Solo Traveller Sessions: 12
Our scout, Jeremy Powell, started the session on Blaine’s World working as an unwitting spy. After his successful hunting exploits caught the eye of the local figurehead of a monarch, the lovely Queen Tiadime, he found himself in possession of a lovely little Scout class starship. She put in a good word with the National Galactigraphic Society, and thanks to her deep pockets and strong influence, they are currently funding his cultural investigations into the unheralded corners of the Janovian Empire.
The best spies are those who don’t even know they are spying.
Jeremy zipped on over to Intania, a small airless planet run for the Janovians by an impersonal bureaucracy, not suspecting that the Queen was hoping he’d gather confirmation that the local mercenary group, the VDC, had staged a soft coup. Any encounter with the locals would confirm or deny that VDC troopers had more ability to commit crimes and escape the consequences than your average antifa drone. Given the tight restrictions on self-defense tools, Jeremy’s friendly muscle packed only a pike and his brass knuckles for keeping the riff-raff at bay.
Seventeen days later all Jeremy had to show for his efforts was… exactly what he was told to gather by the Galactigraphic Society. He had a lot of notes on local dress, cuisine, and culture, but didn’t run into anything suspicious. In fact, he ran into a suspicious amount of non-suspicious activity. No thugs, no goons, no soldiers, no nothing. If the VDC are running the planet, their commander has his troops on a very tight leash.
Seventeen rolls of the dice with a 1 in 3 chance of an encounter, and not a single one came up 5+. Amazing run there. This means something.
Bored, Jeremy and his crew decided to look into running a little cargo on the side. They have three spare tons of space in the L’il Stinker and a bankroll of 24kcr, so why not?
While noodling around in the local tourist shops for a few tchotchkes to take back to Blaine’s World, he was approached by a man with an offer too good to pass up. A shady type, he worked at one of the numerous arms factoriums, and had spent the last three years slipping a few rounds of ammo into his lunchbox. Now sitting on a literal ton of ammo, he had grown nervous and just wanted the stuff off his hands.
One roll of the goods table indicated nine tons of ammo waiting export from the gun-free zone that was the entire planet, and as an Industrial World it could be had cheap. Rolling a 7 on the price chart, with a -2DM, meant Jeremy could afford a single ton of the good stuff – stuff that was illegal on Blaine’s World. So yeah, if the spy business won’t generate adventure, we’ll by gum find it as a smuggler.
Down to his last 500 credits, Jeremy scoots back to Blaine’s World where the local inspector braces him for a few minutes, then lets him go with a perfunctory search that doesn’t find the full crate of ammo.
To determine this, we turn to the reaction chart which came up with a “whatevs” and thus an easy time getting through customs.
The Queen’s agent naturally was disappointed in the poor quality of the intel recovered by the scout, to say nothing of the three-week turnaround time. He though Jeremy was supposed to be fast? His attitude changed immediately when Jeremy offered the crate of secret boom-boom pills, which he commandeered immediately. A few hours later, a message reaches Jeremy that a deposit of 36,000 credits has been applied to his account “from a secret admirer”. Included in the message was a card with the icon of a bee on it.
And just like that, Jeremy has been inducted into the Queen’s Bees, a top secret intelligence agency. Now, with the Galactigraphic Agency as his cover, he can operate as a free-lance roving spy, messenger, and sometime gun-runner. We’ll have to remember that and tailor all of his future adventures to suit.
The downside of all this activity is that we have played Jeremy’s adventures out for almost three weeks of advance time. It’ll be early April before we get back to him. Which makes these blogposts all that much more important. I’ll never remember all this, but can always go back and re-read to re-call.