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- [00:01]
Dirk the Dice
Have you seen me dice bag? The Grognard Files hello, my name is
- [00:19]
Host/Interviewer
Dirt the Dice and this is the Grognard Files podcast where we talk bobbins about tabletop RPGs from from back in the day. And today I'm coming live from my den here in the heart of the northwest of England. I'm completely and utterly surrounded by my stuff. Here on my right is the great library of RPGs and a shelf that is completely filled with little black books. On my left is the ridiculous homemade shrine to the actor Caroline Munro. I'll. I'll just give it a tap. Ah, yes, the Eternal champion has appeared as her most brilliant avatar, stellar star, which can only mean one thing. Yes, we are returning to Traveler, the science fiction role playing game which is such a crucial part of our gaming back in the day and has remained so here. Now, as you know, much of this podcast is about chasing that first rush back to a time when things seem exciting and new and anything seemed possible in games, playing to progress stories with a sense that they may never end. These were our lives, living in an alternate world, a chance to escape, and the idea of escape had never seemed more appealing. Traveller was Judge Blithey, our resident rules lawyers game back in the day, and thanks to our Prime Directive, which meant that we couldn't own the same games as each other after all, what's the point? We were forbidden from reading the reviews of games that the other owned, just in case we were armed with the secrets. There might be something revealed in White Dwarf that would ruin the fun if it was available on the other side of the referee screen. Over the past three and a half years, taking a break over summer, we have met on Saturday mornings online with players from all over the world. Well, mainly northern England plus Australia and for a short time Seattle. We were playing the Pirates of Drinax, a campaign book created by Gareth Hanrahan and developed by Mongoose Publishers. Matthew Sprenge from Mongoose joins me in the zoom of role playing, rambling to talk about the project and what it's like being responsible for Traveller, now that Mark Miller, See previous files for details, has handed over the baton in Judge Blithey's rules. We have the usual rambly chat about some of the highlights of the campaign. I suppose I should do a spoiler warning if you're playing in the campaign. That said, it is fairly generic and more about the background and our experience of playing rather than some of the specifics of the adventures. I should also give a warning to those People who don't like listening to other people's games. You have my sympathy. There's only one thing worse than someone going into the details of the games that they've played. And that's someone who insists on telling you about a dream that they had last night. Don't worry, we don't linger too long on those things. We're more interested in what it takes to run a longish campaign these days. It's not the same as those halcyon summers in the 80s. You need to be more controlled, more focused. I'll be back at the end with a few parish notices. Until then, ramblers. Let's get rambling.
- [04:12]
Dirk the Dice
Open Box welcome to Open Box, the part of the podcast where we look backwards to look forward how our gaming of the past informs the gaming of today. I'm joined in the zoom of role playing Rambling by Matthew Brange. Hello Matthew, how are you doing?
- [04:29]
Judge Blithey
Hi there.
- [04:30]
Matthew Sprange
Very good, thanks for having me.
- [04:31]
Dirk the Dice
So where in the world is the Mongoose headquarters?
- [04:34]
Matthew Sprange
Swindon, Wiltshire, about 70 miles left of London.
- [04:39]
Dirk the Dice
Tell us about Mongoose and how that came about.
- [04:42]
Matthew Sprange
Yeah, that was 25 years ago, almost to this, to this day, sort of. It was me and my business partner of the time, Alex, who I've known right back from primary school. I had this idea that should we start a games company or what? The D20 license had been out about a year at that point. So we put some ideas together, scraped together all our savings, which amounted to about £8,000, that was all, and printed our first D20 book, the Slayer's Guide to Hobgoblins. It did okay. All kind of went from there. We stayed with the D20 license for quite some time. Within the first, what, six months, we started looking around for, got this idea that we could do licensed games. Kind of started chatting about Judge Dredd. So Alex looked into it. It turns out the new owner of Judge Dredd was a company called Rebellion, based just up the road in Oxford. We drove up there to see if we could get the license. Turns out the CEO of Rebellion is an old role player and knew exactly what we were talking about. And a deal was made and things just took off from there.
- [05:50]
Dirk the Dice
Of course they're getting into role playing games themselves, aren't they? With goals and some trolls.
- [05:56]
Matthew Sprange
Yeah.
- [05:56]
Dirk the Dice
So with Alex, were you playing together all that time as well?
- [05:59]
Matthew Sprange
I mean, back in primary school, he and I were doing Fighting FANT and the Lone Wolf solo game books. We messed around with some of the simpler RPGs. Fighting Fantasy was One Maelstrom was another and there was a teaching assistant who saw what we were doing and says, stay back. After school I got something you ought to have a look at. And it was Tunnels and Trolls. That was the first time we played a full blown RPG over those summer holidays. Just as we were going into big school, secondary school, I managed to grab the red box Basic D and D and that was just, that was just the start of it. That was like the next like 40 years of my life. No, but through that we were, we started messing around with warhammers, starting with second edition fantasy battle, then quickly into first edition rogue trader 40k. And that started another sickness.
- [06:53]
Dirk the Dice
So during that period then. Yeah, of course some of the games that have appeared on your back list were the games that we were playing. So things like Runequest and of course Traveller, which we'll perhaps get into. But of course you had some Moorcock stuff as well with Hawkmoon and was that part of the passion as a publisher to bring back some of those games that might have been lingering?
- [07:15]
Matthew Sprange
We've never done a game or a book simply because we thought it would make us sell well and make us some money. We've always done the games and the books that we wanted to play ourselves in the way we wanted to players. So you're seeing a lot of these older games like the Traveler paranoia we've got at the moment. Those are the games we were playing when we were teenagers. We still want to play them. So we got the opportunity to publish them and went ahead.
- [07:42]
Dirk the Dice
Those Hawkmoon books as well, bit of talent spotting because Gareth Rider Hanh did quite a bit of that material, didn't he?
- [07:51]
Matthew Sprange
He did. I mean he was a full blown mongoose in those days because we, we started employing writers rather than having them as freelance. And at the time I certainly would have said it was either Gareth Hanrahan or Lawrence Whittaker were the two best writers in the business. Both of them incidentally would disagree with that, but they're, they're too humble for their own good.
- [08:15]
Dirk the Dice
Also you're part of the Runequest story because that's where we started really. So how did that come about? And it's quite different, isn't it? The, the approach that you took to the rules and some of the other material.
- [08:28]
Matthew Sprange
We never really got Runequest to a place where I was quite happy with it. I mean with Traveller it took us two editions to do that. RuneQuest was another game we'd messed around with when we were at school. I mean as far as the source material was concerned, RuneQuest had his die Hards, all the old games do, but it wasn't really frontline in any way anymore. It kind of like faded away. So I think the biggest thing we did there was able to bring it back into people's consciousness, as it were. And in terms of the source material, the setting, an awful lot had been written for Glorantha before we came along. So I had a chat to Greg Stafford. What else can we do? And we settled on doing the Second Age to give the fans something new, a new approach, had its bonuses, had its negatives. Firstly, you're giving something new about something that's familiar, which is always a good idea. But then you've got all the old guard who like their third age and want to stay there. Thank you very much.
- [09:42]
Dirk the Dice
Am I right in saying that then that took its own path, didn't it? So the legend, because there was quite a few people when I did an episode about RuneQuest who had fun things to say about Legend and the route that that took, the.
- [09:57]
Matthew Sprange
The actual mechanics of RuneQuest 2 that the second edition we'd done, we kind of like distilled out of that something with a broader base, not concentrated on Gorantha. And that was the. The core of the Legend system. I mean, from the start we were determined to make it easily accessible, which is why you'll find every book we do for Legend, It's a straight £10, not going to break the bank. And we made it. Aside from the artwork, we made it all open content as well, so anyone else could come in and carry the flag forward.
- [10:36]
Dirk the Dice
Do you do my old. You've had the flame, the baton passed here, haven't you, from Matt Miller, look after Traveller. So what's that like having that on your shoulders?
- [10:47]
Matthew Sprange
It took us over a year to arrange the deal for Traveller once the decision had been made on Mark's front. Because it was already spanning nearly 50 years, it had gone through the hands of so many different publishers. Plus there was a load of third party stuff that Mark had tried to bring back into the fold, laying out the provenance for that. It's a massive document. It's about that thick. The show's. Yes, this does actually belong to Mark and yes, he can sell it. It took over a year to get all that sorted. We'd met up at Gencon to work out a few things. The deal had already been agreed upon and we're at the point where we were going to be signing the next day and money starts transferring and it all gets sealed up. But I was having a last phone call with Mark about it and I said to him, are you sure you're ready to do this, Mark? You know, like on an emotional level, because this has been your life. And he says, yeah, absolutely, Matthew. I'm excited to see what happens next for travellers. So no pressure there. We've got to come up with something funky.
