Traveller’s Wrath of the Ancients: First impressions review (part 1)

Wrath of the Ancients is the finale to Mongoose Traveller’s Ancients trilogy, which starts with Mysteries of the Ancients and follows with Secrets of the Ancients.

I’ve only read through Wrath of the Ancients; I haven’t played or run it. And to be honest, Wrath needs so much work that I couldn’t run it as written. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

TL;DR Wrath of the Ancients is . . . awful.

And before we start, there will be spoilers ahead.

First impressions

Based on Mysteries of the Ancients (see my review here), I wasn't expecting much from Wrath of the Ancients. Given it’s the same team as Mysteries, I was taking as given that it would have the same flaws: overwritten, badly structured, an unhelpful layout and an adventure full of unlikely coincidences and clues just given to the players.

Would Wrath be the same? Oh yes - and on so many levels is much, much worse.

Before I even started reading I was surprised to find there were no handouts. I was expecting a pdf with handouts. But no, there’s not even any library data. So that was a bad start.

The first 48 pages

As with Mysteries, the first 48 pages of Wrath consist of background and rules. Again, much of this is presented before you really need to know it. Again, most of it is overwritten and mostly tedious - and would be better written more concisely and tucked away in an appendix for reference.

Having said that, the first few pages start well. Wrath of the Ancients starts with a good summary of the overall plot, claiming that the war between the Ancients is over and promising that the war against the Ancients is about to start! That’s quite a promise.

That’s followed by a discussion of the real history of the Ancients (and what happened to the Droyne), which was mostly new to me. It explained what happened to the Droyne and why Grandfather introduced the coyns. 

That’s followed by essays about the Droyne on Andor, the Imperium and the Ancients, Ancients technology, psionic dreams, and an uplift process. Only once we are through all of that, on page 49, do we finally encounter anything that looks like an adventure.

We are also introduced to the villain of the campaign: Tsyamoykyo, “least of the Ancients”. It’s a shame he has such a forgetful letter-salad name – Secrets of the Ancients had the sense to give its villain a much more memorable name: Seven.

Cold Moon

Cold Moon is the campaign’s first “adventure”, if adventure is the right word.

Wrath suggests that the campaign begins “in media res”. It really doesn’t. Star Wars begins in media res. Wrath begins with a confusing muddle.

It’s confusing because Cold Moon is barely more than an outline and the GM (sorry, Referee) has to put a lot of work in to unpick everything and figure out how to use it at the table. It reads like an outline submitted for approval to work up in detail. Only, instead of the author figuring out how it all works, it’s up to the GM.

So, Cold Moon involves a Droyne ship that has been destroyed by something awful. The PCs first see the attack in a dream sequence, and then they are working through the actual wreckage, where they are attacked by G482 monsters (the ones from Mysteries). How the PCs got there is unexplained. (This is what is meant by in media res - in this case, “we’re starting in the middle of the scenario because we don’t know how to get the PCs there - you’ll have to figure it out on your own.”)

As well as failing to explain how the PCs get involved in this situation, Cold Moon doesn’t explain where the adventure takes place, other than it’s a cold moon somewhere. It doesn’t say who the Droyne are. And it doesn’t explain why, in the centre of the wreck, there is an intact TL25 Ancients warship. (Yes, really. Why didn’t the Droyne use it to escape?)

It does say who/what attacked the ship, but as is normal with this terrible narrative approach to writing, it says it at the end rather than put it up front so the GM understands what’s going on from the start. (And it’s no surprise that it’s Tsyamoykyo’s forces that are behind it all.)

There are no real decisions for the PCs to take during this section, other than whether to take the TL25 ship or not. (And why wouldn’t they? It’s literally priceless.) Instead, they have woken up from their psionic dream with the knowledge that something is happening on Andor.

(So that’s one signpost given to the PCs without them having to work for it. I may keep a running total.)

Retconning Secrets of the Ancients

At the end of Secrets of the Ancients, the PCs witnessed two Ancients going head-to-head. They influenced the outcome and decided who won. However, as far as Wrath is concerned, the victor (if there was one), disappears and is never seen again.

