Inexperienced GM here. I've played a few Mongoose Traveller games before, and it is by far my favorite system. I'm going to be running a small game for two friends, and to build motivation, I wanted to find some fellow TravAnons to discuss this glorious game with.
Tell me about your favorite Traveller stories, characters, and settings! Homebrew shit is welcome and encouraged.
I'm probably going to be basing our game in the fringes of the Third Imperium. I prefer gritty, near future sci-fi, so I don't generally like Tech Level 12 and up. But it seems strange that there could be such a huge tech level disparity between neighbor worlds, despite the near-universal presence of Imperial influence. How do such things come to pass, and how can I effectively model them in my game?
Posting psy phi
>>43854671
>How do such things come to pass
Lots of ways. Religious strictures, wars, disasters.
The big one is that that you can't manufacture stuff without the right infrastructure. Devices need parts need components need tools need alloys need chemicals, on down in a massive branching tree of dependencies. And all of that needs people who can handle each step.
Lack any of those and you can't make that particular thing, and probably a whole host of other things. If your population's small, or certain chemicals are rare on your planet, or your tech base hasn't been built up enough, or anything, then you'll be unable to build, nor likely repair that tech.
You can still import it from off world, but that's a big cost, and trying to rely on offworld imports for a specific tech worldwide will eat a huge amount of your economy, so it's best to use locally produced (lower tech) stuff for everyday use.
>>43854713
Ever since that game whenever I see or hear someone randomly sneeze out of the blue I start to get paranoid.
I guess I should be glad that I only played it as an adult then when it first came out.
>>43854671
>Tell me about your favorite Traveller stories, characters, and settings!
I made one really insane character completely by accident.
I was originally going to make a Free Trader sort who knew how to barter and run the ship since no one else had done that and just shore up my combat skills with the after-creation grabs.
Unfortunately I failed my qualification roll so I went into the Draft instead and got into the Marines as a Ground Assault trooper.
His career in the Marines was INSANE, getting some pretty crazy rolls during combat actions and eventually ending his career on a Starburst for Extreme Heroism and two Medals for Conspicuous Gallantry (the equivalent of having two Silver Stars and a Congressional Medal of Honor) thanks to incredibly lucky rolls and ended up with a Social stat of 14 despite not being ennobled in the setting, basically he was just a famous war hero.
Finally he left the Marines and became a Free Trader like he originally wanted before the Draft and is the majority shareholder on the spaceship the crew Travels on and now makes his living as a regular guy jumping from world to world, weighed down by the baggage of a stellar war record he never really wanted in the first place.
>>43855321
That's pretty awesome. I made a similar character the other night. Went total random, 2d6 stats assign in order. Ended up with the most underwhelming example of a human who could only barely qualify for Citizen: Corporate. Well, he ended up doing so insanely well that the local branch exploded in profitability, his bosses love him, and he was recruited as an Agent into the corp's extraplanetary affairs. Now he knows JuJitsu, leads a small corporate strike vessel, and is a bizarrely competent cyber infiltrator and investigator.
>>43855490
I just like the idea that my character was a dude who couldn't pass his entry exams after collage and so joined up to get a job and then became Commander Shepard on accident before retiring so he could just go do that job he originally wanted before all that other shit went down.
>>43855149
Interesting! Thanks for the explanation. I'm still wrapping my head around the World Builder in the back of the Mongoose Trav core book. I tried to go full random, but I've realized it's going to be more of a guideline than anything. I'm just arbitrarily establishing stellar clusters linked by tenuous Jump lanes and tweaking the worlds so their trade makes some kind of sense. Any tips or experience with designing settings on that scale?
>>43854671
I've been running Mongoose Traveller for a while now. Between the spoiled Dilletante, the idiot Artist, and the Merchant Marine as the only character worth a shit the game became Futurama in the first session.Just as planned
>>43855570
Requesting permission to totally steal this character for my game. I need interesting NPCs for patrons and rivals, and this guy totally fits the bill.
