I’ve read two Witch World books so far, the original Witch World and its sequel, Web of the Witch World (both as part of my slow-moving effort to read Appendix N). They’re wild, unpredictable, and inventive. Norton was fantastic writer.

But despite the first two books involving a main character from another world and a main faction from another world…somehow it had never crossed my mind that there’d be all sorts of that stuff happening in the setting. I thought it was just those two things!

I’m currently casting about for a GURPS setting which, as a prominent feature of the setting, combines two or more…genres? Eras? Themes? Whatever you’d call, say, a fantasy world with inhabitants from a high-tech SF setting and modern-day Earth, like Witch World. Or the forthcoming GURPS Ring of Fire, which I’m very excited about, or GURPS Technomancer. Or TORG, Rifts, or other “collision of worlds” settings.

Basically, I want a setting that showcases GURPS’s ability to integrate multiple tech levels and genres into the same campaign, or even the same party of adventurers. The next time a slot opens up for a new game in my Seattle group, my current plan is to pitch a cross-whatever GURPS campaign of some sort.

To my delight, Witch World is a good candidate.

Other strong candidates so include Reign of Steel (so good!), Time Travel or Infinite Worlds, and a mix of Cabal, Illuminati, Warehouse 23, and maybe Black Ops. Rediscovering my interest in GURPS, which I last played in junior high or high school, has been one of the highlights of my year to date.

Which is why when I got to play Tales of Argosa [affiliate link] and our GM whipped out the bespoke oracle dice made for that game, I ordered a set of them that same night.

The playtest version of Tales of Argosa [affiliate link] is a free PDF, and it includes the rules for the oracle dice and the activity die. You can buy the dice on The Game Crafter for $22. The rules for the oracle dice take up one page, and ditto the rules for the activity die. I dropped those pages straight into my Traveller binder, since that’s the game I’m running right now.

Them bones

What makes these great is that instead of just yes/no, you get the classic improv-fueling variations — “yes, and,” “yes, but,” “no, and,” and “no, but” — as well as benefit/complication (which my brain always thinks of as weal/woe; thanks, D&D) and degree of yes/no, and you can adjust the likelihood of yes or no.

Where a 1d6 roll can give you binary yes/no (1-3 or 4-6), and it’s easy to adjust the likelihood of one outcome (yes 1-4, no 5-6), that’s about it. And that’s fine; I love that approach. But in exchange for a tiny bit of rules overhead, the ToA oracle dice are so much more interesting than that in play.

This is exactly the kind of loosey-goosey inspiration within constraints that I love using at the table. Not sure what would happen? Ask the dice. Every time our GM did that in our Tales session, the outcome was more interesting than a simple yes or no.

These dice also have flavor. The symbols are cool. Rolling them feels like a little ritual, one that engages the whole table whenever it’s performed.

That blue die

The activity die tells you what the monster or other random encounter is doing when you encounter it, like eating or working or fighting. There’s a little table of ideas, but even without it the symbols are enough to put some English on an encounter.

POD dice?

These dice are printed on demand, and the symbols are printed rather than etched. (Here’s some info on TGC’s process.) I might have balked at buying non-etched dice if it weren’t for these dice from my first gaming convention in 1992 or 1993. They spent 2/3 of their life in my dice box, avoiding the wear from rolling — although not the wear from rattling around with thousands of other dice — because they’re precious to me. But for the past 10+ years I’ve been carrying and rolling them because life’s too short to not use cool stuff.

Are they starting to wear? You bet. But given their current rate of fading and wear, I’ll probably be dead before they stop being readable.

Tales of Argosa [affiliate link] is an excellent game. These oracle dice rock.

This 2012 Gnome Stew blog post by the inimitable Troy E. Taylor is one of those bright origin points: D&D Burgoo: A Touch of Nostalgia.

I read Troy’s post the day it came out, January 30, 2012. I immediately went down the OSR rabbit hole (here’s a Gnome Stew post I wrote two months later, in March 2012, touching on that experience), which led to other rabbit holes: reexamining games I played as a kid, exploring other old-school systems and philosphies of play, and trying all sorts of stuff. New (old) branches of the hobby have unfolded before me. Old interests have been rekindled. It’s been grand.

Fourteen years after Troy’s post, I’m currently:

• Running a Traveller campaign. It’s Mongoose 2e rather than Classic…but there’s not that much daylight between them.
• Playing in an AD&D 2nd Edition game, hot on the heels of running an AD&D 1st Edition game with the same characters. I love 2e again, and 1e has become one of my all-time favorite RPGs.
• Building a fantasy campaign setting with an old-school vibe, Godsbarrow, using the principles found in Worlds Without Number. I’ve published one Godsbarrow book so far, The Unlucky Isles [affiliate link].
• Buying GURPS books with an eye to running a campaign. I’m not sure what yet, but Infinite Worlds and Time Travel are high on the list. The last time I played GURPS was probably 30+ years ago.

