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.)

Fate of the Sky Raiders session #3: To the bridge!

I’m running FASA’s 1982 Traveller adventure Fate of the Sky Raiders, and this is my report of our third session (which is also session #14 of our overall Sky Raiders campaign).

Last time was session #2.

I have deviated drastically from the text, so this isn’t very spoilery now.

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).

Exposition dumps

This episode was full of exposition dumps. At the end of the last episode, the Travellers had helped the Gardeners of Continuance by fixing their nutrient problem. But this took time, so I asked the players for a scene involving their characters. This turned into a protracted discussion session as they and the Gardeners shared knowledge.

Here’s what we discussed. (Or at least, this is what I remember based on my memory and my notes. I expect I missed things.)

• The PCs continued to learn the language, and we left that in the background. (Nobody had an appetite for roleplaying that.)
• The PCs are still interested in getting to the bridge, which they learn is controlled by a faction called the Synod. They control signals to the processing equipment the Gardeners need, and in return for use of the machines, the Gardeners trade food with them.
• This is one part of the ship – other factions control other areas of the ship. The Gardeners are conservative and haven’t explored the ship much. They are happy where they are.
• There are designs in the 3D printer software that the Gardeners no longer have access to. (These include weapons and components that haven’t been needed for thousands of years.)
• The Gardeners do have some antique Sky Raiders artefacts and items – including masks made of precious metals and jewels. These are sacred objects.
• The PCs explain that bad people (Kalamanaru) will be coming, and they will want to steal the sacred artefacts.

At this point, the players are wondering if this has turned into the Magnificent Seven…

The main bridge

After a failed attempt to hack into the printer software for more useful components (eg better weapons), the PCs realise that they need to speak to the Synod (who occupy the main bridge), and they are escorted to the main bridge and the Synod. (Lorain and all the NPCs are left behind as captives to ensure our three heroes don’t do anything foolish. This also means I can concentrate on the PCs without having to worry about the scientist NPCs.)

We are in danger of repeating everything again, so we cut it short and jump straight to a skill roll, with Sir Sidderon’s social standing and Mustafa’s stewardship supporting Felix’s persuade roll. If the roll failed, we agreed it would mean the PCs were locked up, and we would put the NPC scientists in the spotlight. Fortunately, it succeeded!

(We’ve been talking about printing advanced weapons and armour using the 3D printers, and it’s at this point that I realise that, as I’ve been assuming that the ship has been repeatedly patched and components replaced, the Sky Raiders ought to have been able to completely rebuild their jump and manoeuvre drives. Ah, well, too late to worry about that now. I don’t mention this to the players.)

An amazing TL 9/10 control room

The plan that didn’t quite come together

The players then spent a while creating a plan to deal with Kalamanaru. Their eventual plan involved creating a Sky Raiders-y signal to lure Kalamanaru to a particular location where he could be ambushed.

Tom suggested this could be a montage, and because each player had two PCs, I suggest it had six steps. If they succeeded in four, then the plan would work!

Prepare the signal: Dr Mirost prepared a Sky Raiders signal that would draw Kalamanaru to the right place. (We didn’t actually specify exactly where. If it all works, we won’t need to know where.) 

Printing better weapons: Dr Goezghae used his computer skills to print better quality weapons. Guards aboard the ship had been using cheap-to-print assault rifles (AK-47 type things), but they started replacing them with advanced combat rifles and grenades. And they printed armour.

Refurbish the laser turrets: Dr Chandragora printed new components for the laser turrets and refurbished them, focusing on where Kalamanaru’s forces were expected to be lured.

Training the locals: Sir Sidderon trained the locals in the more modern weaponry.

Sensors: Mustafa used his drones to monitor Kalamanaru’s progress once Kalamanaru arrived.

Ambush tactics: Felix planned the ambush using the local forces.

And how did they do? Well, it wasn’t great.

The first three rolls were really good – with results of 12, 12 and 11 (a total effect of 11). And then it all went wrong, and the next three rolls failed badly (results of 4, 4 and 6), almost wiping out the overall effect. We ended up on an effect of 1, which I ruled was a stalemate with a slight advantage to the PCs.

So Kalamanaru created a beachhead aboard the massive asteroid ship, and we would resolve the situation next week.

Next time

It's time for the campaign finale! But first, I need to figure out what the current situation is. My instinct is that Kalamanaru is trapped on board, and the players have crippled (but not completely defeated) Kalamanaru’s flotilla. We’ll see.

Next: Confrontation with Kalamanaru

Previously: Session #2,  or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders.

Fate of the Sky Raiders session #2: The Sky Raiders' descendants

I’m running FASA’s 1982 Traveller adventure Fate of the Sky Raiders, and this is my report of our second session (which is also session #13 of our overall Sky Raiders campaign).

Last time was session #1.

I am now deviating from the text a fair bit, so I’m not sure how spoilery this is.

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).

I started the session by asking the players to also play one of the NPCs, as I was struggling to juggle everything, and they were being forgotten. So Terry took alien technologies expert Dr Heinrich Chandragora, Tom played Vargr geologist Dr Goezghae, and Thomas played linguistic archaeology specialist Dr Viedistart Mirost. I love how those names just trip off the tongue…

With that sorted, we did a brief recap, and the PCs resumed their push to the main bridge. Next module: an industrial complex.

ChatGPT preparation

Between this session and the last, I had done a little prep. I’d decided that it and the agricultural module behind it would be inhabited by the same group: the Gardeners of Continuance, a conservative faction who didn’t like change. However, their plants were suffering from a nutritional deficiency caused by an unknown defect in their fertiliser production process. They were also slavers and used slaves (from the Pilgrimage of the Silent Vector faction) to operate the machinery in the industrial complex. The PCs would encounter the slaves first.

I had spent a fair bit of time with ChatGPT trying to work out what was going on in the asteroid ship. I decided I didn’t want the ship to be failing – it made it a bit too convenient for the PCs to arrive just in time to save the inhabitants.

So instead, the ship (they call it Elan, or home) is in a delicate balance. Everything is recycled, nothing goes to waste. There are signs of repairs everywhere. However, this also meant that anyone who couldn’t contribute (the old and injured) would be ruthlessly recycled. Elan isn’t Utopia.

Of course, this also meant that the inhabitants would have guns – easily repaired or printed using the 3D printers.

I’m now well off-script as far as Fate of the Sky Raiders is concerned.

First contact

I had a list of slave characters the PCs could meet, and I decided that the first two they would encounter were Virel (who thinks the Travellers are rescuers) and Orren (who wants to escape slavery).

First though, I had to decide what to do about the language. Not wanting to force the players to spend half the game tediously learning the language, I decided that the language was a highly corrupted form of old Vilani and that the scientists (especially the linguists) would quickly be able to translate. So once we had a couple of successful rolls under our belts, I dropped any further rolls, and we roleplayed normally. (I may force occasional rolls in critical situations, however.)

So Virel and Orren met the PCs and found them a hiding place away from the guards. Over the next couple of days, the slaves would pop back when they could and explain what was going on. (So Virel and Orren explained much of the situation described above, including the problem with the fertiliser production process.)

Player discussions

That prompted an interesting discussion among the players about whether they should interfere in the ship’s society. (Particularly over things like slavery and recycling the old.) Of course, one of them noted that when Kalamanaru arrives, the society will be interfered with anyway…

We also discussed the Travellers’ big-picture goal, and they decided they still wanted to reach the main bridge and determine what was actually working to prepare for Kalamanaru’s arrival.

