Alternate Traveller Campaign Frames: Noble House

I've been putting this one off mostly because I really wanted to do the subject justice. (Edit to add: Not that I think that I have, but I have been letting the perfect be the enemy of the good enough for too long now.) This is the campaign frame for Traveller that I myself most want to play in, or run if I must. It has been generally unsupported in official Traveller products, with the closest being Adventure 5 Trillion Credit Squadron and the colonial economic model in World Tamer's Handbook (and don't get me wrong, those were good and potentially useful for the subject), but in the fourth edition, Marc Miller's Traveller (also called T4 for short), the supplement Pocket Empires came out.

Oh, this was a joy for me to see. Finally, the game would support campaigns inspired by Dune and other sources involving high-level politics and intrigue. There were rules covering everything from the economic development of worlds to incorporating new worlds into your pocket empire to setting up and finalizing a marriage between members of your noble family and another one. Assassination attempts, espionage, politics on the floor of the Senate, all of these things were covered in the high-level game here.

There were some weaknesses, of course. The basic game had a development turn a full year in length, which could lead to pretty severe discontinuities between the Pocket Empires layer and the roleplaying layer. The rules for voting factions in politics were a little rudimentary, but still serviceable. The military forces abstractions were perhaps a bit too abstract (although this was at least partly remedied with the addition of Imperial Squadrons, which was a major revision and update to T4 standards of Trillion Credit Squadron). The handling of corporations avoided many of the things that give that aspect of play its distinct flavor, with no insider trading, no boardroom politics, no shares changing hands, only what amounts to an abstracted hostile takeover and a few other simple tactics.

Some of the elements of the noble life have been handled over the years. I mentioned a number of resources in the last installment of "Alternate Traveller Campaign Frames", and at least one more has appeared since then in the form of an article titled "The Influence Game", posted over at Wayhaven Traveller, which could be used to fix the lackluster politics rules in Pocket Empires.

That really just leaves the problems of the speed of play and the generic, unfulfilling corporation rules. The corporations could be handled by looking at the rules on high finance and setting up and running corporations, getting them onto publicly traded markets, and so on that are found in GURPS Traveller: Far Trader, but it still misses the whole corporate struggle aspect as the authors left out the dirty tricks from the Stock Exchange floor. For that, we have to look further afield, to a supplement for the game TORG called Nippon Tech. That included a whole sequence of corporate warfare and a character type, the "Mega-corporation CEO", that could use it. Issuing junk bonds, taking advantage of insider trading, and most importantly the results of adventuring such as sabotage or stolen information are all embedded into the game as warfare against the opponents happens on the trading floor as much as in a firefight.

A lot of these different layers include the idea of a turn length of a week to a month. It shouldn't be hard to incorporate that into the main Pocket Empires sequence. That would fit everything more tightly to the roleplaying layer of the campaign, which effectively has a "turn length" of one week, since that's how often Patron and Rumor checks are made, how long a Jump takes, and so on.

All of this is important to me, as I am (slowly) working to convert Pocket Empires to MegaTraveller standards. I think that edition is the easiest to convert to any of the various other editions out there, so that it could be easily used with CT, CE, MgT, T5, or whatever. I intend to flesh out the corporate section and the politics especially, but also spend some more time on the military elements. Integrating it more completely with the roleplaying is my priority, of course. Setting out a specific method of generating the Noble House and its starting assets will be important too, as will working out ways to incorporate the players into the House.

Alternate Traveller Campaign Frames: Minor Campaign Frames From Classic Traveller

Tana Salm from Perry Rhodan,
just because. From here, which gives
the copyright information.

We've already covered the three or four main campaign frames that were developed in classic Traveller, along with a few from later editions, but there were a couple of others that were sketched out in various publications during the classic Traveller era. None of them was particularly well-detailed, but enough was given in most cases to allow an enterprising Referee to develop them into a campaign.

First was the Belter campaign. This was presented in an early issue of the Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society (JTAS) magazine, and reprinted in the first volume of the "Best of" collection. This is the campaign frame in which players prospect in an asteroid belt, looking for a big strike that will make them rich. The frame is given as a flowchart involving bureaucracy (to get permits and such) and actual prospecting in the belt. The primary weakness of the frame is that there are few meaningful decisions that the players can make, and so it quickly becomes an exercise in dice rolling and the occasional wild complication thrown in by the Referee. There is a reason that not many people play this one for very long. It can be an interesting diversion from more typical Traveller activities for a time, though. This frame was given more support by the inclusion of a Belter career with Prospecting skill in Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium, but the career was not a very viable one (it had a worse survival rate than Scouts).