And since that fateful day in 2012, I’ve also:

• Run an Old School Esssentials game for my daughter, Lark, as her introduction to D&D. That was one of my favorite gaming experiences, full stop.
• Honed my feelings on combat as sport vs. combat as war, a key element of old-school play that fascinates me today.
• Designed Hexmancer, a procedural hex generation system.
• Written wilderness encounter tables for DCC RPG, which were later published in The Gongfarmer’s Almanac – Volume 3, 2018 [affiliate link].
• Inked, and “inked,” a bunch of old-school, precision-edge dice. My home and travel dice bags both have some of these dice in them.
• Written about old-school play here on Yore, like dungeon stocking in B/X D&D vs. Labyrinth Lord and the origins of Classic Traveller.
• Created a megadungeon, Godsbarrow’s Black Furnace, for #dungeon23.
• Read a pile of Appendix N books. I started trying to read them all back in 2012 (there’s that year again!), gave up, and have since started up again.

…And probably more stuff that I’ve forgotten. Look at the many pages of Yore posts in the old school category, and you’ll find all sorts of stuff. And you know when the first post was? 2012, the year Troy got me rolling!

How I game is different than it would have been without Troy’s post. What I play is different. My creative output includes different stuff — heck, I don’t think I would ever have gotten Godsbarrow up and running if I hadn’t gone down this path.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that that single blog post is one of the most influential touchstones in my enjoyment of the RPG hobby.

Thank you, Troy, for sparking so much joy!

TL;DR: Things are going well and this sandbox campaign is a lot of fun. You should try running a no-prep Traveller sandbox because it’s nifty.

Nota bene: If it matters, this is a Mongoose Traveller 2e [affiliate link] campaign. I also use books from previous editions because they’re great and the stats are close enough.

We’re currently using the rules as written. No real house rules, but the core book is silent on whether the PCs can split up to handle spaceport tasks like trade and rumor-gathering in parallel, and we say they can do that. We also came to a shared understanding about when passengers are available and a few other nitty-gritty trade-related things along those lines. Nothing major.

A quick mea culpa: This is an ongoing campaign and the other players might stumble across this post, so I’m not sharing any GM-facing stuff even if it would make this a better blog post. Sorry about that.

A snapshot of play

So much of this post turned out to be about setting up the campaign that I wanted to make sure I led with a look at how it actually, you know, plays.

• The PCs decide what to do that session. Their broad goals are “Find Ancient artifacts” and “Become financially independent.” They move cargo and passengers for the second one, and fly around to different planets for the first one. They can do, and do do, whatever the fuck they want, and go wherever they want within the sandbox. The game is about what happens at the table.
• I know what each faction in the sandbox wants, I know the themes of the subsector, and I know what the various NPCs (met or unmet) want; those are my foundation for improvisation.
• When it’s time for random encounter rolls, I make them. I interpret the results on the fly using a combination of my campaign notes, faction and NPC goals, in-game events, and my oracles (Rory’s Story Cubes and tarot cards).
• If I need stats, I pull them from Supplement 7: 1,001 Characters or I just assume that if someone is competent at something, they get a +1 or +2 and leave it at that. For patrons, I use Supplement 1: 760 Patrons. I use a rumor matrix (more on that below), and if an adventure is needed I use the generator from the core book [affiliate link].
• If “What happens next?” isn’t obvious from the game mechanics, that situation gets a pull from my tarot deck, a roll of a random small handful of Rory’s Story Cubes, or both (updated to add: or a roll of the Tales of Argosa oracle dice). Then I furrow my brow, look over my notes, and come up with something that fits the setting. I don’t worry about “balance” (a slippery slope in a sandbox), but barring unusual circumstances I forecast danger and avoid injecting life-threatening peril that wasn’t previously foreshadowed. “The world is the world,” so whatever I improvise has to make sense in the setting, but it won’t be a bespoke encounter precisely tailored to the PCs and their abilities because who has time for that shit and that’s not something I enjoy in any case.
• Most of the time, we share authorship of setting details. I came up with the foundation, and I keep narrative control over the places I want to be a mystery (because that’s fun for everyone), but the rest is often detailed through a freewheeling conversation at the table. We look at the library data — which the PCs have access to — and try to reconcile all the fascinating and incongruent elements that result from (lightly massaged) random system generation. (I’ve shared an example later in this post.)
• I ask a lot of questions. “What’s that place like?” “What’s weird about this guy?” “Tell me something surprising about this situation.” This comes from years of playing and running PbtA games, and it’s become a central and universal component of how I run games like this Traveller campaign.
• Sometimes the party arrives in a system with a plan. Sometimes they arrive, we hash out what the place is like, they make some rumor and patron rolls and wrangle cargo, and a course of action emerges. In case it’s not evident by this point, I don’t steer.
• And lastly, this group is 1) on board with this process, which was an integral part of my pitch, and 2) used to and good at shared authorship, yielding the spotlight, doing stuff that highlights other players’ characters, and pausing to talk through stuff until we’re sure everyone is on the same page.

I know this list has some big “draw the rest of the fucking owl” energy, but it is what it is. I’m trying to open a window into my weird brain, and into my group’s play, by drawing on half-remembered bullshit from six months ago (which ain’t getting any easier as I get older) and my scattered notes. It’s tough to distill all that into a useful, meaningful blog post.

