Traveller Vignette 045 “ One of the new recruits was a guy called Connors, from the Matriarchy of Dulcene. His family had too many sons, and the family mothers decided three of them should seek their fortunes off-world. To be fair, they'd tried to find suitable jobs for them, and the guy was generally a pretty good fit. He'd apparently been working as a driver / mechanic in his family's vehicle pool since he left school at 14, and he was way ahead of most recruits on mechanical skills. He could also iron and sew like a professional, and got good points for turnout. On the other hand, he'd only been taught the most basic maths, and he'd clearly never handled money beyond the “pocket money” level – the top sergeant had to step in several times in the early days to stop him getting ripped off. Everybody made fun of the fact he'd taken “fashion” as a school subject, until we discovered he knew what'd look good on you better than you did, and could pro...
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Traveller Vignette 044 “ Technology and economics can interact in some very unexpected ways. The ubiquitous LSP OP-500 office printer is a good example – it's a pretty decent office printer, and Ling sell millions each year at Cr 500 a time, making a good margin on each. But not everybody wants to spend that much on a full-spec printer, so LSP wanted a cheaper printer for the home market, and set out to design one to sell for around Cr 250 each. Thing is, it turned out that making a completely new design with a new production line would actually cost more per unit than simply running off extra OP-500s on the existing production line. LSP would still make a small profit on each OP-500 it sold at that price, but it'd obviously crash sales of the same printer in the office market at a higher price – nobody would pay Cr 500 if they knew people were getting the same thing for Cr 250. So they thought a bit, added a memory buffer to the cheap version, which did nothing but...
Traveller Vignette 043 “ The years after the war were hard. So much had been destroyed in the invasion, or by orbital bombardment after the Saruthi realised they couldn't win and wrecked everything as they pulled out. My earliest memories are childhood meals in the orphanage dining hall – there was just enough food for everybody, and you learned not to take too much. After dinner, we sewed by lamplight while a house-mother read stories from an old book. One of the house mothers cried when we finally got the power grid up and the electric lights came back on; she remembered them from before the war. I went to work in the shipyards when I was fourteen; it was hard, heavy work, and I came back to the dormitory exhausted most nights, but I cheered myself hoarse with the rest when our first ship lifted. It wasn't much of a ship – not even jump capable – but it let us start training crews, and we built more and better ships over the years that followed. It cost us a lot...
FN P90 PDW T he latest delve into the random toybox of guns last week produced an FN P-90, an odd little device firing a bottleneck 5.7x28mm round from a 50rd magazine running flat along the reciever top. It's odd-locking, but fully ambidextrous and surprisingly ergonomic once you get used to it. The barrel is notably longer than it looks, since it's a bullpup design, and the higher velocity gives it a flatter trajectory than 9x19mm, so it'll easily outshoot most conventional SMGs. However, the tendency towards 5.56mm carbines mean it hasn't exactly leapt into mass use, which may be a pity. The P-90 with an HK53 for comparison - note that the HK53 is an SMG-length version of the HK33 5.56mm assault rifle, and rather chunkier than the 9mm MP5. It's probably a better comparator to the P90 in terms of performance, however, though the example above obviously has its stock collapsed
Traveller Vignette 042 “ The Aslan was old, grey-maned and dressed in shabby, threadbare coveralls. It didn't fit with the neat stack of bank notes, several thousand credits at least. He handed it to me, bowed and rumbled “T'enk yoo”, obviously sounds carefully learned by rote. The female next to him was nearly as old, and spoke careful anglic. “My brother was interned after the revolution on Kashan, and was prisoner in the camps there.” I felt sick. The revolutionary government hadn't even been able to feed their own troops properly in the last years of the war, let alone prisoners. We'd sent what we could, but it hadn't been nearly enough. “ He says relief parcels from your organisation were the difference between hunger and starvation. He thanks you for his life, for which he cannot repay. He gives this for his oath to repay one hundred-fold the cost of each parcel he received, and for his two packmates who died in the camps and cannot redeem their own ...
Traveller Vignette 041 Marla looked at me, then at the part-empty bottle, as if gauging how much alcohol was in each. It was a local vintage, poor stuff, but I'd found that if I drank enough of it, I didn’t mind how bad it was. “You shouldn't drink alone” she told me, disapprovingly “ I never drink alone” I told her “It's just that everyone who keeps me company while I drink died in the war. I'd still rather spend time with them than most people I meet these days”. She rolled her eyes. “Do you actually practice the whole burned-out warhorse routine for effect, or are you seriously that full of bullshit? No, don't tell me, I don't care. Just take a sobriety pill and get ready. We've got a job”. She started to leave, then paused “And try to shave, for the Emperor's sake, so I don't have to apologise for the way you look” (Author's note - This is just a piece of colour, I'm afraid. I wrote it as a little character piece, but ...
Traveller 2300 - Tools for Colonial Living GDW's Traveller was by far the best-known of the science fiction roleplaying games. However, it was set far into the future, leaving a potential opening for a "near future" SF RPG and GDW launched "Traveller 2300" in 1986 to try to fill this gap. The result was confusing. Despite using "Traveller" as part of the name to cash in on brand recognition, there was no relationship between the games. Traveller 2300 used a new rule set, and a background derived by extending the chronology created for GDW's Twilight 2000 game into the future, after humanity had recovered from WWIII and explored a small section of the universe - roughly a subsector, in classic traveller terms. The games' universe had some excellent features (the Kafers in particular were some of my favourite aliens) but it also had some notably bad ones (including an extremely abrupt left turn to bring in lots of cyberpunk elements in the l...
