My intro to players for our current adventure

Here's the intro I wrote up for my players for our current Traveller adventure.

I'm still trying to get an after-action report of our last session set up, so by way of introduction, let me present this er, intro.

Since everyone requested to play active-service operatives for the Imperium (as opposed to mustered-out/retired adventurers/mercs), the premise here is that their characters are part of a special operations group 'answerable to the highest levels of government in the Spinward Marches'. Yes, it sounds cheesy but it gets the game going, neh?

Think Mission Impossible meets Aliens, or something to that effect.

Porozlo is a world taken from canonical GDW Traveller lore. It was mentioned in Book 4 (Mercenary) and the 76 Patrons supplement. Essentially, it is a highly populated, up-and-coming planet divided until recently between a liberal Free Commerce Alliance and a more inward-oriented Private Ownership Bloc. I also hand-drew a hex map of the world and colored it to boot using colored pencils I cribbed from my son's doodling supplies. Unfortunately, the map won't scan properly, so I won't be able to post it for now.

I normally always send out such intros for my players to chew on before running a game. In this case, I fed them this and left them alone as to how they will accomplish the mission. This includes coming in, getting to the mission area and going out.

-Start-

Date: 1108 Imperial

Mission: Retrieval of Ancient Artifact

Area: Poroszlo [Rhylanor/Spinward Marches] (A867A74-A)

Intel briefing:

Poroszlo is a high tech, balkanized, high population planet in the Rhylanor subsector of the Spinward Marches. Its population, until recently, was divided mainly into two camps- the Free Commerce (FC) Bloc and the Private Ownership (PO) Bloc. The FC nations are concentrated mainly on the large western continent of San Miklos. Although controlling about 2/3s of Poroszlo's population of 9+ billion, the FC nations are the richest, most tech advanced countries on the planet. They adhere to a policy of close ties with off-world mega-corporations and business concerns.

The PO Bloc on the other hand controls the much of the remaining majority on the planet and are concentrated on the central supercontinent of Hoxha. This is further divided into two great states: the Greater People's Democratic Collective (DemoCol) and the Supreme Federated People's Union (SFPU). The PO adheres to a nationalistic, Poroszlo-first policy and are wary of off-world mega-corp 'imperialism'.

Tensions always remained high on the planet giving rise to brush fire wars and coups, the latest most serious being the counter-coup in Steposzhevac, on San Miklos, wherein numerous off-world mercenary contingents figured in forcibly unseating a pro-PO junta.

[note: refer to sample tickets in Book 4, Mercenary for more background]

Last year, the fragile situation was upset by hostilities between two ostensibly allied nations: the DemoCol and SPFU. Skirmishes along both authoritarian nations' shared border erupted into full-scale war. Most predicted a swift DemoCol victory in view of the latter's more sophisticated armed forces (stiffened liberally by higher TL imported military hardware). After swift gains deep into SFPU territory, the DemoCol forces were locked into a stalemate as the SFPU numbers slowed down the DemoCol advance. This Greater Hoxha Eastern Theater of Operations eventually became a meatgrinder which consumed division after division of conscripts from both sides.

Four months ago, a senior officer coup occured in the Republic of Morovic, on San Miklos, wherein the pro-FC national assembly was held hostage by air assault pathfinders commanded by conservative elements in the military. The pro-PO coup plotters appeared to have miscalculated as this led to a spontaneous popular uprsing by the pro-FC segment of the population. With fighting in the streets, the members of the national assembly still at large sent a formal request for FC Bloc military intervention. This was followed by a ultimatum by the DemoCol that any intervention will be considered a formal act of war against the PO. Curiously, the SFPU remained neutral on account of continuing aid and support from the FC Bloc.

48 hours later, air assault units of the FC Bloc landed in Morovic with armored brigades crossing the border from Steposzhevac to the south. Later that day, a state of war existed between the FC Bloc and the DemoCol.

Already under strain from the campaign against the sFPU, the DemoCol forces were pushed steadily eastwards into the home territories of the DemoCol constituencies as generally better-equipped and sophisticated FC Bloc forces went into the attack.

As of the present, FC Bloc forces have pushed as far as 2000 km into DemoCol territory.

So far, none of the combatants have used their stock of nuclear or biological weapons but reported use of chemical weapons has been reported.

Mission:

The Scout Technical Services Branch (R&D office) along with the Liason branch (contact and liason Office) maintains a covert station in the northern territorial area of the SFPU. The existence of this station is highely classified - the decision to create and maintain this goes all the way up to the Office of Sector Archduke Norris. it appears that certain mysterious archeological sites were discovered in the far north of the eastern part of Hoxha - sites which appear to have yielded inexplicable artifacts of ultra-high TL. it is postulated that these could even be from the precursor race known as the Ancients.