I’ve done my best. It sprawls. It might not be in the most logical order. I’ve probably forgotten something important. It’s full of asides. I hope it helps you in your Traveller journey despite all that.

Keystones and touchstones

This campaign wouldn’t exist without these three amazing blog posts:

• The Tales to Astound! blog post TRAVELLER: Out of the Box–The Casual and Improvisatory Nature of Early Traveller Play and the Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog post Classic Traveller and the Zero Prep Campaign Setting. I was curious if one could run Traveller with zero prep, and these two posts 1) showed me that one could, 2) made it sound like fun, and 3) revealed to me that Traveller was designed around improvisation at the table. This is where it all started clicking for me.
• On the Four Table Legs of Traveller, Leg 1: Mortgages, the first in Sir Poley‘s series of four Tumblr posts on the core elements of Traveller. Prior to starting this campaign, I’d only played two or three sessions of Trav over the years. I needed context, and those posts are awesome at providing context.

If you’re thinking about running a Traveller sandbox, stop reading my post and take some time to read theirs (and then come back!).

A huge thank you to the authors of Tales to Astound!, Jeffro’s Space Gaming Blog, and Sir Poley for bringing this campaign — a source of great joy — into my life, and for unlocking some of what makes Traveller such a special game for me.

Goals

I loathe session prep.

I’m happy to do campaign prep, provided doing it means I can do zero (and no more than very little) session prep.

My main goal was to create a framework for a sandbox campaign which would require as little session prep as possible. This started with pitching the idea to my group, of course: Traveller in the classic mold, the PCs making their way in the universe, with random encounters, random subsector and planet generation, no prepped plots of any kind, dynamic factions with their own goals, and all the action being driven by the other players. (For more on this ethos, see my post There is no curtain.)

Apart from that, I really just wanted to create what in my mind is sort of the classic Traveller experience: The PCs have a ship, there’s a frontier subsector full of weird and interesting stuff, and they do whatever they feel like in that place.

To accomplish that I needed to use, gather, and/or create the tools to support that style of sandbox play. That’s what this post is about.

Setting

I created the Cidrogal Subsector for our game. It sits within the Foreven Sector, which is a sort of “GM’s preserve” that’s been deliberately omitted from canon Traveller products (for the most part). It’s analogous to Sembia in the Forgotten Realms: in a location significant enough for it to be an important place, with well-known and -detailed neighbors, but left out of D&D books so you can do whatever you like without having to rework other material to match.

This post unlocked how to approach Cidrogal for me: Foreven, What do You Want to See? And this Reddit post was helpful in thinking about how to start this process. At the end of the day, I just thought about what interested me and put it into the subsector.

Here are some of my notes from April 2025, when I started working on the subsector. They’ve been lightly edited to remove spoilers in case any of the other players read this post.

Build from what’s known, but make Foreven mine:

• Foreven is frontier space
  • Plenty of Amber worlds, at least one or two Red worlds
• Zhodani Consulate is coreward, and wants to prevent the Imperium from expanding spinward into Foreven
  • The Zhodani are the largest canon power in Foreven, controlling 7/16 of it
• Domain of Deneb in Five Sisters sector (trailing) is the nearest outpost of the Imperium proper
• The Far Frontiers region (spinward) is full of Imperial client states, which means the Imperium got there through Foreven
• If the Imperium wants to expand spinward of the Spinward Marches, which it seems to based on the existence of Five Sisters, then Foreven is a logical place to do that

The Cidrogal subsector includes:

• An Imperial client state
  • Borders extend beyond the subsector
• An independent state that’s courting both the Zhodani Consulate and the Imperium
  • Its borders also extend beyond the subsector
• Domain of Deneb (from Five Sisters, trailing) seeking to expand its influence spinward
• The Zhodani, both directly and indirectly
• Independent worlds, some of which are viewed as prizes by the other factions
• A corporation aiming to dominate trade with Five Sisters
• Pirates
  • Which means Red worlds are a feature
• Proxy actions by the Zhodani and the Imperium
  • Working through the two main states as well as the independent worlds
  • That brings mercenaries and adventurers
• At least one 1-jump trade route connecting the subsector to Five Sisters
  • The map shows a logical spot on the coreward and rimward ends (trailing side)

Sandbox framework

For my money, a sandbox needs a few things to work.

A call to adventure

This can be abandoned immediately (the story is what happens at the table), but it gives us all something to hang our hats on, a reason for the PCs to stay in the sandbox, and some toys to play with. I was intrigued by reading about the Ancients and their mysterious artifacts, so I went with that.

“Ancient artifacts were recently discovered in this frontier subsector, sparking a ‘gold rush’ as adventurers, mercenaries, and various factions get involved in searching for more of them.” Boom, done.

Factions

One of the other players, Pete, shared what turned out to be the key to making this whole sandbox Traveller thing click for me: the faction system from Mausritter. Mausritter is PWYW in PDF [affiliate link] and the faction rules are one page long. They’re brilliant.