- [11:54]
Dirk the Dice
And you mentioned that it's taken a couple of goals to get the rules to a place where you like them. So are you kind of satisfied with the current rule set is going to deliver for you at a core level?
- [12:08]
Matthew Sprange
Yes. What we've decided to do, and this is the kind of thing this is, this is what we're going to do. Unless a better idea comes along, we don't want to do another edition at all because the absolute core of the rules does work. So it's just all the stuff around the edges that, that we would ever look at really tweaking and messing around with. So what we started doing is update books. So the first rulebook for the current edition came out in 2016, I think I'm right in saying. And we're currently, we currently got out core rulebook update 2022 and that gave us a chance to do a new layout for it, making a bit more sparkly, redo the art, but also make little tweaks on the rules. We've done this for the other core books at Highguard Central Supply. We're just about to do Aliens of Chartered Space Volume 1 the same way. But this means we can keep the same edition but have it progressing. We can do the tweaks, keep it current, make it better, make it more refined as time goes on. The only little bit of doubt I've got in my mind about that is when we bring out, I don't know, core rulebook 2057 or something. We would have made so many little changes along the way. Will anything be left of the first book? Will it be. It's kind of like a Ship of Theseus problem. Is it by default a new edition? We've also got this mad idea that if you've got the original core rulebook, you're going to be good with that for the whole lifespan of the scaling wave into the future. You don't need to buy the update books. By the same tokens, if you do buy an update book, all the previous books will work with it. Now, that's going to be quite a challenge as time goes on, because as more and more things get tweaked and changed. But the advantage Traveller has is that it is effectively a whole bunch of mini games and rules components that all form their little boxes. They're all connected, but everything tends to be quite self contained within its own field. Which means you've got a system where a number goes into a box, a number comes out of the box and so long those numbers make sense and are transferable between additions. It doesn't actually matter what happens in the box that you can change. So that's the kind of principle we're working on at the moment.
- [14:34]
Dirk the Dice
There'll be people who listen to our podcast who've probably not got beyond the little black books. So if you were trying to appeal to them, what is different, what is markedly different between the play experience of those books and the current rules?
- [14:53]
Matthew Sprange
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. You won't have to constantly remember little rules for all the different skills because they're all unified now, they're all working broadly the same way. We concentrate a lot more on story these days, so, I mean, you talk about Pirates of Drinax, that's the big daddy, but we got loads of campaigns, big and small. At the end of the day, we don't just want to keep firing out rules books and setting books. Role playing games are about telling a story, so we will bring the story to you. That's the big difference.
- [15:44]
Judge Blithey
Yeah.
- [15:44]
Dirk the Dice
And my experience of playing the rules, the things that have been added bring quite a lot to it. So for example, the effects for increased dice rolls particularly give a good experience and as you say, it has a kind of logic to it.
- [16:02]
Matthew Sprange
Yeah, and we're adding. See, we're still adding to the system. I've always thought of Traveler both as a rule system and as the chart is space setting. They're both living things, they're never going to be static, they're always going to be improved upon. There's always new ideas we can bring to it. So I mean, you talk about using the skills and the effect to show how well you do on a check. It's popped up in the fifth Frontier War, but we're going to be incorporating it into other books is something called the group narrative, where players have to work together towards a common objective. They know what the objective is, the referee knows the total effect they need from all their combined skills. But it's up to the players to figure out what skills to use and how to get there. It's a lot less tactical, a lot more narrative. So it's going to work for some groups, not for others. It's going to work in some situations, but not others. But it's still another tool that's there for people to use.
- [17:03]
Dirk the Dice
Yeah. So like a narrative task chain then?
- [17:05]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [17:08]
Matthew Sprange
Without having to worry about time frames and where exactly people are. I say it's, it's before. It's to provoke the plays into telling a narrative as they're working. And it's very free form. The referee's always free to say, no, Sidney, that's silly, you can't do, you can't use that skill. But players get inventive and that's, that's where stories come from.
- [17:31]
Dirk the Dice
The other thing that we've admired playing it as well is the scalability of it. So the ability to deal with like micro events and vast events using similar
- [17:42]
Judge Blithey
rules, logic, that's something we're going to
- [17:45]
Matthew Sprange
be taking a good look at over the next few years. We've got, we've got this big, it's not a blockage. We got this big thing in the system called 2027, which is travellers 50th anniversary and we've got a whole lot planned for that. But it does mean other big projects tend to. We decide, right, we are going to do this big thing, it's going to be great. When are we doing it? And the answer is always after 2027. So we're all waiting for a bit for that.
- [18:10]
Dirk the Dice
So let's talk about Pirates of Drenax and how did that come about and what was the idea behind it? What were you trying to achieve?
- [18:18]
Matthew Sprange
We wanted to create an Adventure Path style campaign, one that we would be releasing for free in 10 parts over a period of time, just as a promotional exercise. As much as anything that came out and people liked it, it was popular. But when we came to do the new edition, that was under the first edition rules. When we came to do the new edition, we had an idea. Well, let's bring Pirates of Dramax together. Let's tweak a few things. Full color art all the way through, massive slip case. It's going to be so heavy that your postman's going to need a pack mule to bring it up your drive. And let's do something really special because, I mean, we'd played the some of the big campaigns in the past. We did Enemy within when we were teenagers. We're actually playing it in our Saturday games now the with the latest edition. But we wanted something like that and Gareth had produced a remarkable base to do that. Because what travel allows you to do with in terms of the rules and having that chartered space setting, not just create a bunch of adventures. You can give it the open world aspect, the sandbox aspect as well. And that you can just run on and on and on with bringing all sorts of things in. Like your players start drifting too far over to the left of the sector. Well, there's a glorious empire book you can use right there. We got a whole bunch of reach adventures that you can just plug into the campaign. We ended up doing Shadows of Sindol, which is an entire plugin mini campaign, but can expand beyond that if you decide you want to recruit a whole bunch of pirates so you can start sacking starports. That's what the mercenary rules can be used for. If you decide you're border the 400 and 610 pirate vessels, you want a capital ship. We've got the naval handbook in the element class cruises. And that's the marvelous thing about travel. It all binds together. Now, you might not be interested in any of that. I know groups who've played all the way through Pirates of Dramax and haven't actually done any pirating. They're playing the diplomatic side of it. But you can do all of that. It's all in that. Combine the core rulebook with the pious genetics slip case. You've got all of that already provided for you. It's just a case of diving and exploring.
- [20:43]
Dirk the Dice
So those original adventures, they were produced as a serial then? Because we very much tapped into the open world aspect of it, only occasionally touching into those scenarios. So they were like a serial.
- [20:58]
Matthew Sprange
They were. Yeah. That was the whole point of it. And whilst you could always add the sandbox thing onto that, it was with the slip case that we properly dived into it. I mean, the original idea, I said to Gareth, they're possibly informed with the travel group I was playing with at the moment. We always stop players from being pirates. So let's have a campaign where they get to be pirates. They get to do the thing they've always wanted to do in Traveller.
- [21:23]
Dirk the Dice
Anyway, I played it and we played it for three and a half years and that's exactly what we came to. We're actually doing what we've always wanted to do and in a legitimate way. Just talk us through the process of coming up with something like that. Because you're right, some of these Become legends, don't they? I mean, I played the Mongoose version of Travel Adventure a few years ago just to revive that. But how do you set about doing that? What's the processes you have to go to as a publisher?
- [21:51]
Matthew Sprange
Paul starts with an idea. I mean, the initial idea is always simple, like let the players be pirates and you get Pirates of Genak. You can say, let's have a multi year deep space exploration campaign. Deep Night Revelation comes on. We're working on one at the moment that you'll see end of next month. Much smaller in scope. The Travelers are all interstellar rock stars. That's the start of the campaign. That's just the idea. Then the writer comes along and starts actually fleshing out, putting meat on the bones, brings up an outline. This is kind of how I think it's going to work. And we may have some comments on that, we may not. And then the writer writes it broadly following the 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 and trying to, you know, beat it into shape.
- [22:47]
Dirk the Dice
Is it the big headline campaigns that seem to attract people?
