Freelance Traveller

When Worlds Collide: AAR Holy Rood Games Night: One Crowded Hour

by Timothy Collinson

This article originally appeared in the May/June 2024 issue.

Gaming at Church

My local church started running a Games Night a year or so ago. Three or four evenings a year we gather with board games in various rooms and spaces round the building. On one occasion I played Escape from Colditz at the back of the sanctuary which gave added flavour to trips to the chapel for rope. We play old favourites or explore new releases. Some, like my daughter, play a number of short games. Others enjoy longer games of 90 minutes or so. We can fit two of these into the three-hour long evenings. Those of us with all-too-large game collections bring along a bunch of titles to offer up as options; those who just want to play can pitch up and make their choices. There’s usually a youth Warhammer table set up in an upstairs room as well. I don’t think it’s limited to youth, but that’s how it works out. Too many choices! I want to be everywhere! Even the Warhammer perhaps on one occasion just to see what it’s like. A dedicated team serve up food halfway through and, board game owners permitting, we’ll eat at the table or if material is too precious or delicate, take a break. It’s a lovely social event and whether we’re playing competitive games or cooperative games a lot of fun is had and I don’t think it’s yet come to blows or had anyone throwing over a table and storming off – despite the games of Monopoly I’ve seen played. (Though no one has yet taken me up on Czech Monopoly which I usually take for fun.)

A couple of times I’ve taken along some of my role-playing books to see if there was much interest in trying that out. I was relatively convinced it wouldn’t really be feasible to a) find a small group, b) do something in a very short time frame and c) all agree on what we wanted to do, but there were people who at least paid a passing interest with a quick look at the various volumes I’d dragged along. Traveller, of course, but also some recent acquisitions of One Ring, Star Trek Adventures, or Alien and so on.

Space Pirate?

Finally, I could bear it no longer and for the most recent Games Night I thought the best way to approach it might be to see if my group from The Traveller Adventure in days of yore would be interested in a ‘demo game’ where essentially we’d play in one room and if anyone wanted to either join us or just drop in for a short period we would make that happen. Two of the gang were up for it which was enough to make a start and prior to the evening I’d even persuaded the vicar and a local GPA GP is a General Practitioner or what I think is called a Primary Care Physician in the US to give it a shot and join us. Four would definitely make a game doable – although the vicar – announcing it in a service a couple of Sundays before – said he was looking forward to playing a space pirate which I hadn’t bargained on! One of the TTA gang even rounded up another work colleague to give it a go although in the event she was too ill to attend unfortunately.

I’d given it a lot of thought and considered running one of my own things which I’d be familiar with, but on reflection they were a bit too geared up for people who either know what they’re doing with Traveller or at least know what they’re doing with role playing. I’d have people who would be familiar with neither and perhaps only vaguely interested at all. I decided I needed something that would work as a one off, something that would be tight and focussed, something that would put the characters in the thick of it early on and keep the pace moving.

Once I was considering the whole gamut of Traveller adventures published across nearly half a century I nearly went into meltdown. So many good possibilities. Double Adventure 3: Death Station (also in Mongoose’s Compendium 2) was a contender, but maybe too much edging into horror for this first outing. The opening heist chapter from The Traveller Adventure might have worked but was perhaps just a tad too complicated for the three-hour slot (of which at least half an hour I knew would be lost to introductions). I did consider something from The Pirates of Drinax just to give the vicar his wish, but it is just so vast I wimped out (although I took it along just to show it as an example of the breadth of Traveller).

