This is a follow up to the post I made after the first session running Far Horizon, a Traveller/Cepheus Hard SF scenario using Zozer Games Orbital 2100 setting (itself a prequel to Hostile).
Yesterday we finally managed to have the second session of the game as we'd repeatedly failed to get the whole group together. We played from 0930 to just after 1300, so overall the game took about eight hours in play. I don't think that a face-to-face session would have been especially faster. Sadly, two of the five players couldn't attend. One of the players who did attend shared the maths on why this was such a challenge to schedule, which was quite enlightening.
The characters managed to unlock the key secrets of Tartarus and escape in good time for their two-and-a-half year return trip to earth. Overall, I had a fun time as a GM and the system almost faded into the background (which is what Traveller is good at when you do it right).
We did use a lot of task chains during the game, as it was a great way to show a science and engineering team working together. These allow people to carry out tasks that will support another character's actions to addressing a challenge. The success or failure of the initial tasks will shift the outcome of the final task. As this was a Cepheus adventure, it was using the slightly less generous Mongoose Traveller 1e task chain bonuses and penalties. However, it would have been simple to switch them around. I found that the task chains gave a great feeling of scientific and engineering endeavour, with a team working together.
One of the players did suggest this was a bit like the D&D 4e skill challenges rules (which I like and cannot understand why they weren't taken into D&D 5e - either 2014 or 2024, but I don't think that they're exactly the same. In the D&D system, each successful task gives you a success that takes you towards success, but in Traveller, they give the person making a subsequent check an increased chance of success.
* If you want to take a look at these in D&D 5e, this is a good hack of the mechanics into that version.
Anyway, back to Far Horizon.
The objectives of the mission are really clearly set out in a mission success sheet in the module. This details the kinds of surveys that can be done from orbit, and then has space for a record of visits to site on the surface where the away team are expected to take imagery, measurements and samples. Naturally, there is a KPI success table at the bottom and each type of survey results in points so you can quantify how successful your mission has been. This worked very well in practice, and the players were keeping a close eye on it through the mission, as it kind of defined the cut points for when they could break away and feel that they had done enough work.
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| Minor spoilers if expanded. |
Far Horizon is a hard-SF scenario. There are some great descriptions of the ship, the technology and the planet, but the key challenges at the heart of the mission all relate to resource management. There are twelve characters, all with different skills and roles. The mission has a set safe window of ninety-six hours to be completed in, otherwise there is an increasing likelihood that the ship will not have enough fuel to turn and burn for home. Landers have limited fuel (3 burns), most of which needs to be used getting up and down to the surface. Space suits have limited amounts of oxygen, and are quite fragile when doing heavy work.
In the first session, we used a table in Roll20 to manage who was where and when. This worked well, but it was pretty awkward to use. For this session, the players cut and pasted the HTML table into Google Sheets, and we had a shared document that everyone could edit. Now, this may sound a little dumb, but I think that it actually helped with the feel of the scenario. There was a serious amount of discussion between the players who were playing the ship's captain, the chief engineer and senior mission specialist as to who was best placed to go on what bit of the mission. Layer onto that the fact that fatigue starts kicking in after a character has been up for 16 hours continuously, so sleep windows need to be planned (in four or eight hour blocks) to avoid this. Vulnerabilities had to be considered (for example, only two characters could pilot the ships or landers) so you don't expose yourself to significant risks.
In practice, the location and sleep restrictions, and the fuel on the landers proved to be the most problematic resource constraints. Oxygen on the surface was managed by having the lander close-by, which was in turn driven by the choice to leave the 'Honda Snowmobile' on the orbiting ship. The lander had reserve O2 and they always carried a spare hard vacuum suit with them. This meant a damaged suit was addressed by a character taking an hour out of surface operations and swapping into new kit.
We had four moments of real peril on the mission. The first involved an off-gassing geyser just before a landing which resulted in some minor damage to the lander (fortunately nothing too bad). We then had a suit puncture when digging, followed by a second suit failure which was causing the helmet to fog badly. Finally, an event happened towards the end which put the lander at serious risk of collision with the ship, but great piloting rolls from both the players involved on each ship addressed that. Obviously, there was no combat. Mostly planning meant that things went well.
There were two other items that proved useful: an organisation chart for the Far Horizon (which I'd created as a handout from the descriptions in the book) and a list of the character's skill sets. This helped quickly identify who was the correct crew member for a task. If I ran this again, I'd do the skills in a matrix versus names to make things easier.
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| Minor spoilers if expanded. |
I also added a second page to the VTT to allow the players to annotate potential landing sites. Initially, it was just the map, then I made the potential sites appear from where they were hidden on the GM layer after the relevant surveys were completed. The players then annotated the map based on descriptions and what they felt was the best target site.
All in all, these tools made the scenario feel very different to the usual Traveller adventure that I've run. It did feel hard science. It did feel as if you were exploring (bizarrely, the planning exercises the game needed drove this). Roleplaying tended towards little vignettes in key scenes, partly also because people had multiple characters.
Roll20 performed better this session; it is very dependent upon people's hardware and connections for the video side. I must also call out the official Traveller character sheet for Roll20. It was simple enough to use with Cepheus and worked really well.
Quoting one of the players, Andy, shows that he was getting the same feel as me from the other side of the (virtual) table.
I enjoyed it very much, not least because it was very different. The clear mission objectives and need to track each character's oxygen levels and sleep cycle made it feel like a genuine scientific mission (as far as I can tell without having been on one). However, the only constraint which actually was a constraint was the limited number of fuel burns available; we were able to set things up so that everyone got enough sleep and oxygen was recharged in time without too much thought, thanks to the spreadsheet, but right up to the end we were thinking hard about who was on which lander and how to allocate fuel burns.
Tom's comment also made me chuckle:
It was great. We focused in since we had the rhythm of the projected management tools, achieved good work/sleep balance, met our KPIs, achieved mission bonus, and yet were sadly sidelined by management when we got home almost 3 years later.
The more things change...
At the end, I did ask the players to give me a short outline of what they thought their character would do on their return from the mission. I think that this rounded the session out nicely.
Reading and running this scenario is one of the reasons I started to explore Mongoose's Deepnight Revelation and Rim Expeditions. I think that these scenarios are going into an area seldom approached in Traveller unless you used the original framework for universe creation. Perhaps Leviathan touched on this, along with Arrival Vengeance's tour of the shattered Imperium. Milieu Zero's Pocket Empires also gave some scope, but it's not often an area addressed.
Overall, I'd definitely recommend this scenario and I would happily run it again with a different group of players. Thank you to Graham, Hattie, Tom, Steve and Andy for playing, and to Paul Elliott of Zozer Games for an excellent scenario!
19 April 2025
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| Some minor spoilers if you expand this. |
Update: Another quote from Tom, reflecting on the game.
It was an excellent adventure. I'd nuance the idea that it was hard science -- it was hard science and operations and engineering -- which when you think about it, is the stuff that gets things done in SF. Stories like For All Mankind or the Mars trilogy are wonderful because not just because of the science but the application of technology by organised people. So it was three times more brilliant than the usual bang bang shooty stuff!
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