A number of the careers in Supplement 4 brought an implied campaign frame along with them.

The existence of Doctors implied the possibility of a "Sector General" style campaign, in which the players would be the staff of a hospital ship or station. This was never explored in CT, though. MegaTraveller saw the introduction of detailed task chains related to medical treatment for injury, disease, and radiation, not to mention mental health, which along with the interpersonal tasks in the Referee's Manual comprise the main resources necessary for such a campaign frame. There was a hospital ship presented in a third-party supplement, but that was more or less it until Library Bob over at Ancient Faith in the Far Future decided to resuscitate the idea recently with his Mercy Ships campaign frame, providing the necessary detail for such a campaign.

Pirates of the Space variety, of course, are a standard of SF going back to the early days in the pulps. The subject is hotly debated, but Traveller gave a career for pirates and so implied that they must exist in some fashion in the Imperium setting at least. An article in JTAS described the necessary conditions for piracy and suggested some possible pirate bases in the Spinward Marches, but the subject was quietly dropped (other than the paramilitary Corsairs of the Vargr). Later on, some people raised objections based on physics and thermodynamics (it's impossible to sneak up on someone in space is the basic thrust of the argument), but others, such as Rob Garitta at Twilight of the GM, have returned to the subject in the hopes of salvaging it. In any case, the Space Pirate campaign frame wouldn't be that dissimilar to the default game, which is somewhat amusing in itself.

Nobles will be discussed elsewhere because the main successful presentations of a nobility-based campaign are found in other editions of Traveller than the classic one. Suffice it to say that CT provided little support for the idea of a Noble campaign frame other than the existence of the titles and the career in Supplement 4. A couple of magazine articles attempted to address the issue with limited success, notably "Robe & Blaster: Upgrading Aristocracy in Traveller" in White Dwarf magazine issue 22 and "Relief for Traveller Nobility" in Dragon magazine issue 73. Those articles mainly gave special benefits to noble characters, rather than pursuing an entire campaign frame dedicated to them. Library Bob at Ancient Faith in the Far Future also provided an interesting expansion when he discussed generating noble houses, then followed it up with some more articles on nobility in Traveller, which he ultimately linked in this article. David Billinghurst provided this expansion to Traveller nobility at Brett Kruger's Reavers' Deep site (and originally at his own blog, Waystar High Port, ultimately collecting a couple of articles together here), based on several sources, and others have presented similar articles. The most complete exploration of the issues involved with such a campaign frame is found elsewhere, however, and I will return to that in a future article.

The existence of the Hunter career in Supplement 4 seems to indicate a possible campaign frame of "Big Game Hunter", either as expeditions with guns to take down alien animals by killing them or capturing them, or with recording devices. This wasn't pursued in any official materials much at all, but the "Environment" series from Gamelords, Ltd., written by the Keith brothers, began to cover many of the issues that would be important to such a campaign frame. Some of the adventures that the Keiths wrote to support that series also supported variations of the idea. Well, OK, it was just Ascent to Anekthor, which detailed a mountain-climbing expedition with the players as expedition members under a noble patron. That pretty much outlines the way that such a campaign might work, making it a variation of the basic campaign frame with a special emphasis on patrons looking for an expedition guide. In fact, any number of specialty campaigns can be produced by taking that idea and running with it. Itinerant engineers might focus on patrons that are looking for repairs and maintenance in adventurous situations, for example. The Referee simply needs to ensure that any patrons encountered are aware of the specific qualities, or at least reputations for those qualities, of the players' characters.

Many other campaign frames that can be developed for Traveller are like that last, focusing the nature of any patrons encountered so that their required tasks are related to the campaign intended. This could apply to just about any profession, from bounty hunters and skip tracers (though that is a frame that really deserves its own approach) to salvage crews to private detectives to paranormal investigators*, and whatever else besides. These aren't major changes to the game, unlike some of the other campaign frames (even some of the other minor frames mentioned in this article). That underlines the flexibility of the basic Traveller campaign frame, while the other frames out there show off the flexibility of the game as a whole.

