SAFCOcast 25: “Useless” Skills and Scurrying for Cover!

In this episode, we discuss the “boring, useless” skills that as teenagers we cringed if we got when we rolled up Traveller characters, and explore the possibilities of these skills with a little creativity.

We also do a quick recap of the online Mayday! even run by Cyborg Prime, Greg Caires and Ken Patterson, and Patrick Kanouse, as well as internet and rules finds.

We also found ourselves in the midst of a tornado warning! We’re OK. North Texas is like that.

Relevant links for this episode:

SAFCOcast 24: Interview with Ken Patterson and Greg Caires about the 2021 MayDay! online Traveller event!

In this episode we interview Ken Patterson and Greg Caires about the upcoming Mayday! event.

The first day of May – May Day – has special meaning to Traveller players due to the infamous Mayday call from the Free Trader Beowulf that has appeared on box and book covers of various variants of the game since its earliest years.

In 2021, May Day will be a Saturday – an ideal time to play Traveller.

To help the global Traveller community celebrate May Day, three groups of players have teamed up to create a unique day of Traveller-related programming.

Operating from its home base on Facebook, the Virtual Traveller group – the same people who organized the weekend-long online “non-convention” last October – will organize “MayDay! a Celebration of Traveller through online roleplaying.” GMs from across the globe will be invited to run Traveller games online using whatever communications tools they prefer and during any suitable time period based on their locale. The only requests are:

  • All games must begin and be run during May 1st in the GM’s local time-zone;
  • All games must conclude by 7 pm Saturday night Central US Time on May 1st to “clear the decks” for a charity game that will be broadcast live on Twitch (more about this below).

Based on lessons-learned from the Virtual Traveller weekend, MayDay! will be organized using Tabletop Events for simplicity game submission, player registration and communication. To cover the expense of using Tabletop, a nominal fee (likely $3) will be charged. That fee buys players their convention badges, and they can then join and play as many games as their schedules will allow.

More about MayDay!:

Tabletop Events:
https://tabletop.events/conventions/mayday-celebration
Facebook Virtual Traveller Group:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/virtualtraveller
Discord Virtual Traveller server:
https://discord.gg/3WRUjXk

Both GMs and players are sought. Questions can be submitted via the links above.

If online gaming isn’t your thing, CyborgPrime is organizing the 3rd annual “Mayday! Mayday!” event, which consists of live interviews of Traveller authors and others who contribute to keeping the game popular and replenished with fresh material. Last year, CP interviewed both Matthew Sprange and Marc Miller, and generous prizes were awarded to members of the audience.

This year, CP intends to interview a variety of new voices, giveaway more and better prizes, give a platform to Ken Burnside of AdAstra Games to host some Traveller Squadron Strike vector combat simulations. The marquee event will be – like last year – the live broadcast of Patrick Kanouse’s Traveller game to benefit his charity The Carcinoid Cancer Foundation (https://www.carcinoid.org/).

Joining him as players are Two Brothers Gaming, High Shelf Gaming, and The Death Die Club. They will be playing Michael Brown’s Angle of Incidence: “A routine cargo run leads to a station orbiting a black hole and one man’s world of obsession, secrets, and madness. As the heroes help an intelligence agent investigate the mad scientist’s activities, they come to realize that they may bear witness to the ultimate adventure…or become just more bits of matter crushed by the black hole’s gravity.”

The Carcinoid Cancer Foundation’s mission is to increase awareness and educate the general public and healthcare professionals regarding carcinoid and related neuroendocrine tumors (NETs), to support NET cancer patients and their families, and to serve as patient advocates. We’ll be giving away a bunch of things, and you can even have an effect on the game.
The game will stream on High Shelf Gaming’s Twitch channel (https://twitch.tv/highshelfgaming/profile) at 8:00 pm Eastern. The game will include giveaways and opportunities to influence the game.

SAFCOcast 23: To Violence Or Not To Violence

First, thanks to all our listeners for sticking with us! It has been two months since the last episode, which of course is not our goal, but life got in the way!

In this episode, besides the usual sections, our main topic deals with non-violent/non-combat Traveller (and other RPGs) sessions. Not arguing against a good shoot-em-up, but just using other kinds of challenges to create a good game.

We also mention Jeff’s table of 2d6 outcome probabilities, so here it is!

Relevant Links

SAFCOcast 22: Interview with Greg Caires about Virtual Traveller

In this episode we talk to Greg Caires about the October 2020 Virtual Traveller non-con that he and Ken Patterson organized. Always fun to talk to Greg!

Relevant links:

 

SAFCOcast 21: Mailbag, Rules and Internet Finds, and Session Discussion

This first light image from the Callisto telescope at the SPECULOOS Southern Observatory (SSO) shows the famous Horsehead Nebula . First light for a newly commissioned telescope is a tremendously exciting time, and usually well-known astronomical objects such as this are captured to celebrate a new telescope commencing operations. The SSO is installed at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the vast Atacama Desert, Chile, and consists of four 1-metre planet-hunting telescopes. The project’s telescopes are named after Jupiter’s Galilean moons, and are neighbours of ESO’s Very Large Telescope and VISTA . SPECULOOS will focus on detecting Earth-sized planets orbiting nearby ultra-cool stars and brown dwarfs.

