Why a return to Traveller? Two reasons, really.
An already-familiar setting
The options for choosing some other game, or some other setting, would mean me having to put another backdrop into my head. For example, I had briefly considered a Coriolis game, the chief advantage being an assumed lower-prep level because of adventures already being written and published by Fria Lagan. But the game still comes with a detailed setting and an entirely new set of rules, and this combination seemed to signal too many hurdles. I also briefly considered rolling my own setting and using the Cypher System rules, because I knew from experience as the referee for a Numenera game that the prep-and-run burden for the game was actually very low. But this required a new setting from me, from whole cloth and the burden for creating and managing player characters in the game is a bit heavier than I’d like currently, and certainly for this group of players.
But, I decided that I wanted to return to my Commonwealth setting because it had a feel that sat well in my head. The feel might be expressed like: what if you took The Expanse and The Hyperion Cantos and Battlestar Galactica and Killjoys and Corto Maltese and Rocco Vargas and Classic Traveller (the game, not the Imperium) all in a blender and whirred it around – what would that look like? Something that was a bit retro-futur but not very, a bit on the hard side but not very. There isn’t a game on my shelf that gives me this setting, really; it sits there because of my own variety of sources with no single source being a strong example of what I’d like.
A lighter set of rules
Because of our current medical circumstances, I haven’t had any face to face gaming since the beginning of 2020. But I’m doing more regular rolegaming now than I did back then. I have three regular groups in flight at the moment, one of them being as a player. They’re all done online via video-conferencing software. They’re liable to stay that way for some time to come: at least months, if not years. (I’m suspecting, in fact, that we’ll get so used to this mode of interaction that we’re forced to engage in at the moment, that by the time we have an option to do otherwise, some of these groups may simply continue to work this way because of the convenience.)
Because of the medium we’re now using for play, it means that my play style leans even more heavily into theatre of the mind, and lighter application of rule-systems. Lighter character sheets; fewer die rolls; very little in the way of detailed tactical simulation that can’t be managed through verbal description and conversation.
And I’m fairly convinced that Classic Traveller can excel under these circumstances based on past experience.
The hook back in
All I really needed was a premise, a hook back in to the Commonwealth for this particular group of players. I knew that I wanted to relieve the burden of accountancy from this group: if they eventually want to be running their own ship, and doing their own books, and managing their own trade, there may certainly come an opportunity for that. But I didn’t want to start the game with “here’s your own ship; go nuts”. It took a few days of musing before I had something I was comfortable with.
The frontier worlds of Hounslow and Becontree always seemed interesting to me: connected to the expanding Commonwealth currently only be routes known to the Scout Service; an interesting pair of worlds out on the beyond: one industrial, the other agricultural.
My premise naturally sprung out of these two factors. The player characters are all family retainers to a wealthy merchant clan: trusted members of the entourage, but none of them family members. One of the scions of the family has been dispatched out from the core worlds to the farthest reaches of the Commonwealth to “secure long term business interests” that will serve the family’s trade strategy for decades to come.
A bit East India Empire, a bit Dune, a bit Dutch Indonesia, a bit Corto Maltese larking about the South American coast. I pitched this to the group as “Sort of like the show Medici. But in space!” and this seemed to work.
I encouraged them all to use an online character generator. Just push the button a bunch of times until you find a character you like. I felt that this method would be just the right level of accessibility for this group of players who might not at this stage want to sit down with Book One and Supplement Four and some paper and dice and spend an hour noodling away.
As a result, we now have three player characters and an introduction session under our belt and a fairly clear picture in my head about where things can go next.
And, I suppose, more reason for more blog posts.