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Chris Tannhauser
United States
San Diego
California
Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
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Fig. 1 — Soft as a 32-year-old sack of rocks.
Everywhere you go in this wondrous universe, you bump into people who open their fat, sassy mouths and force you to draw down on them. "My ship is not a piece of junk," you say, pulling your autopistol, "But that is a mighty fine pallet of gold ingots you've got there."
What happens next? How many rounds can he eat before he stops returning fire? How long will he last under interrogation? How clever is he, knowing, as you do, that clever men leave angry robots loose in their starship holds? Because you're going to need to take him alive and beat some numbers out of him if you have any hope of absconding with all his crap without having to go all close-quarters battle with machines that will eat your friends.
In Traveller, coming up with enough data for a bullet to work with is simple—just grab three hexadecimal numbers out of the ether and you know the size of the pond that rock is gonna splash into. My only problem is that left without any governing ranges I tend to make everyone FAB, that is, strength 15, dexterity 10, endurance 11. That's a big, meaty pond well beyond the normal range of 777 for an average unaugmented, non-combat-drug-smokin' schmo. And while I think it makes a certain kind of sense to have the heroes of the story run into nothing but 'roid-raging cyborgs, it tends to make them do things like hammer an arcology with ship's guns while mooning the local infonet from the open cargo bay instead of going inside for the meeting they scheduled with some slightly shady guy at half-past three.
It turns out I'm not the only referee with this problem. How do I know this? Because the very first supplement for the game was 1001 Characters. As advertised, it contains nothing but 1001 stat lines for ablative bullet sponges and their gear, including, handily, how much cash they have access to.
Take this guy, for example:
Fig. 2 — Been around the block enough times to know this is probably the last lap.
The size of his bank account is not only a deadly character attractant, but is also inversely proportional to his ability to hang on to it.
An endurance of 1 tells even the densest of referees that credits aren't the only thing he's bursting with—he's sporting an itch in the blood that only murder can scratch, and those hybrid parasites he picked up from the that one time he got stung in the neck by an alien bio-computer are about to outgrow their "aquarium". Lean in close, brother, so I can whisper that big fat prime that turns the tumblers on my datavault. Other things might, but I don't bite...
He's not good at much, but he knows enough to cause trouble—imagine this guy getting loose and using his Computer-1 to upload some milspec malware into your nav computer such that your jump drive spools up and leaps away from its moorings into the fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions simultaneously. "Exploded view" does not even begin to cover it. Then, while you're fighting the screaming red lights filling the bridge, he takes a giant, bloody, writhing dump in the cargo bay and uses his Vacc-1 to go EV to avoid the "gorge cycle" of his otherworldly rider.
I see him clinging to the side of the ship, having a good cry while listening to all the screaming and shooting coming out of his tiny helmet speaker.
See what I'm talking about? This is what the bullet asks—and this book answers with a thunderclap. A thousand-and-one times over.
Now let's say your players get out of that mess and end up busting Mach four in a school zone in their illegally modified grav car. They get "pulled over" with a directional EMP and the first three officers on the scene sidle up on this, the hottest of stops. Everybody could be FAB and have Pistol-5, which, on a 2d6 scale means they can pretty much bullseye the memory of a womp rat right out of your fear-meat at 100 meters, but would those guys really be running speed traps?
Naw. It's these guys:
Fig. 3 — It's space Andy Griffith and four Barney Fifes folded onto two bioframes at the local Mad Meat Salon:
And easy as that you got Trooper #7 who likes to hang back and make it home every night to his greasy, torn-foam luv-luv bot by sending Trooper #6 in SMG a-blazin', backed up by Trooper #8 who wants to prove he's as badass as #6. Go to it, boys!
