Category: GM’s Notes

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Into the Void Ref’s Notes Session 30

It took almost a year to get back to the campaign, but I never end a campaign. Ever.

Session 30 was really fun, and was a reminder why I love this group so much. Since William moved to San Antonio last year we are taking the game back to Roll20 rather than in-person. I’ve not run or played a game on Roll20 since the pandemic lockdown, though I’ve kept my account  and all the stuff in there. The biggest issue I’ve had with it is that putting things online is an added layer of preparation. I really like doing everything in a small notebook and using that with my small ring binder that has all the campaign materials and playing in-person. I spend a lot of time on the computer already. BUT — I have made some progress on Roll20.

I got an iPad Mini for Christmas 2024, and recently added and Apple Pencil and the application Procreate to it, and it makes creation of maps for the online game much easier. I no longer want to go jump in front of a bus every time I start working on one. I can sit in my chair, in the front room with my family, and work on the iPad. The pencil works really well too, and the application does exactly what I need it to do.

Now, while I haven’t been running this campaign for nearly a year, I have been running a D&D campaign for three players for about 8 months, so I’ve been getting a lot of GM practice. So jumping back into the Traveller game was not that hard. I was very pleased with the roleplaying done by the group. They give me so many things to riff off of during the game. I had no intention of introducing an NPC computer hacker, but they wanted to find one, so I whipped one up. The things they did that I wasn’t expecting, which was nearly everything, gave me so many options as the referee. It is kinda funny that now, at 60 years of age, I am finally understanding that if you LISTEN to your players and ride that wave the game will be a lot better, and a lot easier to run.

Classic Traveller is a great system for this kind of play. There are enough rules to get the job done, but not so many to make the game oppressive and hard to create and adjust on the fly. Cepheus Engine is the same way.

After the game we started a discussion about the Cepheus Engine, and possibly converting the campaign to the CE System Reference Document. I have already ported a lot of CE mechanics to this Classic Traveller game. I think making it official might help the players, as they’d have all the rules I’m using easily available. So I asked them, if they have the time, to fiddle around with character creation using the online version.

I do, however, ask myself how much this would improve our game. Would it improve it at all? Is it necessary? The honest answer is probably not. Classic Traveller has served us well for many years now. I really enjoy saying I run Classic Traveller. That means a lot to me.

 

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Into the Void – Ref’s Notes 3.

We’ve now played three sessions of my classic Traveller campaign, “Into the Void.” I really should say “our” campaign, because at this point the players are starting to make it their own as well.

A few thoughts.

  • It’s pretty damned amazing how much fun you can have with those three little black books. In some ways they are the barest outline of a game system. Nowhere in them is there even an example of play! And yet they are amazingly complete and flexible. Back in the old days when my friends and I played Traveller one a week, I don’t think we had the experience to appreciate just how well the rules work. Frankly, there weren’t really many complex, “crunchy” systems out there to compare it to.
  • The ship combat system is actually really good. It seems like a ship combat system from a war game, that’s been simplified to fit into a roleplaying game. With small ships at least, combat is something to avoid. In our most recent session (#3), the PCs ship got into a skirmish with a slightly larger ship. We had one round of combat, resulting in the PCs hull taking a hit and depressurizing and the enemy ship having it’s maneuver drive disabled, putting it dead in space. That’s in one round of combat. We didn’t even get to draw the movement vectors on my game mat!
  • The time scales are way different between ship combat and personal combat, so with PCs running around inside the enemy craft during the ship combat, we first did some personal level stuff inside the enemy ship, then the ship combat round, then more inside the enemy ship. The effect was actually really good – very cinematic. I think we all liked it. As Ref, I thought it all fell together well.
  • I’m trying hard not to turn these sessions into dungeon crawls. Now, I think that can be fun sometimes, but it seems too lazy. But I’ll admit — it is tempting. When I’m sitting there, writing, working on ideas, I do sometimes thing “man, it would be easy to have them explore a complex building.” But that’s not the direction I want to go with this. It needs to be about action, ideas, drama, conflict, and story.