More change for Part XII last night.  (And my apologies for not sitting down to write this immediately, but I was way too tired after a busy week and exciting evening.)  This marked two years of our little gaming group as we started out in February 2016.


A month or six weeks back I’d been chatting with one of the lecturers I liaise with as part of my day job.  I can’t recall how we got onto the subject - not that it’s hard to get me onto Traveller - but he expressed an interest and I invited him along the next time we played.  Clearly something had grabbed him about the idea and despite no role-playing experience, he bravely pitched up to join us. Hd threw himself right into it. Actually, I say no role-playing experience, he’s actually the mastermind behind the once a year day I spend in our mock courtroom with the digital forensics computing students.  He and another academic take on the roles of prosecution and defence while I sit up front as judge to keep them in check if they’re asking leading questions and sometimes getting students to explain bits of technical jargon for our (imaginary) jury.


Anyway, we now have two School of Computing lecturers joining the four of us from the Library and one Traveller grognard who lives locally.  This also means that we’ve now had every PC in The Traveller Adventure played as a PC not just an NPC. Just not simultaneously. And while I think about it, some may recall that we started a couple of years ago with three women and three men playing (plus me), we now have four guys, two gals and one transitioning from male to female.  I guess it would be indelicate to point out that while it’s good to have a mix of genders, there’s no requirement to go to quite such lengths to maintain the balance.


So just to catch up we have:

Ted playing Tess the engineer

Carl playing Loyd the Captain

Jonathan playing Kunal the Pilot

Jane playing Fred the Steward/gun-bunny

David S playing Gvoudzon the vargr emissary

David B playing Adma the medic

Emily playing Lily the archaeologist/admin assistant to the captain


and NPCs:

Egon the gunner, Bannerji the far trader Captain/Sternmetal gofer and Kfouzorr the vargr mercenary who’s defected from the Kforuzeng

As ever, you might want a copy of The Traveller Adventure or Aramis: The Traveller Adventure to hand to follow the details.


The second change was venue.  We’ve been meeting in the Duke of Buckingham for the previous eleven sessions - we meet every other month you may recall.  It’s a pub in old Portsmouth that originally let us have a small back room which suited us well. The last couple of times however that option’s not been available and we’ve been out in the main part of the pub with consequent noise and hearing issues.  With that and the fact that one of our number has been left with a dodgy stomach after eating there the last few times, we decided we’d give The Dolphin a try. It’s only another 100m down the road, right opposite Portsmouth Cathedral and real feel of Old Portsmouth.  We’d tried it for book group (on the intervening month) and liked it, so I’d booked the table in the front window which was out of the hurly burly and away from the quiz they hold on Thursday nights. We arrived however to find that there was no sign of my booking and some regulars ensconced in the seats.  The bar staff were apologetic however and as a remedy offered us their upstairs function room without charge. This proved to be a large space with a long central table and was just perfect for our purposes. We could have seated twice the number. It was also wonderfully quiet which meant everyone could hear - even if they weren’t sitting immediately next to me - and my voice was very thankful by the end of the evening as well.  Not at all hoarse as usual. It also felt slightly less nerdy to be rolling dice, blowing things up and conducting interrogations without nearby tables wondering what on Aramanx was going on.


A third, very slight, change was that Jane - our mild mannered cataloguer who has just had her third experience of TravCon - had come back the convention fired up with enthusiasm for dice towers which she’d encountered for the first time on the Sunday morning of the convention in Simon’s B’s wonderful miniatures wargame.  I’ll report on that in my write up for Freelance Traveller if Jeff will have it.  Jane had spent a couple of lunchtimes with craft knife, cardboard and colouring pens creating a very impressive dice tower maybe 8” tall and 4” square.  Having mislaid my folding dice tray we’ve spent several sessions dealing with dice amongst the glasses, menus, plates and other pub table furniture, so all those of us within reach loved tossing our d6s into this stonework keep.  Jane’s now already planning mark II which will be more Travelleresque.


