Outline recap can be found here if one doesn’t want to listen to 3 and a half hours.
So, I assumed GM duties for our Traveller campaign this Saturday (1/20/18) and my first task was resolving the cliffhanger that the previous GM left us in. Overall, I was left fairly satisfied with how the game played out but naturally, there were some issues I wasn’t wholly satisfied with.
During the previous arc, the GM – CommJunkee – wrote out his character (a Vargr spy/saboteur) and had him show back up at the very end needing to be rescued. While I was prepping for my run, I noticed that his CP level was significantly lower than even the newer characters so we artificially brought him to their equivalent. In the process, he reconstructed the character and in the process decided that he’d been grievously injured at some point which resulted in him having some new bionic parts (eye, ear, arm.) Just before game-time, I had the idea to have the injuries take place during the end of his run so he was super screwed up during the initial part of this run.
As a group, we seem to encounter a lot of derelict ships and one of the players – Haank’s – mentioned to me offline that the crew should invest in some sci-fi equivalent of “Jaws of Life.” Amusingly, during this particular scenario, a bunch of things came up that caught me off guard:
- Using the drone to basically do a flyby. This led to a discussion as to whether that drone is actually capable of operating in vacuum … I need to review the GCA file because I actually think it isn’t.
- While on the bridge, someone (Haank’s player, I think?) suggested using the “APU” (which took me forever to realize he was referring to “auxiliary power unit”) with the intent of using internal cameras. Fortunately, someone else (Sae’s character, I think?) mentioned the APU using batteries & them being super rundown so I went with that to “maintain” the secrecy.
- After the fact, Sae’s player mentioned to me offline that he had hoped that he would fail some Curious checks so his character could wander off so I had to remind him that he could always voluntarily fail them.
- I’m not sure why I was surprised that they decided to enter via the bridge airlock rather than the normal docking area…
Ending with the surprise Jump wasn’t exactly where I wanted to finish the session – I had another “surprise” in mind, but this worked perfectly with the time being what it was. Since I intentionally started 4.01 with the “flashback,” I’m thinking of doing the same in 4.02, this time with a different PC (probably Sae at the moment.)
Next up: crazy times in Jumpspace!