Milieu Zero: The Beginning

This week, we had our first actual adventure session for my new Traveller RPG campaign set in the Milieu Zero time period. At five players, it’s a larger group than we’ve been used to for a while. I’m running this on FoundryVTT, using my own MgT2e system. So these posts will be partly about the campaign, and partly about how I’m running it using that system.

Unlike our previous Traveller game, there’s been a lot more interest in the details of items and equipment. Previously, we’ve tended to handwave it. Partly that was because we started on Roll20, which had only the barest support for equipment. When we moved over to Foundry, I didn’t have much of the equipment imported, so we didn’t bother much there either.

Now we have the full set of CSC equipment lists, so the shopping session last week resulted in a lot more fine detail than I’m used to. There has also been a lot more questions about what it’s possible to do with the rules, than our previous rather laid back approach.

Which is fine, because for this session I wanted to introduce the rule system and environment. T|hough they started with a Lab Ship, their first adventure is going to pick up that lab ship. They’ve been given the task by one of the Traveller’s university friends to fly a Subsidised Liner, the Imperfect Friend, to Sylea. Which is handy, because that’s where they need to go. On the way, they need to stop off at Kain, a small world with a population of 800. Though it was part of the Sylean Federation, it decided not to join the nascent Third Imperium. There’s a businessman there though who is hoping that with some advanced technology, he can persuade the world’s Council to change their minds. So the Travellers just need to deliver machinery and Fusion+ components to Jacob Rees.

The Travellers are:

• Dmitry Sokolov – ex marine
• Dr Agardur Durunarar – a scholar and medical doctor, who obtained the Lab Ship
• Ganimakkur Khikuriishmig – ex-navy and owner of a small craft
• Irian Kinamirun Repeauzuualo – noble diplomat (same player who played Zanobia in our previous campaign)
• Nashu Rashina – an entertainer turned journalist (same player who played Khadashi in our previous campaign). She has a large shoe collection.

I’ve got links all the main actors on the hot bar along the bottom of the screen, as well as macros for rolling 2D6 (1), D66 (2), opening the core rule book (8), running the skill request macro (9) and random name generator (0).

I started the game in media res. I tend to like doing this because it gets things moving quickly, forces players to roll dice and make decisions, rather than getting bogged down into questions about where they are and what they are doing. Their ship was entering the atmosphere of the world, and there was a large storm ahead. So I started making skill requests, which forced the players to decide who was in what role.

I had the skill checks pre-prepared in a journal, using my macros. I could just click each one, and it would put a button in the chat asking for someone to click it and make the skill check.

As an example, the first macro ‘Scan for communication’ was defined as:

[[/mgt2e req skill=electronics.comms cha=INT target=4 text="Scan for communications" success="You picked up the landing beacon" failure="You find no signals"]]{Scan for communications}

Nothing complicated, just a set of rolls so everyone got familiar with how the Foundry interface worked, how skills worked, and also an introduction to skill chains.

Kain is a tidally locked world, and they were heading into a heavy storm around the terminator region, which is where the only city and starport was located. They all succeeded their skills, and managed to bring their ship down in the middle of a raging rain/mud storm on a rocky promontory with the lightest of touch downs.

At this point I gave them a bit more information about the world and their mission here. They needed to find Jacob Rees and have him sign for their cargo. Shouldn’t be more than 30 minutes work.

I provided a journal handout which summarised what they knew, so they could reference it if they needed. it also had a link to the World, which included a list of known factions and information about the guy they were meeting. The advantage of running online is that handouts and sharing information becomes a lot easier. It reduces the need for players to try and remember everything or make notes.

It did occur to me that it might be useful to be able to have a simple inline NPC description, without needing a full NPC actor. Just a name, species, UPP and maybe short list of skills. For those NPCs which aren’t expected to get into combat. Maybe that’s something for me to work on later.

What I also experimented with, was giving a secret page for three of the players (which only they had permission to see), which had some extra info. The Doctor knew that there was a special type of animal that could be worth finding and selling to research labs. The Diplomat knew one of the Council members by way of parents at school, and hints that the Journalist might find the world a good source for an opinion or research piece that could be sold once back in ‘civilised’ space. I don’t want to do it for everyone each time, but maybe a side plot for two or three of the characters each time would be interesting.