Also working on a small and very professional mercenary band of Vargr. They used to be Imperial Marines, but were put on trial for war crimes committed by the other side. Facing execution, they escaped and hire themselves out to whoever can afford them. If you have a problem, and no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hireStar Wolf
>>43855626
My group spent our first four sessions shitting around digging our own grave. Then we realized we shouldn't have any power. We unanimously elected the only competent member of our team as Captain because we couldn't be bothered with the responsibility of decision making. Now we're a halfway successful merchant/mercenary crew who all fucking hate each other and routinely make poor choices given any latitude or unsupervised time, but at the end of the day we're all bound by our love for our Fearless Leader.
Welcome to the frontier, we make it weird.
I'm particularly fond of the stress rules in the Scout book, and I'll probably be making a game about sci-fi horror, so it makes sense to include it. But I don't like that it bases off of Endurance. I'm considering giving everyone the Psi characteristic whether they're a psionic or not, and using it for the Stress tests. Mental discipline and control equating to greater command of fear and stress makes sense, and it doesn't turn Endurance into an uber-stat.
Does anyone here use the Scout rules for Stress? Is this a reasonable homebrew alteration? Or do they just slow the game down too much?
>>43855712
>Requesting permission to totally steal this character for my game.
Go right ahead!
His name was Owen Corso, because I wanted a really boring average-dude first name and a last name that sounded generically scifi (I've seen like, four fictional scifi Corsos).
Basically he's the space version of "John Smith", and that was the joke; he was actually a fairly average guy who got lost on the way to college and accidentally a War Hero.
>>43854671
In my Traveller game the party managed to get a job of transporting two "useless celebrities" to the neighboring subsector. The twist was that the passengers were fairly obviously Solomani agitators and were under the impression that they were heading out to hold a speech at a genetics conference at their destination. The party's orders from the government they were working for were to deliver them to an Imperial dreadnought instead of the starport at their destination.
Unfortunately, the party decided to make the actively un-diplomatic ex-navy lieutenant read their instructions. She could not make heads or tails of the flowery and vague language used.
There were a handful of shady incidents during the trip. The party didn't really figure out what was going on since they assumed the agents were trying to send information, when in fact they were receiving instructions to prepare for extraction.
The rescue plan springs into action a few systems later as the party receive a distress signal. After bickering for a while they decide to go and help. The scout ship crew tries to stall the repairs. Meanwhile one of the celebrities sneaks in to the cargo hold to activate their Plan B: a battle dress wearing Jump Trooper in cold sleep, hidden away in a secret compartment of their luggage vault.
One of the party members sees one of their passengers, who they were paid to escort to a meeting, sees him approaching his own luggage during a "situation". He immediately opens fire and their escort target is killed on spot. Two remaining members of the party hear the shot and immediately start wrestling with their second passenger. Due to lucky rolls the passenger manages to not lose for a three rounds. The pilot reaches the scene of the wrestling and immediately blows their last passengers brains out with a gauss pistol.
When sent to escort two celebrities a handful of jumps away the party ultimately ends up delivering a corpse and bits of skull.
>>43854671
>But it seems strange that there could be such a huge tech level disparity between neighbor worlds, despite the near-universal presence of Imperial influence.
Read Tech Level within the Imperium as "How much can we do locally" instead of "How much do we know". The planets that have paid the price to build the infrastructure will have higher TL than the ones who just buy stuff from the once-a-month trader.
>>43862146
I see. I had interpreted Tech Level as the average tech commonly available on a world, not a measure of what the world is capable of independently producing. It makes more sense to see it your way.
>>43855321
What version of Traveller was this? I use Mongoose and I don't recall it having medals or anything in the tables.
>>43863003
http://www.travellersrd.com/content/official/mongoose_traveller_srd/mercenary_srd/creating_a_mercenary.html
Mongoose Traveller Mercenary. At the bottom of the SRD I linked above, it describes certain medals and commendations. The full book has more complete descriptions.
>>43863687
Neat. Cheers m80.
