Travellers

It was our first character generation session for my new Milieu Zero Traveller campaign, which also doubled as a chance to try out my character generation workflow for Foundry. I’ve done it for myself, but never with a group of players before, so it was a good stress test.

Firstly, I did find a number of simple bugs in the careers which need fixing, which I’ll handle over the weekend. Other than that, it seemed to go okay. Having a character sheet dedicated to character generation might help a lot though. Being able to view skills, rolling of characteristics, and lists of career terms and relationships all on one page would probably make things easier.

For a group though who mostly haven’t played Traveller before though, it went reasonably well. It took us about 3½ hours for five players to work through the process, and we have a group of Travellers who all have connections to each other. We may need to iron out some rough edges, but I think it’s mostly done.

We don’t have quite the group of characters that I was assuming, but that’s fine.

• A Star Marine who started at the Military Academy, did a couple of terms as a Marine, then ended up as a Drifter for his last term.
• Someone from a Psionic Community, who spent a couple of terms as an “Entertainer” known for her lack of acting skills who then ended up as a journalist. In the Milieu Zero campaign, psionics isn’t yet outlawed.
• A renowned Doctor who was also notable for bravery in strenuous conditions (probably during a Pirate action)
• A university graduate who joined the Navy and became a pilot.
• A noble diplomat with a high social class and a family who she will probably be leaving behind.

I did allow the pre-careers from the Companion, hence we have a Psion whose only Psi skill is Telepathy (she failed on all the others). There was some confusion over what was meant by the Navy career. The player was assuming this covered non-military naval backgrounds, which is actually the Merchant career. This wasn’t too much of a problem though, and he got the skills he wanted.

The Doctor ended up with a Scout ship, and our Pilot has a private vehicle. With five players, the Scout ship is going to be a bit cramped, but that’s why you have double bunks in the staterooms.

My next plan is to run a short introductory scenario before moving onto the campaign proper. I’ll need to tweak things a bit to make it suitable for all the characters, but the idea is to introduce people to the rules and give them a chance to figure out who their characters are. I know that it often takes me a few sessions to ‘find’ my character after creating it.

For the final set of skill packages, I’m going to allow them to do that after this introductory scenario. That way they can figure out what skills they are missing, and decide on what they need.

I’ll keep this post short, and add a follow up later on what my plans are for the campaign and discuss how I’m preparing things in Foundry.