One Crowded Hour

In the end, I kept coming back to something I thought might be ideal. One Crowded Hour by Martin J. Dougherty from the Crowded Hours book for Mongoose 1st Edition. Long time fans will know that it actually originated as a Traveller²⁰ adventure supplement which was PDF only. Naturally I dug this out to compare the differences and was reminded that I really don’t know the Traveller²⁰ rules at all well but that for the most part the text was much the same.  But not identical. Rules aside it was interesting to find a few details in the T20 version that are lacking in the Mongoose edition. Not much but they turned out to be things well worth knowing. The ages of the Vargr pups for example – which helps with playing them as NPCs and knowing what they’re likely to be doing. The stats and skills for the all the NPCs for another – which helps with everything from initiative to what they can actually contribute to a task. Yes, I could probably have made it up on the spot – but it would have taken time and slowed things down a fraction; yes, I could easily have generated all this from scratch beforehand, but I wasn’t short of a million other things to do so it was nice I could just cut and paste them into a two page spread of crew on one side and passengers on the other which I used to accompany my print out of the adventure. Printed out because I’d scribbled helpful notes all over it to help recall and speed. I was also quite pleased with a double page spread I had created. It laid out the whole adventure broken down into its component parts for ease of reference. It would help keep things on track and assist in ensuring it fit into three hours. That sheet included an organizational chart of the Subsidized Liner’s crew and the NPCs so I had a quick reference. It also included three boxes covering the absolute minimum of what I needed to tell the players about setting, rules and the adventure set up. Email if you’re thinking of running this and want these ‘extras’ or I may get round to making a March Harrier Publishing booklet of them.

Several other things were in favour of One Crowded Hour. Firstly, I knew the author, Martin Dougherty, to write first rate material so I could be confident about the content where I still have doubts about my own abilities. Secondly, I was planning on running Mongoose 2nd Edition rules so ‘conversion’ would be simplicity itself. I could, in fact, run it straight from the original text although I did convert the player character sheets I handed out. I knew it was likely to be tight in terms of timings and that it would suit a pressured ‘get on with it’ kind of atmosphere. I quite liked the fact that it didn’t involve lots of personal combat or ship combat which would make things more complicated for players to learn as well as for me running it and not to mention that that could slow things down considerably in our very limited time. It’s also ‘limited’ in it’s setting so you don’t need to know tons about Traveller to cope with what’s going on. If you’ve ever seen a disaster movie and have the vaguest notion of science fiction tropes, you’re probably good to go. This aspect was perhaps the most important of all as I knew I’d have ‘newbies’ to Traveller, role playing and possibly even science fiction itself.

Now that I’d picked One Crowded Hour it then only remained, a couple of weeks before the event, to really acquaint myself with the detail of the adventure. Having read it some years before was not enough to feel I could reliably run the thing, particularly as I wanted to do my utmost best in presenting a good experience. That meant I had to know it well, know the rules it would need well and know the NPCs well. I didn’t want to be constantly looking things up or reading NPC blurbs as though I’d never seen them before. I also thought it would be helpful to know how they related to each other (even if it was just in terms of knowing ‘those two are both scouts’ or whatever, rather than directly connected). So, for a couple of weeks, my spare time was filled with deciding on handouts, picking two or three choice ‘show off Traveller’ items (the original LBB boxed set, The Atlas of the Imperium: Second Survey & the Integrated Timeline both of which drew a lot of attention, and a bunch of T5 dice), and getting to know an entire Subsidized Liner’s worth of crew and passengers. I also dug out my own ‘Traveller in one page’ handout – which I first prepared for work colleagues and published in There May Be Troubles Ahead – which has all the setting you need to know in one column and all the rules you need to know in the other. Having written that text some years previously for work colleagues when we played at lunchtimes, I was quite pleased that it had stood the test of time and as far as I can see still ‘worked’ as a summary. I possibly overdid this preparation as, by the time we got to a day or three away from the Saturday evening, I was living and breathing the NPCs and encountering them in my dreams. (Although, given Mr Dougherty’s description of not a few of them as being rather attractive, perhaps this was no bad thing.) I had hoped to spend Saturday morning running through two of the set pieces (the excursion on the hull and the low berth awakening) in terms of rules and to get an idea of dice roll probabilities but a last-minute crisis with mother-in-law needing to buy a new mobile phone put those plans out the porthole as the morning was spent shopping and then the afternoon getting her set up on the new device. Ah well. Perhaps it was good to have a diversion and a change of thinking and leave myself fresh for the evening. It didn’t seem to be too critical when we got to those sections and the hull scene I had to truncate a little in any case. Mostly because time was, as ever, running away from us but also because only three players were directly involved.

