Traveller: Knight-Captains

I read Space Viking in December and meant to blog about it but there has been a lot of other reading to blog about lately.  It was very useful context for understanding Traveller's idea of Feudal Technocracy.  The Sword Worlders in Space Viking have planetary kings, continental dukes, and counts of what sound like large industrial conglomerates.  This is obviously somewhat different than what Traveller seems to expect of eg subsector dukes, but it's an interesting idea.

The bottom end of nobility, though, feels a bit underdeveloped in both cases.  If your counts own large corporations, what do your knights own?

Maybe small businesses.  Maybe well-armed small businesses which can be called upon by their lords for military service.  Like far traders with triple turrets, or a mercenary unit.  And really, if you don't have the central authority to keep weapons out of the hands of your people, getting oaths of fealty and to uphold your laws from at least the ones organizing groups of armed men sounds like a reasonable policy from a sovereign's perspective...

There's a certain charm to the idea of "Finished your fourth term in the Navy with a SOC of 12?  You have received word that your eldest uncle passed away, and you are heir to your family's ship.  Arise, Sir Sigismund of the Far Trader Beowulf."  I've heard worse excuses for giving the party a ship.

I don't think that doing this, even in the absence of a starship loan, necessarily removes the financial tension from the game; she's an old, old ship, been in the family for generations, and has lots of quirks and needs lots of maintenance.  The nobility was often in debt historically; you have noblesse oblige to those under you, expenses to keep up appearances and to maintain your status among your peers, and when your lord calls, you must go, even if there may not be profit in the trip.

And then your third cousin shows up to press his claim to the family ship and you have to settle the matter in a gentlemanly fashion, which is to say, dueling.

...  I wonder if there are any good bits to lift from Pendragon or Wolves of God for something like this.

Classic Traveller: Dark Nebula

 

Continuing my read-through of the Classic Traveller wargames, Dark Nebula was published in 1980 and covers a war between the Solomani and the Aslan over about two subsectors of space, including one difficult-to-traverse nebula.  Turns are two years of in-universe time, each hex is half a parsec, naval units represent individual ships, and ground units are divisions.

Overall the core of this game looks pretty reasonable.  The space combat system is kinda neat.  The defender nominates a ship, the attacker chooses one of their ships to engage it, and then this repeats until one side is out of uncommitted ships, at which point the side with more ships left uncommitted can assign them as they please to the various 1:1 ship combats already committed to.  Once ships are matched up, the resolution of each of these combats looks pretty straightforward.

I think what I like about this fleet combat design is that there are lots of significant choices (what order to nominate and assign your ships in) but little mechanical complexity.  In general this seems like a desirable property in a game.  And at the scale this game is operating at, "where do you assign which assets" probably is the right question to be posing to players.

I'm also tickled by the inclusion of tanker-ships, really mobile refineries that you can park in systems without gas giants to skim hydrogen off of the star and refine it into fuel, allowing that system to be traversed by other ships without delays.  I love me some logistics-infrastructure-construction.

One thing here that I found a bit surprising was that moving ships can move as far as they want on the hex maps as long as they're moving along jump routes between systems with fuel available, until they enter a system that lacks fuel or where there's an enemy presence (or is in the nebula and requires exploration).  It makes some sense under the time-per-turn assumptions and the scale of the map, but "move as far as you want" still made me stop and think.  It almost has a railroad-war feeling, like the American Civil War or World War 1, rather than an open-water naval warfare feeling.  Maybe that's always been true of naval warfare under Traveller's assumptions and I just never realized it.

There are a couple of other surprising things in Dark Nebula.  It feels like a somewhat experimental game; there's tech progress from research in the titular nebula, semi-randomized initial boardstate due to the map placement procedure, and neutral forces with reaction rolls, potentially hostile or potentially hireable.  I definitely didn't expect randomization of map layout in a Traveller game set in the Third Imperium continuity.  Some weirdness arises from this - the maps have hex numbers seemingly from a much bigger hexmap, which are very unlikely to end up getting put together into a sensible order during the alternating placement procedure.  I appreciate that the scan quality is good enough to read the hex numbers though!

There are also a couple of other things about the maps which are weird, and not in a great way.  The star density on them is rather lower than is typical for Traveller.  Several of these quarter-subsector maps only have four stars in them, and the densest have eight.  In a typical Traveller subsector, I'd expect more like 40 systems, or 10 per average map on this scale.  I'm not sure how well the balance of unit production against destruction would scale up to higher-density maps and owning more planets.  Also, having a much higher-density graph of systems might lose some of that railroad-war feel and change the character of the game significantly.  Finally, the way Dark Nebula handles ground forces on planets is that there's a box in an empty hex adjacent to each inhabited system, representing the surface of the planet, and you put troop counters there.  But this would not scale well to higher-density maps.  The quality of infrastructure in these inhabited systems is also denoted by the color of the planet's box, which is a bit lousy - printing your own copy of the map requires color, you have to remember what the colors mean, colorblindness problems, etc.  Frankly I found the color-coding confusing on first read and first look at the map; the icons for the stars use random colors not related to the color coding for the system's infrastructure quality.  They're probably supposed to relate to stellar spectrum class but that's not relevant here and we're already gone non-canonical with the random map so...  I don't know why they did that, rather than making the stars the same color as their respective planet boxes.

The lack of compatibility between Dark Nebula's maps and Traveller RPG subsector maps (both in scale and density) also highlights another oddity here - Dark Nebula is the first Traveller wargame I've read that makes no mention of integration with the RPG.  It does seem like integrating a game where turns are two years of in-universe time would be tough, but I was surprised that there was nothing.  I didn't expect much of Invasion: Earth, but we still got one good patron hook there.

