Mongoose Traveller Session The Alien Anomaly

 Another game session tonight. Let me see if I can get caught up a bit on the “story so far” before game time. Get my head just right…

Under the cover of continuous acid rain-soaked skies and Imperial authority the PCs pilot the 50 ton modular cutter towards their destination, a singular disturbance in the “G” band long-range communication frequency emanating from a fixed location on the skillet-hard pock marked surface of Excalibur. The 60 km journey is only delayed for an hour during extremely intense rains. Not an uncommon occurrence when traveling along the surface of the planet. They could have easily avoided the weather in between them and their destination with a sub-orbital lift and set down.

Problem is, this makes them an easy spot, if someone is looking. With the fallout from the failed economic summit at Red Cliff, everyone is looking. Sword World Confed, Imperial authorities, the Darrians, Omni Corp, the Border Worlds. Everyone with the ability to influence interstellar politics is not only watching, but most likely acting. Whether galactic players choose covert or overt methods remains to be seen. If the PCs are going to explore the alien anomaly unmolested, they will need to make a stealthy approach.

The source of the interference is coming from the top of a tall massif cut away from the nearby ravines by gaping canyons of deep, acid-etched substrate. The summit is too narrow and broken to land the cutter, so the group pilots the craft down to a wide, gentle shoulder of the mountain 800-900 meters further below the top. From there they unload the VTOL and sail up to the top. This is the same vehicle which made its debut in my second Traveller campaign. This is when I was using the 1981 Starter Set rules. A cost-saving nightmare of jet propulsion and retro-fitted grav engine put together to make a cheap all terrain vehicle for the demanding conditions of Excalibur's surface.

The piloting roll fails by one in the extreme weather always present. I declare they make the landing, but the vehicle now has 8-12 hours of repairs to be able to lift off again. Damage to one of the grav engines on landing is the cause. The PCs decide to deal with repairs later and start looking for the source of the interference. 

This leads them to some type of hatch in the ground. It is damaged. The hatch does not sit right, a circular lid recessed into a circular frame which has experienced some type of violent shock, or sheer. Possibly from a seismic event. This gives the PCs purchase for tools; crowbars, winches, hydraulic jaws, anything they came up with which was reasonable to have gotten in Central Lake when outfitting their expidition. Most gear available on Excalibur would be stuff like this. Penetrating the crust of Excalibur's tough surface and digging out what is underneath is the entire purpose of people's existence on Excalibur. They have scanners out, checking radiation and interior atmospheric signatures. They are suited up in their vac suits designed for extremely hostile environments. Basically being a most excellent and organized dungeon-delving party standing at the threshold of their next dungeon crawl. Western, Fantasy, Sci-Fi; they all can carry a fast and exciting pulp story. 

So I have a very careful party. The character Sun Tzu has an alien tech enhanced arm and Commander Frank has psionic ability. Both of these features were rolled up by their players during group character creation. These aspects need to have some bearing on the nature of our shared game world. As an adventure progresses you need to move from speculation to "fact". Science fiction adventures do demand this. The technology, cosmic phenomena, and aliens can be as weird as one wants but there has to be a "why" of things. Because players want to find out the why of things. Why are things the way they are when you can possibly have anything occur or experience in any given science fiction adventure? In lieu of gold-for-experience mechanic in Traveller to incentivize exploration of face-eating danger, the science fiction genre offers answers to the unanswerable questions of life. More precise, the illusion of a fictional answer which can be deduced by exploring the environment and having encounters with it. I mean, it is one of many possible uses of the genre for entertaining roleplay. This is what the players and myself landed on during our session zero when we discussed everyone's expectations.

There were two expectations, three if you count the general conceit of week-long jump times and an overall Imperial authority backstopping galactic trade as would be found in the Sword Worlds. The first was to explore secrets of the ancients which came before man and the other was to get into ground combat with mechs. And the Traveller game does these two things really well. If you have a referee willing to put in the time and make a puzzle which has a connected structure which can be traced by players. I like to make a lot of shit up, so this style of old-school play is what I like. And it is what I know. 

This has gotten well away from a recap at this point, and I want to spend some time in daydreamy prep with coffee, cat, and couch so I need to call it quits on this entry for now...