A general Encounter Table for Sword of Cepheus

A Discord discussion of Sword of Cepheus that I took part in brought up the question of encounters.  I mentioned that I'd done up a simple table for some random encounters, and people asked about it. So I'm sharing it here.

I present to you an array of characters that adventurers may come upon in Sword of Cepheus. Gamers familiar with Classic Traveller will recognize this table, and many of the encounters listed. 

This encounter did not go well for our hero.

SoC does not give any standard encounter distances. If outdoors & daytime, the two parties might be a few hundred meters apart at first. The Referee might say they look to be "about one bow shot away" (or 2-3). In the city the range might be down to spear-throwing distances. At night, or in an indoor/underground situation they will be much closer.  Indoors an encounter will likely happen at close enough range for the two sides to speak to one another. Combat in SoC is fairly abstracted, so exact measurement is not required. Besides, how many people can accurately gauge distances outdoors by sight?  Can you?  I'm not good at it. 

The Surprise rule (SoC, p. 54) should affect the initial range. It's hard to be surprised by someone you saw coming from half a mile.

Entries which read Monsters are any non-human (or PC race) creatures chosen from the SoC Monster section, guided by the habitat notes in the monster descriptions. Use the Number Appearing listed in the monster description. Wild animals are specifically non-fantastical or magical creatures that may still pose a threat. 

Duelling in Space

In our last session, a player brought a character to the table, which was a product of this online generator: https://www.batintheattic.com/traveller/

Barbarian Warrior Logan Singh B5A758 Age 46 7 terms Cr4,000 

Skills: Brawling-1, Carousing-1, Mechanical-1, Recon-1, Short Bow-2, Sword-7

Yeah, I put that last one in boldface on purpose. I have remarked before on this blog about how high levels of skill are possible. See Enrique Salazar for one. Now there's one in play in my TU.

Session Recap - gaming on the fly

 Several of the usual players were unable to make it to the session last evening, so I focused on the two who were there. Graham Clark and his sidekick known as C-418 are working for a Count on Holtzmann. We covered three weeks of in-game time. Most was routine work for the Count (in his vehicle fleet) In their free time they did some shopping and a little Trade & Speculation. They netted a profit, but not much adventure. 

Image unrelated, but still cool. I'm sure that creature exists somewhere in my TU.

As I was anticipating concluding an adventure begun the week before with the full group, I had nothing prepared ahead of time. What to do?  The answer is right there in The Traveller Book. I checked on Legal Encounters, Random Encounters and Rumors. All three of these give the Referee tools to generate adventures.