Classic Traveller 01 - Buggies and Battery
Players
Navy Starman Esperanza Klein - B
Aerospace Flight Leader Milagrosa Moreau - Tansquare
Aerospace Pilot Xia Becker - M
Summary
Inaugural Classic Traveller session. The crew find themselves within the remote and undistinguished Sensa System on a space station overlooking the planet Tagh. It is a teeming and miserable desert world made more miserable still by the deliberate restrictions of the Chief Eugenicists who, from their orbiting station, direct events to maintain strife and hardship to ensure a steady supply of cryogenically frozen gunslinger bodyguards for interstellar hire. The crew shuttle to the capital city, a domed structure also called Tagh. They are utterly destitute. They know that if they can recover a specific cryogenically frozen man in the town of Grom and take him to the planet of Ashkar, they will be paid 120kcr.
Bemused at the armed nature of the inhabitants there and the erratic levels of technology (in the tainted atmosphere beyond the spaceport jetway bioengineered horses with massive snouts towed shuttles) and flagrantly armed inhbitants, the crew consider how to get transport to Grom on the cheap.
They fatally carjack an electric buggy-driver using their sole asset: A shotgun. They escape the scene of the crime, eventually finding a a patron who will fence the goods in a bar on the outskirts of the dome: Bruno Ivanov is a gunslinger returned after 25 years of service in the wider galaxy who wants revenge on the arms merchant Gabe Watanabe, who sold him faulty revolvers with ineffective cooling fins that overheated and jammed when they were being used in an EVA gunfight. This is literally plagarised from a rumour we didn't follow up in Idraluna's campaign as it's the first thing that came to mind when I rolled for patron Soldier, for 'target' 'Merchant', and hostility for the reaction roll. Gabe is on a high-tech high-pop ocean world a few jumps distant. Bruno offers them 70kcr overall, 21kcr + 4 low passage tickets upfront to get revenge for him (Bruno being a known quantity, he can't get close himself). The crew accepts with a 3month time limit. They sell the buggy for 1200 cash.
While moving through the city they observe a pile of ash in a telephone-booth sized glass jar, surrounded by tin-badged deputies and members of the public discussing the nature of justice and saying "Ha-Molloch-loo-ya" and whatnot. The crew is unconcerned by this.
Night passes: A great pneumatic hiss can be heard in the morning, looking out of their hotel they see a hole high above them in the plastic dome of the city issuing forth their overpressured atmosphere. The populance is unconcerned, chocking this up to Anti-Eugenicist Liberation Front nonsense - workers in climbing harness and spider-robots patch it up quickly. The crew passes the AELF's stencilled logo being painted over: A fist rising up fron the ground and crushing a spaceship like it's a tin can.
The crew brutalise a city worker for petty cash and his identity (a combined buggy and bioengineered horse riding licence), but abandon the aim of going to his home or workplace to steal his buggy and simply rent a nicotine-stained but atmospherically sealed work truck. They take the highway towards the town of Grom. Most of the way there, a black-leather wearing and chaps-clad deputies have set up a roadblock on the highway. Grom is a slaughterhouse town where the vast herds of biocattle of the planet meet their end. Unfortunately, in their 'terminal stage' they are filled with gasses and inflamamable and a slaughterhouse has exploded. This is blamed on terrorist activity and the crew is turned around, behind them a greasy black cloud rises into the tainted orange sky. The deputy might have investigated more, but was so disgusted to learn one of the travellers was from a planet called 'Yoryeb' he sent them away in contempt.
The crew backtrack and come to a Texas 7 roadhouse buffet where, packing down the gruel and beef and shouting thanks to Molloch, they seek out a patron to get them past the roadblock and consider how to acquire and transport their cryogenically frozen charge.
Notes
I intended to use only the core CT services but two players failed enlistment and by chance were drafted into the aerospace force: No matter. All character names were also taken from the excellent CT character generator.
Prep consisted of generating 8 planets - quite a sparse sector - the night before and morning of, and musing over how one C-starport low-law low-tech desert planet would have a captive government when its only immediate neighbour was another C-starport low-law low-tech desert planet. I decided on a Zardoz-esque domination of the local inhabitants by spaceship-using anagathic-quaffing brodude eugenicists. I'm laying down patrons and connections esp. to other worlds thick and fast this first session. As someone who always gets caught up building a game system and leaving minimal time for the game world prep, it is very fun to be just going for it, laying down the track as I go. I will absolutely do some solo play in this system to fill it out a bit.