The agricultural complex

To reach the main bridge, they needed to pass through the agricultural complex. And that meant meeting the Gardeners. (Perhaps there was a way around, but the Travellers didn’t have a map, and who knows what they would have encountered had they tried that…)

However, they asked their friendly slaves if there were any overlooked access tunnels they could use, and sure enough, there were. That brought the PCs to a maintenance hatch looking out onto one of the huge dodecahedral farming voids, filled with plants, vertical farms, livestock, more slaves working the fields, and armed guards.

The PCs need to get to the other side of the farming void, so they decide to bluff it out and march across the farms as if they belong.

It works for a bit, but soon they draw a crowd, stopping their progress. As the crowd pulled at their spacesuits and unfamiliar gear, Nysa, the habita governor, approached. She brought them to a central room, which was much more lavish than the Travellers had seen previously, with Sky Raider art and valuables. There, the PCs asked for Nysa’s help in leading them to the ship’s main bridge. In return, Nysa asked for help in fixing the problem with the crops.

So that allowed us to create a skill chain (we like skill chains) to identify the problem, source an appropriate mineral supplement and fix the fertiliser production machines.

Of course, it was going to take time for all this to have any observable effect, but it becomes apparent that it has worked. Hurrah!

We are now on day 14. Kalamanaru might arrive any day now (but I reckon the Travellers have a few more days yet).

Sandbox problems

Tom mentioned that he was having trouble parsing the game because there was no map of the asteroid ship. (And there is no overall map in Fate of the Sky Raiders – just some fairly useless deck plans.)

And it’s a fair point. I don’t actually know where they are in the ship right now. I hope it doesn’t matter…

But my main issue is the scale of the ship, the vast cast of NPCs (both the scientists and the inhabitants) and how little support the GM is given. Frankly, I’m finding Fate of the Sky Raiders itself almost unusable, as I’m finding I need to invent so much. That’s not why I run published adventures! If Mongoose ever get around to their rewrite of the Sky Raiders trilogy, this final third needs a thorough rethink as it is by far the weakest.

Next time

With the machinery fixed and the plants returning to health, the PCs plan to continue on to the main bridge. Assuming that Nysa lets them, that is…

But first, given that they’ve just spent over a week in the company of the Gardeners, I might get them to narrate some scenes showing what they’ve been up to.

Next: Session #3: To the bridge!

Previously: Session #1: The asteroid ship, or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders.

Fate of the Sky Raiders session #1: The asteroid ship

I’m running FASA’s 1982 adventure Fate of the Sky Raiders, and this is my report of our first session (which is also session #12 of our overall Sky Raiders campaign).

Click here to read my review of Fate of the Sky Raiders.

Oh yes, spoilers ahoy! (Probably – I am deviating from the text somewhat.)

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).

As for me, I was a little nervous going into today’s session. I knew I didn’t have much prepared – just a vague sense of what was going on. Fate of the Sky Raiders really isn’t my kind of adventure, and I’m not a fan of exploration games. (I don’t run static dungeons – I’d rather have purpose in my games.)

But I trusted that my players would somehow create a direction for the session, which is what eventually happened.

Last time’s cliffhanger

As established at the end of the last session, I started the session with the Travellers in a modular cutter approaching the Sky Raiders massive asteroid base, when their ship (an 800-ton Explorer-class survey ship with the slightly sinister name of Inquisitor) disappears into jump.

Oh dear.

So with limited supplies, their only option is to head to the asteroid. Not that they had any other plans.

As far as entering the asteroid goes, I presented them with several options:

• A crater at the ship’s front has revealed an access tube
• The various laser batteries
• The meson cannon
• The fuel processor station
• The communications array
• The empty flight cradles (where ships would dock)
• The engines

Premonition of doom

Having set the scene, I asked everyone to make a difficult (10+) skill roll using Admin/Deception/Streetwise or something similar to see if they had picked up any hint of the Inquisitor’s betrayal. Felix and Sir Sidderon failed, but Mustafa made a successful Broker roll and had caught wind of something.

I asked him why he hadn’t told anyone: “I’m a prole. It’s not my place to raise such matters.” Perfect.

Anyway, we’ve banked the roll for later. Maybe Mustafa packed a vital piece of equipment or something. But what he did learn was that someone said the ship would be coming back. 

The expedition

Fate of the Sky Raiders provides an equipment list for the expedition and asks the players to decide what they are bringing. I didn’t do that – I had looked at the list and realised that everything would fit in the cutter anyway, so I said they had everything listed. (And maybe a bit more.)

As for the NPCs, I have a bunch to manage: six scientists and three helpers. So that’s going to be fun.

I’ve told my players that the NPCs will stay in the background. Even though the Travellers are actually just hired help, it’s their movie, so they will make the decisions. Where necessary, the PCs can use the scientist's skills and expertise. 

Hopefully, that will make sense.

The docking bay and the map

The Travellers entered the asteroid ship through a docking bay and found it pressurised, with a little power, but deserted. Not so much deserted as completely stripped of pretty much everything. (In my head, the inhabitants have stripped everything they can for the recyclers/3D printers.)

(I presented a map from Fate of the Sky Raiders. The players were unimpressed with the accommodation.)

They repaired the recyclers and unloaded the cutter. They found a map of the ship (etched into the wall – although I don’t think I said that out loud) and spent two days deciphering it (and also repairing the atmosphere recyclers).

Now that they are “looking” at a map of the whole ship (I don’t actually have one I can share), I explain that the asteroid ship is divided into modules. If they decide where they want to go, I will plot a route.

The Travellers decided they wanted to get to the main bridge (not actually a location in Fate of the Sky Raiders itself), and I said to get there, they had to pass through a control complex (a secondary bridge), an industrial complex, an agricultural complex, the meson cannon, and finally the main bridge itself.

Reaching the different modules required using the access shafts– large, zero-g tubes that crisscross the station. We talked about that, and I explained (out of character – maybe as one of the scientists theorising) that the asteroid ship was so huge that the Sky Raiders didn’t expect people to travel around it massively. They would live in the residential areas, do a stretch of time in whichever module they were assigned to, then go home. (So a bit like working on an oil rig.) 

That explained the functional staterooms and meant there wasn’t a fast-access system (no turbolifts) around the ship. (It also probably meant there were zero-g shuttles originally designed for the access shafts. Maybe we’ll find them.)

Access shafts

I’m making so much of this up.

To the bridge

For simplicity’s sake, we decided that everyone was heading to the bridge. So off the expedition set, down the appropriate access tube.

After about 100m, they reached the control complex (the secondary bridge).

The control complex

The dice told me that this section of the ship wasn’t fully functional – the doors and lights were out. It was also uninhabited. The Travellers cut their way in and found themselves surrounded by consoles. Again, anything that wasn’t fixed down had been stripped (for recycling), but as the computers were built into the consoles, they could be operated.

So, of course, the PCs tried to hack into the system. This was a very difficult task (12+) that would take a day, and we created a skill chain using linguistics, alien technology and computers. They failed, but I decided that didn’t represent an inability to 

With computers and power, they decided to hack into the computer. So they spend three days on a task chain that draws on the NPC scientists’ skills in linguistics, alien technology, and computers. It was a fail, but I just said it took much longer than expected – three days.