Meanwhile I’d spent the pre-meal warm up, drink buying, food ordering and so on getting our newbie up to speed.  I’d already sent Jonathan my Traveller-in-one-page document which he found very helpful. Now I needed to find out how we were going to fit him in.  The more I thought about it, the more options I could come up with:


In the end he chose the BOTH option above with the caveat we weren’t sure just how long everything would take and that if he grew attached to Kunal we could just keep her going.  With that sorted out at the bar, in private as it were, so we could surprise the others with Kunal’s death if it came to that, we returned to the function lounge and then caught up Jonathan on the events of the preceding two years - about 150 days of game time.  This was a good moment of course for everyone to drag up their favourite memories - from Gvoudzon being beaten up and the crew stealing hsi brooch back from the museum, to seeing rare seagles flying high over the cliffs on their seafari on Natoko, to rescuing the prospector in the Patinir Belt, to harvesting howood on Pysadi and nearly losing the Captain to first the salvors and then his mad jump onto the March Harrier’s forward cargo ramp three stories above the ground, to the bar fight on Zila, to the whole Two Days on Carsten thing.  It almost sounds like we’ve had fun!  Of course, I made sure to get in a couple of mentions of meson guns - the display they saw in the museum and the news of the Mammoth crash.


So, to the game.  You may recall we’ve spent the last two sessions tackling the events of Wolf at the Door.  I really thought that we should be able to wrap up the chapter with another evening’s play.  I misjudged. Partly because decision making for the group was slow - they’re fine at an individual level but no one, including the Captain, takes charge when larger group things needed to be decided.  To be fair to Loyd, the Captain, this is definitely his character being role played accurately. The other factor was my sticking fairly closely to the ‘travel through the forest’ section of the book as they made their way up the river and making them roll for encounters, animal encounters, searching helicopter encounters, stop to take off their cold weather gear when it got too hot, stop to change stretcher bearers, stop to deal with Bannerji whinging about the pain in his leg, stop to eat…   Not helped by the fact that it’s quite a long way from the road to the mining camp and between the terrain and the load they were carrying, I was working to 3 hours per 5km.


Last time we finished on the dun-dun-durrr moment of Kunal and Adma caught by Renitzan soldiers at the bridge towards the south-east of the general area map, Lily hidden under the bridge having laced it with explosives, and the rest tucked away in the nearby woods.  I’d considered various ways things might develop from here, but remembered some advice Johnn Four (www.roleplayingtips.com) gave on introducing third parties to combat.  He probably expressed it more clearly but essentially it occurred to me that if, as a result of the Renitzen helicopters clearly showing an interest in what was going on the bridge, the vargr mercenaries also showed up, then perhaps the PCs could escape under the cover of the general mayhem if a firefight broke out.  When I thought I’d be playing Kunal as an NPC I’d decided she could tap Adma on the shoulder and suggest a quick retreat as the vargr choppers arrived - naturally with their leader standing on the landing skid wildly waving his weapon. With Jonathan taking over I suggested at the bar the line about “this is our chance to leg it” and let him decide whether he wanted to take that option or do something else.  I think he saw sense and took it!


Now here’s a thing, I generally referee with the GDW version of TTA in front of me.  Well, a print out of the current chapter so I can highlight bits and write in the margins.  I do this mainly because I prefer the artwork. But in preparation for the session I’d been reading the Mongoose version of the chapter once again because my print GDW book is a bit fragile.  There is a snag with this in that sometimes die rolls and other rule bits have been revised to the Mongoose rules. An example of this is the check for the helicopter searches. In GDW a straight roll.  In Mongoose an opposed role between (their) Recon and (PC) Stealth. But that’s what marginal notes are for.


As I’d not looked at the chapter for a couple of months I was a bit surprised to be reading that the guardpost at the river crossing should be 30 soldiers or more.  I’d had half a dozen. I know I can do what I like, but I’ve been roughly trying to stick to the book - save where we go off piste altogether. So because of that, and to give Lily under the bridge something to do while she decided whether or when she was going to set off her explosives, I had her notice an army truck racing up from the East and currently about a mile away.  So two vargr mercenary helicopters arriving, a bunch of troops and a helicopter on the ground with one overhead, and possibly more arriving. A 3-ton truck should or at least could hold a squad or so, shouldn’t it? That should be enough mayhem even if it wasn’t quite the “30” of the book.


