More Patron Saints in the Far Future

It is the season of Advent once again, and I have a new group of stories to share about Saints of Holtzmann's Corridor. 

• for Diplomats: St. Arthur the Peacemaker
• for Colonists: St. Titus of Icemont
• for (Reformed) Pirates: St. Felix the Tabrazian
• for Belters: St. Cassian of Ferrocore

This has nothing to do with the content of this post, but it's still a cool pic.

Saint Arthur the Peacemaker

Arthur (of Mavramorn) was part of the negotiation team sent to Stavanger to bring an end to the Stavanger-Mavramorn war that had raged for several years. During the many heated meetings, he was always the voice persuading for forgiveness and contrition. “Mutual repentance” was his constant refrain. A radical faction of the Stavangerian military attempted to disrupt the negotiations and kill a Stavanger diplomat whom they felt was betraying their cause. St. Arthur sacrificed himself to protect this man from a shooting attack. He died to save an enemy from that enemies' own allies. Shocked both by the betrayal and the sacrifice, the two sides confirmed the treaty and honored Arthur's sacrifice by signing the peace treaty in Arthur's name.

Why there are no Aliens in my Traveller Setting

 Simple answer: I don't need them. What purpose do aliens serve? To produce other-worldliness? To remind the players that they aren't in New Jersey? To give PCs cool new powers & abilities? To be a faceless enemy that Travellers can slaughter without qualm?

Rubber Forehead Aliens, now with AI!

I don't need aliens to do those things. Note this is not me saying that aliens are badwrongthink. The Traveller Book does mention aliens in passing, and says that any character can be of any race. Beyond that is up to the Referee and the players.

As a human and a Christian, I believe that God became Man in the person Jesus Christ. By his literal physical death and Resurrection He provided mankind salvation, the way back to Paradise, communion with God. He healed and restored the Image of God in man. That man bears the image and likeness of God is part of the Christian creed. This makes us distinct from animals, plants and rocks.

Does that make mankind unique in the universe? I don't know. The Church does not claim to know whether there are other image-bearers in the cosmos. So here, in my fictional future setting we find no other image-bearing races. I have chosen to leave that question unanswered.

Yes, I have the Ursas and neo-dogs. Both of these arose from Terran animals. We know that they do not bear the Image. The Church views them as living beings worthy of respect, but not as potential members of the Church. Also, the Ursas and Neo's don't see the point; they are materialists.

I have read many sci-fi pulp stories, the kind of literature that inspired Traveller. The ones set in our solar system often have native races from Venus, Mars and Mercury, and sometimes the outer planets too. Every author has a different vision of what a Martian looks like.

What they have in common is this: they are different cultures from the Terrans. Language, dress, and social practice set them apart. For the sake of story-telling they all can communicate with Terrans. There is some form of common language that all the planets have and know. 

'I think I did a TARDIS' - a First at the Gaming Table

 Huh?*

This past weekend, we had two firsts at the table while playing Traveller. This despite that I've played this game since about 1982.

First, the simple one. My older son was playing a new character, Dismas, an ex-Flyer. He was on Narok, a non-Imperial world in the Corridor. While there he found himself in the middle of a public protest against the Empire and its various evils. Remember that from the Empire's POV, everyone in the Corridor are barbarians. 

Dismas was minding his own business but stumbled into the midst of the protest anyway. Some protesters noticed him and moved to attack. As is typical at the start of combat, we rolled for Surprise. Neither side gained surprise. I asked if Dismas wanted to fight or escape.

Escape and Avoidance: Encountering parties may attempt to escape from, or avoid contact with, an encounter. A party which has achieved surprise may always avoid an encounter by so stating. Non-player character parties which have surprise and are outnumbered will avoid an encounter on a throw of 7+ (no DMs). If two parties encounter without surprise, either may attempt to escape immediately (before any combat or contact occurs). Roll

9+ to escape (DM allowed based on range: -1 if close or short range, +I if medium range, +2 if long range, +3 if very long range).

Adventures in Resource Discovery

This is an addendum to the previous post on the Class-E starport. I'm looking outside of my usual lane of politics-influenced adventures for more pulp-style endeavors.

