How did you resolve your favorite subplot?

[ChaserCaffey]

As we all know, TNE left a number of plot skiens still unfinished when it shuffled off this mortal coil, and all of us who have run or thought about running TNE have all come up with our own ways of resolving them. The ones that seem to be hashed over most often are the conflict with Solee, the events that unfolded after the meeting between the Regency and the RC, the conflicts between the Guild and the RCES, and the overall success of the RC's raid-and-bootstrap strategies.

However, I'm curious as to how people might have thought to resolve some of the more minor but interesting plot points in their TUs. Notably:

1) What, if anything, did people do with the Schalli?

2) Has anyone dealt with the Oriflammen resistance in any detail, and where that has gone? How have the people of Oriflamme reacted to the technarchs' policies as they become increasingly aggressive and expansionist?

3) What happened to those two clippers that were tied up under the Ship Bill?

4) So what happened to the Ashtabula, anyway?

The only one of these I've really dealt with is the Ship Bill- I ended up solving it by a complicated deal in which Eos and Nike Nimbus loaned RCES the money to finish the clippers and took some Aubani J3 drives and starport assistance in payment, spread out over time. They then used the imported technology and upgraded facilities to construct ships to a J3 Fat Trader design, which greatly expanded their ability to trade within Coalition space and the Aubaine subsector. RCES gets the clippers, the Federalists are happy because the technarchs don't, and Eos and Nike get a merchant service that can actually trade within RC space.

Thoughts?

 

[Badbru]

3) The ship bill; Nice resolution, I like it. I'm not sure it resolves the issue for the future but it's a nice resolution for those ships in question.

4) Ashtabula

In my RC campaign I added a little Pocket Empire down in Harlequin Subsector(D) Solomani Rim.
When one of my players took over the helm of reffing to alow me to play for a change he had the RC command having sent Ashtabula on a secret mission (it's beyond AO and PE is secret known only to high ranking RCN and the SG) to this little PE. Whilst there Ashtabula crew discovered something and had to go off to Arkiirkii 2905 Harlequin/Sol rim where it fell victim to a Vampire nest ala Promise. Most of the ship was still in orbit and most of the crew were slaves in the robot run starport and associated factories dirtside.
However I vaguely recall a scenario from Battle Rider that had Astabula as part of the Montezuma High Guard? so that's another option.

1) Schalli
What had to be done with the Schalli ?

Same Ex-player turned Ref had those active Schalli on Aubaine at KeeEEka Strongwall build an 800Disp tonne warship specifically for a mixed Schalli & Dolphins only crew, as their contribution to the RCN, and as a training and employment opportunity ship for Schalli and Dolphins in the RC.

 

[Whipsnade]

Originally posted by ChaserCaffey:
[QB]1) What, if anything, did people do with the Schalli?

CC,

I never got to run a TNE adventure, let alone a campaign, as my group fell apart about the same time TNE came out (due to graduations, jobs, and personal stuff and not TNE.)

I'd tentatively penciled most of the PCs in as remnants. Only a few players were interested in creating new PCs.

As for the Schalli, I would have done the same thing I always did Freaks & Geeks aliens like the Hivers and K'Kree - shunted them into the background in a NPC/patron/nemesis role. No one in my group was interested in playing anything other than humans or Zippered Suit aliens like Aslan or Vargr, so the Schalli would have appeared but only as 'color'; i.e. We're not in Kansas etc.

2) Has anyone dealt with the Oriflammen resistance in any detail, and where that has gone? How have the people of Oriflamme reacted to the technarchs' policies as they become increasingly aggressive and expansionist?

The Oriflamme situation was very intriguing to me as a GM. I'd have kept the pot boiling there so I could use the continual domestic unrest as adventure fodder. I wold have not changed anything as I believed future TNE products would say what occurred on Oriflamme. I felt the political situation of the entire RC was too rosy, they only hung together because Virus would hang each seperately. I expected to have low level, continaully simmering political problems on worlds and between worlds in the RC. Face it, the RCES, Auctions, and all the rest only effected a tiny minority of folks directly. The rest may not be that happy with stirring up trouble out among the stars.

3) What happened to those two clippers that were tied up under the Ship Bill?