What I didn't realize when I initially read Dark Nebula (not until halfway through writing this post and getting kind of suspicious that the combat system seemed much more staid than the rest of the game) was that it was a clear successor to Imperium, published in 1977.  I've only skimmed Imperium, but it looks like it shared the 2-year turn, combat system, turn structure, etc but is played on a fixed map, with slightly more complex fleet compositions including fighters and carriers, and some neat rules about armistices / inter-war periods (allowing the game to be played in a campaign fashion) and interaction between the Imperial player (playing as a frontier governor, not the emperor) and the Third Imperium.  Notably, Imperium does mostly omit tech progress and lacks neutral forces.  Like Dark Nebula, it foregoes any mention of integration with the Traveller RPG (which made more sense in 1977) and still uses the system of planetary surface boxes in adjacent empty hexes.  I may return to Imperium at some point, but given that my interest is at least nominally in RPG integration, I think it may have to wait.

My blind spot for Imperium and trying to understand Dark Nebula's place in the chronology of CT wargames also caused me to take a quick look at 1981's Fifth Frontier War.   This looks like a monster of a game, bringing together the multi-subsector scale of Imperium and Dark Nebula with some details like SDBs and percentage-based damage to units from Invasion: Earth, but with a greater eye towards RPG integration.  First and foremost, hexes in Fifth Frontier War are one parsec rather than Imperium's half-parsec, and turns in Fifth Frontier War are only one week!  But this means that it can't just abstract starship movement into "move as far as you want this turn", so you have to deal with more details.  And fixed maps allowed Fifth Frontier War to put planetary surface boxes around the edges of the board, rather than right next to the systems they're associated with (which, admittedly, might create some difficulty in locating any particular box), allowing it to increase star system density up towards that typical of Traveller RPG campaigns.  Fifth Frontier War looks tremendously ambitious and hideously fiddly, and I can't imagine why it was the last Classic Traveller boxed-set hex and counter wargame.  At the same time I salute the dream of having a metagame world-engine wargame to run concurrently with one's RPG campaign and I look forward to learning its lessons on a more thorough read/post at some point.

Classic Traveller Apocrypha: Federation and Imperium

I was sent down a bit of a Classic Traveller rabbit hole by a comment on a post over at Grognardia recently, which mentioned a CT book that I hadn't heard of before - Book 0: An Introduction to Traveller, published 1981, which I happened to have around on the Classic Traveller CD from FFE.  I haven't read it properly yet, though I did skim the sections on preparing to referee, changing the rules, and the bit mentioned in the Grognardia comment on the proposed setting:

Once the referee has decided the general features of the campaign, it is a good idea to jot down a one or two sentence summary of conditions for later reference, such as "The subsector is located on the fringe of the Moladon Federation, a loose organization of 300+ worlds governed by a federation council. Half the worlds in the subsector are in the federation, the rest are petty one or two world nations. The federation is currently in a period of stasis, between expansions, but plans to eventually absorb all worlds on its borders. The last war was over a century ago, but minor skirmishes are constantly taking place, especially between the larger outer states. Tech levels within the federation are between 5 and 12; outside they are between 1 and 9. Federation naval power is just strong enough to suppress piracy within the borders, and there is a great deal of local planetary autonomy."

This is a very different interplanetary government from the Third Imperium!  Yet it does show up in an official, GDW, Classic Traveller source.  It's also a lower tech level than I would've expected from CT's generation system; with 300 inhabited worlds, I would've expected the Moladon Federation to have at least one TL 15 world.  In order to get the distribution described, the generation rules were likely not adhered to rigorously.  Which is fine and all, but interesting to see in an official product.

The size of the proposed federation is also interesting.  At 300+ worlds, and an average of 40ish worlds per subsector, you're talking like eight subsectors - about half a sector.

This ties to something else from the Classic Traveller Apocrypha II CD - an article by Marc Miller which was originally published in the Jan/Feb 1979 issue of The Dungeoneer (which was Judge's Guild's competitor to TSR's The Dragon magazine I guess?) titled Dealing with the Concept of Empires.  FFE's Guide to Judge's Guild Traveller notes that "The first glimpses of the Third Imperium can be seen in this early article."  Dealing with the Concept of Empires describes several stages of development and coordination of interstellar empires operating under Traveller's assumption that information cannot travel faster than people (which The Concept of Empires describes as "the most basic assumption of Traveller"; Book 0, discussing changes referees might make to the rules on page 34, likewise cautions, "The speed of communication should never be allowed to exceed the speed of
travel. This is a basic tenet of Traveller..."  I hadn't seen this put so emphatically before!).

Dealing with the Concept of Empires outlines four stages for the development of an interstellar polity.  The smallest and most centralized is the federation, where all worlds are within a single jump, limited to maybe a bit over one subsector with jump-6; 60 worlds or so.  The government of a federation can project its authority and exercise state power efficiently within its whole territory.

Up from the federation is the confederation, at a two-week travel radius and with slightly weaker central authority.  This works out to 4 subsectors, or about 160 worlds under default density.  Sadly this sort of government is almost a footnote in The Concept of Empires.  This is a particularly interesting size to me in light of my observations on time, distance, language and culture for D&D; a two-week travel radius is about the size of many medieval kingdoms, and at scales larger than that I'd expect languages to start diverging.  I'm rather sad that this size of interstellar polity didn't get more attention.

Up from that is the empire, with a "communications radius" of two months, comparable to that of the Roman Empire (some quick googling also suggests that London to India was 6-8 weeks during the Age of Sail).  At jump-6, this is claimed to cover about 225 subsectors and maybe 9000 star systems.  This requires, though, that the central authority is not in "constant, immediate communication with all of its component worlds", and leaves opportunities for mercenaries, as central imperial authority is only brought to bear against exceptional threats, and cannot afford (logistically, practically) to intervene in every small local conflict that might arise within its borders.