Deck Plan Dilemma

One decision took a surprising long time and was made quite late in the day. Deck plans. At first I thought I wanted to run One Crowded Hour as ‘purely’ as possible to offer the experience, so although the Duchess Selene of the 2010 text isn’t the subsidized liner us oldies might know from classic Traveller, I would just run with the deck plans as given. I was relatively confident that the actual plot didn’t require any particular layout, but it seemed the easy option. However, the more I looked at the plans given in the book in any detail, the more I disliked them. OK, so maybe the lovely dining room out front was missing but that’s really just cosmetic. The crew being mixed up with the passengers seemed very odd however and there were other details that didn’t quite gel for me. I had a go at simply adjusting them by moving a bulkhead here and adding an iris valve there but the more I did this, the less I thought this was the sensible approach. I then took a look at the Mongoose 2nd Edition version as I was keen to run Mongoose 2nd Edition rules. (My theory was that that was the best chance of showing off something accessible to any new interest in Traveller). The more I looked at the blocky illustration and the deck plans, however, the more I liked that even less. Off I went to dig out the FASA Adventure Class Ships II boxed set of plans that have sat on a shelf needing some love. I had forgotten they have a bit more detail for the dining room adding in a casino and dance floor along with a bar that I rather liked. There were still one or two details that put me off though. Rather surprisingly late in the day – maybe just three or four days before we played – I finally went back to classic Traveller and looked at the plans for the Ad Astra in Adventure 13: Signal GK. Here it all made sense. The lovely forward dining room with its ‘surround’ windows, the passengers split from the crew, a layout that made sense and had clearly been given a lot of thought. I might have come to it sooner if the plans had been in a core book, but I’m glad I got to them eventually. It even meant, with the correct shape now, I could use the wonderful William H. Keith black and white drawing from The Traveller Book. I don’t care what anyone says, this is easily the best illustration of a subsidized liner I could possibly ask for.

Curiously this whole thought process and exploration of Traveller variants came just a few days after a conversation on Facebook had cropped up regarding ‘arty’ deck plans and someone saying that they couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t want fully detailed, colourful artistic endeavours. I’d dared to stick my head above the parapets and suggest a whole bunch of reasons why you wouldn’t. I won’t repeat the points here – see Confession #68 – save to say that the more I looked at the options, the more I really liked the plain simplicity of the classic plans and decided to go with them. I can print as large as A3 (twice US Letter approximately) which is very usable, but to fill the table and be a bit more impressive I split them in half so I could have double that [A2] which worked nicely for writing on. I had a think about miniatures as well and took some along, but in the event decided they would slow things down too much. Two reasons: firstly the faffing about with who wanted what and what scale we’d use (I have lots of 15mm options and a few 25mm options, plus some Lego minifigs that are a bit easier to handle – not to mention not quite as precious!); secondly, it allowed a bit more fudge factor in where people were and when. If we’d had more time, I’d have been quite happy to keep all character locations explicit, but given the shortage of time, it was better not to be too ruled by that. Interestingly, the GP speaking to me the next day about the whole experience mentioned that he’d half expected miniatures but could see exactly why I’d chosen not to get them out.

Settling Down

In the end, I had two players from TTA (Jane and Carl), two churchmen (the vicar and a GP married to the Curate) and two lads who were up for it. I had to winkle one of the latter out of the Integrated Timeline which had been what sucked him in and where he was currently lost. But six players was a perfect number after all the stress about it possibly just being Jane and I playing by ourselves as a Duet. After about five minutes another young lad joined us – presumably when he decided he didn’t like the look of anything else on offer or fancied this more. But I was prepared for seven PCs having bought the six from One Crowded Hour as nicely printed character sheets and also the stack from TTA. It seemed most sensible to let Jane and Carl take either Fred or Loyd as their own characters. Jane took Fred and Carl picked a One Crowded Hour PC. I gave the rogue pilot from One Crowded Hour, Jaime Karweiden, to the vicar as about the closest I had to a ‘space pirate’. He seemed quite pleased with it and readily admitted we couldn’t realistically fit the boxed set of Pirates of Drinax into the three-hour evening. I had two-word descriptions of all the published PCs to ‘sell’ them (one lad really wanted to play a scientist and there was a tussle over the noble which we settled with dice) and the rest went relatively randomly. Unfortunately, the GP got the medic character, Fenri Jornville, by chance and I thought that a bit unkind. I was just thinking about how we could swap, when Jane – who is extremely attached to Fred – very kindly offered him as a trade. She admitted afterwards that she then just played the medic as she might have done Fred. But that was fine, and it gave the GP a chance to do something different than his day job! He admitted afterwards that he’d been very unsure about even playing due to his very poor experiences with role playing in his medical training. He’d hated it and was either trying to exorcise that ghost or trying to confirm that it wasn’t really his thing. Although he struggled on at least one occasion when I pressured him into a quick decision as he was being indecisive (which rather neatly explained his second from bottom position on the initiative order when we rolled for it), I think he found he actually enjoyed the experience and next day he was able to be quite cleverly analytical with observations about what he’d seen me doing in terms of managing the game.