- [22:51]
Matthew Sprange
Perceived wisdom for RPG companies is that Adventures do not sell because you, you do a rule book, you sell it to the referee, you sell it to a number of the players as well. With Adventures, only the referee is going to buy them and a lot of referees just don't. They prefer making up their own things. So it's never going to be where the hay is made. But what we've always thought is you need the Adventures to support the game as a whole. And if you look at the catalogs of other publishers, you can see the ones that think this way and you can see the ones that have looked at their spreadsheets, seen that the adventures haven't sold. So they don't do adventures beyond like the, the initial intro adventure or what have you. But it's the adventures that bring the setting to life. As I say, RPGs are all about telling stories. So we need to provide stories, even if not everyone uses them, if nothing else, to showcase what Traveler is capable of. Yes, you can be a pirate, you can be an interstellar rock star, you could be a really grimy space trucker in a backwater far beyond the Soleimani Confederation. You can do all these things with Travellers and you don't need to bolt on loads of extra rules to do it. And now and again, you do get the adventure campaign that really does punch out things like Masters of Nyarlathotep, the Enemy Within. And now it seems Pirates of genax is beginning to get mentioned in the same sentence as those. As those giants. We've got another one that's just gone off to print this last week, actually. Singularity. The players get to help create a literal godlike artificial intelligence. And then they got to figure out what happens next and they might not like all those answers. It is, of course, a reflection of what's happening with artificial intelligence in our world. So there is the idea that Traveler fans will read and maybe start thinking about what's happening in this world. But I mean, you still go to get to go on deep sea excavations and mess around with ancients and there's fights with aliens, you still get all of that. But hopefully we can add something mortal as well. If people get it, if we've done our job right, I think that might be another one of the big campaigns. I mean, it's about the same size as Paris Driven Acts. It's coming in the slip case with multiple books. Dawn of Patan's Snobby. I think the content of Singularity is potentially higher brow, but in Pirates Gynax, you get to be pirates. So, you know, what are you worrying about?
- [25:36]
Dirk the Dice
Yeah, I find that coming back to Traveler, you know, I used to play it when I was young, but going back to it, yes, you can do all the adventure stuff, but it does give you an opportunity to play around with science fiction concepts, doesn't it? Science fiction ideas. I think that's why the Trojan Reach is so interesting, because of the varied planets and some of the things that you get to interact with. There are some interesting concepts that are being explored through those locations.
- [26:04]
Matthew Sprange
This is something we started looking at a fair few years ago because we'd released. For our first edition of Traveller, we released some adventures that I liked a lot. Our version of Belt Strike, I think, is crying out for a redo, but we're trying not to retread too much old ground. But when we started doing adventures for this edition, I had a chat with Mark about the direction we wanted to go in this. Traveler's based in the classic science fiction of the 50s, 60s and 70s that. I mean, all science fiction is rooted in the real world. It's always a reflection. But instead of just going on with pushing forward with flashy spaceships and lasers and interstellar empires, we wanted to start looking at concepts of science fiction and start exploring various things. Like, for example, we got the three core adventures set in the Imperial Core. The first one, Invasive Species, is all about the importance of maintaining ecosystems. The second one is about the importance of supporting local businesses, set against a backdrop of what was happening in Hong Kong at the time that we were doing it. The third one, Errant Lightning, is all about conversion therapy. You won't find those words in them, but like science fiction gets to layer it and it's just interesting ways to explore what people might be thinking.
- [27:38]
Dirk the Dice
You mentioned earlier the fans loyal to the game for a long time. So how do you balance that out? Reprinting things from traveller's past or the game's past and doing new things.
- [27:50]
Matthew Sprange
The aim is to always do new things. But as I said, we like to produce the books that we want to play. And a lot of these books I was messing around with way back in the days. So there's always a temptation to look at them and think maybe we can do something with that. We got to the point we don't just want to reprint anything. It's not a case of just taking the old text and updating it with new rules and boom, off you go. We want to do something new with them. When Martin was writing the other two books for the Ancients trilogy, you'll find Twilight's Peak in there, for example. It's not called Twilight's Peak. Well, I mean the actual book, the old hands, the veterans will look at those chapters and say, yes, I recognize that sometimes it is a bit more blatant. Later this year it's probably going to be coming out early next year. Chris Griffin is writing Messiahs of the World Ocean. We're taking the little, little black book and turning it into a big 256 page sandbox campaign. The sandbox is the entire world of Bellerophon and he's putting multiple entry points into it, multiple endings. You'll be able to do exactly what you want. You do not need to side with the nomads. You're going to find there's more than one sort of nomad out there and they're not all very nice. We also wanted to sort of like leverage in the whole idea that the original book was Dune on water. So we thought, well, maybe we can play with that as well. Hence the Messiahs of the World oceans. And if the players choose to do certain things, yeah, they can be messiahs and ride the great whales to crush the. The Arcology cities.
- [29:36]
Dirk the Dice
Traveler's got quite an active online community as well, isn't it? I think you support forums. How important is that and how much community content is created through those forums.
- [29:52]
Matthew Sprange
There's a lot. I mean, we don't actually do any marketing, we're not very good at marketing. So the various online media are kind of our lifeline to traveller players, but they will congregate in different areas. So there isn't one place we can go to and say, hey, this is brilliant. No, they've all got their own things, they're all sidelines. So you've got the people who primarily use Reddit, there's our forums, of course, there's Coti for just about all the other editions. Discord is seriously kicking up as well. And in terms of just letting people know what's going on, you've got Twitter, your Blue sky, your Facebook. It's kind of like an unholy mess at the moment, but it seems to work.
- [30:38]
Dirk the Dice
And in terms of onboarding new players, am I right? Think you got a starter set?
- [30:43]
Matthew Sprange
No, what we've got at the moment is we got the Explorers Edition and Merchants Edition, which is basically all the corest of core rules in a 72 page book focusing on specific campaign place. So the Explorers Edition has got the Scout and Scholar careers so you can go off and explore your untamed, untamed sector. You've got all the World generation systems in there, you've got the Type S Scout in there and some Explorer type equipment. You can run a whole campaign just on that, pay just on that book. And it's what, £15 for a 72 page book? We got free adventures that you can download that will be compatible with it. So you can run off and do that. Merchants the same but with trading. So you can do your Firefly stuff just from that book alone. We don't have a proper starter set yet, but you will see one next year.
- [31:46]
Dirk the Dice
So as part of the celebrations.
- [31:48]
Matthew Sprange
Indeed.
- [31:49]
Dirk the Dice
Just say that we really enjoy playing Pirates of Dronex. It's one of the best campaigns that I've come back to and we've played quite a few of the big box ones. So great work with doing that.
- [32:03]
Matthew Sprange
Thank you.
- [32:04]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, we are proud of it and
- [32:06]
Dirk the Dice
thank you very much for spending time with us, Matthew.
- [32:08]
Matthew Sprange
Oh, it's a pleasure.
- [32:10]
Dirk the Dice
Judge Blatty rules. Welcome to the Zoom of role playing. Rambling I'm joined by Blithey. Hello there, Blythey.
- [32:19]
Judge Blithey
Hello, Dirk.
- [32:20]
Dirk the Dice
It's a public holiday, Easter Monday no less, and we're sat in our respective dens. I'm in Adlington, Europe, over there in Little Wigan. It's been a while since We've done these remote ones. Have you got your orange juice there?
- [32:36]
Judge Blithey
I've got a cup of tea today.
- [32:38]
Dirk the Dice
My goodness. It was mad, wasn't it, the weather the other day?
- [32:42]
Judge Blithey
Storm Dave.
- [32:43]
Dirk the Dice
Storm David.
- [32:44]
Judge Blithey
Yeah. You should call them by the ferocity, like Beelzebub. Storm Dave is like, to my mind, just like a rather mild storm. Not too bad.
- [32:56]
Dirk the Dice
Furiosa.
- [32:57]
Judge Blithey
Like the way they name gladiators on the telly. Same thing. Give them. Give them something that. A bit more character to them. Not there. Well, if a tree falls on your house and crushes it. Well, did that. Oh, is that Storm Dave, wasn't it? Yeah. If you said it was Storm Nitro, Storm Pedal Fire or something, you'd think. Oh, that one. Oh, God, yeah, I remember that one.
- [33:18]
Dirk the Dice
It's probably fitting, isn't it, that we're doing this on a morning? Because that's when we played Pirates of Drilling.
- [33:23]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:24]
Dirk the Dice
Saturday morning, wasn't it? You with your little glass of orange juice, sipping at it and it.
- [33:29]
Judge Blithey
It's apt as well to do it on. On Zoom, isn't it? Because it's like traveler technology. It's set in the far future, but people would still use Zoom in Traveller, wouldn't they? No one would. No one would allow them a matter of transportation system where we could. I could teleport to your house or vice versa. That wouldn't be allowed.
- [33:47]
Dirk the Dice
No.
- [33:47]
Judge Blithey
So you'd still be doing stuff like this even though it's the far future.
- [33:51]
Dirk the Dice
Yes. Yeah. So we're going to talk about Pirate Syndrome X, which is a campaign that we've been playing a while, and we mentioned it a while. For a while on the podcast, I think we are. The first mention of it was back in the start of 2022 when we did Gangbusters. And you. I think you just got it at that point.
- [34:14]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, we've been playing it, I mean, like, three and a half years, isn't it? We've been playing it. Yeah. Isn't it three. It's this three and a half, isn't it? It was last. How long it ran for, wasn't it? Three and a half.
