Like a waitress in a space diner
I have a number of old Traveller books in PDF format. I recently shoved them onto my Sony eReader, and have been reading them when I don't feel like reading public domain 19th century stuff.
The old Black Book adventures have a very unique feel to them, a strange combination of epic galaxy spanning feats and hand-to-mouth scrabbling. A few years back I wrote about the strange "Ship of Cripples" provided as pre-generated characters for the Argon Gambit adventure. Last night, I was reading through The Zhondane Expedition.
The adventure starts with the players looking for work in a crime-ridden Star Town on a backwater planet. They are provided with a list of more than 20 jobs they can take, including such glorious careers as short order cook, cocktail waitress, data entry clerk at the North Pole, pawnbroker and miner. Not space miner, either. A miner in a hole.
The game suggests a few sessions spent working these jobs. Welcome to Traveller! No really, it is meant to be this way. Book 0: Introduction to Traveller specifically says the player characters should be desperate trying to make money for food for the few session of play.
Yet, I like that set up. Traveller characters by default start the first session as unemployed wanderers in a desperately expensive universe. They had jobs that took them across the stars, and might be hundreds of parsecs from their homeworld, only to find themselves summarily demobbed with a few thousand credits in their pocket. In this universe, the price of a single middle-class passage to the next star system is roughly equivalent to a year's pay in a planetside job. So, maybe yesterday you were a Starman in the Imperial navy. Today you're a fry cook on a colony world. You're going to want and scrimp and save to get back out into the stars, surely.
The players are supposed to eventually connect with an asteroid mining outfit, only to be drugged and pressed into employment at their interview. They find themselves in a tiny floating habitat in space with only vaccuum suits, with instructions to start prospecting for asteroids or starve. The adventure provides advice for adjudicating escape attempts, but makes it pretty clear these are futile, something to do for a few more sessions until the adventure proper begins.
(Also, spoilers ahead for those who care about spoilers for a 30-year-old adventure module.)
At some point the players stumble across a powered down spaceship disguised as an asteroid. On board they discover a 12-year-old girl in "cold sleep" and a "personality overlay machine." The girl is the daughter of a missing scientist with a great many secrets, and the machine is surely a gateway to countless amusing "brain switch" scenarios so beloved of sitcoms. All of a sudden the universe opens up again, and the actions of the players have the potential to take them almost anywhere.
The old Black Book adventures have a very unique feel to them, a strange combination of epic galaxy spanning feats and hand-to-mouth scrabbling. A few years back I wrote about the strange "Ship of Cripples" provided as pre-generated characters for the Argon Gambit adventure. Last night, I was reading through The Zhondane Expedition.
The adventure starts with the players looking for work in a crime-ridden Star Town on a backwater planet. They are provided with a list of more than 20 jobs they can take, including such glorious careers as short order cook, cocktail waitress, data entry clerk at the North Pole, pawnbroker and miner. Not space miner, either. A miner in a hole.
The game suggests a few sessions spent working these jobs. Welcome to Traveller! No really, it is meant to be this way. Book 0: Introduction to Traveller specifically says the player characters should be desperate trying to make money for food for the few session of play.
Yet, I like that set up. Traveller characters by default start the first session as unemployed wanderers in a desperately expensive universe. They had jobs that took them across the stars, and might be hundreds of parsecs from their homeworld, only to find themselves summarily demobbed with a few thousand credits in their pocket. In this universe, the price of a single middle-class passage to the next star system is roughly equivalent to a year's pay in a planetside job. So, maybe yesterday you were a Starman in the Imperial navy. Today you're a fry cook on a colony world. You're going to want and scrimp and save to get back out into the stars, surely.
The players are supposed to eventually connect with an asteroid mining outfit, only to be drugged and pressed into employment at their interview. They find themselves in a tiny floating habitat in space with only vaccuum suits, with instructions to start prospecting for asteroids or starve. The adventure provides advice for adjudicating escape attempts, but makes it pretty clear these are futile, something to do for a few more sessions until the adventure proper begins.
(Also, spoilers ahead for those who care about spoilers for a 30-year-old adventure module.)
At some point the players stumble across a powered down spaceship disguised as an asteroid. On board they discover a 12-year-old girl in "cold sleep" and a "personality overlay machine." The girl is the daughter of a missing scientist with a great many secrets, and the machine is surely a gateway to countless amusing "brain switch" scenarios so beloved of sitcoms. All of a sudden the universe opens up again, and the actions of the players have the potential to take them almost anywhere.