The Tramp Freighter Campaign

[PTTG]

So we all know the basic idea: The PCs have a spaceship, airship, landship, shipship, or whatever else. It's a free and independent vessel, aside from maybe some loans that need paying off or a distant authority that granted a charter of privateer. Whatever the justification, the players have control of where to go and what to do with their ship, and no immediate supervisors. The universe, sky, world, or sea is their oyster!

Well, now what?

How do you run a campaign like this? What sense of progression should there be? How is it tied to the PC's stories? What sorts of narratives work for this sort of game? And, what are the most successful approaches you've taken part in for this type of campaign?

[thrash]

The master class for this campaign type is still GDW's Twilight's Peak.* You have an apparently open sandbox seeded with rumors. In the course of their background business (carrying cargo, freight, and passengers from world to world), the players encounter these rumors, but also have the opportunity to follow up on some. Eventually, they stumble onto a central mystery that connects several rumors together and points to a significant pay-off -- if they can find it. Now they can use their mobility to connect more of the dots, until they find the prize.

Or not. The beauty of this framework is that the players aren't constrained to any particular course of action. If they don't take the bait, or (more frequently) come up with some other, wholly unconnected "central mystery" on their own, it's easy enough to shift to focus on what does interest them.

Memorable recurring NPCs are important to this kind of framework: friendly rivals, bitter enemies, the crew of a naval patrol ship with the same route, etc. This gives them the chance to develop relationships, rather than having every encounter be a one-off.

My experience is that the players, while they are motivated to make money, are less concerned about the details of the business their characters are in. It is usually most productive to present them with options, e.g.: cargo A wants to go to world X, the next destination in line, but barely pays the bills; freight B is available, but making the most profit off it would require a detour of 3 weeks to world Y, which is off the beaten track; and so on. I use trade and commerce rules to come up with the options ahead of time, or react on the fly when the players do something unexpected, rather than have them play it as a game.


*Not The Traveller Adventure, which -- while it can be fun -- is on fairly tight rails.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Well, now what?

Ask your players what they want to do, and give them what they want. Which, really, should be standard operating procedure for any campaign. Talk with them and build your sessions around what they want to do.

If they don't know, why are they playing in that game?

Campaigns like that have to be player-driven. If they want to just sit back and let the GM do all the work, then they don't have a valid complaint when the GM does something they don't like.

Progression is totally up to what you and the other players want.

Tying it into the characters' stories is equal parts on them giving the GM enough to work with and a willingness to let the GM do their job of weaving together a narrative.

A good way to start a campaign like that is to have the first few sessions be getting the ship itself, which allows the GM to work with the players and weave them into the story, and then they can follow plots they want to explore from that chapter, or explore their own stories. The players must take an active role in developing the story and the campaign. If they don't, it's their fault the game stagnates.

[L.J.Steele]

Take a look at Scum and Villainy -- it has some thoughts about possible jobs, factions, and how what the PCs do affects their standing with various factions and with the local gov'ts.

[RogerBW]

As Mark says, this needs to be self-motivating. If every free trader crew were constantly running into adventure, nobody would ship their cargo (or selves) aboard a free trader and normal people wouldn't sign aboard as crew. So I think this starts at character generation: this ship's crew will be people who are happy to get into a bit of trouble, indeed will go out looking for it with the promise of a big payoff.

An idea that I've had kicking around for a while, but haven't had the chance to run yet, is "passage crew": spaceship is in place A, has been bought, needs to be delivered to place B. This provides an overall constraint ("get to place B by this date") to counter the temptation to hang around and make long-term money – as well as a defined endpoint for this "season" of the campaign.

[thrash]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

An idea that I've had kicking around for a while, but haven't had the chance to run yet, is "passage crew": spaceship is in place A, has been bought, needs to be delivered to place B.

To make this concept work, you'd need to think carefully about what prevents the PCs from keeping the ship and heading off for the nearest border. Not because it's difficult -- there are many ways to address this, from meta ("Let's agree not to do this.") to social/legal to technological -- but because the specific solution you choose may wind up distorting the campaign in unfriendly ways.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by thrash

To make this concept work, you'd need to think carefully about what prevents the PCs from keeping the ship and heading off for the nearest border. Not because it's difficult -- there are many ways to address this, from meta ("Let's agree not to do this.") to social/legal to technological -- but because the specific solution you choose may wind up distorting the campaign in unfriendly ways.

I do take your point.

I tend to feel that if commerce is to be a regular thing at all, stealing ships must be quite hard, whether that's because of physics that don't favour piracy, law enforcement that cares about preventing this stuff, tamper-evident transponders (I think this is what Traveller ended up with but I rather lost track), etc. – and one reason for hiring the usual crew of military veterans could be that they have presumably at some point sworn to serve their Empire. :)

[thrash]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

I tend to feel that if commerce is to be a regular thing at all, stealing ships must be quite hard...

Oh, no doubt. But barratry is considerably less risky than other forms of grand theft starship (hijacking, piracy per se, etc.). Note that by the rules-as-written, one ship in ~200 that PC's take passage on has skipped out on its mortgage payments, abandoning any accumulated equity (starting with the 20% down payment) in a multi-million credit ship. How much easier would that decision be if the crew had nothing at all invested in the ship? Hence, the disincentives have to be that much stronger.

[L.J.Steele]

Worth also looking at material on medieval/renaissance trade which will talk about things like handling debt collection, fraud, etc. when dealing with transient traders.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

I tend to feel that if commerce is to be a regular thing at all, stealing ships must be quite hard

Well, stealing ships wasn't all that hard at any time prior to the 18th century, and commerce managed to exist.

I would say a key feature of the traditional tramp freighter campaign is that ships should be cheap and largely maintainable by the crew. Han Solo should be able to buy the Millennium Falcon with Signature Gear, meaning it costs at most something like 10x average starting wealth. This also helps with the piracy problem, "the best way to make a profit from your pirate ship is by selling the ship" is a perennial Traveller problem.