Absolutely!

For those who cared, Pysadian Escapade seemed to go well last night - despite a no show by the Captain and the excuses of Gvoudzon (who had an important family bowling trip move dates on him while he was on holiday). 

Still the remainder of the crew were up for it.

Well sort of. 

A subset of the players of The Traveller Adventure have also been testing out my make-it-up-as-you-go ability (which is virtually non-existent) by playing fortnightlyish games at lunchtime.  One of those players much prefers her lunchtime character to the rather bland of marine captain of TTA (partly my fault for not writing up a better background for a completely new to role playing player).  I could sympathise and despite the added I've not, to my recollection, ever killed off a PC before and the idea of doing so (in a planned way) rather appealed.

I could think of any number of ways of making the switch: just a fiat "the character has just changed"; have Fox leave the ship and need to be replaced; have Fox die and need to be replaced.  But of course the latter seemed much the more fun way of going, even though I only had the space of yesterday afternoon at work to think up a death, come up with some 'crew for hire' for the (acting) captain to interview, and come up with a reason for Lily to be there (which I actually left to the player). 

I decided to go with a Tasha Yar 'meaningless' death rather than anything heroic because a) the player didn't care much for the character and b) the death had to happen very near the start of the adventure if she wasn't to spend most of the evening in the lead up to the death.  So remembering the dockside games of footy we used to play against other ship crews when I worked on a bookship for a couple of years, I inflicted on Fox the accident I had in Calcutta where I headed the ball at the same time as an opponent and landed very badly tearing the ligaments in my foot and ending up on crutches for three months.  Fox didn't damage his ankle though but hit his head badly on the concrete and never came round from the concussion.  The look on the acting captain's player's face when the ship medic told her the news to pass on to the crew was easily worth all the stress!  She was genuinely shocked - due to a job change she may not be able to play with us in future and had been half expecting *her* character to die!

I worried that it might derail the whole adventure, but what the heck...  It nearly did but ironically, I didn't foresee the players hiring *two* of the applicants (acting captain rather liked the look of the Harrison Fordesque carpenter who wanted to leave Pysadi because his family had been killed in an unfortunate accident) and I simply bypassed all the faffing around in the Business District with the bureaucrats and the old lady and the market which they weren't doing anyway and had the carpenter be the cousin of Baraatsu out at Itzeny which soon put us back on track (literally!) and we finished with the arrival in Itzeny which is about where I was guessing - and I think Richard suggested - we'd get to.

So many thanks for all your tips and encouragement, the players seemed to really love it and I gave them lots to do which made up enormously for my rather narrative driven rescue of the prospector last time.

cheers

tc

  (Oh, and Richard might be interested to know that we stopped at *every* stop on the way out.  First to get cushions for the hard wooden train seats, then to get some food, then to see what the fuss in main street was about (a wild porcupig had wondered into town and was being chased down), then to get some painkillers (which took a couple of stops due to getting permits and so on).  Definitely worth naming all the stations.

(and the look on the seasoned player's face when the carpenter said "phew, that was a straightforward trip, they often get held up for various reason" was a picture.  He's already thinking about the return journey.... [the rules say 50% chance of a hold up which I didn't tell them]).