Museum of Nirinirk
The Traveller‘s work at the world of Medishvlaas is pretty much wrapped up, so it’s time to move on to their next destination of Nirinirk. It’s a two parsec jump, and they’ve hired some pilots and astrogators to fly the two ships they appropriated a couple of sessions ago.
Most of the pirates will be handed over to the government of Ket down on the world, though the pirate captain Vera will be taken back to the Imperium to face – whatever it is she will end up facing. Their job at Nirinirk will be to look for any pirate activity, though according to Vera there won’t be much there.
The jump goes without incident, and they are the only ships at Nirinirk when they arrive. Within a few hours all of their ships have arrive from jump, and they can begin refuelling operations. Not wishing to risk the two badly damaged ships in the atmosphere, they refuel them all using Nameless to fetch water from the oceans and bring it up to orbit.
Nirinirk itself has an official population of about 5,000. It’s a garden world, full of radioactive cities and the collapsed remains of a civilisation that destroyed itself just over a century ago. The background radiation levels are still high, though not so high that a vaccsuit is absolutely necessary. In most places, it’s actually quite safe. Still a risk of long term health effects for people living there, but for spending a few days or weeks, it’s okay.
The Travellers drop off some freight, which seems to be mostly medical supplies for the Sisterhood of the Flame, a local semi-religious order that provides medical care to the people. They mostly rely on charity from off-worlders for their supplies.
There is another ship landed at the main (E class) starport, a trader belonging to Seldonna Corp, a corporation that provides aid to Nirinirk at vastly inflated prices.
Nashu does a human interest piece on the Sisterhood, and Gan, Dmitry and their new crew member Nya visit the local bar to get some information. As well as getting drunk, they manage to get some information.
There might be pirates here – but they aren’t common, and they keep out of everyone’s way. There’s very little trade here, so it’s not a great target for pirates, plus the only other world Nirinirk could be a trade route to has an even smaller population and even less trade. So from that perspective, Nirinirk doesn’t have much of a problem.
There is a steady stream of off-worlders who are coming here though. Some are possibly outlaws – those running from either the authorities or possibly just an unfortunate past, who want somewhere to live where they won’t be hassled. The locals welcome these immigrants, since as long as they don’t cause trouble, they provide much needed skills. With such a small native population, the world really needs a lot more people to make the civilisation really viable.
Before they leave, the Travellers decide to visit one of the nearby cities. They are told to avoid going into the city itself, but flying around it should be fine. Though the radiation levels have dropped significantly in most places, there are still radioactive hotspots in the city ruins.
Using their air/raft, they fly above the city. It probably had a population of a million or so a century ago, before the bombs fell. Given that there are lots of cities like this, the world population must have been in the hundreds of millions at least. Which implies a massive human die off to only have a few thousand now. Possibly some people left, but many of them would have died through secondary effects over the decades following the war. Part of it may have been social – for several decades after the war, very few people were having children. With the arrival of the Imperium, people are now getting their hopes up and trying to repopulate.
That’s not something I really thought about before the session. I hadn’t thought about what ruins would be left behind until the players said they wanted to go visit them. Coming up with stuff on the fly is fine, but the reason I normally like to do preparation is getting all the details joining together. It may have been interesting to have had lots of young children at the starport, a sign that the people here were starting to see a positive future.
But anyway… the Travellers take pictures of the ruins. There were skeletons of tower blocks standing over the overgrown roads and smaller buildings. Troops of monkey-like animals were living in the heights of some of the taller buildings. They wanted to find a bank, and did manage to do so, but decided not to go inside.
Then they went looking for a museum, and having found one, decided to raid it. Dmitry found some antique laser rifles still in a display cabinet. Relics of the First Imperium, they were non-functioning, but still in visible good condition and worth something to collectors.
Irian found a combat vacc-suit with a fancy cutlass, again belonging to a First Imperium noble. Gan found a set of a dozen small statues representing the world’s pantheon of gods. Mostly valuable as art pieces, since outside of Nirinirk few people would be interested in them as historical artifacts.
Whilst loading things into Nameless, they are accosted by a Pseudosaur – a carnivorous hunting common on a number of worlds. It had detected the scent of something possibly edible, and was on the prowl. Fortunately it had announced it’s presence a few minutes ago with a roar, so the Travellers were not surprised. Something that came out of this was that the combat options for vehicles need to be more intuitive. Something to think about as I’m reworking the vehicle sheets for FoundryVTT. There is fancy stuff that they do if you have the right tokens selected and targetted, but nothing to push players to do the right thing to make use of them.
As it came into the museum grounds, Dmitri and Irian shot at it with their weapons. Dmitri using the heavy machine gun that Gan had recently mounted on his air/raft, and Irian with a sniper rifle. It quickly decided that it didn’t like this, and ran back out into the forested streets.
It was soon time for the Travellers to leave for Sylea. I had at some point during the session remembered that one of their ships was Free Trader, so only had Jump-1. So technically it would be hopping a lot slower than the other two ships. I’d forgotten for the first jump though, and decided it wasn’t worth it to retcon things, so just allowed everyone to Jump direct to Sylea without mentioning it.
On day 158 of year zero of the Third Imperium the Travellers arrive back at Sylea. There is some talk about what money they will get for the ship salvage, but that’s something we can discuss in detail next session.
A question that was raised by a player at the start of the session was about what the aim of the campaign was. In many TTRPGs, there’s always a goal of money, experience, relationships or something. Since this campaign is jumping around a lot, and money isn’t really an objective during the campaign, what’s the goal?
It’s a good question, and one of the concerns I had with doing another exploration campaign (but all the players voted for this over the other options). The end goal is to get some trade deals agreed, which the Travellers will get a share of – but only once the campaign is over. During the campaign, money isn’t really a goal, since there will be nowhere to spend it out on the frontiers. Nobody will be using Imperium Credits.
Traveller is slow at giving experience. Relationships will be tricky because the Travellers probably won’t be staying in one place long enough to really meet up with NPCs. They could choose to, but the assumption is that they will be moving around.
One thing I had wanted to do once everyone gets back to Sylea, is to have the conversation about whether everyone wants to continue the campaign now the introduction is over, and make sure everyone is happy about how things are going and what they will be doing. So the question has come at a good point.
Players will need to ensure that their Characters have something that they are trying to strive for, rather than just random planet of the week. It’s a big problem I had with the Deepnight Revelation campaign. The solution I (too late) came up with was that the ship (a 75,000t heavy cruiser) had a big enough population to have stories come out of the ship’s crew itself. That solution won’t work so easily aboard a 400t Lab Ship.
So that’s something for us to discuss in detail next session.
