Iirkkhu

It’s been a few weeks since our last session of Traveller, due to me being away on holiday chasing solar eclipses and looking at caves. I’d also managed to bring back something from Spain, which had knocked me out for most of the preceding week, and I wasn’t feeling great for running this session. But I wanted to get back into things.

One of our players had decided to drop out over the break, so Dr Agardur Durunarar will become an NPC. We still have four players though. Five players was a bit on the large side, especially for a game like Traveller which is being run virtually. It can be easier for players to get left out when on virtual. The frequent initiative cycles you get in games like D&D (or other high-combat games) can also make larger group sizes more manageable, since it forces everyone to get a turn.

Before the game started though, I was half expecting one or two players to drop, so was willing to start with five and see where things ended up.

In our previous session, the Travellers had finished up most loose ends at the water world, and apart from a few final trade bits to complete, were ready to Jump to their next destination which was Iirkkhu.

The previous few worlds have had relatively clear objectives. For Iirkkhu, the player objectives are deliberately less clear. This is meant to be more of a sandbox world, where the Travellers have some broad objectives, but not much guidance on how they might achieve them.

Iirkkhu is a TL 5 world which has no official government. It could be classed as a Balkanised world, since it has a few small proto-government entities, but isn’t quite there yet. The three main factions are:

Landing – the main starport. It’s a town with a population of about 30,000, run by a mayor who is trying to expand the protection of the town to cover surrounding rural settlements. They have problems from bandit raiders in the south who are causing trouble.

Smoke City – a heavily industrialised settlement further north. They too have bandit problems of their own, and are building up a military. They aren’t necessarily friendly with Landing, but with 4,000km and a mountain range between them, they aren’t going to be at war any time soon.

Rail Barons – what civilisation there is here is held together by a network of rail lines that link together all the major settlements. The train system is owned by the Rail Barons, who also make a nice profit off charging for transportation of everything.

Then there are bandit groups, off-world mercenaries, and way off from civilised lands the ‘Horse Lords’, who are considered barbarians not worth talking to by the urban settlements. The entire world population is recorded at 11 million, so a very lightly populated world. It used to be a much more densely populated world before the Long Night, but various things means the population and technology is much reduced from what it used to be.

There are a number of ships in orbit here – mostly small traders. There is one Mercenary Cruiser, which isn’t broadcasting a transpoder. An opportunity for me to describe the different transponder options to the players again.

Their ship was contacted by the starport, and they were given directions for landing and also the landing beacon frequency. This wasn’t an Imperium starport, and it wasn’t managed by the Starport Authority. The Travellers were warned about other landing beacons which may try to encourage them to land elsewhere – which might not be an entirely safe thing to do. They were assured that the port at Landing was the one safe place for them to land.

Shortly thereafter, they were contacted by Smoke City, who told them that landing at their site was a safe option. The Travellers decided to head to Landing, and successfully managed to not get confused by multiple fake landing beacons. There was some discussion about the law level 0 issue of the world, and what weapons everyone would take along. This world was being viewed as potentially dangerous and unsafe, which wasn’t an entirely unfair characterisation of it.

After landing, down at the star town, Nashu chatted up one of the port staff and agreed to meet him in at the Litho Break bar later. There was also The Gentlemens’ Pedigree, which was a bit more up-market. The Red Lantern was also mentioned as a brothel. Nashu was looking for dancing and music though, so the Litho Break was mentioned as a good place to go.

It wasn’t a bad bar. At least it was mostly clean and had a good selection of beers. It was quite busy, had loud music playing and a mostly naked woman was showing off her athletic prowess on a pole near the back of the room.

Gan found some traders to talk to, and Nashu started getting hit on. The others talked trade and rumours with people to find out what was going on here.

Over the next few hours they manage to pick up some rumours

Smoke City is the second largest city on the planet, and is also as advanced as Landing. They are building up their military, and are probably going to make a move at some point to take control of Landing.

The Bandits are actually semi-regular armed forces trying to stabilise the region. Most of the attacks have come from Landing or the Barons, and the so-called Bandits are just trying to maintain independence. Most are farmers or semi-rural folk just trying to make a living.

There’s money to be made if you’re a merc. The Rail Barons pay for people to ride their trains and keep them safe, Landing pays to keep the Bandits out of their territory, and Smoke City does to. Smoke City is most warlike outside of Bandit country, and is building up an army. They claim they want one world government, and it should be them. Landing disagrees.

The leader of the bandits is General Betty Shaw. She is a ferocious psychopath who has brought all the bandit groups together under her control. They used to be disorganised ruffians, now they are an army.

I’m using the roll tables quite heavily for recording and displaying rumours to the players. I have a macro (part of the core MgT2e system) which can be used to set different roll modifiers for a table. So with a click from within a journal, I can use a single table to get a different distribution of results depending on where the rumours are being sourced from. e.g.:

[[/mgt2e roll dice="1D6+3" uuid=RollTable.xxxx]]{Good Rumours}

I’ve also found that I need to often copy NPC names and other titbits of information into the chat, so I’m looking at ways of doing that. Maybe I want an item type of “Piece of Data”, which might be an email, database record or something similar. Then I can give them to players, insert them into journals or output them to the chat. I’ll need to consider a good look and feel for this. Not sure if there’s a better way of doing it. I mean, really it’s a job for a journal entry, but you can’t embed a journal into another journal as a snippet. And I don’t think you can add them to an actor sheet.

At this point, a group of well armed mercenaries came in. Dmitri recognised one of them as an old friend from the academy, and they got to talking. He had come in on the Mercenary Cruiser Gunboat Diplomacy. There were two dozen of them, looking for work on the world. There were multiple options, the hope was for something low risk that paid well.

This was me finding a way to sneak in one of the character’s background relationships.

Nashu headed off with her friend from the starport, and the rest of the group went to find a hotel. There instructions from their Patron were relatively clear. Find out what the latest information was on the world factions, and see which ones were best for the Imperium to support. Also, where is everyone getting their weapons from?

How to do this was going to be the question, and the players had a list of actions for next session:

• Try and meet with the city Mayor
• Find out where the weapons are coming from
• Meeting with Smoke City
• What are the agendas of the different factions?
• What about the bandits? Are they worth talking to?

It hadn’t been a hugely long session, but I was knackered by this point so it was a good time to call it a night.