We spent about half an hour introducing Traveller – my one-page sheet really helped as it had things like the characteristic modifier table on it which the vicar referred to on more than one occasion to get his head round task rolls and to explain them to other players once he’d got the hang of them. Then perhaps the same amount of time again introducing the scenario and the characters. This was a good opportunity to get each player to say something about themselves before we were off into the adventure itself. Those who know it will know that essentially the plot is a subsidized liner emerging from Jump space after a misJump, far too close to a gas giant, and having an hour or so of events to save themselves from destruction in its atmosphere.

We started before the (mis)Jump emergence with what the characters might have been doing during the week in Jump and with the dinner which is rudely interrupted. I thought the Jump activities would give people a good chance to practice ‘making stuff up’ and understanding that it was ok to make stuff up. I’ve been surprised before by players thinking this isn’t allowed. In case they were stressed by the rather open nature of the question, I took along copies of my In the Grey article with its d66 table. Some players did their own thing, some browsed the options on the table and picked one, some rolled d66 and took whatever it gave them. All choices were fine by me, and I think this worked really well. The only mistake here on my part was failing to look up the departure and destination worlds. The scenario doesn’t give these details so that you can set it anywhere you’d like, but I’d bothered to put it into Aramis subsector of the Spinward Marches. Mainly so I could use the Atlas of the Imperium as a kind of Total Perspective Vortex moment of ‘you are here’. I’d have showed off TravellerMap but there wasn’t time and the tech/internet would have been difficult to additionally manage. I had thought at one point I’d take along Jane’s lovely quilted mapIf you’ve not seen the quilted subsector map in all its glory, see the third photo in https://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/stories/aartravcon20.html of the subsector and I kind of wish I had but soon realized as I piled up things to take beforehand that the more I took fun things like this just to show off, the less time we’d have to play so I disciplined myself. In any case, one of the players quizzed me on the destination (Nasemin) and I made something up about its surface features on the fly. That wouldn’t have been a problem except that later on I got asked a more detailed question, finally bothered to actually check the UWP and realized it was a waterworld. Ah well. They were very forgiving of my lapse. At least they learned I don’t know everything. (But I should have known that it was a waterworld having spent six years adventuring in the subsector even if we never actually visited Nasemin!)

A Lot of NPCs

Now if there’s one problem with One Crowded Hour in such a short time frame it’s that there are a lot of NPCs to get to grips with very quickly. In theory, after a week in Jump, the PCs would likely know all the passengers – and there are ten of them – and probably many of the crew – another dozen.  (I had spent some time in the week before we played wondering what happened to all the mid passengers on the liner – it’s important in the final stages of the adventure – but in the end I just decided Maxos hadn’t managed to book any.) I’m game for a host of NPCs, having once tackled some 60 NPCs in the Zilan Wine chapter of The Traveller Adventure, but they were spread out over four hours and weren’t continuously present. Even I baulked at suddenly playing twenty people in any way that would be comprehensible to newbies. I decided I’d focus on introducing one other passenger (or possibly a crew member) to each PC but with a DM of plus or minus one depending on their actions above. If they kept to their cabins, they’d not know anyone, if they were constantly at the bar, for example (as one of the lads decided he was, using his psychology skills to analyse everyone around him which I thought was neat), they’d have more chance of knowing additional people and having extra connections or even potential bonuses when interacting with others. I would love to see how other, more experienced and skilled referees handle it – or the author himself.  Two obvious fixes would be to have much more time for the whole thing so you can gradually introduce them over the week in Jump, or to knock off six NPCs by having the players take crew (or passengers) as the adventure itself suggests at the end. I’d decided to run it ‘as written’ for the experience but another time, I might try that.