As a reward for surviving Secrets, the PCs get access to the Dart, a TL25 Ancients scout ship. Then, at the start of Wrath, they get access to a TL25 Ancients warship. The ship in Wrath makes the Dart irrelevant in almost every sense.

It’s almost as if the events in Secrets are completely retconned out. The Dart is replaced by an even more powerful Ancients ship and their powerful patron just disappears.

It’s like Secrets never happened.

As I read Wrath of the Ancients, I find myself wondering about roads not taken.

Would it be better if Mysteries/Wrath took place after Secrets? The start of Mysteries would be much easier if their mysterious patron had charged them to track down any Ancients technology as part of the Ancients’ shadow war.  They could even be directed straight to Callia? Other changes would be needed, but I can’t help but feel that would make it more interesting.

Disaster on Andor

So the PCs arrive at Andor (in the Five Sisters subsector), 36 hours after Tsyamoykyo’s forces have ripped through the Imperial defences and assaulted the planet. (Timely coincidence #1.)

Hang on a minute - 36 hours? So that means the earlier sequence was premonition? Which might be okay if it were presented like that - but it isn’t. (But then this is one of the challenges of Traveller. Given the vagaries of jump travel and the routes they might take, getting the PCs to a particular place at a particular time is always going to be forced. But maybe it doesn’t have to be.)

The PCs’ ship emerges from hyperspace on a collision course with a huge piece of wreckage. Wrath then gives us nearly 1000 words and two pages of confusing rules to avoid the crash, which involves matching speeds, and even though I’ve read it twice, I still can’t figure it out. Surely it would have been easier to say, “Make a very difficult pilot check to avoid taking damage to the ship.”

However, all that assumes that the PCs are jumping into Andor close to the planet. Andor is a red zone, and according to Wrath’s library, data is interdicted by the Imperial Navy. Surely the PCs would exit jump somewhere in the outer system so they can plan their approach?

Anyway, the PCs then receive a telepathic call for help from a piece of capital ship (lazy signpost #2). They could ignore it (and the adventure warns against railroading), but frankly, they will miss a lot if they don’t go and help. Aboard the wreckage, they find a Droyne diplomatic party and senior Naval officers - and then they are attacked by enemy forces (timely coincidence #2).

These attacking Droyne are heavily armed and are leftover forces from the Tsyamoykyo’s earlier assault. The Droyne don’t seem to be particularly well armed for Ancients forces - they only have fusion weapons rather than disintegrators. But I think that’s supposed to reflect Tsyamoykyo’s erratic approach.

The blockade at Andor

Andor down and the history-dream

Down on Andor, battles are still raging between the local Droyne and the intruders. Assuming the PCs can persuade the locals to let them land (and rescuing the diplomatic party from orbit will probably help), the PCs are brought to the Chamber of Hidden Knowledge and Andor’s leaders.

And another dream: the history-dream of Eskayloyt. 

According to the text, “The Travellers witness the entire history of Andor over what is for others just a few minutes.” However, the text is over 4000 words long! It takes more than “just a few minutes” to read, let alone convey to the players.

I genuinely cannot imagine how to present this to the players without either an awful lot of work or just giving it to them as an information dump.

As well as being an information dump, the history-dream contains several decision points. The PCs can play the part of historical figures/factions and influence ancient (and Ancient) history. That would be nice, if it were presented in a sensible fashion that I could use at the table. As it is, it’s a lot of work for the GM.

At the end of the dream, it is revealed that “just a few days” before the assault, an Imperial ship landed, took some Droyne specimens, and left. A telepath picked up two words: Omicron and Gamma. (A double whammy here: another signpost just given to the players and another timely coincidence. That’s three apiece.)

As the PCs come out of their dream, they find themselves and the leaders under attack by more of the invaders. Hopefully, the PCs can see them off - good job they arrived at the end of the dream! (Timely coincidence #4)

(In many ways, the history-dream is reminiscent of chapter 6 of Secrets of the Ancients, during which the PCs explore the history of the Ancients. Except Secrets does it so much better – why didn’t Wrath take a similar approach?)