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*While not seeming to be a part of a SF setting, I don't see why a universe that includes psionics wouldn't have a reason for this sort of thing. In addition to legitimate psionic and psionic-related activities, there's every opening for fraud as well, as the article "Just Like Magic" from Challenge magazine issue 46 outlined.

Alternate Traveller Campaign Frames: Strange New Worlds

I've discussed a couple of alternate campaign frames previously, covering the Mercenary campaign along with the Squadron and Active Duty campaign frames. Though the last was only presented in terms of Navy games (and so incorporating Marines by default), it would have been easily converted for use with other active duty military games involving the Army. I'm going to start skipping around, because the other campaign frames from the classic Traveller era are either minor and not well detailed, or ones that I am not very familiar with at this time (I will be discussing the frame implied in The Traveller Adventure later on, which is related to the "default" Traveller campaign frame that I've also described previously, but includes some new concepts that are very important).

Unfortunately, the classic Traveller expansion for the Scout service, Book 6 Scouts, did not incorporate a specific campaign framework. It included only a set of tools for the Referee to detail whole systems instead of the main worlds that were rolled up in the basic world generation system along with an expanded character generation system for Scout characters that followed on the same lines as the military services presented in the previous two books. Paranoia Press, who presented an expanded Scouts character generation system a little earlier in their supplement Scouts and Assassins, also did not expand on the sorts of activities that a Scout might perform as part of actual play. The supplements for MegaTraveller titled Grand Survey, Grand Census, and World Builder's Handbook started to cover the sorts of things a Scout might do, but as I have never actually seen the first two of those supplements I can't comment on them. World Builder's Handbook did include some very useful tasks related to surveying a world, but didn't go much further toward detailing a campaign frame related to exploration - though an enterprising and interested Referee could easily turn the notes presented into such a campaign. Instead of discussing those, then, I will skip ahead to the two editions of Traveller that presented Scout campaign frames at least reasonably well.

EDIT: Re-reading some of the World Builder's Handbook, I see that it includes more detail toward an exploration and contact game than I remembered. I may return to that supplement later.

First, Traveller: The New Era got in on the action. In its extensive rewrite and reimagining of the MegaTraveller supplement called World Builder's Handbook, titled World Tamer's Handbook, GDW presented detailed descriptions of the tasks necessary to survey a new world in the wilds ravaged by Virus. Those tasks were generic, of course, and so not limited to the New Era setting. Highly detailed looks at the environment of a world were presented, along with methods for generating them beforehand. Information down to the amount of extractable wind and hydro energy, soil fertility, and so on in a 10km hex was presented in a usable and efficient manner. Scouts could go in, find out the details of a world, and return to provide the results of their survey to whatever home base they served.

The supplement didn't stop there, though. The other side of the Scout coin in SF is colonization, and World Tamer's Handbook presented a campaign frame of colonists, a first in SF gaming generally, and for Traveller specifically. A model was provided that allowed players to determine the economic output of their colony based on decisions they made about allocating resources both infrastructure- and human-related, which they could then direct toward various improvements and maintenance - a true domain-level game at last. This also saw the return of the sandbox format for a Traveller campaign, which had largely dropped by the wayside during the late Traveller and most of the MegaTraveller eras in favor of the then-popular story-based format. In addition to whatever the Referee chose to throw at them to further the story, colonial administrators (the PCs, the rules assume) would experience various random events that provided story hooks related to administering a group of people in a colony. Sadly, this wasn't well implemented, as the events mostly were defined in terms of a single task roll to resolve them ("Crime Wave, succeed in a Difficult Investigation roll" or suffer some penalty, for example). Nonetheless, this was a great idea, but didn't see much support from the community of players, something that can really be said about most of Traveller: The New Era, unfortunately. Some general notes toward scaling the colonial model up to cover entire world governments were included, but the system becomes unwieldy at the higher end. This would lead to a different system for world-spanning empires later on, and I will probably discuss that campaign frame next time.

