Milieu Zero

So we had our first (zero?) session of my next TTRPG game this week. The plan was for another Traveller campaign, but I gave the players a couple of options for what we could do. One was set in the core, with the players working for various nobles doing deniable and not entirely legal operations. The other was also set in the core, but a thousand years earlier.

After some discussion, it looks like were doing a Milieu 0 campaign. The very first Traveller game I ever ran was actually a Milieu 0 one-shot for T4, back in the 90s. I haven’t visited that era since though. Milieu 0 is right back at the formation of the Third Imperium, with the players exploring “The Fringe” and (beyond that) “The Outback”, trying to bring new worlds into the fledgling Imperium through the promise of trade, threat of superior technology, or simply trickery and diplomacy.

Now that we’ve settled on what we’re doing, I need to do some planning to start filling in the details. Taking a look at the map for core, the worlds seem actually quite high tech, so I may tweak that a bit. Or just set things further out. I need to finished reading the Milieu 0 T4 book, and start coming up with some plot ideas to get them started. Once things are started, it will be up to them to decide where they want to go after that.

I don’t want it to be pure exploration though. I want there to be the opportunity to come back to places, have recurring NPCs, and consequences to decisions.

I’d also like to have a little bit more combat in this campaign, if only to try out how combat works in FoundryVTT. Speaking of which…

The next release of MgT2e (0.18) will be Foundry 13 only. I’ve started removing deprecated features, and begun to think about how to move everything to the new API.

I’ve also done a couple of introductory videos to show both players and referees how to set things up for their first game. For players:

And for the referee:

They are also linked to from the included documentation. As you may have noticed, I seem to have taken a liking to the ‘watercolours’ filter in GIMP for backgrounds. I think it helps move images which are just there for artistic colour into the background, where a high definition image would tend to draw attention to itself.

There aren’t any decent landscape Traveller images that I can really use though. Even for the official content, the art tends to be portrait, and there are very few pieces which lend themselves to a good scene background to use as a starter page. For my Milieu Zero campaign, I’m looking at Chris Foss, given that his art was used for many of the T4 books (though as much as I like Foss, the way T4 used it, it comes across as stock art).

Anyway, I have plans for more videos, I’ll need to start implementing the new vehicle rules when the Vehicle Update book is published (though it sounds like it could be really complicated to implement the combat side), and I want to take another look at automatically updating tokens with effects.