The covert station is in the heart of a SFPU industrial settlement, which unfortunately is now an active warzone after the DemoCol opened its northeastern front in an attempt to deprive the SFPU of its source of strategic minerals and resources.

Your mission is to proceed immediately to Poroszlo and retrieve a list of items from the inventory of the station. Failing to do so, you are to completely destroy the whole inventory of the station.

Important:

1. Poroszlo is now an Amber Travel Zone. Travellers proceed with caution.

2. The Imperial Navy just imposed a blockade of all military activity in the system. All travel two and from the world is restricted to the main starport of Timosoara in the continent of San Miklos (FC Bloc territory) and the subsidiary spaceports in the SFPU and the DemoCol.

3. Space and air defenses remain very tight throughout the planet - a legacy of a prolonged state of political tension in the past. this contributes to a lot of emphasis in ground-based action.

4. We have solid imperial contacts in Timosoara. there is a small spy ring in the SFPU and DemoCol spaceport areas, respectively.

5. you are expected to find a way into the planet, arrange for mission-specific gear and to get to the mission site. you have to specify what support you need so we can assess if this is available.

6. The FC has, until recently, employed numerous off-world mercenary contingents. the SFPU may have a few (officially known as Offworld Military Advisers) and the DemoCol has a few also (officially termed as People's Democratic Volunteers).

-end-

If you do see any parellels between the events here and something you came across in a history or game book, chances are you're correct. I admit to cribbing something from both actual history and a game book to spruce this up. I just hoped I wasn't too obvious!

Dry Spell

It is a dry season for me as far as gaming is concerned. Work has eased up a little bit but promises to come down in a raging torrent by the beginning of next month, what with the news that I’m being handed another department to run. This has its respective pros and cons- and I am reminded of the age old adage which says that crisis lends its share of opportunities. Far from complaining, I continually thank my lucky stars. At the very least I have a job and this counts for very much in these curious times we live in.

That said, I foresee no further sessions of Mutant Future (or any gaming, for that matter!) perhaps until the first week of April at the earliest. I thank the Pancreator that the inhabitants of this third world paradise I am constrained to call home have an apparent collective fixation with Holy Week. This means, amongst others, that work tends to stop as early as the day after Palm Sunday. Maybe (just maybe), I can wangle some seriously fun gaming time on that week.

In the meantime, I’ve taken the opportunity to catch up on my reading (both gaming-related and otherwise). Amongst the items I am presently going through include Urutsk, World of Mystery (‘UWoM’). These are two downloadable PDF documents written by Kyrinn S. Eis (who also maintains a blog here). These documents appear to be beta versions of a players’ book and a referees’ guide.

It is a fact that I don’t post on my blog now as much as I would want to – I’ve learned to accept this as part of my present circumstances. The same is true with my attempts to follow the posts on many blogs I have grown to love. I’ve followed Timeshadows blog for some time but only recently had I managed to find the breathing space to go over UWoM. I must confess that I have not had the chance to go over this as completely as I want to (and I’m still going through it as I write this) but so far, it’s beginning to fire me up as inspiration for future games.

Briefly, my take on UWoM is that it is a science-fantasy RPG background and system. It’s got the elements I automatically look for in such a setting: galactic-scale cataclysms, weird and wonderful flora and fauna, aliens, humanoids, a liberal mix of tech levels, swords wielded alongside blasters, guilds, religious wars, the rise and fall of empires- just to name a few.

The writing style in the opening of the players’ book grabs your attention. It puts you right there with a minimum use of words-

“I want you to imagine or remember the wilderness in or around your area. If you live in a city, think of the area with the most trees, parks and open fields. Now imagine all that twice as vibrant and close and dense.

If you live by the coast, imagine the worst storms you can remember. Anywhere else you may live, jungle, desert, etc. imagine or remember the same intensities but keyed to those locales you know best.

Now raise the sea-level three feet (roughly a metre). As the planet is generally flatlands not much higher than sea level, most Trees have developed long torpedo-like seed pods, similar to mangroves which allow them to grow from under the water. Cedar and cypress, sequoia, everything simply adapted to the added three feet of water.”

In three starting paragraphs, I found myself in Urutsk already. This is something I have not seen in a long time in gaming material, and I find this very refreshing.
The fluff associated with UWoM spans centuries and concerns events which can be very convoluted and often-times violent. My impression here was something very akin to the political-military machinations in Frank Herbert’s Dune. This provides the players a lot of leeway as regards the kind of games they want: whether these are dungeon crawls, stand-up fights or a lot of skullduggery and covert ops.