Everyone who's played CT knows about Animal Encounters, right? And as a component of this, from TTB, page 96 we find “In addition to animals, the referee may include one or more events in his encounter tables.” And “An event's purpose is to add interest, atmosphere and perhaps a bit of danger to the adventurers' travels.”

The party of adventurers have set up their Class E starport as the base point for a new colony. They venture out to explore the wilderness around the base camp. What do they find? The Referee should prep an animal encounter table. That table should include Event encounters.

What kinds of events should there be? Well, there has to be a reason that the PCs parked their ship where they did. A new planet has plenty of room to select from, so why that particular spot?

Establishing a New Colony - First Steps

How hard is it to set up a starport for your new settlement?

In my post about taking off and landing, I suggest that starships & pilots are used to landing at starports, with radio & radar guidance to ensure a safe landing. Starting a new colony on a new world, or just away from the existing port, landing can get tricky. It is still necessary to grow the new settlement. What else is there to do but build your own spaceport?

But what does that involve? As it turns out, not much, at least initially.

From Supplement 11, Library Data N-Z

[Starport type] “E,[is] (the worst, little more than a spot of cleared ground.)”

And we can put the fuel tanks right over there . . .

From the Traveller Wiki

In the short form of the Universal World Profile, ports are assigned a classification grade (A to E, and X) to the port facilities available in the system. This grade assigned to the port encompasses the services available in the port.

Class E: Frontier installation. Essentially a bare spot of bedrock with no fuel, facilities, or bases present.

From the unofficial supplement (MK-002) Starports! Credit to Rob Eaglestone, et al.

E. Frontier starport. With no facilities, the installation is little more than a flat expanse of bedrock and a sign. This designation effectively means there is no starport, but there have been previous landings and that location is indicated in records.

Each starport is characterized by a few basic elements: the Beacon, the Landing Pad, and the Traffic Control Facility. 

 

At the Class-E level, the beacon may be no more than a Continental Range communicator, perched on the roof of a shelter. The Equipment list in TTB includes communicators that operate out to Continental range of 5,000km. This range extends into Earth's exosphere. That is far enough to serve as a landing beacon. Traffic control is the job of whoever is manning the radio. A ship landing at a class E port will have the skies to itself; traffic volume will be very low.

 

The question of why your PCs want to set up their own starport is a topic for a post of its own. The actual cost in time, labor and equipment to set up a rudimentary port may be within the reach of most Travellers. Keeping it after it is built might be much harder. 

 

Have you ever seen this happen in play?  Tell about it in the comments.  

Signal Boost

 This is outside of my usual kinds of posts, but I feel like it's worth doing. While Traveller is my main game, it, like all other RPGs owes a debt to The World's Most Popular Role-Playing Game. Also, it is Good and Right to know your history.

Ad Fontes!

https://jonmollison.com/2024/03/13/told-you-so/

From Mr. Mollinson:

At the 21ish-minute mark, Jason launches into a very interesting story about pre-GenCon tournament D&D play.  What it looked like.  What players did.

SPOILER ALERT:  The #BROSR was right.  About everything.

Link to the issue of Europa: https://whiningkentpigs.com/DW/oldzines/europa6-8.pdf

From Travellers to Rival Lords - more on owning land

In an earlier post I talked about the possibilities of Travellers owning land. Land ownership is definitely a route to High Level Play. Here I want to move that idea forward by discussing the adventure potential of owning a lot of land. Also, what happens when the PC's activity comes to the attention of the planetary government. 

Someday, Traveller, all this shall be yours.

I use the term sub-state to refer to any organized territory that is not part of or obedient to the planetary government (hereafter I use the abbreviation PG). For those who are interested, here is a summary list of what any state actually does.

Ten Functions of the State

1. The Rule of Law
2. Monopoly on the legitimate means of violence
3. Administrative control
4. Sound management of public finances
5. Investments in human capital
6. Creation of citizenship rights through social policy
7. Provision of infrastructure services
8. Formation of a market
9. Management of public assets
10. Effective public borrowing

 taken from Fixing Failed States by Ghani & Lockhart

Why do sub-states exist? And why should Travellers get involved?

