Traveller: Using Sorcerer and Sorcerer & Sword
Christopher Kubasik:
Playing Traveller has been a dream of mine since I picked up the books at the Compleat Strategist on 33rd Street years ago. I knew there was a game in there I wanted to play... the setting was amazing, the color incredibly evocative.... but the resolution mechanics always let me down.
Several threads on Story-Games over many months prompted me to take a look at using a different set of rules.
And after rummaging through all the new-fangled systems we have these days to make the play of Traveller more in line with what I always wanted, I settled on Sorcerer & Sword. The port was strangely easy; the system and the tools of the rules lined up to my needs almost 1:1 to what I wanted. There are no Demons in this game -- it's straight up Third Imperium Classic Traveller. But there are things like Psionics, Ambition, Social Standing, The Ticket which replace Lore and that can gum up a character's Humanity. Humanity in this game is defined as Friendship.
Here's the link to The Rules I built for my players: http://playsorcerer.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/ss.pdf the rules. I'm sure there's a lot of cleaning up to do. Inside, you'll find:
[*]A few pages of world background. We're using the Classic Traveller Third Imperium, utilizing the FRAMEWORK of the setting (the Imperium, the Spinward Marches, the Zhodani, the Vargr, the Alsan, the noble house structure and politics, the Planet Creation Rules and subsector maps, and all the implied details from Books 1, 2, and 3 from the Traveller Black Box). However, we're stripping out all the specifics of the worlds, creating our own worlds and subsectors within the Spinward Marches.
[*]Character Creation Rules (which strangely didn't have to be altered that much! The Descriptors for Stamina and Will are lifted straight from Sorcerer & Sword) The biggest change is switching Lore to "The Rift" which are the things that can separate people from their friends.
[*]A section on what I wanted to play in Traveller, and how I ended up choosing Sorcerer & Sword.
[*]Pages of material from the Mongoose's Traveller System Reference Document (open source) since most of the Players had little interaction with Classic Traveller and I wanted them to see equipment lists and World Creation stuff
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And here's a link to the character sheet.
http://playsorcerer.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/sspcsheet.pdf
Of significance, to my way of thinking, this game is more Sorcerer & Sword than Sorcerer. By that I mean Sorcerer is soaked in alienation. The game begins with the PCs in dysfunctional relationships. It is a given they are deeply involved in Lore and the dehumanizing effects of Lore.
In Sorcery & Sword, having a bound demon is an option; one need not start off with a dysfunctional relationship. In fact, one might never get into one. The definition of Humanity is Friendship, and I consider the game a "warmer" game than Sorcerer. Lore is a part of the world, and Old Ones and ancient artifacts certainly can tempt PCs to greater power. But, at least in the Conan stories, we are not entangled by definition with these de-humanizing activities.
The Traveller game I want to build is like more like Conan-styled Sorcerer & Sword stories: The PCs are friends, and friendships the point of view norm. They can take actions to threaten their sense of friendship, but it is not a given. It is a threat they carry with them in their own desires and ambitions.
There are no demons the game we're going to be playing. Lore has been shifted to "The Rift" -- the slang term for the distance between stars that tears friendships apart, as well as the coldness or selfishness that can separate friends. How this is all going to play out has yet to be determined. But the germs of the mechanics are in the pdf.
My Players (Eric, Vasco and Colin) started Character Creation a week ag Sunday night, and damn if we didn't start getting some great PCs.
Christopher Kubasik:
Last Sunday Vasco, Eric, Colin and I gathered for character creation. I'm still waiting on the finalized character sheets, but here's a summary of what happened. While reading all this, remember that the definition for Humanity is Friendship in this game. It echoes across all the decisions the Players made.
There was a great deal of brainstorming and sometimes the backstories started getting very convoluted and complicated. At one point there was an emphasis on Spec Ops for one of the PCs, and I could feel the whole game shifting to some bizarro space-hack Bourne Identity game -- which had nothing to do with what I wanted to play. So I made a call: The PCs were either Marines, Navy or Army. That's it. Things went much faster after that.
The Players decided that they had served in the Imperial Marines together. They also decided that after mustering out, the three of them started a mercenary company... a small one of about 20 guys and a starship crew working off a tramp freighter. The handle both small unit jobs, as well as getting subcontracted for larger mercenary tickets.
