The Saucy Sue in Space (Five Parsecs from Home)

So, I recently picked up Five Parsecs from Home 3rd Edition. I love the digest-sized hardback rulebook. Aesthetically, this is my ideal. This probably stems from getting into sci-fi gaming via Traveller and the Little Black Books in the late seventies and the digest-sized Laserburn rulebook with its supplements in the early eighties.

Better yet, this rulebook really does hark back to the Traveller adventures we had back then. The contents very clearly show a debt to Traveller. I've bought a lot of the Nordic Weasel material along the way and found it interesting, but I always found it hard to read because of the layout. It just did not suit my reading style and made learning the rules harder, which is a shame because the games are just the kinds of things I wanted. This rulebook is a sea change in that. It is easily readable and I love what I have read. I am really looking forward to getting a few games in soon.

The first thing I decided when reading the rules was that they mapped so clearly onto the Traveller background that I would set my adventures in the Spinward Marches in the period covered by the earliest adventures and supplements I owned. This is the first decade of the year 1100 of the Third Imperium. It is a time when things start to unravel culminating in the Fifth Frontier War. This will give me background events to set my own crew's adventures against, and perhaps for them to get involved in. Who knows? They might even change the course of history!

Five Parsecs from Home uses a lot of tables to procedurally generate encounters and worlds. I shall need to fudge things a little so that these results make sense within the Traveller universe. I'll be limiting myself to the Traveller jump technology, so it will probably be a case of checking the details on whichever planet I land on and picking among the various Five Parsecs from Home options for worlds. There will be a fair bit of fudging things and winging it but the tools are all there in the rulebook and it should adapt easily. And, to be honest, that will not be much different from how I GMed my Traveller games all those years ago. It will also be interesting to see if I can deconstruct the original adventures into a series of set pieces with perhaps some procedural dice rolling between episodes. Some of them will probably work better than others for this, so we'll have to see how I go.

The other thing that is fun is to dig out my old Traveller figures. So much nostalgia! And that is despite the fact that some were painted thirty years ago and it shows. I shall have to see about patching up the paintwork a bit here, and it might encourage me to return to some of the others sitting around the house.  I did rebase a lot of them not so long back, so there is that, at least.

The crew of the Saucy Sue

So, on to my team. I mostly diced randomly for them, but did make a couple of executive decisions about their backgrounds to fit the storyline I had in mind, which is based on ideas from the introductory adventure The Imperial Fringe that came with the Deluxe Traveller boxed set. This also meant that I decided to keep my team to just four crew, because the standard Type S Scout/Courier in Traveller has berths for only four crew. I wonder how much trouble they will get in, and how long they will survive. I'll be running them in some test games first to get to know the rules, before starting out in the campaign proper, so there may well be a few games that turned out to be all just a dream.

The concept here is a team that starts with a patron: The Sector Government. This will be an enduring patron who will give the team missions occasionally. I need to figure out how the survey work that the team is meant to do fits in. Not sure how to do that yet, but I'm sure it will become clear as the game progresses. Hopefully, I shall have time to do that before I have to return to work and find myself once more in a different country from my figures.

Nudge Unit 3561

***detached scout team on roving commission***

***assignment: Spinward Marches***

***team assigned to Type S Scout/Courier Saucy Sue***

Commander Eshtovr Vindenes

• Team leader of Nudge Unit 3561
• Homeworld: Jewell/Jewell
• Empath. Psi powers believed inherited from her Zhodani mother. Nothing distinguishes her human father to suggest they come from him.
• Successful career in Contact & Liaison with specialism in intelligence analysis.
• Now mustered out but engaged by Senior Scout Administrator Galadden for the Imperial Fringe Audit. Mission to conduct surveys of planets in the Spinward Marches. Secondary mission to nudge societies towards desired future paths.
• Vindenes is known to be particularly dedicated to the Scout Service and the Third Imperium in that order. Her early upbringing on Jewell was characterised by alienation from both human and Zhodani societies because of her mixed heritage. The Scout Service gave her a home where she belonged and she is fiercely loyal to it.

Supervisor Garth Burnside

• Security chief of Nudge Unit 3561
• Homeworld: Squanine/Trin's Veil
• Standard Imperial human
• Successful career as security specialist in Contact & Liaison.
• Now mustered out but engaged by Senior Scout Administrator Galadden for the Imperial Fringe Audit.
• Burnside grew up in the Feudal Technocracy of Squanine and is known to crave recognition for his successes since leaving there. This has occasionally led to him taking too many chances in the field. Since joining Commander Vindenes' team he has shown more moderation. She appears able to manage him better than many of his previous commanders.

Skilled Worker Shelby Kutts

• Engineer of Nudge Unit 3561
• Homeworld: Rethe/Regina
• Standard Imperial human
• Undistinguished career as engineer with Contact & Liaison.
• Now mustered out but engaged by Senior Scout Administrator Galadden for the Imperial Fringe Audit.
• Kutts grew up in the arcologies of Rethe as part of the underclass in the lower levels Arcology Pinochet XXIII. Although a good engineer, he lacks seriousness and is only interested in the gadgets rather than knuckling down and doing the routine work. His attitude has improved under Commander Vindenes.

W33-b Omnibot 'Weeb'

• Assigned bot to the Scout/Courier Saucy Sue
• Standard programming package
• The Omnibot series is an anthropomorphic general support bot designed for flexibility rather than specialist use.
• W33-b is usually called Weeb by the crew of the Saucy Sue.
• Intelligence suspects that W33-b may have gone AI sometime around 1103. This is unconfirmed. Intelligence continues to monitor the situation.