Says Who

Charted Space, the Original Traveller Universe is big. It is pretty too big for most practical purposes. There are a few ways to approach this. The most common is to find places that are more interesting for games to take place in (I have some suggestions for interesting places my intro to Classic Traveller post). One can also just roll up your own setting, which is the assumption in the original books. This post if going to talk about a few considerations of how to shrink the whole OTU setting down to something more manageable.

One thing that might be useful for thinking about in SF settings is what information ships broadcast. While all sorts of things could be, a good model for what information might be valuable is to look at the Automatic Information System (AIS) used by shipping here on Earth. This is a transmitter that broadcasts a position and other identifying information reguarly, originally for collision avoidance, but which is now used for a variety of other things.

This is an entry for the SFRPG Secret Santa. Doubloon asked for a space truck stop, and well, here it is. Welcome to Jan’s Landing:

Summary

Jan’s Landing is an old, rundown asteroid base built and used by Mzansi Minerals during the mining boom in the near belt a few decades ago. When Mzansi finally pulled out 13 years ago the manager, Jan Huysamen, took over the site for pennies on the dollar and repurposed it as a supply hub, since it was on one of the main routes inwards from the outer system. It now serves as a relatively busy stop-over point and transit hub for in-system traffic. Rumours of the abandoned mine shafts being used to hide dissidents and smugglers are vehemently denied. It is a comfortable stop and a good place to meet those in the employ of other companies, as well as get some relaxation in between trips between the inner and outer system.

The following was intended as a short adventure seed for a simple Traveller adventure, but grew a little in the telling. It is based on the (largely improvised) game that I ran at Festival Draconis in October 2024, but has been formatted to match the style of the Freelance Traveller Active Measures.

It is suitable for starting a campaign with or as a one-shot, but should a Referee wish to introduce the adventure into an ongoing campaign, it should work fine, although note that it takes place at the opening of the Fifth Frontier War.

Editor’s note: The following is an extract from partially burned papers from the church of St Almat. They seem to be from the notebooks of one Magister Garius Kal. They may prove to be of use during our current predicament.

[Werewolves] are misunderstood. Our folk do not change their form to some sort of bestial wolf during the fool moon. That is how one makes orcs, and it appears to be irreversible once the rage has taken the poor souls. Werewolves are the souls of those who [fragment burnt and missing]

The Clacks and Post - a Magical not-Victorian Matrix Game

Welcome to the city of Endon: greatest city in the world. It is a dynamic, go-getting city that is moving with great velocity into the Century of the Fruitbat. While a great many things are changing, the speed of communication is not one of them. Until now. The New Clacks Company is looking to change that with the power of engineering. Not everyone approves of this, in particular the traditional long-distance communications provider, the Royal Post Office, considers this as encroaching it on their territory.

Background

I do not really use any VTT tools for running games, but folks running Traveller of various kinds often like having deckplans, at least for the ship owned or used by the PCs. While there is no shortage of deckplans out there, sometimes you just need a new, custom one. A fairly common source for making one’s own deckplans is the set of Starship Geomorphs created by Robert Pearce a few years ago. (Geomorphs, by the way, tile perfectly, so you can just replace one geomorph with another of the same shape, and the new one will fit everything around it correctly. See the examples a little later.) These are available as a fairly hefty CC-SA-NC licensed PDF.