BBQ Chicken Wings

This session of Traveller Deepnight Revelation carries on from where things left off at the world of Eguyame. First though, I wanted a brief discussion about weapons and law levels in Travellers. I’m adding a legality level to items in Foundry, so that I can automatically determine what equipment a Traveller is carrying is legal or not on a world. It’s not exactly clear where all weapons fall, so we had a bit of a discussion about that. The main thing we decided was that handguns probably fall into the concealable weapons category.

Then it was back to the game. Since I didn’t have too much planned until they get to the Droyne colony at Draytsirv I was going to be relying on random events. The main questions for the players was whether to try and crash a small asteroid into the planet, and whether there was likely to be food on route. The first was quickly answered, and I allowed them to give a small rock in the asteroid belt a gentle nudge, putting it on an orbit which should intersect with the planet in about 9 years.

After some checking the planets on the starmap, it was decided that a small detour from the flight plan provided by the Droyne would be needed in order to increase the chance of a food resupply. They still had ~130 days of food, but this was something they were really careful about.

At the next world, there was food, but it was in the form of a cyanobacteria soup that filled the oceans. The world also had a thickish (2.5x Terra) atmosphere, and was quite hot. If it was an emergency, then they could resupply from here, but it wasn’t a preferred place to do so from. The ship’s food processors were also at this point not great at turning basic food stuffs into something people would want to eat. It would be edible and nutritious tasteless slop.

So onwards they went. At the next world, refuelling commenced at the gas giant. After filling up about a quarter of their tanks, there were some impacts on the hull. Nothing serious, but there was something solid in the clouds. The ship moved back up into space whilst they figured out what they’d found.

It turned out that there were lifeforms in the atmosphere, and the Deepnight had run into a flock of them. A little smaller than a person, they were winged gliding creatures with soft bones and a large beak. Removing the stains on the front of the ship, it was decided that they could be edible. This was an encounter I’d planned for earlier in the journey, but had dropped it since there were enough things happening at the time that it wasn’t needed.

So a mission was sent down to try and capture some. Rolling on the random “how did things go” table, I got a poor result and an Incident – they’d found something interesting. Since the gliders were eating something, I decided there was something else much lower in the depths.

So the Deepnight lost contact with the crew of the shuttle. They didn’t lose contact with the shuttle – it was still there, and flying, but the crew wasn’t responding. They managed to get remote control of the shuttle, and brought it back up – along with a external net (of now decompressed) flyers.

The crew were inside the ship – smiling and zoned out. Eventually they were brought around, and they said they’d been talking to something that made them very happy. It seemed to be a create down in the atmosphere that was telepathic. It could communicate with images and emotions, but could get across a lot of information.

So the team is sent down again, this time with a few more precautions. The creatures down below seemed to be large jellyfish-like creatures, with little concept of anything outside their world. They were suited to the high pressure depths, so couldn’t rise above the clouds. They had poetry, and philosophy, and liked to theorise about the world that they knew. They would get attacked and eaten by the flyers, but that was part of the cycle of life.

They were aware of things that came to visit sometimes. There had been things that weren’t as talkative as humans. Didn’t think in the same way. There were more of them recently compared to how many there had been before, but they had little concept of useful units of time.

When the crew came back, one of them seemed to have been greatly affected by the experience. Known for being a bit of a lazy deck hand, he now seemed willing to put a lot more effort into his work. He also started writing quite good poetry.

The evening before jumping away, the ship put together a big BBQ, eating the flyers that had been captured. There were enough for a party, but it wasn’t enough to really restock their supplies.

A couple more jumps on, and the Deepnight finds a world with proper fresh food for the ship to resupply at.