The mystery was solved when I finally picked up the GDW text again and realized the original said 3D soldiers, not 30 and that when I first set up the guard post I must have rolled relatively low.  Never mind, the original 6 plus another 10 was still within the 3D limit! I’d lucked out on my keep-to-the-book-where-possible roll. I won’t stop here to be waylaid by a diatribe about Mongoose editing.  That’s the other reason I don’t ref with the Mongoose text in front of me, I can’t bear the errors. Though in fairness I should perhaps admit that the local area map we used for much of the evening was the one from Mongoose which is *much* clearer than the GDW version.  It’s about the only time in TTA I prefer the newer artwork. Although having said that, it’s impossible to know without cross-referencing to the GDW version what the movement indicators on said map mean, so you really need both books to run the adventure under Mongoose rules.


So Lily, who had been itching to do so for a chunk of the last session and much of the start of this one finally blew the bridge - just as the Renitzan soldiers were crossing it.  While the (remaining) Renitzans and vargr mercenaries fought it out between themselves - eventually leaving just one vargr chopper flying and lots of bodies on the ground - the PCs made good their escape northwards into the woods.  Lily on the east side of the river, everyone else on the west side.


They finally ditched the sled they were dragging with the ton of gear they’d liberated from the Governor’s mansion.  We were pretty much down to weapons and ammo, cold weather gear and Lily’s field kit and some rations by now. Yes, even the prosthetic leg had been dumped…


As they’d turned their comms on to communicate with each other, I now had them notice incoming messages - from the usual advertising and trade notices through to Lily receiving a concerned missive from Ashwin Chooder (see Two Days on Carsten). He’d seen news footage of rising hostilities and the aftermath of the mercenary attack on the governor's mansion, knew Lily was down on the planet although not exactly where, and wanted to check she was alright.  If only he knew! Apparently there was other content to the message but Lily wasn’t sharing that. Everyone is seeing news footage about the attack on the mansion - serving as a Senledi brigade hq. Bannerji is known to be missing, his colleague Loess Thingon dead in the rubble, and the leader of the mercenaries, Thane Dhurgeng has been shot and killed.  Tess looks twice - isn’t that the vargr she shot in the snout with a brilliantly lucky round from an autorifle she picked up and fired rather randomly. (with -3 for no skill)?


Off into the woods they went although their surrounds were soon developing into proper forest and it was slow going as they made their way up the river carrying Bannerji on his stretcher.  Actually, he was quite happy. At the start of the session he’d been in some pain from his leg. It was early morning and Adma hadn’t tended to him since last night. The only two medics of the ship’s crew are Adma and Kunal and at the time were both wrapped up with the Renitzan soldiers.  Bannerji rather failed his ‘self-medication’ roll and took uppers instead of pain-killers. The March Harrier crew were relieved when they wore off and he quit singing. Fortunately they were deep in the woods. Taking point, Gvoudzon was nearly but not quite surprised by animal encounter for forest terrain.  #6 - a pouncer. I said it was about the size of a mountain lion but had a wicked looking whip like tail raised over its back. Gvoudzon was taking no chances and shot it dead with a couple of well-aimed pistol rounds. Lily was soon on the comm being stressed about hearing gunshots. After a debate about throwing the carcass into the river to stop any relatives sniffing it out and trailing them, or just leaving it where it was to attract said relatives so that they weren’t sniffing out the PCs, they decided their lack of food meant they should take a haunch with them and leave the rest.


