Tweaking SOTA ... [heavy on the spoilers]

[alex_greene]

My players often want to be space traders. They almost never want to do space trading. It is just their excuse to going places and having a ship. Hence my abstracted space trucking methodology mentioned above.

That works.
Do you agree with me that any ship's purser worth her salt would be keeping tabs on the various planets they tend to regularly, and they'd pick up on the best cargoes to sell to those worlds?
An example: an Industrial world, an Agricultural world, and a Garden world. The Ga has got a lot of stinky manure to sell, the In world readily turns it into fertiliser, and the Ag planet would bless the ground you walk on if you delivered that stuff to them.
This can be taken to a dedicated trade subgame thread.

 

[MongooseMatt]

I am a sandbox referee myself, but the success of "Adventure Paths" for other game companies tells me that a linearity of MotA/SotA is something a lot of folks like. If that was all Mongoose published in campaigns, it would be annoying to me. But having a mix of PoD and SotA isn't bad.

Bingo. Different referees have different preferences, and so we bring you a mixture of campaign styles to pick and choose from (if anyone is looking for another sandbox campaign a la Pirates of Drinax, we begin work on one next year...).

As for the rest with regards to canon... no one should be sweating it. There is no metaplot (beyond the FFW, and that is limited in both time and space) and the endings of all campaigns, as you play them at your table, are canon. So, in the FFW and even with absolute extremes, if the Zhodani completely trounce the Imperium and set up a series of protectorates throughout the Marches... canon. If the Imperium thrusts deep into the Consulate and claims many new worlds... canon. If the status quo is maintained... canon.

We have a mechanism that will handle all of this but, as things stand, go ahead and play and explore Charted Space knowing that we are really unlikely to invalidate the results of your campaigns. It is all canon.

 

[locarno24]

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.

Honestly my absolute favourite bit of the Mongoose Traveller 1e Secrets of the Ancients was chapter 6: The Secret.
It's intended as a kind of interactive monologue/exposition dump but I love the adventure so much.
Playing as full on ancient-era agents of Grandfather and co, with missions covering centuries and millennia and full-on 'tell physics to get knotted' technology is fantastic fun if you have the right group of players; you could easily do a full campaign using the alternate simple rules in that chapter.

 

[Vormaerin]

Yeah, that was pretty cool. I can't imagine I'd ever run SotA or Wrath. My players get more than enough apocalyptica from the fantasy and superhero games they play in, so they like the more soap opera feel I give my game.

But using those scenes as 'memory crystals' or Ancients interactive art images or something like that as they explore weird places seems like it would be pretty fun.

 

[locarno24]

It was a very good narrative idea and beats 'half hour exposition dump' into a cocked hat.

 

[alex_greene]

Yeah, that was pretty cool. I can't imagine I'd ever run SotA or Wrath. My players get more than enough apocalyptica from the fantasy and superhero games they play in, so they like the more soap opera feel I give my game.

But using those scenes as 'memory crystals' or Ancients interactive art images or something like that as they explore weird places seems like it would be pretty fun.

Interactive memory crystals and art are a brilliant workaround. Both of you just came up with the perfect answer to making Grandfather's Monologue not boring, and it's something they never thought of when putting together SOTA.

On top of all that, this is the best way of presenting anything Ancients-related without going down the monologue road. Want the characters to experience the final moments of the Final War? Memory crystal. Grandfather's cringeworthy interview on Larry King? Interactive art.

 

[alex_greene]

Bingo. Different referees have different preferences, and so we bring you a mixture of campaign styles to pick and choose from (if anyone is looking for another sandbox campaign a la Pirates of Drinax, we begin work on one next year...).

As for the rest with regards to canon... no one should be sweating it. There is no metaplot (beyond the FFW, and that is limited in both time and space) and the endings of all campaigns, as you play them at your table, are canon. So, in the FFW and even with absolute extremes, if the Zhodani completely trounce the Imperium and set up a series of protectorates throughout the Marches... canon. If the Imperium thrusts deep into the Consulate and claims many new worlds... canon. If the status quo is maintained... canon.

as things stand, go ahead and play and explore Charted Space knowing that we are really unlikely to invalidate the results of your campaigns. It is all canon.