See my answer above. Politics would happen with winners and losers. The ships would be built. Some would be happy about it, some would be angry about it, and some would be happy/angry about various bits of the whole package.

4) So what happened to the Ashtabula, anyway?

Presumably lost with all hands to Virus. She wouldn't show up in some TED's navy or have a crew to rescue in my TNE universe. Various NPCs would try and sucker the PCs or other NPCs with Ashtabula tidbits, but nothing would pan out. Ask Mr. Nilsen what was planned for that vessel. The whole Ashtabula plot point reeked of Future Announcements to me so I would have stayed away from it in order to preserve my campaign. I did the same with the 5th FW and shaghaied my PCs to the Islands in order to avoid a war whose events were being written by someone else.

The only one of these I've really dealt with is the Ship Bill...

Neat solution and one that gives you plenty of plot hooks. That's always a plus.


Sincerely,
Larsen

 

[TheDS]

Gee, LEW, did all your games run in real time? In my first ever group (nominally MT by a bunch of CT players in Spinward Marches) we jumped to a different world about every hour or so, or skipped by several jumps in a minute. The GM believed in traveling to accomplish goals, something that rubbed off on me until a few years later when I read the starter adventures in the TNE mainbook.

The one where everyone starts as a savage is my personal favorite, and I use the concept in most of my games now. Basically, start out very small, throw in some little challenge, and this helps get players acclimated to the game (if they've never played before) or to their characters' situation. Then they meet some sort of incongruity, which reveals to the players that their characters are part of something much larger, and they choose the direction they wish to explore.

 

[ChaserCaffey]

Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />4) So what happened to the Ashtabula, anyway?

The whole Ashtabula plot point reeked of Future Announcements to me so I would have stayed away from it in order to preserve my campaign. I did the same with the 5th FW and shaghaied my PCs to the Islands in order to avoid a war whose events were being written by someone else.
</font>[/QUOTE]Interesting that it seemed that way to you. I specifically didn't post this on the "Ask Dave" thread because it seemed to me that the Ashtabula was something that was deliberately left open for individual GMs- something cool that your players could do in the game world. And, incidentally, get a major in with the higher-ups of RCES if the GM wanted them to have contacts there for later play...

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />The only one of these I've really dealt with is the Ship Bill...

Neat solution and one that gives you plenty of plot hooks. That's always a plus.
</font>[/QUOTE]Thanks. Really, it was more an excuse to pull out FF&S and do some keel-up design work, but a nice J3 ship with plenty of cargo space is just the kind of thing some deserving PCs could use to explore the Wilds. Of course, it's a subsidized merchant, so it comes with a few strings...

 

[Uxi]

I had a long complicated vote drawn out with the the Ship Billing eventually passing. It tossed up the political structure and made some strange bedfellows that created cross relationships that endured beyond the bill.

This strengthened the Pro-Consolidation / Centrists forces.

The other big issue that was brewing in my old campaign (and which I'm intending to renew in my new upcoming campaign) was "The New Worlds."

Initially, Lancer and Nex are allowed to bypass "provisional membership" and gain full membership. It doesn't change the balance of power in the Coalition (Both Pop 7), but shows signs that neither faction is willing to allow the other to change the balance of power further.

Kal is granted provisional status, to the consternation of the Technarcs with shady dealings there (indeed this is the result of an adventure whereby the PC's expose this to Coalition leadership, though politics keeps it out of the public spotlight).

Eventually though, Civil War is looming over the issue, as I mentioned in the "Ask Dave" thread.

 

[Whipsnade]

Originally posted by TheDS:
[QB] Gee, LEW, did all your games run in real time?[QB]

DS,

At the time, yes. When the 5th FW kicked off in 1107 it was 1107 in our game too. This was the early to mid 80s mind you, things were different then. We couldn't keep up with the war news and didn't want to 'slide' back in time either.

We couldn't use a modem to get the latest TNS bulletin. We had to wait for a JTAS dead tree copy to wend its way to our FLGS. Due to our deployment schedule, we sometimes didn't get a copy of JTAS for months and usually got them out of order. So we couldn't follow the war, nor did we wish to trail it by a few months.

Starved for entertainment, we wanted to play now with the PCs we had now. We didn't want to wait, you see. The Adventures and Double Adventures got heavy use in our group.