Finally, up from the empire you have what Miller terms Imperium, where travel delays for information are so long that travel from one end of the Imperium to the other might exceed a human lifetime.  In such a situation the central authority cannot effectively govern the periphery and must cede most authority to local officials and perhaps to designated "agents", dispatched by the central authority to then wield power on its behalf at the fringes over a period of many years, "perhaps even [with] drug-induced longevity" (an interesting perspective on the level of power required for access to anagathics).  This is the premise for Miller's 2020 novel, Agent of the Imperium, following the adventures of one such agent.  This conception of an empire much too vast to administer, with delegation of authority to dispatched agents, seems to be the original vision of the Third Imperium.

Miller's closing remarks are about the possibility that the essential function of an imperium-scale government is really communications, the Imperial Postal Union.  This strikes me as a delightfully laissez-faire sort of imperial government; you can do most anything as long as you don't mess with the mail, but if you do, that's when the marines in battle-dress start taking an interest.

I think these sizings are also interesting for non-government entities.  Can a mega-corporation meaningfully run operations with more than a week or two delay in communications?  On a sufficient scale do you end up with many wholly-owned subsidiaries, each operating largely independently across their respective subsectors until an Agent of the Board arrives from HQ?

In any case - something which is surprising in the combination of these two documents, Introduction to Traveller and Dealing with the Concept of Empires, is that the proposed Moladon Federation is much too large to be a federation in The Concept of Empires' terms - "300+" planets instead of 60.  And at TL12, Moladon probably isn't using jump-6, so it should take them even longer to get to the periphery than the federation proposed in Concept.  I'm not sure what to make of this.  Concept preceded Introduction by two years.  Did something change in Miller's thinking about interstellar coordination?  Was Concept's definition of "federation" never especially canonical (probably the most likely explanation, really; it was just a magazine article, not a book).  Was it just a slip?  Has the Moladon "Federation" actually grown into a confederation or small empire in practice, but kept the old name out of tradition?  Is it more of a Stellaris-style federation, of multiple smaller interstellar governments each with high state capacity over their own one-subsector territories, all joined in a big mutual defense pact?  It's interesting to think about. 

edit: it turns out that Book 0 was written by Loren Wiseman, not Marc Miller.  So that's a pretty good explanation - maybe Wiseman never read Concept.

I did find something else interesting though while looking into the "what TL do you need for jump-6?" question.  In my previous post on jump tech level restrictions in CT Book 2, I noted that drives and powerplants for jump-6 100-ton ships are actually possible at TL 9, with the limitation on jump range for 100-ton ships really being in computers.  I was looking at the 1977 version of Book 2 and was really confused why I would have thought this, because the Jump-6 program is only size 2!  Apparently this was changed in the '81 version of Book 2, where jump program sizes now increase linearly with jump distance and jump distance is quickly bottlenecked by computers, as I had seen previously.  I think by the '77 rules, jump-6 100-ton starships were totally doable at TL-9, which is pretty wild.  But since Introduction to Traveller was published in '81, presumably for the '81 rules, this doesn't give Moladon a free pass on jump-6 at TL12.  Digging out the '81 rules instead, though, I think you only need a computer-4 to handle jump-6 plus Navigate, which is doable at TL-10.  So I guess holding together an interstellar government with J-6 X-boats is pretty doable earlier than I would've thought.  The fact that the worlds outside the Federation cap at TL-9 sort of makes sense in this light; they are the ones that don't have jump 4-6 yet and are largely stuck in their own little clusters, unable to project power very far.

Classic Traveller: Invasion: Earth Review

Invasion: Earth was published in 1981, the fifth of the series of Classic Traveller stand-alone games.  The premise is that the Third Imperium is invading Earth (defended by humans at the same tech level).  The game covers space warfare across the solar system in low detail, and then orbital bombardment, landings, and corps-scale ground warfare on a hex-map of the Earth's surface in somewhat more detail.  Turns are two weeks, with a special reinforcement turn roughly every 14 weeks, and the hex map is on an 1140 km scale.  The projection is quite neat; it's a very nice map. 

Overall verdict: very ambitious, some neat ideas, but a bit of a mess

The main pdf is 29 pages total, including the cover, front matter, rules, map, inventory of counters, counter-sheets, and combat resolution tables.  The text itself is only about 12 pages, of which two are background information on the Solomani Rim War and one and a smidge deal with using Earth in Traveller campaigns separate from the wargame.  So we really only get about nine pages of wargame rules, which is not much to cover so grand a conflict.

The rules start out relatively well with space combat, dividing the solar system into near-earth, far orbit, and deep space, and covering jumping in, closing through those distances, actually fighting, and going dark in deep space.  There is some weirdness around System Defense Boats fighting space targets; SDBs are primarily atmospheric / low orbit (I'm imagining them kind of like SSTO spaceplanes but agrav) and have only a ground bombardment attack score instead of having both a space attack score and a ground attack score like many naval units.  But because of this there's a whole separate space combat firing step just for SDBs attacking proper ships, and you have to divide up fleets being attacked by both SDBs and typical naval vessels, with part of the Imperial fleet fighting just SDBs and part fighting the regular navy. (How you divide your fleet is an interesting gameplay choice at least I guess?)  I'm not really clear why SDBs don't just have an anti-ship offensive score and use the regular combat resolution table when attacking ships, and then have a bombardment score for attacking ground targets.  Maybe it's so that they can add their bombardment score with the bombardment scores of planetary defense batteries when attacking ships doing landings?  But SDB weirdness aside, the space rules seem basically reasonable.

