MTU – 1105-001 – In the Beginning…
Tonight we managed to have our first online session of Traveller.
[We’re using Mongoose v2 because….well…even though the PDFs take ages to load, they’re nicely done. But I kinda half use everything interchangeably. As someone who used to play White Dwarf CoC adventures using Golden Heroes, fudging the odd rule is second nature.
We have pretty much every sourcebook for all of the versions of Traveller. We also have the Cepheus rules, and I’m using some elements of the adventure HOT ZONE by Zozer Games (which I got from DriveThruRPG).]
The players:
Deph – a noble/diplomat by career
Maui – a pilot and merchant rogue
Cleon – the grizzled ex marine
The players start off in an emergency ablative lifepod with three cryopods being jettisoned from a Megafreighter while they were en route to Bellerophon (one to act as muscle for an activist group, one on holiday, one looking for work).
Rather than a bountiful water world, they find themselves on an arid, low pressure rocky world, tidally locked to it’s star. And it’s warm – they work out they’re right on the edge of the goldilocks zone and they have to improvise fast. The marine scopes out more wreckage from the freighter and sets off – discovering three more ablat-pods and a cargo-pod. The latter contains only pirated contraband (designer knock offs and crappy low end tablet computers), expensive lumber and possibly jacked human body parts in their own little freezer. While Deph thinks about using the freezer to power an air conditioning unit, they notice that one of the pods is malfunctioning, one is fine and the third seems to contain only red soup. They set about helping the person in the malfunctioning pod, but can’t wake her. They work out they have about 50 days of minimal rations – which means 10 days between 5 of them. Not much.
Maui also figures out this is a deadworld. Little or no value, possibly not even on charted routes with a small dim red drawn star – but this planet is horribly close to it.
Meanwhile, Cleon has spotted more wreckage and discovered some metallic-looking crab creatures scavenging the metal from the crash site. After pinging one of them with his gauss rifle, he figures that he’s just burning ammo and a different tactic is required. He calls the others over (which takes a long time due to the low oxygen content in the air) and while Cleon scales the megafreighter infrastructure, Deph and Maui try to sneak past the crabs. Deph gets caught on some ragged metal and the two do their best to avoid a brace of silver crabs looking for a pink and helpless meal. They make their way through the superstructure of the ruined freighter musing that they could probably get the manoeuvre drives working but that jump drive is toasted. Meanwhile Cleon has gotten himself into the upper shuttle bay and found that the craft has a classic pinnace in the shuttle bay. As the silver crabs begin to close in on Deph and Maui, Cleon gets the pinnace airborne and hovers above the ruined bridge, allowing the two to scramble aboard…..just after they loot the staterooms and grab a download from the flight recorder.
Let’s see why this freighter crashed….and how the hell will they get off this hellhole…
