The Starport Dive

[Tiglath]

I'm waiting for Metz' face to hinge upwards revealing Void at the controls of his puppet!

...and, yes, for me the Virus plotline seemed to be the result of one of those moments where the GM was woefully under prepared and had also drunk well but not wisely...

[terrymixon]

I'm waiting for Metz' face to hinge upwards revealing Void at the controls of his puppet!

Now you die for learning my secret!

[Tiglath]

The butler cat did it!

[joertexas]

The butler cat did it!

Figures.

[terrymixon]

Metz slowly pushes a glass off the table.

[terrymixon]

...and, yes, for me the Virus plotline seemed to be the result of one of those moments where the GM was woefully under prepared and had also drunk well but not wisely...

Rest assured, there will be no virus.

[Tiglath]

Metz slowly pushes a glass off the table.

"I can hold him - just as long as the laser pointer batteries last!"

[Eris]

I was thinking about the conversation you guys might have with Metz and made myself laugh.

Doctor Metz: "Do I look like a mad scientist?"

Also Doctor Metz:

Oh, I see that coming if Spicoli can't be convinced he's being paranoid.

[Eris]

...and, yes, for me the Virus plotline seemed to be the result of one of those moments where the GM was woefully under prepared and had also drunk well but not wisely...

Rest assured, there will be no virus.

Ah, but you didn't say there wouldn't be a Robot Rebellion or an AI Apocalypse!

Guys, I wasn't a fan of Virus either...really not a fan...but I have used it as a myth behind of something that took place thousands of years ago in Akus Moby (among other games).

GDW wanted to reset Traveller out of the Imperium setting into a more frontier like balkanized one. That wasn't a bad idea, to have many small polities and individual worlds starting over in a wreaked universe, IMO. I didn't like having a 'Satan ex Machina' be the cause though, especially not one that didn't really make sense. The venality and stupidity of your bog standard human would have been good enough for that.

So, I was (still am) a fan of the post-Rebellion Era, but not how GDW got them there.

Give me a universe where a 3 or 4 system polity is normal and a sub-sector wide one is big. Give me an old tramp trader cobbled together from parts scrounged from Pete's Salvage Yard and kept flying with baling wire and bubble gum and Kyle the Engineer's tinkering with mis-matched parts. Where pirates are common and privateers are even more common. Where a Starship landing on a world is an amazing event to the locals. Where bazaars and barter isn't an uncommon way to do trade. If you don't recognize this, it's Firefly crossed with The Solar Queen. That's the Ficton (ir. 'verse) I want to play in!

[terrymixon]

...and, yes, for me the Virus plotline seemed to be the result of one of those moments where the GM was woefully under prepared and had also drunk well but not wisely...

Rest assured, there will be no virus.

Ah, but you didn't say there wouldn't be a Robot Rebellion or an AI Apocalypse!

Guys, I wasn't a fan of Virus either...really not a fan...but I have used it as a myth behind of something that took place thousands of years ago in Akus Moby (among other games).

GDW wanted to reset Traveller out of the Imperium setting into a more frontier like balkanized one. That wasn't a bad idea, to have many small polities and individual worlds starting over in a wreaked universe, IMO. I didn't like having a 'Satan ex Machina' be the cause though, especially not one that didn't really make sense. The venality and stupidity of your bog standard human would have been good enough for that.

So, I was (still am) a fan of the post-Rebellion Era, but not how GDW got them there.

Give me a universe where a 3 or 4 system polity is normal and a sub-sector wide one is big. Give me an old tramp trader cobbled together from parts scrounged from Pete's Salvage Yard and kept flying with baling wire and bubble gum and Kyle the Engineer's tinkering with mis-matched parts. Where pirates are common and privateers are even more common. Where a Starship landing on a world is an amazing event to the locals. Where bazaars and barter isn't an uncommon way to do trade. If you don't recognize this, it's Firefly crossed with The Solar Queen. That's the Ficton (ir. 'verse) I want to play in!

I loved Solar Queen and Sargasso of Space.

I’m not saying the civil war might not roll around. Not they we’ll get there in a game like this.

[terrymixon]

I was thinking about the conversation you guys might have with Metz and made myself laugh.

Doctor Metz: "Do I look like a mad scientist?"

Also Doctor Metz:

Oh, I see that coming if Spicoli can't be convinced he's being paranoid.

You just need to see Roscoe at karaoke night. That’ll set you at ease.

[helvorn]

I'm waiting for Metz' face to hinge upwards revealing Void at the controls of his puppet!

