Fate of the Sky Raiders session #4: Confrontation with Kalamanaru

I’m running FASA’s 1982 Traveller adventure Fate of the Sky Raiders, and this is my report of our fourth and final session (which is also session #15 of our overall Sky Raiders campaign).

Last time was session #3.

Not too many spoilers here, although I’ve included my overall feelings of how the campaign went, so that will be more spoilery.

The Travellers

Our players and their characters are Terry (playing ex-space pirate Sir Sidderon Dubois), Thomas (playing drifter Felix "Dusty" Pygrin) and Tom (playing Zhodani prole Mustafa Lama Doka).

The players are also playing some of the NPCs: Technologies expert Dr Heinrich Chandragora (Terry), Vargr geologist Dr Goezghae (Tom), and linguistic archaeology specialist Dr Viedistart Mirost (Thomas).

The situation

I spent the gap between sessions working out the results of last week’s montage.

I decided that Kalamanaru arrived aboard the 800-ton Explorer-class ship the PCs had arrived on, along with a 400-ton subsidised merchant and two obsolete (but still dangerous) 400-ton Zhodani destroyers.

The PCs lured Kalamanaru to a docking bay of their choice, and once Kalamanaru’s modular cutter had docked, the PCs opened fire with the refurbished pulse lasers. The asteroid’s guns quickly knocked out one destroyer and crippled the other, but the two other ships moved out of the laser turret’s firing arcs.

However, inside the docking bay, things weren’t so great as training hadn’t gone so well, and the Gardeners turned out to be terrible shots.

So, we have Kalamanaru’s cutter in the docking bay (now pressurised, with the docking bay doors sealed), with his men trapped inside while the PCs watch from outside. Meanwhile, Kalamanaru’s other two ships are out of sight, doing something.

What do the Travellers do?

The firefight

A brief chat with Kalamanaru made it clear that negotiations weren’t going to be easy, so the Travellers decided to take a more forceful approach.

They knew their weapons were no use against the cutter’s hull, so they decided to remove one of the pulse lasers from the asteroid ship’s turrets. (They had manufactured/printed replacements for these, so dismantling the laser wasn’t a huge job.) They jury-rigged a mount for it, and wheeled it to the end of an access shaft – and shot at the cutter.

In response, Kalamanaru sent two men to attack the pulse-laser crew, but the PCs got the drop on them and fired the pulse laser again. The second shot ruptured a fuel tank and boom; the battle was over.

(I hadn’t expected they would use ship-mounted weapons, so there was lots of flipping backwards and forwards through the rules as I looked up pulse laser damage and critical hit locations for ships.)

After that, Kalamanaru surrendered, ending the campaign.

Aftermath

We talked generally about what would happen next. Clearly, the societies aboard the asteroid ship would be in turmoil as news of outsiders spread. (Plus turmoil created as scientists come to study the ship.)

The asteroid ship itself is within the borders of the little-documented Mnemosyne Principality, and I like to think that they are granted some space on one of their worlds. (Curiously, there’s nothing about the principality in Fate of the Sky Raiders.) But for our heroes, it was time to retire.

I wish I had remembered to cap the campaign off with an epilogue from each of the players – a scene from the future. But the discussion rambled into a general look back at the campaign, and I forgot.

Reflections on a campaign

Although short by many GMs’ standards, this 16-session ttrpg campaign (including session zero) was the longest I’ve ever run. I was starting to tire of it by the end, but that may be because I found Fate of the Sky Raiders so hard to run.

(My players kindly said that they hadn’t noticed that I was finding Fate difficult.)

So while I thought that the first two parts were great, I didn’t enjoy Fate of the Sky Raiders. My initial instincts from 1982 were that it would be hard to run, and I was right.

We talked a bit about the asteroid ship and whether it should have had a robot maintenance crew. That’s very SF, but that’s not very Traveller. 

I mentioned that the original book had jump-capable ships aboard that the PCs could potentially find, but that I’d removed them because I couldn’t imagine someone not taking them 5,000 years ago, when the ship was adrift with no engines. Terry pointed out that things can be lost for unknown reasons, but while I can accept that there might be jump-capable ships aboard, I need the adventure to explain a) why they hadn’t already been taken, and b) why the PCs would now be able to find and repair them (as opposed to anyone else).

Overall, I think Fate of the Sky Raiders needs a lot of work. (I know Mongoose are working on an update.) Some thoughts if I were rewriting it (and not changing it completely):

• I would include an overall map of the ship. Perhaps a nodemap, but at least something to give the players a sense of scale and space.
• I would include examples of the different societies, their relations with one another, how they have survived for 5,000 years, and dilemmas and challenges for the PCs. If I were including random tables, I’d make them easy to use during play. I wouldn’t leave it all to the poor Referee!
• I would create a plan for Kalamanaru’s forces, with a series of events. I would have him arrive at a specific location, meet specific inhabitants (who react accordingly), and then move on. This would give the GM something that the characters can hear about and react to.
• I might even plant the seed of something valuable in the ship in the earlier adventures to give the PCs something to aim for. A specific treasure or technology, perhaps.

And of course, actually think about the ship and make it more realistic than it currently is. It has been drifting for 5,000 years and is still inhabited; what does that actually mean?

Colony ships

Here’s a recent YouTube video that examines three entries to Project Hyperion, which explores the feasibility of crewed interstellar travel via generation ships using current and near-future technologies.  Not quite the same as our Sky Raiders’ ship (if nothing else, the Sky Raiders can use artificial gravity), but the concept of keeping a vast ship and its crew and passengers viable for hundreds of years is the same.

I particularly like Proximum, the asteroid ship, which has a governance system based on The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe. The Fourth Turning argues that every generation fails to learn the lessons from two generations back. Proximum takes a nicely SF approach to deal with this by having a three-part governance structure:

• The council: Elected representatives making day-to-day decisions.
• Apollo: An AI supporting those decisions – containing all the records so that nothing is lost.
• The Chorus: At age 65, members can enter hibernation and be periodically revived as advisors. These advisors carry the lived memory – while Apollo knows that a famine happened, it cannot convey what it feels like to ration food to your children.

I know that’s way more sophisticated than I have any right to expect from a 45-year-old Traveller adventure, but it’s the sort of thing I hope Mongoose are thinking about.

As for me, I’m glad I didn’t come across this before running the campaign, as I might have been tempted to rework Fate of the Sky Raiders even more than I did, and that’s not really what I want when I’m running a published adventure.

The Sky Raiders campaign in numbers

So anyway, that was the longest campaign I’ve ever run. It was enough – I don’t know how other groups run and play campaigns for much longer. I was ready for a change.

Here are some numbers.

• 32/16: We started on 11th August 2025 with character generation and ended on 23rd March 2026. That’s 32 weeks of calendar time, but we only played for 16 sessions. We try to play every week, but there are occasional breaks. (I think we had a break of over a month for Christmas.)
• 7/5/4: Of our 16 sessions, we spent seven on Legend of the Sky Raiders (including session zero and character generation), five on Trail of the Sky Raiders and four on Fate of the Sky Raiders. In theory, Fate could have stretched out for many more sessions, but I was tired and wanted to draw the campaign to a close.
• 2/30: Our sessions are two hours long, but they often start a little late, and we are easily distracted. I suspect we played for around 30 hours.
• 3/4/3: Most of the time, I had three players. I started with Terry, Jon and Thomas. Tom then joined in September, and Jon dropped out in November.

We’re now taking a break for the Easter holidays, and when we return, we will start something completely different…

Previously: Session #3: To the bridge!

Or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders. (And here are my reviews of Trail of the Sky Raiders and Fate of the Sky Raiders.)