accent. I love this town on Earth called Sheffield. Bear with us, because things are going to get a lot more complicated."

 

[alex_greene]

A passage from the Mongoose book:-

Library: An eclectic mix of data storage media, from data crystals and holowafers to chemical dyes on wood pulp.

That's books and comics, to you. See why I go off script?

 

[alex_greene]

The adventure feels railroady. Events happen beyond the characters' control. Important NPCs die without warning, and the irritating ones are protected by so much plot armour.

 

[Garran]

Every early-era adventure that I've seen has the same problem, and the remakes don't really do any better since they're stuck with the same even its rails are on rails script as the original, so I just avoid them entirely.

 

[alex_greene]

Every early-era adventure that I've seen has the same problem, and the remakes don't really do any better since they're stuck with the same even its rails are on rails script as the original, so I just avoid them entirely.

I know.
The version I ran through was ... different. I had the characters pick up the trail of the Ancients. They didn't go near Boughene. There was nothing there for them. Instead, the trail led them to some dead vacuum world in the Abyss Rift, occupying an empty hex, which is where they found fossilised Droyne remains from 300,000 years ago.
They found the last resting place of Grandfather and all of his offspring. Something had brought them all together and slaughtered them, then left them on this lifeless moon where life had once thrived.
There was an obelisk. Whoever had left Yaskoydray and his clones had left this behind. The translation was "Boring monologue. 1/10 do not recommend."
Kidding.
The trail did not end there. It led them beyond, to a new campaign of my own making. Someone had seen fit to stop the Ancients, 300,000 years ago. This tied in with the rumours circulating throughout the Marches and beyond. Rumours about some mythical being, alive and real, with a capacity for invention beyond anything Grandfather could imagine.
Some being, currently possibly inhabiting a human body.
Somebody going by the name ... The Maker.

 

[carlc]

The adventure feels railroady. Events happen beyond the characters' control. Important NPCs die without warning, and the irritating ones are protected by so much plot armour.

There are some real cul de sacs in the adventure as well. "Either the players do this or the adventure is over", it's very frustrating. I've already decided that I won't be running Wrath of the Ancients until I've had chance to smooth it out.

 

[alex_greene]

There are some real cul de sacs in the adventure as well. "Either the players do this or the adventure is over", it's very frustrating. I've already decided that I won't be running Wrath of the Ancients until I've had chance to smooth it out.

I don't blame you. How they're going to run WOTA if the Travellers managed to screw up both MOTA and SOTA is beyond me. Also, SOTA is invalided if they screw up MOTA - and sometimes, they may do everything right in MOTA and still make it impossible to begin SOTA (such as accidentally killing a certain person who turns up in SOTA right at the start).

 

[carlc]

I asked in another thread and apparently any outcome from Secrets can work with Wrath but let's see. In the meantime I'm hacking up Tripwire as a filler whilst waiting for publication.

 

[alex_greene]

*looks askance at Matt* What if Tripwire is part of the inspiration for WOTA?

 

[carlc]

Don't do that!

*looks askance at Matt* What if Tripwire is part of the inspiration for WOTA?

Don't do that!

 

[alex_greene]

The thing is, you don't need to do anything featured in any of the Ancients stories. They're absurd, but not absurd enough to be playable. No exploding planets, suns burning up whole worlds, stuff like that.
Ancients stuff like that should only be revealed gradually, in spacer bars, on comm screens and so on. The campaigns end with your characters standing under some alien sky, looking up at the universe, I dunno, mourning the long-extinct Ancients because they were all wiped out by something really monumentally stupid or something.

 

[carlc]

I promised a complete newbie a Traveller campaign as she had never played before, but as I have a Pirates campaign running concurrently I wanted something I could pick up and run. Now the group don't want to stop even when Secrets is finished and they're actually quite invested in the Ancients stuff.

Meanwhile I've put my Skandersvik game on hold whilst I turn parts of that into something my third group would want to play (the first section was somewhat boring to them)

 

[Sigtrygg]

If Mongoose is willing to re-write Traveller future history with the outcome of the FFW being unknown and determined by campaign events then I hope they do something similar with the Ancients.

The trouble with the Ancients is everyone knows their secret - or at least they think they do.

As I have posted before there were races exploring the galaxy long before the Ancients, and while they may have never discovered the jump drive what if they get to TL28 and discover the reality drive...

Known space is too convenient. The Ancients appear several thousand years ago and spread humanity and vargr across the stars, and yet there are other races that just so happen to be of similar TL development when humanity encounters them - the Hivers, the K'kree, even the Aslan. Good job none of them were several TLs above humanity...

 

[alex_greene]

If Mongoose is willing to re-write Traveller future history with the outcome of the FFW being unknown and determined by campaign events then I hope they do something similar with the Ancients.

The trouble with the Ancients is everyone knows their secret - or at least they think they do.

As I have posted before there were races exploring the galaxy long before the Ancients, and while they may have never discovered the jump drive what if they get to TL28 and discover the reality drive...

Known space is too convenient. The Ancients appear several thousand years ago and spread humanity and vargr across the stars, and yet there are other races that just so happen to be of similar TL development when humanity encounters them - the Hivers, the K'kree, even the Aslan. Good job none of them were several TLs above humanity...