Uplifted Travellers

If this sounds like a very high-powered Traveller campaign, that’s exactly what it is. And the PCs are being uplifted to cope with it. The uplift process started at Twilights Peak, paused while they had fun in Secrets (although possibly should have had a big impact on that campaign) and continues in Wrath. The PCs are becoming powerful psionics.

I’ll leave it there for this time.

Next time, I get frustrated by what happens at Research Station Gamma.

The Dead Undead: After action report

We’ve just finished The Dead Undead, my latest investigation for Other London: Desk 17. The mystery has been solved, and we’re taking a break while we do something else.

Goals

I had three goals.

• Playtest the scenario before putting it on DriveThru and itch.
• Use the players’ characters as the basis for some more pregen playbooks.
• Have fun.

So I achieved the first goal – I made a few tweaks to the investigation, but it didn’t need a drastic reworking, and it’s now for sale.

However, the second goal is a work in progress. As I described some time ago in this post, the players took their characters in weird directions and turning them into Desk 17 pregens is not quite as straightforward as I hoped.

Luckily, the last goal was a total success – I had fun, and the players told me they also enjoyed themselves. (They were certainly very engaged.)

It also took us a lot longer to solve than I expected. We took 11 sessions to play through, which, given we are easily distracted, probably meant about 16-18 hours of play, which is pretty good.

Other London lore

I also learned a few things about Other London.

Desk 17’s offices: We decided during session zero that Desk 17’s office was in the old London Necropolis Railway station building on Westminster Bridge Road (above the café and bookshop). I didn’t know that was a thing, but you can read about it here. (It led to a lovely moment when they brought in a witness who thought their offices were so cool!) The office stairwell is haunted by a spook who appears to be feeding on the magic of one of the PCs – that can only go badly.

Vampires and their reflections: "Can I see her reflection in the polish?" made me wonder about vampire reflections. I decided there and then that vampires didn’t reflect in silver-backed mirrors, but other reflections (puddles, chrome, modern mirrors) were fine. And the same for cameras – they show up on digital cameras but not wet film.

Vampire servants: One NPC in the investigation has a prolonged life because they drink vampire blood. I decided to keep the exact benefits vague – it depends on who you drink from and how often you drink.

Vampire funerals: What does a vampire funeral look like if vampires don’t explode in a shower of dust (and in this investigation, they don’t)? I created a vampire family plot.

Folk songs: As part of session zero, the players created the EFDSS as an ally. They visited the library and found an old folk song that told the story of a fae gang who burnt down a windmill that was blocking their view of the sunrise, killing everyone inside. That’s the first time I’ve dropped clues and history into a folk song.

Aspects-only Fate

I run Other London using Fate Accelerated. Not that we lean hard into its narrative approach, but because I find Fate to be a simple, lightweight system that is fine even if your style is mostly trad (as mine is).

However, I’ve found myself irritated by approaches recently, so I thought I’d give aspects-only Fate (from page 26 of the Fate System Toolkit) a try. In essence, a character’s aspects give them a +1 to rolls where they apply. +1s are cumulative.

I liked it. Typically, players rolled the dice with a +1 or +2 bonus instead of their usual +2 or +3 with FAE. It toned down their power and made more rolls uncertain. (I usually set the target for an overcome roll at +2, making rolls more chancy.)

Having said that, we didn’t roll dice very often – maybe two or three times a session. We only play for two hours (often much less as we are easily distracted by other things) and don’t roll many dice (lots of conversations with NPCs, but they rarely need dice).

I also tweaked a couple of other things.

Rather than refresh fate points to three each session, I’ve started them all with three fate points, but they only refresh one each session. (They can still earn them through invokes as normal.) So this means they can’t spam them as much as they might otherwise do.

In practice, this didn’t have much effect – nobody ran out of fate points.