Atmospheric stuff like bombardment and landings follow.  There are some very weird things in this section.  Space ships in low orbit can go on overwatch against SDBs coming out of hiding in the oceans (neat) but the action economy on it is very strange, where you get to fire against each SDB wing with every naval unit on overwatch?  If the rules didn't say verbatim "All overwatch naval units attack each SDB wing that came out of hiding" I wouldn't think that that could possibly be the correct interpretation.  In the following bombardment phase, each ship or planetary defense battery only gets to attack once ("Each unit capable of firing during this phase may fire once."), but in the contested landings phase after that, planetary defense batteries can get to fire at every unit landing near them.  No saturating these air defenses up close I guess; that I can kind of buy.  But the SDB overwatch thing seems trickier to justify.

Ground combat seems fairly reasonable; units are quite mobile because antigravs are assumed to be standard kit on both sides, there's a supply system which is fairly simple and based on space-dropping logistics bases which is neat, there are stacking limits on how much stuff you can fit in a hex but this is a wargame with counters so you get some super-corps counters that refer to an off-map sheet of boxes to say "here's all the stuff that is in that hex".  There are some weird bits in the way that targets are selected during ground combat; the example of combat even provides a case where A and B are on the same side and C and D are on the other, and basically A shoots at C, C shoots at B, B shoots at D, and D shoots at A.  And apparently that's fine, there's no conception of fronts and mutual engagement with particular units who are fighting you while you're fighting them (except inasmuch as you're all in the same 1150km hex, which I guess is just a big melee of anti-gravs and plasma weapons).

Reinforcement and scoring has some interesting bits; it is assumed that the Imperial player will definitely take the Earth, and he has access to as much replacement of lost units as he wants, but taking more time and using more replacement units costs him at scoring and may cause him to lose the game even though he has taken the planet.  The actual details of reinforcement for the Solomani (hereafter Terran) player look somewhat fiddly and involve counting how many of his starting 60ish urban terrain hexes are not yet garrisoned by the Imperial player.  The game also ends when the Imperial player has occupied 50ish of those urban hexes so you need to count them to determine if the game is over, in addition to reinforcements.  The setup procedure for the Terrans to place all their starting units looks like something I might want a beer for (and I imagine the Imperial player might want a beer while he waits).

As I mentioned at the beginning, the map is neat.  Sadly the counter-sheets are quite blurry and everything that follows about the units is working from the Counter Inventory rather than the counters themselves.  (Also, I hope you like NATO symbology.  Still, would it be a proper hex-and-counter wargame without it?)  The unit variety looks painfully-high; the Terran player has nine different kinds of System Defense Boat wings, most of which have fairly small differences in stats between them.  The Imperials have lots of one-off units; for example, they get five Colonial Lift Infantry Corps at TL12 and then one at TL11 with the same nominal stats but which takes an extra penalty in combat resolution because the TL is lower.  I kind of question the inclusion of regiment-scale units with 5 combat power in a game where there are corps with 100 combat power rolling around.  Could we have just...  dropped regiments, divided all the combat power numbers by 5, and eliminated space transport capacity from cruiser squadrons?

Which is to say - there's significant room for simplification here.

(On the other hand, looking at it again, almost all of the regiment-sized units are elite, armored, or both, which means that their combat strengths are understated - they might use 5 points of transport capacity but then actually fight at strength 20)

I do appreciate that we get half a page on using this ruleset for conflicts other than this particular battle in this particular war in the Third Imperium Setting.  It mostly deals with ground troops without grav vehicles; wheeled, cavalry, and foot, and the implications on supply and sealift of not having grav vehicles be standard.   I'm here for this, it's exactly the kind of stuff that I want for mercenary involvement on Balkanized worlds in the course of a Traveller campaign, but...  there are other blockers for that.

The combat tables are mostly OK but there are some under-explained modifiers next to the Surface Bombardment Table.  It's interesting that bombardment damage on surface targets caps at 50% of the target's strength per turn - which means that splitting your fire and bombarding two targets with half of your firepower each for two turns can be more effective than concentrating it all on one target in the first turn, then the other target the next turn.  So that's a bit odd, but maybe it doesn't actually come up in play.

The material on using Earth in Traveller campaigns is basically three patrons and a couple of deeper conspiracies to tie them into.  Two were a bit trite and could happen anywhere but the third actually ties into something from the wargame so I liked that one.

Again, in conclusion - a very ambitious sort of conflict to try to tackle in nine pages of rules, and some rough edges are apparent as a result.  If anybody knows of a ruleset that is to this what Azhanti High Lightning was to Snapshot, an expanded and cleaned-up version, please let me know in the comments.

On further reflection, the other thing that this game needs is Tyranids.  It is excusable that it doesn't have them, because they may not have been invented yet when it was published, but nevertheless, it is the perfect use-case.  "How long can 50,000 guardsmen and assorted aerospace assets delay the advance of the hive fleet?  How much can they make it cost to devour this world?" are exactly the kind of questions that Invasion: Earth is aimed at answering.  This is the kind of scale that a Warhammer 40k game should be operating at.

Classic Traveller: The Imperial Fringe Review

The Imperial Fringe was published in 1981 as an "introductory adventure" included with the Deluxe Traveller boxed set.  I acquired it on the "Classic Traveller" CD from Far Future Enterprises, which makes it a little hard to evaluate its value for money.

Calling The Imperial Fringe an adventure is somewhat misleading.  It is actually the sketch of an enormous, sector-spanning, 20-year campaign.  It is also, however, brilliant documentation on the designer's expectations about how a Traveller campaign might be run.  I wish I had read this like 10 years ago when I was first getting started with Mongoose Traveller.

