Traveller’s Wrath of the Ancients: First Impressions review, part 3

This is part 3 of my long review of Mongoose Traveller’s Wrath of the Ancients. This will make more sense if you read part 1 and part 2 first.

If you can’t face reading part 1 and 2, well, the TL;DR is that I think Wrath of Ancients isn’t great. It’s overwritten, badly structured and formatted and makes excessive use of lazy coincidences, signposts and information dumps. Worse, I think it would be hard work to run.

In the last two posts I went into the plot in some detail. This time I'm thinking about railroads and presenting an alternative campaign idea that fits my idea of what an Ancients campaign could be.

Riding the railroad

Wrath of the Ancients doesn’t want to be thought of as a railroad.

Which is odd, because a railroad is exactly what it is. You can see that from the signposts I’ve mentioned - each scene has a signpost leading to the next one. Sure, the PCs may take slightly different routes between the scenes, but it’s still a railroad.

At one point, Wrath even says, “The Referee should not railroad them in any direction...” Except that if the PCs don’t follow the big flashing “here’s the adventure” signpost, the GM has to work overtime trying to get them back on track.

(To be fair to Wrath, it does have a couple of pages of signpost ideas to get the PCs back to the plot. But that only signals its railroad-y nature.)

But if you are worried about your campaign being a railroad, write it so it isn’t! Don’t write a railroad and then lecture the GM about it not being a railroad!

Avoiding a railroad isn’t hard:

• Provide a timetable of events and write the villains so we know what their plans are, and how they and other parties (Imperials, Omicron, Zhodani and others) react.
• Write scenes and set pieces flexible enough that they can be located wherever necessary.
• Give clues to the players so they can decide in what order to investigate them – and at some point make sure they know what the bad guy’s plan is so they can work out how to foil it.

There - a non-railroad campaign.

(And frankly, it’s not the end of the world if your campaign is a railroad. As long as the players are having fun and are making their own decisions, railroads are fine.)

Let’s not upset the boat

One thing I found disappointing about these campaigns is that they don’t really rock the boat. Chartered Space isn’t really changed by what happens. I would have been much happier if, during the campaign, the Ancients had gone on the rampage, carving up large chunks of Chartered Space.

So what would I do?

So, given I don’t think much of Mysteries/Wrath, what would I do?

First, I’d probably keep Secrets of the Ancients entirely separate. Secrets is great and stands on its own. Mysteries and Wrath use the same Ancients canon as Secrets (ie, the Final War isn’t over yet), but they don’t really play well together.

So, some options.

The classic campaign

One option is to go back to Adventure 3: Twilight’s Peak and drop information and ideas into an existing campaign. Work it like Twilight’s Peak, with rumours leading to the Ancients’ base.

And that might be enough - I might never use Wrath of the Ancients.

The Omicron campaign

One of the challenges of writing for Traveller is designing adventures that suit any party. (You can see that in some of the gymnastics that start some adventures.)

But why do that at all? Why not assume that the PCs are members of Omicron Division, seeking evidence of the Ancients. This way, the PCs could visit Research Station Gamma and the blockade at Andor, and meet the Ancient Hunters all before things start kicking off.  

And then it’s easy to give the PCs clues pointing them towards Twilight’s Peak and the rise of Tsyamoykyo.

(And with the PCs involved, I’d make Omicron less inept.)

The Ancient Hunters campaign

For this version, get the players to create Ancient Hunters during character generation. Give the PCs links to other Ancient Hunters, and make them interested in anything to do with the Ancients. This might be more like the standard Mysteries of the Ancients campaign - but give them several clues to follow at once, rather than just giving them the next clue.

Agents of Seven

And if you’ve already run Secrets, then the PCs may be agents of the Ancients and part of the Final War. They’ve got an incentive to follow up leads to other Ancients’ sites like Twilight’s Peak and can get involved that way.

The rise of Tsamoykyo

But what is Tsamoykyo doing? In Wrath of the Ancients, he doesn’t really get started. He supposedly has the goal to do great (but unspecified) works and to meet God (as the creator of the universe) to understand why the universe is the way it is. But the campaign ends before he gets started, which I think is a shame.

So let’s give him a preposterous plan: Tsamoykyo wants to create an Undoing to summon the Creator. To do this, he’s going to rip a huge section of Chartered Space into a small pocket universe and collapse it into a giant black hole, which will then punch back through into the real universe, creating an anomaly that will force the Creator to appear.

