Says Who

I have recently been rereading the Pern series by Anne McAffrey, and thinking about it as a RPG setting. Spoilers are going to crop up in this, so if that bothers you, you might want to avoid this particular tag. This first post will give a high level overview of the setting and how people are organised within it. Follow-up posts will think about possible adventures and provide more details about dragons in particular.

Classic Traveller has a moderately arcane combat system to modern eyes. For the most part though, it is not too bad. This is an example of how it can be interpreted. If you want to do things differently, there is no reason to assume that this is the only way it should (or can be interpreted to) work. In general though, I think that the following example is mostly sensible and will not cause too many feathers to be ruffled. (This is another thing that is being posted to here as a more permanent home than various discord messages and a file on my PC, but which was written a while back.)

One of the central questions for starting a Dracula Dossier campaign is to decide how the agents are going to get the actual dossier. There are a couple of options given in the book, as well as some published operations that can do it. Two of those published operations are (S)Entries and the Harker Intrusion. I could not decide which, so I used both, roughly like this. (S)Entries is available in the Nights Black Agents core book, and The Harker Intrusion is one of the Edom Files adventures.

Someone told you that Traveller is a cool SF TTRPG, and you heard that Classic Traveller (CT) is a good version of it. So, how do you start? This was a (relatively) brief guide that I wrote in August/September 2023, with some edits in December. This is a more permanent home for it than a PDF uploaded to various discords.

Contents

• Choosing a Core Book
• Additional Books and Supplements
  • Books
  • Supplements
  • Other
  • Conclusion
• A note about those letters
• Core Mechanics
• Character Generation
• What do players do?
  • The Ship
  • Patrons and NPCs
  • Travel
    • Implications for Bounty Hunting
  • Adventures
    • Piracy
• Getting a Sector
• Additional Resources

Choosing a Core Book

First of all, there are a few different versions to choose from:

Just a quick note on the mechanical bits for my Dracula Dossier campaign. It is written for Night’s Black Agents, which is a Gumshoe game. I tend to dislike some aspects of Gumshoe though, in particular the spending of general abilities, and only rolling a single d6 (which just feels dull compared to rolling either more dice or fancier dice). So, here is the basics of the system we are using: