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Sunday 18 January 2015

My Traveller Players Are Maniacs

So we did our first session last night.  I'll note that the last Traveller game I ran, a few years back, we had a motley crew but fairly standard for a Traveller campaign: an aged diplomat, a shrewd trader/pilot, a jack-of-all-trades, a tough Vargr bodyguard type.  But nothing super out of the ordinary.

In this first session, which was taken up entirely by character creation, we ended up with:

-An academic who made a lengthy and prized career by constantly stealing other people's work and claiming it as his own.

-A guy who was drummed out of the navy because of a piloting accident, and then spent the next 30 years getting revenge by a life of piracy; who did a 3-year stint in prison and managed to squirm his way out of a second prison term.

-a dilettante who dedicated his life to doing as little work as possible, engaged in a secret conspiracy against the Emperor for kicks, squandered his way through two family inheritances, and released an album of terrible lounge music... and in spite of it all managed to retire as a Count with high imperial honors.

-a Scout who was drummed out of the Imperial Service after accidentally starting two wars in the span of half a decade, then went on to make himself a fortune as a corporate spy until being fired as the 'fall guy' when he accidentally implicated a member of the board who was more important to the company than he was.

-a combat-crazy Space Marine who hit a mid-life crisis, tried a brief stint in the navy which he quit when they wouldn't let him pilot a capital ship, then spent the last four years living as a hobo getting into firefights with bag ladies.


Every single man-jack of them has ended up obtaining at least one Enemy.  The Scout has a bounty on his head with both the Vargr and the Aslan.  The academic is despised by half the scholarly community of the empire.  The Space Marine conducted an illegal black op which may have accidentally created an origin story for the Third Imperium's version of Batman.


So yeah, I wasn't really expecting my Traveller PC party to end up looking like these guys or anything:






But I really wasn't expecting them to look closer to a Traveller game's equivalent of this:




It's going to be an interesting campaign.

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8 comments:

  1. Looks like a VERY interesting start for a Firefly-type criminal campaign...

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    Replies
    1. Without any redeeming features though.

      Which is super cool for RPG.

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  2. So it seems the Traveller character creation system delivers on its promises. I should really conclude my Shadowrun and give Traveller a try.

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  3. Question: How much of the back story was actually in the random roll Lifepath and how much of the (awesome) back story was commentary and imagination on the part of your play group?

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    Replies
    1. Well, absolutely all of it was grounded in the rolls/career-chioces for lifepath. But how those rolls were interpreted was where the imagination came in.

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  4. This sounds awesome. I bet you guys will have a ton of fun with it.

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