Colin decided that Herne "Mak" Makarios had been on a world working alongside rebels that the Imperium had encouraged to violence. Just when the final assault had been called, the ruling power sued for peace with the Imperium and negotiations finalized. When the Imperium got what it wanted, the war was called off and Colin's battalion ordered off planet. This left the rebels without the backup they needed and the ruling government slaughtered untold rebels. (Colin explicitly based this on the actions of the Bush Sr.'s call to the Kurds to rise up again Saddam after the First Gulf War. Eric and Vasco decide their characters had been on the world as well.) Colin said this would be the basis for his character's Price.
It ended up serving his Kicker as well. His merc company is offered a job by ruling government to finish off the Vargr rebels he once fought alongside. As the offer is made, Mak finds out that an old buddy of his is still fighting for the Varger on that world.
Vasco created Broyce "Bear" Yenko, and decided his character's price was tied to something criminal in Bear's past that had caused him to be BRANDED and kept him moving around from world to world. I pointed out that space was big and that if people on world to world knew what the brand meant it would have to be some sort of capital crime under Imperial law, and suggested his Imperial Citizenship had been revoked -- which would be as big a deal a citizen of the Roman Empire losing his citizenship. Vasco liked this idea, and built on it: he had been branded in his teens, and had enlisted in the marines to find a place to belong. He was essentially set up as canon fodder -- but proved himself with marital skill and loyalty time and time again until he DID find a place he could call home. When he mustered out, he stayed with the two guys he'd bonded with. This was his home.
His Kicker is that if he he's offered his citizenship back as part of his payment for taking the Mercenary Ticket. Vasco said, as we discussed the idea, "You know, at first I didn't think the citizenship thing would mean that much to my guy, but actually, I think it means more than... yeah... I really like that."
Eric created a son of a noble family of Imperial politics: Zishan "Zee" Fujita. His father is the Duke of a subsector within the Spinward Marches, but Eric's character is rebellious and has lots of trouble with authority. However, he's a very good and responsible leader to his men. Although he could have advanced quickly through the ranks because of his noble lineage and his ability, he constantly screwed up his behavior on purpose and remained a sergeant... which is exactly where he wanted to remain. He was on a world where the marines where fighting a last stand battle during an in interstellar conflict, and losing badly. An admiral called a retreat to redistribute the forces to world that had a better chance of surviving, but Eric's character destroyed the communication equipment and rallied the troops and locals to a bloody defense. He said, "Like a whole Alamo thing," which became a shorthand for the incident for all of us. (The three of them decided to call their company's ship "The Alamo." Colin added, "In this setting, in the future, The Alamo is shorthand for, 'Fucked over by the officers.'")
Eric's Kicker is Zee's father has used his influence to seize control of The Alamo to shut down the mercenary company.
A few other details surfaced -- which didn't apply right away, but that I knew I would use because the Players were interested in these things:
Colin said, "I want some sort of religious crusade. Somehow." The other guys nodded. I made a note.
Eric, free-associating off of some of the ideas we'd had, discussed some reading he'd been doing about Israeli/Palestinian dynamics, telling a specific incident about how Israelis upstream of a Palestinian settlement cut off the water to the Palestinians -- and how terrible it would be not to have the power to do anything about that. Okay... imbalance of power between political entities... noted.
Christopher Kubasik:
We rolled up one world, the Ticket Planet, using the Classic Traveller World Creation chapter. We ended up with a desert world with tainted atmosphere, with a balkanized government, several hundred thousand people, and a Class D (poor quality) starport. We decided that the planet had been in better shape the last time they'd been here; that nukes had been used while they'd been gone that had reduced the population, tainted the atmosphere and several damaged the planet's infrastructure. We imagined that the reason the Imperium had used the rebels years earlier to gain leverage on the ruling government was to gain access to fuel's used for interplanetary Jump Drives. The planet was rich with the stuff.
We posited further that the oceans had been burned off during the nuclear war and that the old mining facilities in the sea canyon walls were now the safest place to be. The ruling government had shelter and technology on their side. But the outcast/slave cast living in the wilderness died off at early ages and were dwindling in numbers. However, missionaries from a nearby world (the Crusade!) had arrived with arms and supplies and were helping them wage a last battle against the Imperials allies.
This is the world of the Player's Kickers. This is where they'll be heading for the game -- or not!
The whole process of creating the worlds in Traveller is a blast. You roll random details about tech level, planet size, government and law type and so on... and you then use that as "a prod to the imagination" as the Classic Traveller rules say. As we built up details it seemed like a mix of the imaginative prod of In a Wicked Age...'s Oracles and the setting creation system from Shock: as we took a combination of interesting, randomized and suggested elements and built a setting of conflict out of them.