The pitch, basically, is that a senior member of the Scout Service contracts the players to do a survey of the sector and provide up-to-date UPP codes, based on in-person observations, of each of the 440 planets in the sector, with a time limit of 20 in-game years (1040 weeks).  Reminder: a subsector map is 8x10 hexes and usually about 30-40 planets, and a sector is 16 such subsectors.

This sounds extraordinarily ambitious to someone coming from Mongoose 1e - our games have usually been confined to single subsectors and maybe two years of game-time.  Occasionally a plot point would take us a little bit off of the edge of the subsector but the assumption was that this was a temporary state of affairs and that we shouldn't expect additional subsectors of prep effort.

The players get paid a fixed sum per world surveyed on submitting survey reports at Scout Service offices.  This sets up a brilliant incentive to actually travel - you don't get paid for visiting the same planet a second time.  And this leans into something I've liked about Traveller, which is that "planet of the week" allows a lot of variety.  One week you can do Alien on a derelict, the next week you can do Blade Runner in the big city, the week after that you can do Mad Max stranded on a desert planet looking for water to run the reactor on, all with the same set of characters, without breaking continuity or suspension of disbelief, while continuing to build campaign capital.

I also really appreciate that this setup shows rather than tells you a lot about the Third Imperium.  It is so huge, and travel so slow, that they do the census basically every 20 years, and official records about the state of whole planets can fall completely out of date in that time.  And their solution to this problem is contracting the census out to a handful of retirees on a shoestring budget and a deadline measured in decades.  The implications about the state capacity of the Imperium mark it as a very different situation from ours.  Imperial subjects probably aren't filing individual tax returns with the central Imperial Revenue Service every year.  The empire can just lose track of millions of people for decades.  What does the response time of Imperial law enforcement look like?  Weeks, months?  If your ship gets "pulled over" by the Navy and they want to "run your plates", how out of date is that particular patrol cruiser's database of ship registrations?  Is there even a standard Imperial-issue identification document like a passport?  So it raises lots of fun questions.

Returning to gamier matters, The Imperial Fringe also makes explicit:

The assumption in the adventure is that one character has possession of a type S Scout/Courier and thus provides transportation for the group. The referee should suggest that one player attempt a scout career. If, after all character generation has been performed, no scout has a scout ship, one of them should be arbitrarily given a scout ship in order to further the adventure.

Obviously, I'm not thrilled at the suggestion to respect neither the oracular power of the chargen dice rolls nor the consequences of the risk/reward decisions of the players during chargen.  But it is interesting to see that even this early, the official Word of Miller was "give 'em a ship," at least for introductory campaigns.  And with a campaign of this scale, I have to wonder how many people started "introductory" campaigns and then ended up playing it for years of real-time.

Giving a known ship makes setting up appropriate rewards a lot more viable, plannable; if you know what their monthly ship costs are, and you know the rate at which they can survey, then you can set the pay structure up to keep them under light monetary tension, without it spiraling either down into overwhelming debt and desperation, nor up into huge piles of cash.  And this makes sense in the world; your patron also knows what it costs to run a Scout/Courier and wants to encourage you to actually get the job done, rather than either failing due to lack of funds or retiring due to excess of funds before finishing.

The combination of the known-small cargo hold of the Scout/Courier and the strong incentive to keep moving on to new systems to write fresh survey reports probably constitutes a workable solution to the Golden Pair problem (though not a very general solution).  It doesn't matter if there are two planets with strongly-complementary trade codes next door to each other; you barely have the means to exploit this opportunity on any single transit between them, and you have strong incentives to not do anything in a loop.

And while the initial setup procedure may not be maximally respectful of player agency, once the game has started they're just let loose upon the sector.  No further railroads here...

Until you start inserting other published CT adventures into suggested systems, per page 19; then you might run into some small-scale railroads.  I salute the hustle of using the introductory adventure to advertise the rest of the product line.  But still, even if you do go buy all of those adventures and drop them into the sector map, you still have a big sandbox with a couple more-detailed points of interest rather than an adventure path like The Traveller Adventure, which came out a year later in 1982.

This suggestion to drop in modules throughout the sector does highlight one obvious weakness here, which is that there are a lot of worlds described with UPPs and no further details, and this is very much not a ready-to-use, "grab-and-go with no prep" kind of product.  Significant Assembly Required to make each world interesting, to keep the game from turning into a "we jump, we descend, we check the survey boxes, we take off, we jump..." routine.  Religious observance of the random encounter rules is probably wise, but not mentioned here; it might be easy for a new Traveller GM to miss.  Maybe at the time knowledge of their use was more assumed, from old-school D&D?

The other difficulty that I have with The Imperial Fringe is a less universal one - it probably doesn't handle open-table play particularly well.  You're going places well away from the main routes, so justifying characters appearing and disappearing out in the boonies strains disbelief a bit.  And the ship doesn't have enough stateroom capacity to justify a "you're carrying everyone but half the crew has food poisoning this week" approach.  A bigger ship with more space and enough crew for PCs to fade into and out of the background might be a way to do it though; basically a Star Trek-style "survey cruiser" sort of thing.  But then you start having to think about command structures and payroll...

So yeah, I wish I'd read this back when I had a stable set of players in college, rather than adults with lives doing master's degrees while working full time jobs and raising kids and taking long vacations.

Classic Traveller: Mayday!

Previously in this series reading the rules of the Classic Traveller boxed-set games: Snapshot, Azhanti High Lightning.

Summary:

Mayday! is an alternate starship combat system for Classic Traveller.  It hews very close to CT Book 2's starship combat system; some pieces seem identical to me.  Where things differ, they are mostly simplifications.  There are some simplifications in the damage model and hit tables and in the starship stats, but the biggest change is that movement, time, and space are managed with hex-grid and counters rather than minis on a tabletop with tape measures.  The way that vector movement is tracked with just counters on the grid, requiring no paper notes, is very clever.  I suspect it might not scale very well up to large numbers of ships, but this is a system that seems quite targeted at engagements between small numbers of small ships; the sort of fights and escapes that a Free Trader might find itself in.

