The GROGNARD Files: The Pirates of Drinax, Traveller RPG Host: Dirk the Dice Guest: Matthew Sprange (Mongoose Publishing) Date: April 12, 2026

Episode Overview

This episode of The GROGNARD Files dives deeply into Pirates of Drinax, the acclaimed Traveller RPG campaign from Mongoose Publishing. Host Dirk the Dice, co-host Judge Blithey, and special guest Matthew Sprange (head of Mongoose Publishing) discuss the allure of Traveller, the development philosophy at Mongoose, the challenges and joys of running a long-form campaign, and their group’s lived experience traversing the high-adventure, science fiction sandbox of the Trojan Reach. The episode is rich in insights about balancing nostalgia and innovation, running epic sandboxes, and the distinctive nature of modern Traveller.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Publisher Origins & Ethos

• [04:34] – The Birth of Mongoose Publishing

  • Matthew Sprange recounts how Mongoose started "25 years ago... with my business partner Alex, who I've known right back from primary school... scraped together all our savings, which amounted to about £8,000... printed our first D20 book, the Slayer's Guide to Hobgoblins. It did okay. All kind of went from there."
  • Not motivated by chasing trends: "We've never done a game or a book simply because we thought it would make us sell well... We've always done the games and the books that we wanted to play ourselves in the way we wanted to players." [07:15]

• [10:35] – Taking Up the Traveller Mantle

  • Matthew discusses the weight of inheriting Traveller from Mark Miller: “It took us over a year to arrange the deal for Traveller... I said to him, are you sure you're ready to do this, Mark?... He says, yeah, absolutely, Matthew. I'm excited to see what happens next for Traveller. So no pressure there. We've got to come up with something funky.” [11:10]

2. Philosophy of Game Design: Traveller & Beyond

• Editions & Rule Evolution

  • Matthew emphasizes a philosophy of evolving core rules without full resets: “We don't want to do another edition at all because the absolute core of the rules does work... we started doing update books... [the system] is a bunch of mini games and rules components... It's kind of like a Ship of Theseus problem. Is it by default a new edition?” [14:00]

• From Black Books to Modern Traveller

  • "Firstly, it's pretty much the same game. Roll two dice, add mod fives, try and get eight or more. You already know how to play our edition of Traveller. The benefits is that it's got a unified system throughout." [14:52] – Matthew Sprange

• Story & Narrative Tools

  • Stronger narrative emphasis in new Traveller: "We concentrate a lot more on story these days... we will bring the story to you. That's the big difference." [15:17]
  • Introduction of "group narrative" tools, letting players collaboratively tackle larger narrative goals. [16:01]

• Scalability & Flexibility

  • Dirk highlights the campaign’s scalability: "The ability to deal with micro events and vast events using similar rules, logic..." [17:30]
  • Matthew points to upcoming projects and the ambition for Traveller’s 50th anniversary ("2027 is travellers 50th anniversary and we've got a whole lot planned for that." [17:44])

3. The Pirates of Drinax Campaign: Conception & Design

• Genesis & Design Intent

  • Meant to capture “Adventure Path” energy; was originally released in episodic, free-form fashion: “We wanted to create an Adventure Path style campaign... one that we would be releasing for free in 10 parts... It was popular. But when we came to do the new edition... full color art, massive slip case... do something really special.” [18:18]

• Sandbox Philosophy

  • Flexibility is a core appeal: “You can give it the open world aspect, the sandbox aspect as well... I know groups who've played all the way through Pirates of Drinax and haven't actually done any pirating. They're playing the diplomatic side of it. But you can do all of that.” [19:40]
  • "The original idea... we always stop players from being pirates. So let's have a campaign where they get to be pirates." [20:58]

• Supporting Content & Mini-campaigns

  • Emphasis on plug-and-play: “We ended up doing Shadows of Sindol, which is an entire plugin mini campaign... If you decide you're bored of the pirate vessels, you want a capital ship… element class cruisers... it's all in that." [19:40]

• Design Process at Mongoose

  • Matthew outlines the journey: "Paul starts with an idea… writer comes along and starts actually fleshing out, putting meat on the bones, brings up an outline... But with something that large, there's always going to be new ideas creeping in. When they finish their manuscript, it comes to us and that's when we start getting the hammers out..." [21:51]

• The Value of Campaigns

  • "Perceived wisdom for RPG companies is that adventures do not sell... But... you need the Adventures to support the game as a whole. It's the adventures that bring the setting to life." [22:47]
  • Pirates of Drinax now sits among the classic "big campaign" pantheon, alongside campaigns like Enemy Within and Masks of Nyarlathotep. [24:33]