Having introduced the characters we were then into the dinner before Jump emergence and just as I announced this, the Curate came in from the kitchens with the first of the chilli hot dogs that were being served up. You really couldn’t have scripted better timing. We immediately christened the Curate Kim Felderman, the Chief Steward on the liner, and applauded her timing. Very kindly she and her team were serving us at our table so we could press on and not lose too much time eating which I was very grateful for.

It was probably, therefore, around 75 minutes into the session before I’m getting to the vomiting passengers, the reveal of the misJump and throwing for Initiative to see how everyone reacts. I’d pre-rolled the NPCs to save time and had them on a sheet into which I could simply insert the PCs as their dice rolls dictated. There was a good spread which meant it wasn’t all on me describing NPCs but I’d also pre-planned the NPCs’ immediate movements (if not interfered with by a PC) so I didn’t have to spend any time thinking about what they were likely to do and I could simply describe each of their actions in one succinct line. That definitely helped or it would have been too much me and too much thinking which would have slowed things down. It was a good opportunity to introduce the concepts of the combat ‘round’ and major/minor actions but without having to get into combat details. The two funniest things were one of the NPCs, Kim Felderman herself, being right at the bottom of the Initiative order (-5) which seemed a bit unlikely for a senior member of the crew, so the best I could come up with was that she was caught short in the ’fresher much to her embarrassment. Secondly, as mentioned above, the GP who was second last in the order was being a bit indecisive, so I decreed that that was why he was virtually last to act and moved on round the table without him. I hope I wasn’t being too mean, but I think it acted as an encouragement to everyone else to have a think about what they wanted to do more quickly. Ordinarily, I’d have probably allowed the thinking time, but given the nature of the scene and the pressure, it seemed ‘in character’.

Heat of the Moment

We pretty much progressed through the adventure as it is published so I won’t rehearse everything here but some highlights stand out. The players in general came up with pretty reasonable actions in the heat of the moment as to what they wanted to do. The vicar, as a pilot, wanted to head to the Bridge following the Captain and Pilot who acted before him. I decided the access to the crew section and the Bridge would be locked which stopped him and I worry that he took that as a hard ‘no’ rather than, if he’d preferred, something to be worked round (calling the Bridge and offering to help or hacking the door lock or something). I failed to make clear that such options were open. One of the lads decided he was taking to his stateroom to try to sleep as he couldn’t cope with the pandemonium. Internally I puzzled over why he’d want to put himself out of action for the duration but far be it from me not to let the players do what they want to do. I decided that would be hard (Difficult, 10+) with all that was going on which I thought might give him a chance to rethink but he was determined and after some three tries did finally get to sleep. To this day I have no clue what the player was thinking regarding this as an action, but why not let him choose that?

Between Initiative limits and the varied choices people were making, we were nicely scattered around the ship. So that made the ‘cabin pressure failure’ scene easy to run with someone able to help Kharghazz to fix the hole. We dealt with that and ran round the Initiative order a couple more times before allowing more of a free for all. At which point I had to try and make sure I was giving everyone a fair crack of the whip in terms of actions and so on. I was moving briskly round the table and responding to what people wanted to do as I threw the events of the scenario at them. I thought I was doing okay, but one of the lads – not the one trying to sleep in his stateroom – at one point reminded me he’d not acted for a while so perhaps I’m less skilled at that than I had imagined. Good for him speaking up, however. It was good that I’d absorbed how pressured the scenario should feel as it kept me moving where ordinarily I might have lingered to allow more ‘space’. Given the time constraints we had, this was perfect (and necessary). On the downside it meant that there couldn’t be as much role playing as I might have liked, but on the other hand I think it maintained interest and the sense of emergency that is the whole point of the thing. A note to myself for the future might be to try and gauge better where things should be hurried along and where things should be allowed time to breath.

Waking the Dead

The Waking the Dead scene, which involves trying to revive the low berth passengers who aren’t already dead, could be played much more for horror and although I didn’t hold back on the basic description, nor did I focus on the grimmer parts of it. Not knowing how comfortable the adults I knew would be with such things held me back; not knowing the young lads at all, more so. Not to mention horror isn’t my favourite genrein any case. I’d actually written some brief notes on the low berth passengers names and something of their backgrounds in order to either help the PCs (players) ‘care’ or to help role playing when they came round. Needless to say, none of this came up as the PCs were motivated enough to help out and the pressing business of saving the ship didn’t really allow time to get to know those they’d awakened. I quite like the chapter Martin has written there, however, and might recycle it elsewhere should the need arise. The author has also given some interesting options for ‘damage control’ around the ship and given a longer time slot and players who are interested or PCs who have the skills, there’s lots more that we could have done here.

