Mongoose Traveller’s starship mortgage-payment-system
is the most brilliant game mechanic I’ve ever encountered, as a DM. It’s also the
first rule I’d ignore if I wasn’t consciously trying to play the game exactly
how it’s described in the book.

A Bit of Background

I’ve been
involved in two Traveller campaigns
in the past as a player (both with the same DM), and am currently DMing a
third. All of them are using Mongoose’s first edition. I’ve never played any
other edition of traveller, and know almost nothing about the history of the
game. I don’t know which mechanics are unique to this edition of Traveller and which
have been around for decades.

In the
campaigns in which I was a player, I think the DM was continually frustrated
with the rules of the game. He wanted to run a tight, story-focused campaign
and picked up Traveller assuming it would be, essentially, D&D in space. For
his second campaign, he chopped out huge chunks of the ruleset and replaced it
with homebrew ones, removing space travel and Traveller’s quirky character
creation entirely. This worked for the game he wanted to run (he’s an extraordinarily
talented DM), but I think we all came away feeling pretty lukewarm about the
actual rules.

Bored out
of my mind in lockdown, desperate for anything to shake up the daily routine, I
picked up the copy of Traveller
that had been sitting on my bookshelf, untouched, and skimmed through it. In a
mood of “I’ll humour this weird rulebook,” I followed the random
subsector creation chapter to the letter,
creating a surprisingly-well fleshed out chunk of space to play around in.

It was then that I realized I’d never actually played Traveller. So I dragged my partner along
in an experiment: let’s play Traveller,
exactly how it is described in the book, no matter how flat-out insane the
rules seem to be. I will only consider houseruling or changing a rule once
we’ve both figured out what it’s for. I learned a ton in this experiment, so, during my kid’s naps (oh, right, I have
a daughter now, that’s where I disappeared to, Internet), I’ll write about what
I’ve learned.

(The Carlia Subsector.
Not pictured: along with this map is a LONG word document describing the
atmosphere, gravity, population, tech level, cultural quirks, government, etc.
of the main world in each of these systems, plus a huge table of the price of
dozens of trade goods on each planet. These, it turns out, are crucial game
aids. I’ll get into them later.)

Traveller, I’ve learned, is a table held up by four
legs: Finances, Character Creation, Patrons, and Random Encounters. If you
remove any of these legs, the rest of
the game stops working. Following
them, as described, gives you a rip-roaring swashbuckling adventure of fighting
pirates, escaping bounty hunters, smuggling, jailbreaks, and all that good
stuff you want in a campaign—but it happens spontaneously.
I’ll get into it more in detail, but for now, we’re going to talk about finances
in Traveller.

Yes, the Game Is About
Mortgage Payments

The central
driving mechanic of Traveller is
making mortgage payments for your starship. The assumption is that the player
characters are part-owners of an FTL-capable starship that’s more expensive
than any one person, or any ten people, could ever afford outright. The game
(thankfully) provides a quick way to calculate your starship’s mortgage
payments (something like the value of the ship/240 per month), and for all of
the example ships in the book, gives them to you pre-calculated. In the case of
my solo campaign, my partner owed the bank a whopping 500,000 credits a month
for her Corsair. For scale, that’s the exact
same price as
the single most powerful gun in the game (the “Fusion Gun, Man
Portable”), owed monthly. In
D&D terms, she had to raise the equivalent of a +5 Longsword every. Single. Month.

(In addition to mortgage payments are smaller fees: life
support (i.e., food and water), crew salaries, fuel, and ship maintenance, but
the mortgage is by far the largest single expense, so that’s what I’ll focus on).

I started
my partner out with a fueled up and fully-crewed ship (we used pre-generated
NPC stats from the middle of the book for her crew, plus an NPC who was
generated during her character creation, which I’ll get into later). Character
creation started her with 10,000 credits, and I told her she had until the end
of the month to multiply that by fifty times.

Debt Leads to Trade

The fastest
way by far in Traveller to make money
is to interact with the very well fleshed-out trade rules. Each spaceship has a
certain amount of tons of cargo it can carry, and each world has a list of
trade goods for sale at various prices. So the clear way to raise that 500
grand was to speculatively buy trade goods, pick up passengers and freight,
deliver mail, and so on. These rules are generous;
by stacking modifiers, it’s possible to reliably quadruple your principal every
time you reach a new planet (which happens every week).

I think my
old DM severely nerfed the trade rules (he also didn’t enforce mortgage
payments, leaving them on the cutting room floor like D&D’s Encumbrance
rules) due to this seemingly-unbalanced generosity. Again: the best gun in the
game is 500,000 credits—so how on earth can a system that lets you make
hundreds, even millions, of credits by trading stand?

