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.
Enjoyed the review!
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