Legend of the Sky Raiders: Prepping the first session

I’m running Legend of the Sky Raiders for my regular group. Last time I covered character generation, now I’m explaining my prep.

Our Trello desktop

Prepping the adventure

So obviously I’ve read the adventure (I did that when I wrote my review), but because running a game is different to writing a review, I’ve been reading the first part of the adventure in more detail. I’m focusing on that now because that’s the bit I need first. I figure I can worry about the second part of the adventure (into the outback) once we get started.

(Experience tells me my group will be easily sidetracked, so there’s no point prepping too much too soon.)

So I’ve concentrated on the rumours, the NPCs and the initial journey out from the city.

The rumours

Legend has sixteen rumours for the players to find in the initial part of the game, as they outfit their expedition. Some of them are more important than others. Legends presents them as an unordered list, but I’ve rejigged them and grouped them by category, so if the Travellers are looking for information, I know where to find it.

Additionally, some of the rumours are really encounters, so I’ve separated them from the rest.

I’ve copied the rumour text into a Word document and edited it to create something that I will find more useful at the table. I’ve printed it out so that I can cross off rumours as I feed them to the players.

Ultimately, there’s only one key piece of information they need – and that’s the name of the first native village they need to get to. As long as I remember that, the rest can be handwaved.

Hexcrawl logistics

With the start of the adventure requiring the Travellers to prepare an expedition, I realise I need to know how the hexcrawl works. Unfortunately, Legend of the Sky Raiders isn’t well organised, so I’ve pulled together the hexcrawl rules into a single Word document that I can refer to. I will let the players see this, so they can see what the plan is.

(There is an option in the adventure for an NPC to put together the expedition, but I don’t trust my players not to want to do that themselves.)

I’m pretty excited by all this. I’ve never done this sort of resource management game in a ttrpg before. It’s always something that I thought was a bit tedious (I stopped playing Traveller before spreadsheets were commonplace), but I’m hoping it will be fun. (If it does become tedious, expect some handwaving pretty quickly.)

Online set-up

With the group scattered across the country, we’re playing online as usual. We have a Google Drive folder for rules and documents, and our tabletop will be Trello (as usual).

For Traveller, I’ve set up Trello with the following columns: Admin (links to our game folder, The Traveller Map, the setup and the like), PCs, NPCs, Locations, Library Data. (See above)

As part of the game is a hex crawl, I need a space for the players to draw on, so we’ll use Roll20 for that. I’ve loaded the maps (which wasn’t as intuitive as I hoped). It’s been years since I’ve run a game using Roll20, so I hope I can remember how to use it.

And because it’s Traveller, I’ve put a blank Google spreadsheet in the folder to help manage the resources. I’m sure we’ll need it.

From Classic to Mongoose 2nd Edition

Everything in Legend of the Sky Raiders is written for Traveller’s old little black books. I do have The Traveller Book, so I can refer back to that if I need to. But we’re using Mongoose’s 2022 rules, so we’ll see if it really is backwards compatible.

(I’ve already noticed that carbines aren’t in the new rules, so I’ve swapped some NPCs' weapons.)

Planning for next week

Next week, we start properly, and we need to figure out how everyone has gotten from mustering out to being stranded on Mirayn. The character creation minigame creates a lovely history for everyone – but it would be brilliant if it finished with something that suggested how the characters finally get together. Yes, there is the connections rule, but could there be something more?

Anyway, I’ll be taking away most of their toys.

Coming soon: Session 1.

Previous parts in this series: #1 My first-impressions review of Legend of the Sky Raiders. #2 Creating characters.

Traveller character creation

I’m running the Keith brothers’ classic 1981 Traveller adventure, Legend of the Sky Raiders, for my regular group. I recently wrote a first-impressions review – ie, I’ve only played it. To begin, we are creating characters.

Setup

We started our first session with me explaining the basic setup (the Travellers are down on their luck on Mirayn, accepting a job from an archaeologist) before we rolled up characters.

(After my last post, you might wonder why I didn't give my players pregens. Well, partly it's because the adventure doesn't come with interesting pregens, and partly because I wanted to try Traveller's character generation, partly and because I wrote that post after we generated characters, and partly because I was lazy and didn't want to do the work on top of all the other prep, but mostly because I chickened out.)

The players each had a pdf of the rules, while I had a paper copy and the pdf. I had the flowchart on my screen (why isn’t that on a single page?) and flipped back and forth through the careers as I answered questions and guided them through character generation.

The players rolled real dice and told me their results – we didn’t use an online dice roller.

Generating characters

Character generation took us a little over two hours to generate a single character for each player. One character mustered out after four terms, the others five. I’m sure this would be quicker were we to do it again – none of us had rolled up Traveller characters in decades, and certainly not with the new rules. For a first-time player, character generation isn’t super-intuitive – there is a lot of flipping back and forth.

We were running late by the time everyone had mustered out, so we didn’t do the skills package. We’ll do that next time.

Afterwards, one of the players shared a couple of online character generators (here and here). We all agreed that while they would have made things simpler and quicker, they weren’t necessarily better. I suspect doing it by hand will give the players more ownership of their characters.

