The TL;DR outline recap can be found here if one doesn’t want to listen to almost 4 hours.
Overall, I was pretty satisfied with this session. I will admit that I was at least mildly worried since the “trial” portion of the adventure only involves half of the group – exactly half now that Mel has gone on hiatus; 3 Players have characters who were involved in capturing the serial killer, 3 players don’t – but it worked out nicely since one of the players who wasn’t involved managed to get himself involved and the other two are essentially “audience members” who don’t seem to really be that interested in forcing themselves into stuff.
Before that, though, we had the trip to Mora which was, as noted, a 28-day journey. Using the Spaceships Malfunctions thing from Pyramid 3_103 worked nicely, though there was the usual “why didn’t I see this coming?” from the engineer’s player. Thankfully, though, we’ve got a retired Air Force guy who was on airplanes throughout most of his career playing so he can easily make the “Sorry, dude, but things sometimes break. No warning, no explanation, they just break.” That said, I did make an error because I skipped the automatic preventative Repair check that they get before the malfunction happens before it becomes a “serious malfunction.” So I’ll keep that in mind next time.
The Customs check on Mora allowed me to establish them for the denouement that I have in mind, and then we moved on to the Sam data-dump – everyone liked the Dollhouse references with Sam’s crew; he has Echo, Sierra, Victor, and Whiskey aboard – before finally moving on to the trial itself. If you’ve reviewed the previous game preps for adventure 4, it’s notable how much I changed the planned trial. That’s principally because I wanted to use the visual of the “Voice of Rao” from Krypton.
So with that in mind, I started poking around and noted that the Traveller wiki article on Mora established that the planets and moons and stuff were named after Sylean mythological deities. That lead me to the article on the Sylean sub-species in GURPS Traveller: Humaniti, which has a nice article on the religion of Maar Zon. Thus, I used that to change the intended venue. Revealing that Breyon Sodhii is hidden underneath that multi-faced mask was something that I was planning on doing later, after the trial, but it worked very well as a cliffhanger even though the PCs are unaware of it.
As is his wont, Eddy forced himself into the mess with his decision to be interviewed by a reporter. Even before his player said his Unluckiness was going to come into play, I was totally intending on doing so.
So yeah, overall I was pretty happy with this. We’ll see if that remains the case as the adventure continues unfolding…