Shaaak

The Travellers in our Milieu Zero campaign are close to being ready to leaving Sylea and heading off on their shakedown cruise. There is some final shopping and a chance to pick up some final trade goods, and then they make the one parsec jump to the system of Shaaak.

So that everyone is aware of what happens during a jump, we make rolls for Astrogation and Engineering. Often I skip these, but I want to go through things step by step for the first few times so that the players are aware of what’s being skipped.

Their rolls are good, and they set their destination as one of the gas giants at Shaaak. They have a week to decide which rooms they each want to take about the ship, and to do some study. A week later, they come out of jump near to the gas giant on 056-000.

At the Gas Giant, I make a random encounter check and there is a police patrol craft there. Just a 50t heavy fighter, who checks their credentials but otherwise leaves them alone. There is some discussion about piracy – and a plan is made to run a virtual combat simulation maybe next week so everyone gets a chance to see how ship combat works without risking the entire ship.

It’d be good for me as well, since space combat is something I haven’t done much of in Traveller, so knowing what they can handle, or can’t handle, will provide some interesting data points.

They can’t refuel from the gas giant directly with their lab ship, so they send down their pinnace Nameless to skim for fuel. It takes a couple of flights to pick up enough fuel to give them enough fuel to be able to make a Jump 2. Not quite full tanks, but enough.

Then it’s a long flight to the planet, and they understand a bit more about why traders are often willing to spend money to buy fuel rather than refuel for free.

Several days later, they reach the main world. The Big S is put in orbit around the planet, and the pinnace is used to fly across to the station so that they don’t have to pay full docking fees. Even though they are being paid Cr400,000/month, money is still tight.

Their first contact is Under Minister of sanitation Ixial Lombotta. He is expecting delivery of some machine parts and Fusion+ units. They are met though by his assistant, Zoop, a young woman who helps them with the paperwork, and finds them some rooms at a high port hotel. She has some cybernetic implants to aid her in her job, including a wafer jack. Dr Durunarar notices that she seems to have a bit of an infection around one of the implants, and offers to take a look.

They also need to find Tamas Shid, a mechanic who has previously (by another team) been identified as willing to sell out her world for a few extra Imperial Credits. Previously, I put a lot of my notes into Google Docs, but this time around I’m almost entirely putting things in Foundry. One thing I realised that I could do with was a lightweight way of recording NPCs. I don’t always want a full NPC actor to be created in Foundry, I just want something in the journal to easily record basic stats and skills for my own use. I don’t expect them to get into combat or anything like that.

So in a recent MgT2e release, I added a simple macro that allows you to define UPPs for a character inline within the journal. The result is something like this:

The stat block is as simple as [[/upp upp=687985 skills=”carouse 0,…”]]{Tamas Shid} and you can set other properties such as gender, species, profession etc. Skills can be rolled by clicking on them, but it’s a simple template I can use for my own notes. For now, it doesn’t support images – the portrait is just a standard inline portrait.

I’m finding it quite useful to sketch out NPCs, and keeping the data within the journal. I am thinking of adding a “turn this into a full NPC” button.

Zoop and Tamas were both added as helpful NPCs who can maybe provide information about the world, and ease some of the things the Traveller might end up having to do.

Tamas was met at a bar, and apart from Gan getting drunk, all went well. They talked about the various technologies that Shaaak had, and it’s limitations. Tamas was also keen to see the Traveller’s ship.

Meeting with their third contact, Minister Kol Obin, was a bit harder. He had also been identified as someone who might be willing to do a deal with the Imperium, but he was much higher rank, and down on the planet. Irian was giving the task of contacting him, but was rebuffed by his secretary since “it wouldn’t do to be seen mingling with off-worlders”, plus he was busy at conferences and things.

A short while later, Irian got some email spam about a Science and Energy conference that was going on over the next few days. She quickly realised that possible Minister Obin didn’t want an official meeting, but if they were to happen to bump into each other at a big conference, then they could have an unofficial and off the record conversation.

Zoop came in handy here. She had already offered to get people passes to head down to a Zoo, and arranging some tickets for the conference for Irian and Gan should be easy.

What I had in mind for the world, with it’s three billion population and civil service bureaucracy, was very Soviet-like. Architecture was functional, everyone had their place in a heavily regulated ranking system, and things were falling apart despite the world being at TL 9. They could make their own tech, but their factories, power grid and general technological capability relied on a lot of old tech that they no longer had the capability to repair.

As an aside, I’ve just finished re-reading The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov, and I’ve found them to provide some good ideas for the sort of worlds that the Travellers will be encountering. So this world has domed settlements (the very thin atmosphere is a good reason for this), and everyone has a social rank which they are all fighting between themselves to increase in order to obtain better living conditions.

So the Travellers head down to the planet’s surface, some to go to the Zoo, others to head to a science conference. They do happen to ‘just bump into’ Minister Kol Obin, and have a private conversation. He is minister for Power, and has been pushing for the world to buy in Imperium technology rather than rely on home grown systems. He’s currently up against a lot of resistance.

If something were to happen to a local power station, then it would help prove his point. If he could step in with a quick solution, that would greatly help his political position, and harm that of his enemies in the Ministry.

So, basically, the Travellers are being asked to subotage a locally built fusion plant, which is mostly being used to power a big data centre. The Minister tells the Travellers that the data centre is being used to track citizens who are effectively in debt bondage and being treated as little more than slaves. This appeals to the Noble’s feelings towards slavery. A couple of the Travellers seem keen on the idea of explosions as well.

It seems a good point to end things, to give the players a chance to decide whether they want to do this. It has risks and may hurt people. It may also advance the causes of the Imperium if pulled off correctly.

I wanted to give them an opportunity to do something dodgy, partly to give the chance for a bit of action, partly to see whether they wanted to do this sort of thing. If they do, it provides more options in the future about how they approach worlds. If not, I know not to waste too much time on planning such scenarios.

My thought is that this could be done with subtlety. They don’t need to blow things up, just get foreign material into the water cooling system or something which will force a shutdown. No big explosion. It’s not a fission plant. But they might want to do something that involves more special effects. What they do will be up to them.