One oddity among these mostly-simplifying changes is the addition of missile design rules, with a design space of about 4300 possible missiles.  I'm not really sure why this is here but it does look fun to fiddle with.

Like Snapshot, though, Mayday neglects human factors like morale and fatigue.  I don't know how many turns a typical Mayday combat lasts, but with 100-minute turns, fatigue and crew rest seem like they might be worth considering.  Almost no consideration is given to crew matters here; you should know what part of the ship your Traveller characters are in when damage is being allocated, and Gunnery can give a bonus to hit, but that's about it.  Certainly this system doesn't even begin to address the niche protection / social problem of starship combat in RPGs - the party seldom has more than one ship, which means a small set of decisions to make per round and huge stakes for everyone (all eggs in one basket, so to speak) but no real way for many characters to contribute.

But for such an early work, and for a lower-complexity system aimed at being a standalone boardgame and supplement to Book 2, I think that's pretty forgivable.  I think the movement rules alone are good enough to justify this book (maybe not at $20 on DriveThru, but as part of one of FFE's CDs, definitely).

Minis-and-tapemeasure was never going to fly with my groups, and Mongoose's maneuvering system was a bit too abstract and never really clicked for us.  But I think this hexgrid system looks much closer to the platonic happy medium.  I only found one or two rules that I would feel compelled to change or ignore outright (like running into planets); this looks good enough to me to give a serious run with very little modification.

Raw notes:

The whole rules pdf is only 20 pages, including front and back covers, hex sheet, and some counters

I like the subtle dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot Morse-code "mayday" signal worked into the cover's design

Copyright 1978 - so this predates Snapshot, even.

"Book 2 of Traveller details the resolution of starship combat using miniature figures; Mwday utilizes many of the same concepts to present a board game with a hex map and die-cut counters. Thus, in addition to the scenarios provided in this game, many adventures in Traveller can also be played out using the system provided here."  So like Snapshot, pretty explicitly integrated with Traveller.

"The nature of the vector movement system requires three counters for each ship (one for each of the past, present, and future positions). which are then differentiated by color codes."  I do love me some vector movement systems, and this sounds like an interesting tracking scheme in the absence of a note-sheet per ship.

Even small craft and missiles have this three-counter past-present-future thing going on.  No wonder the game came with 120 counters!

"Randomizer counters feature a large number from 1 to 6. The twelve counters serve as a substitute for dice when necessary."  Kinda curious how the math works on drawing twice from two copies of 1-6, versus rolling two independent d6s.

"Blank counters are provided without any markings or color. They are used primarily t o indicates the presence of protective sand clouds around ships."  Interesting.  I had been thinking of sandcasters as like micro-grapeshot fired directionally at incoming missiles, rather than clouding.  Do sand clouds make sense in a vacuum, without an atmosphere...  ?

"Four geomorphic (or perhaps astrornorphic) game map sheets are provided as the surface on which Mayday is played. Each map sheet (approximately 5% by 8% inches) represents a two-dimensional expanse of interplanetary space."  Cool, so you don't need a whole 6' x 10' or whatever table like you did for CT Book 2 combat.

"Each game-turn represents an elapsed time of approximately one hundred (100) minutes."  A lot can happen in an hour and a half.

It's been a while since I looked at CT Book 2, but the turn sequence here (Movement, laser fire, counter-laser / anti-missile fire by other player, ordinance launch and impact, computer programming) feels pretty familiar.

This vector movement procedure / implementation is delightfully simple.

"Any ship may land on a world by moving onto the wortd counter at
one hex speed. Entering a world counter a t a speed of greater than one hex results
in an impact which destroys the ship." lolol.  But since you accelerate from gravity for passing through a hex adjacent to a planet...  you'd basically have to stop / stall in an adjacent hex, right?  Is there another way to set this up?

"At the end of every movement phase, if two present position counters occupy the same hex, the vessels have intercepted each other. Missiles may detonate; ships may collide.
At the end of the movement phase, i f two future position counters occupy the same hex, Ithe two vessels will intercept each other in the next player-turn. The interception is unavoidable, and consideration should be given to the launching of lifeboats or other protective measures."  Oh come on, they're 1 light-second hexes, you aren't going to run into anything by accident.  Honestly even running into Earth-sided planets accidentally seems rather unlikely; Earth has a radius of like 6400 km, so a cross-sectional area of pi * r^2 = 129 million km^2, whereas a square light-second is like...  almost 10^11 km^2.  So your odds of hitting Earth while traversing a random line through a cubic light-second volume containing it are like...  1 in 1,000 ?

"When both the present position counters and the future position counters of ma ships share the same hexes, courses have been matched, and boarding operations are possible."  That is slick, though.

By page 5 we're through the turn sequence and movement, and now getting to firing sequences.

What is this missile design system.  4 options for guidance type, 4 options for propulsion type, 4 options for detonation type...  plus, presumably, options for payload and max acceleration rating?

"Homing: The missiles homes on a target specified at launch, constantly altering its future position at least one hex per turn in the direction of the present position of the target."  But...  if you aim where they are, how are you going to hit where they will be?

Interesting, sandcasting is primarily an anti-laser defense with a small benefit against missiles.

"Any ship which receives four or more hits in a single player-turn has been destroyed. A hit is considered a consultation of the damage table; laser hits count as 1 each, proximity missile hits count as 2 each..."  So there's no "hull damage" track or equivalent!  It's like Chainmail HD, where you needed 4 hits in the same turn to kill a Hero!

