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.