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Arrival Vengeance

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sandmanninja

SOC-9
I was going through my Traveller books and saw one was still in shrink wrap!

I carefully withdrew it from the bookshelf and saw a mint edition of Arrival Vengeance - the last MT book that was published. Sealed in its original wrapper.

I wasn't sure if I should break the seal or not... :oo:

But I did. :eek:

Brand new catalog from 1992 for GDW's product line. Some beautiful deck plans and cut-a-way views of the side/internals of the 60,000 ton ship.

Plus the "official" word that settles "Was it a Clone or the Real Strephon" debate! :omega:

That would be a nice ship to turn into a Hero Model - lots of uber detail.
 
Bloody hell man...

sandmanninja said:
...
Plus the "official" word that settles "Was it a Clone or the Real Strephon" debate! :omega:
...
Click to expand...
Well, was it a Clone or the Real Deal or even worse a twin? I got to know. Ummm. Please. :D

Congrats on having a virgin Traveller book, even if it is MT and their damned Shattered Imperium, though I would have cracked the seal too.

Oh and what the hell is 'Arrival Vengeance' anyway? I fell out of Traveller and gaming...girlfriends, school, jobs and my own little game, so I never did get all the MT stuff. I did get some neato T4 though when I got back in later.
 
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Arrival Vengeance (Wikia entry) is a grand tour of each of the factions in the Rebellion. Norris sends an upgraded AHL class cruiser out to talk to the different factions and attempt to patch things up. The last stop on the tour is The Real Strephon who sends Avery along to stay with Norris. This is one of the lead-ins for the Regency and 1248.
 
Archduke Norris 'borrows' an AHL-class ship - the Arrival Vengeance - from mothball storage. The PCs end up being recruited to be on the 60,000 ton ship whose purpose is to cross the Great Rift to Daibei and head towards Core & Gushemege. The goal: Contact Margaret, Lucan & Strephon, trying to re-unify the Imperium and end the Rebellion!

I think it's really good, but I was a fan of the RULES (never liked the shattered Imperium).

On page 23, under GM INFO, it says a Clone was gunned down. The Real Strephon was en route to the Core Naval Depot.

So there it is. And it's canon, too. :)

I found another box of game stuff and there was an unopened box of BRILLIANT LANCES! I haven't opened that one yet.
 
Very sweet mesh! I see you have the Imperial Starburst logo. :)

As soon as I saw the detailed plans I told myself I'm going to have to do this puppy...

Thanks for the link - awesome model
 
Nice animations!

The one that borrowed heavily from Star Wars ;) made me think.
Those twin cannons lined in in a row... They look like they get into each others arc of fire.
Do you think they would be more for anti-Fighter / anti-Missile / Multiple Target engagements?

I've started blocking out the general shape of the AHL and a fighter. If I do an AHL then I'd do her fighters and using Particles would want to do an all-out battle as la new BSG.
 
Having had a little practice flying this ship in a fully 3D space combat environment (as playtesting for the new "Squadron Strike" boardgame) I can tell you that I like to fly with the nose 30 degrees off the target while the spinal mount recharges, which unmasks all the upper and lower bay weapons (except those behind the dorsal fin) and then pivot the nose onto the target bearing when the spinal mount is ready to fire.
 
I am not a big fan of the shattered Imperium, but I have to say I think Arrival Vengeance is pure awesome.

a) You're in charge of a Lightning Class, dude!!!!1!!!!!!!!!1

b) High Drama

Yes, Traveller is best played low-key in terms of both gear and plot... but an exception every now and then is welcome IMO.
 
FYI, there's an "easter egg" on my map web site (travellermap.com) - search on:

(arrival vengeance)

INCLUDE the parentheses. You'll get a stop-by-stop route of the Arrival Vengeance and can click on the links to traverse the route. WARNING: INCLUDES SPOILERS!
 
Science Fiction has a number of tropes, and Golden Age CT only ever hit a subset of them.

CT's brush with interstellar war (the FFW) was, when the shooting stopped, just that. A brush. Neither civilization nor any empire was hanging in the balance. The social changes that accompany extensive war did not take place. A year later it was as if it hadn't happened at all.

The "righteous" wars of Imperial expansion were centuries gone, as were the years ruled by the Fleet Emperors. The "rebellious province" had been a century before and was on the other side of the Imperium.

Without hopping into a historical frame or travelling for years just to find the frontier, the age of exploration was done. The Imperium was hemmed in on all sides.