...and, yes, for me the Virus plotline seemed to be the result of one of those moments where the GM was woefully under prepared and had also drunk well but not wisely...

They screwed things up so badly with the Civil War setting that they figured the only way out was to burn down the whole house and throw out the baby with the bathwater by invoking Virus. I think they backed themselves so far into a corner that they lacked the creative vision to get their way out.

[helvorn]

Rest assured, there will be no virus.

Ah, but you didn't say there wouldn't be a Robot Rebellion or an AI Apocalypse!

Guys, I wasn't a fan of Virus either...really not a fan...but I have used it as a myth behind of something that took place thousands of years ago in Akus Moby (among other games).

GDW wanted to reset Traveller out of the Imperium setting into a more frontier like balkanized one. That wasn't a bad idea, to have many small polities and individual worlds starting over in a wreaked universe, IMO. I didn't like having a 'Satan ex Machina' be the cause though, especially not one that didn't really make sense. The venality and stupidity of your bog standard human would have been good enough for that.

So, I was (still am) a fan of the post-Rebellion Era, but not how GDW got them there.

Give me a universe where a 3 or 4 system polity is normal and a sub-sector wide one is big. Give me an old tramp trader cobbled together from parts scrounged from Pete's Salvage Yard and kept flying with baling wire and bubble gum and Kyle the Engineer's tinkering with mis-matched parts. Where pirates are common and privateers are even more common. Where a Starship landing on a world is an amazing event to the locals. Where bazaars and barter isn't an uncommon way to do trade. If you don't recognize this, it's Firefly crossed with The Solar Queen. That's the Ficton (ir. 'verse) I want to play in!

I loved Solar Queen and Sargasso of Space.

I’m not saying the civil war might not roll around. Not they we’ll get there in a game like this.

The old Andre Norton stuff is still truly awesome.

They could have let the black war run its course and then have a long night kind of rebuilding. The problem would be what would be other powers be doing during the interim.

[Eris]

The old Andre Norton stuff is still truly awesome.

They could have let the black war run its course and then have a long night kind of rebuilding. The problem would be what would be other powers be doing during the interim.

Hence the need for something that would take *everybody* down at roughly the same time. It didn't have to be VIRUS, though, as they already had a Deus ex Machia out there called the Empress Wave. The Empress Wave was totally undefined and could have been anything they wanted, for example:

What we called the Empress Wave was the cry of civilizations that were being swept over by a psionic blast from the galactic core. A massive wave of psionic energy travelling at Jump Speeds out from the core for some unknown reason. We didn't know what it does, but it's clear it does something bad! The Zhodani have been going coreward for decades trying to find out, no one else has. Now they know and are running and even if we weren't embroiled in a Civil War it's too late for any of us to do anything!

As the psionic wave passed through space it had terrible effects on the minds of all sentient creatures, killing many and driving most of the rest totally mad. It wasn't the machines that rose up and tried to kill everyone, it was virtually every living being rising up, all at once, and trying to kill every other living being that took down the Vargr, Imperials, Zhodani, Solomani, Aslan, even Hivers and K'kree as it passed through. The wave wasn't simply a wave front, it was a multi-light year event that lasted a long time. If it didn't get you at first, it might tomorrow or the next day or next month or next year as the numbers of survivors dropped and dropped and dropped.

In the aftermath, after it finally faded away, some people had survived and a few of them actually regained their senses. Some technology and some infrastructure survived, but very little and enough time had passed that few understood how to use any of the "magical" devices that were left behind. All star spanning civilizations were long gone and the TL almost universally was somewhere below 3. If you are on a world that couldn't sustain itself you had died. If your world could sustain itself you still needed generations to relearn and recover what was lost...and you knew the Big Boogy Man was up there in space waiting to drop on you again. Few would be able to get past that fear until many generations had passed.

Set the game in the recovery period. A world here and there is beginning to rise back up to TL6+ and here and there their are magical devices (TL 9+) that work if you can find them and figure out how to use them, but you don't really understand them. Does anyone? In this environment, interstellar travel begins again, with salvaged and cobbled together ancient equipment, that takes you out into the complete unknown. Your mission: find out what's still out there, recover tech and information from worlds that might be filled with dangerous maniacs still, make contact with those that aren't and begin to trade and form alliances with them. Mostly to see if it's safe to venture into the void again.

Hum, I think I just made a psionic version of the Zombie Apocalypse spread across the Galaxy.

[terrymixon]

Hum, I think I just made a psionic version of the Zombie Apocalypse spread across the Galaxy.

Yes, you did.

