Traveller is a good RPG because you can have fun with it even if you have no friends to play with. There's so many tables to roll on, you can make characters and spaceships and vehicles and other shit till you die, and that's really fun and useful for a DM (assuming you like random tables) because you can generate content that has relevance to game mechanics fairly quickly.
There are some problems with this, but we'll get to those as they come up.
The other thing of note about this game is something I want to start doing more of- single-player RPGs. I've gotten to the point where scheduling is frustrating and the prospect of getting even three people on the same time is more than I want to do. I don't want to stop running for groups, but I do think this single player idea is better for trying out new systems and has a lot of other advantages.
Now, onto the game.
Our intrepid hero is Abū Aaliyah, former first officer of the free trader vessel On Hope Alone. Despite her ambition to command a navy ship, she failed to make it into the Academy and was drafted by the Army instead. After four years trapped in a tank, she took a position on a free trader vessel and spent the next several years working her way up to a position on her current vessel. After her vessel's airlock failed rather violently, she was stranded on the budding colony of Guangliang with a 38 million credit mortgage on a crippled ship and no crew.
It was about a month after this that the game started.
Aaliyah woke up in the Guangliang Orbital, a grandiose title for the glorified bus station orbiting the planet, having slept there since the loss of the Hope. The good news was that starport authorities had finally gotten around to recovering the vessel; the bad news was that she now owed about 2 million credits in repairs and towing fees. Even worse, the money for the last delivery the ship had made had been credited to the deceased Captain Yarborough, meaning it was languishing in the bank account of a dead man and not going to paying the prodigious debt of the Hope's new captain.
Determined to settle this matter and tired of being put on hold by the Ministry of Infrastructure, she set off for the planet surface on the free shuttle service. A chat with the pilot revealed that the central colony was largely uninhabited and the government ministries were really just small cliques of bureaucrats; either flunkies of the governor or petty tyrants who reigned with fists of steel over whatever had fallen into their file cabinets.
Nevertheless, Aaliyah set off to the Ministry of Infrastructure, which turned out to just be a small office in the tiny government building that had been set up for the tiny colony. The Minister of Infrastructure, a soft-spoken balding clerk named Cornell Lobo, carefully explained why the funds had already been disbursed before Aaliyah hit him with a barrage of paperwork and threatened to go complain to the governor. Deciding it would be better to face the fall for questionable bookkeeping than mildly inconveniencing his boss, Lobo decided to temporarily waive the repair fees and put her in contact with the local trade office.
Needing a crew, she got sent off next door where the local security forces had set up a barracks. With the help of their leader, she bought out the contract of one mercenary and the freedom of an imprisoned smuggler. Half a million credits deeper in debt, she prepared to return to the Hope with her new crew.
One thing I need to start doing is rolling for more things beforehand- we stopped the session partly because getting the trade information I needed took a lot of dice rolling and knowledge of other places in the sector, which I had not imparted to the player yet, preventing them from making informed decisions about what to do next. We'll likely cover some of this stuff in between sessions to make things easier.
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