(The NPCs’ stats haven’t aged well. For example, Dr Vledistart Mirost is described as being “a specialist in linguistic archaeology and in the general area of most languages.” However his skills are Computer-3, Rifle-1, Jack-o-Trades-1, Electronics-1, Carousing-1! Back in 1982, Traveller didn’t have a science skill, so I decided Dr Mirost had Linguistics-3.)

Anyway, the computer was full of error messages. Some systems are working (including some laser batteries), but the drives appear to be completely inoperable.

Then a video call comes in from the main bridge. There’s a human dressed in weird clothes and with tattoos jabbering at them – it sounds like they are asking questions. The PCs can’t understand it, and the caller terminates the call...

Next time

Before we ended, I asked the players what they planned to do. Their plan is to continue towards the main bridge. So that gives me something to plan for.

Next: Session #2, The Sky Raiders' descendants.

Previously: My review of Fate of the Sky Raiders,  or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders.

Fate of the Sky Raiders review

Fate of the Sky Raiders was written by J Andrew Keith with art by William H Keith Jr and maps by Mitch O’Connell. It was published by FASA in 1982 and is the final part of the Sky Raiders trilogy, preceded by Legend of the Sky Raiders and Trail of the Sky Raiders.

As with my review of Legend and Trail, I am writing this review before running my players through Fate of the Sky Raiders. (Right now, my players have almost completed Trail – we just have some loose ends to sort out.)

As the review is a bit too spoilery, I've delayed posting this (and the subsequent session reports) until my players are far enough through the adventure that it won't spoil it for them.

And yes, spoilers ahead. Although it’s a 45-year-old adventure, so there’s that.

Memories from 1982

Physically, Trail of the Sky Raiders was a LBB-sized 60-page book with extra maps. I remember buying it back in the day, but I'm using a pdf right now. I can remember three things from that time.

1. I found Fate to be something of an anticlimax after the build-up in Legend and Trail.
2. I thought it would be difficult to run.
3. I loved the illustration on page 30 (ie, the centre pages), which fell open when you held the book. I mean, it’s not something that specifically happens in the adventure (although it could), but it’s a lovely bit of design that I’ve never forgotten. (Of course, it doesn’t work so well with a pdf.)

Fate of the Sky Raiders: Plot

At the end of Trail of the Sky Raiders, it is revealed that the Sky Raiders were a minor human race fleeing Vilani expansion 5300 years ago. They built a massive asteroid starship and fled their home in the Gushemege Sector, across the Great Rift (at sublight speeds, taking 300 years to do so), to the Far Frontiers Sector, where they resumed their pillaging ways. They had a civil war about 5000 years ago that damaged their ship’s jump engines, leaving the ship adrift, travelling at sublight speed. With data from an abandoned Sky Raiders ship, the location of the asteroid ship can be calculated – assuming it hasn’t changed course or been captured by a stray planet.

From there to here

Having proven themselves, Lorain Messandi employs the PCs to accompany her team to search for the Sky Raiders asteroid ship. Sure enough, they find it – and the team boards a cutter to explore it.

However, once the cutter reaches the asteroid ship, the expedition’s support ship pulls away and jumps! They have been abandoned!

All that is effectively prologue – Fate of the Sky Raiders is all about exploring the massive asteroid ship and finding a way to escape.

(This review of Fate of the Sky Raiders complains about how railroady Fate is at the start. I guess it is, but to me, it’s just setup. Fate is about exploring and surviving the massive asteroid ship. I’ve already told my players that I’m starting with them stranded on the asteroid – everything before that is backstory.)

Exploring the asteroid

The Sky Raider’s asteroid ship is vast: approx 10 km x 8 km x 7.5 km, displacing around 50 billion tons and carries millions of people. It may be one of the largest ships in the Traveller universe.

But there’s no overall map. Instead, there are floor plans of the various modules the PCs might encounter: control complexes, industrial complexes, agricultural complexes, power centres, docking bays, and surface modules. (Oddly, there are no recreational areas, schools, hospitals, laboratories, mess halls, or recycling centres. There are a bunch of staterooms, but given that this is somewhere people lived and raised families for maybe ten generations as they crossed the Great Rift, there’s nowhere you’d want to call home.)

The modules are connected by zero-g access shafts. The asteroid is riddled with these modules, with the large agricultural modules opening onto enormous dodecahedron voids used as fields.

Amazingly, the ship still has power. Not much, but some.

When the PCs explore the ship (by heading along an access shaft at random), the Referee rolls randomly to determine the next module the PCs encounter. They also roll to see if it is operable and whether it is inhabited.

The inhabitants

So yes, not only does the asteroid ship have power, but it also has air, water, food – and inhabitants. And the inhabitants are rolled randomly as well:

• Population (1D-2)
• Government type (2D)
• Attitude (2D-7+Government type); low = friendly and open, high = xenophobic
• Technology (population, plus some modifiers, but no higher than TL5
• Special characteristics (a random list, such as short of food, at war, or good at repairing equipment)

So the PCs will have to make contact, learn the language and so on. Luckily, the PCs are part of a large team, so some of the NPCs can help.

Events

Events occur every time the PCs enter a new module, or twice a day in an inhabited area. Event tables are provided for all modules and cover jammed doors, equipment failure, finding a fuel cache, encounters with the inhabitants, and more.

The NPCs

The PCs are part of a team that includes Lorain Messandi and a dozen or so other NPCs. Descriptions are provided for each, and some get a reaction table in certain situations.

As welcome as this might be, I know I will forget much of this unless I can somehow make it easy for me to use at the table. 

The bad guys

After three weeks or so, the bad guys turn up to start looting the asteroid ship. Maybe they encounter the PCs, maybe they don’t. But it’s Kalamanaru and his gang of treasure hunters, and here in deep space, where there’s nobody to stop them, they don’t care who they kill.

Escape!

Fate of the Sky Raiders suggests two possible endings:

• Find one of the Sky Raider’s old (jump-capable) scout ships, repair it and leave.
• Boarding and taking one of Kalamanaru’s ships.

(And apart from a TPK, there’s an unmentioned third outcome, which is that the Travellers settle down with the inhabitants and live their lives out peacefully aboard the starship. I’m not surprised it isn’t explored, but I’ve known players do stranger things.)

Fate stresses that boarding and taking one of Kalamanaru’s ships is likely to be tricky, given that his forces arrive with two 400-ton destroyers. However, it fails to recognise that if the PCs can repair a Sky Raiders scout ship, they can probably also repair the many, many laser turrets the massive Sky Raiders ship is armed with. And perhaps the ship has more powerful weapons elsewhere.

And it makes no sense to me that there are any scout ships left. If the Travellers can repair one, then so can the Sky Raiders, and the scout ships would have been taken thousands of years ago.

My thoughts

My initial thought is that I think I’m going to find Fate of the Sky Raiders hard to run. The previous two episodes are largely narrative, with a fairly obvious route through the adventure. Fate, on the other hand, is very different – a procedurally-generated dungeon with random tables.

I don’t run that kind of game, so it’s a bit of a shock – especially the different cultures. I don’t find inventing numerous NPCs easy, particularly at short notice and with different government structures and attitudes that I’ve just rolled up. Yes, I’m given some tools, but not the ones I need.

I can see I’m going to have to prepare things ahead of time, and I wish that’s what Fate had done for me.

(Here’s a post from someone who thought the same, and came up with four key cultures for the inhabitants of the asteroid ship. I thought this was interesting, but the result ended up a bit too fantasy dungeon-in-space for my liking.)