Traveller Vignette 040 “ The liner Jenny Haniver emerged from jump without warning, on a prohibited vector that intersected the orbit of the system's main inhabited world. Orbital control tried to raise her onboard flight computers, then the backup flight computers and finally the human crew, without any success. She'd exited jump with significant velocity – another serious navigation infraction – so control wanted her boarded before she hit atmosphere and burned up. The tyranny of orbital mechanics meant we were about the only ship with the right location and thrust potential to intercept, and the fact we were nothing but an intra-system shuttle without a full crew aboard be damned. Anything from planetside or close orbit would have to burn to meet her, then reverse thrust and burn in the opposite direction to match velocities, which wasn't going to happen.” (Author's note - This is obviously a scenario set up; if the PCs have a ship, then it happens to...
Traveller Vignette 039 “ Hunting psions is part of the Bureau's job, but frankly not a major one – despite the urban legends about secret megacorp research projects and elite covert operatives, actual psions are very uncommon, and most aren't actually that powerful. The last psion hunt I remember was back in 1105; we'd picked up his trail when Naval Intelligence broke an undercover psion ring which might – or might not – have had Zho backing. The ring had been testing a new drug which supposedly helped unlock dormant powers, and asked planetary authorities to do a routine follow-up on anyone who might have been a test subject. Anyway, this guy ran a speeder dealership, and a very successful one. He didn't show any of the standard powers, but he was supernaturally persuasive. I mean, he couldn't make you believe your mother was a Vargr or something, but everything he said just seemed so...reasonable. The first agent I sent to interview him came back wit...
Traveller Vignette 038 “ Brother James met me in the mission's carefully tended vegetable garden. He looked thin, overworked and oddly content. The Iskandrian church had been working on this low-tech backwater world for three generations now, running clinics and schools, and their work was slowly paying off – literacy and life expectancy were up by a measurable amount, and child mortality was down. From what I understood, there was actually a waiting list of people back on Iskander willing to spend two years training then another five years here, working for nothing but their keep and the belief that they'd be rewarded in some future life. They didn't particularly try to proselytize, because their church taught that the best argument was a good example, but they got converts anyway and I'd not met anybody on world who had anything but praise for the brothers. “ The mission seems to be doing well, Brother” I said. “ Pretty good” he said modestly “But you know...
Traveller Small Arms - Part 1, Handguns Traveller has a gone for "generic" weapons - an autopistol, rather than a "10mm Muller-Riviera Mk 19" - which is fine, but the weapons in the basic book - and especially the handguns - seem a rather sparse assortment. It would be nice to have a little more choice, and for a TL9 pistol not to be identical its TL5 equivalent. On the other hand, I like the simplicity of the existing rules, and didn't want to come up with a huge book of new weapons. The best option was therefore to add a couple of simple options which modified the existing weapons, and add some colour to show how a weapon changes through tech levels, while still using the same combat table. The first thing is to add a "light pistol", which uses the same combat tables as the body pistol, but made of conventional materials rather than the high tech detection-proof materials as the body pistol and weighing 350g. Cost, availability and lega...
Traveller Vignette 037 “ The trouble with getting drunk is that you're basically borrowing happiness from tomorrow, with a hangover as the payback. I blearily rummaged a can off coffee from a cupboard, pressed the tabs on the lid for cream and extra sweet, and left it on the counter to heat while I ducked into the fresher. After a shower and half the coffee, I felt a bit more human, if only to about the Homo habilis level. I left the other half of the can; the last thing you want when you'll be in an EVA suit is a full bladder” (Author's note - This is essentially just some colour that can be dropped into descriptive text as a reminder we're in a science fiction game)
Traveller Vignette 036 The woman's face was a shocked, white oval as I locked eyes with her along the combat shotgun's vent rib barrel. At this range, the buckshot load would barely spread, and it'd probably take most of her head off. “ Whatever they told you I did, they were lying” she said, with desperate urgency Actually, the Guardians had never told me what the woman was supposed to have done, they just told me to kill her, and what would happen if I didn't. (Author's note - This is a scenario set-up; the PCs may be the ones on either end of the shotgun. Why the guardians want her dead may vary, from her having witnesses something she shouldn't to being the unknowing carrier of a dreadful plague that will kill millions if it spreads)
Traveller Vignette 035 “ I couldn’t make out what the crowd was shouting, but the tone was clear enough, an angry rumble that wanted blood. The riot police holding a line across the square were firing shotgun shells into the pavement just in front of the crowd, so the pellets ricocheted off the cobblestones and into the shins and thighs of the mob. Enough to sting, but not enough to do serious damage. It was keeping the mob back, but only just. Everyone could see that even if the police started firing into the crowd, they couldn’t kill enough to make a difference before the rest swarmed over them, but nobody wanted to be the first to die. Then I heard the flat boom of a rifle, firing from one of the buildings across the square. One of the riot officers went down with a bullet in the chest, and all hell broke loose… (Author's note - Generally, adventures involve the characters being given a mission by a patron. This time, they are caught on a planet (perhaps while the...
So what went wrong with the Ringworld RPG? In 1984, Chaosium produced the now largely forgotten Ringworld RPG, based on the works of Larry Niven. In terms of rules, it used Chaosium's well-tested Basic Role Playing percentile skill system, with a couple of refinements. First off, it provided detailed rules for all sorts of environmental hazards characters might run into, from falling through to vacuum, asphyxia and radiation. Secondly, it replaces the combat round with continuous one second "impulses". A character can take a major action (drawing a weapon, aiming it or changing a magazine) which take number of impulses based on their DEX - typically 4-5 impulses for an average character - or minor action (eg fire a weapon that is already aimed) which only takes one impulse. It's an elegant system, though one that does require a certain amount of book keeping. Physically, the box contains four books plus some reference sheets and a set of stand-up "...