My other change had no impact, largely because we didn’t get into combat. Instead of the usual (slightly counterintuitive) FAE stress boxes, I was going to cut them down to three single-use boxes. That would have made the PCs less robust in a fight, but we didn’t actually have a fight (the investigation’s climax resulted in a standoff in a park, but we didn’t break into combat).

The Dead Undead

I’ve put The Dead Undead onto DriveThruRPG and Itch – and also created bundles on each where you can get everything Other London related at 50% off.

Other London: The Dead Undead on DriveThruRPG

Other London: The Dead Undead on Itch.io

The Orphan Room

I’ve started the next investigation, and I know it’s called The Orphan Room. I sort of know what’s going on, but I haven’t worked out the details.

Time to get my thinking cap on.

Where is Desk 17’s office?

As part of session zero for Other London: Desk 17, I get the players to create Desk 17 itself. I’ve created a worksheet where the players answer simple questions (Where is Desk 17’s office? What’s weird about it? And so on.), choose their support team and select a couple of stunts.

And it crossed my mind that I could give players a menu of options for the location of Desk 17’s offices.

Ideas for where you might find Desk 17

Inside Marble Arch. This has form, as three small rooms were genuinely used by the police from 1851 to 1968.

The London Necropolis Railway station on Westminster Bridge Road. We are using this in our current game.

Mappin Terraces in Regent’s Park Zoo. Constructed in 1913-14, the hollow spaces inside were once used for the aquarium – but are they now Desk 17 offices?

Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Above Mornington Crescent tube station. Mornington Crescent has pedigree – it not only houses the secret entrance to Charlie Stross’ Laundry but also the Peculiar Crimes Unit (from Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May series) is located in offices above the station (until they are destroyed in a bomb blast).

In Centre Point. Converted to residential flats, much of the tower is now empty (led to its being called one of London's "ghost towers")

In the BT Tower. In the old revolving restaurant, perhaps?

No Swan So Fine, CC BY-SA 4.0 &lt;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

50 Berkley Square is supposed to be the most haunted house in London. Desk 17 would fit right in.

The Kingsway telephone exchange, hidden in tunnels deep below Chancery Lane tube station.

Or some less salubrious ideas (particularly when you’re channelling Slow Horses):

• Below a Soho massage parlour
• Above a chicken shop
• Behind a candy store
• On a barge in Surrey Quays.

Scenes in RPGs

I started roleplaying in the 1980s, went into a deep freeze in the late 1990s and didn’t come out until about a decade ago. “Scenes” were one of the new things indie games brought to TTRPGs, and I still find them tricky.

It doesn’t help that many RPGs don’t explain scenes properly. It seems like “scene” has become a specific piece of TTRPG terminology that is subtly different from its usual meaning. And everyone assumes that everyone knows what is meant when they talk about “scenes”.

As a result, it can be a bit of a muddle. This is my attempt to unravel that puzzle.

Dictionary definition

According to Google, there are two meanings to scene:

• The place where an incident in real life or fiction occurs or occurred.
• A sequence of continuous action in a play, film, opera, or book.

The first definition is straightforward, but when you start thinking about the play/film/opera/book definition, it gets a bit trickier.

Back when I helped out with the local pantomime, everyone knew what scenes were. Scene one was the big opening scene. Scene two took place in front of the “greys”, the grey curtains pulled across the stage that hid the backstage crew changing the scenery. When scene two ended, the greys opened to reveal scene three. And so on. A two-hour pantomime might have no more than nine or ten scenes.

In movies, scenes are often shorter. So rescuing Princess Leia in Star Wars becomes many scenes: the room where Luke persuades Han to rescue her, the turbolift, the detention centre, Princess Leia’s cell, and so on. Again, these are all location-based as they are different sets.

But in a roleplaying game?

Well, they vary. Some use scenes, some don’t. Some use scenes in a specific way, some use the term but don’t really define them.

Trad and other games

Broadly, in RPGs, trad games don’t use scenes. They might mention them, but they’re using them in the sense of the first dictionary definition: they’re a place or location.

