Hey folks, long time no electrons. This is the info page/FAQ for my
2300AD campaign,
The Dark Between The Stars. The game is based on the first edition
Traveller rules and
2300AD setting from Mongoose Publishing, and is currently in the planning/recruitment stage.
The Premise: Rebco SAR is involved in more than just search and rescue operations in space and on Earth's far-flung colonies. As humankind has spread throughout the stars, it has encountered numerous alien species, mysteries, and threats. Humans being what they are, tend to take risks and meddle in things they're not necessarily well-equipped to deal with.
That's where you, the heroes, come in. You'll be called upon to help people and organizations deal with the difficulties of off-world life on one of Earth's many colonies. With the shadow of the Kafers spreading throughout human space, will you be able to nurture and protect human civilization on the frontier, or will you simply fade into the dark between the stars?
The Platform: Audio will be handled through Discord, while the virtual tabletop (VTT) may be handled either through Roll20 or Owlbear Rodeo. Players are not required to have their cameras active; I know I, the referee, will not.
The Rule of Rules (Rule Zero): As a friend of mine wrote on his own long-running campaign site:
Even if a game element
is initially permitted, if it is later deemed incompatible with the
campaign, it will be modified or removed. Any characters (PC or NPC)
that use
that element may be required to adjust to the change (in other words, grandfathering is not guaranteed).
The (GM) will attempt to keep this
sort of thing to a minimum (if at all), but sometimes this may happen
in the process of keeping the rules appropriate to the campaign setting.
That being said, while there are a ton of other Mongoose Traveller (and third
party) books which are possibly compatible, the two aforementioned books
are the foundation. Those books will be referred to and open for access
as needed in the campaign at the referee's discretion. The same goes
for material from the original Traveller 2300/2300AD RPG and related periodicals from GDW, Digest Publications, and Stygian Fox. Still, if an element presented in any of the material proves to be an issue, it will be removed or changed as needed.
Campaign Tone: While the Kafer War seems to dominate the setting of 2300AD, this campaign will be focusing on exploration, dealing with problems related to off-world colonies, as well as international (and interstellar) diplomacy, rivalries, and politics. As such, characters in the group will need to have a wide range of abilities and skills - medical, combat, sciences, etc. The Kafers will show up in the campaign, but they won't dominate it completely.
Character Generation: Beginning characters will be created using the rules as presented in Mongoose Traveller 1e, modified by the Mongoose 2300AD rules. I would recommend that characters be no older than 30 or 35, as I'm not aware of the 2300AD setting having anagathics to prevent the effects of aging. As with the original 2300AD, a deck of cards comes in handy for selecting a character's motivations. I'm willing to allow players to choose their character's motivations, so long as they are reasonable. Finally, all player characters are human, as the aliens in the 2300AD setting are NPCs.
Replacement Characters: Should a starting character be killed or otherwise need to be retired
from play, the player may be offered the chance to generate a new
character with access to one or more MgT1e career books at the referee's
discretion. New characters joining the group, whether tied to a new player or to a current player, will have roughly the same amount of experience as the least experienced character in the group.
About Rebco SAR (from Mongoose 2300AD, p.85) Headquarters: Lansdowne, Wellon, Tirane, Alpha Centauri, Core
Mission Statement: To provide the best and most appropriate human resource to tackle any problem, anywhere.
Products/Services: Employment services, troubleshooting, security and mercenaries.
Language(s): English, French, Urdu.
Culture: Free-wheeling but at the same time very cautious. All operations must be above-board.
Staff Levels: 125,000 throughout Human space, including contractors.
Scope of Operations: Human space.
In the year 2244, two financial institutions on Earth, the Rawal Pindi Trading Company of Pakistan and the National Express Bank of America, merged to become Rebco. The majority of Rebco’s business involved financial services on Earth but in 2257, after developing a large internal security force, the corporation created a splinter group dedicated to providing short-term security forces to organisations on colony worlds.
This began with uniformed guards for corporations and over time ranged up to include mercenary troops for small colonial governments and even rescue operations. Rebco relocated their new organisation’s offices to the colony of Wellon, on Tirane and they called it ‘Rebco Search and Rescue,’ or, more succinctly, ‘Rebco SAR’. Since then, Rebco SAR has expanded from providing security forces to matching persons seeking employment with employers looking for experienced personnel.
Missions for Rebco SAR can involve anything. If there is money to be made, Rebco SAR will most likely be willing to get involved, although its coordinators pride themselves upon their honest reputation and will avoid overtly criminal activities.
