Freelance Traveller

#26: Be Careful What You Wish For

This article originally appeared in the January/Feburary 2017 issue.

I wrote last time about how I came to offer The Traveller Adventure for a group of complete newbies (and one old-timer) having longed for a regular group. The first evening seemed to go as well as I could expect with the slight wrinkle that the amateur dramatic pro – if that’s a thing – couldn’t make our first session at rather short notice. I’d suggested he take on the part of Gvoudzon knowing it needed a bit of pre-planned theatre as he’s thrown out of the Museum of Aramis with some lines to learn. I reckoned he’d be great at that. Everyone else would get randomly assigned characters on the night.

Not to worry, I thought it might actually work out quite nicely as it gave the others, as the March Harrier crew, a chance to get to know each other, bond a little and explore the underground city of Leedor. In fact we had so much fun seeing the creatures (some real, some holographic) in the park’s zoo, gambling at the wamp-rat races on the seedier side of town and dealing with the energetic Bwap factor that we only barely touched on anything actually printed in the book. As ever, I may justly be accused of over doing it on the sub-creation to give the place a sense of reality.

Anyway, we finished on the ‘cliffhanger’, if you can call it that, which would result in the introduction of Gvoudzon next time. Yes, enough fun was had that everyone was keen to book a second date a couple of months later. I guess that’s a success!

However, that still wasn’t enough for J, the work colleague who’d bravely tried out TravCon in March and loved it. How can I play more Traveller, she would ask? I knew the feeling but with Chronic Fatigue already limiting my evenings out to once a month (usually Library book group, now alternating with TTA), I didn’t think it was sensible to try another evening game, fun though that might have been. I also thought about trying out some of the ‘solo’ adventures (one player, one referee) I’ve written but decided that might be a bit intense.

It happened though, that D, the Gvoudzon player, and one other from TTA were willing to try out a lunchtime session once every other week or so. Just an hour, and a change from the usual Scrabble or cryptic crosswords of lunchbreaks in any case. The idea was that I would develop my (non-existent) off-the-cuff ability and would do no preparation for these sessions at all.

J had already been generating a character or two and had a nigh-on seven-foot army sergeant ready to go, D would carry over Gvoudzon and continue to play a Vargr separated from his pack but in an alternate universe to TTA, and E would create a brilliant archaeologist to join the excitement. I now have not just one on-going campaign but two! Is this wise? It’s certainly fun!