Fallen out of the habit of updating here – can’t quite figure out why. Probably just general laziness. Anyway … we’re continuing to use Fantasy Grounds for our Traveller game until the Covid-19 overreaction BS dies down; I would be fine actually meeting up to play, but a couple of the players wanted to do the ‘better safe than sorry’ which I still think is overreaction.
My Interlude finished last week with the two “big bads” both getting killed, much to my surprise. We’re also introducing a new PC this week as the player in question was never satisfied with his other character; I ended the interlude with the old character getting shot – the dice said he was dead, but since the GM was pulling some shenanigans, I’m going to have him in a medical coma at the hospital with no idea on recovery. More importantly, as he was passing out, he heard a PC’s voice saying it needed to look like a robbery gone bad.
Which leads to this coming week. As a result of the PCs involvement in the vigilante killing of some major criminals on the Habitat and the as yet unsolved shooting of a PC, their boss has decided to get them off the freaking Habitat for a while so this craziness can hopefully die down a bit. And that leads into …
This week, we’ll be doing parts of Beltstrike though I’m not using the existing refinery image, but are instead using the Mine Complex and Orbital Refinery from the adventure that Gigermann ran several eternities ago. Amusingly enough, two of the other players were involved in that as well. Unfortunately, this means I have to do a bit of re-writing, so I’m scrambling to get that done.
The Factory adventure from Beltstrike is also a staggeringly boring sequence, IMO, as it simply consists of the PCs going from room to room making what amounts to “can I avoid getting damaged in this room?” plus some other random rolls. As a result, I’m planning on shortening this entire sequence significantly … or at least curtailing the number of rolls that will be required. In the original material, there’s a chance of some wannabe pirates squatting in the station who lead to a shoot-out and the possibility of obtaining a different ship for PC use only, but that doesn’t quite work as well with this different map … although I’m actually looking at trying to incorporate that anyway, probably with one of the Enemies of a PC on the hunt. I really want that encounter to be a bit more dynamic somehow, so I’m looking at that.
From there, we’re going directly into the next bit, which involves the PCs going to pick up some supplies, potentially having some issues with said supplies being delivered to the wrong ship, and maybe then going into some shenanigans. After that, they come back to the station (ideally, with the supplies), and are joined by some other members of the company to begin getting the facility online. Early in this, I’m going to introduce the alien artifact MacGuffin, so that could be fun. In retrospect, I suppose I might be able to introduce that even earlier … hmmm … maybe while they’re doing their initial survey, they get pointed in that direction and then the wannabe pirates show up? That’s actually a pretty decent take…
Fantasy Grounds has worked out relatively well, though with this group, it is weird to not see their faces since its supposed to be my Face-To-Face group. If nothing else, just having some of the automation built-in is awesome. But I do prefer the F2F feel with this group.