Chariots of Fire Amber Zone Revies # 29

Amber Zone Review #29 
   
Amber Zone: Chariots of Fire, by  Anders Blixt

To the Rescue!

Location: Gatina (C-765876-7) in the nations of Castica & Handor.

Patron:  An officer of Castica's Military Intelligence brach

Mission: Castica wants to stage a propaganda coup on their neighbor Handor by stealing two specialty fire engines. These vehicles were purchased jointly by the two nations (under a previous government in Handor) and housed in the Handorian capital. The rigs are the core of a specialty fire fighting unit for combating urban & industrial fires. The rigs are to be driven from one capital to the other, a distance of only 10 km, with the border halfway there. There are a few roads which the rigs could take to cross the border.

Payoff: Cr 50,000 to the group.

Complications: Tensions have been on the rise between the two nations, so the border is patrolled by armed forces on both sides. The rigs are easily recognizable to both sides. The PCs will have to explain their possession of the rigs. The patron has not been able to forewarn his side about the hijacking. Either side may decide to arrest or shoot the PCs if they think the rigs are being stolen. The rigs cannot be damaged in the transfer. The patron will cut the pay if the rigs are damaged.

Strong Points:  The more I think about this adventure, the more complicated it becomes. At first you might think, 'steal a truck and drive it 10 km? Easy.' But it won't be. Fire engines are big and hard to mistake for anything but what they are. No one (offical, anyway) is going to let the PCs take these two rigs without asking a lot of questions, and possibly arresting or shooting them if they don't like the answers.

          The real challenge, then, is to steal two large vehicles without anyone suspecting that they're stealing them. This is a mission for Danny Ocean or Neal Caffrey, or maybe even Mission Impossible, not gun-toting heavies. Social skills like Forgery, Bribery and Carousing will be of more use here than fighting. Even more important than that, it will require planning and role playing by the players. It may not be as epic as The Great Train Robbery, but if the PCs pull this off, they will have definite bragging rights for a long while.

Weak Points: As a matter of preference; if a PC I'm playing is going to do something that might result in jail time, I'd rather it be something more significant and heroic than stealing from the Fire Department. This adventure also lacks any sci-fi feel to it, this could just as easily be happening between Germany & Poland. I'm also not happy with the implication that the PCs actions could help provoke a war between these two nations.

What I'd change: Nothing. This is not my favorite kind of adventure; I don't prefer ones where the PCs are committing crimes. Nevertheless, as written, the adventure is solid, just not my taste.

In My Traveller Universe: This scenario requires a balkanized world, and there are not many of them IMTU. Latoria (Weitzlar subsector) seems the closest match in size, population and tech level. 

Firefighters and other emergency services workers, both professional and volunteer are real heroes, whether in the Far Future or right here, right now. Support your local Fire Department, and consider making a donation to the Firefighters Support Foundation.

photo credit: <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/leecannon/5806534643/">Lee Cannon</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">cc</a>

Traveller Skills and Setting Part 5

In a game called Traveller, you know there will be VEHICLES

The other posts in this series are here, here, here, and here.

Who needs contra-gravity when you've got one of these?

          The Vehicle skills were there to enable the PCs to travel around while on a world. They are:

• Air/raft (the basic contragravity car)
• ATV (All Terrain Vehicle) 
• Ship's Boat 
• Aircraft, of several types 
• Tracked vehicles 
• Wheeled vehicles
• Watercraft, of several types
• There was also a Vehicle cascade skill, where the player could choose a type

           The vehicles presented suggest, much as the weapons skills do, that there are varying degrees of technological development throughout the setting. They also tell us about the geography of the worlds. Travellers can expect to encounter all kinds of terrain in their wanderings, and there are vehicles to match. Here's a detail that I have overlooked for a very long time from the Vehicle skill description:

          "Vehicle skill . . . may also be used for assistance in repairing and maintaining a vehicle". 

          I had always gone with general Mechanical skill as the necessary to repair a vehicle, but the skill is actually a vehicle-specific mechanical skill.

          There are ground huggers, wheeled for easy terrain, roads & prairies and such, and tracked for rougher ground. Aircraft and contra-gravity craft are for covering a lot of ground quickly, on worlds where the inhabited areas are widely spread. There will be waterborne exploration as well, both on the surface (hovercraft, large boats) and in the depths (submarines). 