No computers, plus very little free time and/or storage space, also meant that we preferred playing 'prepackaged' Traveller over creating a lot of our own. We originally rotated the role of GM, with some sessions being 'canned' adventures with pregenerated PCs, others being mini-arcs, and still others full blown campaigns. When the War rolled around, we were just about out of our carefully rationed prepackaged adventures and I had been writing amber zones like mad stickig them into wherever we happened to be on the Main.

The War that the 'present' was off limits and our use of prepackaged materials meant that the past was used up. We could have pulled a duex et machina and simply thrown the PCs we loved back in time somehow (one member did suggest using the Ancient ship from SotA for this) or we could find another region to play in.

We'd played a lot of TCS. In fact, that game had brought us back to Traveller's RPG side. I had a some materials left from those wargames and so I shanghaied the campaign there, working frantically to stay ahead of the campaign by writing stuff only hours or minutes ahead of time. Tihs also got me stuck with being the GM full time.


Sincerely,
Larsen

 

[Whipsnade]

Originally posted by ChaserCaffey:
[Interesting that it seemed that way to you.[/qb]

CC,

Well, thanks to a cynical mind, I had my doubts about Ashtabula from the beginning. The RC and RCES were founded in large part to find missing ships after all and once I saw that the Dawn League ships were all accounted for in the GM's section of Path of Tears, I really marked Ashtabula as off-limits.

The color text for Pat 'Who Me' Ritter in the TNE Personalities book clinched it my mind. Here's one of the biggest wigs in the RCES still carrying the torch for Ashtabula. That just screamed Future Announcements to me. The ship was definitely in my "PCs Can Look For But Never Find" catagory. I figured she'd turn up in the Guilded Lily trilogy and was amazed she didn't make a cameo appearence in the Vampire sourcebook; i.e. port records show her arriving on a canary mission.

Would you have let your PCs find her? Or even get close to finding her?


Sincerely,
Larsen

 

[Uxi]

The Ashtabula was listed as "Lost 1201" not "Missing Fate Unknown"... that means destroyed, not missing, doesn't it?

What am I missing?

 

[mike wightman]

The CR Ashtabula is one of the ships listed in Scenario 2: Task Force Dagger, in Battle Rider.
It forms part of the RC fleet, which also consists of LM Aurora, LC Aurora, SM Victrix, and 2 TL12 drones.

These ships have the task of defeating the Montezuman High Guard.

 

[ChaserCaffey]

Originally posted by Larsen E. Whipsnade:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by ChaserCaffey:
[Interesting that it seemed that way to you.

CC,

Well, thanks to a cynical mind, I had my doubts about Ashtabula from the beginning. The RC and RCES were founded in large part to find missing ships after all and once I saw that the Dawn League ships were all accounted for in the GM's section of Path of Tears, I really marked Ashtabula as off-limits.

The color text for Pat 'Who Me' Ritter in the TNE Personalities book clinched it my mind. Here's one of the biggest wigs in the RCES still carrying the torch for Ashtabula. That just screamed Future Announcements to me. The ship was definitely in my "PCs Can Look For But Never Find" catagory. I figured she'd turn up in the Guilded Lily trilogy and was amazed she didn't make a cameo appearence in the Vampire sourcebook; i.e. port records show her arriving on a canary mission.
</font>[/QUOTE]Yeah, that was somewhat surprising to me as well, but I figured that it was a deliberate way of leaving a high-profile rescue mission open for the PCs to do. Really, it's all just a matter of how you read the material.

Was there a post somewhere on this board to the effect that the later episodes of Virus Redux might be brought out? We might still get to find out...

Would you have let your PCs find her? Or even get close to finding her?


Sincerely,
Larsen

Definately maybe. It's not the sort of thing I would just toss out, but it wasn't a "never under any circumstances" sort of thing either. If I had a group of PCs that seemed interested in rescue/recovery missions, then I could see my way to a campaign of a few months duration whose climax was discovering the fate of the Ashtabula and recovering whatever and whoever was left.

Interesting that she appeared in a later product- I hadn't heard about that. Was that Brilliant Lances, or Battle Rider?

(Edit: fixed some HTML tags)