Item Oddities

[endersig]

Looking over the "goodies" availilbe to Characters in Classic Traveller, i was quite disappointed. Where are the stun watchs? pen rockets? tracking devices? X ray glasses? even a Swiss Army Knife? Here is what i have, and PLEASE add your own! my party has a real affinity for oddities and i'm running out of ideas. Understand, all these items are hard to come by (Roll a +10 for a merchant to have, then roll 1d for how many they have in stock)

Pepper Spray Watch
Weight: Negligible Cost:75-150Cr fires a spray of peper spray 1m long, blinds for 2-5 combat rounds. Requires a Mechanical skill to reload, hold 5 carterages of pepper spray. Carterage cost: 5Cr

Ear Stud Grenade
Weight: N/A Cost: 250 Cr an attractive earing which, when seperated and thrown, is a tiny HE grenade. Does 2d damage and disorients target for 2 rounds.

Stun Dart Pen:
Weight: 15g (again, not applicable in groups of less than say, 10) Cost: 15Cr a pen that fires a small 5g Tranq dart. range: 2m

Grappling Hook:
Weight: 1 Kg Cost: 250 Cr a hook used to scale buildings, length: 75m

Laser Ring:
Weight: 10g cost: 500 Cr a ring that fires a 6 inch Welder beam, does 1d damage to unarmored foes. requires 1 hour to charge

 

[Gaming Glen]

I hear you and have said the same thing many times. I've bought other "equipment" books of other systems to help expand the list of items available, but usually can only glean less than a dozen. They all have a long list of weapons and armors, and usually some sort of futuristic medical options (to heal the wounds made by those weapons that were not stopped by the armors

). And its just not items but what does new technology do to things.

What will containers be like? Glass, plastic, metal? Or will the product itself make its own container so you can eat/drink it afterwards also?

Will there be powergrids on worlds settled after cheap fusion generators are available or will each home have its own generator?

Will home entertainment holovision be able to put you in the center of the action so you can feel the rush of air and the smell of battle as well as seeing or hearing it?

How will contragrav tech change the world? Will floating vidscreens follow your head movement? Will all aircraft become VTOL?

Will computer hardware become virtual, able to reconfigure itself with a "download"?

How far will cosmetic surgery go? Will furries (people who want to be an animal) have their wishes fulfilled? And contragrav can assist the winged varieties.

After suffering through 4 near misses of hurricanes with Jeanne still not far away and my shutters are still up: Will weather control have any chance of reality? FYI: I live west of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.


Glen

 

[Gaming Glen]

Oh, looking at your list again. 4 of 5 things are combat oriented and the fifth is something you can find in any other equipment book.

Something that might help bring about ideas for items is new materials. Example: clay that moves so statues can go through motions; I guess they can't be called statues any more then.

Paintings where the eyes, AND HEAD, DO follow you (and increasing paranoia). For us gamers of the future: will miniatures move for different poses?

Laser-equipped mowers and tree cutters (there is still the problem if when does the laser stop or be ineffective, i.e., range).

What will be a new mouse trap?

Quick-drying dryers for clothing. Or will clothing clean/dry on their own? I hear talk of army-clothing able to read the body conditions. How far will this go?

Self-cleaning carpet; can be used in spaceship living areas. This would make for harder crime investigations when the carpet cleans up the body fluids or chemical killing agents; unless it goes to some storage and a record of where it came from is kept.

Will we still suffer from "Survivor" entertainment. Next Survivor series (of one episode lasting about 60 seconds at most): surviving on an asteroid. (hmm, a whole thread could be devoted to picking OTU planets for Survivor shows).

Glen

 

[Malenfant]

That sort of thing is done pretty well in Transhuman Space and WW's Trinity game (which must have the most "real" setting I've ever seen in a scifi game, down to what the latest fashions are and the hottest music is!). You could mine those for ideas...

The problem with Traveller is that there's such a wide range of TL - and most probably won't actually see the Imperial maximum anyway. But yeah, there is a bit of a descriptive vacuum when it comes to what hightech life in Traveller is actually like (probably because without nanotech or computers that are even remotely comparable to what I'm typing this message on, it's not actually that exciting at all).

Oh: doing Survivor on the planet that the Chamax Horde live would be fun