Optional simplified computers rule - program-shuffling not mandatory.

Computers only go up to rating 3?  I guess this really is focused on small starship engagements.  None of these big fancy navy ships with their big computers.

Similarly, only jump-1 and jump-2 computer programs at listed, nothing higher.

Interestingly, small craft do not take to-hit penalties for their lack of computers here; they do take -1 in CT Book 2.

By page 11, we've gotten through all phases of the combat turn, the list of programs, and are now into special rules like damage control and missile design.  Missiles have another stat which I did not anticipate - number of turns of thrust.

A note that High Guard's combat system can be adapted to use Mayday's movement system.  I don't think I've read CT High Guard's combat system; maybe that's next on the docket.  Mongoose's High Guard combat system was a bit...  abstract, if I recollect rightly?

Page 13 has the list of available ships for Mayday; it goes up to the 400-800 ton range (corsair, colonial cruiser).  So definitely not intended for the dreadnoughts.

Small craft also have limited turns of thrust!

One of the scenarios is a yacht race, to learn the movement system.  Clever!

Several of these scenarios have interesting things going on and are very much not just stand-up fights.  Smuggling has an iterated component within a single scenario.

The attack and damage tables on page 15 are better-documented than in eg Azhanti High Lightning

Overall I like this a lot.  I think the use of color to indicate past/present/future markers was a questionable decision vs having past/present/future text or something on the markets, but maybe there were manufacturing constraints.

Do lasers have a max range?  Ah, they take a penalty to the hit roll per hex of range, limiting their max effective range.

Classic Traveller: Azhanti High Lightning's Combat System

Background:

I've taken an interest recently in the "boxed set" Classic Traveller games from the late 70s and early 80s.  Previously, I looked into Snapshot, a board game about starship boarding actions using a fine-grained action-point economy.  A comment on boardgamegeek suggested that Azhanti High Lightning had a more refined boarding combat game along similar lines, so this week I sat down and read the rules.

Summary of findings:

This seems like a much more reasonable system than Snapshot.  I like that you never need to handle more than six action points at a time.  There are some rules here that are novel and weird (like having to commit your characters to courses of action for the turn and then sticking to those courses through five 6-AP "phases") but mostly I like they direction they're going here.  Compared to Snapshot, a morale system has been added, damage to structures has been clarified, ammunition tracking has been made optional, some of the extraneous counters like target markers and explosion markers are gone, and overall things do seem improved.

There are still a couple of rules I would change.  Stacking up four combatants in a 1.5m square seems at the very least clunky from a book-keeping perspective, and the explosion damage rules and scatter probabilities are a bit wonky.  In terms of play aids, the weapons table is terribly opaque and requires reference to a couple different places in the rules text to make sense of; I'd definitely be penciling in some notes on which columns mean what there.

I think this exists in a bit of a weird place as a boxed-set game.  On the one hand, it is mechanically less integrated with Traveller than Snapshot was, because the stats on the chits are derived from Traveller stats rather than being literal Traveller stats.  The damage model has also diverged from attribute damage to accumulating "wounds", and the action points don't depend on your Dex and End.  So this might make it a bit uncomfortable to use as an alternate combat system for Traveller.  But it also has some features that might make it uncomfortable as a stand-alone boardgame; the biggest thing that springs to my mind are some ambiguous rules like morale checks for taking "unexpected" fire, which seems like the sort of thing you might want a referee for.

There's a note about integrating with Book 4: Mercenary, and I think this game makes a lot of sense in that light.  This is a slightly higher-abstraction game than Snapshot (or Traveller's default combat system, outside of grids-vs-range-bands) with a lot of support for heavy weapons (like automatic grenade launchers) and heavy armor (three armor types: cloth, combat, and battle dress.  No fine distinctions between cloth, jack, and reflec here...).  This seems like a really good fit for supporting Mercenary play, where you have a slightly higher number of combatants than a party of four PCs and a similarly-sized opposition force (hence wanting less detail per combatant in their stats and ammunition counting and such) and they're armed with military-grade hardware.  I also like that this personal combat fire sequence is nearly-identical to Striker's (released one year later), so there's some consistency and carry-over; if you have spent the time learning AHL's fire sequence for your small-unit mercenary actions, and then you accumulate more troops and more hardware through your successes, it slightly lightens the lift to migrate up to Striker.

Maybe the most unfortunate thing about this is the name - "Azhanti High Lightning" sounds like the name of an adventure, or a book detailing a class of ship (which, to be fair, half of this book is), or maybe a ship combat system for High Guard.  Infantry combat system would have been far from my first guess.

Raw notes:

Published 1980, so just one year after Snapshot.

Only one set of playtesters credited.  Uh oh.

Same 15-second rounds as Snapshot

1.5 meter squares.  Weren't Snapshot's 1-meter?

As with Snapshot, only about 25 pages of rules, then some scenarios.  The second part of this book, originally published as Supplement 5, deals with the eponymous ship class in great detail (the name and date laid down of every ship of the class build in the Third Imperium, for example).  Also, of course, deckplans.  Lots of deckplans.  I'm going to focus on the system rules here and maybe examine the deckplans and other supporting material some other time.

"No square may contain more than four active characters at a time".  Good lord that sounds tough to keep track of.  And on tiny 1/2 inch squares!  With facing!

Turns are cut up into five action phases.  Each phase, each character gets 6AP.  So this still provides a large number of AP per unit of in-game time (30 AP per 15 seconds - double that of Snapshot) but cut up into single-digit installments so you aren't doing double-digit arithmetic constantly.

They've abandoned the inverted high-optionality initiative system for simultaneous action within a series of steps within each phase within each round.