[terrymixon]

Everybody has their own preferences. Me, I like the big, bold, busy Traveller experience. Setting this game in the golden age of 1105 lets me plan things with such a wide variety of possibilities. It gets me excited.

[terrymixon]

For those needing it, the campaign ID for this game is: 1073

Personally, I trust everyone and their rolls, so it isn't required, but someone asked.

[Eris]

Everybody has their own preferences. Me, I like the big, bold, busy Traveller experience. Setting this game in the golden age of 1105 lets me plan things with such a wide variety of possibilities. It gets me excited.

Well, you know when I'm running The Spinward Main (1085), so the same time frame as you really.

However, I really would like to run something more...um, Firefly, Wild-West, John Grimes, Solar Queen...at some point.

Actually, no! I'm a week away from 73 and age is catching up with me, physically and mentally...

What I want to run, before I get so old I can't, are Fictons based on:

1. "The Road Not Taken"/Space 1889/non-D&D SpaceJammer game (pre-NASA Solar System with Venusians, Martians, etc)
    
2. Another Intrepid Merchant/Explorer Science Fiction game (see Solar Queen and Firefly above), what I was trying to do with AKUS...and still want to resurrect and finish the trip to deliver that cargo.
    
3. "Weird" early Bronze Age game set on a fantasy Earth with real monsters, magic and meddling gods (sort of Xena minus 2000 years/Bell-Beaker culture period), so sort of D&D but lower tech than even that (clubs, copper points on a spear, stone axes and arrow points, bronze daggers and leather armor are the best there is)
    
4. Broken/devolved Ringworld game with ubiquitous swarms of nanites as the basis of "magic", this is my "Islands in the Endless Sea" setting idea (I originally envisioned this back in the early 2000's as being a role-playing game Travellers played during their weeks in Jump Space to pass the time)

To have a chance of doing this, I'd have to run games for a fixed time, say a year or two at most. They would have to be more like a novel length Adventure than a continuing Campaign, with a beginning, middle, and end. I'd focus heavily on that game, then when the Adventure concluded, suspend that setting and move to the next. If a setting was successful (and I was still able to do so) I would bring it back in a few years for another Adventure. There would have to be few rules or stats to remember or use, almost completely role-playing and story-telling.

I'd be happy to play in games like that, too!

[helvorn]

Everybody has their own preferences. Me, I like the big, bold, busy Traveller experience. Setting this game in the golden age of 1105 lets me plan things with such a wide variety of possibilities. It gets me excited.

Well, you know when I'm running The Spinward Main (1085), so the same time frame as you really.

However, I really would like to run something more...um, Firefly, Wild-West, John Grimes, Solar Queen...at some point.

Actually, no! I'm a week away from 73 and age is catching up with me, physically and mentally...

What I want to run, before I get so old I can't, are Fictons based on:

1. "The Road Not Taken"/Space 1889/non-D&D SpaceJammer game (pre-NASA Solar System with Venusians, Martians, etc)
    
2. Another Intrepid Merchant/Explorer Science Fiction game (see Solar Queen and Firefly above), what I was trying to do with AKUS...and still want to resurrect and finish the trip to deliver that cargo.
    
3. "Weird" early Bronze Age game set on a fantasy Earth with real monsters, magic and meddling gods (sort of Xena minus 2000 years/Bell-Beaker culture period), so sort of D&D but lower tech than even that (clubs, copper points on a spear, stone axes and arrow points, bronze daggers and leather armor are the best there is)
    
4. Broken/devolved Ringworld game with ubiquitous swarms of nanites as the basis of "magic", this is my "Islands in the Endless Sea" setting idea (I originally envisioned this back in the early 2000's as being a role-playing game Travellers played during their weeks in Jump Space to pass the time)

To have a chance of doing this, I'd have to run games for a fixed time, say a year or two at most. They would have to be more like a novel length Adventure than a continuing Campaign, with a beginning, middle, and end. I'd focus heavily on that game, then when the Adventure concluded, suspend that setting and move to the next. If a setting was successful (and I was still able to do so) I would bring it back in a few years for another Adventure. There would have to be few rules or stats to remember or use, almost completely role-playing and story-telling.

I'd be happy to play in games like that, too!

Sign me up for all of the above!

I like the idea of the Empress wave rather than virus. I would love to rejoin AKUS if it starts back up.

Runequest has a nice Bronze Age setting. The rules are simple it would work well with the weird Bronze Age setting game.

[terrymixon]

I think that's it for Mad Dog's purchases. Now you'll have to start spending credits.