What I liked

The Sky Raider’s secret: I like the fact that we finally meet the Sky Raiders’ secret – their enormous asteroid base. (Although I’m not sure my players really care. They’ve never been that invested in finding out who the Sky Raiders actually are. I guess that parts of this episode are mainly for Referees and Traveller scholars. )

The asteroid ship itself: The ship itself is epic. (Or at least it could be, more on that below.)

But I’m afraid that’s about it in the positives column.

What I didn’t like

So, a few things I didn’t like.

Procedurally generated ttrpgs: I’m not a fan of procedurally generated ttrpgs. I’ve never been one for random encounter rolls, and I don’t enjoy sandboxes. And while rolling for the next module doesn’t bother me, I have more of an issue with randomly generating inhabitants.

The main issue for me is the lack of logic that leaving things to dice rolls can create. Unlike some, I don’t want to try to explain away what is patently obviously a stupid set of dice rolls. (If you’ve read my thoughts on Rethe/Regina, you’ll know what I mean.)

And I know I’m not good at re-rolling/adjusting on the fly. I’d much rather be given a few sample cultures to pick from rather than roll them randomly.

Maybe that’s picky of me, and I wouldn’t necessarily disagree. But I also know my players, and one of them has a scientifically logical mind. If it doesn’t make sense, he will question it. And I’d rather it made sense too.

The asteroid ship: The ship itself puzzles me:

• The ship was designed to be a self-sufficient generation ship for at least 300 years while it crossed the Great Rift. However, there’s no sign (other than the field chambers) that the ship is designed for permanent human habitation.
• 50% of the ship’s volume is given over to fuel. Presumably there are refineries and machines for capturing and processing ice asteroids somewhere, as it certainly isn't skimming fuel from gas giants!
• The ship has huge pressurised flight decks for the scout ships. Why aren’t they on the asteroid's surface, in a vacuum?
• Are there any low berths?

Entering the ship: Lorain decides the team should enter the ship through an access tube exposed by an impact. So that presumably is full of dangerously sharp metal… However, the surface of the ship is dotted with flight bays and turrets and airlocks – why not use one of those? (I will give the players a choice.)

Logic gaps: A few logic gaps I am struggling with.

• Why are there jump-1 ships still aboard? Why didn’t anyone take them after the civil war 5000 years ago when it was obvious the ship was just drifting? I will probably remove these.
• Given that the ship was set up as a generation ship, why is the inhabitants’ TL so low? Did they stop teaching and learning? Given it took 300 years to cross the Great Rift, clearly the ship was built to be ruthlessly efficient at recycling and maintenance. I can imagine recyclers feeding 3D printers and everything built to last. Yes, 5000 years is much longer, but if anything fails (power/air/heating/water/food), then everyone dies. And they’re still alive.
• If I had been trapped on the asteroid, I could imagine setting up a giant antenna to broadcast a distress signal, hoping that someone would stumble across us. It might be broken now, of course.
• The asteroid ship itself is truly huge and an engineering marvel. It must have taken years to build, and I imagine there might even be records of its construction back in Gushemege Sector. 

Of course, I can fix all these, but I find it slightly frustrating that I have to.

Overall

Overall, I found Fate of the Sky Raiders disappointing. While I like the big idea of a huge asteroid ship travelling the stars, I don’t like the randomly generated execution. Maybe that’s me, but I feel like I’ve been given an outline and I now need to construct an adventure.

I know that’s how some of the old Traveller adventures worked, but it’s a very different approach to the first two parts of the series.

And unlike the previous two parts, I don’t feel I can run Fate of the Sky Raiders as written. I need to make too many changes.

Coming soon: Fate of the Sky Raiders session #1.

Previously: Trail session #5 Rescuing Loraine or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders (or my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders).

Trail of the Sky Raiders session #5: Rescuing Lorain

I’m running FASA’s 1982 Trail of the Sky Raiders, and this is my report of session #5 of Trail, or session #11 of our overall Sky Raiders campaign.

Click here to read my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders. (Or if you want to start from the very beginning, here’s my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders.)

Oh yes, spoilers ahoy!

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).

(Jon has bowed out of the game for the time being.)

Standoff at the starport

We started the session with the Travellers in their G-Carrier after successfully finding an old Sky Raiders ship. As they approached the League of Suns starport, they saw on their sensors a Descarothe Hegemony Navy cutter. Luckily, they picked it up on their sensors before it saw them, so the PCs landed out of sight.

From their hiding place, they contacted Timo, who was aboard the Tyrant’s Fate (his Type-S scout ship). Timo told them the Hegemony wanted to arrest the Travellers for violating their airspace. The League were complying because they didn’t want to start a diplomatic incident (and they are outnumbered on Qarant).

The PCs decided to deceive the Hegemony into thinking they were aboard the Tyrant’s Fate, and once they’d done that, Timo took it into orbit. Whether it was successful or not, the PCs then turned back towards the archaeological dig to rescue Lorain.

First, though, they had to find her.

Finding Lorain

The Travellers identified four potential locations for Lorain: any one of three digging camps, or the command post.

Starting with the digging camps, they put the G-Carrier down nearby, then used their drones to try to spot Lorain. (We did this as a task chain using Stealth,  Electronics (remote ops), and Recon.) They eventually found Lorain at the command post.

(An aside. These drones are really useful. The players are making a lot of use of them, and they’re so useful I should probably give them to the bad guys as well. Maybe in a later game.)

So, how to rescue Lorain?

Rescuing Lorain

Under the cover of darkness, the PCs took out three sentries with their stunners, tied them up, and took their uniforms. (And aren’t stun guns good?)

They scouted around the command post, but failed to find Lorain.

I reminded them that their stunned sentries might know something, and a little while later the PCs learned the layout of the command post (which I had to invent – why wasn’t there a map?) and where Lorain was being held.

Felix and Sir Sidderon went into the command post, while Mustafa prepared to steal one of the Hegemony’s air/rafts and disabled the other. (I had nudged them to think about their escape – the plan is to leave via the balcony.)

Inside the command post, Felix and Sir Sidderon got the drop on the guards outside Lorain’s room and stunned them both. They entered the room, found Lorain, and started to escape when another door opened – it was Kalamanaru himself. Kalamanaru hit the alarm button, and Sir Sidderon stunned him, dropping him like a sack of potatoes.

Yeah, not quite like this.

With the alarms raised, Lorain and her rescuers climbed aboard Mustafa’s stolen air/raft, but a bullet hit the air/raft, causing it to crash halfway between the command post and where the PCs had stashed their G-Carrier.

(I can’t remember now exactly what happened, but I think Mustafa failed his air/raft roll. We hadn’t discussed failure before the roll (I really should remember to do that), so I asked Tom to roll a D6, with 1 being the worst case and 6 being best. Tom rolled a four, so I decided that the air/raft made it some of the way.)

So with the Hegemony troops closing in, Sir Sidderon laid down suppressing fire while Felix remotely patched into the G-Carrier. With the G-Carrier running, Mustafa remotely piloted it to rescue them, and then they took it straight up into orbit to dock with the Tyrant’s Fate, and into jump.

Safe at last!

And that was pretty much the end of the adventure—the rest was exposition and setting up Fate of the Sky Raiders.

Lorain was pleased to be rescued, disappointed she didn’t get to see the Sky Raiders ship, but pleased with everything the PCs had recorded and taken.

