Many Traveller adventures (and in similar systems/settings) are geared towards the PCs being fresh out of a career, with ‘assets’ amounting to massive debt, a half-collapsing rust bucket of a ship, and someone who can give them a job that might not kill them. Sometimes they do not even have the ship (but common advice is to get one fairly quickly: the game is titled “Traveller” after all). Incidentally, a similar thing happens in the various OSR scenes: there are squillions of starter dungeons and one-page adventures and so on, but very few published adventures aimed at sustained high level play (and even fewer good ones).

Levels of Play

Traveller-the-rules does not have mechanical levels, but there are still tiers or levels of play. Broadly, I think of them as follows:

• Street-level: No ship, no major assets or allies
• Beater ship, big loan, some assets or allies
• Good ship, small loan, some assets or allies
• Multiple ships, no (or small) loan, notable assets or allies

What an ‘asset’ is is fluid and depends somewhat on the sort of campaign being run. For example, in a mercenary campaign that asset might be increasingly well-equipped troops (going from a section or two of light infantry to a fully armoured assault company with armour and fire support). Similarly, in a merchant/corporation game the PCs may be controlling an increasingly large company or companies (going from a single tramp trader to a multi-system corporation with regional offices, their own manufacturing facilities and thousands of employees). Both of these are linked to having increasingly large amounts of money, which can buy these assets, and should be considered an asset of its own.

The concept of allies is important to the core gameplay loop espoused in Classic Traveller’s core rules, encapsulated by the various patrons. As the PCs become more and more established, those patrons and allies will become increasingly important individuals in the setting. A starting PC is most likely going to know someone who is a local player in a single system, maybe with interests in another one. A high-level party will be rubbing elbows with the people in charge of systems and fleets of ships and megacorporations. (The reverse is also true: their rivals, even if not the same individuals, should be increasing in power as well. A local crime lord might not be a major hassle for a high level party, but the low level party that is threatened by a local crime lord is unlikely to accidentally annoy the sector duke either, unless they are doing something very dramatic.)

We can reasonably assume that a “high level” Traveller group has concerns that are at a very different scale to those of a “low level” group, along with the capacity to handle problems at a different scale. This is often not accounted for in many published Traveller adventures or amber zones. The sort of challenge that a group of five people with shonky armour and a couple of laser rifles and an unarmed air/raft are hired for is going to be little more than a speed bump to a platoon of well-trained troops with combat armour and a light IFV. Likewise, while a 10 000 credit bribe might be unpayable by a low level group, to a group who are running a company with manufacturing complexes on three planets and have paid off their ship loan 10k cr is hardly more than a rounding error on their balance sheet.

This leads to two conclusions:

1. A high level party needs to be offered things that require a large amount of resources even to consider starting. They will be taking tickets that need a platoon of trained troops as a minimum. They need to be paying for overpriced tickets to the duchess’ ball in order to meet with someone as an equal in order to negotiate for manufacturing rights in the neighbouring system. They can leverage the fact that the sector’s fleet admiral owes them a favour to get an exclusive trading contract with the sector’s naval bases.

   Similar takes on all of these are possible for low-level parties, but at smaller scales: a patron needs some people to hit a gang hideout; the PCs need to meet with a local customs official at a party and get them to look the other way; the local naval supply officer has some goods that fell off the back of the g/carrier. Essentially: think big!

2. The jobs being offered should be paying a lot more than the low-level group.
   They might not actually need payment in cash (because they probably have a bunch already), but could easily be less tangible: favours owed, concessions in commerce, favourable trade deals, direct support in some other undertaking.

Making High-Level Adventures

The difficulty for making high-level adventures (especially for publication) is the assumption that they require more context than a low-level one. Whom PCs have as useful contacts and allies by the time that they have amassed millions and have a platoon of troops in battledress depends on what they have done to get there. The contacts and knowledge of the setting when starting a low-level campaign can be built up with lower stakes (and local concerns) which can help ease players into the setting and let them make mistakes with less large-scale ramifications.

On the one hand, it is nice to arrive at that organically, but there is also no reason that one can not just parachute into a high level Traveller campaign. Start with the things that are outlined above for a given tier, create some allies of sector-wide influence and see what happens. This is almost the model that is taken for things like the relatively recent naval and mercenary adventures by Mongoose: some of the navy adventures have the PCs aboard large ships with potentially hundreds of crew; some of the merc missions assume that the PCs are in charge of at least a platoon-sized element (which would be about 30+ troops).
For a high level start, consider what the PCs will be doing. A mercenary campaign will obviously need troops under the PC’s command; a corporate campaign should have a decent-sized corporation that wishes to consolidate or expand its operations; a group of dilettantes will need to have their yacht filled with booze, and so on.