Still awesome, even in the 51st century.

           Ship's boat is included with the Vehicle skills despite it being for operating small space craft carried aboard larger ones. Ship's Boats can go from the surface to orbit and beyond, which points to inhabited orbital stations, or colonies on the moon, too far for an air/raft but too close to need a starship.

Conclusion
 

Adventure calls. Are you up for it?

           Given this cursory overview, and without having any prior knowledge of science fiction literature, and without seeing any of the official setting publications that followed, a gamer in 1977 could open up the Traveller Little Black Books and create a setting that is:

• a big, potentially infinite galaxy
• open to travel and exploration
• inhabited in some places and unexplored in others
• primitive in some places and advanced in others
• potentially unified culturally if not politically 
• inhabited by several cultural/political groups which either cooperate or conflict with each other
• expanding its cultural reach or shrinking from the frontier
• a dangerous place to go about in, whether in space or on land
• subject to wars, crime, and all manner of plagues upon mankind
• ripe with opportunity for the skilled, the bold and the daring.
• One where the PCs can be major powers or part of the masses.
• Limited only by the imagination of the players & the referee.

           Yes, that sounds like the Traveller I have played and enjoyed for thirty years. 

Does this change anything about the way we play Traveller in the 21st century?  

Is there a significant aspect of the original skills that I'm missing?  

For another POV on the Classic Traveller skills, check out this post at Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog. 

Traveller Skills and Setting part 4

We all need a little savoir-faire.

"So our mission this week will take us into Zhodani space . . ."  "What?!?"

The Social skills are all about getting NPC's to cooperate, or do what the PC's want them to do. These skills are:

·         Administration
·         Bribery
·         Forgery
·         Leadership
·         Streetwise

          Traveller has no generic Charisma stat, nor a general Persuasion skill – each of the five social skills covers an particular kind of interpersonal situation. It seems reasonable for some of the Social skills to play a part in getting a favorable reaction from an NPC, beyond what the skill description states.

A side thought about Streetwise. The description of this skill mentions how sub-cultures tend to be similar wherever one goes, but I had always thought of it in terms of lower class sub-cultures. Is not the Aristocracy its own sub-culture?  So a character with high SOC and Streetwise skill can move with and influence the rich & famous.
 
Streetwise also shows that the different worlds in the setting at least may have a common social history, if sub-cultures on different worlds all share common characteristics. So, the worlds have some amount of cultural unity despite the distance between them. Of course there can always be interstellar states that are culturally unified within but distinct and separate from other states.

In a curious move Bribery is mentioned in the Trade & Commerce section as being useful for influencing the purchase and sale price of speculative cargo. The Merchant career, which offers Bribery skill, has pointed many Traveller players in the direction of becoming Free Traders, wandering from planet to planet, buying and selling goods.

Leadership skill can be used anywhere there are people, but the rest of the social skills presuppose organized societies. There is nothing stopping the PCs from going back and forth between those two areas, but the social skills require that civilized area exist. Otherwise, why have them? Leadership in particular is about motivating others, so it should be useful as a reaction bonus.

Social interaction is part of the setting, without specifying to what ends those skills should be employed. Two of these skills are generally illegal to employ – so an element of lawlessness exists, even in the civilized parts of the setting.The PCs can be either part of that lawlessness, or avoid it, or be actively working against it.

The outcome of every  other kind of social interaction is determined by the Reaction table in the Encounters section. In comparison with more modern games, it is a pretty simple table, requiring the Referee to interpret and translate the result. Doing police investigations, trying to get a date, running for political office or engaging in other criminal activities are left to the role playing skill of the player and the flexibility of the Referee.

This is the fourth post in the series. Posts one two and three are here, here and here.

Next up: the Vehicle skills and my Summary.

Traveller Skills and Setting part 3

Bring out the Big Guns!

Go ahead, space Punk. Make my day.

     The Weapons skills (excluding Gunnery, which I moved to space) fall into two broad categories, blade/hand weapons, and guns.