In trying out the generators, I discovered I’d missed a rule (about gaining an extra roll when you achieve a commission), so we’ll do that. (That rule makes no sense to me. People generally still develop, regardless of whether they advance or not. So everyone should get a second roll – but those who advance get a wider choice of tables.)

The Travellers

So here’s our group:

Felix "Dusty" Pygrin 478CB7 Age 34

Admin 0, Animals 0, Art 0, Broker 1, Carouse 1, Deception 1, Drive 0, Electronics 1, Gun Combat (Energy) 1, Investigate 0, Medic 0, Navigation 0, Persuade 2, Pilot 1, Recon 0, Science (Planetology) 1, Science (Archaeology) 1, Stealth 0, Streetwise 1, Survival 1

University dropout, drifter and occasional broker. Has a weird Ancient artefact.

Sir Sidderon Dubois 775ACC Age 34

Admin 0, Carouse 0, Language 0, Drive 0, Vacc suit 0, Engineer  (J-Drive) 1, Athletics 0, Gun Combat (slug) 1, Broker 1, Explosives 1, Leadership 1, Medic 1, Melee 0, Heavy Weapons 1, Pilot (Starships) 2, Stealth 1, Recon 1, Tactics (Military) 1

Graduated from university, joined the army. Left the army to become a space pirate. Has a cat – apparently, IMTU Terran cats are as widespread as humans.

Timo Sosak  8A9B84 Age 38

Pilot 4, Survival 1, Science 1 (Archaeology), Gun Combat (Slug) 4, Melee (Blade) 2, Electronics 1, Medic 1, Engineer 1, Recon 1, Vacc suit 1, Astrogation 0, Mechanic 0, Carouse 1, Seafarer 0, Language 0

Five terms in the Scout service – mustered out with a Scout ship, which I need to take away at the start of the adventure. (He also rolled six weapons during mustering out – hence Timo’s high weapon skills.)

Hmmm, Mongoose 2e Traveller characters have many more skills than I remember…

Observations

My thoughts on Traveller’s character generation:

• The minigame is very Third Imperium-centric. We’re playing in the Far Frontiers sector, centred around the League of Suns. Do they have the same careers? Are the assumptions the same? For simplicity’s sake, we assumed so, but “realistically”, a mini-empire like the League of Suns probably doesn’t have much need of a scout service.
• The players created connections with each other during character creation, but in hindsight, I think that would be better done at the end. This is because we all started at the same time, and so everyone was going through each term together. However, the characters mustered out at different ages, so events that seemed to occur at the same stage for the characters turned out not to be the case. (This isn’t a big issue, but I would do it afterwards later on. It also means that if anyone joins the group later on can also create connections. Interestingly, this character generator creates connections after mustering out.)
• Judging by how the rolls went, there are clear bonuses for sticking with a career rather than flitting between careers. Probably like life.

I can’t work out how much I like Traveller’s character generation. On the one hand, it spits out interesting characters with a backstory and history. On the other hand, it’s hard to steer a character in a particular direction (without fudging die rolls) if you have specific game needs (which is my personal preference). 

The players seemed to enjoy it, though, and that’s probably what matters most.

Coming soon: Preparing for the first proper session.

Previous parts in this series: #1 My first impressions review of Legend of the Sky Raiders.

“Character generation is massively overrated”

Source

Why don’t campaigns come with pre-generated characters?

Call of Cthulhu’s Masks of Nyarlathotep expects the investigators to drop everything and leave the country to solve the murder of their “good friend” Jackson Elias.

Delta Green’s God’s Teeth requires a very specific set of player characters – a single Delta Green agent (the lone survivor from their cell) and some friendlies.

Traveller’s Secrets of the Ancients requires the Travellers to care about a distant relative they’ve never met.

(And as I discussed in my review, Traveller’s Legend of the Sky Raiders requires down-on-their-luck Travellers stuck on a remote planet far outside of the Third Imperium.)

I don’t know of anyone who puts their regular groups through these enormous campaigns. Instead, they create characters just for the campaign. With a bit of luck (or good guidance), the players must create characters that care about whatever it is that is driving the campaign. But given the campaigns themselves rarely provide much guidance, that can be luck more than judgement.

(And if you get it wrong, it can feel like the PCs are doing what they are doing because the players are playing the campaign, and not because it’s something the PCs are driven to do. Or you get mismatched PCs, as Neil Gow describes here.)

A better approach: pregens

But wouldn’t it be easier if the campaigns came with pregens? Characters suited to the campaign? With suitable skills and, more critically, the right connections, interests, and drive to follow the leads and see the campaign through?

Even if players would rather create their own, such pregens would provide a template for what would work for the campaign.

The pregens could even have room for the players to tailor them (like PbtA’s playbooks).

But don’t players hate pregens?

Well, that’s the theory. But I’m not sure.

