Our Shortest Traveller Campaign

I think my brother and I were kids at the time, about 10 years old, and we played the Annic Nova adventure (out of Double Adventures 1) as we just got into Traveller. I was refereeing and my brother was playing. The adventure looked cool, a mysterious ship abandoned for some reason with plenty of mysteries to unfold. How this ended didn't work out how we planned.

Spooky Ship, not a Dungeon

Like most kids of the time, combat was fun and exciting. We ran modules as-is and rarely expanded upon them, having this expectation that the module writers knew better than us and paying for a module meant we were going to be entertained - no matter what our expectations were.

Yes, that is a recipe for disaster. We were kids.

Looking back, yes we were wrong and our expectations were out of line. We expected everything to be action-packed and a blast of a good time, and our expectations were kind of set by the excellent Star Frontiers game, which defined a huge part of our childhoods. Grab a laser and blast monsters! Play cool aliens! Explore lost worlds! Hack computers and robots! Fight the evil bug-eyed aliens!

That Star Frontiers campaign lasted 40 years. Such is the power of childhood memories.

So, Traveller and Annic Nova. I have a better appreciation for this adventure now, and I can think of a million better ways to have run this. Add some strange monsters, and maybe a surface installation down on the planet below to explore. Add some monsters or strange goings on. Fragments of ship's logs and a crew being slowly driven into madness. Space pirates looking to take the ship without knowing what they are getting into.

This ship is really cool and a great set for a lot of different ideas.

How It Really Ended

Explore the ship, fly it back to the starport, and sell it. Earn 5 million credits (or was it 25, it has been a while...?) and sit on a pile of money. Campaign over.

I know, we were kids, but millions of credits seemed like being a billionaire to us! You can buy any weapon or piece of gear! A small army of mercenaries! The PCs were rich!

I know, that many MCR is not exactly rich in the context of Traveller, but our young minds could not process what to do with all that money so that is where the campaign kind of ended. We were trained by the D&D model of wealth, where with 5 million GP you could hire an army of red dragons and genies with wish rings to ride around on them. You won. The rich were invincible.

Yes, we were stupid and young.

Still Good Advice

A game can become unplayable if the Travellers become too powerful.

This comes from page 4, book 3, in the scenario book The Fall of Tinath for the starter set of Traveller I got the other day. There is a paragraph here saying the same thing, as a referee, you need to keep the players hungry, looking for money, never dropping huge buckets of wealth upon them, avoid the "battle cruiser mentality," and make sure special powers and other perks are paced out throughout the campaign (and even lost at times) instead of making the game about a mad collection of wealth and special powers.

Sounds like many of the Pathfinder or D&D games I have run, in fact.

Too much wealth can ruin a game. Too many cool powers can ruin a game. Battleship Me and All My Friends can ruin a game.

Missing the Point

Part of my brain says, "You are missing the point!" No matter how much money you have Traveller is still a pretty deadly game. A stray shot or a bad starship encounter later, and it is, "Game over, man." It is all about immersion, the stories, the personalities, the factions, the plots, aliens, criminals, colony governments (and the people in them), and the unexplored universe.

Yes, having 5 billion credits makes a lot of this pointless.

But you should be ready for the day the PCs have five billion credits. Perhaps a title of nobility is bestowed upon the character, and all of a sudden a lot of factions and governments come looking for financial backing for colony projects, expeditions, infrastructure projects through monster-infested colony sites, and even backing a war with cash for later profits. There are two universal truths in our world that are helpful to remember:

Money does not solve problems.
Money creates problems.

Jealous rivals? Being labeled the reason why the subsector is so poor? Governments who see your rich wallet as a threat to subsector stability? Criminals and pirates looking for a quick paycheck for kidnapping, piracy, theft, or raiding your assets? A hostile press creating all sorts of lies about you, unless, of course, you support them? Politicians who would label you an enemy if you didn't pay up and support their side? The other side that hates you now that you do? A totalitarian regime seeking to end your character's influence and claim your resources and colony investments? Tax-happy planets wanting you to pay your fair share? Terrorist/pirate factions seizing your subsector investments "for the people" or themselves? Other companies wanting to know "where you stand" on expensive conflicts that hurt their businesses? Alien factions looking for "support" and a voice?

All jealous and greedy people need are a reason, and greed and envy are great reasons.

You look at the richest places in today's world and how many problems money creates, and you realize that maybe money isn't such a big problem after all, but an opportunity for trouble that can write thousands of interesting stories.

No to Invincibles, Yes to Fun

The advice is good not to let a party gather so many powers they have an answer to everything. It is good to keep players hungry. No invincible superheroes. Yes struggling spacers.

However, I feel it is very important to start the players out seeing the consequences of their goals. Put some conflicts in the universe that affect them that are caused by greed and envy, where money and the lust for power is sending the people of the universe to their deaths over "who owns what?" It is a pointless, greedy, negative theme for a sci-fi game where normally the ideals of Star Trek or Star Wars push characters into "greater good" feelings.

Traveller isn't really about the greater good. It is a universe sandbox. You could play this like Grand Theft Auto with lasers and bug-eyed aliens and hit all the right points. Money and greed should be constant themes, because a player's goals should be reflected in the universe around them.

Show them the consequences of greed early. Set the tone. Keep them hungry. Let them choose sides.

If they want to join in and celebrate greed and backstabbing, let them.

If they want to fight against greed for a greater good and unity, let them.

The hidden end-game in Traveller plays out nicely as a wealthy faction the PCs control that finds out how much the subsector loves or hates them. Or both.

And the next generation of PCs can start after that story ends. Is there peace in the subsector? War? Economic opportunity? A subsector depression? Piracy? Revolution? Is it time to explore new frontiers? Write the history of one era, and move on to the next.

Tomorrow, Yesterday, and Today

Part of the mistake we made as kids was not to see this, and not make this an option. The universe felt empty and who cared? It was a different time, and there were other games with built-in motivations that captured our imaginations. The pre-made universes of other games gave us instant starting points and places to jump in..

But today, I like dreaming and I like creating. I like a more open sandbox in which to play in. I want blank canvases for my ideas instead of pre-made posters with copyrighted content.

I look back and wonder what if? I read this new edition and my mind explores infinite possibilities. Those thoughts come back and I want to share what went wrong, what our mistakes were, and how I would have done things differently. How maybe there wasn't any good options given how the games were written back then, and how the games today have learned from those mistakes. Also, I like reflecting on history and our world and using that for stories in this world.

Part of what I like about Traveller is that the game is simple, yet it has enough defined parts that work together that become limitations to explore within. It is not a generic game such as FATE where anything goes and it is more about story and less about interesting parts. You have a toy box, some rules on how all this works together, and an open sandbox to play in.