When Steve Jackson Games picked up a license to produce a Traveller edition using their GURPS rules, one of the supplementary books they produced was GURPS Traveller: First In. First In gave the GT version of Scout activities, including, in addition to the expected detailed world generation system, a set of rules for surveying a system. As is the case with most of the GT materials, though, these tools were provided with no real guidance as to what to do with them. A decent GM could certainly take them and turn them into tools for adventurous games or even campaigns, of course, but no such framework was explicitly provided. In a nice turn, there were a number of optional rules included, ranging from minor to as radical for the Traveller game as incorporating 3D star mapping instead of the traditional parsec-wide-hex based 2D sector/subsector system. The designer's notes for that supplement, available for free on the SJG site, give more detail still toward a game using 3D star maps, including discussion of possible changes to the Jump Drive and so on. I should add at this point that if you have any interest in the GURPS Traveller line at all, you should hurry up and get the PDFs, as SJG's license to sell that edition expires at the end of this year, and they will not be renewing it. After that point, they will not be selling GT materials, not even the PDFs.

Alternate Traveller Campaign Frames: High Guard

After the release of Book 4 Mercenary showed that there was a market for expanding on the careers of the original game, the next obvious direction to look was the Navy, those masters of the spaceways. Where Mercenary added more guns and other ironmongery, Book 5 High Guard added a new spaceship design sequence that could handle ships up to 200 times larger than the largest ships of the original spaceship design rules! To supplement those monstrously large spaceships, the supplement also included a new spaceship combat game that could handle larger numbers of spacecraft than the miniatures-based one from the original books.

Which was all fine and dandy until you realized that they forgot to include anything to actually do with those big spaceships and battle fleets. Unlike Mercenary, the authors forgot to include a campaign framework that made those spacecraft useful to anyone's game. So they sat down and did two things.

First, they rewrote the supplement. The first edition was kind of a mess, and the ships that came out of that design sequence weren't very interesting. Second, they released Adventure 5 Trillion Credit Squadron. TCS, as it quickly became known, was a radical departure at the time, presenting a campaign system with a rudimentary "domain" game that served to provide a reason for large fleets of giant spacecraft to fire weapons at each other. The players would play combination Admiral/Planetary Government and send ships at each other in a sort of roleplaying/wargame mashup. Except that there was a lot less of the roleplaying, a situation that would have to wait 16 years to be repaired, albeit imperfectly, but that is so different that it really represents a different campaign frame, and I will come back to it in a later installment.

In TCS, the game is changed to play in weeks, and each week allows six phases: Jumps, Communication and Intelligence, Battles, Changes of Control, Refueling, and Final Operations. I won't go into too much detail, but most of those phases are pretty self-explanatory. The Final Operations phase is the one in which campaign-level events occurred, such as ordering new ships, ship construction being completed, multi-week activities like being repaired, and so on. Planets would generate revenue based on the Traveller world statistics (UPP or Universal Planetary Profile), and the relative value of wealth from one world compared to the others based on technology level and the local starport. The campaign frame was more like a wargame than a roleplaying game, but that was OK.

Or, the Referee could just specify that a certain technology limit and certain other limits (minimum Jump capability, number of pilots available, and so on) applied, and let two players generate squadrons that just fought it out in one big battle (this method was also the basis of the Tournament Play method). TCS was pretty flexible.

Another way to use High Guard came up in one of the issues of Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society, in which a campaign frame of active-duty Navy and Marine personnel would engage in mission-based adventures. The article included a way of generating the pay scale for those services and gave some advice and basic adventure seeds (one piece of advice was to watch or read The Sand Pebbles for ideas of the sorts of trouble that Navy personnel can get up to on shore leave, which is pretty depressing advice really; it's a good book and movie, but not particularly a happy one). So, out of one supplement, two or so campaign frames ultimately came around. The Active-Duty campaign, of course, was a little more under Referee control than the basic game (or TCS), much like the Mercenary campaign framework, and shares similar advantages and disadvantages. It does point out that we are seeing the same forces that were present in the hobby as a whole at the time affecting perceptions of how to play Traveller. That would become a big problem with the next edition of the game, MegaTraveller. Many of the sandbox tools remained to be used, so that edition wasn't entirely lost to the "storyteller" style of gaming. In fact, as we shall see, several campaign frames that are very much sandbox oriented have yet to come about by the end of classic Traveller.

Alternate Traveller Campaign Frames: Mercenary

I previously discussed the default assumed game in Traveller, in which the players maneuvered their characters to scramble for payoffs from patrons and sometimes following up tantalizing rumors. That wasn't the only way to play the game, though, and a few other options were explored through the various expansions and editions. I'll cover some of these in this occasional series, and who knows? Maybe I'll outline some others.

