Compromise and Conceit

Variety is one of the good aspects of playing weekly for 3 hours in a haphazard tavern environment with a large club. Because groups collapse, change and reform quite quickly one often moves between groups, or starts a new campaign after a short time. So I have had an opportunity not only to play (a rare innovation for me) but to play different systems. So far, WFRP and A song of Ice and Fire, but this week was Traveller. I haven’t played Traveller since … 1989? A long time ago! It hasn’t changed  much either, the same dry and simple system, the same sense of an empty universe, the same 70s techy feel. I remember when I first got traveller nobody had home computers in the real world, and the computers in the spaceships were clearly envisaged as the mainframes of the ancient world  – taking up huge amounts of space and having just enough power for navigation and firing weapons. Now of course your average Tech Level 15 Traveller “4bis” computer sits on the dashboard of any decent Japanese car…

Traveller also had that sense of being lonely on the edge of space, which I liked, and of being very <i>normal</i>, which I don’t like at all. Neither of these properties has deserted it in its latest incarnation. We have in fact plunged off into the never never, some little island of systems isolated in The Great Rift, a vast empty patch of space which cannot be crossed in a single jump, and so is inaccessible to normal spaceships. Our top secret mission – to scout out a secret jump path to enable the Empire to cross the Rift. The complication – the bunch of star systems we are investigating is inhabited by loony low-tech Frenchies, who reached the systems many millenia ago on generation ships of the European Space Agency (!) and may be a tad touchy about ending their isolation. I like this a lot! Though I wonder how the ESA managed to land Frenchies in the Great Rift when they can’t land a robot on mars. But I suppose they were aiming for Alpha Centauri and missed. I just hope me and my mates don’t end up having to do a Dunkirk – we have not enough fuel to get back…

… anyway, it has all the elements of classic Traveller – we’re skipping around possibly hostile star systems in a freighter, not particularly well armed (though better than the locals!), trading our way to the next system and trying to work out how we will make our fortune. My suggestion is going to be: betray the Empire, sell a trade route to a big trading company, and become fabulously rich and powerful on the proceeds, in a wierd French backwater space system where everyone worships us as Gods. But I presume that something is going to go horribly wrong very soon. Which is a shame, because I won’t be attending for the next 2 weeks, and I rather suspect I will miss all the fireworks.