Says Who

The Chang Pickup

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.

Some Truths About Werewolves

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 The Post

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.

Dracula Dossier Session 15

Dramatis Personae:

  • S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running.
  • N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back.
  • An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot. In an overwatch position.
  • Al, playing Petros - The Dogfather. Tailing the folks outside (player not available)

Recap

09 May 2011

The previous session had the PCs watch some intruders waltz into their own intrusion. They took this poorly, and prepared to jump them. Yannis knocked at the door, but failed to talk them into opening it. At the same time Padraig sneaked into the flat properly, with a disguised pistol at the ready. The fight was short and sharp, with Yannis choking out one of the intruders in a surprise attack and Padraig shooting the other in the arm, causing him to be overpowered.

Dracula Dossier Session 14

Dramatis Personae:

  • S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running.
  • N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back.
  • An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot. In an overwatch position. (Player not available)
  • Al, playing Petros - The Dogfather.

Recap

09 May 2011

After returning from Scotland, the agents took a bit of downtime to look into some of the things that they had found. They got access to one of the flight tracker archives and looked at helicopter flights around the eastern coast of Scotland. This turned out to be pretty helpful: an apparently abandoned oil rig was still getting monthly flights. The destination and origin was not the same each time. Looking at the details, they have enough information to make a guess as to the next location - although not 100% sure - and a rough date.

Tiled for Deckplans

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.

Dracula Dossier Session 13

Dramatis Personae:

  • S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running.
  • N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back.
  • An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot.
  • Al, playing Petros - The Dogfather.

Recap

06 May 2011

Being so close to the last known location of HMS Proserpine, as a shore base at Lyness, Scapa Flow, the agents decided to nose about a little. They found a small boat willing to take them across in the morning. They were able to do this while Coop travelled up from London overnight.

Dracula Dossier Session 11

Dramatis Personae:

  • S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running.
  • N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back.
  • An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot. Former Marine, pulled into the CIA as a wetworker.
  • Al, playing Petros - The Dogfather. Asset-sitting Cassandra (player unable to attend)

Recap

04 May 2011

Since Cassandra Irving is clearly someone of interest to some organisation, the agents decided to use her as bait. She would go and draw some cash at St Pancras and buy a ticket on the train to Brussels. Hopefully that would get someone’s attention, but she could hop off before the train actually left and so stay safe. Petros would keep an eye on her, while Coop watched for any action at St Pancras and Yannis and Padraig headed to Brussels. The plan was for Coop to possibly follow them.

Dracula Dossier Session 12

Dramatis Personae:

  • S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running.
  • N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back.
  • An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot. (Asset-sitting, player unable to attend.)
  • Al, playing Petros - The Dogfather.

Recap

05 May 2011

The agents passed through St Pancras without stopping for long and went straight up to Inverness. They had records from Johnson & Co that a refrigerated cargo was flown from Wick Airport in Scotland to the London Heliport, where it was picked up and delivered to ‘Carfax’, with the address of the Institute. They wanted to do some poking around and figure out what it might have been and where it actually came from.

Dracula Dossier Session 10

Dramatis Personae:

  • S, playing Padraig - Irish actor, formerly linked to drug running. Currently working at a cleaning contractor (player unable to attend)
  • N, playing Yannis - Belgian hacker who got recruited by the ADIV/SGRS a while back. Currently working at a cleaning contractor (player unable to attend)
  • An, playing Cooper ‘Coop’ - All-American patriot. Former Marine, pulled into the CIA as a wetworker.
  • Al, playing Petros - ‘Ambiguously Balkan’, openly works for the dog/horse racing rings that the various Balkan mafias are involved with. The Dogfather.

Recap

03 May 2011