In this episode we read some great email’s from listeners! Lots to think about! We also cover Internet Finds and Rules Finds, and discuss the latest session of our Into the Void Classic Traveller campaign!

Relevant links:

 

SAFCOcast 20: the Elements of a Traveller Game!

In this episode Jeff and Bob discuss the basic elements of a Traveller game, as detailed by Marc Miller in the Traveller Book.

Before that Bob does a short correction from the previous episode,  we do Internet Finds, and some fun Rules Finds, as well as present the last of the planets submitted in our Random Planet Generation Smackdown! (that system appears below, under the relevant links).

Relevant links:

 

Random Planet #9!

Faddle – from Pete Burke

C589632-8   Ni

Faddle is a cold, icy world with most of the surface covered in permafrost.  

There is a band approximately 400 miles wide around the equator that is comfortable and is actually considered pleasantly tropical.  The atmosphere is dense which helps create the effect Faddle is famous for – the floating “Udrassi” mats. 

Udrassi is a native organic lifeform that straddles the line between fungus, plant and animal life.  The udrassi combine into large circular floating mats that organize around a central hub.  On each hub,  three pools of amino acids are arranged in a triangular pattern – early colonists to the planet were able to quickly determine that by adding saline water of specific concentrations to the pools in certain sequuences, the mats could be raised, lowered or steered and also directed to attract or repel other floating mats. 

The mats are extremely strong – some colonists built houses and larger buildings anchoring into the mats themselves.  It wasn’t long until early colonial families created resort hotel compounds for tourists by assembling larger mats together – and by manipulating the hub pools on the mats, small towns developed by combining mats together.
  

The planet is mostly a recreation destination – the floating lifestyle of the permanent residents is very laid back .  Some floating resorts stay in the tropics all year round, while others float to a mountain range south of the equator in the permafrost region where a ski resort has been set up.

SAFCOcast 18: Classic Traveller Combat, Mailbag, and other Stuff

Our main topic, inspired by one of our SAFCO Mail Bag submissions, is a discussion of the combat procedure from Classic Traveller.

We also go through some great mailbag submissions, discuss the Central Supply Catalog supplement for Classic Traveller, Timothy Collinson’s Generation-X Traveller book, and Internet Finds!

Thanks to everyone for listening.

Relevant links:

SAFCOcast 17: interview with Ken Patterson, about the upcoming Virtual Traveller event

This episode is an interview with Ken Patterson, regarding the event he and Greg Caires are organizing for October 2020 — Virtual Traveller: a Weekend of Virus-Free Roleplaying.

The event can be found here, on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1205944649744350/

Jeff and I had a good time talking with Ken! We appreciate him coming on, and hope you enjoy the interview.

SAFCOcast 15: Random World, Awesome Online Con Game, and Other Traveller Delicacies

Weirdly we had no XBoat Transmissions this time! We need email!

In this episode, we get back to our Random Planet Generation project by reading about Algira, a planet created by Patrick Kanouse (full description below). Really nice work, Patrick!

We then move on to Internet Finds, including…

  • Darkest Stars, a Classic Traveller Fanzine by Omer Joel and Paul Elliott
  • Jeff finds two Traveller articles in online copies of the old Dragon magazine. Dragon #43 p 35: Traveller Adventure “Canard” by Roberto Camino is the first. We’ll post the other on our next episode!
  • Stray RPG Thoughts. Just found this  blog. Dude has amazing stuff about mega corps and the super rich in RPGs. Highly relevant for Traveller, Cyberpunk, or whatever.  https://strayrpgthoughts.blogspot.com/

Our main topic was our participation in an online Classic Traveller Game run by Greg Caires, as part of the online offerings of this year’s North Texas RPG Con. It used Greg’s Sappers character class, which appeared in Freelance Traveller, September/October 2019: Character Generation Rules: Deep Space Rescue Corps: A Career for Classic and MegaTraveller.

We wrap up with News of the Imperium, a new segment in which we discuss upcoming convention games and events relevant for Traveller, upcoming or recent product releases, and anything else that fits.  This time it included…

SAFCOcast 14: Traveller on Roll20, Session Recap, and other Traveller Stuff!

Note: Episodes 1-14 happened before we changed to a Traveller-only show. In those episodes we discuss some other RPGs. As time went on we realized we were really a Traveller-only podcast, and in Episode 15 officially made the switch. You will find lots of Traveller talk in 1-14. Just be aware.

In which Jeff and Bob discuss a very nice mailbag submission, recap the last Classic Traveller session of their Into the Void campaign, discuss their end-times transition to the Roll20 online system, and various other fun things like some rules finds! Also, Bob drops an f bomb that must be bleeped, thus revealing his true, dark nature!