Alpha Section: Running the Adventure

Referee’s Campaign Notes

This adventure is what is known as a ‘Big Ship Campaign.’ A big ship campaign is where a ship is detailed to the Nth degree and players are crew or passengers who end up having adventures in the course of the ship’s journeys.  A great explanation of Big Ship campaigns can be found in the old Polyhedron magazine issues # 21 “Take Command of a Titan” and #22 “Of Great Ships and Captains”. (Ed. Note: A copy of these articles can be found in the Polyhedron Archive download [1] at the Port Loren Public Library [2] on the starfrontiers.us [3] website.)

This adventure is only a kick off and the above named articles should prove invaluable to a referee running a Big Ship campaign.  In case a referee is unable to locate copies of a these articles, the following advice is provided to help a referee continue the adventure. 

1. The number one rule is to not actually destroy the ship or make it a big floating lifeless hulk as that pretty much ends the campaign.  The threat of the ship’s destruction is good but the possibility of it really being destroyed means an end to the campaign.
2. The ship is often in the background of the adventure but should not be completely relegated to the role of taxicab.
3. Mutinies in the real world are actually a very rare thing.  Captain Kleevor, as a CFM captain, holds a reserve commission in the Rim’s Navy known as the Flight and his ship has the legal status as auxiliary warship and by default is part of the Flight’s merchant marine service.  If the player characters decide to mutiny and make off with the ship, United Planetary Federation authorities (both Star Law and Space Fleet) will be obliged to hunt them down due to treaty provisions.  The players will quickly find themselves without any sort of safe haven to hide within the Frontier.
4. Kleevor is the Captain and provides some structure for the adventure but should not make all the decisions.  He is no Captain Ahab or Bligh.  The player characters can possibly take over the ship after a period of apprenticeship and Kleevor can be moved out by having the CFM appoint him to its governing board back on Faire.  A referee will need to look for opportunities to delegate authority and leave the PCs to sink or swim on their own merits (as will occur in this adventure).
5. Non-commercial adventures can be introduced by having the ship chartered by a university to transport its scientists and equipment or the ship can be recalled by the Flight to support a military operation.
6. The focus for a merchant ship campaign of this sort is going to be exploring the Frontier and possibly a little beyond.  A referee will find that compiling files on systems visited and NPCs met will greatly ease his work load.  During the course of this adventure the player characters will visit two planets and meet a number of non-player characters that the referee should recycle and use as contacts and plot hooks over the course of the campaign.

Captain Kleevor001-cleaned-200w.png [4]

To Zeb’s or Not to Zeb’s , That is the Question

The oft debated controversy of Star Frontiers is whether the Zebulon’s Guide material should be treated as canon. This adventure is predicated on the crew being hired by the Capellan Free Merchants which were first introduced in the Knight Hawks supplement and then expanded upon in the Zebulon’s Guide partial revision. I’ll not debate the merits of using some of the Zebulon’s Guide material here.  In this adventure Captain Kleevor is presented as an ifshnit and his ship having ties to the Flight which is all Zeb’s Guide material. Referees that don’t want to use the Zebulon’s Guide material can easily make Captain Kleevor a human and ignore any other reference to any other Zeb’s Guide material that turns up.

Captain Kleevor’s ship , The Venture

The Venture is a Capellan Free Merchant ship and enjoys certain advantages.  First and foremost is its status as auxiliary merchant marine for the Flight.  This position means she must be equipped with atomic drives and receives government subsidies for fuel.  Her captain holds a reserve naval commission and the ship can be activated for active duty at any time though this is actually an exceedingly rare occurrence. 

The Capellan Free Merchants is accorded mega-corp status but in actuality it is an association of independent business men like Kleevor.  Their one iron hard policy is mutual protection and an extreme response to attacks against its members.  Thus any CFM ship can expect help from any other CFM ship in the vicinity.