- [34:26]
Dirk the Dice
Three and a half years with a break for summer. And it's marked in my mind because I started the rewatch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at exactly the same time and we've completed the campaign and I finished watching Buffy. But that's another conversation.
- [34:43]
Judge Blithey
There you go. Yeah, yeah, we'll come back to that.
- [34:46]
Dirk the Dice
But yeah. And we had the same group of players, although we lost Will, didn't we, halfway through the first season?
- [34:54]
Judge Blithey
We did, but that was understandable because he was in Seattle and whilst Michael lives in Sydney and for him it's Saturday night, isn't it, rather than Saturday morning. That seems reasonable. Was for Will in Seattle, wasn't it something like two in the morning when we started playing? For him, it was 2 in the morning. I mean, he battled on for a bit, but to be fair, I think that's a little bit of a big ask, isn't it? Every Saturday night or Sunday morning or whenever it is for him. What would it be?
- [35:25]
Dirk the Dice
It was early in the morning.
- [35:28]
Judge Blithey
Yeah.
- [35:29]
Dirk the Dice
Because he'd. His hair would look slightly ruffled and he'd have his silk pajamas on. Look very smart in his pajamas. Much more smart than I do.
- [35:38]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, it's true that, isn't it? Well done, you know, like. Yeah, smart pajamas. Mind you, he was on. He was on screen. Wasn't maybe his special effort, but yeah,
- [35:49]
Dirk the Dice
his character, Buscombe, which early on he was going to be the face, wasn't he, of the operation and we missed him. But as we developed our skills, we slowly got better and better at diplomacy and those social skills.
- [36:06]
Judge Blithey
Well, again, yeah, that's true, isn't it? He was supposed to be the diplomat on the. The face, which you do need in this campaign, I think. And you realized that, didn't you? But I did. I included the optional rule of experience points. So you were allowed to kind of develop a few skills as well as we played. So, yeah, you could. You bunged a few points into diplomacy and persuasion and broker and that kind of thing. Yeah.
- [36:32]
Dirk the Dice
We should say to people right now that if you're playing Pirates of Drinux, then there might be a few spoilers in here, but we'll try and keep it fairly generic. But inevitably we're going to mention some elements of it, aren't we?
- [36:47]
Judge Blithey
We are going to mention elements of it. Although as we may come on to discuss, I think if you play in Pirates of Renax, you may listen to our conversation and think, what on earth are they talking about? Are they talking about the same adventure? Because I think that is one of the key things to admit that it genuinely felt like for me as a gm, I don't know about players, but as a gm, it definitely is the proper sandbox, a proper adventure where anything could happen and it could genuinely go in any different direction. People often say that about adventures, don't they? Oh, it's a sandbox. Oh, various different outcomes. But I think those outcomes are often limited in a lot of big campaigns to maybe two or three outcomes. Whereas I do think with Pirates of Dry Acts it could genuinely go all over the place.
- [37:42]
Dirk the Dice
It could. I mean last time we had Thomas Rawlings on, didn't we? And he was talking about how role playing games, board games and video games intersect and. Have you ever heard of the computer game Pirates by Sid Meiers? No, no, no, I didn't play as much as I did Civilization, but it's a similar open world type of scenario where you as a player can go through the Caribbean and various other islands and you're given sanction by the Spanish government to act as a pirate, but your loyalties might shift and you've got, it's a turn based strategy game moving around and having your own experience in this open world. And I, I think that's what, that's, that's what this is trying to create, isn't it? It's giving players the license that, you know, you've got like an overarching setup but you can explore this place and develop your own way through it.
- [38:47]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, yeah, that, that is the, the setup, isn't it? The setup is very much a kind of 18th century pirate thing, isn't it? Where you're privateers rather than you're pirates, but you're also sort of privateers in that. King Olab on Drinax wants to reform the Drinaxian or Star Dragon Empire, doesn't he? And what he does, or rather he does and his daughter as well, his children are quite important in it, aren't they? He's kind of got grown up daughter and a grown up son who are quite significant characters in it. But initially it's all his daughter's plan, isn't it, to reform the Empire. And what he does in the scenario is right at the beginning you're given a letter of mark in that you, he wants you to go around, act as pirates, disrupt trade and do whatever you need to do. And then when the, when the Empire's formed, absolved of all your crimes because you've been working for the Empire rather than actual pirates, that's the general gist of it, isn't it? So, but then there are I think nine scenarios in there, but around that you are allowed to do whatever you want to do in terms of visiting other planets and forming alliances and going, doing pirate raids and all that kind of thing.
- [40:03]
Dirk the Dice
Yeah. And that's where again it's analogous to the video game because that has various mini games within it that you can interact with and it's a bit of a diversion. There are some mini games, perhaps get onto that as part of it. There's some with their own little rules, aren't they, that.
- [40:25]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, there are. Yeah, yeah. Which is quite. I. I think I picked that as one of my highlights of it. I think they're really good, the mini games in it, good in themselves, but also good in the way they allow you to do big things like big spaceship battles or battles on a planet, but. But do them in a manageable way, rather than a really complicated set of extra rules that you might encounter, you know.
- [40:55]
Dirk the Dice
Yeah, but let's go into that. But let's just step back a bit because just talk me through when you. When you got that book. Is it a book? What is it? What format does it come in?
- [41:05]
Judge Blithey
Here? It's three books, so it's. It's the Pirates of Drillax, which contains the scenarios, and then there's the Trojan Reach setting book that has. I think it has bits about the Aslan in it and it gives you all the planets and gives you a map. So, you know, just. So in a way, the Trojan Reach kind of sits on its own because it's just a big sector book, giving you all the planets and lots of different scenario hooks, which we might come onto later. And then you get another one called Ships of the Reach, which is a spaceship book with all different. Different new spaceships that are in the Trojan Reach. So, yeah, it's three books, really.
- [41:45]
Dirk the Dice
So I'm faced with those three books because I'm. I'm interested how you tackle that. So you look at it. What was the point where you thought, I'm going to run this? So when you were looking this back in January.
- [41:59]
Judge Blithey
Well, I think. I think I thought. I think I thought, I'm going to run it when I bought it, because I ain't playing that much money and not running it. So from a practical perspective, I think we decided. I decided I've got to run this somehow because. Buy these three hefty books that the price they come up.
- [42:18]
Dirk the Dice
Did you get. Did you get the PDF first? Or did you.
- [42:23]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, I think I did. I think. Yeah, I ordered the books and then you get the free PDFs, don't you? So you can kind of look at them before the books arrive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think what's odd about the Parish adrenaline is actually when you first read it or look at. Seems quite straightforward, quite manageable in that the setup's quite straightforward. It's not a complicated setup, is it? There you go, go and be pirates for this rather crazy king who's a bit like Brian Blessed, who's a lot like Brian Blessed in Flash Garden. That's really what he's based on, is it? Don't be a pirate. I mean, it's not that difficult, is it? Because you could just go, well, we're going to be pirates, so let's go here and let's rob some ships and that's what we'll do. So, and then you've got nine scenarios which are all set out quite clearly and you think, well that's okay. There's, there's things to do, isn't. There's nine scenarios, get them stuck into those. How hard can it be? So I think when you first read it, it doesn't, it's quite, it's big. So obviously it's big. But I've done big things before. Haven't we, you know, done Storm King's Thunder and Dragon Ice for D and D? So it's not, I suppose it's not that daunting if you've done big campaigns before. But what I would say about it, one of the crucial elements of it that you don't quite see coming or I didn't. And it's not really criticism, I think in a way it's a good thing, but 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. So the first scenario I think we did was a treasure ship. One where you get rumors of an imperial treasure ship that's been repaired on the planet and go and rob it and steal the treasure. And that's quite straightforward because that's the first scenario. So you think, okay, well this is you pirates, you hear about this, go to that planet and steal things from that ship. You know, that's kind of just a straightforward scenario, isn't it? But almost. Once you get beyond that, you as players start to interact with this universe and realize you can go wherever you want and do whatever you want. And then it becomes quite difficult to shoehorn those scenarios into the adventure without it seeming fake and railroad. You know, you go and rob the treasure ship, then you do this, then you do that, and you go here and you go there and then I'm thinking, all right, well I need to put another one of these scenarios in because they do have things in the scenarios that are kind of important that you do. But you think, how do I get them into this scenario? Now I Just say, well, never mind all those things you're doing. You go back to Drinax and you meet this Aslan who says that he wants you to do this or do that. And it seems odd then because you think, oh, it's been like a sandbox for the last few sessions. They've genuinely been doing whatever they want to do. And now I'm saying, go and do this. Do you see what I mean? There's a kind of weird contradiction there.
- [45:37]
Dirk the Dice
I think, as players, when you encounter that first scenario, is a sense of liberation. Because you were great pains to set the tone of this as, you know, more flesh Gordon than.