Christopher Kubasik:
A couple of days later I started working on some background notes for setting and situation, based off the Players' Characters.
I decided to create some subsectors, again, using the standard rules from Traveller. A subsector in Traveller is a unit of political space -- an area about 8 by 10 parsecs in size. If it's part of the Imperium there would be a duke ruling over it on behalf of the Imperium. Sixteen subsectors make up a sector. For sectors make up a domain. There are about nine domains in the Third Imperium.
(Communication in the Third Imperium can only go as fast as space travel. As space travel takes weeks and months between stars, the Imperium holds itself together by family ties and loyalty -- families and noble rules must act on their own and in the best interests of the Imperium using only their own judgment and authority in moments of crisis. Sometimes, of course, the system fails. But for the most part, it has held the Third Imperium together for 1000 years.)
A subsector map is made up of an eight by ten hexgrid map. You roll a dice to see if there is a world in a hex (I set it at a 40% chance) and then roll up the world details. I rolled for the stars, but have only made notes for about four worlds in addition to Vaerr, which is the Ticket World tied to the PC's Kickers.
Christopher Kubasik:
I should note that all of those dots on the map above represent the "main world" of a star system. Normally, you'd roll up all the worlds and fill in a lot of data and, as GM, create about 30 worlds. It took a LOT of discipline NOT to do that -- because it's really fun building worlds!
But in this game I want the Players to participate in World Creation, so they have a stake in what is interesting about the world. Moreover, I'm taking a page from Sorcerer & Sword and building the details of the map out slowly. I can't tell you how much fun I had years ago creating several subsectors' worth of worlds, politics, and potential conflict -- only to never get anywhere with the information in play since the Players had no way to plug their interests into the setting.
Here's a five page document about the Brill Subsector.
I decided the rebels on Vaerr had been Vargr, a race of creatures created out of Canine stock from Sol thousands and thousand of years ago. They stand about five feet tall and can use equipment and weapons designed for humans. They have their own cultural quirks, and I'm seeing them as loyal to whoever treats them best lately.
The Vargr had settled the Brill Subsector long before members of the Humanti race arrived. When settlers from Sol did arrive, the Vargr aided the settlers and kept them alive during the Long Night -- the fallow period that took place between the Second and Third Imperiusm. Together they built the Utheng Federation -- which once contained the worlds listed on the map, as well as the worlds in the Llako Protectorate and the worlds of Helius and Arzul.
When the Third Imperium showed up some eight hundred years later, the human settlers refused to become part of the Imperium. The Vargr got caught up in the middle, used by either side to hurt the other.
Inbetween the Fourth and Fifth Frontier Wars, the Imperium rallied a Vargr Rebellion on Vaerr and nearby worlds -- which culminated in the incident that Colin described as his Character's Price. The worlds around Llako surrendered to the Imperium, broke away from the Utheng Federation, and became a Client State of the Third Imperium. Trade ties between the Llako Protectorate are growing stronger, and nobles around the subsector believe they can conquer the Utheng Federation and draw the Brill Subsector into the Third Imperium in the next 50 years.
The "Alamo" world Eric created is Helius, which also used to be part of the Utheng Federation. I decided that the battle took place during the Fifth Frontier War, and once again the PCs and their fellow marines were fighting alongside Vargr -- Vargr who had broken away from the Humaniti and Vargr of the Utheng Federation and wanted a safe haven for Vargr in the subsector. The Imperium had promised them Helius if they helped fight of the Utheng Federation and the Zhodani Consulate who had joined forces to attack the Imperium border worlds. When the battle on Helius went south, the order came to retreat... but this time the PCs refused to abandon the Vargr and fought like hell to protect it. The losses due to the actions of Eric's character were horrific (Eric added that detail) but the marines defended the planet and the Vargr have a safe world now.
Meanwhile, trouble is brewing back on Vaerr... religious missionaries and troops have arrived from the Z'hande Caliphate sprinkling food and medicine to the Vargr across the Llako Protectorate. Loyalties between humans and Vargr are split all over the place, and members of the Z'hande Caliphate are gathering converts and allies as they prepare to make their own play for control of the subsector.
The PCs are returning to the world where they once betrayed allies, allies who now get weapons and instructions from a religiously inspired civilization that threatens the Imperium,
Which way they'll jump as old and new allies appear and friendships are broken, tested and formed is what the game is all about...
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