Post-Session Report 1: The Beginning

After several weeks spent buying and reading the Mongoose Traveller core rules as well as several Classic Traveller adventures, particularly the double adventures that seem rather readily available on e-bay, the time was fast approaching for the very first session of the game. I have to admit that I was a little more nervous and concerned about getting this game started than is normally my habit. For one thing, I pride myself on being a pretty good referee. There are many skills that make up a good referee in my estimation, but chief amongst them is a mastery or near-mastery of the rules. This means, to me, that one:


a) knows the rules so well that he or she rarely need to refer to the books;

b) knows the books so well and/ or have copied vital tables and information out of them so that referring to them is quick and easy and

c) is so comfortable with the game that when called to do so, he or she can make quick rulings at the table that adhere to the spirit of the game with fairness and acuity.

This doesn’t ensure infallibility, but it means that you know what you’re doing, and all RPG goodness is built from the foundation of rules-competency. I possess none of these three as a Traveller referee, so by my own definition I can’t yet be pretty good. Only through actual play can one accumulate these skills, so while I’m learning the game and getting good I also need to teach the game while providing the favorable conditions for that spark that turns a stack of numbers and a handful of dice into the magic we call role-playing.

Then of course there was putting it all up onto a blog. I wasn’t blogging about something I already knew inside and out and had done a million times. I wasn’t offering the potential reader my well-reasoned and battle-proven philosophy on the game. I wasn’t prepared to defend myself in the comment section with years of experience as the basis for my decisions. I was winging this. All that said, 20+ years of RPGing and a generally reasoned and even-keeled approach to most things does buy me something… and I really wanted this to work out for us. I wanted my wife and I to enjoy this game together. This train wasn’t stopping, so I needed to figure out how to at least keep it on the tracks while I figured out all of the controls. Lacking familiarity with the game as a referee, I needed some familiarity with the setting and the starting point. So…

“You step through a narrow portal between two large windows opaque with grime and residue. The establishment is the “Welsh Rabbit” and it is all that passes for a decent bar on this cold moon on the fringe of known space. The air tastes of re-circulated smoke and stale beer, the sound is the dull roar of two dozen furtive conversations. Your partner, Nathan Khyber, bellows above the noise and stink. Seeming quite drunk and obviously gambling, he’s holding court at a table in a dark corner of the room. He’s been here most nights the past several weeks you’ve been back on Llewellyn, ostensibly looking for job leads. You’ve had no work lately, and need to at least make the payment on the ship and cover living and operating costs, let alone actually getting ahead. He’s currently in the middle of an old navy story you’ve heard a hundred times and the people in his card game have probably now heard at least twice. What do you do?”

Yes, I started with a variation on “you all meet in a bar”. It gets a lot of flak from some quarters, but I’m here to defend it. Yes it’s a comfortable, easy and unimaginative RPG trope… but it also provides no assumption on what the first adventure will have to be and allows the player(s) to take control of their actions in the campaign right away. “Here you are… so what do you do?” it says.  In the above example, it is naturally expanded on somewhat since there is already  a history between the two primary characters of Pilar (my wife’s PC) and Nathan Khyber (her NPC partner) through character generation. They’ve been through tough times together and recently they’ve been looking for work. My wife is aware of the monthly costs on their modified Type S star ship the Longshot and knows now they need to find some gainful employment to pay them. She comes looking for her partner and finds him carousing and blowing money. What does she do?

I actually had a pretty good idea ahead of time what she would do (hey, ten years of marriage also buys me something) and essentially she did it. She walked over to the table and dumped a beer over poor Nathan’s head. So right away we’ve got some kinetic, player-driven action. This is another part of what makes a good referee, I believe. Build the world and let the players loose in it. This is a small, limited example of that phenomenon, I grant you, but an important starting point for a new player. I gave her a situation she could immediately identify with and she went with her gut in approaching it. There was no single way to solve this, and actually nothing that needed solving at all… she also could have walked away or done any number of arbitrary or responsive things given the starting point that was established. She didn’t worry about what was the "right" way to play or what I expected or whatever. She dumped that beer on his head because the lout was yukking it up with his drinking buddies instead of helping in their search for paying work. We were less than five minutes into actual play and she was already role playing, without apprehension or self-consciousness. It was infectious.  We were both immediately into it.

Of course, what she didn’t realize was that Nathan was indeed finding them work. His three poker partners were: Alexei Volkov, merchant captain of the Free Trader Cerulean Seas; Tiger Alice, an Aslan female merc and old friend in the employ of Volkov; and Hun San Yi, the scout base and star port administrator. Nathan had three leads on potential work that he then explained to Pilar, while he dried the beer from his head and shoulders at the nearby bar.

The first lead ended up being the most easily dismissed. Hun had a survey job on a hard-to-get-to planet just over the Imperial border. The pay would cover their monthly expenses with a couple thousand to spare (12,000 credits) but would take six weeks in transit time due to its isolation and their ship’s jump-2 capability plus the time to perform the survey. They could augment this with other work along the way or try some speculative trading at stop-over worlds, but there were no assurances.

The second lead was from Capt. Volkov. He had arrived on Llewellyn that morning with three tons of needed parts for the primary life support system on the nearby world of Ovuurn (belters’ colony - 1 jump away). He was already beyond the extent of his typical route and wanted to head back to the core for more lucrative pursuits, but would pay our travellers 6,000 credits to make the delivery for him (2x the going freight rate). Time is money for Volkov and the 6K was getting off easy for him while providing some easy money for two weeks of simple work for the Longshot.