- [45:54]
Judge Blithey
Yeah.
- [45:54]
Dirk the Dice
Hard. Science wasn't felt. It felt like the machinery of government and different political forces were operating and around us, but these planets were just getting on with life and they hadn't allied themselves necessarily with anyone. And kind of free booting atmosphere around these planets that we were going to go and visit. But by getting that treasure as well on the treasure ship, you felt emboldened because as a player, it's quite rich pickings, isn't it, that you get.
- [46:30]
Judge Blithey
Yeah.
- [46:30]
Dirk the Dice
And it sets you off as feeling. Actually, we're quite good at this. We are quite good. We've got this wealth and we can use this wealth in a different manner. You know, we. We can determine our path through this because we can forge alliances by using what we've recovered to get our status improved in various planets. And it kind of tweaked on us. And we got it captured our imagination very early on. And I think that's where the spreadsheet came in, wasn't it? The. The accountants of Drillux, well, kept an account of our manifest that we'd managed to get. And we started thinking like entrepreneurs. Like, we could set up these different trade routes and we've got this moon base where we would hold our. Our stock. Very, very early on, we started feeling. It was like just worrying about the logistics of it and the.
- [47:25]
Judge Blithey
I think. Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting point as well about the style of it. I like the style of Parrot because I think Mongoose is trying to do this a bit more, actually with some of the stuff they're producing because they're doing a new thing called the singularity, which is kind of quite interesting that I've had a little sneaky peek of. That's kind of a bit more sci fi about an AI thing and we'll talk about that. But I think what's good about Pirate Jones is it is a little bit flash Gordon. Blake7 kind of style, isn't it? The style of it feels off kilter with what you'd normally get with Traveler. I can remember once, our Wednesday group, I think it was Steve and our Wednesday group said something about some of these Traveler scenarios. Just like Alistair McClane novels, they're not really sci fi. What? You know, that's true with some Traveler stuff. It sometimes feels like it might be sat on a spaceship and it might be sat on another planet, but it's just like a action movie or something rather than sci fi. Whereas I felt that Pirates of Drinax is more colorful, isn't it? The characters are more colorful, the NPCs are more colorful and the whole setup is more colorful. And you feel like it is more like some kind of 70s sci fi movie, you know, more so than Normal Traveler. I. I would say, at least that's how it felt to me as a GM when I read it. That's got that slight 1970s sci fi vibe about it.
- [48:48]
Dirk the Dice
I think early on we had this idea that we would work for Kingola, but we'd also be our own agents and that whatever promises he gave us, we would always be slightly distrustful of. Particularly since his court very early on seemed to be conflicted over the path that they were going to take us. Acting in that buccaneering spirit, how did you kind of manage that? How did you pace that out? Because it felt like although we did have free reign, we didn't really waste any time. It was very tight, wasn't it? Those two hours on a Saturday morning.
- [49:26]
Judge Blithey
The thing I'd say about that is I think that approach, which I think is kind of embedded into the campaign, that approach kept it interesting for me as a gm, because three and a half years is a long time to run something. I'm not sure I would have had the stamina to run something that was a bit more linear. Whereas with this, I didn't know what the ending would be, I didn't know how it was going to play out. Was I managing it? I suppose I was in a way, because I had a kind of eye on where it could go. I was quite happy to let you do whatever you were doing. I think partly because I knew we'd be running it for a long time. So the first season, for example, when you were doing stuff, well, it's fine. All this. They can do all this because we know we're near the end of it and there's things that are going to happen, there's scenarios, they're going to get involved in, so it doesn't really matter. And it keeps it fresh and interesting. For me, I was never bored of it. I've run big campaigns before, and as I think we've discussed on this podcast a few times, there is that problem for a gm, isn't there, as campaign fatigue. Where you've read it, you know what's going to happen. Whereas with this, although it sort of knew some things were going to happen and I knew There were certain NPCs and certain factions waiting in the wings that were going to appear at some point, it didn't feel like there's any rush to introduce those things. And you were also quite good at making, I was going to say making a mess of things, making your own adventures. You were quite good at making and doing your own thing, weren't you? So that made it interesting. And I think that's the. That is the great thing about pirates trinity, more than anything I've ever run, it has. It remained interesting for me as a gm.
- [51:12]
Dirk the Dice
We had a base as well, didn't we? So Drinax also operates as a kind of centering device, doesn't it? So there are always points where you would say to us, well, you could go and see what Olab thinks of this, because we could consult with him and consult with his court. About midway through, we began to realize that all was not well with the core and there was these conflict. I know that Andy, when we've asked for feedback, haven't we, from the players, he kind of wondered whether we should have gone more into that courtly intrigue. But we tended to err on the side of adventure rather than the political machinations of what was happening at court.
- [51:56]
Judge Blithey
I think as well, the other thing that makes it easy to manage from a GM perspective is whilst you're doing your own thing and having your own ideas, there's a lot in the campaign books that enables you to come up with your own stuff as a gm. So you've got those nine scenarios, but then you've got a load of adventure hooks for other planets. You've got a load of detail about other planets and other Systems and other NPCs. So there's a lot in there. Kind of one of the weird things about it, played it for three and a half years, but there's elements of it you never went. You never went near the pirates of. The most staggering thing was the pirates of thieves. So there are these pirates out there, these pirate clans, if you like, or gangs that hang out on a planet called Thieve. And then you met one of them. There was an Aslan one who became a little bit of an enemy early on, and they were in the background as npc, so you knew about them and what they were up to, but you never went there. And you don't have to. You don't have to. But when you read the scenario, that's kind of like a. There's an assumption you. You're bound to go there, but you didn't. You didn't go there at all. You just avoided that completely. And gdco, the Mega Corporation, became your kind of arch enemy. But again, it doesn't have to be your arch enemy. You can make an alliance with it. But I think the thing with it as a scenario package is there's a lot of stuff in there that gives the GM a lot of scope that, all right, they've gone off piste, they've gone over there, they're doing this, they're doing that. But there's enough in it to give you ideas, to give players something to do. I think what really weird about it is there's nine scenarios. I think you could run Pirate shooter NX 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]
Dirk the Dice
Because we should talk about the antagonist, shouldn't we? Because where it is part of the charm of how. And. And this is again using the analogy of the Caribbean. It's those areas that are a bit out of reach of the Imperium, isn't it? So it's at the tail end of its jurisdiction. So. And. And on one side you've got the Aslan tribes who are busy fighting each other or wanting a piece of it, and they're very territorial. And as you say, you've got gdco, which is this corporate monolith who are expansionist and interested in the area. And also you've got the free booting. You've got the pirate hunters as well, haven't you? They were antagonists that we came across a few times. So you have got that potential, haven't you, of trying to as players trying to navigate your way through it. I think the reason why we chose GDCO is that we saw some of the horrific experimentation they were doing, and at that point we decided morally that they were the people that we had to stop.
- [55:10]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, they don't have to become antagonists, but they are like the prime candidates for it. And I think as well, you did quite a good job with the Aslan you kind of allied yourself to the Aslan almost in many ways, even though you can't quite do that because they're different clans, so you can't completely ally yourself to them. But I think you allied yourself to some of the bigger clans and that made it easier from that side, I think. And in a way, I suppose you could argue GD CO are like proxies for the Imperium out in a way because they're an imperial company that are in the Trojan Reach. And so there's this idea, isn't there, that the Trojan Reach sits between the Imperium and the Aslan. And in a way, both sides would like to take or take it over because it's rife with piracy and all sorts of things, and ships have to travel through it. But neither side will take it over because it'll trigger a war with the other side, which neither side wants because they'll see it as expansionist. So it sits there, you could argue, I suppose, G D KO R are really proxies for the Imperium, aren't they? Yeah, kind of trying to take over that. That area of space by. By the back door, almost.
- [56:23]
Dirk the Dice
But maybe the fact that they were amoral corporations, faceless manipulators of people and politicians, maybe we were projecting a bit as well, turning them into the.
- [56:37]
Judge Blithey
But no, well, but that's. I suppose, going back to what I was saying as well, that the more. There's enough in it that you can, as a gm, kind of focus in on certain aspects that the players are interested in and focus out of other aspects, if you see what I mean. So the fact, once you got your teeth into gdco, there's enough in there for me to go, all right, okay. That GDCO becoming the. They don't like gdco, Andy particularly. And so it was one of those, wasn't it, Edo? Well, in that case, GDCO are going to become arch enemies, because you need an arch enemy and that's what you're going to get.
- [57:15]
Dirk the Dice
Ignore this. It's a rug covering a hole. Let's talk about some of your highlights as a gm and I'll respond to them as a player.
