GLITTER SECTOR - GM notes for session 1

07 Apr, 2026

Last Sunday was my first traveller session¹!

I'm using the Facsimile rules with a few back-ports from the '77 version, which I've written up below.

My players are my fam (most players from my Phaedra campaign) plus my dad and a few friends. All of them played in my War Game, so I broke the ice by having everyone talk about their roles in the game, which was great. I really need to write a retrospective about that game sometime.

The characters:

• Saturnia Plutonis, dim and well-endowed graduate of the psionic institute
• Duke Augustus Reeve, retired Admiral and legendary pilot
• Javi Shale, "jerk engineer who can barely see the future"
• Freydis Karlsson, failed out of the Merchant service with a chip on her shoulder. Personal guard for the Duke
• Marcus 'Big Badger' Salieri, retired Second Officer of the Merchant Service. Wheeling and dealing type
• Admiral Bodias Terras, count and dilettante

Session Recap:

I think session recaps are boring as fuck usually, so this is full of my game-time gm decisions as well:

We made characters! So much god damn fun. I told everyone they could make one as a test and then a real one, but most people stuck with their first characters.

I talk about this more in the Rule Changes section, but I allowed characters to skip joining a service and instead get tested at the psionic institute. This was awesome and I have no idea how I'd ever end up with any psionic characters otherwise. The trade-off is they start with practically nothing and may not get training at all if their potential is too low.

I gave a quick overview of the setting - we're playing out on the frontier (in the Vart subsector of GLITTER SECTOR), and we'll likely never flesh out 'the empire', where all the characters come from - and gave the players a rumor² each, plus one bonus:

• The Catom system is home to a people who descend from a Generation Ship, which traveled in deep space for hundreds of years before making to this sector. They've scuttled their ship, which likely contains technology seen no where else in the empire
• Pirates tend to be found around the more advanced starports in glitter sector
• Psionics should stay away from Alspach, where they are regularly kidnapped
• Sharjah is one of the main ship-building ports, controlled by a local mafia. Sharjah is also known for organized fighting tournaments
• Several systems speak of a giant Flesh Ball that changed their worlds for the worse.
• Some systems contain black carbon ziggurats and these systems scavenge and sell strange black artifacts that sell well on Rich planets
• Rellim, where the players will begin, is a home-away-from-home for imperial citizens. The last bastion of civilization in the sector.

I told them that a ship with enough jump capability to make it to the sector only arrives once a year, so they can't return home for at least one year. They made it to the giant ship-building port of Rellim, where they were hassled by guards (the nobles in particular) and the group decided to either steal a ship (they didn't start with one and couldn't afford one) or find a patron to give them some cash.

Rellim: A small-but-dense city world, known for it's amber seas, almost completely covered with canal cities. As the players will learn, the ship-building union (the Great Union) has taken over political power, and inverted social standing on the planet (social standing 1=E, 2=D, etc). The Great Union is opposed by the Royalists, who seek the return of Imperial authority, and the Anarchists, who want both parties to burn ³

Half the group stayed in high-class housing, and the others in normal housing for a week while they searched for a Patron (I took the monthly costs for food and living expenses and divided by 4). I'm using Classic Traveller: The Starter Traveller Edition as a resource for most charts, and it includes two patron tables, so I rolled and checked my options: Doctor and Rumor. I wasn't going to give them another rumor, so I picked doctor. I couldn't come up with anything off the bat myself so I searched 'doctor' in 76 Patrons, and found one where a young woman is being kidnapped by one, so I rolled with that.

Those who had been staying in the normal hotel had gotten to know Dr. Savannah Fitzloff (I hate coming up with names, so I googled 'Doctor Name Generator' and I can't believe that worked), a middle-aged Royalist doctor who explained the political situation on the planet. She eventually returned to the hotel with a young woman in hand, who handed a crumpled up napkin with a quick sketch of a mountain-side villa to Javi and promised a 300k credit reward for her and her brother's rescue. She was grabbed by two 'orderlies' and two 'officers', who drug her to the street side, after the doc drugged her.