The first alternative game was in the very first supplemental release for Traveller, the ground military expansion Book 4 Mercenary. (It's possible that Supplement 1 1001 Characters preceded it since both were released in the same year, but I haven't been able to confirm which came out first and both came out the year before I played my first roleplaying/adventure game.) Mercenary provided an expanded character creation system, which is all well and good, but more importantly it introduced the idea that the players could be employee-soldiers in a mercenary company, fighting for pay where they were told to go by their superiors, hoping one day, perhaps, to become those superiors. It included a rudimentary mass combat system (requiring a great deal of work by the Referee, since it was nearly nonexistent), and it also included the patron-substitute of a Mercenary-based campaign, the Ticket. Tickets were descriptions of the mission for which the company was to be hired, including objectives, pay, and other details. Some of the patrons in 76 Patrons, in fact, are Tickets instead of people. A typical Ticket might have the players travel to a backwater planet on which the locals were gearing up to fight each other and train the troops of one side or another. No doubt, many Referees introduced all sorts of complications. This campaign didn't include the detailed structure of play found in the default game, but that is because its own structure was very simple and mission-based. Eventually, GDW released a mass combat, or rather skirmish-level, miniatures game that interfaced very well with the Mercenary campaign frame.

Mercenary-based games were rather unlike normal Traveller games. In the normal game, the players would have maximum freedom of movement and choice of which adventure threads to take up. In a Mercenary-based game, the players went where they were told. That would usually be by the Referee, at least at first. Later, one or more of the players might find themselves in charge of a mercenary group. In some cases, the Referee would take a player whose character had long military experience and put them in charge from the beginning. In the cases where one or more players were in charge, that player or those players would be able to pick from a selection of mercenary Tickets proposed by the Referee, giving them somewhat more flexibility.

The course of play was more flexible than the day-to-day scheduling of the standard game, too. Once a Ticket was accepted, the time to travel would be simply calculated and then assumed to go without incident (unless the Referee had something up their sleeve). From there, the situation would play out in a more freeform method, the Referee adjudicating the results of the plans proposed by the players. Depending on the Referee, this could be either narratively handled or structured as an ad hoc wargame, with maps to regulate movement and perhaps Striker to handle direct contact. Striker was designed with roleplaying in mind, in fact, being centered on "orders" and the time of transmission for those by various methods of communication (providing the real benefit of battlefield computers, as an aside), and using a simplified form of the Traveller combat system so that injuries to two dozen soldiers didn't need to be tracked closely, itself based on the system originally included in Azhanti High Lightning. That simplified system would ultimately be used in MegaTraveller after some modification.

After the Ticket was completed and the unit was paid, the Referee would have to work up some expenses (replacement ammo and supplies, for example), plus the troops needed to get paid, and then the unit would look for another mission. Repeat as necessary and as interest held.

The main disadvantage of this campaign frame is the fairly straight-ahead nature of it: the players are given a mission and must solve the mission to gain the reward. There is little room for the players' characters to have their own goals that they can pursue with as much dedication as the default campaign framework. It isn't quite a railroad, as the players are given much leeway to decide exactly how they intend to carry out their mission, but the goals are not their own. That said, since it is a game in which the quantifiable goal is the pursuit of money first and foremost, it is perfectly possible for the characters to become wealthy enough to be able to make their own plans, eventually. This framework is probably most useful to players who prefer the more modern ways of gaming, as a compromise between the sandbox and the "adventure path", but it should also appeal strongly to those with an interest in military SF.

Note that it was possible to mix the Mercenary campaign frame with the default one, but I don't know anyone who did that, and I am not sure if it would be as interesting as either frame separately. That said, a campaign that alternated between Tickets and the players' characters getting in undirected trouble (using the default encounter/patron system) while on leave between the Tickets might be quite interesting.

Another interesting thing about the Mercenary campaign structure is the fact that it may have the most flexibility, ironically, in terms of the flow of any particular session. While the standard game has a pretty fixed "flow" (find cargo/freight, find patrons/rumors, resolve patrons and random encounters, rinse and repeat with only occasional variation), a mercenary Ticket can take a large number of forms, from the Cadre Ticket in which the players train the native troops to the Assault Ticket in which they go in guns blazing, and any number of others that the Referee can dream up. Again, the expense is that the stories that arise inherently owe a lot more to the Referee and less to the players and their characters, but some groups may find this structure worth it.