At the starport, which was little more than some landing lights and a cargo container masquerading as an office, they met Norm who seemed to be keeping an eye on things. They also figured out that given the high winds, it was a good idea to make use of the provided chains to lock down the ship to stop it from blowing off the cliff edge.

Though it wasn’t strictly necessary, I did provide a map of the starport area – mostly so that I could demonstrate the scale of their ship. Though, I hadn’t prepared a proper scaled token, and got it wrong. So I’m going to need to retcon that next session (I assumed 256px square grid, rather than 100px, so it was 2.5 times too big).

There were some comments made by Norm that he had poor connectivity to the ‘city’ since the satcom network was limited, and hadn’t been updated for years. He’d sent a brief message on ahead to let people know that the Travellers were going in and looking for Jacob Reese.

It was a few hundred metres down to the city. It was far muddier off the rocky promontory, and the City was just a collection of converted cargo containers turned into habitats. They were brightly painted however. It was called a City, but with a population of about 500, it was little more than a tiny settlement.

The bar was the “Red Brick”, which was brightly lit up. Heading inside, it was crowded and warm, and the locals seemed welcoming. Jacob wasn’t around (of course he wasn’t, that would be too easy), but he was probably at his family house. In the mean time, the Travellers were able to get something to eat and drink, as well as talk to the locals.

I had a rumour table prepared, and after some quite good socialising rolls, they picked up pretty much all there was to find out here:

Why stay here?: Kain isn’t the nicest world, but it’s their world dammit. They were born here, they will live here, and they will die here. They don’t need outsiders coming in and expecting to profit from Kain’s riches without having grown up here.

Settlements: Most people live here in City One. There are others out in the wild lands, but nobody has a good idea of the total population. According to the extended genealogy maps, there’s maybe a couple of thousand people. Not sure whether all of them are still alive.

Social Life: The people here keep themselves entertained. There are plenty of card games, as well as various indoor ‘sports’. The really stupid do paragliding. Sitting around and telling stories is important. Once a week, there’s an imported film shown.

The Imperium: The Federation was useful, and helped the world a lot. The Imperium could be just as good, but the Council decided against it. Some of them have reasons to do it, since they make a nice income from the export taxes. Minister Ling could do something about that, but she hasn’t.

Family Life: Family life here is really important. It’s a hard life, but families need to stick together. Given the size of the population, pretty much everyone is family. There’s a genealogy map up on the wall showing who is related to whom, and therefore who is allowed to marry.

Technology: There is basic tech here. They have access to electronics, and know how to fix things. They just don’t have a good enough industrial base to be able to build things from scratch. They used to have lots of mining stations, but that was before the Fall.
The Federation provided some simple satellites, which provide planet wide comms and weather feeds Probably not the most advanced or secure systems, but it makes life easier. The off-world imports, especially medicine, definitely help those of us who struggle, but we could survive without it.

This was set up as a roll table, with ‘draw without replacement’ set, so they’d only get each rumour once. There were six rumours originally available, and they got all of them.

Doctor Durunarar was asked for a second opinion on someone’s medical condition (a side thing that could have gone somewhere, but I didn’t really follow up on that), and Nashu sat down to start interviewing people for her news piece. The genealogy chart was something that could be important, and Irian picked our her ‘friend’ from the tree.

From here, the plan was to go talk to Jacob. Gan and Nashu stayed, whilst the others went to find their contact.

His wife was home, but he wasn’t. She hadn’t heard from him for a while. There had been an argument between Jacob and one of the Ministers about 60 hours ago. Then he’d said he was heading off to one of the mining stations. She didn’t hear the entire conversation, and noted that there was someone else there as well who she didn’t recognise.

About twenty hours ago, she got a brief text from him saying they’d arrived, but that he didn’t like the look of things. Shortly afterwards, there were some texts from one of his employees saying he was heading out there and ‘tooling up. She hasn’t heard anything since.

Meanwhile, back at the bar, Nashu had picked up some extra information from his interviews:

Off-Worlders: There have been some off-world strangers here of late. They’ve come to the bar at times, and have seen an unsavoury sort. They seem to be doing work for Minister Joseph Kirunirim, Minister for Trade. They weren’t Syleans that’s for sure.

