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| My original copy of Twilight's Peak |
James Maliszewski has been posting some more on Traveller, this time discussing his favourite adventures. It's a fun read which I recommend.
Top 10 Classic Traveller adventures: 10 to 6
Top 10 Classic Traveller adventures: 5 to 1
He places Twilight's Peak at number ten, although he questions whether he should have put it that low.
Twilight's Peak is the third adventure ever published for Traveller and it's a very good one. Indeed, I hesitated to place it so low on the list, because, in some respects, it's a near perfect example of the kind of sober, serious science fiction that Traveller represented (especially in contrast to most other SF RPGs at the time). Unfortunately, the adventure depends heavily on the learning of certain information via rumors in order to proceed from world to world across the Spinward Marches. Even then, these rumors often only lead to the search for yet more information, potentially leading to a long and tedious investigation into matters whose ultimate import is not clear. Admittedly, the final payoff is worth it and the scenario includes a number of interesting stops along the way, but, unlike The Traveller Adventure – which is not included on this list, by virtue of its having been included elsewhere – I found it to lack forward momentum at times. Still, it's well-done and, as I said, a solid example of the kind of restrained science fiction Traveller does better than most SF RPGs before or since.
Personally, I'd put Twilight's Peak at the top of my list. I have talked about this before back in 2014 in the first #RPGaDay but I'll recap.
Twilight's Peak is a framework with a meta-plot to be stumbled upon. It isn't a standalone mission like you get in The Kinunir or Research Station Gamma. It's the seeds for an extended campaign across the Spinward Main, the Jump-1 route through the Spinward Marches. You have a ship, which needs repairs and will struggle to be profitable if you don't fix it, so your characters will need to take other jobs to finance the repairs. The Referee can then weave scenarios at each port, draw upon published adventures and let the meta-plot slowly reveal itself. Throw the JTAS TNS messages for the period on top of this, and you have the Fifth Frontier War brewing in the background.
My experience running this was one of the best that I had. I've run it twice; once very directly, but the second time I treated it like a decent bottle of red. I opened it and let it breathe, pouring a little out every now and again. At its best, it should start to feel like the reveal in a multi-season TV show when things that happened in the past emerge as more significant the more the characters discover.
My initial concept of Traveller was always framed through Andre Norton's Solar Queen free-traders, Arthur C Clarke's exploration of Rama, and Isaac Azimov's Foundation, with elements from CJ Cherryh, EE Doc Smith and more layered on top. Twilight's Peak is so Norton that it pushed all my buttons in a good way.
It'd be good to hear other people's experience with this.
24 December 2021
I have no experience of running anything but The Traveller Adventure as a campaign but this is probably where I'd most like to 'go' next - so thanks for the heads up. Although I think I'd been hoping for something tighter and briefer than what we've been doing for 38 episodes and six years!
ReplyDeleteThink of it as a framework and build in other plots and adventures from JTAS etc.
ReplyDeleteI really need to read more classic sci fi. I remember Doc Smith being on my mother's bookcase when I was a teen-ager but I never read it. I need to see if it's available on Prime Reading
ReplyDeleteDoc Smith is fun; although it does get a bit repetitive as it just keeps escalating. I wonder how it would hold up now as I haven't read it since I was a teenager.
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