I have said to my sons many times “everything is complicated”. The factors that allow ungoverned spaces to exist are many and varied. In simple summary, any PG has limited resources. Those resources have to enable the governance of all the PG’s territory - the carrying out of the ten functions listed above. Sometimes there’s not enough to go around. The PG combines reasons of 'can't spend resources’ and 'won't spend resources’. The Referee has to decide how effective is the PG at running its own territories.

Sub-states are quite common in Hotlzmann's Corridor, given the low world populations and lower Tech Levels than in the Empire.

How will a PG respond to the presence of a sub-state? It will depend a great deal on the activity of the sub-state. Is it competing with the PG for resources or off-world trade? Is it seeking cooperation or alliance? Is the sub-state engaging in or supporting rebellion against the PG?

The PG has three general categories of response:

O Give Me a Home - Acquiring land in Traveller

I was wondering recently. What does it cost in Traveller to own land? The concept is not addressed in The Traveller Book. The underlying assumption of PCs forever on the move explains this absence. When the Third Imperium came along, the galaxy gained a social structure, and introduced the possibility of PCs owning land.

Land ownership can integrate with the concept of Traveller. It means that the wandering PCs are not aimless. They have a place to return to. Everyone is from somewhere. For most folk, where someone comes from is a major factor in their identity and sense of self. Where do I belong? is not a frivolous question. 

I've mentioned before in Character Experience and Development that PCs might gain land as a reward. If the PCs do some thrilling heroics and save the town/city/planet, that piece of prime real estate makes sense. You've endeared yourself to the local populace. They want you to feel that you're a part of them now, by owning part of where they live.

Welcome home!

 

Once the homestead is official, if the PCs get involved with that, the property should start paying for itself. Land is a resource for making money. Grow food, extract resources and then sell it, or rent it out to someone who does those things. Or rent it out as living space. Referees can make adventures out of any of these options. 

World Mapping

I enjoy making maps, and have made Traveller world maps for years, for many worlds of my TU. But within the game universe, how do the characters and governments make these maps?  I think the common answer to that question is by using survey/scout ships and orbiting satellites. I have read recently a few things about real-world satellites and their capabilities that prod me to consider them in more detail for gaming.

It is simply impractical to park a Donosev survey ship and its crew in orbit around a planet for a few years while it does the surveying. Unmanned satellites are the more economical and reasonable option. However, sat surveys have limitations too. At high altitudes, a sat with optical or visible light cameras can see a lot, but not in any useful detail. The standard Traveller world map is a good representation of the problem.

Look at the map of Earth as presented in the game Invasion:Earth. The area of the continental United States is covered in four hexes. Three thousand miles in four hexes?  Each hex is 713 miles in width. There is, for all practical purposes, NO detail of the surface available from that map. Even the hex that represents the Rocky Mountains is so vague as to be almost useless. Humans don’t live and act at that scale. The continental US has almost every type of terrain found on this planet, from swamps to river deltas to deserts to mountains, foothills and coastal plains. None of that is depicted on the I:E map.

See what I mean about lack of detail? Can you tell where the Appalachian mountains are from this photo?

That is the kind of representation that a high orbital satellite provides. It’s quick and easy to do but provides the most meager information.

The reverse is true as well. A camera sat might focus on a single square kilometer, or 10 meter square of the surface, and produce a very detailed image. But only for that one square. What is adjacent to it?  What terrain must be crossed to get to it? How long did the sat take to find that one spot – a week, a month, years?  Satellites orbit, and for this reason, are able to look at any one spot for a limited time each time it goes around. Maybe not much changes from one orbit to the next, but maybe something does.

My first Traveller campaign - a look back

I have often on this blog written about my Traveller adventures with my sons. But my first attempt at Traveller, as an adult anyway, with me as the Referee, was with my wife, Angela. It seems appropriate to write about this, because my wife died in May of this year, four months ago today. This is the reason for my long absence from the blog. With my return, I want to remember my wife and her impact on my gaming life in particular. This blog is not the place to discuss the fullness of my marriage.

In the first year we were married we moved from North Carolina to Pennsylvania as I took a job at a school there. We knew nobody, and had been married less than a year. What to do?  Play Traveller, of course. 

