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."