Speaking of stand-up fights, I can’t help but agree with the spirit of the writer’s advice at the beginning of the combat section in the UWoM players’ book:

“Also my understanding of combat is heroic by virtue of its terribleness, and the amazing fact that some fighters survive at all, and not by dint of cinematic illusions or desires for wish-fulfillment.

While certain more forgiving elements have been included, in general these rules are justifiably lethal at all levels of play, and even heavily armored foes are capable of being instantly slain by exceptional strikes.

My overarching advice is for player-characters to avoid combat under all but the most favorable conditions, and even then, to be prepared for the loss of said characters, as healing in the early Autumn era is in no way as common or miraculously effective as in many other games.”

This resonates positively with me. This is how I see combats being played in my games as well.

I know I’ll be re-reading UWoM after I finish my first reading. Even as I’m going through it, I’m finally convinced to run that science fantasy game of a rather different sort from my current Mutant Future one. Along with this, I’ve this hankering to revisit Dune, Book of the New Sun, and Tales of the Dying Earth in the next few weeks.

If I can’t game for now, I’ll at least put the time to good use.

A Proper Introduction

I was just stealing a sneaky break and by trawling the messages of my gaming egroups for the year 2009, I stumbled upon the introduction I cobbled up for some (expected) new players during the start of my ongoing Mutant Future game. I'm just posting it here for (1) posterity, (2) and additional information and insight into our present campaign. It goes something like this:


"The time of the Ancients is gone, and the world suffers under the light of a
blood red sky.

It is said that the race of men is old, older than we think. It is said that
long ago, the race of men sailed the empty gulfs of darkness between the stars
in the heavens in great ships that majestically glided throughout the void. Some
say this is how our world, benighted Cygnet Delta came to be our home.

It is said that out of the travails and chaos spawned by men's voyages
throughout the endless empty gulfs, an age of greatness and reason came to be.
It was a time of immense wealth and promise and they called it The Republic.

But out of that time of light followed a time of trouble, of hubris and sin.
Violence fed on anger and birthed such strife that all the good brought about by
men's blood and toil came to naught and was swallowed up by a ravening evil that
ultimately destroyed The Republic.

It was a time of portents and omens on the earth and in the heavens, until even
the sun began to die, seeming to fade before its time.

As the generations of light passed on, so were born the generations of darkness,
benighted and cursed under the blood red sky of Cygnet Delta.

This is a tale of such times and those who lived and died in them…"

Ah well, back to the salt mines for me now....

The Mutant Lord's Impressions: Episode One

Episode One was the first experience I had in running Mutant Future and the first time any of my players ever played in a Mutant Future game, so this essentially was a learning experience for all of us.

The rules were pretty straightforward and being from a Basic D&D background a long, long time ago in my distant childhood, every thing came back to me smoothly. I liken this to not riding a bicycle for the longest time and just hopping on one and taking off down the street. Analogy-wise, running Mutant Future as a game system was a smooth ride.

The addition of variable damage rules and variable hit points from Carcosa (what my players now term as the ‘Carcosa Variable Damage Rules’ or CVDR) provided an additional level of uncertainty and tension during combat. Overall, that translated into a whole lot of fun, particularly when a player would satisfyingly roll high on the variable damage table and throw a whopping d12 when stabbing a critter with a “puny” dagger.

Checking under the hood - Sanly Bowitts and its environs

As soon as I made up my mind to run a Mutant Future game, I knew I’d have to make a few departures from my default settings for my other games. Science would have to be ‘softened up’ from the normal Traveller-Twilight 2000-Gurps Ultratech background in my usual game to a more rubber-science feel. Hence, the giant insects, lizards, vermin and glowing green mutants (not that the ladz have ever come up against a glowing green humanoid yet…). The point is, I relaxed quite a bit on my usual hard-science SF aspects of my game and threw the players into a real science fantasy universe that almost makes the Known Worlds of Fading Suns seem like hard science SF.

Also, with the drastic reduction in my overall game prep time brought about by an ever-increasing work at the office as well as the usual demands of bringing up two little kids, I was forced to take a more “laid back” approach in campaign development and world building. When I say “laid back” I refer to adopting a “kitchen sink” approach. I took what I wanted and what I could from existing post-apocalyptic sources and inspirational material, tossed them into my collective pot, stirred the mess around a bit, and fed them at will to my players.

Yes, the result was stew but so far, my players have yet to complain of the taste.