In all cases, the types of patrons and (potential) allies and rivals are going to be important. If you want that high level feel then it should be senior administrators, district governers, and fleet admirals instead of small local. A bonus for this is that the important folks are more likely to be travelling themselves in many cases, so you can bring back NPCs in future sessions as well, instead of figuring out why yet another random small-time crook is now on the other side of the sector needing a favour from their old friends.

Approaching Generic Adventures

For a high level campaign, the goal is simply to think big. A low-level campaign might have someone scheming for a hundred thousand credits. In a high level campaign they should be scheming for potential millions. Instead of stealing a fancy car, they are looking to buy out the fancy car maufacturer by manipulating the market.

The primary distinction between a high and low level campaign is the amount or scale of resources that can be leveraged by the PCs (and their opponents). For illustration, consider the same scenario for a low and high-level party:

Someone has a bunch of illegal goods in a storage depot. If you can get away with them, they can not come after you legally, and you will have crippled their business for the short-term.

In a low-level campaign the PCs are likely going to need to gear up and hit their targets directly. A high-level party probably has the funds (or the assets) to pay someone to do it for them: a merc squad, a bribe to the storage owner, buying the warehouse, nuking it from orbit, whatever works and will not get them into too much trouble.

Having challenges resolved by the sledgehammers might seem dull, but it does not have to be. A high level campaign can benefit from troupe play: playing the mercenaries that got hired for a once-off mission, having a low-level group of employees who execute the vision of the main PCs. (This is often suggested for military campaigns, having some PCs as commanders who give instructions to a second group who are on the ground.)

Time-skips are also effective. The plans of a high-level party may well span longer timeframes than low-level ones, and this should be embraced rather than shied away from. A high-level party by definition has the resources to cover their day-to-day expenses, so if they are engaging in plans that require a few weeks or months, then just jump to the next decision point.

If you are doing time skips and sweeping plans over weeks and months, something interesting is quite likely to happen. It will start looking suspiciously like a wargame (especially if one is leaning into the mercenary side of things). It is almost as though RPGs are historically in conversation with wargaming.

The Roslov Adventures

This brings us to the Roslov adventures I have been uploading on itch.io and what I am trying to do there. These are building up a single planet as a setting by detailing mostly NPCs and some locations. All have the assumption that PCs are rich or noble or both, or at least can pass as rich or noble and blend into Roslov’s upper crust. This lets them meet various important local people as (near-)equals: Miss Barbara Murray, CEO of artisinal scent company Parfum Dumont; Director General Claude Sellers of the Roslovian Gendarmerie; retired naval Commodore Sir Basil Syms, now running luxury safari expeditions to remote parts of Roslov; famous racing driver Lady Janet Holden and her upstart rival Katherine Mara. These are not people who naturally hang out with random tramp traders on a social basis, but will do so with nobility, senior officers, or the very rich, even if they are off-worlders.

While a wide range of adventures can work (as described above), one of the simplest is to deal with mysteries: having NPCs who have secrets gives a range of options once those secrets are discovered. Whether a NPC is blackmailed, their secret nest-egg is stolen, or a third party is willing to help the PCs out in return for the secret depends on the approach taken by the PCs as well as what it is and how much an NPC cares about hiding it.

Members of high society have the same ambitions as those outside it: more wealth, more power, more fame, and so on. Seeding a handful of NPCs with secrets related to how they got (or plan to get) those things can provide for ongoing adventures. Re-using those NPCs deepens the connections that a player has to the setting – whether they are liked or not! The various machinations that different NPCs are covering up are going to be linked to other NPCs that the players (hopefully) care about.

This is also a means of keeping the focus on the PCs: they are involved because they belong in the same circle and can talk to potential secret hiders as equals. You could use the same NPCs with PCs that are servants and hirelings, but that will look quite different: instead of mingling at the Vicomtesse de Eaton Clovis’ fancy ball, you will be serving drinks and hoping to overhear something useful; instead of being invited to the preview of the Moore Collection being auctioned off as a potential (and valued) bidder you will be pulling guard duty and hoping that nothing goes wrong so you can earn your paycheck.

Conclusion

Doing a high level campaign, whatever you may call it, is not truly that complex, but it does require a shift in mindset compared to starting at the bottom with a beat-up ship, a mountain of debt and a dream. With some additional planning and with PCs (and their peers) thinking big it is possible to start hitting those sweeping space opera, megacorp, mercenary campaigns.

A thanks to various folks who have talked about this, in no real order: ColinM (who has talked about similar things in his long-term campaign) and JPR (for the first time I saw the concept of the tiers of play) on the unofficial Traveller discord; oldhawkeyes, who has been doing some great CT hacking recently; SammyJ, The Dusk Witch and Mr Nightmares on the SFRPG Collective for helping me marshall my thoughts. Many of the good ideas in this post originate with them.