You give each faction a name, goals, and resources. Between sessions, you take resources, PC actions, and faction actions into account and then roll for each goal to see if they made progress towards achieving the goal.

To that I added a high-level summary (e.g., “Sinister mining corporation now expanding into trade, Weyland-Yutani vibe“) and a concept from The Dresden Files: Our World: faces. In TDF, the “face” is an iconic central NPC for each faction. If you want to interact with that faction, you most likely go find that person to get the ball rolling. The players know who the faces are.

Given that Dresden assumes you’re mostly playing in a single city, I stretched that a bit to accommodate Traveller’s much larger sandbox. Each faction got two faces:

• Someone high up in the organization, a driving force; not necessarily the Big Leader, but a leader
• Someone lower down in the ranks, more likely to be encountered while roaming the spaceways

Each of those NPCs got a one-sentence sketch that included a simple character trait and a concrete goal.

Each faction takes up about half of a printed page. I can easily see at a glance what they’re about, what they’re up to, and how things are going for them, and I have a ready reference for improvising stuff on the spot.

“Hey, we just rolled a random encounter. Given we’re in the X System, it probably involves Faction Y. The have lots of well-armed starships at their disposal, so it’s one of those ships. Who’s flying it? Let’s see who I jotted down — yep, it’s that guy.”

I don’t roll between every session. Some factions have goals that would take weeks or months to achieve. I also needed the PCs to at least learn about each faction before the faction moves would have meaningful impacts in play. So far I’ve rolled once or twice, so roughly every five sessions. It just depends how much in-universe time each session takes.

Faction template

While I can’t share any actual factions, here’s the template I use:

Faction name
Brief summary, ideally one line
Major goal, ideally one line
What they want:
– Immediate goal that can impact or be engaged with by the PCs
– Immediate goal that can impact or be engaged with by the PCs
How they’ll get it:
– Resource, actions, etc. – e.g., naval fleet, assassination, spies
– Resource, actions, etc. – e.g., naval fleet, assassination, spies
Faces:
– NPC who the PCs can interact with easily
– Higher-up NPC working on one or both “what they want” items

Interesting places

My first step was to use Zhodani Base’s random subsector generator. I set it to: pocket empires, backwater, scattered, rules book 6, no atmosphere fix.

I spun the wheel until I got one that had the vibe I was going for: dense enough to be full of places to visit, sparse enough to feel like the frontier, and with some I’d-never-have-planned-that clumps/clusters/choices.

Like any good random generator, this one produced some glorious stuff and some elements that needed work. The first pass had way too many lifeless ice-ball worlds. But other themes that emerged piqued my interest, so they stayed in. Ideas began to germinate.

Once I had all the subsector library data, I put it into a giant spreadsheet. It included a splash of GM-only info about every system, so I stripped that out and copied the spreadsheet into our shared drive for the other players to use.

When we come up with details about a system, I create a new tab and add them there.

Subsector map

I spent a lot of my campaign prep time on making the subsector map.

I started by exporting my subsector data to the absolutely amazing online tool The Traveller Map.

I tinkered with system names and other details, leaving some as they were and injecting some of my own personality and preferences into the randomness. I wanted a mix of system types, including at least a couple asteroid belts. Ditto with bases. Instead of a web of trade routes, which I felt would add visual clutter, I went with “main lines of trade and communication,” a simple network of jump paths. I had to learn The Traveller Map’s syntax for adding those, and borders, and so on; that took time.

A blog post, Traveller 1977: Subsector Maps, turned me on to cribbing names from the UN’s database of city names. I followed the author’s recommendation to scroll to the bottom and pick obscure-to-me places. It was a hoot. Unfortunately, I can’t find it online anymore — but looking at lists of cities is fun starting point, and there are plenty of those out there.

I adore coming up with names. There’s a distinctly 1960s/1970s SF vibe that I wanted to capture here, a fuzzy collection of names that don’t makes sense, names that imply things about those systems, and just plain cool names. The Kurutoga Advance is named after my favorite mechanical pencil, a Uni Kuru Toga Advance.

Making this map was by far the longest step in my campaign prep. I spent a lot of time on it because it’s incredible how much plopping down a cool map adds to the play experience for the whole group, and because a sandbox needs a shared frame of reference — and that starts with a good, useful map.

The Traveller Map is a fantastic tool. Once you know which dial to twiddle, it turns your data into a clean, crisp, gorgeous map with high usability. It looks like a map from a Trav book.

I’m not always confident that I’ve nailed something, but I nailed this subsector map. This campaign wouldn’t work without it.

Campaign prep

I did at least 12 hours of campaign prep, maybe even 15 hours or more. For some GMs that’s, like, Tuesday, but for me that’s a metric shit-ton of prep.

That included:

• Reading about the underpinnings of sandbox and sandbox-esque Traveller campaigns
• Writing notes about how I was going to make this work
• Writing a one-page bible of subsector themes for easy reference during play
• Creating the factions
• Creating the subsector map
• Creating the spreadsheet of library data about every system in the subsector
• Designing a few random tables for things like species and allegiance
• Writing notes about how to use my oracles
• Putting together my binder of rules print-outs and notes

That stuff is covered elsewhere in this post; I just wanted to put it into a list so you could see what it looked like in one place.

