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Crystal Realm Rulings
Crystal Realm Treasure Log
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I’m playing a short Classic Traveller campaign with three friends. In this campaign, each player controls three characters, comprising a ship’s crew, some scoundrel types, and a few mercenaries. This is a sampler campaign and we’re trying to get a feel for the systems.
Session 1 was sort of a “dungeon in space.” The players started in the middle of a patron mission in the Barossa system. Their task was to explore a derelict ship and strip it for parts. This session was kind of pokey - I don’t think Traveller is good for dungeon crawling play.
I emphasized that having a skill level of 1 makes you a professional, 2 makes you an expert, and 3 makes you an authority. On the ride in the air/raft over to the derelict Golgad the Barbarian, unfamiliar with the ways of space, did not fasten himself properly and began tumbling into the abyss. But the pilot, Pippi “Flapjack” Beauregard, has Grav Vehicles-3, making her effectively the Chuck Yeager of air/rafts. Cameron doesn’t even need to roll scoop Golgad gently out of the void.
In this session I used the “situation throw.” As a referee in the real world, I have no idea how difficult is to recalibrate a combobulator. So we fly past all the Star Trek speak, and I simply roll 2d6 to set the difficulty. Then players can roll their 2d6 to see if they succeed.
If you roll 2d6 twice and compare the results, there is a 50-50 chance of the second roll being greater than the first one. But things change if the players know the difficulty and can make a decision in between those two rolls. And in the course of interpreting the situation throw, I will probably commit to some fact like “a 10… it seems like this door is really heavy” or “a 10… it seems like the mechanism is jammed.” With that information, the players can then look at their character sheet to see if they have a high strength score or a multitool. If they do, I have to give them a bonus. They can also try something entirely different, generating a more favorable situation throw.
I also used a “partially secret situation throw.” In this scheme, I roll one die and keep it secret, and a player rolls one. The sum is the situation throw, but the player only knows their half of it. I rolled a 2 and the player rolled a 6. This meant the situation would require a roll of 8+, about average difficulty. But since they saw the six, they figured “this could be really hard” and decided to do something else.
We managed to get some horror elements despite having no horror rules. Pippi opened a door and activated a trap, taking damage, which is allocated directly to stats. Cameron said “this is way scarier than Mothership!” I dealt even more damage in Session 3, and I think we can definitively say after the end of that session that Classic Traveller can do horror.
Session 2 was more of an investigation. The characters met with NPCs in the moon starport and on the planet surface, trying to uncover information about the mysterious “New Marquis” and his connection to a missing starship.
I had to improvise two encounters with NPCs. I used the Classic Patron rules to generate a type of patron, and the “Random Mission” table from Mongoose 2E to generate a handful of things that patrons wanted, picking the most appropriate one from a list of three.
For the first improvised encounter, Cameron said “Barnsley Garden has the gambling skill. Can I meet someone and gamble with them?” The patron I rolled was “Noble”, and I rolled three missions, picking “Entertain a noble.” I improvised a noble character who wanted to slum it with spacers over game of cards. They won a little money and pumped him for information.
This session really went off the rails (complimentary) when the players decided to rob the noble in a dark alleyway after he left the bar. Barnsley had the Streetwise skill, so I had them roll 2d6 to corner the noble in an appropriate place - a result of 9 meant there was no issue, and no further rolls were needed. They took him for Cr6,000 (randomly generated: 1d6 x 1,000).
Next, I had them roll 2d6 vs. the planetary Law Level to avoid police harassment. Rolling 2d6 vs. Law is the standard roll to avoid the police for the crime of “appearing in public.” Given the actual robbery I applied a very generous penalty of -2. They failed, and miserably.
I want to underscore that, rules-as-written, the default mode of police interaction with travellers is “harassment.” There is not much more to it than that. No procedure is recommended for a high speed chase. The police have arrested you, taken you into the station, and determined without trial that you are guilty of a crime. Fuck you, spacers!
Later editions of Traveller have ever more intricate rules for interacting with the law. In thinking about the law rules and reading examples, I concluded that the law level of a system defines the stance on weapons and how aggressive the police are, but the government type determines what the punishment is. A dictatorship will probably sentence you to be hanged, whereas a bureaucracy is going to impound your ship and bury it under a mountain of red tape.