     Wait, I thought this was a science fiction game in the far future. Why do we need swords and pikes? As well as:

• daggers
• foils
• clubs
• fists (Brawling skill)
• broadswords
• axes
• long and short bows
• halberds
• spears
• and the Marine favorite, the cutlass!

     This is often leveled at Traveller as a criticism, but not one that is well founded. Any number of sci-fi novels have characters who wield swords & spears, Norton's Voodoo Planet and Pournelle's King David's Spaceship, just to name two. So the designers included them to keep that bit of color in the setting. Recent and well-regarded sci-fi TV shows like Firefly and Dark Matter have characters wielding swords & knives in a 'starships & spacemen' setting and it works just fine.

Laser may beat Spear, unless Spear gets too close. That's why it has Shield.

 The existence of blade skill indicates the existence of low-tech or primitive societies in the setting. PCs could be from these low-tech areas, or have experience with them reflected in their possession of hand-to-hand weapon skills. In either case, technological advancement is not spread evenly throughout the setting. Some worlds have higher tech than others.

The attentive player will notice in the combat section that swords and spears will kill their PCs just as quickly and easily as guns will. 

The list of guns available also point to a diversity of technological achievement among worlds in the setting. I have been told that pre-industrial firearms were meant to be included in the LBBs but weren't for some reason. The guns presented are all generic types rather than specific models:

• body pistols (the pocket pistol)
• automatic pistols
• revolvers
• carbines
• rifle
• automatic rifles
• shotguns (nothing says Traveller like shotguns in space!)
• laser carbines
• laser rifles

The assumption is that these generic types can be found anywhere, and reinforces the idea from Streetwise of all the planets in the setting having some amount of common history.

As a practical matter, bullets will kill PCs as quickly as death rays and blaster bolts will. But for those who wanted them, Mercenary introduced some more futuristic weapons including the terrifying fusion gun. This thing will not only kill you, it will reduce you to a smoking pair of boots. 

It's called science fiction adventure in the far future, so there have to be laser weapons, something which was not available on Earth in the late 1970's, to give it a future feel. Another criticism leveled at Traveller was the limited selection of 'blasters' and other sci-fi weapons. Fair enough, until you read some of the novels that inspired the game – H Beam Piper in particular armed his characters with the kinds of weapons he was familiar with – pistols and rifles. Firefly came along much later, and it employed projectile weapons in a spaceship setting without anything seeming out of place.

In a more general sense, both the blades and the guns say that the setting is a potentially dangerous one, and that not all goals can be achieved with the social skills. When those fail, the weapons come out.
 
Some players have expressed the opinion that weapons in Traveller were deadly so that players would think twice about getting into combat. The theory goes that combat can result in death, and pretty quick death, so get out those social skills and try to resolve the disagreement with skills and role-playing instead. 

So let's talk about the social skills next.

Part One of this series is here.
Part Two of this series is here.

Traveller Skills and Setting part 2

The Technical Skills
part one is here.

The Technical skills can be further broken down into two sub-categories which I call Repair and Probabilities.Repair includes :

• Computer
• Electronics
• Medical
• Mechanical
• Jack of all Trades

      All of these skills involve the use of tools & training to make, modify, repair and occasionally break physical systems. Characters with these skills were expected to deal with these kinds of problems themselves, and from this we can interpret a setting outside of 'civilization' where repair services will not be available for hire. Again this points to exploration of uninhabited areas.

      These skill categories are pretty general, which means the PCs are generalists, not specialists. "Oh, I can't fix that contra-grav car, I only work on plumbing" is not very helpful. Players can choose to have a specialty as part of their PC's backstory, but I apply the skills broadly for ease of play. The PCs are masters of their fates, plying their skills towards all manner of goals.

      The equipment list is also pretty sparse, which keeps the skills in the foreground of problem solving – it's not about whether you have a sonic screwdriver, but whether you have Mechanical skill, and some imagination.If you've got the skills, you can improvise tools and succeed. If you have the tools but no skills, you've got a problem. 

     In the games I run, PCs are free to try anything, even if they do not have the appropriate skill. I impose a pretty hefty -DM for lacking the skill but at least they have a chance and are encouraged to try. Some skill descriptions specify a penalty or action not allowed without the skill, but not many.  I allow Jack-of-All-Trades skill levels to offset the -DM but never to add a +DM.