Tsamoykyo has already run a trial (on a smaller scale) that has shown great promise. 50 years ago, a mysterious black hole appeared out of nowhere in Reft Sector. (When they become aware of it, astronomers will want to charter a ship to visit the black hole [where there may be clues] and also travel to where they can observe it appear in real-time [ie, overtaking the light emitted by the event].)

The eye of God?

With a successful trial under his belt, Tsamoykyo puts his plan to create a huge pocket universe into effect. So he will take a huge chunk of space - let’s say a 25-parsec radius around Andor (so taking out the Darrians, Sword Worlds, a corner of the Zhodani Consolate and a large chunk of the Third Imperium) and pull it into a pocket universe.

(Centring it on Andor explains why Tsamoykyo has to rescue the Droyne.)

The new pocket universe will only be a parsec or so across, and compressing all those systems into a tiny space will create an enormous black hole which will punch back into normal space. So that’s the plan.

So why is Tsamoykyo doing this now? (Rather than, say, a thousand years ago, or 200 years in the future?) Because of Twilight’s Peak. 

Tsamoyko stored his pocket universe-creating device at Twilight’s Peak, and when he learned that the base had been disturbed, he sent an agent (Tellsadiu – from Mysteries of the Ancients).

Tellsadiu teleported the device back to Tsamoykyo and began to warm up the base.

A timetable

With that as a rough idea, here’s my (equally rough) timetable:

984: Twilight’s Peak is disturbed (121 years ago, during the Third Frontier War) by Mercedes and her crew. The alarm is triggered.

1050: Tellsadiu arrives at Twilight’s Peak and returns the device to Tsamoykyo.

1052: Tsamoykyo creates a test black hole in 1052 (in the middle of Reft, where light will take 30+ years for the black hole to be noticed in the Third Imperium).

1060-1105: Tsamoykyo starts setting up ship teleporters at the edge of his planned area. He needs 30 (say). These will all be in deep space, placed there by his ships, and will be networked.

1080+: The mysterious black hole is observed in Reft from the Third Imperium.

1106: Twilight’s Peak is destroyed (as per Mysteries of the Ancients)

1108: Tsyamoykyo takes secret Droyne cache on Andor.

1108: Tsyamoykyo establishes a forward base at a location on the edge of the rip where he expects the Creator to arrive.

1109: Tsyamoykyo triggers the Undoing, creating a monstrous black hole brimming with exotic energies.

1110: Tsyamoykyo meets the Creator!

Okay, this is a bit rough and ready, and I suspect needs fixing in places. But it’s a start.

I haven’t really worked out how the device works, but I think it needs teleporters to be “around” the area to be pinched off. They then become portals into the universe. And the bigger the bit of the universe you are pinching off, the more portals you need. (Ideally, I want the PCs to use the teleporters to zip quickly around the map.)

One thing this does is highlight Tsyamoykyo’s arrogance. He considers the Third Imperium and other empires utterly beneath him and can’t conceive of them interfering with his plan. That’s his mistake…

Other factions

I also need to think about potential other factions that might be involved. They include:

• Omicron Division
• Imperial Navy
• Zhodani Consulate
• Other aliens – such as the Darrians and Sword Worlds
• The friendly Droyne from Mysteries of the Ancients
• Seven and/or Grandfather (if I bring them in)

They all have their own objectives and will react accordingly. (I might even need a timetable for each.)

Getting the players involved

I can see several entry points, depending on what sort of campaign I’m running. Some ideas:

• The PCs are recruited to investigate the black hole. There they uncover signs of Ancient technology, leading them to investigate further.
• The PCs are asked to investigate mysterious signals coming from deep space and discover a portal in deep space.
• The PCs are drawn to Twilight’s Peak as per Adventure #3.
• The PCs get involved in the adventure on Callia (in Mysteries) and are drawn into the Ancients that way.

As part of the campaign, I want the PCs to discover Tsyamoykyo’s plan and understand how they may foil it. So I’ll need clues – maybe captured intelligence from enemy Droyne, information from friendly Droyne or Omicron, theoretical research from a scientist studying the black hole, or even decoded messages from Ancients’ artefacts.

I also like the idea of the PCs having to convince the Imperial authorities to take action. If they’re successful, maybe we’ll see fleet action against one of the teleporters.

And we can end with a final confrontation in Tsyamoykyo’s pocket universe as before. (Although it’s been pointed out to me that Wrath of the Ancients and Secrets of the Ancients have very similar endings, so perhaps we should do something different.)

Return of the Ancients

So I think that’s what I’d do with Mysteries/Wrath of the Ancients.

That’s assuming I do anything with them – it’s much more likely they’ll just stay on my bookshelf, unplayed.