Hi there,
For anyone interested I'm just back from the pub and our 7th every-other-month episode of The Traveller Adventure. I think it went well although one of our number was really unwell and couldn't make the evening which she'll be disappointed by - and we missed our 'lively' archaelologist!
We spent a week in Jump relining a water tank that needed work, dealing with a 95 year old high passenger who thought he was on a cruise ship and kept trying to pay the steward for time in the pool or the casino or whathaveyou. (Both of these were recycled from my game at TravCon as I didn't see any point in reinventing the wheel twice.)
Arrival at Zila went as the book - although they made rather more of the crashed scout ship at the (very basic) starport than I had imagined a 'bit of colour' warranted. They spent some time picking over the four legal insurance companies I'd come up with - different names, prices and qualities. They managed to avoid the dodgy one...!
I can't believe anyone else running TTA has ever made anything of the train journey from the starport into the city - but I thought I would because it made such a nice contrast with the 3 day journey they'd experienced on a steam train on Pysadi which we'd had some fun with. I think it worked nicely as a juxtaposition.
I did my best to make the bar interactions and conversations as interesting as possible - along the lines the book suggests [1] - but everyone could see the bar fight coming a mile off even though that group have never encountered one and two of them had never even been in a role playing bar brawl before. Still, much fun was had, punches thrown and sobering up in the local nick afterwards. It was quite fun playing the drunk NPC Akerut merchant while I was on my third pint of cider! Hard to draw the lines between real and role I'm sure! I'm not sure I did the descriptive bits as well as I might, but I tried. More practice needed.
And of course, at the end they met Marc which was fun although a couple of them didn't quite get the significance... :-)
Great fun, they're on their way to Aramanx and the more sandboxy part of the adventure so we'll see how that goes. (People complain about TTA being a railroad, but that's actually worked well with my group of complete role playing newbies who aren't quite sure what to do sometimes.)