Skip to main content

Stars Without Number Campaign: The ANNIC NOVA (Session 5)



This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar.

The next portion of the campaign is an adaptation of the classic Traveller adventure "ANNIC NOVA". This is one of the oldest Traveller adventures, having appeared in the Journal of Travellers' Aid Society Issue 1. I have used the ANNIC NOVA ship several times over the years, both as written and in heavily modified forms. I was inspired to use it again after watching Seth Skorkowsky's excellent video on the adventure. He provides some great suggested changes and some additional handouts. I highly suggest checking out any of his videos. He will be coming up more on this blog, especially when we get to Call of Cthulhu. 

The characters made their way to Hermanville, which turned out to be much smaller than they were expecting. They decided to stay the night there before making their way to the nearest spaceport, Goldenwood. They asked around town about finding work and were directed to a man named Dr. Darius in the bar.

They found Dr. Darius to be a drunk, and perhaps crazy, xenoarchaelogist who had retired to Hermanville when the Empire lost interest in aliens beyond persecuting them. I decided to really ham up my performance as drunk Dr. Darius and went full Foster Brooks, mostly for my own amusement. 

Dr. Darius told them a story of his youth in the Imperial Scouts. One time his ship spotted an unknown vessel while patrolling a secluded region of the belt. They approached the vessel, which had ANNIC NOVA written on its nacelles, and Darius stayed on the scout ship while the rest of the crew boarded the ANNIC NOVA to explore. They never came back. 

Darius was able to pilot the ship home by himself. The scouts attempted to launch a rescue mission, but the ship was gone by the time they could return. Darius eventually mustered out of the Scout Service and went to school, but the ANNIC NOVA was never far from his mind. He kept tabs on fringe conspiracy communities and learned that others spotted it from time to time, but always in a different place. He was eventually able to develop an algorithm to predict where the ship would be. A few years ago, he hired a ship and crew to take him out to a spot where he predicted it would be, but he got there too late and it was already gone. 

After he retired, he continued to tune his algorithm and was able to confirm its accuracy against other reports. He also cashed in his Scout Service ship voucher and bought the same ship he had served in after it was mothballed. He is now looking for a team of able-bodied folks to accompany him out to the ANNIC NOVA. 

The players decided to take him up on his offer and he took them to Goldenwood in his aircar the next day. His ship was old, but in good shape and more than big enough for the team. They headed out for his predicted location without delay.

They arrived to find the ANNIC NOVA where he predicted it would be and after a flyby, decided to board via umbilical to a rear airlock. Once onboard they determined that the air was safe, and that the artificial gravity system was functional, but there were no overhead lights. A brief investigation revealed that they had entered the ship into one of its jump pods. 

They moved out into a long hallway that had some kind of large battery in the center, and a hydroponics section with a ramp going down aft of their position. Forward of their position there was only what appeared to be a control panel for the jump drive, although there were some controls on it that were unfamiliar. They found another jump pod, that seemed to contain a more powerful jump drive, through a door across the hall. Confused by the extra jump drive, they decided to go down the ramp.

As they approached the ramp, they discovered a hatch in the aft bulkhead that had been concealed by the plants in the hydroponic section. They decided to leave that alone and investigate the lower level. They moved down the ramp into a workshop. A brief exploration revealed that there was a smaller workshop for fine metal work behind one of the two doors in the shop. They also found an elevator with strange symbols on the buttons. 

We stopped there for the night.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hex Crawls

Those of you who have been reading this blog know that I have never run a megadungeon before. I have always used more realistic dungeon settings, keeping all underground areas to a minimum and keeping the over all size of castles and the like fairly small. There is another style of gaming I have never indulged in: the hex crawl. I have never seen hexes as discrete chunks of the map. I always just used them as a guide to find distance if they were present and not worrying about themif they were not. I have always taken a more continuous view of overland maps. This is another streak that will be ending with my upcoming OSRIC game. I will be using James M's Outdoor Map as a starting pont in my campaign. I will be heavily modifying it for my purposes but most of the features will stay the same. I will be adding my own versions of Castles Blackmoor and Greyhawk to the map. I have been struggling with how a hex crawl works. How do I know if they find features in the hex and isn't 5 m

Traveller: Session 5

    This is part of an ongoing campaign. You can find the other sessions over on the sidebar. This session was run on October 27, 2022. This session contains secret communications between me and the individual players. This means that these recaps do not cover everything that happened in the session. I will be reporting only the information that all players had access to.   131-1116   After the council meeting ended, Nashu, Archduke Ishuggi’s chief of staff, pulled him aside. Following the revelation that Yuri Lang, the emperor’s would-be assassin, had been a member of Archduke Adair’s intelligence service and had been involved in a combined operation with Gateway Intelligence, she had the staff run overlap checks on all recent contacts. The goal was to determine if there were any more unexpected connections between people that could be a threat to Ishuggi or the emperor.   She learned that, in 1113, Yuri Lang (“Baron Pazi”), Zurzi (Archduke Bzrk’s chief of st

Traveller: Session 24

    This session was run on March 30, 2023.     With the Prismatic Ray safely on the ground and camouflaged, Aryanna decided to head to the artists’ commune to monitor the situation with the pirates they had escaped from and to establish radio contact with Arenui and Mar-ven through local channels to avoid giving away their position. Mhan, Hal, and Zarf stayed behind with the ship. Using the Ray’s passive sensors, they could see that the Razer’s Blade , the 100 ton boat launched from Jugisaal’s Razer to intercept them, had finished with Jade’s cargo lighter and was entering Twinsong’s atmosphere. In Caldera, Arenui and Mar-ven were finishing up negotiations at the life support supply warehouse when the air defense alert sirens started to sound. The warehouse owner told them that they had to leave the building while he took his employees into the strong room. They attempted to convince him to allow them to shelter in the strong room as well, but he refused becau