At the university, she analysed the data crystals (Tom complained that she didn’t have to make a roll…) and I told them the history of the Sky Raiders and their asteroid ship. (Terry immediately picked up on the asteroid ship – perhaps it’s still out there! I assured him it was.)

I also explained that they are invited to accompany Lorain aboard the Inquisitor to find the missing asteroid ship. The asteroid ship is found, and it’s massive. But when Lorain, her team and the PCs go to board the asteroid ship, the Inquisitor backs off and jumps away, stranding them…

Which is how Fate of the Sky Raiders starts. We’re not playing next week, partly because Tom and I are both at a weekend-long freeform and I expect to be tired, but also because, having read Fate of the Sky Raiders, I need to work out how to run it. But more of that later.

Next time

I imagine the next couple of posts will be freeform larp-related, but after that, I’ll return to Traveller with my review of Fate of the Sky Raiders, followed by my session reports. (And after that, I think I’d like to be a player for a while.)

Coming soon: My review of Fate of the Sky Raiders.

Previously: Session #4 Island hopping on Qarant or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders (or my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders).

Trail of the Sky Raiders session #4: Island hunting on Qarant

I’m running FASA’s 1982 Trail of the Sky Raiders, and this is my report of session #4 of Trail, or session #10 of our overall Sky Raiders campaign.

Click here to read my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders. (Or if you want to start from the very beginning, here’s my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders.)

Oh yes, spoilers ahoy!

Oops…

As I prepared for this session, I realised I had forgotten something rather fundamental. In Trail, shortly after Lorain is kidnapped, the bad guys ambush the PCs and try to take the plate from them. The idea is that with Lorain and the plate, the bad guys can find the treasure they think is hidden in the city on Qarant.

Without the plate, though, there isn’t much point in kidnapping Lorain. (And arguably, kidnapping Lorain is an illogical thing to do – there are other people who can translate the plate, and kidnapping a high-profile academic is so much more suspicious than simply paying a scholar. But anyway.)

But while the PCs were having fun in Alzenei City, I forgot all about the bad guy’s plan and didn’t try to take the plate from them. (Which is actually a shame, as the PCs made 3D copies just in case.)

So I need to reframe Qarant. I think the bad guys’ plan is that by kidnapping Lorain, they hope to lure the PCs (and the plate) to Qarant to rescue her. They have spies in the League team who will report as soon as they see the PCs – and will also keep their eyes open for the plate.

So we’ll see what happens.

The Travellers

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

Jon can’t make it this week, so it’s just the four of us.

Island hunting

Before arriving at Qarant, the Travellers studied the inscription on the plate and realised they needed to find an island in a river. As Qarant has one significant river, the Zanatar, they focused on that and decided to conduct a survey along its entire length.

This is not in Trail of the Sky Raiders, so I rolled 2D and told them they had identified seven potential islands of interest (ignoring lots of tiny river islands obviously not worth looking at). Five of these are in the League of Suns-controlled area, with the final two being in Hegemon territory.

So they flew their Type S Scout to each location, then used drones and the air/raft to study each island in detail (a task chain involving Electronics (remote ops), Recon and Archaeology). While they planned that, I typed “Give me seven different descriptions for a large island in the middle of a large river (on an alien world)” into ChatGPT and used those descriptions.

Despite some excellent rolls, the Travellers failed to find anything of significance (because they were looking in the wrong place). For one island, I told them there were signs that the river had shifted in the 5,000 years since the ruins were built. (That was a hint.)

For the two islands in Hegemony territory, I created a countdown clock with five markers. I told them that each time they failed a roll in the task chains, I would mark the clock and apply the negative modifier to the next roll. The first island went smoothly, and I made only one mark. But then bad rolls on the last island meant that I filled the rest of the clock (despite succeeding overall on the task, thanks to a heroic last roll) – and a Hegemony air/raft appeared, causing the PCs to flee.

Once they had come up blank, I suggested (via Drew) that they might look at the ruins, as wasn’t that where the artefacts were found?

A couple of minutes later, Terry said, “I’ve found it.” He had spotted the hidden island on the map Dumaer’s girlfriend gave them several sessions ago. (It’s nicely done – it’s really obvious if you know what you’re looking for, yet hard to see if you don’t.)

The temple

Back at the League starport, Drew arranged a G-carrier for the PCs and their equipment. They then headed off to the Hegemon dig and the temple on the island. (Drew asked, “Aren’t we rescuing Lorain?” “Not yet,” was the reply.)

The PCs evaded any patrols and made it to the temple on the island, where they worked their way through it to find the treasure (a Sky Raiders ship) at the bottom. I didn’t worry about the event rolls or anything like that – there was no time pressure because the Hegemony troops had no idea they were there.

Once they had taken anything of value (lots of photographs, computer memory crystals, some trinkets and old bones), the Travellers headed back to the League starport to plan their next move.

Next week

Trail of the Sky Raiders is pretty much done. There’s only the loose end of Lorain to tie up, and the players plan to rescue her next time.

However, I am going to throw them a few curveballs:

• When they arrive at the starport, they find the Hegemon Navy’s cutter there. The Hegemon want to arrest the PCs for violating Hegemon airspace. (They really want the plate, though.)
• Gant Sprech, the starport’s General Manager (and the League’s head honcho on Qarant) will require evidence that Lorain is present on Qarant and is being held against her will before they can act.
• And finally, should the PCs ever return to Alzenei, they discover that Felix’s house has been burgled (Kalamanaru’s goons broke in to look for the plate).

So we’ll see how all that pans out. And I’d better read Fate of the Sky Raiders and work out how to run that.

Next: Session #5: Rescuing Lorain

Previously: Session #3: Not breaking in, or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders (or my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders).

Trail of the Sky Raiders session #3: Not breaking in

I’m running FASA’s 1982 Trail of the Sky Raiders, and this is my report of session #3 of Trail, or session #9 of our overall Sky Raiders campaign.

Click here to read my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders. (Or if you want to start from the very beginning, here’s my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders.)

Oh yes, there will be spoilers. A lot of them.

The Travellers

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

Jon can’t make it this week, so it’s just the four of us.

Alzenei Day 6: Lokhav’s apartment

The Travellers suspect Lokhav of kidnapping Lorain Messandi and have decided to break into Lokhav’s 17th-floor apartment using their air/raft. (We left it last session with them outside the apartment block.)

Between sessions, I decided that Lokhav lived with his girlfriend, Ket, and that she would be at home. But the players didn’t know that yet.

So, as we started, I wondered aloud what sort of measures a typical TL 12 apartment block might take to prevent ne’er-do-wells from using air/rafts to break in. And Tom suggested a 3m-wide anti-antigravity field to repel air/rafts. Plus, there are air/raft garages on the roof and a reception with a concierge-bot on the ground floor. (And they are structurally designed with air/raft impacts in mind. It’s not often I call for a civil engineering roll!)

(In hindsight, I should have said that Alzenei’s air/rafts were all autonomous vehicles – so there would be no garage as people would just rent one when they needed it. Maybe I’ll save that for the next TL12 city .)

While the Travellers are dithering in the air/raft, working out a plan, one of the apartment windows closes. There’s someone inside! Is it Lokhav? (The windows are TL 12 privacy screens, so they can’t see inside.)

The robo-concierge

Felix decides to bluff his way past the robo-concierge, so I channel Total Recall’s Johnny Cab. The robo-concierge is extremely helpful, but won’t let just anyone in – and eventually puts Felix through the Lokhav’s apartment.