They took a short break to remove their cold weather gear as the late second summer day was heating up nicely.  Fred and Loyd were relieved of stretcher bearing duties as they’d put in a three hour stint. This meant a slight diversion to decide just how tall everyone was to avoid Bannerji sliding off.  It’s been long established that Fred is 7ft tall - the Captain had presumably had his end of the stretcher on his shoulders! - but I gave everyone a free choice in how tall they wanted to be. I suppose I could have dug out Career Book 3 from Spica which has tables for such things, but it didn’t seem particularly necessary.  In the end the crew is surprisingly short was the answer with Loyd at 5’11” as the tallest of the PCs.  Having settled that they moved on for another three hours and could hear a helicopter - but way off in the distance.  Actually I had them roll and only Loyd noticed anything so the others thought he was hearing things. Come lunchtime and they definitely need to stop - endurance was flagging and while water is plentiful, there’s nothing to eat.  Lily, on the other side of the river, and somewhat further north as she can travel more quickly, is enjoying the beautiful flowers on the forest floor and the fact that she’s got all the rations in her backpack. I believe she may even have skipped along at one point.   She checks in via comms at set times so they have the comms on as briefly as possible in case anyone is tracking them. (It’s tempting but so far I’ve not had that happening.)


It’s getting dark and the group need to stop for the night.  Lily, still a bit further ahead is just able to make the next bridge before it’s too dark to see.  She creeps up slowly and with her binoculars can see a small outpost with a couple of guards outside.  It’s just become too dark to see any colours on the uniform, but the structure is on the Renitzan side of the river.  Retreating to a safe distance she calls this in to the others and using her Survival 3 makes a posh lean to shelter to sleep in and enjoys some more rations.  Back on the other side of the river the others are making the best they can of limited supplies and one tent. It’s a two-person tent but they decide it’s cold enough that three of them can sleep in there for shared bodily warmth.  Bannerji is given a place thanks to his injury and Tess and Kunal are given the other two places thanks the gentlemanly insistence of the Captain. Kunal fortunately misses the rather appraising look Bannerji gives her as she climbs in.  The others are left to the forest floor and the - fortunately harmless - millipedes that occasionally scurry through the leaf mulch. They’re still not eating and are tired and hungry. Someone hears a helicopter operating after nightfall and suspects that at least someone - most likely the offworld mercenaries - have IR capability.  The PCs bury themselves under the thickest canopy and densest foliage. Tess is exhausted after her lack of sleep the night before - if there are insects this evening she doesn’t notice or care.


At dawn they try some of the meat.  Raw. Everyone manages to get a bit down them for breakfast except, perhaps ironically, Fred who just can’t stomach it.  His big tough demeanour took a knock. (We had a side debate on whether the two vargr would find this easier than humans or not.  I decided they were canine sophonts, not dogs and would still find it a problem. I was also asked to declare whether it was white meat or red - I rather missed the discussion on what this would mean for being eaten raw but apparently red was the good answer!)  The sound of a distant chopper gets them moving and after three hours are in the vicinity of the bridge having seen one possible fording place as they passed it about ten minutes back.


Lily meanwhile has breakfasted and crept up to watch the guard post and two new guards emerging while two disappear inside.


As the main bulk of the PCs get nearer to the bridge there’s the sound of a helicopter.  Much closer. The scurry for cover and everyone makes it save for Kunal. Yes, Jonathan’s first experience of double 1.  Not quite realizing the import of that immediately, everyone else’s reaction clues him in that this is not good. Kunal has been seen.  She thinks about running for just a moment and then decides to take one for the team. Throwing her weapon down she starts waving at the helicopter as though she’s trying to flag it down.  It hovers over her while two vargr in the back keep her covered with weapons. Another is on a comm unit to someone or other. Everyone else tries to squirm deeper into the cover they’ve found.


Meanwhile, Lily sees two new soldiers emerge from the guard post and head in the direction of the sound of the helicopters.  She keeps quiet; keeps watching and lets the others know two are on their way.


Meanwhile Kunal is interrogated by the woman who speaks a fairly broken Galanglic.  The man beside her waves his weapon threateningly at the helicopter still hovering overhead with the vargr shouting something incomprensible.  The man is shouting back incomprehensibly. The Renitzan on the ground manages a “Who are you? Why are you here? Where are you from? What are you doing?”  Kunal goes into full damsel in distress mode explaining that she’s a botanist out looking for rare specimens when she slipped down a steep slope, lost her gear and now isn’t too sure where she is.  She’s an offworlder and not too familiar with Aramanx. That much is clear. The soldiers are suspicious but give her the benefit of the doubt at least temporarily. They’re not shooting her out of hand but they do drag her roughly back to the guard post and at this point the helicopter gives up the chase and heads off west.  Kunal is handcuffed, and dumped unceremoniously in front of someone with more stripes on his sleeve than the woman who’s been asking the questions so far. So for the Serznt Kunal goes through her story again. She talks up her plight and taking a leaf out of Tess’ experience the night before - which Jonathan had rather brilliantly picked up in a passing comment regarding the last session - Kunal goes on about how relieved she is to be away from the insects.  This actually gets some grudging recognition of shared misery from the Serzant. Kunal is also starving by now and keeps asking for food but the soldiers are reluctant to provide any (several more badly failed rolls in a row) - although they do give her water.


