New Year, New Mission

Something I forgot to mention in my writeup of the previous session of Traveller was that one of the NPCs had made an announcement. Madeleine, who had been pretty much single handily responsible for the profit they had been making from trade was going to leave them. She had joined the crew in order to see new worlds and meet different people, and though the relationship she had with Kadashi was good, being stuck on the same ship with the same crew for 20 years wasn’t something she found appealing, so she’d leave them before they joined the Deepnight Revelation mission.

Though Madeleine is probably the most fleshed out of the NPCs, it really did seem the right thing for her to want to do, and I didn’t want the NPCs just doing things because they were tagging along with the PCs for no other reason than that they were PCs.

We actually had all the players back this session, so there was a bit of a recap on the previous briefing. I also decided it was time to give out some XP, so everyone got 2 xp to spend.

1106-359

By the time they’d finished the various briefings, and their ship the It’s A Sex Thing had its modifications completed, it was getting towards the end of the year and they needed to head to Abalask to meet up with the fuel tanker and prepare for their trip to the nebula.

I have updated the ship model, to include a second laser turret, the doors to the cargo hold (since I needed to know where to put the anti-personnel guns) and some anti-personnel guns beside the doors.

They also had a chance to meet with the crew of the I Mean It This Time, the scout ship that was going with them into the nebula. Most of the Sex Thing crew were recognised from the holo-series that they’d starred in some months back.

From here, I’d expected them to jump to the middle of nowhere, and from there to Abalesk, but they instead decided to go via Hannrii, a somewhat out of the way world with an E class starport. Since I’ve recently generated full system maps for all the worlds of Gushemege sector, I had something prepared.

The world of Hannrii II is a small world destined die within the next few hundred million years as it loses its atmosphere and seas to the cold vacuum of space. Single celled life forms known as Prokaryotes are the dominant type of life on Hannrii II. They generally cluster near the surface of the seas, seeking sunlight and other nutrients available. The winds on Hannrii II can be powerful, whipping up huge dust storms that last for days.

Auto-generated description of Hannrii

So they got to celebrate the new year of 1107 as they came out of jump, and began the long trip into the main world which sat well within the jump mask of the star. Now that I have systems generated with WorldGen, I can bring up star system maps and show where planets are on a specific date, which might turn out to be useful.

The starport was very much a self-surface affair next to one of the seas, with a couple of concrete landing pads mostly covered with dust and sand, an empty building with an old coffee machine in it, and a refuelling station, all bathed in the reddish light of the local star. There was a small town a few kilometres along the coast, and an hour or so after they’d landed, a small bus turned up offering them a lift into town where they could sample the local wares.

The town was rustic, though provided hearty meals of a mix of imported products and locally grown fresh vegetables from their greenhouses. It’s not a place where exciting things happen, and Kadashi was unable to find any artwork here that was worth buying.

It was around this point that someone pointed out that the physicist Dr Nekunka looked a bit like Gaius Baltar, an observation which has probably permanently set the personality of the NPC. So he was getting friendly with the local women, and talking about how great he was (but that latter point was already a personality trait). Given that these NPCs will be part of the Deepnight crew, it may not be a good thing that they have a Baltar-personality type with them.

1107-004

A day later they leave Hannrii, and head into the outer system and making a jump to Abalesk. Abalesk is a similar world – a small, mostly desert planet with an even thinner atmosphere, and is again deep within the jump mask of it’s star. There is a navy base here, and a class A starport.

They meet up with the Endurance class tanker Clean Up Your Own Mess, and after there is some final planning, they head off towards the Anundarluu nebula on 1107-013. It’s a short trip out away from the star, then a 2 parsec jump to the middle of nowhere, refuelling from the tanker. A second 2 parsec jump takes them to staging point alpha just outside the nebula.

They refuel from the tanker a second time, and on 1107-029 are ready to head inside and start exploring the comet which was the source of the infection for the Deepnight Endeavour.