Just finished a Traveller session with my sons, 11 and 14. We've played a bit over the years. They've never watched Firefly. Last year we played alot of mercenary/cut-throat cyberpunk. Which is why I was so moved that tonight the boys replicated The Train Job episode from Firefly almost exactly, and totally unplanned. So cool!
The world is Ubar. Desert world, thin atmosphere, too thin to breath, inhabited by ranchers and miners who, like the miners in Total Recall, get shafted by Orion Mining and suffer unprecedented levels of birth deformities. Many are Judge Dredd/Strontium Dog style mutants. In my notes, they have started a rebellion, sabotage, bombs, and just hired an offworld terror expert and a ton of SMGs to kick start their bid for freedom and fair play from Orion Mining.
On my boys side - hired to run through the old Amber Zone SCAM from an old JTAS. Smash up an execs office to cover his financial misdeeds, and he gives you info and security codes on a cargo in a nearby warehouse he has been tracking through the company's database. They steal this cargo.
Turns out it is illegal guns - SMGs, belonging to the mutants. My players try to sell the cargo on world (they live there at the moment, running an ATV and getting paid for grunt jobs). Of course this offworld terror expert Kaplan masquerades as a buyer to get the guns back.
After a desert rendezvous and gunbattle they capture Kaplan and hear the whole story. They find that although Kaplan had offered them twice the going rate for the guns, he hasn't a penny, the mutants had stolen from the company and saved what they had to buy the guns and hire him. Their plight is desperate. My boys say, meh, and plan to hand him to the cops for a bounty. Until, at the last minute, my older son says he feels really sorry for the mutants, wishes he could help, and just before they drive their ATV into the lift, they say: what will you do if we let you go. (The lift is a vast warehouse looking lift that lowers cargo/vehicles/people 2 miles down into a well-populated wealthy and irrigated asteroid impact crater where Crater City sits, full of rich breathable air and rich people).
He says, I'll never look for you, I'll give you the Cr10,000 fee the mutants offered me. My two sons then go for brokle and say, look we're sorry, we'll give the entire cargo of SMGs back to the mutants and let you go. Let us have the Cr10,000 fee instead of a government bounty.
And if there's anyway we can help the mutants in their rebellion - count us in!
______________________
It so reminded me of The Train Job, where Mal and co find out how badly the locals need those medical supplies after stealing them, and then drop them back off outside the colony - without any reward.
Very cool ...! And the session was only planned as a deal that goes wrong with bullets and firefights, I planned for the players just to get out alive and learn not to sell illegal cargos again without first doing a bit of in depth research!
So looking forward to next Monday Maybe we can play at the weekend as well!
(I posted this also on RPG.NET)
The world is Ubar. Desert world, thin atmosphere, too thin to breath, inhabited by ranchers and miners who, like the miners in Total Recall, get shafted by Orion Mining and suffer unprecedented levels of birth deformities. Many are Judge Dredd/Strontium Dog style mutants. In my notes, they have started a rebellion, sabotage, bombs, and just hired an offworld terror expert and a ton of SMGs to kick start their bid for freedom and fair play from Orion Mining.
On my boys side - hired to run through the old Amber Zone SCAM from an old JTAS. Smash up an execs office to cover his financial misdeeds, and he gives you info and security codes on a cargo in a nearby warehouse he has been tracking through the company's database. They steal this cargo.
Turns out it is illegal guns - SMGs, belonging to the mutants. My players try to sell the cargo on world (they live there at the moment, running an ATV and getting paid for grunt jobs). Of course this offworld terror expert Kaplan masquerades as a buyer to get the guns back.
After a desert rendezvous and gunbattle they capture Kaplan and hear the whole story. They find that although Kaplan had offered them twice the going rate for the guns, he hasn't a penny, the mutants had stolen from the company and saved what they had to buy the guns and hire him. Their plight is desperate. My boys say, meh, and plan to hand him to the cops for a bounty. Until, at the last minute, my older son says he feels really sorry for the mutants, wishes he could help, and just before they drive their ATV into the lift, they say: what will you do if we let you go. (The lift is a vast warehouse looking lift that lowers cargo/vehicles/people 2 miles down into a well-populated wealthy and irrigated asteroid impact crater where Crater City sits, full of rich breathable air and rich people).
He says, I'll never look for you, I'll give you the Cr10,000 fee the mutants offered me. My two sons then go for brokle and say, look we're sorry, we'll give the entire cargo of SMGs back to the mutants and let you go. Let us have the Cr10,000 fee instead of a government bounty.
And if there's anyway we can help the mutants in their rebellion - count us in!
______________________
It so reminded me of The Train Job, where Mal and co find out how badly the locals need those medical supplies after stealing them, and then drop them back off outside the colony - without any reward.
Very cool ...! And the session was only planned as a deal that goes wrong with bullets and firefights, I planned for the players just to get out alive and learn not to sell illegal cargos again without first doing a bit of in depth research!
So looking forward to next Monday Maybe we can play at the weekend as well!
(I posted this also on RPG.NET)
