Using Troupes in Traveller

Arrival Vengeance - more of a campaign frame than a scenario.

In the MegaTraveller era, there was an epic scenario pack called Arrival Vengeance: The Final Odyssey. It told the tale of a Lightning Class Frontier Cruiser despatched from the Domain of Deneb to try and establish what had happened to the Imperium; it had the potential for the characters to find out the truth about Emperor Strephon's assassination and contact the different factions in the shattered Imperium. In honesty, reading it made me tearful when I found out the truth of what happened. In canon, the mission was successfully concluded and the Domain of Deneb went its own way.

Arrival Vengeance was part of the Hard Times line, which contained some of the strongest writing for Traveller as it dealt with the collapse of interstellar society and pitched the characters involved into scenarios where they had a chance to keep the flame of civilisation burning. One of the interesting aspects of this was that it suggested that the players play multiple characters, both command crew and lower ranks so that they could be involved in all the scenarios. It was a style of troupe play more associated with games such as Ars Magica. I never ran this campaign, so I never tried it out.

Reaver's Deep...

Moving forward, I worked on several scenarios for BITS that potentially could have resulted in the need to adopt such a style of play. One was firmly grounded in Milieu Zero and never made it to print (it was part of a collaboration with Signal GK). The second has made it to the table a couple of times at conventions but not as an extended game.

Looking back, you should have seen it coming. The briefing was word of mouth. It was never on the Navy’s muster or posting opportunities. And it was vague, but enticing. An opportunity to earn hazard rate, or maybe even prize money. A fast track to promotion, or maybe an opportunity to muster out early with full service career entitlements. But they couldn’t tell you want it was about, not until you signed up.

Officially, you resigned from the Navy a few months ago; in reality, you’re on detached duty but the records are sealed. You’ve travelled across the border into one of the Imperium’s client states, and the Captain has just called a briefing having met with the system authorities. The rumour is that you’ve been given a Letter of Marque, and are turning Privateer...

This was a campaign frame called 'Plausible Deniability', which was an evolution of the J.Andrew Keith material in Letter of Marque. The characters were the crew of a Type T Patrol Cruiser, operating as a deniable asset for the Imperium against the Carillian Assembly in the Reaver's Deep Sector. The Type T was kitted out as a privateer and carried a crew of eighteen. Ten of the crew were starship crew, a mixture of officers and enlisted men, and eight were marines. There was the potential to add additional characters into the game if their operation was successful, as they were supporting the Provisional Government of Illdrissar against the Carillian Assembly and would almost certainly need to capture and crew a merchant vessel as a support ship as a minimum.

I handled the troupe play by having the players generate the main command crew members. This was their primary character. I generated a crew list with names and characters for the remainder of the crew (I'd have probably done let the players do this if I was running this outside a convention).

The BITS Simple NPC system - a boon for a hurried GM

I gave a spread of experience amongst each crew section based upon the BITS Simple NPC system but didn't assign this to individual crew members. Finally, I generated a list of potential motivations for the characters, stealing liberally from the card-based method in 2300AD.

At the table, I had a stack of coloured index cards (one colour for marines and one for crew) and when a secondary character was needed, I let the relevant officer assign which crew member was in use. The player then picked (or rolled) a motivation, and also how experienced the secondary character was. This was all written on the index card.

When a skill was called for, the player decided if it was core or not. There was a limit to the number of core (high rated) skills, so this was recorded on the index card. Significant events and equipment were also added. This gave the scope for another player to take ownership of a secondary character if a scene ever occurred where a player had the secondary and primary characters involved.

Overall, it seemed to work well and definitely felt that it would be effective for a sustained campaign(*).

Has anyone else used troupe style play in Traveller? How did you approach it?

31 January 2021

(*) Speaking of which, I stole the campaign and adventure front approach from Dungeon World, which worked well, providing a light framework for the campaign. If anyone's interested, drop me a comment and I'll share how that worked.