Session prep

Fuck session prep right into the sun.

Between sessions, I’ve only had to do these things:

• Roll for each faction’s progress toward its goals. This is lonely fun for me, not prep; it doesn’t feel like work at all.
• Pull stat blocks if I knew an alien creature was likely to come up next session.
• Handle any loose ends if they couldn’t be dealt with at the table. For example, we finished one session by rolling a bunch of rumors. Before the next session, I randomly generated what those rumors were.
• Come up with “planetary scuttlebutt” when the Neutrino Phoenix arrived in any system. One of the other players, Reagan, suggested this based on using something similar in a Star Wars game he’d run years ago. It’s a great way to showcase faction activity and the consequences of the PCs’ actions.
• Read up on rules that we were fuzzy about last session.

A small — and I do mean small — measure of session prep is acceptable. I don’t regard needing to do any of these things as a failure. This campaign runs on damned near zero prep.

Improv tools

Traveller by nature lends itself well to sandbox gaming, at least in the “PCs roaming the universe” model of play. The players have a ton of agency, their characters have bills to pay, and random encounters are baked into the system.

I’d argue that it’s not built to support zero-prep sandbox play as naturally as, say, a PbtA game. PbtA distributes narrative authority and authorship around the whole table, GM and players alike, whereas Traveller assumes the GM is in charge of the world and adjudicating it without that sort of input from the other players. But one of my hobbies is bending RPGs to my Thou Shalt Not Prep preferences, so I’ve bent this one and found that it works out nicely.

Here are the tools involved in doing that:

• A solid foundation for improvisation, in the form of system data, the map, the factions, and subsector themes
• Random encounter rolls
• Two oracles, Rory’s Story Cubes and tarot cards
• Books of random patrons and NPCs
• My NPC card file
• A rumor table
• Breaks
• Shared authorship during play

This post has already covered the foundation in other sections. No need to repeat that stuff here.

Random encounter rolls

Drawn straight from TRAVELLER: Out of the Box–The Casual and Improvisatory Nature of Early Traveller Play and lightly modified by me, this is the first page in my GMing binder for this campaign:

The random rolls that create a Traveller game

Space: Daily, 1D, encounter on a 6 (p.155)

• See space encounters in revised core book

---

Law: Daily or situational, 2D+DM, encounter on planet’s Law Level or lower (p.256)

• In space on first approach to a planet
• Daily, offworlders wandering the streets of a city
• Other situations, see table in revised core book (p.256)

---

Random: Daily, 1D, encounter on a 5+ (p.94)

• See tables in revised core book

---

Patron: Weekly, 1D, patron encountered on a 5+ (p.93)

• See 760 Patrons (p.3) or random table in revised core book (p.93)

---

Rumor: Weekly, 2D, rumor on 7+, see rumor table in my binder

---

Animal: Daily, see animal encounter tables

Those aren’t the only reason stuff happens in the game, of course. Lots of things happen because of something the PCs did, or something a faction did, and then spin out from there. But this is the core structure. Whatever else is going on, random rolls are part of it.

We all know that whenever the Neutrino Phoenix arrives in a system, there might be an encounter. The other players pondered skimming gas for fuel but decided against it because they didn’t want to risk encounters. A random daily roll injected a faction representative into the action and spawned an entire session. And so on. It works, and it works well.

Finally, the Mongoose Traveller 2e core book [affiliate link] has an adventure generator in it, and I like it. I use it as needed.

Rory’s Story Cubes and tarot cards

Back in 2015 I played and GMed in a round-robin Dresden Files campaign that stands as one of my all-time favorites. Each GM brought their own approach to running sessions; mine were zero-prep affairs. I used Rory’s Story Cubes and tarot cards as oracles when winging it.

Those remain two of my favorite improv tools more than a decade later, and they’re at the heart of how I handle things on this fly in this Traveller campaign.

Story cubes:

• Grab three or four Story Cubes and roll them
• Use the first couple things that come to mind to add some depth to an NPC
• Ignore a die or two if they don’t fit
• Also works for situations/encounters

Tarot cards:

• Lay out three cards
• Upside-down means the opposite
• Use the first things that spring to mind to flesh out the situation, encounter, etc.
• Also works for NPCs

Updated to add: Tales of Argosa oracle dice

Added March 2026: Since I wrote this post, I’ve started using the oracle dice from Tales of Argosa in this campaign. They’ve become essential to me and have elevated the game.

They didn’t displace my Story Cubes and tarot deck, but a lot of situations where I was rolling Cubes or pulling cards are better served by using these oracle dice. “What’s this guy’s deal?” and “What’s happening in the jungle?” are great questions for the Story Cubes. “What’s this group up to?” and “Why did these folks show up?” are questions I like to resolve with tarot spreads.

But if it’s yes/no, and especially if the improv staples “Yes, and,” “No, but” and so forth are helpful, the oracle dice are fantastic. There’s some overlap (obviously, since I didn’t have the oracle dice before), and sometimes one tool might take the game in a different direction than another, but that’s all fine in my book.