- [57:26]
Judge Blithey
I suppose the first highlight is. Is the sandbox element of it, which I've just talked about. There's an element there that. That's the. Overall, that's the biggest element of it that I really enjoyed as a gm. The sandbox element only got tricky towards the end. So the last season was the one where I thought, right, gonna have to end this now because we've been doing it for three years. You could have carried on. But I think there's a tipping point where you've got to conclude it, where enough elements coming together to make it feel. Well, end it at some point.
- [57:57]
Dirk the Dice
Yeah. I think as players there was a point where our influence had become such. So elevated that us just doing kind of chicken runs of stealing stuff, moving away, it became sort of irrelevant. There was like a. A shift, wasn't that? Where it became more about actually this is why are we doing this? We just get somebody else to do this for us. Because.
- [58:24]
Judge Blithey
Yeah. Have that status you've got. Yeah. Because by the end of it you've got a fleet, little fleet of ships, haven't you? That's kind shared with Genax a bit. But they are your ships. So like you say, you think at one point you got this Auroric command vessel which is quite a big chunky spaceship battleship. And it's better than your ship. It's better than the ship. You all had a sentimental. The Endless Blue. You had a sentimental attachment to your Harrier ship, which it is. That is quite a good little ship. You know, by player character standing. It's better than some boring one jump free trader, isn't it? It's a lot better than that. But you're right. There is a point where you think why wouldn't you just go and send one of these battleships to go and do some piracy? Got a crew. You lot go and do some piracy for us. Why are we doing it? You made that point a number of times towards the end. Why are we doing this? And I think you're right. And that's kind of, I suppose, the tipping point where I thought he's right. Why are you doing it? You can't carry on doing this adventuring stuff because it doesn't seem plausible now because you've become quite powerful with your own fleet of ships. Why wouldn't you be sat. Yeah. Somewhere with a balloon of randy.
- [59:40]
Dirk the Dice
Exactly.
- [59:41]
Judge Blithey
You would be, wouldn't you? Yeah. But by that point, I think you think as a gm. All right, now you've got to start to move it in the direction of it ending where you've got this big, big diplomacy elements of recruiting all the planets that you've made alliances with and then negotiating with the Imperium and negotiating with the Aslan and all that kind of thing that there is that point where you think, no, you've got to end it. There's a lot more scope in it. And there's a lot more things you could do because there's loads of material there. But I think you've just got to accept as a gm, you can't use it all because if you tried to use it all it would just get really confusing.
- [60:16]
Dirk the Dice
And you could argue. Well, you could argue, could do that troop play where another set of characters you could have to do those low level missions that you were doing at the start. Now that your characters are more like a diplomat. I don't think that would have been satisfying because one of the things, and again, speaking to our, my fellow players, the things that we enjoyed was inhabiting the characters for two hours every fortnight because they, although we didn't speak in character because we rarely do that, it felt like when we were expressing opinion, we were expressing it from the point of view of the people that we were step outside of. That would have felt odd to say, right, oh, this week we're going to do. You're going to play these secondary characters. And we did have some secondary characters because we had mercenaries on board the ship, didn't we? Marines?
- [61:09]
Judge Blithey
You did. You had mercenaries who started off as expendable NPCs, but in the end I think you quite like some of the. Some of them more than. Well, you're right, it is about. Because there is one adventure in there that we didn't do. And I say, I mean we did all the adventures, but I have to say that I did chop and change them a little bit because I think some of the adventures are quite detailed and quite involved. And I think in the run of player as we're, as we were kind of playing it and going to planets and doing this and doing that, I think in a way some of their adventures, if you started them right at the beginning and ran through them as written to kind of slow you down a bit. So there's one adventure where I think you meet a scientist, Charlie Aster, on Tech World and she goes on the run. In the original event, she goes on the run and you're supposed to chase across all these systems. I thought that's a bit. That's a lot of messing about there. And weirdly, in the adventure it does say the players might not want to bother chasing, in which case, fine, you think, okay, all right, we're not doing that one then I. This is a bit odd, you know, so you kind of. Some bits you chop out. But there is one adventure where you play pirate hunters rather than your own characters, which I never did because I always as you just sort of Suggested, I always thought. I'm not sure that. Sure, it'd be fun, but would it just break the whole momentum of it if we spent four or five sessions doing that? That doesn't seem. I'm not quite convinced.
- [62:45]
Dirk the Dice
So that's the sandbox element and I enjoyed that. And you're right that it felt good. It felt right. Then it started to funnel towards a conclusion at the point that it did. So what are the other highlights?
- [62:58]
Judge Blithey
Well, I think the other thing I enjoyed about it from a GM's perspective, and it is the kind of moral choices that it involves. So there was a lot of. Because you become involved politically in the Trojan reach, I think that you end up with certain moral choices that you have to make, which I thought was fun to just sit back as a GM and let you all thrash out those kind of issues. I mean, there's a big spoiler in the. Now this is a big spoil. I don't know we should say this, but maybe we won't. But there's some. You find something in the adventure that gives you a big moral choice as to whether to use it or not. I think that's. Let me just leave it at that. That was interesting because you had this potential to do something that I think Michael always thought it was completely immoral. Your character is quite keen on doing it. What the view that. Come on, if we've got this kind of power at our disposal, we should use it, or at least be prepared to.
- [64:05]
Dirk the Dice
I suppose it was that position of if you've got a negotiating position and there's a gun on the table, it kind of adds a little bit of extra, doesn't it?
- [64:18]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, but I did. I did enjoy. I did enjoy that element of it that as you got more into. I think really it's more like the second season onwards, not so much the first one, but the second season of it, the moral dilemmas became more and more of an issue and things like whose side to take. Like you say, you've got Oleb and his children, you've got Princess Rao Herrick, who's his son. That's kind of interesting, isn't it, in terms of what they're up to and whose side you take. And again, it surprised me how that played out, because it didn't play out quite as I expected it to play out. So when.
- [64:59]
Dirk the Dice
When you move into the end game, you have you mentioned the moral choices, but you also have different variants of the type of empire that you're onboarding other planets to. So, yeah, that's Determined by some degree by dice rolls, isn't it? By what the offer is and the. The shape of what this enterprise is that Olab is looking at. But I think what happened was our players had a split decision, didn't they, on what vision they had of this kind of idea of confederated planets all working together for a common good under the eyes of democracy. Whereas I had a more authoritarian view, believed that, you know, the way to control these planets was by exercising power.
- [65:53]
Judge Blithey
And I think that ultimately was like, more oled for you, wasn't it? Which made some of the planets a bit trickier to recruit because it didn't quite go your way. I think he wanted to keep all this technology. Didn't want to share technology, did he? That was a big factor that. And I suppose that that element with forming the empire leads. Leads on to. One of the other really interesting aspects of the campaign is the number of little mini games in it. Because that bit about forming the empire and recruiting the planets is a mini game, isn't it? Almost. So you roll dice to determine what kind of plan, what kind of empire Ole wants, what kind of empire you want. That works out, that gives you certain scores. And then you try and recruit the planets, don't you? Some of which you've become friendly. So it kind of tracks. Certain planets go from being neutral or hostile to friendly because you've been there and maybe done stuff for them and formed alliances. They've all got a status in terms of how they view the empire and view you. And that involves rolling dice, doesn't it? And at the end of it, you've got. These planets are on side, these planets are not on side, that kind of thing. So it's like a mini game. And there's a number of mini games in it, isn't there? So there's one where there's a battle on Drinax and there's a mini game to deal with that with its own little set of rules. And then there's some rules for mass spaceship battles. So I think highguard has rules for mass spaceship bouts, but in Paris, Trinax, it's a simple. It's quite a simple little game, isn't it, that you play using? There is dice, and I think that's quite good because it's not. It's not daunting, you know, it's kind
- [67:41]
Dirk the Dice
of game that you might have come up with as kids with your Earth fix models.
- [67:47]
Judge Blithey
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Really. Yeah. But I think it works well, because I think I would. I think myself and maybe other GMs and maybe other players as well, would be slightly disheartened if it included very, very complex battle rules for ground troops and big spaceship battle. You'd think, oh, God, you know. Oh, no, this is, you know. But that is a big part. You can't really avoid the big space battle. There are some big space battles in it and there are some other things going on that the minigames resolve quite well. Even right to the end where you're negotiating with the Imperium and the Aslan back is a little minigame, isn't it, of negotiating things. Things. Occasionally it kind of zooms out and gives you a bigger picture of what's going on that you, as players are involved in by influencing those things.
- [68:41]
Dirk the Dice
I mean, personally, I wouldn't want it to be like that all the time, but I think it was good at the points where it happened. And I think, as I was saying earlier, I think that was the point where the other game we were playing, the, you know, the Planet of the Week type format we were doing kind of brought down a bit once the mini games were introduced, weren't they? Because it scaled. And once they started to happen, the Planet of the Week type scenarios just didn't seem to fit well together.