Felix then has a slightly awkward conversation with Ket, Lokhav’s girlfriend. I rolled really low on her reaction roll (3), so she was extremely suspicious of Felix and his frankly sketchy reasons for wanting to come up. Felix made a great Deception roll, but it wasn’t enough to overcome Ket’s hostility. (Which is a shame, as Ket would have told him that Lokhav was home and had called to tell her he was going off-planet with work for about a month.)

So Felix then hacks the robo-concierge and gets up to the 17th-floor hallway, with doors to three different apartments. There’s nowhere to hide, but there are cameras, so Felix listens at the door. It sounds like Ket is talking on a vidphone (she is!), but Felix can’t make out the words.

After scrubbing the robo-concierge and camera files, Felix leaves, and the players decide to call it a night.

Alzenei City: Day 7

Alzenei starport

After failing to get very far with Lokhav’s apartment, the players are a little despondent, so I reminded them that at the end of the last session, they said they wanted to investigate the starport, talk to the police and translate the inscriptions on the mysterious plate.

(I’m not sure whether this is a function of my GMing or Trail’s design, but the players' despondency surprised me, given how much more Trail had for them to find out. Trail has loads more information they can learn, albeit not all relevant at this point.)

So the PCs headed to the starport, which (as established before) consists of a highport and downport, connected by a beanstalk. There, the PCs learn that there are two ships in port - theirs, and an A2 Far Trader called the Diamond.

However, another ship, the Type A Free Trader Golden Dreamer (operated by Kalaman Enterprises) had left earlier this morning. It filed a flight plan for Desaekhe via Qarant. Most suspiciously, a family of four was bumped from the Golden Dreamer just before it left, replaced by some Kalaman Enterprises operatives. 

The Travellers hack into the starport’s CCTV systems (using a skill chain) and see Lorain, Lokhav and a couple of thugs boarding the Golden Dreamer. Lorain looks under duress – she’s not going by choice.

All the signs are pointing to Qarant…

And I still can’t say “hegemony.”

The Institute

The players are all for jumping into their ship and heading straight to Qarant, but I suggest they do a bit of research first to learn more about the situation they are getting into. A quick check of the library data reveals that Qarant is jointly administered by the League of Suns (who have an E-class starport and a dig run by the Institute for System Studies) and the Descarothe Hegemony (who have another E-class starport next to their archaeological dig). Qarant’s entire population consists of the archaeologists and their support teams, and we have a short discussion about tech levels (which I’ve mentioned here before).

So the Travellers head to the Institute for System Studies for a letter of introduction, and bump into Drew Kensing, the useless noble who is in love with Lorain. Felix rescued Drew from a snikersnak on Mirayn, so I’m sure that will come up again. Anyway, it is agreed that Drew will accompany the PCs to Qarant and get in the way make introductions at the Institute dig site on Qarant.

Then the PCs go shopping and load up with TL12 goodies.

Jump

Finally, en route to Qarant, Sir Sidderon translates the text on the plate. Will the players spot the clue in the text, or will I need to use Lorain? We’ll find out next week.

And there we leave it. I think we have maybe one or two sessions left – and then onto the finale, Fate of the Sky Raiders.

Coming soon: Session #4: Island hunting on Qarant

Previously: Session #2: Alzenei City,  or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders (or my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders).

Trail of the Sky Raiders session #2: Alzenei City

I’m running FASA’s 1982 Trail of the Sky Raiders, and I’m already improvising wildly! This is session #2 of Trail, or session #8 of our overall Sky Raiders campaign.

Click here to read my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders. (Or if you want to start from the very beginning, here’s my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders.)

Oh yes, there will be spoilers. A lot of them.

The Travellers

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

Jon can’t make it this week, so it’s just the four of us.

Alzenei City

The Travellers are in Alzenei City, and we started with some unfinished business from the last session.

The map and calling Lorain

We left the Travellers in possession of a map. At the end of the last session, Terry suggested running the map through an LLM-style AI to identify where it might be. Alzenei is TL12, so it seemed eminently feasible, and a successful roll later, I told them that the map showed an archaeological dig on Qarant, a nearby planet operated by both the friendly League of Suns and the hostile Descarothe Hegemony. Unfortunately, the dig is on the Hegemony side of the border

The PCs also called Lorain and arranged to meet her the day after tomorrow at their ship, the Tyrant’s Fate.

The call was interesting. At this point, the PCs already suspect that there is a mole in Lorain’s office, because Margayle told them that Ben Dumael died after calling Lorain’s office. So they were acting really cagy in arranging a meeting with Lorain. And despite all my attempts, they refused to show the plate during the call (which is what Trail needs).

So Lorain agreed to meet them on their ship in two days.

Killing time in Azenei City

With a day to kill, the PCs went their separate ways.

• Timo went into orbit and brought their ship, the Tyrant’s Fate, down to the lowport.
• Felix took his daughter, Josine, to the zoo. He pampered her with presents and promised to write more.
• Sir Sidderon had Lupin seen to (claws clipped, vaccinations updated, that sort of thing). He checked to see if they were being followed, but couldn’t see anyone.
• Mustafa failed to find cargo for Qarant, but learned that there is growing tension between the League of Suns and the Hegemony, which is bad for business.

Meeting Lorain

Finally, Lorain turned up at the Tyrant’s Fate, and the players had an incredibly awkward conversation with Lorain where they tried not to reveal too much, making Lorain suspicious. The conversation is awkward until the PCs open up and show Lorain the Sky Raider plate.

So the PCs explained to Lorain how they got the plate – and what happened to Dumaer. (Lorain had heard of Dumaer, but not seen him since before the Mirayn adventure. She certainly wasn’t aware that he’d tried to contact her recently.)

Lorain wanted to take the plate for study. She was interested in its origins, as it might justify her father’s theory that the extinct civilisation on Qarant was the victim of the Sky Raiders. (This is buried in library data, but luckily I remembered it.)

Lorain took a holo-recording of the plate and agreed to approach her sponsors and try to get funding for an expedition to Qarant for Cr: 500,000. She had a meeting with them in two days, at which point she would call the PCs. (I realise that any academics in the audience are laughing hysterically at this super-compressed funding timeline…)

Alzenei Day 5: The writing on the plate

With a day to kill, Sir Sidderon had the bright idea of fabricating 3D-printed copies of the Sky Raiders plate. (I have no doubt nobody considered this as a possibility in 1982…)

While cleaning it for copying, the fabricating facility discovered writing on the back. Without knowing what the writing said, the PCs instructed the fabricators NOT to copy it onto the replicas.

Trail of the Sky Raiders points the PCs to a learned NPC who can help them. However, between Felix’s Archaeology and Sir Sidderon’s Linguistics skills, they decide to have a crack at deciphering the writing. They roll well, but I decide it will take a couple of days of focused study.

Alzenei Day 6: Lorain kidnapped

Finally, I get to kidnap Lorain! 

So Lorain failed to call the PCs, and doesn’t answer her phone. So the PCs headed to her workplace, and discovered that she had been kidnapped. Also, her assistant, Lokhav, is nowhere to be found.

Suspicious of Lokhav (and rightly so), the players decided to break into his 17th-floor apartment using their air/raft.

But as we are approaching the end of the session and I haven’t planned for this (and Trail of the Sky Raiders doesn’t even mention Lokhav’s apartment), we end the session there.

