Ideas for Traveller

Copyright 03/1982© Bob Mc Williams

 

   To whose who know Bob : could you ask him to contact me

A few issues ago (WD25 Starbase) I mentioned some of the science fiction novels I thought would be relevant to Traveller referees as a source of ideas for situations, themes and settings, and in this issue I want to cover some non-SF sources.

Traveller is essentially a game about life - albeit a fantasy one set in the far future. Mankind hasn't altered radically in the Traveller universe, and the same ambitions, hopes and fears guide the actions of characters as they do in the present. Apart from making it easy for players to 'fit' their characters, this also allows us to delve into the whole spectrum of literature past and present, giving a truly immense selection of source material.

In a short article such as this I can only give a few suggestions, which I hope may encourage you to adapt ideas which might not be seen to be immediately relevant. In fact, the film industry has been doing this for years - the recent film Out/and is a classic example, using the basic theme of High Noon in space. There are two major areas where general literature (including films and TV) can be useful.

The first is as a source for adventure ideas or themes. The film The Magnificenrt Seven (or even better, Kurasawa's Seven Samurai on which it is based) serves to illustrate the point admirably. Here we have a plot made for rote-playing and for easy refereeing. A location is chosen - probably a backward, colonial planet where the immigrants have enough trouble just staying alive, and a local warlord who extracts every last credit from the farmers, in return for his 'protection'. Enter our seven assorted adventurers looking for money to pay for repairs to their trader, who realise the farmers' plight and vow to take on the warlord's thugs the next time they turn up.

Another type of situation - one of my personal favourites is the train journey thriller, ranging from Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express to Colin Forbes' Avalanche Express. Transferred to a different era (the transcontinental monorail, perhaps), your imagination is the only limitation in converting the plot to the game - players leaping from grav rafts onto coach roofs, mysterious aliens in private first class compartments, and so on. Some of these stories can also be converted to take place on passenger starships with a little extra work.

Thrillers such as The Day of the Jackal, lce Station Zebra and Guns of Navarone can all yield Traveller situations if the background settings are suitably altered, both to make them more SF in content and to disguise their origin from the players. Nor does one have to stick to recent literature - the novels of authors such as Walter Scott and Alexandre Dumas will also provide suitable material.

On the subject of converting a book or film plot into a Traveller adventure, we hope to cover that subject in detail at a later date. For now, I advise you to choose a book you have read and' not use a film unless you know it very well. This is because of the need to refer back to it - difficult with a film unless you have a home video. Read the book again, and this time make notes as you go, under three headings.

Firstly, note the basic elements of the plot, including what the players know about it at each stage and when they find out new elements. Different players may know different elements. Secondly, make notes on the main characters in the plot, and how they interact. Decide which characters will become player characters (not always obvious), which should remain under the referee's control. You might want to rig the Reaction Table with plus or minus DMs to get the right relationships. Thirdly, note any particular incidents you find interesting and might want to use in the game. Also note any incidents that would give away the plot being used. As an example, in Where Eagles Dare, Richard Burton and his pals use a Gable car to reach their objective. Even if you have succeeded in convincing the players that the plot is taking place on Regina in mid-winter, and not Norway, using the same element will now tip off the quicker thinking players who have seen the film. Of course you can bluff the players by using the Gable car sequence from Where Eagles Dare when you are actually following the plot from Guns of Navarone!

The second area of usefulness for non-SF material is in providing ideas for background people, places, animals and artifacts. In the broadest sense everything is useful, from discussion on government economic policy to Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way. Obviously some of it is of more immediate use. A lot of my ideas for incidental information and locations comes from documentary TV programmes on wildlife, travel, science and so on. Similarly, magazines such as National Geographic and Scientific American are a fund of ideas - libraries usually have back copies of these.

There are no hard and fast rules about using information, but I have found that it rarely seems to work out that you find exactly what you are looking for, when you want it. This means you will need to store ideas in some form, perhaps by keeping a notebook which indexes each subject and where to find it. Using the same guidelines as for plots (altering and disguising ideas), you can come up with many interesting and unusual ideas for incorporating into a Traveller adventure, which have the added bonus of being based on fart.

Finally, I'd like to say a few words about material we could do with for Starbase, as well as thanking everyone who has already sent in contributions.

There is quite a lot of material in the Starbase file, but it seems mainly to be on one or two common subjects of which the most popular are starships and weapons. This doesn't mean we won't consider any more contributions on these subjects, but they need to be interesting: no-one for example has yet submitted a truly alien starship design, or much in the way of alien weapons.

What, then, do we want? Well, I hope to devote a few issues to specific subjects in much the same way as Treasure Chest does for D&D, and contributions are welcomed for these. In the near future there will be items on grav vehicles and other forms of planetary transport, new skills, new computer programs, and new items of equipment. Even if you can't think of anything to submit yourself, tell us what you would like to see in Starbase.