Freelance Traveller

Cardboard Figures

by Ewan Quibell

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2021 issue.

These are adaptions of original work of the legendary Patrick Crusiau (also the women in green are an adaption of Shaun Austin’s “Bike Gang” adaption of Patrick Crusiau’s original using other bits of Patrick’s originals (you get the gist I’m sure)).

During lockdown I wanted something to engage my son with that wasn’t anything to do with the PlayStation so I turned to Traveller for an answer.

In my continued quest to use anything available to play Snapshot with I thought that introducing my son to the game may be a way to give us some time together doing something that we might both enjoy.

Now I got the original Snapshot box set out to see if he was interested but the tokens just weren’t doing it for him. So I turned to the cardboard figures that I used for Skirmish in Apple Tree Farm (yes I’ve still got them) and he smiled.

These were printed as 25mm, which obviously doesn’t fit the 15mm scale of the Snapshot deck plans. So, no problem, I thought, I’ll just print them at 60% of the size. Which of course works a treat.

When I was printing, cutting them out, then sticking them to a base to make the figures it was evident to me that Patrick had for some reason predominately drawn men. While this in itself isn’t an issue it didn’t fit with my more gender balanced playing style.

Now I’m no artist but I can use a mouse and use Paint to blend pixels so I just went about using those women that Patrick had drawn to adapt and change both male and female figures where they seemed to fit. And voilà the results are here; hopefully adding a little more diversity to the originals.

As originally inserted into the PDF magazine, the images are scaled to be printed as 15mm. If you have Patricks’s originals, you can scale those to be printed at 15mm as well. Pick the ones you wish to use and have a skirmish…

[If you prefer 25mm figures for other battle maps appropriately scaled, print Patrick’s at the original size, and scale these up to 165%. —ed.]

We played the Snapshot introductory scenario “THEY’RE LOOSE!”, which is appropriate for someone (i.e., my son) learning the game. For the animals we used Patrick’s “Aliensss” and “Red Swamp”. For the characters we used my adaptions as well as figures from Partrick’s “Xpage” which I’d used previously in “Skirmish At Apple Tree Farm” as a Darrian Naval Lieutenant. I have in fact loads of Patrick’s figures printed and made up on ½” cardboard bases but these were the ones that we picked for the sessions.

We must have played the scenario six times, rolling up characters and animals each time to make it different, and to work though picking weapons against their attribute values for maximum effect. Each session lasted about 2 hours. We introduced more rules as we went along, with the last session using the complete rule set.

The pictures are a re-creation of the infamous “Round 3” where Patricia with her shotgun (it didn’t take him long to work out the weapon of choice in Classic Traveller) is just about to completely obliterate all the animals through cover fire following the loss of SceelibitBob (the Darrian) the round before by Alien blackfeet. He was very impressed with himself after this victory (and please note he’s much better at naming characters than I am).

The majority of time the animals had the upper hand with at least four of the sessions being total party kills with the animals left in command of the ship with the crew members as food during jump.

Which leads me to an additional Snapshot scenario following on from the introductory one:

“The Intrepid? Are you sure?”

It’s 1116; the Imperial scout base at Mercury has identified a new object entering the system from Spinward in a very unusual trajectory. At present the object is entering the system off-plane at a distance of 50 AU. The object was picked up by a Scout remote scanning platform in the Kuyper Belt. A ship from the Scout base has been assigned to investigate.

When they get there the scouts from the base are amazed to find that the ship tumbling towards them is in fact the original TL12 scout ship Intrepid from Imperial year 75 missing fate unknown from that date on a mission for the Emperor himself in the Spinward Marches.

The Characters: Generate two crew for one player and four animals for the second player.

The Situation: Place the two players at the rear air lock entrance of the scout ship Intrepid. Place two animals in the bridge, one in the air-raft bay and one in stateroom 4.

• All the interior doors are open, although the air-lock doors are closed.
• The crew are armed with their weapons and are in Vacc Suits.
• The ship is in vacuum (the atmosphere has frozen), and is powered down (the ship is in Zero G).
• All iris valves have to be manually opened if they are closed.
• If power is restored iris valves can be controlled from the Bridge (and the other doors are controlled from their locations), the grav plates can be powered up (putting the ship in a 1G environment), and the atmosphere restored.
• As soon as an animal has line of site to the crew, line of site to another moving animal, or power has been restored for two rounds they can act, until then they are hibernating.
• Power can be restored from the Drive room on an Engineering skill roll against a task difficulty of 10 or above on two dice. The Intrepid has 10 minutes (40 rounds) of fuel (courtesy of the hydrogen collecting in the fuel transfer piping due to the deep cold).

Victory: A player wins when they have completely destroyed the crew members or animals belonging to their opposing player.

Options: The following options may be used to variety to the base scenario.

• Allow multiple players, each manipulating one or more characters or animals.
• Allow armour other than nothing for the animals. Each animal can have one of; nothing, jack, mesh and cloth, assigned as the player wishes, with no animal having the same amour as another.

Instructions

(provided by the editor)

If you print these images, they should come out 95mm wide by 118mm long (red edge to red edge) for 15mm use. They are correctly sized in the PDF magazines if you print them with no scaling or shrinking. If you click on either of the images here, they will open at full size in a new browser window or tab.

Cut out each pair of panels along the outer red lines. Do not cut along the red line between upright and inverted characters. Cover the back with a thin coat of adhesive—school glue or stick glue works fine, provided that you don’t use too much. Fold carefully along the middle line, ensuring good alignment and pressing any air bubbles out. Cut the figures out, ensuring that you leave some white space below the feet. Cut the white space below the feet into two ’tabs’ and fold them in opposite directions, then glue them to a cardboard base (see the detail picture above, right).