I wrote a whole blog post about oracle dice.

Books of random patrons and NPCs

Supplement 7: 1,001 Characters and Supplement 1: 760 Patrons are my go-to books at the table. I also bring Supplement 13: Starport Encounters, but I don’t think I’ve actually used it yet.

Sometimes I roll randomly and see if the result makes sense. If I need a certain type of NPC, I go to the right section and pick one from there.

If a new NPC has even the slightest chance of being seen again, they go in the…

NPC card file

I think I started doing this when I ran first-edition Urban Shadows from 2017-2019. (No link for that one because I don’t support the publisher.) It’s a huge help in a sandbox game, where characters naturally accumulate over time and every NPC is a “toy” in our sandbox.

It’s just a pile of 3×5 index cards and a card case for them. For this campaign, I bought colored cards with matching tabs, and I file NPCs based on their relationship to the party (ally, enemy, etc.).

Each NPC gets a name, species, pronouns, pertinent stats or a reference to which character from Supplement 7: 1,001 Characters they are, at least one goal, and at least one big, broad personality trait. Over the course of play I jot other stuff down, then start using the back of the card, and then they become a proper mess — but they still work!

I also intended to write down locations and file them here, but I’ve been really bad about that. So far, we’ve seen multiple NPCs more than once but never returned to any locations, so it’s probably fine.

Rumor table

This excellent blog post on Stuffed Crocodile turns the rumor matrix found in some older Traveller modules into a d66 table. The author posits a logical next step, creating a custom version for each adventure/location, but I ignore that bit and just come up with the details on the fly (or between sessions).

When the PCs obtain rumors, the players roll a few times and I jot down the categories. It’s not hard to turn “Minor information,” “Misleading clue,” and “Important fact” into an adventure seed using the various tools I’ve described in this post.

Breaks

Breaks are one of the great tools of improv GMing.

Because there is no curtain, and therefore no reason to pretend I’m all-seeing, all-knowing, and have prepped everything ahead of time, when I need to make something up we all know that might take a few minutes and everyone’s fine with it.

Conversely, when the other players are strategizing or min-maxing the Neutrino Phoenix‘s cargo hold, that organically produces a break for me where I can make shit up.

Shared authorship

This sounds fancy, but it’s really just “Ask the other players lots of questions.”

For example, the campaign started on the planet Mortencen. I pulled up the library data and talked through it. Then we all came up with ideas for why, and how, it was how it was. Fifteen minutes later we had a fully sketched-out — and interesting — planet, and we spent a couple sessions there. It’s also someplace the party could easily wind up again, so apart from the pure fun of doing that we also invested in our shared sandbox.

Here’s the library data:

And here are the notes I jotted down based on our shared authorship of Mortencen:

• Balkanized = treaty for neutral starport control, point of contention
• Orbit is the fancy place to live
• System is also balkanized, access to the gas giant is restricted
• Tidally locked, everyone lives on the night side where it’s “only” 90f
• Mineral resources are on the day side, giant armored crawlers, balkanized
• Rusty red orange, red sandstorms on day-night line, lightning, Fury Road
• Lots of day/night themed stuff
• Tourist attraction = ceaseless, spectacular aurora borealis
• Unusual custom tech = no tech above TL11 allowed on planet, they are recovering from a high tech war
• They have scanners, bureaucrats, technical manuals, inspections, “bus lockers”
• Illicit business happens in tunnels or on dayside landings
• Aurora called Finger of God
• Treaty troops from all nations, grey East Berlin vibe
• Unusual custom nobility: assigned a minder in highport, a personal concierge
• Two space elevators

Thanks for reading

If you made it this far, I hope you got some good fuel for your own Traveller campaign, whether ongoing or forthcoming. Happy gaming!

Reading Appendix N

• The Stealer of Souls, by Michael Moorcock. This is the beginning of Moorcock’s Elric series. I’ve read one Elric book before, but it wasn’t listed in Appendix N; this one is, and it’s superb.
• Hiero’s Journey, by Sterling E. Lanier. More Appendix N, but this one is post-apocalyptic and rather long. I like it but I’ve been enjoying the “quick hit” of banging out pulps, so it’s been on hold for a bit.
• I just finished Escape Across the Cosmos, by Gardner Fox. It was a fun pulp SF story, and makes me optimistic about Fox’s two Appendix N series, Kyrik and Kothar.

Playing AD&D and Public Access

• An AD&D 2nd Edition Al-Qadim oceancrawl, the second installment in our ongoing Basement Game. We just rolled a storm as a random encounter and I’m pretty sure our next session has at least a 25% chance of a TPK. I haven’t played AD&D 2e in decades. It’s a hoot.
• My online group is twenty-two sessions into Public Access, which we’ve been playing for two years. This RPG is tough to describe, and the core (only) book is basically all spoilers, but it’s Carved from Brindlewood + creepypasta and the introduction is a solid elevator pitch.
  • “Public Access is a tabletop roleplaying game about a group of people in 2004—the Deep Lake Latchkeys—who find themselves investigating strange mysteries in and around the town of Deep Lake, New Mexico. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Deep Lake was the home of a notorious public access television station called TV Odyssey, the history and fate of which—the station literally disappeared—is the source of much speculation in certain corners of the internet. As the Latchkeys conduct their investigations in Deep Lake, they will become increasingly aware of the central role TV Odyssey plays in everything that’s going on, and will have to face whatever terrible truth lies at the heart of the infamous station.”
• My Traveller group (below) just wrapped up a two-session Fiasco game. We used the Boomtown play set, which continues the tradition of every single first-party play set I’ve tried being absolutely fabulous. This was one of my favorite Fiasco games.