- [69:19]
Host/Interviewer
Oh, no, they sat in our chairs.
- [69:24]
Dirk the Dice
I bring a couple of highlights to it. The first one is one that you've alluded to, which is this idea of a sandbox. But not only a sandbox, because there's loads of sandboxes out there, isn't there? But it's just the sheer inventiveness. I mean, I suppose this is Gaddaf Rise of Hunter's Talent, isn't it, of creating these environments, these locations where there's so many hooks available, so imaginative and inventive, that it felt like proper science fiction.
- [69:56]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, that's kind of what I mean, that sometimes Traveler doesn't feel like the parts of Dream actually does feel like science fiction. It does.
- [70:06]
Dirk the Dice
It's like this idea, isn't it, that there's this planet called Sink that has a sentient marsh swamp that absorbs the intelligence of what?
- [70:18]
Judge Blithey
That was my idea because it doesn't tell you. I don't think it had reading. What the. Why are they sinking into the marsh? I came up with that because I thought, why are they doing that? But I think that's testament to it as a campaign because there's. There's so many ideas in it that if it was a normal Traveler game, would I come up with a sentient marsh? Would I would that seem a bit pulpy and a bit daft, but because it's Parachute Renax, that felt like it fits right in. It's like a weird idea where you think. Well, it's full of weird ideas like that, isn't it? Because it's like 70s sci fi, that kind of thing. So. Yeah, but.
- [70:54]
Dirk the Dice
But they're all discussion over. We discovered this superior artificial intelligence which, like almost something from foundation or again like Blake 7. And we considered what. What would happen if we sunk the superior intelligence into the marsh and what.
- [71:14]
Judge Blithey
That's right, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you got. Yeah, it's like a. There's like an AI. Introduced an AI to it. That. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's kind of funny that though, because it does, it does, it does for its future imagination. Because there's so much in it and you're reading it, it's very, very easy to come up with ideas, you know, that seem to fit in and make sense in that kind of universe. That feels off beam with normal Traveler in some respects. Yeah. Maybe not completely, but it. Do you know what I mean? Sometimes Traveler scenarios are a bit straight laced out. Whereas parts of Drinax felt not wacky. Not wacky. That. I mean, it's not like that, is it? But it feels like, well, let's say like Blake 7. Like people would be dressed in the past, church people be dressed like seven if it were in some flamboyant.
- [72:12]
Dirk the Dice
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, as we said, 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.
- [72:43]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, yeah, there's. Yeah, there's this like. Yeah, there's a planet that has a number one. Yeah, it's like a water planet, isn't it? And the ruler is Governor Ranib, I think she's called. And she's like an Android, but she's a child. But she's not a child, she's an Android, but she looks like a child. Things like that. Which in a way you could argue on one level it's just set dressing. But she became quite interested.
- [73:10]
Dirk the Dice
So we tampered with her batteries in a stealth mission so that any moment
- [73:16]
Judge Blithey
we could depose her if required. Yeah, you could depose, but that's what's so good about It. It's got things like that in work. It's kind of quite a colorful npc. It's an interesting npc. It doesn't matter if it's just a brief encounter or whether that you bring that character in and make more significant, that that's kind of what happens. So there's like a character, isn't there? Tisney Zazzle, who is in the first season, is. She's like a X pop star, isn't she? Who is the charismatic dictator of a planet. And you rescued her, which is one of the little. That is one of the little hooks in. A separate little hook in that you can do that. And she became quite an important character, which doesn't have to be. But if that's what's good about it, if it's full of interesting NPCs who are capable of being more interesting and more fully fledged if required. But equally, if they're not required, they're not. They don't have to be that important. So as a gm, you can bring things in and out, you know, more. So bring. Bring characters in and out without worrying that they're not interesting enough. But equally you can leave characters out. You don't need to worry that them being left out is somehow damaging the campaign because it doesn't. Doesn't really.
- [74:41]
Dirk the Dice
The last. The last highlight for me, if you are a GM or a referee who's contemplating running pirates in Trinx, you're going to have to accept the fact and brush up on your Starship Combat rules. Because it felt to me that 25% of the time, so one in every four sessions involved Starship combat. And we've had a bit of a checkered history, haven't we, with Starship Combat for Traveler. But the way that you organized it, and this is me blowing smoke up your fundamental. It made it exciting. And you used a particular tool, didn't you, to do that, so a particular graphic to help, yeah, organize those fights so that it was. See the relative distance and how we were positioned in the fight quite easily.
- [75:42]
Judge Blithey
But yeah, it's like a kind of player mat, almost. The virtual one, obviously, but you can put tokens on it and your ship stays in the middle and everything moves around you relative to you, doesn't it? So as you. If you accelerate things, you move the tokens nearer. If they accelerate, then you move them further away. And it did. It gave like a kind of visual interpretation of what was going on, which did make it easier to manage because it is a bit tricky, I think. Start at combat In Traveller, I think in almost all games it's quite, quite a tricky thing in it because there's a lot going on. I think there's a lot going on and that's not necessarily a bad thing because what I realized with this, this campaign is because we did quite a lot of starship combat. The fact there's a lot going on is good. It's bad because there's a lot going on. So you've got to get your head around a lot and think about this, that and the other. But equally it's good in that it gives all the players something to do. So you were piloting. John and Andy were gunners. Michael was on the sensors. But even with the sensors, which might seem a bit boring, when I started using missiles against you, that became quite important role because you were kind of trying to block the missiles and there's something to do for all the players in starship combat. It's not like anyone's really sat there doing nothing. The flip side to it is because there's a lot going on, there's a lot going on so you've got to kind of manage it. And sometimes a starship combat would take up a whole session really, wouldn't it? Because you're slowly managing the distance, doing this, doing that, you know, oh, some missiles come in, oh, we need to do this, stop the firing moves, that, all that kind of thing.
- [77:28]
Dirk the Dice
Some of it just came down to a single dice roll. That's what made it particularly exciting, that there's a great deal of peril, isn't there? I mean, starship combat, it's a way of getting a total party kill, imagine.
- [77:44]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, it isn't. There's a couple of times it was going down to the wire. I think you did have luck on your side though. Remember you did have a look mechanic which I introduced. The look. There are two things. If I ran it again, I'm not gonna run it again. But if I run it again, there are two things I would consider changing and I don't know how you feel about this. I introduced the luck mechanic. There's an optional rule in the Traveller companion about luck, isn't there? So you can burn luck points before you roll to be fair. So it doesn't guarantee success. But I think at times that gave you a bit of an edge. I didn't mind that when it was stash of combat or combat because there's a lot of dice rolling so you're not going to burn your luck that quickly. But I would ban luck spends for Some of the bigger roles that you do, so you might not be rolling very much. You go here and you've got to make a diplomacy role, you've got to make a broker role. And the problem with the look mechanic is then people go, oh, well, oh, I'm going to spend 4 luck on this. Guarantee it. That's the bit. I think if I did it again, I would have luck, but I would say you can only spend it in combat.
- [78:58]
Host/Interviewer
Yes.
- [78:58]
Judge Blithey
Yeah. And that's it. It's for combat situations only and all the other stuff, you know, because it does do this thing parts Gen X, where scales in and out in the same way that with the mini games. The mini games are like the ultimate example of giving you a more abstracted, broader picture of what's going on. But it also does it sometimes where it'll say, right, you go to this planet, you need to do this, you need to do that, you need to do this, roll that, roll the other roll, and then you can achieve this. And you think, oh, it's only three roles. So if they've got luck, they could really make sure they achieve that. And sometimes there were times when I thought it would have been really interesting if you'd have failed that role. Do you see what I mean? Yes. You know, so that's that. The other thing I think I would change is, and I don't think you might disagree with this because I think what you said earlier about getting all the money. There's another optional rule in Traveller Companion about having a wealth score rather than actual money. So there was a point, I think, towards the end where we lost track of how much money you'd got and it all became a bit academic. Can we buy one of these? Yeah, because I think you got loads of money. No one lost track. Whereas there's this, there's an optional rule where it gives you a wealth score. So what would happen is the more money you get, your wealth score goes up, up, rather than tracking actual credits. Yeah, you get a higher wealth score and then when you want to buy something, you roll against your wealth score like it's a stat and if you achieve it, you can afford it and if you can't, then it sort of factors in availability and certain things being more expensive on certain planets than they are in the book.
- [80:42]
Dirk the Dice
In general, I like those abstracted credit rating type approaches. Maybe it's good early on when you're starting out and you're a kind of small enterprise counting the credits, but perhaps in season three, which is a point where I think we start to lose track at that point. Moving to a wealth credit score would have been better because as you say, it captures not only your value but also some media influence.