Which is to say, I disagree – for at least four reasons:

• My experience of playing freeforms for over 30 years is that players are very happy to play good pregens that are linked to the game.
• Having run and played many convention games in the past ten+ years, I find that games work so much better with PCs designed for the adventure. I’ve never heard anyone complain.
• As I hinted at above, characters in PbtA games are largely pregens. And PbtA games are very popular.
• Reviews of ALIEN’s Chariot of the Gods and other adventures often praise the conflicting agendas of the scenario’s pregens. Players seem to love them. (And similarly, Greg Stolze’s disturbing Jailbreak.)

So the argument that players hate pregens is, in my experience, tosh. 

How did we get here?

I blame D&D’s concept of “modules” and the idea that pre-written adventures can be dropped in anywhere for any adventuring party. With that model in mind, why would you provide pregens? (I hate the term “module” for adventure or scenario, but let’s not go there.)

But I started with Traveller – and I followed that with Call of Cthulhu. Traveller’s original LBB adventures were scattered across the Third Imperium. There was no way a single adventuring group could do all the adventures, so inevitably, you’d have to create new PCs for the adventures.

And to be fair, Traveller’s adventures came with pregens. But they were just a list of stats and skills – no actual character. If Traveller had been more bold, and made their pregens more compelling so that players actually wanted to play them, things would have been different.)

Legend of the Sky Raiders

Here are the pregens for FASAs Legend of the Sky Raiders.

That’s it. That’s all you get. (Ironically, the key NPCs in Legend of the Sky Raiders would make better pregens.)

Call of Cthulhu

As for Call of Cthulhu, most of their adventures are independent investigations scattered across the globe. They were often deadly – the game doesn’t encourage campaign play. (Maybe that’s changed with the latest edition, which I’ve not seen.) If your investigator survived one investigation, they were hardly motivated to dive into a second. Or third…

So, pregens.

What’s the solution?

Give your adventures pregenerated characters. Write them for your one-shots, write them for your campaigns. Give them meaningful hooks and links to your adventure, and make them compelling.

As for me, I try to practice what I preach. I’ve put pregens in most of my published ttrpg adventures, particularly the more recent ones. And where I haven’t, it’s usually for a mission-based game where the game's characters are already focused on driving the adventure (such as Abaddon’s Puppet for The Dee Sanction).

Traveller: NPC stat blocks

Traveller’s stat blocks are not very helpful for a new GM. Why? Because they don’t include the stat bonuses. And that makes them easy to overlook.

I’m a big fan of making games as easy to run as possible. Especially roleplaying games, which require juggling plot, multiple NPCs and (sometimes) extremely complicated rules. Especially in something as high-stress as combat.

And forgetting to add a stat bonus/penalty could be the difference between life and death for a PC.

The stat block

But this is a modern character stat block from Death Station.

So, no stat bonuses listed.

And while not all NPCs are hostile to the PCs, this one probably is. So they are likely to attack the PCs with their club. What modifiers do they have to hit?

For a Traveller expert, this is easy. But for a new GM? (And remember, this is a free adventure that’s often suggested to new GMs as a good starting adventure.)

Worse, the NPCs in this adventure have a second stat block, depending on whether they are “enhanced” or “fatigued” – and they still don’t include stat bonuses.

Untrained NPCs

So here’s something that I’m not sure about. In Mongoose 2nd Edition Traveller, does an NPC get the same -3 penalty that an unskilled PC gets?

I’m going to argue no, for the following reasons:

• The -3 DM is referred to on page 58 of the core rules, which says “If a Traveller has no level in a skill at all, then they are untrained and will suffer DM-3 when trying to use that skill.” Note, it says nothing about NPCs. It could say “character” instead of “Traveller”, but it doesn’t.
• NPCs don’t generally have level 0 skills listed—so you could argue that they have level 0 on anything that’s unlisted.
• NPCs don’t have to follow the exact same rules as the PCs.
• It’s much simpler for the GM to ignore the -3 no-skill penalty for NPCS.

But goodness, it would be so much better if the rules were clear.

Clearer weapon stats

And while I’m here, things are worse if the NPC has a gun…

Here’s an NPC from Mysteries of the Ancients. (I’ve just noticed they have Gun Combat 0. Eh?)

They’re attacking us from 85m away. What attack bonus do they get? Well, that depends on what they are using – and that means I’ve got to go to page 126 (for the weapon stats), page 76 (for what the ranges mean), and page 74 for the actual DMs… Is it only me who is frustrated by this?

(In this case, at 85m is DM-2 for the shotgun and DM0 for the rifle.)

But we could write gun stats thus:

Shotgun 4D, bulky. Short (DM+1) 0-12m, Medium (DM0) 12-50m, Long (DM-2) 50-100m, Extreme (DM-4) 100-200m.

Rifle 3D, Scope. Short (DM+1) 0-62m, Medium (DM0) 62-250m, Long (DM-2) 250-500m, Extreme (DM-4) 500-1000m.

Yes, it’s a bit more text on the statblock, but it’s much easier to use at the table.

And that surely is the point.

Legend of the Sky Raiders

And what about Legend of the Sky Raiders, which I’m preparing to run for my group? (My review here.) Well, I don’t expect attribute bonuses in Legend’s stat blocks because back in 1981, attribute bonuses weren’t a thing.