Where does a setting go in such a case? Especially a setting as big as the Third Imperium, that has been stable, aside from those aforementioned border scuffles, for centuries. If you are trying to sell an RPG where a large number of the players are already playing gun-toting scofflaws, mercenaries, or "off the books" agents, the answer is pretty obvious. You go to war. Real war. Empires-in-the-Balance war. You introduce larger-than-life personalities who will drive larger-than-PC events.

RPGs in general suffer from static settings. Companies lavish vast effort on snapshots of large and detailed settings. Lengthy (often to the point of silly) histories are concocted to explain the current state of affairs. Rulers, movers, and shakers are all detailed. Then the setting... just... stops.

A few SF settings are noteworthy for avoiding this, and Traveller is the oldest of them, but the Third Imperium was showing signs of having that same problem. "We printed it this way, we can't change it now." Of the settings with the most movement (the other two that come to mind being Battletech and Shadowrun), Traveller was the only one that could get away with stasis, but even so there is only so long you can claim to move the timeline along on news stories of technology advancements, luxury liner launches, and "man bites dog".

And so we got the Rebellion. Like it or not, time marches on, and the Golden Age fans have a century or more to play around in. The thousand year empire got eleven hundred years in total, but now the Emperor is dead, and it is time to let slip the dogs of war and make some new history.
 
The thing is, though, that the Rebellion setting is just as static as the Imperium, only more fragmented. I say this based on the Rebellion sourcebook, the only MT "plot book" I have read. To me it looks like a compromise between the new concept of a metaplot and the old concept of an open setting, and it displays problems associated with both.

If play starts the day after Strephon's assassination, and if one wants to stick to canon, .e. metaplot, then whatever the players do will not be allowed to be consequential enough to change the historical development charted in the book.

If play starts at the end of that development, it starts when that development has given way to stasis again. 10 factions that balance each other out, and which, with the exception of Norris, are all kind of unlikeable, frankly.

So what do you do in that setting? Take part in the border warfare between two factions? a) But they're all crooks, dullards or goofballs. b) As soon as the big ships show up, PCs tend to die / be sidelined.

The only guy with a mission, Norris, is isolated from the fray. Instead, he's fighting Vargr and Aslan. Fine, but that's exactly what he used to do before the Rebellion. It's just that now there are more of them.
 
Rhialto the Marvelous said:
The thing is, though... whatever the players do will not be allowed to be consequential enough to change the historical development charted in the book.
Click to expand...

That kind of depends on the ref. There's nothing saying they can't allow the players to be "the one to make a difference" and change the course of (future) history.


Rhialto the Marvelous said:
The only guy with a mission, Norris, is isolated from the fray. Instead, he's fighting Vargr and Aslan. Fine, but that's exactly what he used to do before the Rebellion. It's just that now there are more of them.
Click to expand...

Only isolated if you're not playing in The Marches ;)

Oh wait, you may mean isolated from the rest of the Imperium, in that case, yeah, but so what...

My favorite scenario of the era is The Nail Mission. The PCs get to be part of mission that may have a significant role in the future of The Marches. Heck that one pretty much encourages refs to have the PCs change the future of The Marches.

Or you could interpret it as the PCs are the reason the future for The Marches turns out as rosy as it does. Heck you could do that anywhere with a little imagination. Why will faction-x do what the future history plot says? Because the PCs meddled and were the "one man" to make a difference at a critical point.
 
Knightfall and The Flaming Eye advance the storyline somewhat

Hard Times propells it quite a bit.
 
I do agree the idea of the Nail Mission, as opposed to the scenario by the same name, is principally good.

Again, though, there's a quandary: Either the players successfully complete the mission and so save the canon/metaplot. In that case, their free will was more likely than not significantly constrained. Or they fail/do something else. In that case, the metaplot goes out the window. Or some unknown stranger saves it in the players' stead, which they can't do too many times before it gets old.

The worst thing, though, is that the faction leaders are so dull, and that there are like 8 of them rather than just 3 or 4.
 
sandmanninja said:
I was going through my Traveller books and saw one was still in shrink wrap!

I carefully withdrew it from the bookshelf and saw a mint edition of Arrival Vengeance - the last MT book that was published. Sealed in its original wrapper.

I wasn't sure if I should break the seal or not... :oo:

But I did. :eek:
Click to expand...
Uhhh... yeah! Best traveller module... IMO. Actually roughly based my campaign on it. Very cool.
 
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