I think The Great Rift intro holds an important clue. Charted Space is bounded by rifts. This region, which includes Earth, is one tiny little spur between galactic arms. When you get ancient, near-immortal species turning up, Loriens, Grandfathers, they can think in the long term, and on a grander scale.
The FFW might be a huge future event in the history of the 3I, but 1105 really needs to be the beginning of an era where Humaniti begins to take its first faltering steps towards becoming a Type II Kardashev civilisation.
So the Ancients trilogy should be about the Travellers uncovering the clues which lead to a definitive answer as to why there have been no Ancients of any sort in this region of the Galaxy for 300,000 years - because they became a Type II civilisation and transcended the limitations of their physical bodies, and escaped this tiny corner of the universe to explore pastures new.
Like the rest of this galaxy at first, and later other dimensions.

 

[Geir]

(sorry, every time I see 'Kardashev' my brain translates it into 'Kardashian' - I need to go soak my brain in alcohol)

The Great Rift is a Traveller game artifact. There's stars in them rifts in reality - they're just clouds within the Orion arm (if it's an arm and not a... elbow??), which should peter out to lower density somewhere in the Vargr Extents , and I've already mumbled about Deneb really being twelve sectors more to spinward.

But be that as it may, I'm glad the future from 1105 onwards doesn't need to be a repeat of what was written forty years ago (or even what Loren Wiseman rewrote 20 years ago for GURPs). And if the Droyne end up as just another uplifted race in the redefined past, that won't hurt my feelings, either.

 

[alex_greene]

The OTU needs to change, and the early 1100s seem like the perfect time for these changes to occur. New drives, new forms of power (total conversion drives, zero point energy), new advances in medicine (new anagathics, new cybernetic implants to boost longevity and serve as a "hard drive" for personalities should they crash, and so on).
In other words, the Travellers need to up their game beyond the trade game, or war games. The greatest takeaway from the OTA series is that they can tread where giants once walked ... and the road is there for them to become giants, themselves.

 

[Vormaerin]

That's the sort of thing that should happen in personal campaigns. Or in alternate settings. I'm not a fan of published settings that "evolve" and render material already published incompatible with the stuff they want you to buy now. I am a big fan of publishing multiple settings (or, at least, rules that support multiple settings). And Mongoose seems to be going that way, so I am pleased.

My own campaign is quite divergent from the OTU, which is how it should be imho. Tailor it to the things your players are interested in.

 

[alex_greene]

That's the sort of thing that should happen in personal campaigns. Or in alternate settings. I'm not a fan of published settings that "evolve" and render material already published incompatible with the stuff they want you to buy now. I am a big fan of publishing multiple settings (or, at least, rules that support multiple settings). And Mongoose seems to be going that way, so I am pleased.

My own campaign is quite divergent from the OTU, which is how it should be imho. Tailor it to the things your players are interested in.

The thing is, once you have your copy of the OTU in your hands, you can pretty much do with it whatever you feel like. Your Travellers can lead the way to the pinnacle of sophont evolution, or accidentally burn Charted Space to the ground. It's up to the players what happens to the universe.
If they stumble across the concept of the space folding drive, and find they can retool a plain and simple Jump-1 into a miraculous Spore Drive powered by a Total Conversion power plant made up from scrap metal found in a junkyard, run with the ball. If other people get the plans for the drive and improve on the tech, bringing TL 28 concepts to life at TL 13, let it happen.
If these brand new ships suddenly bring an end to trade and warfare as you know it, gravy.
You know that the game will go in any direction, once you start the ball rolling. Because it's what the Travellers do that matters. Not what happens in the campaign book.

 

[Sigtrygg]

The Droyne are already an uplifted race - their unmodified form is the Chirper.

Why does charted space have so many psionic races? Research Station Gamma and other sources show that there are many psionic races, animals, plants, and who is to say there are no psionic fungi

IMTU the reason behind seeding the charted space area with psionic potential was the petri dish... now ask yourself who did it and why?

Again IMTU Grandfather didn't discover jump drive, he invented the means by which jump space could be accessed by machines, he also eventually discovered the "truth" of the first starfaring races and his status as a lab rat. He hides in pocket universes not because of his progeny but because he knows what's coming.

Humans and Vargr are his long term solution...

 

[Vormaerin]

The thing is, once you have your copy of the OTU in your hands, you can pretty much do with it whatever you feel like. Your Travellers can lead the way to the pinnacle of sophont evolution, or accidentally burn Charted Space to the ground. It's up to the players what happens to the universe.
If they stumble across the concept of the space folding drive, and find they can retool a plain and simple Jump-1 into a miraculous Spore Drive powered by a Total Conversion power plant made up from scrap metal found in a junkyard, run with the ball. If other people get the plans for the drive and improve on the tech, bringing TL 28 concepts to life at TL 13, let it happen.
If these brand new ships suddenly bring an end to trade and warfare as you know it, gravy.
You know that the game will go in any direction, once you start the ball rolling. Because it's what the Travellers do that matters. Not what happens in the campaign book.

Isn't that what I said? Go hog wild in your personal campaign. I have never seen anyone disagree with that.

I just don't want Mongoose publishing books that do that and claiming they are Third Imperium Setting. Alternate Settings? Rulebooks of variant techs? Sure. Even adventure arcs like Wrath of the Ancients or Singularity that can change how the Third Imperium setting is are fine, as long as they don't become "and this happened" and they start publishing books that assumes that's what actually happened. But published setting material should remain consistent so people buying it don't have to go "hrmm, is this pre- Wrath or post-Wrath?".

Published settings are starting points for personal campaigns. They should not be treated like everyone is playing in the devs' campaign.