The PCs outside make themselves even more difficult to see as a rather speedy open topped off-road vehicle drives up the road.  Two of the three vargr on board get out and Lily can see them enter the guardpost. Kunal sees both of them only barely ushered into the inner room - they can only just be said to be waiting for permission - and they take a good look at her.  “This isn’t the human we’re looking for. Is she with anyone? What’s she doing here? What has she told you?” The Renitzans answer with the information they have and the vargr don’t seem willing to waste more time on a wild goose chase and are soon heading back down the road - much to everyone’s relief - the Renitzans included.


By now Lily is pretty sure there are six local border guards at the post and gets in touch with her fellow crewmates.  Are we going to rescue Kunal or try and rescue her? There is actually some debate about this. For a start Kunal is in a mess of her own making and secondly, while the PCs are just about equipped to make such a rescue attempt, they barely have the training.  Only one has any real experience of combat, two have no projectile weapon skills and all are nervous of getting caught either by the soldiers or by more of their comrades turning up at short notice.


The best meta-gaming question of the evening came from Emily who after this discussion had gone on for a bit, bluntly asked Jonathan if he’d enjoyed the evening and was he likely to come along next time?  I.e. was it even worth bothering to go to the hassle of rescuing someone who might be an NPC in the future! Once everyone got the implication of the question, there was much mirth and Jonathan took it good-naturedly.  Fortunately, he was thus far having a ball - although he felt bad he’d put the others at such risk. But stout-hearted Ted/Tess with a defence which wasn’t clear whether it was in character or out, rounded on Lily with a “you’ve only been with us a few weeks, we’ve known Kunal for months if not years, of course we’re rescuing her”.


There followed much discussion and little decision about exactly how this was to be achieved, but eventually a sort of plan was hatched whereby Gvoudzon and Kfouzorr would approach directly from the West and cause some kind of distraction while everyone else would go back to the ford, cross over and sneaking up from the East side, attempt the rescue.  Ever one to make the most of her ability with explosives, Lily added to the mayhem by setting off a bit of her remaining stock of explosives throwing into the river and causing a rather interesting squelchy noise that drew two of the guards out of the post to investigate. (I had them mightily suspicious of the vargr at first but rolling double 1 when the explosion happened and thus high tailing it off to investigate.)


With Bannerji left in Lily’s lean-to and Adma and Tess watching from a distance, the latter  armed with her trusty autorifle that had made short work of Dhurgeng and with which she’d been practicing loading and unloading at every stopping point the day before, the time had come for the others to move in.  The attack went off quite well as they burst in and Kfouzorr decided diplomacy was best dealt out of a barrel and took out one guard while the others tried variously to despatch the rest. Unfortunately Egon took a couple of hits which wasn’t helped by Loyd going for his by now signature charge with two SMGs waving wildly.  He managed to hit a Renitzan but also hit poor Egon who was by now in very poor shape (the final double 1 of the evening).


In the exchange of fire there were misses and hits on both sides and finally Loyd, fearing to let loose with his OMGs again (well, the joke was new to Jonathan and it was two months on, so worth hearing again!), whipped out a knife to further attack the wounded Renitzan leader.  He was soon surrendering along with two other wounded survivors. All the PCs were wounded except for Adma, Lily and, perhaps ironically, Kunal.