Coming soon: Session#3: Not breaking in

Previously: Session #1: Leaving the railroad or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders (or my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders).

Trail of the Sky Raiders session #1: Leaving the railroad

We’ve started session #1 of the 1982 FASA adventure for Traveller, Trail of the Sky Raiders, and the players have already taken us in a direction the adventure didn’t expect!  (Or session #7 of our overall Sky Raiders campaign.)

Click here to read my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders. (Or if you want to start from the very beginning, here’s my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders.)

Oh yes, there will be spoilers. A lot of them.

The Travellers

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

We’re starting with three players this week, as Jon, who plays Timo, couldn’t be with us as he was stranded in Shropshire.

A bar on Nomael

Trail of the Sky Raiders starts on Nomael, where the PCs spot a familiar-looking artefact in a bar – it is a Sky Raider’s artefact!

So that’s where we started, eight months after the last session. The Travellers had been paid for their adventure on Mirayn, were reunited with Timo’s Type S scout ship and were now on Nomael for some reason or other.

In the bar, they saw the artefact, realised it might be Sky Raiders' treasure, and bought it from the barman. The barman told them that an ex-Scout called Dumael had sold it to him. He didn’t know where Dumael had got it from.

First mistake

I made my first mistake in this scene.

The idea in Trail is that the players spot the Sky Raiders trinket, buy it, and then go to Alzenai to show it to Lorain Messandi. I thought that that would be enough, but Tom asked what his character’s motivation might be. So I mentioned that the similar-looking piece they saw back on Mirayn had been valued at Cr: 500,000. “Ahah, that’s my motivation,” said Tom. I should have led with that…

Chasing Dumael

Before leaving Nomael for Alzenei, the PCs decided to see what they could find out about Dumael, the mysterious scout who had sold the Sky Raiders trinket to the barman. They quickly learned that Dumael hasn’t been seen for a while, that he is based out of Alzenei, and that his ship is a Type-S called the Blue Viper.

The PCs also learned of the connection between Kalamanaru and the Descarothe Hegemony. It turns out that I find “hegemony” really hard to pronounce, which is unfortunate as I know it’s going to come up a lot…

(At this point, I’m already dipping into the Trail’s clues. Trail states that the barman remembers the name of the person who sold him the artefact, but it feels very early for this information to be coming out. Never mind, I’m sure it won’t be a problem…)

Alzenei City and TL 12 wonders

Trail describes Alzenei City in slightly pedestrian terms: “With ground transport obsolete, buildings are separated by wide, parklike malls; transportation is now largely tied to the network of subshuttle lines that apply grav technology to an underground mass transit system with great economy, efficiency and pleasing aesthetic effects.”

I wanted something a little more futuristic and different, so with my player’s help, we fleshed out Alzenei City:

• A beanstalk connects the ground and orbital elements of Alzenei’s starport.
• Alzenei City is partly submerged, and a kind of coral is a common building material.
• Genetic gill modifications are common (although Felix, who comes from Alzenei, could never afford them).
• A common form of transport is the personal G-tube, a two-person anti-grav sphere.
• Felix owns a small bungalow, which is probably a bit cramped with all four of them.
• Felix’s ex-wife and 12-year-old daughter live in Alzenei City, somewhere.
• Aquaria are popular on Alzenei.

And with that little bit of world-building done…

Chasing Dumael (again)

Rather than tell Lorain about the Sky Raiders artefact (as Trail expects), my group decided to learn more about Dumael first.

At the Scout base, they learned that he hired himself out for various unnamed duties, but that he had turned up dead in an alley three months ago. He did, however, have a girlfriend, Margayle Sharnon, in startown.

Felix knew of Margayle's, and led the PCs to it. There, they found a run-down lounge bar that had clearly seen better days (the aquarium had guppy-blight).

Margayle was out when they arrived, but told the PCs about Dumaer when she turned up. She told them that he vanished after arranging a meeting with Lorain’s office. He had seen her broadcast about the Sky Raiders, and had got excited about some artefacts she had. Then he died.

Margayle gave the PCs a map that she thought was linked, but didn’t know exactly where it was of.

(All this seems to be coming out extremely early. The players are already suspicious of someone in Lorain’s office, despite me trying not to signal that too hard.)

My other mistake

I wish I had played up Margayle’s grief more than I did. My defence is that the players had gone off piste and I hadn’t prepared Margayle in as much depth as I might normally have done. (Arguably, Trail itself pays lip service to her grief as well. She’s not even included in the NPC list.)

Next time

My top tip for anyone running a continuing ttrpg is, at the end of a session, ask the players what they plan to do next. So that’s what I did, and this is what they’ve told me they want to do.

• Work out where the map comes from. Scan it and let a computer match it with existing features (like giving it to a LLM).
• Talk to Lorain (at last!)
• Ask the police about Dumaer’s murder
• See Josine (nice – a bit of character stuff)

We’re taking a week off (because I will be recovering from Consequences), but we’re playing again at the start of December.

Coming soon: Session #2: Alzenei City

Previously: Session #6: Tomb of the Sky Raiders or start right back at the beginning with my review of Legend of the Sky Raiders (or my review of Trail of the Sky Raiders).

Trail of the Sky Raiders review

Trail of the Sky Raiders was written by J Andrew Keith with art by William H Keith Jr and maps by Loren Wiseman. It was published by FASA, way back in 1982. It is the second part of a trilogy for Traveller, preceded by Legend of the Sky Raiders and followed by Fate of the Sky Raiders. 

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’ve completed Legend of the Sky Raiders with my group, and we’re about to start Trail of the Sky Raiders. This is my first-impressions-ish review of Trail, and it's a bit too spoilery, so I’ve delayed this (and the subsequent session reports) until my players are far enough through the adventure for this review not to spoil it.

Physically, Trail of the Sky Raiders was a LBB-sized 56-page book with extra maps. I am using pdfs.

Oh, spoilers ahead…

The plot

The Sky Raiders is a semi-legendary culture which flourished 5300 years ago in the Far Frontiers sector. Almost all evidence of the Sky Raiders is derived from oral traditions, myths, and legends from a number of separate worlds in the Jungleblut subsector. Their origins, fate, and all details of their culture remain unknown…

Trail of the Sky Raiders picks up a few months after Legend concludes. Trail does include a way for those who haven’t completed Legend of the Sky Raiders to get into the adventure, but that’s not my group. (I imagine most groups play this as a trilogy.)

Anyway, Trail starts with yet more contortions to get the Travellers to where the adventure wants them. Some months after their adventures on Mirayn (in Legend), the Travellers are struggling as the ship they have stolen has turned into a money pit, when they spot an old metal plate in a bar that they recognise as a Sky Raiders artefact…

Except that my group of Travellers didn’t steal their ship, and they have their own Type S Scout ship anyway. Still, I didn’t worry too much about that – I knew that I just had to introduce the artefact. My players would recognise a McGuffin when they see one and would do the rest.

The PCs go to Alzenei to show the artefact to Lorain Messandi, their patron from Legend of the Sky Raiders. Unfortunately, before they meet her, she is kidnapped, and ruffians attempt to steal the artefact from the players.

Their investigation then takes the players to Qarant and an archaeological dig, where the players learn that a) the bad guys have the other half of the artefact, and b) their information is incomplete.

“They’re digging in the wrong place,” to quote Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yes, the artefact is the Staff of Ra, and the dig on Qarant is Tanis...