In Barossa’s case, we have a “captive government” - space nobles have colonized a low-tech agricultural world and instituted apartheid. I ruled the following: if you roll an 8+, you have to pay back twice what was stolen. If you roll less than that, you go to jail. They rolled a 10, paid their Cr12,000, and were set free. The police took their cut and gave the noble a smug recommendation to stay out of the spaceport.
For the second random NPC, the players wanted to talk with someone who interacted with the New Marquis. I rolled “Ambassador” with the mission “act as guides.” Improvising again, I determine that their patron is Baron Helmont, who wants to go on a hunting trip on the jungle planet Metron. The players would serve as his heavily armed escort, and in return he would owe them a favor, which they will use to get closer to the New Marquis.
Before jumping to the Metron system, I encouraged the players to purchase equipment. They page through the Equipment chapter, planning their hunting trip. The equipment is limited by the current system’s low tech level, putting some cool gadgets out of reach. I should have limited their shopping by the local law level. I allowed them to purchase carbine and shotgun ammunition - had this been done correctly, only shotgun ammunition would have been available.
They jump to the Metron system. Because they have refined fuel and have kept up repairs, no throw is required to succeed. The return flight will be different. Metron has no starport and they will not be able to purchase fuel. Instead they will fly the ship into a gas giant and scoop unrefined fuel out of it. This means they will have to throw for a misjump - should they roll a 12 on 2d6, they could end up nine months away from their present location (with one angry patron aboard).
In Traveller, a ship spends a week in jump space regardless of the actual distance jumped. This presents an opportunity for self-improvement using the Experience rules. The players opted to improve their weapon skills - choosing one melee and one ranged weapon. They get the bonus immediately, and at the end of four years of game time, they will roll to see if the bonus sticks.
Metron has an X-class starport, which is to say: no starport, not even a marked space of bedrock. Rather than take the ship down, they pile into its onboard GCarrier, which is an enclosed armored personnel carrier. Flapjack is still recovering from her experience with the trap in Session 1, so this time Mister Haliburton takes the controls, using his Jack-of-all-Trades skill to avoid the -3 penalty for being unskilled. They begin the long 8-hour drive down the surface.
Traveller’s rules demonstrate that you are supposed to use the die result as a measure of relative success or failure. Here’s a heavily edited excerpt from the character generation example:
During his first term of service [Jamison rolls 11 vs. 5+] … he faces no great dangers, merely the humdrum of day-to-day events.
[In his second term] Jamison suddenly finds himself faced with some of the dangers of the merchant service [rolling the lowest it is possible to roll and still survive], possibly a pirate raid.
Returning to Mister Haliburton on the GCarrier, he rolls a 4. That’s bad! I rule that he comes through the cloud layer closer to the ground than he expects and is forced to make a crash landing. I start to describe who is injured and stop myself, and say “I’m going to lean into the dice rolling.” This was a good decision. By deciding to be brave here and do it randomly, we got a way more interesting situation.
Eight people are on the GCarrier. I rolled 1d6 to see how many are injured. Six, the maximum number. Everyone, including me, groans. I determine that Mister Haliburton is probably well-protected in the cockpit, and to be kind to the players I also rule that Dr. Sam Acton is unharmed.
When you take damage in Traveller, your first hit is assigned randomly to either Strength, Dexterity, or Endurance. For each injured character I determined the stat randomly. Golgad takes 2 strength damage - a broken arm. Baron Helmont takes 4 dexterity damage, a broken leg. Brigit, Sirhan, Blamtes, and Helmont’s manservant Gribley all take 2 endurance damage. I lean on the players here and ask “what’s a good endurance hit?” and we go with “bruised ribcages.”
Dr. Acton gets to work on the injured. We crack open the Drugs chapter and discover to our delight that the main way to heal people of disease and injury is a panacea known as medical drug. There is also an advanced concoction, slow medical drug, which has the added effect of speeding a persons metabolism and perception of time such they get 30 days worth of healing in 24 hours. Slow medical drug includes a built-in sedative so that they can sleep through the experience instead of watching people move around them at a snail’s pace for a whole month. Dr. Acton has three doses of slow medical drug, and gives them to Baron Helmont and Blamtes, wisely reserving the last dose for future calamity.