The Short Walk and Long Fall chapter as crew, and then PC passengers, have to go out on the hull to make risky repairs, I knew to be a key chapter, but it is tricky. Firstly, not everyone is involved and secondly it could go on a long time if you played out all the detail that’s there. Not to mention the large risk of failing catastrophically and dying. I decided to curtail it somewhat and just hit the highlights, but that seemed to work well. I didn’t hold back from the grim nature of Karghazz’s decapitation, but I think that sufficiently motivated the three PCs who bravely volunteered and certainly emphasised the risks to the players concerned. Well done them for stepping up to what I was really presenting as a suicide mission – however vital it was to the ship. Well done the GP for role playing his very real fear about being sucked off into space even as he dodged the debris that was hitting him. No one raised the issue of radiation from the gas giant but I did have some notes on the rules for that in case anyone did. I might have brought it up myself if time hadn’t been against us. Full marks to the author once again for a scene that’s harrowing, exciting, risky and still provides role playing opportunities.

We didn’t have a lot of time for the lifeboat scene, but one of the characters, Anders Miracru, being played by one of the lads, had been doing such a good job with his psychology and diplomacy at various points that it felt very reasonable when it was suggested that he’d been able to defuse the whole situation nicely. As we needed some moments for the final scene, that worked well. I was also pleased that the scientist character who can be a bit problematic in a short one-off like this where there’s not much time for ‘science’, might not have a lot to do. I thought the player came up with some very inventive and interesting suggestions and seemed to take good heart from being able to do so and contribute.

The Unexpected

There is a bit in the adventure about the aftermath of the crash and possibilities to take the scenario forward into further struggles, but I knew that for us the climax would be the crash landing and wreck of the Duchess Selene along with seeing who survived. Here the weirdest part of the whole evening happened. Not the collision of work and home and church worlds, not the collision of the nice safe environment of the ship with the harsh realities of the outside world, but the odd desires and choice outcomes of players who do the unexpected. The character who’d taken to his stateroom to sleep, chose to wake up at this point and re-join the action. That was convenient as his skills in the engine room would become useful. Now strictly, it might be the engineer or the captain making the dice rolls at this point but where’s the fun in that when they’re NPCs (or dead!) and it would just be me. Why not get the players involved. So having done pretty much nothing for the entire game, our ersatz engineer made three critical difficult rolls in a bid to essentially save the ship. Admittedly I let him have a Boon on the first of those for being well-rested – cheeky suggestion but I liked it! – but it was essentially his contribution to the events that helped mean the crash landing wasn’t quite as fatal as it might have been. Mr Dougherty really doesn’t make it easy to survive this scenario if you allow the dice to fall where they may. In our case, however, and against all the odds, we managed to crashland the ship on the moon without killing anyone. Although there were some serious injuries to deal with.

We were two minutes short of our allotted time so there was just a moment for the epilogue and then to clear up the room and clear out. By the end we had a small audience watching as their games had finished and they’d packed up. I’ve no idea what they made of it all and it was hard to judge what even my players had made of the whole experience. A couple of them of course were familiar with Traveller and myself and knew what to expect; some took to it like ducks to water from all appearances; and some struggled a little more with what they were doing or what they could do. But my sense was that they’d all thoroughly enjoyed it and might yet revisit doing something similar another time. Perhaps not next time, but in a little while.  Maybe. We’ll see.

Any stress involved in preparation had easily been worth it from my perspective. I felt I’d showed off a tiny bit off Traveller, I’d introduced role playing to those who might not be quite sure what it would involve. I’d loved getting under the bonnet (or hood) of an adventure I think should be hailed as one of the modern classics of Traveller and I think somewhere in there, I’d had a fun time too. My usual doubts notwithstanding and all the things I can see I ‘could have done better’ are par for the course, but I learned things as well and perhaps next time will do just a little bit better. Now to Faversham in a fortnight for one of my own creations.