Traveller #005: Big Hammer Solutions and Prime Directives

The journey of the Deepnight Revelation continues... 

Today the crew for this session of Brett's ongoing Traveller game consists of the following:

Jeff "Mega" Credit in the role of XO, as played by Mike

Will "Danger" Robinson engineer extraordinaire, as played by Brent

Daryen "Lucky" Gavic the vagabond drifter and space rogue, as played by me (Ronn)

Prime Directives? We don't have any such thing--go find the fungus and eliminate the threat it poses--that's our directive. Also, maybe, see what else is out there in the unexplored places in the universe... bring back the cool shit.

Welcome to the Near Side of Yonder, maybe we'll find something cool... or at least a gas giant we can use to refuel the ship. We're so far outside charted space every jump is a surprise. The surprise this time being an arm of the Great Rift stretching across our planned course. Going around it will add years to our trip, so everybody is scrambling to find a crossing point. 

Given three options, we picked the delta path, which was the third one. Which led us to a five planet system which had a large space station present. We thought to make contact and let 'em know we're here. Which worked out fine. Nobody started shooting, so that's good.

That space station belongs to some furry, human-likes who call themselves the Tenipal. They kinda look like us--same height, covered with fur, weird two-thumb hands. They seem alrite. They're stuff ain't as good as ours, according to the science's. They know about the Fungus, but seem more worried about some other alien-folk they call the Erline. Seems the two of them been fighting and warrin' for a good long time. Friends they ain't. We decided to go see them and ask about the fungus. Maybe they'll like us better than the furry people.

The map we got from the Tenipal had red spots and blue spots and red Xs. Red bein' bad and blue bein' OK. No sense in going to the red Xs, as they been mostly ruined by the Erline. War or fungus, seems the Erline have a big hammer way of thinking, which is mostly same as me, but probably works against the mission. The blue spots are supposed to be more friendly. I guess we'll find out.

These Erline are some ugly crab-looking beasties; six legs, four arms, six eyes, two of which bulge out like they're going to pop, they are only about knee high, but 120cm long, and claws, I almost forgot the claws... that's a big bug. Why are so many aliens gross, ugly things. Where are all variant humans, the green sexy ladies, blue nymphos, and red warrior babes. No such luck, we get weird furries and bi-polar bugs.

We've had a couple encounters with the Erline and they were very different, the first group seemed scared of us. And well they should be, the Deepnight is pretty badass. The second group wanted to trade jump drive technology for basically nothing--not a great deal. But in both cases, they showed very little interest in us or where we had come from. Hell, they seemed to care not a wit about the fungus at all. Find some fungus, drop a nuke. Have a hammer, use a hammer.

We had to slip away when a Tenipal distress drone summoned us to save a planet. We've been doing a lot of saving and not a lot of fungus finding. Which seems like a better gig, but not really what we signed up for. Find the fungus, save the universe. That's how it was pitched to me.

Well, we got back just in time to see what happens when you smack a hammer down on a Tenipal city. Seems an Erline Citadel droneship was hurling space rocks down on the planet under the excuse of eliminating fungus and creating a quarantine. There was a lot of hemming and hawing, but eventually we got around to destroying the Citadel droneship, fought off some robots, and got down planetside. You know what we found on our sensors... no fungus. Simple mistake or excuse to make a little mayhem? Seems we need to ask some questions.