Good on you OP, Traveller is great, and mongoose is solid.
current situation of one PC in our campaign:
>PCs got in a space combat with a destroyer and a merc cruiser.
>One PC Vessel was badly damaged and jumped out
>Its a 200 ton SC Courier
>Multiple hull breaches, bridge was vented
When a vessel reaches 0 hull, I assume the hull has been breached, and generate D6 breaches in random locations (use the internal damage table)
>Pilot was sucked out the hole, but the PC captain of the vessel was able to catch her before she left the vessel.
>Self sealing hull kicks in while she's still in the hole
>Pilot is now trapped in the self sealing compound, onboard a heavily damaged vessel in jump space.
Goodie Goodie, wonder what the PC running that vessel is going to do!
A few things we did to speed up space combat:
Allow "effect" on hits, just like personal combat. Any hit above 8 adds damage.
When firing with a turret of all the same weapon, roll one attack (enemy can dodge up to his thrust as usual, 3 thrust to dodge an entire triple turret). Reduce the armor of the target vessel from the damage, then multiply the damage by the number of weapons on the turret.
So I fire a triple turret of beam lasers, get a total of 11 for my roll to hit. I roll damage, get a 5, add 3 for my effect, then check my total damage of 8 against the targets armor. target only has 4 armor, so 4 damage gets through. Multiply this by 3 and we have a total of 12 damage.
its much quicker than rolling for each individual weapon, and gives a good middle ground between the core book and high guard barrage rules. You may not get as average results, but this further helps speed up space combat. A few lucky hits can cause a shit load of damage.
>>43854671
Traveller General
copy paste opening post
[Query/What is Traveller?]
http://1d4chan.org/wiki/Traveller
http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Main_Page
[Where are the Forums?]
http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewforum.php?f=89&sid=a5b3579cc4c1e8e69aab43a42d5b26f9
http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/
[Display Star Maps:]
http://www.utzig.com/cgi-bin/iai/map_top.pl
http://www.travellermap.com/
[Computer, what scale are these maps?]
>Each hex is a system, and is roughly 3.26 Light years [1 parsec] wide.
>Worlds have a string of numbers that describe them - a Universal World Profile, or UWP.
[Display the key for universal world profiles:]
http://www.travellermap.com/formats.htm
[Display Useful Files:]
>Continuous Thrust Travel Time Calculator
http://www.transhuman.talktalk.net/iw/TravTime.htm
>Heaven and Earth - World Builder
>Note: Run in compatibility mode.
http://www.downport.com/wbd/HEAVEN_&_EARTH.htm
>Community Links
http://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Traveller_RPG:Community_Portal
[Run/Audio File:]
>Goldsmith - Alien Soundtrack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwCcrhUdgOI&list=PL56A81A723975A961
>Slough Feg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM7DJqiYonw&list=PL8DEC72A8939762D4
>Old Timey Space music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w34fSnJNP-4&list=RD02FH8lvwXx_Y8
>Herrmann - The Day the Earth Stood Still
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ULhiVqeF5U
[Display the Core Rulebook:]
>This contains all you will need to play and run Traveller
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?2xoxdoeu2jbr6qc
>Pasta LINK
http://pastebin.com/swinsu7x
Lots of Traveller stuff
http://www.mediafire.com/folder/r778br7g7ux9q/Traveller
>>43862578
The "Commonly Available" interpretation holds better in independent space, where each system is largely on its own.
In Imperial space, backwater worlds are like small towns (and often have about the same number of people). You can order just about anything, but it will need to come from the big city and may take a while.
>>43867422
The new Beta Core book for Mongoose Traveller's revised edition has done a shitload to fix space combat and combat in general; unifying the overwhelming disparity in effectiveness between gear in the Core and other books and the effectiveness of gear in the Centeral Supply Catalogue, fixing up turrets and missile damage and armor on spaceships, a whole bunch of useful stuff.
>>43867781
I'm very happy to hear that they are putting work into addressing the weak spots of the previous core book.
