I am just under a week away from running my next instalment of Classic Traveller on-line. I have restricted the sessions this year to 6 only and this episode will mark the third such session. I am pretty excited with what I have got coming up so I thought that I would do a bit of a recap on what has gone on up until now in the game universe.
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| Screenshot of me playing X3, very Travellery! |
I created the system for this game so there is no such meta-universe as the third imperium like the main setting deals with. Regardless of this I have kept all of the Aliens as per the Traveller rules. All I have done was refresh the major setting. The players initially find themselves in a human dominated sector which is a loose alliance of planetary bodies that are largely surrounded by some alien empires (Villani, Aslani, K’kree, Hivers, Droyne Vargr). Inside the sub-sector there are three main political parties. There is the Weel who are traditionalists and who have always held the most power in the sub-sector, the Mechanist’s who are pro advancement and technology and feel that the Weel is holding development back whilst around them highly technological advancements are evident. Finally, the smallest party with major power are the Fell 6. An alliance of anti-alien religious zealots who are sympathetic to the Mechanist’s message, but not their methods.
The first episode had the players join the crew of a dust mining land vehicle that collected a rare chemical compound which is used in Jump technology. At least two of the players were actually spies working on behalf of outside operations as the Captain of the ship was a Villani that was commissioned with less than a day of deployment. Whilst out on deployment the Captain proved to be overzealous and a little unhinged in chasing the storms, almost wrecking the new vehicle in the process. As the net began to close though a crew member is found murdered in the dust that has been collected and the distraction buys the Captain the time she needs. Before long the new vehicle suddenly collapses through the roof of an ancient cavern.
Escaping the now wrecked ship the players find what they have crashed into is a factory of some form. They track the Captain down and find her in the control room. They manage to stop her activating a device and bring the situation under control.
Over the next two years it is uncovered that the Captain was in fact a Villani spy. She was looking for this location with the ship and to lay claim to the facility that was in fact a long dormant jump drive manufacturing station created by the Ancients. This was the source of the chemical compound that was being mined and the archaeological crews found a machine capable of manufacturing the compound.
Also in this time relations between the sub-sector and the alien societies around it soured as the Fell 6 leader took to the Government podium with a bill to outlaw all intelligent alien species from the sub-system after the unabashed attempt at espionage. Though the bill was not passed it did irreparable damage to the sub-system.
In the second game some of the players used the same characters whilst others took on the role of new characters. The premise was the Aslani character (a follow on from the first game) was sent as a diplomat to lead a search team for a missing ambassador’s niece on one of the Fell 6 planets. It was uncovered by the Aslani that the rate of missing extra terrestrials on this planet was ludicrously high but hardly ever reported on.
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| My sub-system |
The party were on the way to the area that the Aslani went missing when they found the submersible they were travelling on (it was a water world) was sabotaged. A great deal of action occurred and the submersible began to sink but the group just managed to get out alive. A long story short the party then befriended a group of local mermaid like creatures who showed them the dark secret of Siberius (the planet). At the bottom of the oceans there were secret bases. In these secret bases there were robot combatants and assault ships being made by the Mechanists whilst the Fell 6 were jointly working on some horrible extra terrestrial research program and disposing of their mangled corpses.
The Fell 6 and the Mechanist’s were quietly preparing for a war.
And that is where the last game finished. Since then, around 7 months has passed. The system is now at war. A civil war where planet fights planet. The Aslani intervention bought the Weel just enough time to mobilise much of it’s inter-system navy though it was at great cost. At the mobilisation many hidden armies were activated and billions of people have already lost their lives. The Weel fights a war on two fronts as the Mechanists force them back into a defensive mode and the Fell 6 use their spy network to assassinate Weel supporters on many planets.
As if that is not dangerous enough there is now news that the Aslani and Droyne are beginning to mobilise their forces and looking at the sub-system that is currently an area where planets are regularly on fire. This upcoming game will lead into the heart of the war to find out perhaps what is truly at stake here. I can’t wait! If you want to watch, the game is happening on 25 June at 8 P.M. Australian Eastern Standard Time. It will be streamed live from this blog and will be available to watch as a recording after that time also. Keep rolling!