The 1001 are subdivided into Navy, Marines, Army, Scouts, Merchants, and my favorite, "Others", which can only mean store clerks, hose jockeys, prostitutes, gimps, guys who don't know the war ended 43 years ago, rogue AI pets, and clergy. There's also a section called "Chance Encounters". While this sounds like an escort service where the girls aren't nearly as pretty as the picture that suckered you in, this is actually troopers, police, thugs and "nine characters drawn from the pages of science fiction":
Fig. 4 — Careful, he's got a disguise kit!
While not nearly as evocative as Fall Guy #30 above, he is fascinating in his own way. I mean, how do you disguise that level of awesomeness? That must be the most epic disguise kit ever. The mind reels at the possibilities. Nanosculpting distributed-AI cream? Dimensional rotisserie with extra bodies sluicing through what looks like an n-space dry cleaners' shop? I am stuttering and boggled with it. Could that be his Achilles heel, the only chance the characters have of defeating this godlike being? Reprogram his face cream to eat him? Purge all his three-space forms into a single, thousand-limbed screaming thing? And then hammer it with ship's guns while mooning the local infonet?
If you're playing Old Skool original Traveller—and really, you should be, it never went bad and it's still in print and available—this is a must. Your players need people to get hard done by, pissed at, have words with, point iron at, and run around inside a starship cargo bay shooting at each other like gangsters who've never taken a marksmanship course, let alone a basic pistol safety class.
So whether it's the dude they stop to ask for directions or the crew of the solar sloop they hijack for livers, this book has 1001 random people to get caught in your players' gears. That's been more than enough to last me, uh, 32 years.
Get some!
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Eric Dodd
New Zealand
Martinborough
Wairarapa
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Bloody Lensmen - they always turn up just when you're looting that TL 18 Ancient's Stellar Pleasure Barge to insist that you give it up to the Galactic Archaeological Bureau...
Wonderful fun review as always HG, but it does show the important point - just because we didn't have Aspects and Traits doesn't mean all NPCs were just faceless goons.
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Chris Tannhauser
United States
San Diego
California
Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
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Thanks!
And to prove out your point even further, I came up with all that crap about the different NPCs on the fly, as I was writing the piece. I like to think that Fall Guy #30 is a sucker's sucker -- he looks weak & wealthy to lure in the snack-worthy, and hates himself for it. The wad of cash comes from previous victims, he's a big spender in bars in his attempt to forget, which attracts the venal vulnerable and the cycle repeats.
This is just my Traveller referee's reflex and the way I've been using this book since 1978. The numbers paint a picture if you can bend your head to see it...
As for the Lensmen, those with power beyond reason require unreasonable force applied at a crazy angle to topple them. They will fall. The only question is how many innocents must suffer the splash zone?
My players would answer... all of them.
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Kris Miller
United States
Lick Observatory
California
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"'Exploded view' does not even begin to cover it."
Brilliant! We've all been in that game.
Fun review.
Cheers,
Kris
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Art Gorski
United States
Prescott
Arizona
Get my Mac software for Classic Traveller at http://naasirka.weebly.com/
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Great review! Have a tip.
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Jason Zer0
United States
Del Mar
California
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Ooooo. Can't wait for next Traveller campaign at Thursday Night Academy.
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paz AKA Matt Lewis
United Kingdom
Great Sutton
Cheshire
All hail Lord Fudge!
[PFRPG PBF Games] GMing: Crypt of the Everflame, 2x We Be Goblins! · Playing: Vestige's Margreve 'Hollow', Bearpaw's Pathfinder Society
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You had me at 'ablative bullet sponge'.
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Matt Sturm
United States
Ann Arbor
Michigan
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This is one of the greatest reviews I've read on the Geek. I've had this book for, I dunno, twenty-five years perhaps? And I've never, ever looked at it quite this way. And I'll never look at it the same again! Brilliant.
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Callisto 1 Mission Log, Day 3,125: I swear to god, if Logan does that spoon tapping thing again I will use it to dig his other eye out of his head. Also, the toilets stopped working sometime last month. Probably should've mentioned that first.
