Players’ Information: The crew of the ship has bought some cargo (frozen bug-fish) at Regina (Spinward Marches 1910). They thought that they would make a huge profit at Extolay (Spinward Marches 1711) at the bug-fish festival. But their information was wrong. Their cargo is unsellable. While trying to locate a buyer at Extolay the crew is contacted through their ship’s computer connection by an anonymous caller. The caller wants to know if the crew could help her with something that is legal but may cause some confusion. This is a task that is best performed by outsiders using a cunning plan but could be performed in other ways. Violence should be avoided. In return, she would buy their cargo for what they paid at Regina.
This is better than nothing and it means that it will free up the cargo hold. The crew will get one day to consider the offer. The caller say that she will call them again in exactly 24 standard hours.
How do we perceive a sector? What do we look for? Where is the adventure? I have discussed this before when I tried to find out why a subsector was popular. I may have been partly wrong. It looks like the position of a subsector within a sector also is an important factor.
Using a new function at the TravellerMap one can now rotate a map. (When I write this there is no UI. You have to use the API to do this.)
This is what the Spinward Marches looks like upside down:
Spinward Marches Upside down: Made using the API at TravellerMap.
So what can we see here? My eyes move up to Glisten subsector. Starting from Glisten and running a J-1 ship to Five Sisters subsector suddenly looks like an interesting idea. Lunion subsector also looks like it a good place for adventures since it is so close to the Sword Worlds. (But the Sword Worlds really needs to be stronger.)
Less interesting is the backwater Regina subsector in the lower end of the map. The conflict with the Zhodani is now in an unimportant lower corner. That doesn’t look very exciting or important any longer.
What do you see in the upside down Spinward Marches?
In science fiction we have seen lots of spherical space ships. We remember the ships used by the Space Vikings by H. Beam Piper and the Death Star from Star Wars and the Heart of Gold from the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the ship from E.T. and the Borg Sphere from Star Trek: First Contact and lots of more.
In Traveller we have the Mercenary Cruiser and the Tigress class. We all know that the Mercenary Cruiser is supposed to be able to land. But in Traveller it cannot do that since it is only partially streamlined and the rules say that it then cannot land. I think it should be able to land under certain conditions. These conditions might be a slow decent and no flying in the atmosphere. For a quick assault, the cutters would still be needed.
Peter Elson, who has painted a lot of the images for TTA (that we love) has also made a spherical ship. This ship is also able to land in an atmosphere.