So in Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Liminal, D&D, Runequest, ALIEN, and the like, scene doesn’t have a particular meaning.

Scene-based games

Some games build scenes into their mechanics. Many of these are GM-less, and the term ‘scene’ is used when a player controls what’s happening.

(I’m sure many other games use scenes. These are the ones I am familiar with.)

GMless games

Games without a GM often use scenes as a way for each player’s character to have spotlight time. Other PCs may be in those scenes, but everyone at the table knows who the spotlight is on during the scene.

Fiasco: Each character gets four scenes where they are in the spotlight. Fiasco confuses things because players can decide whether to “establish” their scene (set it up – who is there, what’s going on) or “resolve” the scene (decide on its outcome – the other players establish the scene). Much as I enjoy Fiasco, I find this fairly counterintuitive in play – particularly when a player chooses to resolve.

Follow and Kingdom: Ben Robbins uses scenes in his games to “… shine a spotlight on your character to see what they think and do…” In both games, the player decides who is in the scene, where it takes place, and what’s going on. Then, you play to find out what happens.

Unfortunately, these games don’t clearly state the one piece of advice that I find makes a scene really sing: to know what your character wants from the scene. (They may not get it, of course.)

GM-ed games

Hillfolk and Good Society both use scenes.

Hillfolk has a strict player turn order. When it’s your turn, you create a scene involving your character. You establish it as with other games (where, when, who and so on) – and if it’s a dramatic scene, you decide on the emotional reward you want from another character.

(Hillfolk also has other types of scenes, but dramatic scenes are the main ones.)

Good Society uses scenes for roleplaying, but fails to explain clearly what they are or how to manage them. As a result, scenes felt directionless and saggy and dragged on too long.  I talked about this when I played Good Society.

Most Trusted Advisors uses “scene” liberally throughout the text, but it doesn’t explain what they are. However, from my experience of running Most Trusted Advisors, I think it would benefit from more rigorous scene discipline.

Tips for scenes

So for these types of games, these are the questions that whoever is establishing the scene needs to consider:

• Where is it?
• When is it?
• Who is present?
• What is going on?
• What do I want?

And for me, the last point is the most important in helping to keep scenes punchy. If you know what you want going into a scene, it’s much clearer when the scene is over. (And I find it helps to tell the other players what you have in mind, so they can react accordingly.)

Games that get muddled

Some games use scenes liberally in their text (e.g. Blades in the Dark and Monster of the Week), but they don’t have much of a mechanical effect, so the fact that they’ve not defined what a scene is doesn’t matter too much.

Unfortunately, the same isn’t true for other games.

Fate Core defines a scene as “A scene is a unit of game time lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour or more, during which the players try to achieve a goal or otherwise accomplish something significant in a scenario.”

Scenes are important in Fate mainly because a character’s stress boxes clear after each scene. But what is a scene? That’s left to the GM, and isn’t always clear, despite the advice above. I don’t know if rescuing Princess Leia from the Death Star is one or many scenes in Fate. Is rescuing the princess enough of a goal? Or can you break it down into smaller scenes? (Such as blagging our way into the detention centre, escaping from the detention centre, and getting back to the Falcon) As far as recovering stress goes, this difference could be critical. (I might do it either way, depending on the tone of the game.)

Lady Blackbird allows characters to refresh their dice pools by having a “refreshment scene” with another character. Lady Blackbird doesn’t explicitly say what these are but suggests that they’re quiet moments with other PCs. (I really like these as a way to encourage roleplaying between characters – it’s such a lovely design.)

Going back to Star Wars, Leia’s moment with Luke aboard the Millennium Falcon just after Ben Kenobi’s death is the sort of thing I imagine when I think of a refreshment scene. (And Luke has clearly refreshed his dice pool as he mans the Falcon’s gun turret and blasts away at the incoming TIE fighters.)

And it’s not just me

And it’s not just me! This recent post on substack and this thread on RPGnet suggests others are thinking about this as well. I had already earmarked this as something I wanted to reflect on after playing and running Good Society and Most Trusted Advisors earlier in the year. These posts have, however, prompted me to finish this post.