Mister Haliburton is a mechanic, and begins to look at the GCarrier. Time for a situation throw, and the result is a middling 6 - he can do it but it will take all week.
As the referee, I now make day and night encounter checks a week in advance - this is just checking if there is an encounter, I’ll determine what exactly it is based on their location when the encounter occurs. The first encounter will be tonight. Before this session I prepped encounter tables for Metron’s jungle and swamp biomes using the Animal Encounters chapter. This has produced 20 encounters that look like this:
1 Flying Pouncer, 12kg, 9/9, no armor, attack as pike. A if surprise, F if surprised, S1.
What this means: this encounter is with a solitary flying creature, a carnivore with the pouncer behavior, like a panther. It’s not big, only 12 kg. It can take 9 damage until knocked unconscious, and 9 further damage until dead. It has no armor, and attacks like a pike weapon. It will attack if it has surprise, flee if it is surprised. It moves at normal speed.
I generated a bunch of other flying encounters for the jungle, so by the time I got to brainstorming what this one could be, I was trying to branch out from describing the creatures as avians. This one I decided to call a “harpoon fungus” based on its flying pouncer behavior and pike attack. It is a floating gas bag which dives out of the air to spear its prey, spreading its spores over a fresh kill.
Sirhan steps outside and begins setting up tents. He has Tactics-1 and Moose describes him as scanning the perimeter with his IR goggles. Unfortunately for Sirhan, the creature is above and it is not warm blooded. Both roll for surprise, and the harpoon fungus wins. The harpoon fungus rolls an attack, hits, and deals 3d6 damage.
Traveller’s “first blood” rule means that the first hit to a character in an encounter is dealt to a random stat, and all damage is allocated to that stat. Afterwards, the player can choose how to allocate damage between strength, dexterity, and endurance. When one stat drops to zero, the character is unconscious. If all three drop to zero, they are dead. The fungus deals 12 damage to Sirhan’s strength, right in the shoulder, and he is immediately knocked unconscious. Thankfully, Dr. Acton saved one dose of slow medical drug! The rest of the characters quickly chop the fungus to bits.
They have six days left on this planet, and no more slow medical drug. There are many more dangerous things in the jungle besides the harpoon fungus. For example, Baron Helmont’s desired trophy is a 200kg killer carnivore known as the “jungle ghost.”
So far, we have found that Classic Traveller rewards leaning into randomness and using the data generated by the games many systems. Traveller has deep mechanics for describing people, planets, ships, and creatures. It takes a bit of work, but you have a ton to pull from. Sandra Snan describes this as “in a cloud, bones of steel.”
I am having trouble putting a fine point on why the loosey-goosey situation throw feels better to me than many storygame mechanics, which also ask the referee to invent situations whole cloth given only a “success, with complication” result. When I use the situation roll, it is never to determine “how a character did” - it’s to say “the situation is exactly this dire” but I always have to solidify that into a fact to represent that number. The players always get something out of it, even when it’s bad. They get new information they can use to guide decision making.
On the character side, having a high skill value feels different from other games. In Trophy Gold, the skills are is the only buttons I can press, and each one triggers a hunt roll, which feels the same every time. In Mothership, it always feels the same because I’m going to fail.
In Classic Traveller, Cool Skill-1 is the ability to roll. Cool Skill-2 is maybe a +2 bonus on that roll. Cool Skill-3 is a button I can press to fast-forward through all but the most dire situations requiring Cool Skill. It is very unlikely that any other character has Cool Skill-3, or even Cool Skill-1, so I have a unique role in the party. And I can be incapacitated by a harpoon fungus at any moment and then no one has Cool Skill. You are dealing with attrition at a very coarse grain. You are not in a bad spot because a slowly incrementing Stress number is applying Panic effects unrelated to the story. You’re in a bad spot because you are on a planet and the game is willing to knock your pilot out. That’s adventure.