4. Science Fiction Ideas & Social Commentary

• Using SF as Social Lens
  • “Instead of just going on with... spaceships and lasers... we wanted to start looking at concepts of science fiction… like, for example... our first core adventure is all about the importance of maintaining ecosystems… the second one is about supporting local businesses, set against Hong Kong protests at the time... the third, conversion therapy. You won’t find those words in them, but science fiction gets to layer it and it’s just interesting ways to explore what people might be thinking.” [26:04]

5. Community, Supporting Content, and Onboarding

• Community Engagement

  • Discussion of the fragmented but passionate Traveller communities on Reddit, Discord, CotI, and the Mongoose forums: “It’s kind of like an unholy mess at the moment, but it seems to work.” [29:51]

• Entry Points for New Players

  • Mongoose has Explorers Edition and Merchants Edition as entryways ("£15 for a 72 page book"), with plans for a proper starter set soon (2027). [31:45]

The GROGNARD Files Actual Play & Referee Insights: Three-And-A-Half Years with Drinax

1. The Campaign Experience

• Play Setup & Group Dynamics

  • Ran for "three and a half years with a break for summer... same group of players, though we lost Will (Seattle timezone proved too much)." [34:13]
  • Blend of UK, Australia, and briefly the US in Saturday-morning/ZM sessions.

• Campaign’s Sandbox Nature

  • “I think that is one of the key things to admit that it genuinely felt like... a proper sandbox, a proper adventure where anything could happen and it could genuinely go in any different direction." [36:47] – Judge Blithey

• Emphasis on Player Agency & Liberation

  • Dirk: “When you encounter that first scenario, is a sense of liberation... we were quite good. We've got this wealth and we can use this wealth in a different manner. We can determine our path through this." [46:29]
  • The party quickly became entrepreneurial: “The accountants of Drinax kept an account of our manifest... we could set up these different trade routes and we've got this moon base..." [47:24]

• Tension Between Prewritten Scenarios & Sandbox

  • “It makes it trickier to run, is that there is a real contradiction between the pre written scenarios and it wanting you to do what you want to do as players... it becomes quite difficult to shoehorn those scenarios into the adventure without it seeming fake and railroad.” [44:54] – Judge Blithey

2. Political, Economic, and Factional Play

• Court, Factions, and Antagonists

  • The group mainly focused on entrepreneurship, diplomacy, and eventually high-level intrigue, with antagonists naturally emerging from play—notably the corporate empire GDCO. "[We] saw some of the horrific experimentation they were doing, and at that point we decided morally that they were the people we had to stop." [55:10]

• Adaptability & Player-led Focus

  • "You could run Pirates of Drinax and not run any of those scenarios, and it’d still work because there's enough in it to prop it up, really." [53:56] – Judge Blithey

3. Pacing, Structure, and Mini-Games

• Campaign Arc and Seasonality

  • Natural seasons emerged; periods of open-ended sandbox play gave way to tightening focus as "the party’s influence became such that running chicken runs of petty piracy no longer made sense." [57:56]
  • Sessions scaled from small missions to large-scale negotiations, fleet management, and major political events.

• Use of Mini-Games

  • "There are a number of mini-games... forming the empire and recruiting the planets is a mini-game... there's a battle on Drinax and there's a mini-game to deal with that... mass spaceship battles... it's quite a simple little game... Even right to the end where you're negotiating with the Imperium and the Aslan back is a little minigame." [65:53]

4. Moral Choices & Emergent Storytelling

• Dilemmas and Player-Driven Story

  • "There was a lot of... moral choices that you have to make... you find something in the adventure that gives you a big moral choice as to whether to use it or not... Michael always thought it was completely immoral, your character is quite keen on doing it." [62:58]
  • Split in the party over the vision for a new empire: "Some wanted confederation and democracy, others, more control and power." [64:58]

• Science Fiction Ideas and Locations

  • Emphasis on "proper science fiction": “Creating these environments... so imaginative and inventive, that it felt like proper science fiction... a planet called Sink that has a sentient marsh swamp...” [69:23]

5. Referee Tools, Challenges, and Adaptations

• Managing Scope & Avoiding Bogging Down

  • "The biggest risk is getting bogged down in any one of the scenarios... I tried to do the scenario, but look at it and think, what's the kind of endpoint here? Maybe that first chapters, it is a bit tedious, maybe get them right into the action." [87:32]

• Starship Combat & Table Tools

  • Starship combat became a defining element: "It felt to me that 25% of the time, so one in every four sessions involved Starship combat... the way that you organized it... made it exciting. And you used a particular tool... a player mat, almost... tokens on it, your ship stays in the middle and everything moves around you relative to you." [74:40], [75:42]
  • The mini-game approach made large battles engaging and not overwhelming.