The skills in the Probabilities group are:

• Tactics
• Forward Observer
• Gambling

     All of these involve making educated guesses on the outcome of events beyond the PC's direct control. The description of gambling makes mention of organized (i.e. casino) gambling events, which implies civilization; the other two skills are specifically military, which again implies the presence of civilized, organized society (whether human or otherwise is left to the referee). Both  the casino and the war zone are environments where the PCs can make choices, use their skills, and pursue their goals.

      These military specialties, combined with the passing mention of Armored Fighting Vehicles in the equipment section, point towards the possibility of large-scale armed conflict. However, the absence of any other rules for conducting major conflicts seem to indicate that the actions of the PCs will be strategically significant. There is also a Leadership skill which allows the PCs to lead troops, but I have placed that with the Social skills.

      Large-scale conflict happens between states, whether on the same planet or on different planets. Here we see that there are organized political entities in the setting, and they may come into conflict with one another.

     When Book 4 Mercenary came along it expanded this idea of a military-themed adventure but still kept the scale small enough for the PCs to matter without having to be General of the Armies of the Confederation.

So, having mentioned weapons, next we'll talk about combat skills. 

What do Skills tell us about Traveller's Setting?

What do Skills tell us about Traveller's Setting?  A post series.

The original rulebooks, affectionately called The LBBs.

     Ken Hite, a game designer and writer, said in a panel discussion at CelestiCon 2011 that skills in an RPG are part of the setting. As such, they help to define the game world just as much as the back-story does. (The link there goes to an audio recording of that panel discussion, and is well worth listening to). So I have done an experiment, I've looked at just the skills presented in the oldest Traveller rulebook I have, to see what I could see. I will present my findings in this and a few subsequent posts.

      I'm not trying to be purist, as if we could or should strip Traveller of the 30 years of development and detail that has naturally grown out of and around it. I simply want to 'look back' and see what the ideas were at the beginning. Traveller was meant to do some things, but not everything. For example, there are no giant robots in the rules, so Japanese anime a la Robotech was not part of the original scope of the game.

      Classic Traveller was inspired by or based upon a number of science fiction works & series from the 50's and 60's – these provided the inspiration for the setting. However, In the original Little Black Books there was no setting at all. Not one planet was ready-made to serve as a setting for an adventure. The referee and players were supposed to supply that. You could tell from the title and subtitle that the game involved travel in space, but that's all.

      So, if I found myself in 1977 at my FLGS, buying this new game Traveller (now referred to as Classic Traveller or CT), with no personal history of reading science fiction, what assumptions could I make about what I was supposed to do with this game based on the skills offered?

      The skills list for Traveller is not extensive: there are 18 basic skills, 4 weapon skill categories, and 8 vehicle operation categories. The categories break down to a good number of specific weapons and vehicles.

      The basic skills were all the tings the designers decided characters needed formal training to be able to do. I've further sub-divided them into three categories: space, technical, and social.We'll look at Space today, and get to the others in later posts.

The Space skills are those which qualify a PC to serve a crew aboard a starship:

• Piloting
• Navigation
• Engineering
• Steward
• Medic
• Gunner (transferred from the Weapons group).

      The crew positions in the starship operations section each correlated directly to skills. While other crew positions could be inferred, only the skill matched positions were required for a ship to make it into space. Thus, a small band of PCs could operate a starship without the requirement of a big NPC crew.

      These skills clearly indicate that travel and encounters in space are going to be part of the game setting. Starships were meant to be more than a plot convenience to get characters from one planetary system to the next. Starships themselves were a destination and an adventure location! The presence of Gunnery skill indicates the possibility of the PCs encountering hostile forces in space. Places to go, and people who want to stop you from going there.

     The PC crew can decide where the ship goes, so the whole of space is opened to them, however large that area may be. Judging by the starship operation rules, solar systems may be very widely separated, and as such the setting can be quite large.

      Furthermore, through possession of these skills, PCs may operate starships independently. That is, they can be owners rather than just crew of the ship. This makes the PCs masters of their fates, more or less, able to pursue any goals that may be achieved by traveling in space. 

Up next, the Technical skills!