Angela was fond of the Dragonriders of Pern series by Ann McCaffrey, so she asked if her game could take place on a world like that. I've said before that you can model just about anything with Traveller, so I said sure, let's have a world with starships and dragons. I selected Bellesile from my TU, and set about designing the world and figuring out how humans and dragons exist together. I kept all the notes from that project in a folder through all the subsequent moves.

She named her character Alina Madrig, and chose the Noble career after getting a good SOC score. This is her hand-written character sheet:

Alina also possessed Animal Telepathy - she could talk to the dragons! Beyond rolling dice, she took a character building guide I found online and wrote out a pretty thorough description of who Alina was, where she was from and whom she knew. I used that to build a list of major NPCs that her character could interact with. She may have had the most complete backstory of any Traveller character I've ever dealt with.

How much room is there on a planet?

Talavera, the capital of the Empire of my Church and Empire setting, is a large planet with vast oceans. The UPP is A-969835-F, and 947 million people. But how much room do they actually have for a billion people?

Size 9: 9,000 mile diameter

Hydro 9: 90% of the planet is oceans

I had an initial idea of a densely populated island, where the buildings reach high into the sky to make room for nearly a billion people.

Then I did some math. What I found was, to say the least, not that dramatic.

Talavera has 25,446,900 square miles of land area. Spread 947,000,000 people over that and you get a population density of 37.215 ppl/mi^2.

According to this table of population densities of countries, that's less than Norway or Sweden. Neither are the sorts of places you think of when you think of dense populations. China, at 378 ppl/mi^2 is ten times denser. 25 million square miles is several times the size of Russia.

I did up a table to compute the square miles of surface area on planets in Traveller. By taking the Size code and cross-referencing with the Hydrographics code, you can find the land area of any planet of normal parameters. It may be water, it may be ice, it can be some other kind of liquid.

Here is a sample of the table, including a few Earth examples for comparison. The entire table, in MS Excel format, is available here.  The long and short of it is this: any planet is going to have plenty of room for exploration, or to hide something or someone. Even a Size-2 planet with Hydro-5 has space near to the size of Russia to work with.

Of this area, only a scant percentage is going to be inhabited, unless A) the population is in the Billions or above and B) most of the planet is covered by liquid or ice. A planet with only a few million people is going to be 90+% uninhabited.

What might go on in the frontier areas of a lightly populated world? Possibly a lot.  Share your ideas in the comments.

 

Size Code	Diameter	Radius	Total Area	Hydrographic-5
0	500.0	250.0	785,398.2	392,699.1
1	1,000.0	500.0	3,141,592.7	1,570,796.4
2	2,000.0	1,000.0	12,566,370.8	6,283,185.4
3	3,000.0	1,500.0	28,274,334.3	14,137,167.2
4	4,000.0	2,000.0	50,265,483.2	25,132,741.6
5	5,000.0	2,500.0	78,539,817.5	39,269,908.8
6	6,000.0	3,000.0	113,097,337.2	56,548,668.6
7	7,000.0	3,500.0	153,938,042.3	76,969,021.2
8	8,000.0	4,000.0	201,061,932.8	100,530,966.4
9	9,000.0	4,500.0	254,469,008.7	127,234,504.4
10 (A)	10,000.0	5,000.0	314,159,270.0	157,079,635.0
Russia			6,601,670
China			3,600,950
Canada			3,511,023
USA			3,531,925
Brazil			3,266,584
Australia			2,947,336
Texas			261,231
California			155,779
New York			47,126

Military Reputations in the Corriodor

This is a panel from a G I Joe: A Real American Hero comic from back in the late 1980's. I've edited the text balloons a bit to reflect the situation in Holtzmann's Corridor. In case it's not obvious, a Raid and Hostage Rescue has just taken place. 

Now this is just a bit of silly fun on a Friday night, but it does reflect a bit of the political rivalry that exists in my Church and Empire setting. 

What could be said about the Pocket Empires or the Third Imperium & its rivals in your game?

Bonus points if you have this issue, and can tell me who these two mercenaries were actually talking about.

Don't Believe Everything You Hear - Rumors in Traveller

Encounters are a staple of role-playing activity. As the PCs move about from place to place they naturally meet up with NPCs and interact with them.