The final lead was from Tiger Alice. She and Khyber were friends from way back and she had until recently been working on a crew smuggling contraband onto the world of Agape. The cargo is mostly harmless stuff: Old Earth literature, holovids, pornography, prescription pharmaceuticals, alcohol and cigarettes. None of it is generally enough to catch a serious Imperial smuggling charge, but the local authorities are vigilant enough and local law prohibitive enough on Agape to make it a lucrative business. Crews can make 10x and more the going freight rates, so smaller ships can really make a killing while drawing limited attention from authorities. The operation is run by a broker named Black Al out of the nearby world of Loki.

After some brief consideration where I answered a few questions, Pilar decided upon the Ovurrn spare parts run. She reasoned that the smuggling job would be there when they wanted to pursue it but they needed some quick cash just to break even this month. The Ovurrn run would take just over 2 weeks to jump there and back, and if nothing else came up in the meantime, they could make the several-week trek core-ward to Loki to see about some smuggling, paying expenses in the meantime out of their savings or from jobs along the way. I had to admit it was some sound reasoning and I had nothing to do with it.  Again, she was embracing the role of the player and not apprehensive or unsure at all. 

So the partners agreed to terms with Volkov and picked up the cargo on the following morning. Here Pilar did something I hadn’t expected. She got the cargo manifest and inventoried the items prior to take off. She wondered if her mechanic skill of 1 would be enough to properly identify the equipment as spare parts for a life support system and I granted that it was and the cargo was as Volkov had represented it. It was a very simple but very smart move on her part. Volkov could have just put anything on her ship, she wanted to make sure that he didn’t .

The cargo now on board and pre-flight checks complete, the crew of the Longshot, anxious to be off now that paying work was in hand, lifted off from the docking bay of the star port and leaped into the lunar sky. As the ship made its way beyond Llewellyn and out to the outer reaches of the star system for a safe jump, Pilar successfully worked out the astrogation course, throwing a modified 11 on her check. Nathan was doing his best to recover from a severe hang-over. I rolled for an encounter before leaving system and came up with a free trader on its way in. The crews exchanged official pleasantries over the open comms band but went their separate ways, thousands of kilometers between them. We were off.

Here we talked a bit about faster-than-light- travel and I showed (again) the subsector map. I explained again that it would take about a week to arrive in Ovurrn’s system and she wondered what they’d be doing all that time. Here is where my own background of living onboard ships underway served well in describing a plausible ship-board life. Pilar and Nathan would stand watch on the bridge and/ or in engineering. They would perform routine ship checks and maintenance and since they were in fact isolated from the rest of the universe while in jump space, would otherwise do their best to avoid boredom. I also reminded her that having spent the last couple of years essentially in jump space with Nathan Khyber, making their way back to Llewellyn after their botched scout mission, there was some familiarity and comfort already between them.

One week passes. Nathan Khyber, being the more accomplished pilot, is logically on the bridge as the ship nears the end of jump space. I explain to Pilar that entering and exiting jump space are crucial times during a ship flight, akin to take-off and landing for jet planes. There were spots on the bridge, at the turret and in engineering that she could choose to be during these times as a matter of habit. Being the only mechanic in the crew of two, she chose engineering. (Damn, I love this woman!). The jump back into real space happened without a hitch. Pilar was just finishing up the last few routine checks on the engineering plant and drives when Nathan squawked over the internal comms that they were receiving a distress signal from an automated transponder (I decided last minute to use Signal GK vs. Mayday or S.O.S. despite not actually having Vilanni in MTU) . Due to the weakness of the signal and its relative position to the Ovuurn belter’s colony, it was unlikely that the colony was receiving it as well. After a short deliberation, where Khyber offered no opinion other than the limited likelihood that somebody else would pick up the signal soon, Pilar decided that the Longshot should answer the call. They set a course for the signal source, and after several hours of travel came within range well enough to identify it as a space station. It appeared to be on low or emergency power and comms attempts couldn’t raise anybody onboard. We discussed briefly the handful of ways one would possibly leave their ship and enter another and then adjourned for the night after about two hours total of set-up, discussion on the game and MTU and actual play. It had been a long day for us both already and I knew we’d only get in a little bit of playing before one or both of us were too tired to keep going, but I wanted to kick this thing off.

I count this as a successful session and start to the game and campaign for us. It was short and there was a lot of fumbling about on my part when we actually made die rolls (not very often) that I’ll need to improve upon quickly if I’m not going to drag the game down, but I think a little bit of prep time with an actual session or two under my belt will vastly improve on this. For my wife’s part, no worries at all. She was great and will only get better. She immediately took initiative on everything.  She understood right away the importance of money in the game and made making it a real motivator for Pilar.  The decision to take the Ovuurn job was well-reasoned on the basis of risk and reward. She didn’t foresee answering a distress call (nobody could), and we still don’t know how that may or may not complicate what’s an otherwise straight-forward job, but now we can jump right into the action when we play next with at least two things already going on and a seed planted for future work.

So we’ve put away the books and dice and I’ve let the dog outback to relieve herself while she’s checked to make sure the kids are sleeping soundly. Just before bedtime…

Her: (jokingly) The nerve of you, blowing all of our money on gambling and drinking

Me: Hey, that was Nathan Khyber’s hard-earned money and it wasn’t me. I’m just the referee.

Her: It’s not you then?

Me: Hell no. He looks like Nathan Fillion.

Her: Oh… you didn’t tell me THAT.

Me: Are you regretting not jumping his bones during the week in jump space?

Her: Nah. That would just complicate things. G’night.