Traveller session #1

Last night the exploration vessel Leviathan set out into the unknown with its crew of 55 and 4 civilian scientists.  Each player had one of the senior officer pregens and one or two characters rolled up using the original Traveller rules.  Yes, some PCs died in chargen.  The players rolled up a large number of ground-pounders (Army and Marines), which resulted in many PCs assigned crap jobs aboard the ship.  There are only so many starship gigs available for a dude whose best skill is Cutlass-3, so we ended up with several trained killers working as Cargo Handlers and Galley Hands.

Many of the extra PCs ended up serving most of the session as the landing party.  While the Leviathan and its shuttle scooped fuel from a nearby gas giant, the landing party would survey the mainworld of the system with the ship's pinnace, a term that provided unlimited amusement to the players.  

The first world explored (dubbed "Erebus") was an airless rockball with the remains of three domed cities, all bombed out. Under the largest they detected some trace emissions of breathable gases, so the party donned vaccsuits and descended below the street level.  That's when the morlocks jumped them.  It was a brief struggle, as the morlocks only had clubs and daggers while the party had a large array of firearms.  Pat's vaccsuit helmet was dented up a bit and a couple suits had to be patched quickly, but the morlocks were defeated.  A quick examination of some of the less laser-blasted bodies revealed small limpet-like symbiots on the bellies of all the morlocks.  These creatures oxygenate the blood in exchange for nutrients, allowing the morlocks to live in thinner atmospheres than normal humans.  A live symbiotic limpet is the only thing of value they found on the world.

The second system visited was more promising.  They found an earthlike world they named Wibbly.  Wibbly is inhabited by slowship colonists whose technology level had crept back to the stoneage due to lack of heavy metals, but they had a very successful neolithic civilization going.  First contact with the Wibblonians went reasonably well and some trade followed.  More importantly, vast deposits of petrochemical were found just under the surface.