Traveller has a mechanism for a type of encounter I've seen in almost no other RPG. In the Encounters section there are tables for encountering Rumors. Here's some of what the rules say about them (TTB, p.99):

Information is a valuable commodity to travellers, and rumors are the source of much useful information.
In any case the idea of the rumor allows the player characters to learn of new exciting an potentially rewarding (or potentially deadly) situations. In many Traveller situations, a rumor is simply information leading to a patron, a job or a potential treasure; . . . 
Rumors are valuable, and once player characters know of their potential, they will seek them out. 

I have no idea what kind of information this gathers.

I admit that over the years of playing, I've struggled to know what to do with the Rumor table. The main difficulty was always what is this Rumor about? An important clue? To what?  An Obvious clue? Why is it obvious?

It occurred to me that one solution to this is to create a list of rumors to match the table, all relating to one thing.

When the players inquire about a thing or a person, or when the Referee gets an idea about something that the players would find interesting, start brainstorming. Decide what the facts of the matter are. Use the Rumor descriptions in the table as a guide and create the tidbits that will reel in the players.

Example: rumors about a treasure on Worosha.

Social Standing and Class Consciousness

It seems that I am on a quest to make Social Standing a more important aspect of Traveller. Not sure why this is. I tend to play and write more plot-heavy and action-driven games, and have never gotten a PC into a 'comedy of manners' type situation. Pride and Prejudice is a great novel, but not a good model to base a Science Fiction adventure upon. (If you think I'm wrong, please do comment and explain your idea.) But as I look back across my now five years of writing posts for this blog, I see that I've spent some time trying to integrate Social Standing (SOC) into my favorite game.

Some players may consider SOC a 'dump stat'. I don't. I think it deserves its place in the UPP, because it can tell a player some interesting things about the PC. In the hands of an experienced player, SOC can be a useful tool in the arsenal for getting things done.

What's All This About Class Consciousness?

I assume in my TU that each planet has a mostly unified culture, even if the governments are not unified. There is not one monolithic 'Galactic Culture' or even an 'Imperial Culture'. Planets are like islands. Most residents don't ever leave, and don't ever interact directly with folks from somewhere else. This results in planet-based cultures.

Some cultures rate highly on what is known as the 'Power Distance' scale. These are socially stratified or 'class conscious' cultures. It matters what class you come from, and you stick with 'your people'.

Asteroid Visualization - Bennu

I have followed with great interest the OSIRIS-REx Mission to Asteroid Bennu (1999 RQ36), discovered twenty years ago this month! The next step in its exploration is to attempt a landing of the O-R spacecraft on it's rocky surface. It's a microgravity environment, and a challenging operation to conduct remotely.

Best of luck to the NASA team that's running this mission. 

What could a space-faring Traveller find by landing on such a small object?  What degree of difficulty would there be for the Pilot?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

D66 Reasons Why the Colony Failed

A few months back I asked a question of one of the Facebook Traveller groups that I read. I have a scenario in mind where the PCs are exploring an abandoned habitat. No specific setting, no specific arrangement. Just some kind of colony. The idea may have grown out of the tables in Stellagama's Pirates & Privateering source book, which lists abandoned space stations as a random encounter.

The question was: Why did the colony fail?  Much to my delight, the answers poured in. I have collected here the bulk of the answers (deduplicated for near identical answers) and arranged them in a D66 table. To roll D66, roll 1D for the 'tens' digit and a second 1D for the 'ones' digit.

 

Clearly something has gone dreadfully Wrong here.

If you have any ideas that don't appear on this list, share in the comments!

D66 Reasons why the Colony Failed

11 Pilgrimage site for some religion that was later deprecated as a forgery

12 Fast-acting or slow-acting contagion (bacterial/viral/fungal/parasitic)

13 Mining site, better yield found elsewhere and everyone moved.

14 Mining site, ore vein tapped out

15 Colony set-up was a scam. Shells of buildings only, no infrastructure. Scammers on the run.

16 Environmental factor not initially detected caused health problems (i.e. death)

Not Human at all: Ursas!