Can you expand upon the changes they've applied?
>>43867781
Has anyone uploaded the current PDFs? I want to check out the High Guard rules they've got going, but I honestly don't trust Mongoose enough to give them a non-refundable $20 deposit against purchase of the final rules, because they've fucked up so hard so many times before over so many genres.
>>43867900
Skills and careers are almost identical, except they now have rules for going to collage after basic education and they hugely paired down the weapon skills to simply Slug, Energy, and Heavy.
Equipment had the biggest changes, with equipment now having defined abilities such as Scoped (no penalties at maximum range as long as you take time to aim) or Crushing (melee weapons only, basically you can't take Parry actions against them because they're too heavy to block), or AP (weapon ignores that many points Armour).
Armour seems to have been increased in effectiveness (TL12 Cloth is now Protection 8 for example), which makes heavier armors even scarier, but since Armor Piercing weapons are now a core thing instead of a CSC thing the heavier armors are balanced out by higher-tech weapons tendency to have high AP numbers, though you should still be getting the fuck out of the way when someone has Battle Dress and is coming at you if you aren't carrying heavy ordinance.
The active use of the AP trait helps better define certain CSC weapons better; a Static Blade does AP5 or 6 and does slightly more damage then the more expensive monoblade, but the monoblade has a whopping AP10 so even guys in Combat Armour worry about getting hit with that shit.
>>43868116
There's no actual PDF's; it's basically all Word documents at this point.
They seem to have removed the finicky, "go back and check the book again" letter codes for ships in favor of actual numbers ("this is how much power the PP has", etc), and weapons and ship armor are WAY better; now for every linked weapon of the same type you roll +1D to the original's damage, and missiles are now 4D6 weapons and travel faster so you actually worry about that shit.
Beam lasers are differentiated from pulse by having much higher accuracy at range but having less power while pulse lasers are more powerful but don't operate so well at a distance.
Everything seems the same, though the High Guard doc adds ion cannons.
>>43868630
Armor for ships and vehicles is reduced in number (so there's no armor 12 crystaliron fighters that can go around ignoring all harm) as well.
Oh, and PGMP's and the like are horrifyingly more effective; on paper it seems like they suck (their damage is listed as 1DD, which means they just roll 1 dice), but DD means it's Vehicle-scale damage so against normal folks it multiplies that number you just rolled by TEN so even guys in high-Tl Battle Dress worry about instantly dying from a solid hit from that shit.
The upside is that vehicle scale weapons like FGMP's and PGMP's aren't really designed to be used on human-scale targets the same way antitank rifles or modern portable missile launchers aren't either, so they get -2 to hit anyone who's human-sized due to their clumsy nature.
>>43867422
Nice! I like your simplified version a lot. Saved and incorporated. I haven't worked with the space combat rules very much, do you have any other useful tips or streamlines?
>>43867557
Thanks for the copypasta! I almost never see Trav threads on here, so I wasn't sure what to do. Saved for future use.
>>43868790
THIS. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED. I love space madness RPGs, been thinking about how to incorporate it into my upcoming game. Thanks, MongTravAnonBro.
>>43875181
>I almost never see Trav threads on here
We had a sector project this time last year, but real life intervened.
>>43875452
Well, on that note, I have an idea.
So, I rolled up and tweaked a stellar cluster for my PCs to explore (pic related). Once I get a few clusters designed, I'll arrange them on a subsector map. For now, I'm in the process of developing the politics of each world, both internally and with regards to the rest of the cluster. But I'm curious how someone else would interpret these results. I'm happy to share my perspective if someone else desires, but I don't want to color the picture too early.
For anyone who's interested, this subsector is a bit of a backwater these days. They used to see a lot of Imperial influence, but not so much anymore.
I made a random planet gen thread the other night
>>43830851
>>43875542
That was beautiful. Not quite the scale of politics I had in mind for this thread, but I absolutely loved it. If I ever see that thread pop up again, I'll have to join up. Hell, might start one myself.