Running Traveller

• My second in-person group recently started Mongoose Traveller 2e, a sandbox set in the Cidrogal Subsector (itself part of the Foreven Sector, a “GM’s preserve” largely left alone in Trav canon). I’ve played way less Traveller than I’d like, and never run it before, so this is a learning experience. I did what is for me a huge amount of campaign prep (at least twelve hours, maybe fifteen or more), but if all goes well I’ll continue to need to do zero session prep. Tons of random generators; the random encounters at the heart of Traveller; two of my favorite oracles, Tarot cards and Rory’s Story Cubes; faction mechanics borrowed from Mausritter, at my friend Pete’s suggestion; and more.
  • Shit, there’s a proper blog post in here — but it’s one I’m not quite ready to write. I want a couple more sessions under my belt so I can not only say “I’m doing X” but also “and here’s how it’s going.” Having been blogging for twenty years…there’s like a 40% chance I’ll forget to write that post.
  • Much of my prep time involved making the subsector map, including the spreadsheet of planetary data and notes and all the campaign underpinnings that go along with it (factions, etc.). Eagle-eyed Yore readers will note that I named one of the pocket empires after my current favorite mechanical pencil.

Playing wargames

• This year I’ve been playing a ton of wargames, mainly in-person but also on Vassal. I don’t get many chances to play board games at home these days and my local MTG nights are usually a bad fit for my schedule, but late last year I joined a tabletop gaming club. My Traveller group plays there, but the club is also full of folks who love wargames and euros. I’ve played more wargames in the past six months than I have in years, and it’s been grand.
  • I’m about 2/3 of the way to my wargaming goal for 2025, with just six games left to try this year: ASL, Fields of Despair, Necromolds, Panzer, Ambush!, and Fields of Fire. I’ve got ASL and Panzer underway, Fields of Despair is next up with a friend at the club, Necromolds is a quick game, and Ambush! and Fields of Fire are solitaire games. Barring unusual circumstances, I should hit that goal.

Playing Switch games

• I’ve got four games on the go on the Switch: Persona 5, Breath of the Wild, Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and Blasphemous 2. For the past couple weeks I’ve been playing Persona 5 at bedtime and loving it. I’ve never played an RPG like it before. Having always wanted to go to Japan, I love that it feels like a little tour of Tokyo.

I’ve got other stuff going on too, of course, but that’s about it for Yore-related activities. Hope your summer is going well. Happy gaming!

Knowing that, a question hoves into view: Why are you reading Appendix N?

When I started my run at it in 2012, my goal was to engage with the roots of D&D, to see how the listed authors and works shaped a game that’s been part of my life for decades, and (being a completist by nature) to read everything in Appendix N.

But I didn’t especially enjoy a couple of authors, and grinding out that reading for completeness’ sake was part of what burned me out on the whole project.

A dozen years later…

I’ve been running AD&D 1st Edition for a few months now, and it’s become one of my favorite RPGs. I’ve been back at reading Appendix N for about four months. As with AD&D 1e itself, I view Appendix N’s mix of very specific stuff and stuff that’s open to interpretation as a feature, not a bug. AD&D is a quirky game; Appendix N is a quirky list.

My overriding goal for reading Appendix N is now, “Have fun reading some neat books while exploring the roots of the RPG hobby from a different angle.“

Why these authors? I dunno, read something by each of them and see if anything shakes loose.

Why are there so many stories in the vein of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court here, when that’s not really a major theme in D&D? (And for that matter, why isn’t that specific story on the list?) Or is it a major D&D theme in some way I just haven’t picked up on?

I play to find out. With Appendix N, I’m reading to find out.

If I find out I don’t really like the first book I read by a listed author, I’m probably going to set the rest of their titles off to one side indefinitely and move on to another Appendix N author. If I really dig an author, I’m going to go extracurricular until I’m ready to circle back to Appendix N.

So far, this approach is working and it’s been great fun.

The mental shift to this being something I can do as much or as little of as I like, however I like, has been great. I’m currently chipping away at my first goal, which is to read at least one book by each of the twenty-nine authors/editors listed in Appendix N.

I’ve read five Appendix N books since October:

I’ve been reading other stuff alongside my Appendix N books, and I’m in no hurry. Four out of these five were excellent! The fifth was decent.