Anyway, our heroes have to rescue Lorain and then solve the puzzle, leading them to the treasure that sets up episode three, Fate of the Sky Raiders.

The investigation

The first part of the adventure is an investigation into Lorain’s kidnapping.

The investigation is split into locations – the Institute, the Starport, the Scout Base, Startown, and so on. In a couple of cases, there are core clues (hey, we’re playing Gumshoe), but the PCs can uncover many others. 

Unfortunately, the general advice for running an investigation is a little overwritten: 

While searching for clues and information, the general guidelines presented below should be followed, modified by the referee as needed to cope with unexpected player actions. In every instance, however, the referee should be ready to improvise heavily, to drop clues into the course of the game that will set players on a new, profitable path of thought or action, even when their own inquiries would not normally give rise to this information.

Unfortunately, Trail doesn’t make it easy to “improvise heavily” as the clues are written as if they are found in specific places. For example, some clues are found on Lorain’s computer. However, the information could just as easily be told to them by a member of staff, or found in a news report, or some other way. So I’ve taken the text and (where I can) stripped it of its context so I can respond to my players’ approach.

I guess I can forgive Trail this – ttrpgs weren’t even a decade old by this point, and this would have been one of the first published investigations.

Anyway, there are enough clues to point the PCs to their next location: an archaeological dig on Qarant.

Qarant

Getting to the dig on Qarant is complicated by the fact that the planet is occupied by both the League of Suns (Imperial-leaning good guys) and the Descarothe Hegemony (Zhodani-leaning bad guys). And the dig is on the wrong side of the border.

So the PCs need to figure out where to land, how to get behind enemy lines, rescue Lorain, and find the treasure. Because there is treasure, which, if all goes well, the PCs will find before the bad guys. And that treasure leads specifically to the trilogy’s climax: Fate of the Sky Raiders.

So Qarant is broadly a sandbox – it’s up to the PCs to make a plan, and it’s up to the GM to react and respond.

There’s even a complicated bit about exploring an ancient temple that involves abstractly tracking how much time everything takes. (There isn’t a map – that would be too much like D&D, I guess.) This is needed because the bad guys are also searching for the players (the Referee rolls dice for that). But that’s a bit OSR for me – I expect I will montage the temple exploration, and I’ll bring the bad guys in when it makes dramatic sense.

My thoughts

Overall, Trail seems less railroady than Legend of the Sky Raiders. There’s a similarly artificial set-up, but once you’re over that, the adventure seems pretty solid: an investigation part to figure out what’s going on and where Lorain is, followed by a tricky situation to rescue her and a neat prize at the end of it.

(And frankly, that’s the model for so many other investigative scenarios. Most Call of Cthulhu scenarios follow that model.)

I think it’s also going to be shorter. There’s less stumbling about in the jungle, but we’ll see.

Criticisms

Trail of the Sky Raiders is pretty good, but it’s not perfect. Some fairly significant problems could derail the adventure, and I have a few minor criticisms. My minor gripes:

• The link between Legend and Trail adventure is pretty clunky. Once again, the PCs are down on their luck and desperate for cash. Thinking about it, it might have been nice if Lorain had remembered Dumaer talking about the plate and sending the PCs on a mission to track it down. (Or even just asking them to keep an eye out for anything Sky Raiders related, and to bring it to her.)
• While the clues are nicely grouped by location, they are still cluttered and overwritten. Clues are presented as being in specific places, without considering that the same information might be found elsewhere. (I know I should make allowances given this was 1982, but I see the same mistake being made today.)
• A clearer layout would help manage the clues, particularly mixing them up with the narrative. (I copied everything into a MS Word document, edited it down and simplified it to make it easier for me to run.)
• I was confused by references to the Serendipity, which turns out to be the name of the PC’s ship. But that assumes the PCs have the ship as described in the setup – my group doesn’t.
• As I discussed in an earlier post, the tech level on Qarant makes no sense.

What’s missing?

I felt a few elements were missing from Trail.

A countdown clock. Or at least some timed events. The investigation on Alzenei tells the GM to break each day into four periods (morning, afternoon, evening, night) and that the PCs can investigate one area at a time. (And must sleep for two periods in eight.)

But there’s no actual time pressure. It doesn’t matter if the PCs dawdle. There are a couple of events, but basically nothing really happens if the PCs take their time. 

Drew and Talia. Where are Drew and Talia? Drew is the noble who funded Lorain’s expedition in Legend and is in love with her, and Talia is Lorain’s friend and colleague. I would expect both to make an appearance here, as they already have a connection with the PCs. (I will add them if I can.)

Really big problem #1: The Sky Raiders plate

There’s a structural problem with the Sky Raiders plate: it has writing on the back.

The players aren’t told this when they first get it; it’s something the Alzenei research team tells them. The bad guys mustn’t get this writing first, so the players aren’t told about it until after they have transmitted a telefax of it (I’ll get to that below) to Lorain. (The telefax is then intercepted by a bad guy, which starts events moving, but crucially, the telefax doesn’t have the writing on it.)

This is never told to the GM. The bad guys must not learn about the writing – as that will give them the key clue that means they find the treasure before the players.

I only worked it out when I realised that I would need to describe the plate to my players, without mentioning the writing. Annoyingly, the image on page 4 of the book shows writing on the piece, but maybe that’s different writing. (It’s not an image to show to the players, as it shows both pieces together. But still.)

I don't think the players are supposed to see this...

During our game, the players wanted to make 3D copies of the plate. I ummed and erred, and one of the players suggested that the writing only appeared when the plate was cleaned up ready, for scanning. I readily agreed. Phew.

Really big problem #2: Sidestepping the adventure

Another issue is that the PCs could completely sidestep parts of the adventure. I’ve started running this, and my players have already got the map of the dig and worked out its location before they spoke to Lorain.

They then discovered the writing on the back, and thanks to having the right skills (and some good rolls), can translate without anyone’s help. So they can go straight to Qarant and find the treasure without involving Lorain at all. (In which case, she isn’t captured, and that part of the investigation doesn’t happen – and neither does her rescue.)

Now, that didn’t happen and Lorain was kidnapped, but at one point it was a possibility. And it’s more of an issue that Trail doesn’t really allow for that in its writing. It assumes that the players will follow the path as directed.

(Hmm. Does that make it a railroad? I don’t think so. Trail expects the PCs to take a definite path through the adventure, but it doesn’t take agency away from the players, which to me defines a railroad.)

Really big problem #3: The link to Fate of the Sky Raiders

Perhaps the biggest problem is the link to the Fate of the Sky Raiders, which is contained in some data tapes the PCs find.

If the dice roll badly, the bad guys might arrive early and capture the PCs, leaving the data tapes in their hands. 

And for Fate of the Sky Raiders to start as written, Lorain must end with the data tapes, and the bad guys must not know they exist.

If that doesn’t happen, the GM needs to rewrite Fate of the Sky Raiders to make it work. I’m sure that’s possible, but it’s a lot easier if the game goes as expected.

The far future in 1982: telefaxes

The far future was even further away in 1982 than it is today, and Trail features a marvellously futuristic device: the telefax. “She requests, strongly, that a telefax of the artefact be transmitted by phone (a standard feature of the Alzenei phone system) so she can begin work on screening it at once.”

Telefaxes, eh? How tech level 12!

Overall

Despite the niggles, I like Trail of the Sky Raiders, and so far, my players appear to be enjoying playing through it.

Next: Session #1: Leaving the railroad