In general I love systems where you write down orders secretly before all players reveal them simultaneously (including spellcasting commitments in TSR D&D), and this sort of has one of those.  This is an odd one though, because the commitments you make are 1) quite vague, just one of three general courses of action (move, covering fire, aimed fire), and 2) binding across all five phases of a turn.  My first inclination is to think that that sounds like a long time to be stuck with one plan, but maybe the plans are loose enough that it's OK?  I really don't know if 15 seconds an unreasonably long time to re-evaluate your plan of actions - how long is an OODA loop cycle in actual combat?  And the good news is that if you pick move, you can still take snap-shots - but you'll shoot last.  Maybe being stuck in aim/covering fire mode is the worse end of the deal, since then you can't move (I think?  There is some ambiguity here around what exactly each course of action prohibits you from doing).

Climbing ladders is really slow.

Elevators have RNG for how long they take to arrive.  Love it.

I'm confused about this note about covering fire on exposed characters on page 9.

This is possibly the simplest set of range band DMs I have ever seen in Traveller (8+ to hit at effective range, 10+ at long range 12+ at extreme range).  I like this.

Reloading is gone but you have to commit to ammunition types at the beginning of the game.

Cover gives a penalty to hit but a bonus to damage as "only the vital areas of the target...  are exposed."  Battletech "You were behind a hill so the odds of a headshot went from 1 in 36 to 1 in 6" vibes.

Three levels of wound - light, serious, and instant death.  Light wounds do give penalties to actions, while serious wounds put you out of action.

This wounding system reminded me of Striker so I dug up Striker and had a look:

Looking at Striker's fire combat procedure, this is very similar, with slightly different DMs for eg cover and concealment, but also significant use of some shared terminology like Danger Space.  Same range bands and DMs, and the example of the RAM grenade launcher with flechette rounds is even the same.

And Striker's personnel injury rules are also very similar (including an identical example), though the bits about exposed vs in cover are organized a bit differently.

What year was Striker?  1981.  OK, that tracks.  So they borrowed some of the infantry fire procedure from Azhanti High Lightning for it.

End Striker digression.

Returning to Azhanti High Lightning, they do clarify this idea of being in cover but exposed; the difference between crouching behind something, unable to fire or be fired upon, and putting your arms and head up over it to fire but also be fired upon at a penalty to hit (but a damage bonus if hit).

Stray shots against certain backstop objects can cause them to explode.  Love it.  "The explosion of red-coded equipment is equivalent to the strike of a fusion gun".  Oh boy!

Grenades with a 3.75m radius seem...  a little on the low side?  And even if you're in a 1.5m square adjacent to an exploding grenade, you still only get hurt on 10+, so your odds if you aren't in the same square as the grenade are pretty good.

These grenade scatter diagrams are a bit wonky.  They definitely thought about the probability distribution on different directions, but I'm surprised they weighted it in favor of overshooting rather than undershooting.  Grenades also scatter 2d6 1.5m squares, which is...  a long way, and a weird distribution of distances.

Melee seems pretty straightforward and a little higher-abstraction; no parrying, your melee rating is just subtracted from the other guy's attack on you.

This morale system is...  interesting.  Needing to make a morale roll to stick your head up into covering fire makes a lot of sense.  Needing to make a morale roll to move into melee is not unreasonable.  Needing to make a morale check for taking "unexpected" fire seems like it might be contentious to adjudicate in a board game, rather than in an RPG with a referee.  Having all of your dudes have to make morale checks before any of them move is interesting but seems like it kinda doesn't capture the collective nature of morale as a phenomenon.  Having morale check results interact with the rank system, where your high-rank dudes have to roll first and then their results influence the results of the rolls of their subordinates, is probably a decent fit for military actions but tougher to fit to PC crews operating on informal lines.  But I guess I haven't gotten to the bit on integrating with Traveller campaigns, who knows what they'll say about the interaction between PCs and morale.

I suppose I should be happy to see a morale system included at all after Snapshot, really.  Progress!

That brings us to the end of the core rules of the game on page 17, and to the beginning of special rules for unusual situations, like energy weapons, fighting oozes and robots, vacc suits and explosive decompression (incidentally, it's surprising to me that they say that the interiors of starships are usually pressurized - I thought there was a note in Classic Traveller's combat system about pre-emptive venting before combat to prevent fires?).  Rules for structural damage are much more developed than in Snapshot, though they have their quirks.  If you set the timer right on your satchel charge, you can guarantee that it can't be disarmed because there won't be enough time.  Grenades might be better at damaging hardware than at injuring combatants.  I went down a rabbit-hole trying to figure out grenades' penetration values and ended up discovering that the weapons table is quite inscrutable; documentation on what the columns mean is solely embedded in the text for the fire combat rules, nowhere near the table itself.

After "Special Rules", we get "Advanced Rules", which are actually just ammunition/reloading and zero-g combat.  So ammunition tracking is still here, it's just optional.  Zero-g combat looks broadly similar to Snapshot's.  I do like that you can injure yourself by running into things while moving in zero-g.  I find it a bit odd that you can't make melee attacks while using a hand-hold?  I feel like "hand-hold in one hand, cutlass in the other" isn't deeply unreasonable?

Finally, on page 23, "Integrating with Traveller", which has a couple of interesting bits in it.  There's a note about changing the ground scale to meters "if using this system for outdoor battles".  The "melee value" on the counters is derived from the Brawling skill and no mention of Blades is made.  There are some bits about higher-range and higher-rate-of-fire weapons like VRF gauss guns, which I don't remember being in CT Book 1.  And then finally at the end, "Morale and leadership bonuses...  are generated as specified in Traveller Book 4, Mercenary."  Which might also be where the gauss guns came in, and provides a good reason to want a combat system aimed primarily at handling high-powered weapons against combat armor and battle dress.