• Rules Tweaks & House Rules

  • Luck mechanic (Traveller Companion) was helpful in combat, but could undermine high-stakes social rolls—would restrict to combat use in hindsight. [77:44]
  • Wealth rating instead of counting credits—helpful once a group achieves high status. [78:58]

6. Reflections & Takeaways

• Endings & Campaign Fatigue

  • On finishing: "I feel like I got away with it. I managed to do it. I got away with it." [84:21] – Judge Blithey
  • Endings were less anticlimactic than some other epics: "It feels quite—yeah, it is more Asimov than Star Wars at the end, I'd say. It feels like big scale event that you have been party to rather than just like a bit of a climactic shootout." [85:03]

• Group Buy-in & Commitment

  • Value in having summer breaks to refresh the campaign: "Having a little break for a month or two and then Coming back to it... everyone turned up, everyone does it. There's a commitment all across the board for these things." [85:58]

• Universal Experience, Yet Personal

  • "The delight of all these things is we've all got our collective head cannon of what happened in that over those weeks and months and years of playing. That's the magic of what this hobby does sometimes, isn't it?" [89:59] – Dirk

Notable Quotes

• "We’ve never done a game or a book simply because we thought it would make us sell well... We've always done the games and the books that we wanted to play ourselves in the way we wanted to players.” – Matthew Sprange [07:15]

• “You can give it the open world aspect, the sandbox aspect as well... I know groups who've played all the way through Pirates of Drinax and haven't actually done any pirating. They're playing the diplomatic side of it. But you can do all of that.” – Matthew Sprange [19:40]

• "There is one of the key things to admit that it genuinely felt like... a proper sandbox, a proper adventure where anything could happen and it could genuinely go in any different direction." – Judge Blithey [36:47]

• "The more money you get, your wealth score goes up... Rather than tracking actual credits... That would have been better because it captures not only your value but also some media influence.” – Dirk [81:12]

• “It's filled with those science fiction ideas of what superior intelligences might look like or how do these things rub alongside each other. So it has all the kind of analogies to... 17th century high seas and privateers. But it's also got some ideas just floating around and some of them are just like discarded, aren't they? Like the governess of the planet who's an Android.” – Dirk [72:11]

Timestamps for Important Segments

• Mongoose Publishing Origin Story: 04:34–06:52
• Philosophy of Publishing & Traveller Inheritance: 07:15–11:53
• Traveller Rules & Layout Philosophy: 11:53–16:01
• Pirates of Drinax Campaign Conception: 18:09–22:47
• Why Run Big Campaigns & the Value of Adventures: 22:47–25:35
• Science Fiction Themes & Social Commentary: 26:04–27:49
• Community & Onboarding New Players: 29:36–31:45
• Referee and Playgroup Experience (Open Discussion): 33:18–90:39

Memorable Moments

• Comparing Pirates of Drinax to Sid Meier’s Pirates: The group draws direct comparison between Drinax and the open-world structure of Sid Meier’s computer game Pirates, capturing the ‘privateer with a Letter of Marque’ feel. [37:41]
• NPCs as Dynamic Tools: The Android child-governor and the pop-star dictator both emerge as captivating, memorable figures, showing how NPCs can grow in prominence according to the group’s focus. [72:43]
• Group's Entrepreneurial Spreadsheet: "The accountants of Drinax... kept an account of our manifest... started thinking like entrepreneurs." [47:24]
• Negotiating Empire’s Future: Real arguments arose about whether to build a confederated, democratic alliance, or an authoritarian one—reflecting the open, emergent storytelling that Drinax enables. [64:58]
• Starship Combat as a Core Activity: One in every four sessions featured intense starship battles, often resolved by a single dice roll for maximum tension. [74:40, 77:27]

Final Thoughts

Pirates of Drinax is celebrated here not just as a massive, flexible sandbox for Traveller with endless hooks, but as a campaign that genuinely enables player agency, moral exploration, and emergent science fiction storytelling. Mongoose’s design ethos—grounded in love for the games and an openness to both nostalgia and innovation—yields a structure that supports variety, invention, and group-driven narrative. For GMs considering running Drinax, be ready to adapt on the fly, track evolving influence, and handle both epic intrigue and pulpy, swashbuckling adventure.

For show notes, resources, and to join the conversation, visit thegrugnardfiles.com.