What would your PCs do, if they arrived at a Class-E port on some frozen dead end world, and discovered that this character:

"Stan", E7D776  Army, 2 terms Lieutenant

was the Port Authority? The Ursas appeared several hundred years ago; and other than the fact that they came from Earth, their origins are more legend than fact. The Ursas themselves cannot say who uplifted them. They don't think about it that much. They are here, deal with it.

Ursas are intelligent to a level comparable with humans, and some are quite smart. It is unwise to think of them as large, furry humans.  Ursas's motivations are hunger, desire for territory (see point 1), self-preservation or reproduction. Ursas that live in human society have chosen to adopt human means of sating these desires. Working for pay to buy food negates hunger and the need for territory.  Cooperation with humans provides security and the opportunity to find other Ursas to address that last drive.

Ursas are not aggressive, unless they sense a threat. They know that they can intimidate humans with their size and will do so if it helps their goals.  They will fight if facing a threat to themselves, their territory, their cubs, or any character the Ursa considers important to protect. Ursas in the Army can wear armor and carry heavy weapons. Think about that for a minute.

Around My TU - Brocadia

In other posts I have shared my Holtzmann's Corridor subsector, where my monthly game group is playing. Here's a planet from another part of my TU, the Weitzlar subsector Glorious Empire Subsector. This region is where I'm trying out some concepts and running some characters solo, without it having an impact on the main gaming group.

Here I present Brocadia, a world of that subsector, that has a few interesting features and I hope a number of adventure possibilities. Enjoy.

0108 Brocadia B-772639-10
Kingdom of Brocadia. Current monarch: Wilhelm XI. Maintains control through a large and effective secret police service.

Tags: police state, freak geology

Leaving the Starport might be harder than you think

Please have your TAS documentation ready. All bags will be searched.

From the US State Department's Travel Advisory website:

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/China.html

Exercise increased caution in China due to arbitrary enforcement of local laws as well as special restrictions on dual U.S.-Chinese nationals.Chinese authorities have asserted broad authority to prohibit U.S. citizens from leaving China by using ‘exit bans,’ sometimes keeping U.S. citizens in China for years. China uses exit bans coercively:

• to compel U.S. citizens to participate in Chinese government investigations,
• to lure individuals back to China from abroad, and
• to aid Chinese authorities in resolving civil disputes in favor of Chinese parties.

In most cases, U.S. citizens only become aware of the exit ban when they attempt to depart China, and there is no method to find out how long the ban may continue. U.S. citizens under exit bans have been harassed and threatened.
U.S. citizens may be detained without access to U.S. consular services or information about their alleged crime. U.S. citizens may be subjected to prolonged interrogations and extended detention for reasons related to “state security.” Security personnel may detain and/or deport U.S. citizens for sending private electronic messages critical of the Chinese government.
Extra security measures, such as security checks and increased levels of police presence, are common in the Xinjiang Uighur and Tibet Autonomous Regions. Authorities may impose curfews and travel restrictions on short notice.
China does not recognize dual nationality. U.S.-Chinese citizens and U.S. citizens of Chinese heritage may be subject to additional scrutiny and harassment, and China may prevent the U.S. Embassy from providing consular services.

Hmm. If the Chinese on Earth would do this to foreign nationals in their country, why would not sovereign planetary governments do this to Travellers?

Here are some simple rules for adjudicating the PC's entry or exit into a world.

In the OTU, this may be handled differently. I wrote these rules for my ATU, in particular for Holtzmann's Corridor, where there is no Imperial government sitting atop the locals telling them what to do.

Starship Crews and Patron Saints

Saints preserve us!
 
Christians have had patron saints almost since the beginnings of Christianity. In this Advent season, I take another look at the Ancient Faith as it may be in the Far Future.

In the Church & Empire setting, there are untold thousands of saints. Many are revered on the world of their birth, or where they upheld the Faith. A small number are venerated across the Church, and of these there are several who are significant to those who travel in Space.

• St Brendan the Navigator - patron of Navigators from the earliest days of space flight.
• St Mamas the Guide - patron of Pilots, having flown 124 rescue missions into the most dangerous of conditions to the aid of disabled ships. She perished on the 125th mission.
• St Anicetas the Physician - patron of starship medics, one of the founding doctors of the Mercy Ship fleet. He died at his operating table at the hands of hijackers.