Scruffy Looking: There’s a couple of scruffy looking people here who are Outlanders. They don’t live in the city, but have their own place out in the Morning. There are aquifers they can get water from, and have their own mines. Export taxes are keeping them from really profiting from their land though.

The way I’d done this, was setting the roll table to be 8 items, but using a 1D6 for the roll. Then, I defined the following macro in my journal:

[[/mgt2e roll uuid=RollTable.MyYanJIOM9BMwlJR dice=1D6+2]]{Roll}

This allowed a table roll, but with a +2, so the journalist would have a chance of getting some extra information they wouldn’t get from casual conversations.

The Minister Jacob had been talking to had been Joseph. Anna Rees mentioned that they were friends with Minister Navu Ling, who was Minister for Law. So Nashu and Irian went to interview her. Though Ling was relatively rich, her house was much the same as most other people here. It was just slightly better decorated. It even had a big picture of her and her family up on the wall. It started as a friendly piece, but they ended up grilling her about why the world hadn’t joined the Imperium. Ling gave a good explanation, but Irian could tell that she didn’t believe it.

When asked about Jospeh and Jacob, she denied that she knew anything. Irian started questioning her, giving Nashu time to sit back and use her telepathy. She didn’t pick up much, but then one of her daughters came in, and Nashu got a flash of fear from her. Was something or someone threatening Ling’s daughters?

So, I think, the assumption at this point was that several of the Ministers had shares in the Export company, which was heavily taxing outgoing goods. This was putting a severe limitation on what was being exported, but it kept them rich. Opening up to trade, which joining the Imperium would require, would raise the level for the entire world, but they’d no longer be quite so much on top.

The Travellers had headed back to the ship to discuss all this (the ordering of all of this may be slightly wrong), and Gan managed to hack into the CommSat network which hadn’t had any security patches applied for decades. This allowed them to track down were Jacob and Joseph probably were. They were currently out of contact though – maybe some jamming was happening there? They also picked up a message from Minister Ling to Minister Kalinna Cartails. They didn’t see the content, just the record of the sending. Then Cartails sent a message to Joseph, but due to the jamming, it was stuck in a buffer, allowing them to read it (and then delete it).

The message was something along the lines of “Ling is being a good girl and doing what she’s told. Some off-worlders are possibly heading your way.”

The plan now was to head out and try and find Jacob. They could take the smallcraft to do that, which would be stealthier. It was a few thousand kilometres, but wouldn’t take them long to reach there.

And that seemed like a good place to end things for the night.

Overall, I think things went well. More players definitely meant more ideas floating around and more things to juggle for me as GM. It was both easier and harder than GMing for two players. Harder, because there’s more people to try and give the spotlight to. Easier, because I’m not having to drive things as much.

The players seemed interested in what was going on, and interested in the world background. As an introduction to Traveller, I wanted to start things small rather than stick them in a city of a billion people (leave that for when they get to Sylea).

I think I was able to get a few points across which will be important when they go out exploring beyond the edge of civilisation:

• This is a TL 4 (early 20th century) world, but it has some advanced technology such as satellite communications. It’s old and out of date because they can’t maintain it themselves, but technology like this which doesn’t require complex infrastructure is useful to such worlds. They may find low tech worlds with such things in place, or it will be the sort of thing to win over such worlds if offered.
• Trade can give big benefits to a world, but there will be factions against it. Find out which factions will benefit, which will lose out, and try to work with the former.
• Having access to high tech gadgets (in their case, good private comms) gives the Travellers a big advantage over lower tech locals.
• There’s lots of things to find out, and they probably won’t pick up on all of them. There were a couple of bits of information missed, but that’s fine. I don’t expect the Travellers to find out everything. Some things may remain a mystery.

I’m hoping that I didn’t overwhelm players with too much information. Some of them are more used to the Foundry interface than others, so some may have found it easier to follow the links from the journal pages to the world information etc. Hopefully it will become easier over time. I prefer to have the information structured like this though, since otherwise it’s an info dump that can be hard for players to remember and keep track of.

Next session should see them fly out into the “Day”, which will be a lot dryer and warmer for them. There may be an opportunity for some combat, but I don’t want to force anything. It’ll be interesting to see what the players end up doing, since there’s also a lot of things that they could do which they don’t have to do.