I know some of my players could be reading this, but what the heck, they’ll find out anyway. Some of a few odds and ends related to the setting at the start of my Mutant Future include the following:

Sanly Bowitts is a respelled name of a village at the edge of the desert in the post-nuclear war America of Walter M. Miller Jr.’s ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’, if memory serves me right. I always felt that the first part of his work captured the feel of a world emerging from the destruction of the War to End All Wars, into the Shadow Years that follow.

Being my default start location for the ongoing game, Sanly Bowitts had to be fleshed out to a more organized degree as I expect my players to be spending some time meandering around town, hatching plots and raising their usual brand of mayhem. Hence I took the town of Horn from the excellent 1981 Gamma World adventure module Legion of Gold and plunked it right into the Cygnet Delta of my Gamma World. Gary Gygax, et al really did great on that module and I’m unabashedly ripping off bits here and there for use in our game.

The Hub is a larger, ostensibly more powerful city-state north west of Sanly Bowitts. I named it after a town in another post-nuclear America wherein the Normals war with the Mutants. This is in Michael Resnick’s 1969 novel ‘Redbeard’. I regret losing my copy of this book but I always considered Redbeard to be one of those stories that go so far in capturing that Gamma World-Mutant Future feel.

The musicians from the Strontium Ninety who were seen to have rendered a performance of a ditty with a chorus which goes somewhat like “Whip it Good!”, I’ll leave to my readers to figure out themselves. If you don’t get it, don’t feel too bad- I’ll attribute this, amongst others, to generation gap. I’m pretty old and my music tends to show this.

In relation to the musicians in the Strontium Ninety, I’d say the bar fight involving a stunningly beautiful, scantily clad, platinum blonde swordswoman and the three hulking verdure brutes should be another giveaway for those who’ve seen the animated Heavy Metal Movie. This, and the great white bird should bring the name “Taarna” in mind, if it hasn’t done so yet.

So far, this is it for Episode One. As I write this, I remember a recent post in James Maliszewski’s Grognardia wherein he did a review of the old SFRGP Space Opera. Having never played Space Op myself, I was intrigued (as most old style-SF rpgs tend to do so to me). One thing that struck me was the impression that FGU’s Space Op was essentially a happy mish-mash of different SF themes, tropes and icons all unabashedly placed in one game. Hence the cover of the gamebook as appearing in James’ blog had something that looked like a Wookie mixed in along with some other character types.

I couldn’t help say “Yeah, I can relate to that.” It dawned upon me that my Mutant Future is shaping up to be a mish-mash of post-apocalypse themes. A mixed stew. I hope it retains its flavor without going stale on me.

What's it like?

I’d said earlier that Under A Blood Red Sky is more of a rubber-science game with more of a science fantasy feel than a true science fiction post-apocalyptic one. This game then departs from my usual gritty style which was, for the longest time, my default setting in earlier games I ran in Twilight 2000 and Gurps: Fallout.

No, this time, I’m running something different. Under A Blood Red Sky goes all out with such staples including aliens and rayguns as well as giant insects and talking mutant animals. Just to give you all an idea as to where I am coming from this time, here are a few of the influences which served to shape my particular vision of the Mutant Future:


Jack Kirby’s Kamandi. I grew up reading this comic from the 70s and largely went out of my way to track down many of its issues. I recall combing the thrift shops outside Clark AFB in Angeles City just to find the next installment in the thrilling adventures of The Last Boy on Earth. The mutant animals of my Mutant Future have a lot in common with Jack Kirby’s Doctor Canus, Great Ceasar, Mylock Bloodstalker, and of course, the serpentine Mr. Sacker.



Thundarr the Barbarian. To be honest, I used to see this being flashed on TV when I was in high school but never paid it much attention. Now, I’m catching up through You-Tube and the very excellent posts from The Savage Afterworld which I follow with great interest. The image of an intrepid and eclectic band of adventurers led by a sword-swinging fighting man making their way through the ruins of our fallen civilization is just pure grist of the mill in my Mutant Future.

Gamma World. Arguably the mother of all post-apocalyptic role playing games and the linear progenitor of Mutant Future. Amongst all its incarnations, I still prefer the old first edition with all its clunkiness and rough edges.



My Mutant Future may be more ‘wonky’ than ‘gritty’, as opposed to say a campaign set in the Darwin’s World setting – a setting which I personally think looks awesome. Nonetheless, while our adventures in Cygnet Delta are described as science fantasy, I’d like to think that they are, as my games always have been, very deadly. A well-aimed shot from a Mark XX Hand Blaster will kill you just as efficiently as a well-placed sword thrust or rending strike from a mutant critter.