• The Legion in Space: Fast-paced pulpy goodness, like I imagine cracking a ’60s SF magazine to be.
• Twice in Time: This went nowhere I expected, and it’s a hoot. Would love to read more Wellman.
• The Warrior of World’s End: A shotgun blast of proper nouns, but enough fun ideas to be enjoyable. Not my favorite.
• Rogue in Space: Snappy, surprising, and straight to the point. Would love to read more Brown!
• Witch World: Book one was so good, so full of surprises, that I started buying the rest of the series halfway through reading it. I’m delighted there are so many of them. A classic, and Norton is a master.

I’ve already taken a detour, too: Gary didn’t list specific works for Andre Norton, and my pick, Witch World, was so good that I’m continuing the series with Web of the Witch World.

My side of the office is being overtaken with little piles of moldering pulp novels. I love it! Here’s my main to-read pile:

The on-deck pile is mainly authors who are new to me, feeding straight into my goal of a one-book survey of 100% of Appendix N authors, but there are a couple of exceptions. I’ve read several Farmer novels and I think I’ve read a Derleth novella, but I want to read a listed Farmer book (The Maker of Universes) and a full-length Derleth book (Mr. George & Other Odd Persons).

I’ve also got a little pile of three books which would close out two authors for me, Zelazny and de Camp.

…And then there are the further excursions into authors whose work I know I enjoy. When the shelves at the used bookstore aren’t turning up new-to-me Appendix N titles, I usually pick up a Burroughs or Norton novel as they tend to be readily available.

I’ve done a little eBay and Amazon shopping, too, notably for authors no one ever has in stock locally. But buying used books in person is much less dicey — and it’s more fun, and supports bookstores I want to stick around.

The state of the miniature union

I’ve pretty much stopped painting minis.

The last minis I recall finishing were a couple of Blood Angels Infiltrators back in July 2023. (I might have poked some half-finished terrain after them, but I didn’t get far.) I tried to chart a course out of the painting doldrums by assembling a couple Blood Bowl minis in January 2024, but that didn’t take. A few months ago I packed up my painting tools and set the hobby aside — dormant rather than dead, I hoped, but you never know.

For the three years I was painting regularly, 2020-2023, one of my goals was to never play with an unpainted miniature. And I succeeded! And hell, it was a good motivator to keep painting. But at the same time, when I concluded that the juice — the number of games I actually played with my lovingly painted minis — wasn’t worth the squeeze, I wasn’t wrong about that, either.

So with Star Wars: Shatterpoint, I’m starting out low key. I’m going to play with gray.

Playing with gray, and a corollary

If I want to paint for the joy of it, then cool. I’ll do that. But I’m not letting a “need” to paint get in the way of inviting a friend over and kicking Shatterpoint’s tires.

There’s also a corollary to the whole idea of playing as a return on the investment of painting: Time spent painting a squad/army/team/etc. I don’t wind up liking could have been spent painting one I know I love. My Hive Fleet Balaur Tyranids that I painted up for Kill Team are a good example.

While I had a great time painting them, and leveled up as a painter in the process (they remain my best-painted minis to date), that team has been played twice, once by me and once by Reagan, and neither of us wanted to play them again. That’s a lot of painting hours that could have been saved if I’d assembled them and played a game or two before taking them any further.

Like seeing an old friend

Tonight I returned to form, and it felt good. I queued up an audiobook, Thrawn, parked my stained painting mat on my equally paint-spattered desk, pulled my tools out of the closet, and sat down to work on a Star Wars: Shatterpoint squad.

A year on from the last time I did this, I find that I now need my magnifiers to spot and accurately remove mold lines. Given that I picked up a pair of reading glasses this year — long overdue! — I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise.

After forty-five minutes of Thrawn, which is excellent so far, I’d gotten Luke fully cleaned and ready for gluing. I usually mark day one with a new game/army/etc. by fully assembling and posting a mini, but as my glue has dried up a little pile of Luke’s bits will have to do.

We ended on a cliffhanger, with the party having attacked a group of large spiders and two PCs failing their poison saves.

I joined this group in 2015, so I’ve been slinging dice with my pals for almost a decade; over the past few months AD&D 1e has become one of my favorite RPGs; and we’re using my first real homebrewed setting. I couldn’t ask for a better way to celebrate this milestone than that.

Created by P.R. O’Leary, CATS stands for Concept, Aim, Tone, Subject Matter, and it’s a social contract-adjacent pregame discussion to get everyone on the same page, set expectations, and avoid potential issues. It only takes a few minutes and we find it hugely helpful.

I’ve also noticed that most of the time, like last night, in my group it becomes CATSOS — with the OS standing for Other Stuff. I’m declaring CATSOS to be pronounced “catsauce” because it’s funny.

CATSOS

So what’s Other Stuff? It varies. It’s just, you know…other stuff. For example, last night we veered into a discussion of whether RQ is a game where the party is expected to stick together most of the time, like D&D, or one where that’s not the baseline, like Ars Magica, and how everyone felt about both options. You could fold that into the Concept portion of CATS, or maybe even Aim, but it doesn’t neatly fit into either of them.

Without running through CATS, though, we likely would never have surfaced that topic. It was productive (we landed on “no expectations that the party is always together”) and made an already useful CATS chat even more so. Talking about CATS tends to segue naturally into talking about OS as well.