Travelling to the Motherlode

A motherlode of scenarios to plunder...

I'm edging back into Traveller, my forever game. Running two new scenarios and playing another at TravCon left me with an itch that I'll continue to scratch over the Christmas break when I run the Far Horizon (Orbital 2100) scenario with Cepheus. 

Listening to First Age's recent musings on Traveller on his podcast left me wondering why I've really not played or run the game for a while, and also why I've not picked up more of the current Mongoose line.

The not running or playing is probably more easily explained than why I haven't picked up much of the new material released. Effectively, I've played in two big campaigns (Eternal Lies and Shadow of the Sorcerer for Conan) since the pandemic and ran two others (Curse of Strahd and the current Achtung! Cthulhu Shadows of Atlantis game). With work, I don't really have time to do more each week than play in one and run one game. But what about conventions?

I've tended to shy away from Traveller recently at conventions as I've been exploring other systems. When that's combined with the lack of TravCons, it's really easy to just not run it. The daft thing is that running Traveller is easy for me; like comfortable shoes, I can just slip into it and go. I've tended to use conventions to run something that I may not run elsewhere, or to run something fun and different like the linked Star Trek Adventures TOS and TNG games that Dr Mitch and I did at North Star.

My reticence for purchasing Traveller material recently has a number of factors at play. I've been reluctant to pick up the updated core rulebooks for Mongoose Traveller 2e (202x) on because they started coming out not long after I had finished collecting the core books for Mongoose Traveller 2e (2017). Mongoose has started to focus on quality and the end result is that the books are towards the high end of pricing. As I'd hardly used the previous cut of 2e, I didn't really have the urge to pick up the same game rules again. I suspect I will at some point, but I've no urge right now.

I haven't tended to pick up the campaigns and adventures as I don't like the writing style of one of the go-to authors Mongoose use, although I've seen loads of positive comments about Pirates of Drinax and others. I know my friend Tom has run a fantastic campaign in the setting. I don't like the more detailed sector books that Mongoose produced (caveat - this is based on 1e) because they provide too much detail for me, having a lack of spaces to breathe. If you've ever seen the GURPS Traveller books, I prefer what was done with Rim of Fire rather than Beyond the Claw.  There was also the matter of the amount of changes and ignoring of previous printed canon (which could easily have been addressed with search of PDFs).

I have picked up some compatible material; Cepheus Universal (which feels like a cleaned up and condensed version of Mongoose Traveller 1e with all the supplements in a single book), Hostile and Orbital 2100 have all found their way onto my shelves. I also purchased all the Scoundrels of Brixton zines, and more recently The Jägermeister Adventure  from Moon Toad, all of which are really nicely constructed.

However, I realised that a lot of my interest has been drawn to another game that has echoes of Traveller; Mothership. It may be a percentile based system, but it has a similar format to Classic Traveller's Little Black Books, and some fantastic scenarios, both in-house and third party. Although Mothership was built to play science-fiction horror like Alien, it works fine in the same niche as Traveller, and increasingly there seems to be a wide selection of third party books that aren't pure horror. When I read them, I start to mentally translate them into Traveller, and I know a lot of them could be picked up and run off the cuff by an experienced referee. 

I see more experimental, exciting material coming out in this space that's worth exploring, and I'm happy that it is. There are new riches and ideas to be plundered; a veritable motherlode.

Anyway, the slow gravitational pull of my forever game continues, and I find myself musing on trying to run Hard Times, or The Jägermeister Adventure, or perhaps even The Flaming Eye.

Happy Travelling.

7 December 2024