- [81:12]
Judge Blithey
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you could, I think you. I can't remember exactly. I think you can roll and then if you still want it, you can have it, but you've got to reduce your wealth score.
- [81:22]
Dirk the Dice
Yeah.
- [81:23]
Judge Blithey
So again, you might want that plasma gum, but you, you roll and you fail. You fail. Even though you've got a lot of money because it's more expensive than you imagined, I think you can have it, but then you've got to reduce your wealth score so that can go down and then make buying other things more difficult. And I think, like you said at the beginning, it's fun because you go, hey, we had 2 million credits, right, brilliant. I feel like we're proper pirates sat in a bath. Victory over the Imperium. But later on it does become. There were times where I think everyone just went, how much money have we got? It's just loads of money now, loads of money. It doesn't matter.
- [82:02]
Dirk the Dice
There's so much more we could go at. I mean, the other bit I enjoyed as well was this idea that because we had our status grew, that we installed espionage assets into certain areas within the Trojan reach, so that when we arrived at our planet, we had an advantage over some of the antagonists because we had somebody installed there who was feeding us information.
- [82:29]
Judge Blithey
What it's kind of Piratex has highlighted to me is how flexible the Traveller system is in that you can do with the same system, you can do very detailed combat round by round combat, but you can also do big stuff like installing an asset and saying, right, we'll make a roll. And that rule that it's got about effect, where however high your score is over the threshold of success gives you an effect score. As a gm, you can use that, think about effect and say, well, okay, you've got an asset, you roll a 10, that's 2 over 10, 2 over 8. So effect of 2, you can ask them, they're going to know two things on this planet. They can feed you two facts of information. You can kind of use the system for very big ideas and also for very tiny ones, you know, like shooting a gun, firing a gun and all the factors about COVID and this, that and the other, you can use it for that, but you can also use it to negotiate with a whole planet or install a spy somewhere and get some secrets with exactly the same system and exactly I Mean, you probably say that about a lot of systems, but somehow Traveler feels really good. And I never really noticed it before in other games of Traveler, bro. And I think it's partly because the Mongoose version tweaks the rules a bit and includes that rule about effect and all that kind of thing. But it does feel like a very, very good system for zooming in on detail, but also pulling away and giving you a bigger picture and doing exactly the same dice rolls. But it seems to work for both situations. You see what I mean?
- [84:15]
Dirk the Dice
So it's finished now. How do you feel about it now that it's finished and it's out of your life?
- [84:22]
Judge Blithey
Well, I feel like I got away with it. I managed to do it. I got away with it. Hopefully. There's always a sense.
- [84:30]
Dirk the Dice
There's always a sense at the end of these big book campaigns of Anticlimax though, isn't there? You kind of reach it and you think, all right, okay, I've done that now.
- [84:40]
Judge Blithey
Yeah, yeah, yeah. There always is, isn't there? It's always that. Although to be fair to it, I think perhaps less so with this one than others, because I think it does end on quite a good. The end of it is quite well played out, isn't it, in terms of negotiations and then what happens? And it feels quite epic.
- [85:03]
Dirk the Dice
It feels quite. Yeah, it is more Asimov than Star Wars. The end, I'd say it feels like big scale event that you. You have been party to rather than just like a bit of a climactic shootout at the end. It's not like that at all, is it?
- [85:23]
Judge Blithey
No, no, no. It, it becomes a little bit more abstract and it is about these big negotiations that you do. But as you said, like, like you said that that's kind of inevitable because the whole trajectory of it for players is to become more and more powerful. Therefore some shoots out in a bar is hardly like the way it's going to end, so. But it does. I think it does quite a good job of ending it on the right note.
- [85:49]
Dirk the Dice
Thanks for running it. It was great to experience it. Just what have you got lined up next? That's the only thing you're having a break from.
- [85:58]
Judge Blithey
I might have a break. It's quite a thing, isn't it? When you've run something for so long, it's quite commitment. Although to be fair, having the breaks over summer helped, I think. Yeah, I think that's the thing with a big, with a big book campaign. Having a little break for a month or two and then Coming back to it, as long as you strict with yourself. I think we were all very good at being quite strict and got right. Beginning of September, we're starting again. Everyone turns up, everyone does it. There's a commitment all across the board for these things, isn't there? So it's not just a gm, it's the players as well. You all turned up for it and that, you know, the break, you could argue having a little break is a dangerous thing because you might not restart it. So there is danger there. But it's a good thing in that it gives everyone a bit of a breather from it and then restart it again and it feels fresh and you're great. We're doing this again, then have a little break again.
- [86:55]
Dirk the Dice
And you did a good job as well. That it was so broad and so full of potential of keeping it on track, allowing us to explore it a bit. But it never felt like it got bogged down. And those things can go down rabbit holes, can't they? That can bog things down. But I think we managed to avoid that. And I think your guidance and the use of the NPCs kind of directors in particular ways, yeah, work really well, I think.
- [87:32]
Judge Blithey
I think the scenario. I think the scenario. The scenarios in it are all very, very good scenarios. And you could run them completely independently, you know. But I think in a way the biggest risk is getting bogged down in any one of the scenarios, to the point where you spend in session after session after session after session after doing this scenario by the book, you know, by. As written completely, you know, that. That could be a little bit frustrating, I think, for players, maybe, because like I said, like I've said all along, there is that contradiction as a player. It's saying to you, as a player, go out there, do what you want to do, blow things up, form alliances, create enemies, eliminate enemies, all that kind of thing. And you were all having a lot of fun doing that. That the danger would have been if I said, anyway, never mind that you're meeting Aslan in a bar and he wants you to do this, that and the other. And then we're doing session after session with a. With a scenario that sort of. That could be frustrating, I think, because what I tried to do was 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. Start it here or start it there, that kind of thing. Like there's one, there's one scenario where you go to a planet and you have to negotiate with the Aslam and he's very, very involved in the different clams and what's going on, this kind of thing. I remember thinking, let's, let's get them to this planet and let's give them some. I think it was the one where you called one of the Aslan Big boy and he took exception at it. And Jonathan then had to fight him in a duel. Which he never forgave you for. No, he never again forgave you for that. He started a fight, but he had to fight him to the death or something. It's quite funny, but that scenario could. You could. And I'm not just picking on that one, but that's a scenario. You think you could really kind of disappear, like you said, down a rabbit hole of dealing with all of his Aslan clan and as players, would you then go, oh, this is a bit tedious. We're enjoying ourselves. Yes. You know, stealing from Imperial ships. You know, why are we doing this? And that's the. I think that's the biggest danger in it, is that feeling of you could get bogged down in any one of these scenarios a bit too much.
- [89:59]
Dirk the Dice
And 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. And they'll kind of converge at points, but we've all got a different experience of it. If Andy, Michael or John were here, they probably have a different perspective of their experience of playing. That's. I suppose that's the magic of what this hobby does sometimes, isn't it? It creates these things that you've experience. It's. It's been great.
- [90:39]
Judge Blithey
Yeah.
- [90:39]
Dirk the Dice
Thanks, Blythe.
- [90:40]
Judge Blithey
Thank you.
- [90:46]
Host/Interviewer
Never mind the dice rolls. At last there's something to read. Campaign ideas, reviews of both old and new games, and much, much more. This is the answer to the void that we have found. Find Nevermind the dice rolls on Patreon and Drivethru rpg.
- [91:22]
Dirk the Dice
There isn't another bit.
- [91:24]
Host/Interviewer
Thanks to Matthew for spending time with us and I'm excited to see what comes out next for the travel alignment. I also completely forgot to ask about the forthcoming Dark Conspiracy reboot. Sorry to Lee Williams in particular, is a massive fan of the game. Maybe we'll get Mongoose on again when it comes out. It was spotted that I've just done a new ad for Nevermind the Dice Rolls, a great monthly zine produced by Kat, who with her other half Andrew, has been one of the longest supporters of of the Grog pod. You can find out more at Drivethru and by searching Patreon. We'll never have paid for ads on the podcast, but if you are a Patreon supporter with something to promote, let me know. It'll help spread the word about other creative content that's out there. And the short ads provide a little break before this bit, which isn't even a bit, if you know what I mean. At the time of recording, it's almost virtual. GROG meet 2026 on the 17th to the 19th of April. It's our online meetup and there's still some spots available. I'll put a link to Warhorn in the notes. Also note from May we have a whole new season of detective novels lined up for the book club. You'll find more about that at thegrugnard files.com all of this is made possible thanks to the generous support of the patrons. So thank you to everyone who throws some coins into the beret every month to keep this show on the road. And please, if you're listening to this and you enjoyed it, please pass it on. Show it to someone else if you didn't like it. Well, as I always say, bugger off. I'll give some individual shoutouts next time. I can feel a thunder phase coming on. Until then, adios amigos.
- [93:45]
Matthew Sprange
Sam.