This sparks joy. I feel that if the Travellers' actions bring down the Imperium and set Charted Space in flames, I should just run with the ball, as long as it's the Travellers who are in the thick of it. I want the players to come away from SOTA, FFW, TPoD, and look back and say "We changed things," "We experienced a sense of agency," and even "How in Hades did we end up in the Imperial Palace, with our chef sitting on the Iridium Throne?"

I don't want them to come away thinking "The Referee did a lot of talking, and then the world broke. And we were kind of there."

 

[carlc]

Honestly my absolute favourite bit of the Mongoose Traveller 1e Secrets of the Ancients was chapter 6: The Secret.
It's intended as a kind of interactive monologue/exposition dump but I love the adventure so much.
Playing as full on ancient-era agents of Grandfather and co, with missions covering centuries and millennia and full-on 'tell physics to get knotted' technology is fantastic fun if you have the right group of players; you could easily do a full campaign using the alternate simple rules in that chapter.

My players loved that section but came out of the other side absolutely hating the Ancients, which had consequences later on...

 

[carlc]

The problem so far, with both MOTA and SOTA is that both are horribly linear, with TPK a distinct possibility at many different points in both.

There were points in SoTA where I effectively had to be HAL 9000. Luckily the players were cool about it.

Also there were large sections of background/surrounding Information that were interesting to read but there was no way you could introduce the PCs to it without huge chunks of exposition (which is not my style in any circumstances). This much was left on the cutting room floor.

 

[JustEastOfTheEdge]

I have always found it surprising how people get the adventures to work as intended by the author, since no two play groups are alike, and Traveller has widely different themes.
I can see them working perfectly in a pre-rolled one off experience. But shoe-horning them into an existing campaign always seemed more trouble that its worth. Maybe there are players who willingly allow themselves to be dragged through a set path, but mine will kick against everything thrown as them, and will demolish the 'script' with certainty, even a reactive or multi-path script.

It is almost not worth my effort in learning it, as most of it is shredded on first contact . I end up extracting less than 10% from a typical adventure booklet.

As for the opening post about the "and x suddenly appears", you are absolutely spot on. I am afraid this is the trope that has been thrown at us for so many years now- look at any Marvel movie - it is just a sequence of "and x suddenly appears". Lazy writing, something Disney excels at.

 

[WHULorigan]

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.

In my campaigns Alpha Cygni ("Deneb") is on the other side of the Zhodani Consulate in Bliardlie Sector. The similarly named star in "Deneb Sector" is "Deneb Minor", a Type A2 III/IV star that lines up closely with Deneb from Terra's observation angle.

An interesting note is that on the MegaTraveller CD from FarFuture, there is among the files an early hand-drawn map of Charted Space that specifically pins the location of a number of real-world stars' locations (with Right Ascension coordinates specified where Coreward/Spinward/Rimward/Trailing are normally noted on the Charted Space Map, and the additional note that all stars are within +/- 10° Declination). On that map (interestingly), Deneb is in the roughly CORRECT location on the far side of the Zhodani Consulate. Why the change in position occurred before the Charted Space Map was published is a mystery, since they obviously knew the correct position.

Two other interesting observations on that map are:

• The location of the prominent world/star "Troy" on roughly the border of Subsectors D/H in what would later become the Trojan Reach Sector
• The extreme Spinward edge of what appears to be a significant polity on the Trailing edge of the Hive Federation in Kolire Sector

 

[WHULorigan]

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

(EDITED): . . . becoming a Type II Kardashev Kardashian 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.

It actually makes the Heat Death of the Universe seem not all that bad after all . . .

 

[alex_greene]

It actually makes the Heat Death of the Universe seem not all that bad after all . . .

The thing about Kardashev Type IV civilisations is that they may well be so far beyond the level of thought we are used to that they may well contemplate such thoughts as "H'mm. Heat Death of The Universe. What method shall we use to reverse that?"
I just had to check that I am still on the SOTA tweaking thread, and I haven't wandered into some other thread by mistake.

The ultimate conceit of Traveller is that it's the humans who will reach the high pinnacle of evolution, because they can diversify their thinking beyond whatever hats the other species are wearing, such as the Aslan need for territory or the K'Kree's bloodthirst and love of Joan Baez records.