I have a long history with the Sci-Fi RPG Traveller. Back around 1980 (give or take a year or two) I owned a bunch of the original little black books, and spent many hours creating worlds and fleets of starships with them. I tracked down everything I could find about the Third Imperium and its denizens. I bought MegaTraveller when it came out, though it served me as more of a source of lore than as a game system and I didn’t get into it as much.
The ability to express a character, planet, or starship with a simple series of letters and numbers fascinated me and probably contributed greatly to my eventual choice of computer programming as a career.
But here’s the thing: I’ve still never had a chance to actually play the game.
Back then when I had an irregular-but-better-than-never gaming group, every time we managed to get together everyone else wanted to play D&D or, on a few occasions, Champions. So Traveller just didn’t happen.
Fast forward >mumble mumble< years, most them away from the TTRPG scene, and I’m now in a position where I’m running games regularly, mostly virtually, and there are some folks who’ve indicated an interest in trying it out! So I’ve picked up the latest Mongoose 2nd Edition core rules, along with an adventure called Flatlined which seems to come highly recommended as a starter episode or one-shot. The choice of Flatlined was largely based on Seth Skorkowsky’s review.
There’s no official Traveller support for Foundry, but the Twodsix system accommodates it pretty well, so that’s what I’ll be using.
The included maps, however, are… well, let’s just say they don’t lend themselves well to the virtual tabletop.
BEWARE! POTENTIAL SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT!
The adventure starts in a type of cargo ship called a smallhauler, which has crashed and is slowly taking on water, and I thought that Foundry’s lighting and audio features could make this opening scene into something special.
Referencing the maps in the book, the text of the adventure description, and Seth’s own maps he attached to his review, I fired up DungeonDraft and got to work… and pretty much immediately realized that the stock art included with the program really wasn’t up to the task of building a decent SF-themed layout. Some searching turned up a few collections of appropriate material, both free and paid. So in the interest of credit-where-credit-is-due, the following map packs contributed to the process:
FA_Artificial_Floors_A_v2.03 by Forgotten Adventures
GF Sci-Fi and Modern (free) by Gnome Factory
Spiffeigh’s Modern Day Assets by Spiffeigh
Star Wars 5th Edition Asset Pack #1 by The Whills 2020
Tech Sampler by The Drafting Table
Traveller Assets by Drakonbane
TygerModernBasics by Tyger_purr
TygerModernCommercial by Tyger_purr
TygerModernComKitchen by Tyger_purr
TygerModernStorage by Tyger_purr
So after much tinkering – I’m far from a DungeonDraft expert – this is what I came up with:
Rather than adding lights in DungeonDraft, exporting the result in Unversal VTT format, and bringing them into Foundry with Universal Battlemap Importer, I opted to set up the lights and walls inside Foundry itself simply because I was more familiar with the lighting options there.
The ship is running on dwindling battery power, so emergency lights are on (but in some cases broken or damaged) and automatic doors will open and close, but that’s about all. I set up red-tinged lights all around the inside of the craft, some with the “torch” animation enabled to create a flickering effect.
There’s a crane hanging from the ceiling of the cargo bay and I wanted to include it on the map, but partly transparent to show that it wasn’t on the floor. I couldn’t figure out a way to create transparency in DD, though, so I had to create a blank map, add a crane to it, export, then use Paint.net to crop around the crane itself and remove the background color. Back in Foundry, I created a tile pointed to this bit of clip art, and set its transparency.
In the end, I had something that looked very different from the base map, but had a very “Aliens” vibe that’s appropriate for the adventure:
Next I found some sound clips from the BBC Audio Archive and added dripping water through the whole area and, in the two rooms with cryogenic pods, a computer voice urging those waking up to keep calm. Using the Ambient Doors module, I added different sounds to the two types of doors within the ship as they open and close.
Lastly, I used Monk’s Active Tile Triggers to set up clickable “teleporters” at the elevator shaft where characters can climb the ladder between the crew area and the cargo hold, so players can move their tokens back and forth freely.
Making it Modular
I’ve been wanting to mess around with creating distributable custom modules for Foundry; this would allow me to pre-made scenes, adventures, etc. to share with others. This seemed like a good opportunity to try it out, so I followed this guide and added a few lines to the module.json file to specify the modules mentioned above as dependencies.
Get the Foundry VTT module here.
To use the module, just unzip its contents into the /Data/modules directory in your Foundry install, start up a world (using Twodsix or whatever other system you want), and go to the module management window to activate “Flatlined Smallhauler”. If you don’t have Ambient Doors and Monk’s Triggers installed and enabled for the current world, you’ll be prompted to do so. The scene will still work if they’re not in place, but without the door open/close sounds or the teleporters between levels.
At this point, under your compendiums there should now be one called “Flatlined Smallhauler”. Simply open this up and import the scene.
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(EDIT: Now that I look at it, I could probably find better images for those clickable doors…)