"We Have Always Been As We Are"

The Campaigns

Information on these campaigns, and the log where available, can be found by following the link under the Name column.
 
# Name Start End Summary rules
date place date place
1 TWA 001-1??? Regina 001-1??? Knorbes A hunting we shall go CT
2 Porky's 001-1107 Lunion 154-1107 Zaibon Capture an asteroid ship CT
3 Regina 001-11?? Regina ???-11?? Mithril Travelling in the classic sense MT
4 Lunion 001-1117 Lunion 117-1119 Frenzie Wide-ranging epic, mostly outside the Imperium MT
4a The Bridge 118-1119 Frenzie 145-1119 unknown A fictional bridge between campaigns (MT)
5 Mora 133-1119 Mora 277-1120 Emape Research and conspiracy T4
6 Misha 277-1120 Emape 098-1122
 Regina
 Free form adventuring T4
7
 Nightshade
 098-1122
 Regina
 323-1122?
Travelling again
 T4
8
 Crusader
 323-1122
 Curmudgeon
 195-1123
 Adabicci
 Black Ships and Civil War
 T4
9
 Regency
 195-1123
 Adabicci


T4

The campaigns I run are set in the same Traveller universe, centered around the Spinward Marches.  I've maintained a consistent background since 1982.

The first one (of which no record remains) was in the Classic Traveller (Little Black Book) setting, based on Adventure One, The Kinunir.  In retrospect this was not a good place to start, as that adventure was rather too vague and lacked direction.  I was, however, to use that book later for an adventure seed for the Lunion Campaign (q.v..).  The name is because the campaign began on the TWA flight which brought me from England to live in the United States.
The second (the Porky's campaign) was set in the Zaibon system.  This ended with the players discovering (and thwarting) a joint Zhodani - Sword World covert operation involving a ship built within an asteroid (as opposed to an asteroid ship, a subtle but significant difference under Book 2 rules).  That ship, had it completed field trials successfully, would have been sneaked into the Glisten system where it was intended to cause significant disruption of shipping in the subsector capital in the first stages of a preemptive strike starting a Fifth Frontier War.  The characters captured the ship and handed the information over to the local Duke.

The third started on Regina, and was a classic "Travelling" campaign.  Some materials exist on paper -- none as yet in electronic form.  This included a straight-forward running of Mission on Mithril, a very good adventure which has influenced some of my ground based happenings ever since.

When MegaTraveller came out, the canon Imperium was a mess.  Fond as I was of the frontier setting of the Spinward Marches in the Third Imperium, and far from exhausting the possibilities of that milieu, I took the events of the Porky's campaign as a ready excuse to maintain the traditional setting.  The characters had uncovered the plans for a Zhodani - Sword World first strike, and thus removed the element of surprise.  It was so easy to hand those plans over to Norris and let him use them to negotiate a more stable peace on the Zhodani border.  Of course, what the "evil" Zho's wanted all along was just a limiting of Imperial expansionism, and so Norris' plan was welcomed with open arms -- so much so, in fact, that the astute historian might wonder if that had been the real Zhodani intention all along...

So a Fifth Frontier War was avoided, and Norris awarded the title of Archduke as a reward.  Without the war to set up the circumstances that resulted in the abuse of Strephon's transfer of more power to the nobility, Dulinor The Mad never had the military might to back up an attempt on the throne -- so never was in a position to seize the throne by right of assassination.  Thus no war, no assassination, no rebellion.  Peace and prosperity continues in the Marches as it always has.

It was time to start up my fourth campaign, the Lunion campaign.  This started traditionally with a group of characters demobbing at Lunion, with a pair of ships (merchant and scout) between them.  New characters (new players) were added while in Zaibon (yes, the same Zaibon).  Wandering fairly aimlessly for a while, I threw quite a few adventure hooks at them -- the one on which they bit was good old Adventure One, The Kinunir, modified to suit the rules and the setting.  From there they ran full tilt into a wide-ranging epic, travelling way to spinward of the Imperium, encountering aliens (hostile and otherwise), revolutions, and conspiracies way beyond the dreams of any theorist.  It ended soon after an unexpected return to the Imperium (via misjump), leaving all sorts of loose ends and subplots.

Continuity between that and the next campaign (the Mora campaign) was maintained through several characters and the Anastasia, with an off-line "bridge" section written to carry the log from the end of the Lunion campaign to the start of the new one, tying off (or leaving untied) loose ends to set up a lower scale less military adventure setting.

With the departure of the Marquis Marcus Crestworthy from the Third Eye, and at over forty gaming sessions, it seemed appropriate to move on to a new campaign name.  While initially still considered part of the Mora campaign, I recognized that the absence of the primary scientist, and the more investigative and adventuring focus of the remaining characters, would change the nature of the group.  So it seemed like a good checkpoint to reset the character list, log records, and so on.

The Misha campaign is named after the initial captain of the ship, whose freebooting non-Imperial barbarian personality influences the direction of the whole group.  Conspiracies, tracking down hidden organizations, and buying whiskey seemed to be the main thrust.

The Nightshade campaign is named after their ship, a somewhat unusual one registered with homeport of Dulu / Scorpio / Foreven.

The Crusader campaign is so named for no apparent reason.