Since full deck plan for Kleevor’s ship will not appear until part 3, the adventure will need to be run with an abstracted deck plan (see the accompanying cross section of the ship, p24).  Characters can travel from one area of the ship to another and perform approximately one action in ten minutes.  This abstracted movement covers traveling to the ship’s elevator and using it to reach another part of the ship and access a piece of equipment or computer console.  How long attempted actions take is a matter for the referee’s judgment but game masters should be flexible and err on the side of the players if it’s a close call.

HARM rocket battery ammunition was detailed in the Star Frontiersman [5] issue #17, its name stands for Hypervelocity Anti-ship Reaction-drive Missile.  It is specialized ammunition for rocket battery and assault rocket weapon systems that is designed to shred hulls on small craft making a HARM hit almost a guaranteed one shot kill on a fighter craft. The ammo performs identical to the original ammo for the system firing it except that the rocket battery's advance damage table modifier is increased (from -20 to -30). The Venture starts this adventure with the standard rocket battery ammo loaded in the weapon and two sets of palletized HARM reloads (total of 12 salvos) stored in the cargo hold. RB (HARM): LTD/RA 3/ DTM -30/HDR 2d10

Note: if using the basic game rules for Knight Hawks encounters simply rule a HARM hit on a fighter as an automatic kill otherwise there is no change.

Kleevor Needs a Crew

The former crew were involved in a bar room brawl at Port Loren.  Weapons were drawn and numerous opponents were wounded as well as responding police officers.  The crew has been arrested and charged with a host of charges.  Kleevor has paid for lawyers and attempted to secure their release but to no avail. 

He has delayed making a contracted run to Timeon/Lossend as long as possible but now must replace his crew and make the delivery.  He has posted a classified ad on the info net and will interview the PCs at Dinza’s Antiques, the business establishment of another Capellan Free Merchant. 

This adventure was designed with a fan article from Star Frontiersman [5] issue #11, “Spacer Skills Revisited” in mind.  It’s very much a beginning level adventure and starting player characters with first level spacer skills and the canon pre-requisites listed in the Knight Hawks rules book ramp the adventure up to high level play immediately.  As a referee you can of course use any rule set or rules conversion you desire but it’s strongly recommended that you use a graduated system of pre-requisite skills similar to that discussed in the sited Star Frontiersman article. 

This module will assume that player characters are essentially starting characters with up to three skills and one of those being a space skill and the others are pre-requisites, all at the minimum levels described in the “Spacer Skills Revisited” article.  If a spacer skill only requires one pre-requisite skill then a player will be free to choose any other skill at level 1.

If the party is small, Kleevor can cover the positions of pilot and astrogator.  The ship can easily accommodate 1 to 3 gunners though finding an RPG character willing to shoot weapons has never been difficult.  The crew should also have at least one engineer and if two players are interested in playing tech characters a robotics tech could come in handy.  A large party with all the spacer positions covered can accommodate character concepts that don’t have actual spacer skills but until the party is over four in number the players should consider covering all of the spacer skills at least once.

Kleevor’s Contract

Normally Captian Kleevor would have arranged for more bulk freight to fill his hold for the run to the Timeon system.  However, with his crew in jail he’s had to pass on several cargos.  The current contract predates the bar brawl and is only a few small crates.  He has delayed the delivery as long as possible but must complete it now or else he incurs penalties and will suffer a loss of reputation.  It does not sit well with him to essentially abandon his former crew but there is still a banknote to pay on his ship and the humma crewmen have been in more than a few legal scrapes that he’s been forced to bail them out of.

The contract is essentially a gun run but there is nothing illegal about the business deal.  Pirates have been extorting food from farm settlements on Lossend in the Timeon system and one such settlement has decided to defend itself.  Kleevor took the deal to provide weapons (all of them are legal) for twice their worth in grain and an agreement to fill his cargo hold one time at a discounted price.  He plans to offload the food at Laco in the Dixon’s Star system where demand for food is high.  If his former crew had not been arrested, he would have realized a high profit from the venture but now will just barely operate above a deficit.