We finished the evening with triumphant victory - although Kunal was now feeling reallybad about causing so much trouble (Jonathan was as well - he’d nearly killed them all on his first game session which would have been quite spectacular), and they were all just beginning to think about looting the guardpost.  I promised I’d tell them what there was to loot next time - phew! Saved by the bell. However, we were nowhere near the mining camp I thought we’d have been able to arrive at by the end of the session. Ah well. As long as everyone’s having fun and don’t find the whole thing dragging out over too many years, I’ve no problem with it.  I reckon we could be about halfway through - so, two more years and four altogether?!


We had a lot of fun, there was lots of player input which I always think is better than me dominating and mostly I was too busy to be distracted by one of our newer players querying whether I was reading the first-aid rules correctly.  Querying might be too weak a word. I didn’t know whether to be a tiny bit irritated or majorly impressed that he could have possibly learned that kind of detail so quickly. Fortunately Tess is ever ready with the relevant page of the core rules (or the Central Supply Catalogue when I realized SMGs aren’t listed in the core rules and I didn’t know what damage they did) (I’m trying to encourage the players to know what damage their weapons have - and even have a note of what weapons they actually have - they’re not great ones for such record keeping) and we could work out a generous interpretation of first-aid, medical treatment and healing.  As I’m probably not running combat with that much exactitude in the first place, it wasn’t a major worry. (I have an idea on the subject in any case should the PCs ever get to the Wolblutn). I’m also beginning to think that I should be much stricter about everyone having character sheets with weapons and other gear clearly listed or they don’t possess the stuff. What do other refs do?


Some highlights for me refereeing were translating the plain line of the animal encounter table into a fun sounding animal on the fly.  Fun in the sense of interesting and dangerous rather than ‘nice to play with’. The combat was the same struggle as I always find it, but I was not rolling dice secretly, I was letting them fall where they might (in the dice tower, yes, I know…), and translating that into a fair bit of risk for the players.  Some really enjoyed that, others still prefer the storytelling aspects. I think we all agreed that a mixture was the way to go - but it leaves me pondering the exact balance of what would be best with the disparate desires of players. I also enjoyed the making-things-up-as-we-go aspects and felt more relaxed about that.  The animals I’ve already mentioned but it also happened when I was rather put on the spot about just how the vargr chopper and the Renitzan ground forces were going to respond to each other. Never mind all the descriptions of battalions here and battalions there that the book provides, give me some clue as to how to do detail we’re likely to encounter!  I also had fun describing the firefight at the start even though it was really just a backdrop to Kunal and Adma getting out the conflict zone. Wasted energy - although it will come in useful yet - was preparing a crew for the Wolblutn and doing a 2d6 animal encounter table (as well as describing some of the critters) when a) there was one in the book which I’d forgotten about and b) using the rules we only encountered two creatures anyway.  Still, there’s more forest to traverse. My frustrations were that I managed to forget to deliver the Kfouzorr speech at their overnight campsite and I could probably have made more of Bannerji setting a trap or something beside a path to catch some food. Still, the (rather important to the larger plot) bit with Kfouzorr will work next time as well and may even be better for not being squeezed in.


It would appear Jonathan will join us for part XIII in May and we’ve already booked while the pub staff were keen to make amends and perhaps allow us the function room again.  If no one else books it with real money in the interim. In the meantime, I sent a note to players next day as I thanked them for playing and adding:


If you're looking at your news feeds on your comms in the moments you turn them on you can see the diplomats on Aramanx are working overtime, double time and even triple time.  Lots of shots of late night meetings up on the orbital station - considered neutral. The Renitzans are blaming vargr mercenaries for an attack on a bridge, the Senledi are blaming the same mercenaries for an attack on a governor's mansion (somehow *their* reports miss out the fact that it was a brigade hq), the Kforuzeng mercenaries are accusing the Senledi of housing military operations in civilian premises and saying they're only trying to locate two of their own for their own safety (pictures of Kfouzorr and Gvoudzon accompany this).  Somehow the vargr interviewed uses the word 'safety' with a straight snout. Bannerji is still reported as missing. In the chaos no one seems to have joined up the dots or even noticed you. Military buildups on all the borders (and there are many) are widely reported.


Not bad for a bunch of “newbie” players (two years experience doesn’t sound that new, 12 session of Traveller does) - surviving their first real combat, starting a ground war, and rescuing one of their own.


tc