Traveller

Doug was kind enough to run a great game of classic Traveller for us tonight.

A space professor had hired us to accompany him on a safari trip. He was trying to locate a beautiful creature that few had ever seen, in the hopes that it would be named after him. Tom was a bumpkin bureaucrat, the Company representative. I was a retired General, the “brains” of the operation. Ryan was another retired army officer, the muscle. And Cameron was our pilot, and added muscle (with a laser gun and an itchy trigger finger). We explored the uncharted planet, met the locals, figured out how to communicate with them through crude drawings and lots of body language, and finally found the interesting 8-legged rainbow-winged beetle beast. But not before:

• Cameron and Ryan got caught in a gale and came terribly close to dying of exposure,
• Tom had his oxygen hoses tampered with by a local spider-sloth-squirrel-raccoon and passed out,
• Cameron, Ryan, and I got sick after eating the local space potatoes,
• Cameron and Ryan took out a gigantic spider-dragon-unicorn thing intent on eating us,
• Tom wrestled and hog-tied the rainbow beetle beast,
• And everyone nearly found out I had gotten old and couldn’t hit anything with my rifle anymore!

It was a terrific experience for Cameron to play with the big boys, and even though he really only got to shoot a few things, he had lots of fun. I look forward to the next Traveller game, and will have to read the rest of the rules. The game holds up very well despite having been written in 1977 – almost 30 years before Cameron was born!