House Rule: Character Improvement
One of the big questions of Mongoose
Traveller was how characters advanced in skill levels during their adventures. I put the following system together to answer that question. In addition, I hacked some of the XP and learning/teaching rules from
MegaTraveller (
Player's Manual - p. 41-43) and
Traveller: The New Era (p. 133-134) to expand upon how characters can teach (or learn from) others.
Basic XP Guidelines- 1 XP for surviving the adventure.
- 2 bonus XP for good roleplaying and/or ingenuity in the game.
- 1 XP for each skill used repeatedly or in a particularly dangerous situation.
Spending Experience Points Players keep track of what skills their character used during the adventure. Only these skills are eligible for improvement with the cost in XP being equal to the new skill level (e.g. Skill-1 costing 1 XP, Skill-3 costing 3 XP, etc). Boosting a skill from Skill-0 to Skill-1 costs 1. Learning a skill from scratch up to Skill-1 costs 2 XP.
Learning via Observation and Training Characters may also learn through observation and training. A character observing another character successfully performing a task gains 1 XP for the relevant skill. This works only if the character explaining the task has a skill level twice that of the observing character (e.g. a Skill-2 character teaching a Skill-1 character how to do something; or a Skill-4 character teaching a Skill-2 character to do a task).
Teaching a character to do something requires a Difficult check of the teacher's relevant skill (i.e. using Repair to teach another how to repair something). The students' INT and EDU modifiers are also taken into consideration when totaling the final DM. For multiple students, average the INT and EDU modifiers if you so choose.
The teacher must have at least one level in the skill being taught and the student cannot have a skill level equal to or higher than the teacher's. If the teacher succeeds at their roll, they gain 1/2 XP per student (minimum of 1 XP). The teacher's roll is followed by the student's roll to demonstrate understanding. The comprehension DM is the difference between the teacher's roll and the target number. if the student succeeds, they gain a certain number of XP
If the number of students is less than half the teacher's skill level, each student gains 3 XP. If the number of students is more than half the teacher's skill level, each student gains 1 XP.
Example: Corey has INT 10 (+1 DM), EDU 7 (+0 DM), and Repair-1. His teacher, Brian, has INT 13 (+2 DM), EDU 9 (+1 DM) and Repair-2. Brian is going to teach Corey how to repair his pistol. The DM for the task is -2 (Difficult). Brian rolls 2D6, adding the task DM of -2 (for Difficult), his own INT and EDU DMs (+2 for INT, +1 for EDU), his repair skill (Repair-2) and Corey's INT and EDU DMs (+1 for INT, +0 for EDU) he gets a total DM of +4. He rolls a 7 adding the +4 to get 11; this gives a +3 (11 - 3 = 8) DM to aid in Corey's understanding. Brian has succeeded in adequately explaining the task; now Corey has to demonstrate his understanding.
Corey rolls 2D6, adds his INT and EDU DMs (a total of +1), his repair skill (Repair-1), and the +3 comprehension DM. His roll is a 9, giving a total of 14. He shows that he understands. For his success in teaching, Brian receives 1 XP, since he has only one student. Since Corey is the only student and he understands what he has been taught, he receives 3 XP.
Characters with a skill at Skill-0 may still learn a skill, either through observation, instruction, or trial and error (also called "The Hard Way").
Skill Caps Characters are limited in the total number of skill levels they can have. This limit is the sum of their INT and EDU scores. Untrained and level-0 skills do not contribute to this total.
Additionally, a character is limited in how many high-level skills he can maintain at a time. This limit is typically one level-4 skill and two level-3 skills. If a player raises a skill up to level-3 or level-4, and thus exceeds this limit, he must simultaneously drop a skill down from that level as well.
If the sum of the character's INT and EDU DMs is greater than zero, they are allowed that many additional skill levels toward their total. A character with an INT and EDU both of 9 (+1 DM for both) could have up to 20 levels in their skills (9 + 9 + 2 = 20). This does not allow them any additional level-3 or level-4 skills.
Skill Caps, Enhancements, and Aging Cybernetic enhancements will not allow a character to surpass these limitations.
Should a character suffer a loss of either INT or EDU due to aging, the character's skill caps are also affected. For example, the same character fails an aging roll and has his INT reduced by 1, dropping it from 9 (+1 DM) to 8 (+0 DM); the character's EDU is 9 (+1 DM). Where once the character had two additional skill levels, he now loses one skill level and must drop one skill by a level to reflect this deterioration if he had previously hit his maximum number of skill levels. If the character had not already hit the maximum, they do not suffer the loss of an active skill level, only the reduction of the maximum number of skill levels they can have.
