Command Crew

For this session of Traveller we focused on character creation. The group already has a crew for the far trader It’s A Sex Thing which will become one of the scouts for the Deepnight Revelation. That gives them the equivalent of an ‘away team’ to go on exploration missions. What we needed are characters to act as a command crew for the Deepnight Revelation itself, so that the players can have a say in the grand strategy of the mission.

In a previous session, when we only had half a group, we rolled up the Executive Officer (Kirkiimekki Kamarsukhar) and the Chief Engineering Officer (Siona McFranchester). This time we were rolling up the Chief Operations Officer and the Chief Mission Officer. Since we had all players present, the other two also rolled up a couple of extra characters as well – some low level crew for the mission.

It took about 3 hours to finish, and one of the players needed to drop out before the end and had us finish off their character. Once again, we switched between the standard events and those in D66 Compendium 2, depending on whichever seemed more interesting.

Many of the enemies, allies and so forth aren’t much use, since the PCs will be leaving them far behind – though in some cases it gives a reason for why they’re going on a long mission. It’s always possible that some of them will end up on the Deepnight itself though, since at least one of the rivals is shared between several characters and is a Navy Officer.

Several of the characters do have ships of their own – we have a couple of boats, as well as a (fully owned) yacht. Potentially they could go along with the ship, providing something other than just an identical set of scouts. A yacht isn’t a great ship in terms of practical performance, but it might be useful for diplomatic missions.

I might allow the players to customise their boats to some extent, to provide a bit more flexibility when performing missions.

I was hoping to get into kicking off the mission this session, but since we ran out of time that didn’t happen.

Now that I know which roles the characters are filling in though, I may start fleshing out a few of the other high ranking NPCs aboard the ship, so that there are good pool of people that can be called upon when needed. I should at least do the ship’s Captain and Mission Commander, so they will be the ones ultimately in charge.