By Spenser
While making a transit through jumpspace, the Traveller’s ship is untouchable and unreachable for about a week or so.
Some Referees enjoy playing these days and plan detailed encounters accordingly. Others mark the time in-game simply by asking players “do you do anything special during jump?” In these cases maybe a vague roll is made on the off-chance some kind of mishap occurs during the transit, but usually things are hand-waved towards an exit from jumpspace, where the next chapter of the adventure can start.
I propose some middle ground, a little dice rolling and so in true Traveller fashion randomly spicing up those weeks in jump. This little supplement fleshes out that idea.
If you have something particular planned for the Travellers’ time during jump, then that should take center stage. But if you have nothing planned but would still enjoy seeing if anything unusual happened, these tables can help.
First let’s talk about the the regular things that happen when a “small” ship is making the transit through jumpspace. The ship may indeed be using the physics of jumpspace to cheat Relativity, but time still passes.
According to most versions of the Traveller rules, the jumpdrive isn’t even active or powered during the transit. It was certainly active at the start of the jump, but during time in jumpspace the ship is sort of “floating along” in the bubble created by the energy delivered from the refined hydrogen fuel. The maneuver drive is also offline, because there’s really no maneuvering while in jump. No one is EVA-ing, or otherwise departing the vessel under normal circumstances. Comms are silent.
So what is going on?
Well the powerplant is going, certainly. The ship’s computer, gravitics, and life support systems and all humming along. And the business of the ship is taking place. Sophonts are being sophonts.
Anyone injured is down with the autodoc. The crewmembers are probably standing some form of watch, actively reviewing, inspecting, maintaining, practicing, keeping up to date, or otherwise focusing on their primary area. Paperwork is being caught up on; manifests, budgets, logs, inventories, and assessments are being created and approved. Some people are probably working out, or working through courseware and practicing physical skills to get an edge.
All those people are cooped up in that relatively small space, they’re very likely doing what sophonts do everywhere – some are plotting and scheming, some are relaxing and recreating by consuming multimedia, enjoying hobbies, or imbibing. The truly self-motivated might be running “do at home” businesses while in jump.
This is all relatively normal. What about not-normal?
When you’d like to fast-forward through a given jump but would still like to farm the opportunity of a jump-week for interesting tidbits you can use during play, here’s a set of tables to generate odd or noteworthy happenings that occurred during jump. These small plot points are designed for later ( optional ) revisitation and further development by the Referee, or to be used as a co-creation tool with the players. In My Traveller Universe I have the player roll and put it on them to develop the details. I can do this as jump happens if I want the players to spend in-game time on it for some reason, or I can assign it as meta-game activity that happens away from the session table. This latter use further involves the layers in the creation of the game world and what’s happening. I reward quality work of fleshing these items out by giving boons or sometimes spinning the occurrences favorably for the players who did the writeups.
After I’ve deemed a given jump is successful by the appropriate rolls, I’ll give the players every opportunity to accomplish tasks during jump as they describe. I’ll resolve anything that needs that level of my attention, and then before the emergence into regular space we’ll make rolls on the Jump Week Events table.
Read through the Events. Some of them have origins in activities that took place prior to jump but are only discovered at some point during the transit.
The events are meant to be pretty broadly applicable to a small ship typical of Traveller adventures, but your milage may vary. As the Referee you may determine that a given outcome could not possibly apply to your players, or simply that you don’t like it for some reason. Roll again. Or pick one that catches your eye. There are a few instances where possible “big stuff” shows up in the results, and these events will probably requiring some roleplay could occur. If you’d rather not do this, feel free to ignore or dial-down the result so that it doesn’t warrant specific roleplaying time.