Improving Characteristics Characters may also improve their characteristics through training. The target characteristic score's DM, in addition to any aging modifiers, is the DM for the training roll; characteristics cannot be improved through training beyond +1 per year.
To quote the MT rules "...a character could regularly lift weights to improve his Strength; he could study fencing to improve his Dexterity; or he could run regularly to improve his Endurance. A memory course could enhance his Intelligence, and he could regularly participate in a reading and discussion group to increase his Education."
The exceptions to this rule are social stats (Caste, Charisma, Social Standing, and Territory). These cannot be increased through formal training or experience. Instead, "it requires significant cash expenditures and consequent changes in lifestyle to 'become' part of the desired social class."
House Rule: Sanity
At least two of the original GDW adventures (one being "Bayern", the other remaining nameless to avoid spoilers) had scenarios and rules regarding how encountering alien intelligences affects the human psyche. The purpose of having these rules isn't to make 2300AD into some
eldritch dark space where sanity-blasting xenomorphs lurk in every
shadow. No, it's just to provide some point of reference in how humans
deal with encountering the truly alien with little or no points of
reference in common.
Because the original
2300AD system differs from the Mongoose
Traveller rules, and because Mongoose
Traveller's base rules don't handle anything regarding sanity (
Book 4: Psion has rules for psionic trauma), that leaves a bit of a gap. I've crafted some workable (at least to me) rules from the psionic trauma rules in
Book 4: Psion, the rules from WildFire's out-of-print
Chthonian Stars setting, and Terry McInnes' article "Losing It" from
The Travellers' Digest #17.
You can find them here.House Rule: Psionics
The original
2300AD didn't allow for PC psions. Some GDW adventures had PCs encountering psionic aliens (again, no spoilers), and as above, had rules for such encounters' effects on the human psyche. As it stands, I'm using Patrick M. Murphy's
2300AD psionics house rules as a guide, as well as my own common sense. In other words, if your character has psionic abilities, don't expect them to be crushing starships or flinging jets of fire from their fingertips. As per the Mongoose
Traveller rules, characters cannot have psionic talents at generation without permission from the GM.
My guidelines for psionics in Mongoose 2300AD can be found here.
House Rules: Armor Ablation and Other Options
Combat will use both the Knockout Blow and Random First Blood optional rules on p.66 of the MgT1e book. With regard to damage to armor, one (1) point of armor protection is lost for every three (3) points of damage that gets through.
So What's The Difference (Between Games)?: Around 1986, Game Designer's Workshop released Traveller: 2300, which was essentially a follow-up to Twilight: 2000. Unfortunately, the title caused a bit of confusion, and so GDW revised and retitled the game 2300AD.
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Different and yet...
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In "The
2300 AD Revision" (
Challenge Magazine #34), Lester Smith writes (
bold emphases are his as they appear in the original article):
Some people originally confused Traveller: 2300 with Traveller or thought that there was some link intended between the two games. By changing the title to 2300 AD, we put an end to that problem, while at the same time maintaining the continuity of the releases in the 2300 line. Let me emphasize here for anyone who might still be wondering: 2300 AD has nothing to do with Traveller. Not only are the rules to the two games much different, the games are set in different "universes," with completely different alien races, different routes of travel between the stars because the FTL drives in each game operate on completely different theoretical bases, different technologies (there are no grav plates in 2300 AD, for instance), and different themes. Traveller spans the Milky Way galaxy and concerns humanity's struggles to maintain a civilization over that broad reach of space. 2300 AD reaches stars just beyond 50 light-years from Sol and concerns humanity's struggles just to survive among those stars.
Flash forward to 2012, and Mongoose Publishing releases their edition of the
2300AD license
- with "Traveller" emblazoned on the cover. Granted, the second edition
doesn't have that same point of confusion, but I'm not really thrilled
with the second editions of either Mongoose
2300AD or Mongoose
Traveller. Overall, I find it rather ironic that Mongoose Publishing has unintentionally reinstated the relationship between
Traveller and
2300AD.
"So, what about 2320AD?" you say. Well, that's a different matter. If the campaign timeline runs through the end of the Kafer War, we'll cross that bear when we get to it.
If anything else should need to be addressed with regard to the game rules, it will be added to this blog post. Now, let's reach for the stars.