Well, it
turns out, the bank simply taking 95% of your player’s earnings every month
severely dampens potentially-snowballing nonlinear growth, so my partner and I
never saw the kind of wealth explosion that looks inevitable from the rules as
written, despite her scraping together everything she could do maximize profits.
In all the time we’ve been playing, despite having already made millions of
credits, she actually hasn’t been able to buy a gun better than her starting
laser pistol, or, in fact, any armour at all. I’ll get to why in a moment,
because the most important thing about the trade system is that…

Trade Leads to Travel

Garden
worlds sell cheap food. High-population worlds buy food for a high price.
High-population worlds sell manufactured goods that are in high-demand on
non-industrial worlds, and so on. In a quest to maximize profits, the party was
locked into a continual tour of the subsector I generated earlier, constantly
moving from place to place. Staying put for any length of time meant letting
time trickle away (time that could be
spent raking in cash for crippling mortgage payments), so that wasn’t an
option. What wound up happening was that the party went on a self-guided tour
of the subsector, stopping in at colourful worlds I’d generated earlier. This
happened entirely without me, as DM, having to dangle bait in front of the party
the way that I always have to in D&D. Travel is good, because…

Travel Leads to Conflict

I’ve
already spoken at length on the subject of random encounters [here], but Traveller really builds the game around
random tables in an elegant way. Every time the party jumps from one world to
another, there’s a chance they’ll get waylaid by pirates (the rulebook has a
fun, albeit hidden, ‘pirate table’ that describes different tricks and hijinks
that pirates use to attack). 'Pirates’ in Traveller
are spaceship owners unable to pay their mortgages by legitimate means, so turn
to piracy. The fact that the party is always
carrying their life savings in trade commodities whenever they travel around
makes them a prime target for piracy, and leads to combat with stakes beyond
“fight till everyone’s dead.” The pirates aren’t orcs, and don’t want
to kill the players for no reason. They want to take their cargo and get away
as quickly as possible, suffering the least damage as possible, and the players
want the opposite. Thus: pre-combat negotiations, tricks, hijinks (my partner,
carrying a cargo of “domestic goods,” chose to have her crew throw
individual toasters out of the cargo bay each in different directions to ensure
that the pirates had to engage in lengthy EVA-missions to catch them each, thus
allowing her ship to escape without suffering damage).

Traveller’s starship battle rules are fun (and integrate
into boarding actions that results in player-scale combat), and are triggered primarily just by moving around.
Conflict is fun by itself (that’s why combat rules are most of the rules in most games), but in this context, have the
added advantage, as…

Conflict Leads to
Tradeoffs

It became
clear to my partner after her first run-in with pirates that her ship and crew
were under-gunned. While buying powerful weapons and armour is trivially cheap
compared to the amount of money she was raking in through trade (most weapons
cap out at a few thousand credits, and she was moving hundreds of thousands a
week), actually getting her hands on some was another matter.

Good
weapons in Traveller are advanced
ones, which have a high-TL (tech level) rating. These weapons are only
available on high-TL worlds (each world has a TL rating generated in subsector
generation). Making a detour from trading to buy 'adventuring equipment’ wound
up being an extremely costly endeavour,
taking the party weeks out of the way of the most profitable trade route. The closest
world in which these weapons exist also outlaws all weapons (various laws are
generated procedurally as well) which means engaging in black market smuggling
(which is fleshed out in the rules) and risks run-ins with the law.

Compounding
this problem was that her Corsair took minor damage in the combat with the
pirates, and the nearest world with a shipyard capable of repairing the ship was
different from, and out of the way of, the high tech world with fancy fusion
guns. Also, getting the ship repaired meant that it would be in drydock for
days or even weeks, which incurs an opportunity cost of almost a million
credits that could have been made during trade…

Tradeoffs lead to Debt

In her
case, she wound up getting her ship repaired, forgoing arming herself and her
crew, and skirting dangerously close to bankruptcy kicking her heels as her
ship was patched up. There isn’t an easy answer to what she 'ought’ to have
done, which was fun as hell. Further,
as a DM, I wasn’t annoyed that she was 'messing up the plot’ by staying put (or
frustrated that she wasn’t going to my elaborately-plotted narrative that would
occur when she tried to buy black market weapons) because there was no plot. Everything that came about
emerged procedurally.

The 'Loop’

The beating
heart of a Traveller sandbox
campaign is this loop:

Without DM
intervention (or Patrons, which are sort of procedurally-generated adventure
hooks), this loop can sustain a campaign pretty much indefinitely. What this
means as a DM is that any DM-interventions (i.e., adding in pre-written
adventure hooks or encounters or whatever) can be attached to any of these
steps to allow it to come about during play. It also means that if you don’t have any pre-scripted content (to choose
an example completely at random, let’s just say your hypothetical one-year-old
threw your notes in a toilet) you can just sit back and let the loop above take
care of providing entertainment.

To bring
this back to mortgages, if your players don’t have the threat of having their
spaceship repossessed by the bank hanging over them like the Doom of Damocles,
then the whole system breaks down, and the DM has to do all the heavy lifting
of providing character motivation to go explore new planets.

Next, we’ll
talk about how Traveller’s patron
system ties into all of this.