The Dormant Accounts

I was listening to Writing the Universe (BBC Sounds) and Robin Ince was talking with John Lloyd about The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. They played a clip from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which talked about depositing 1p in your own time and using compound interest over billions of years to pay for your meal at Milliways. And that made me think that if that was the case, there would be bank accounts here and there, slowly accumulating interest.

And then I wondered what that would look like if you stumbled on some of those accounts today. Then I wondered what sort of story you might generate from that, which is when I decided to turn it into an Other London idea.

As I didn’t have the answers, I decided on a faction. (I have no idea if or how this will ever make it into a game, but it’s a fun idea to noodle around with.)

Trent & Rochester & Associates

Concept: Legal firm managing the estates of the dead

Trouble: A troublesome heir who wants what’s rightfully theirs

Goal: Maintain the accounts until their owners return

Trent & Rochester & Associates (“the firm”) is a small firm of lawyers specialising in managing the investment accounts of those “no longer around” (a euphemism) to manage them. The accounts themselves are held in banks and other financial institutions. The firm merely manages them. The firm does not disclose how many “clients” it has, but charges handsomely for its services.

At least one account has been managed by the firm since it was founded in 1766. The firm has reportedly managed many others for over 100 years. These are not ordinary accounts.

Trent & Rochester was founded in 1766 by Thaddeus Trent and John Rochester after they graduated from Cambridge. They set up business in London, providing discreet financial services to specialist clients. In 1812, shortly before Mr Trent died at sea, the firm changed its name to Trent & Rochester & Associates. Rochester welcomed a new associate, Thomas Taylor, shortly after.

Since then, the firm has only ever had two partners. Currently, these are Timothy Thwaite and James Rochester (no relation).

Mr James Rochester (no relation): Wealthy aristocratic lawyer, partner in Trent & Rochester & Associates, skilled bureaumancer, recluse

Awesome (+4) at: Probate law, investment law

Skilled (+2) at: General law, bureaumancy, knowledge of Other London factions, wine, 

Bad (-2) at: sports, youth culture

Stress: O O

Rochester went to Harrow and studied at Cambridge. He spent ten years working in the City for a variety of investment bankers and law firms, where he was a promising high flyer. However, in an unexpected move, Rochester joined Trent & Rochester & Associates. Since joining the firm, he has become a recluse and no longer sees his family or old friends.

The inheritor

Seraphina Black is an art student studying at West College London. She has learned that her great-grandfather, Peregrine Black, was extremely wealthy and that his assets should have been hers – but instead, they are held by Trent & Rochester & Associates.

Unknown to Seraphina, Peregrine was one of the original members of the Golden Dawn. Peregrine was a Seer and predicted the rise of modern technology. His account includes detailed instructions for investing his wealth - for example, his last instruction was to invest in "Googol" in 2005.

Seraphina Black: Streetwise art student, I’m older than I look, I grew up in Tower Hamlets – of course I’m carrying a knife, I may have latent Seer powers inherited from my great-grandfather

Skilled (+2) at: Art, London street culture, surviving and scavenging, scrapping 

Bad (-2) at: Following rules, listening to my parents

Stress: O

Questions

• Who owns the accounts?
• How many accounts are there?
• Will they return? If so, when?
• Why do they need so much money?

Information, rumours and lies

• The firm only ever has two partners, and its “associates” are little more than fake identities for Trent and Rochester (unliving immortals who take different names over the centuries)
• Clients include vampire lords, angels, sleeping fae, or King Arthur
• Isambard Kingdom Brunel had an account with the firm
• The firm steals money from “dormant” bank accounts – there are no clients
• The firm is struggling with anti-laundering laws and needs computer specialists to help with modern accounts
• Some old accounts have been recently closed

Location: One Canada Square, Canary Wharf

Enemies: Modern banking laws, HMRC, The Order of the Gilded Reflection

Allies: The City of London, Lord Slyke, Lord Boston, The King of the Tangled Wood