The party gathered and tried to return her, with limited success. They wrestled one of the kidnappers down (I couldn't find the initiative rules so I just had them roll a d6 versus a d6 for the one they grabbed, the party won and Javi wrestled a grenade from his hands before he could pull the pin) as they rest grabbed a cab and escaped with the woman. A police vehicle showed up and gave the party a 10k reward for capturing a wanted criminal (an Anarchist, who the cops showed little regard for).

Javi ran back inside to find the doctor, and ran out the service entrance, where some workers on their smoke break directed him to find her down the alley. Javi eventually caught up with her (I rolled a dex of 5 for her, and with Javi's higher dex, I assumed she was winded and didn't get very far). He tackled her, which I counted as a d6 of damage, which I had rolled and hit her endurance of 5, and knocked her unconscious. He called to the rest of the group of their short-range communicators.

To distract the smoking workers, Saturnia flashed them for several minutes, as the rest of the group passed by stealthfully. Saturnia mumbled that she would cuddle one for 50 credits, which one of the workers accepted. He was being a creep though and pushing her boundaries, and she called Freydis to come stare him down. He gave over his credits and ran away, as the party convened around the unconscious doctor.

Other Thoughts

We had so much god damn fun. My biggest goal was to limit my prep and just have some fucking fun, and it was really successful! I tried to run this almost rules-light: The focus is on the action and the world, and I wanted to pull in rules when we needed it. I just made a lot of shit up honestly, and it was for the best.

I did spend a bunch of time setting up the subsector. Like the rulebook recommends, I wrote up each system on a single page, and plenty of room for notes and each get fleshed out. I started rolling each system individually and writing up descriptions for all of them but gave up pretty fast and just used Traverse Fantasy's generator and skipped descriptions for all but the ones near where the players would start.

I did use SWN's world tags for some worlds but ehhhhhhh I kind of like what I made up for ones without tags, so I probably won't use them much. I am trying to channel cool shit rather than having it make sense, which seems to be the best route to fun. Most planets are directly stolen from various media or from my other campaigns (There's a Left Hand of Darkness world for example, with some surprises from some of my other writing hidden in the tundra).

I've done some random experiments on some planets. Some (unfinished) special trade goods tables instead of the standard ones, for one. And Rellim has reversed social standing rules, things like that.

I liked the facsimile edition while reading but it's kind of pain in the ass when it comes to play. Combat equipment is in book 1 while extra equipment is in book 3. Shit like that.

Questions the Other CT heads:

• I am looking for better character sheets. I like the ones in the book personally but I need good digital versions. I sent these these ones to my players. They are pretty but it's not quite what I am looking for. I'd like more detailed sections for equipment for one (no space to track weight in these).
  • These are sick as hell but they do a little too much.
• Several character's have higher than 1 in Jack-of-all-trades and the book provides no support for that. I did some googling and I didn't like what folks had proposed for their solutions for this. What do y'all use for this?

Rule Changes

Book 1

• Based on a call-out in this post (and a misremembering of it, honestly), I told players they could skip joining a service and go get tested at the psionics institute instead. I also said they can take two skills of their choice at level 1.
  • Really, how this worked out was luckily both characters rolled high psionic potential so they both received scholarships. The two skills were implied to be classes they took (they lived in dorms and such, it was awesome). I also gave them a 500 credit stipend after their 4 years of training.
  • Hypothetically, if one did not have good potential, they end up with nothing

Book 2

• No getting unrefined fuel from water
• Drive Failure: (in addition to listed DMs) +1 per previous jump using unrefined fuel. Flushing tanks and restoring to normal requires a week at a port.
• Misjump: (replaces all DMs): +2 if using unrefined fuel, +5 if within 100 planetary diameters of a world or star, +10 if within 10 p. diameters, +1 per month passed annual maintenance. Misjump cannot destroy ship.
• 12 on Hit Locations table is turret or weapons, no critical hits in space combat
• Using the ship encounters from 77 (pirates more likely at A or B starbases)

(these changes mean fuel is harder to come by, misjumps are more likely, but misjumps can't kill you and ships don't randomly explode in combat)

Book 3

• We're using jump routes instead of communication routes. The routes on the map represent the possible travel locations from a given system. In order to use them, you must rent a jump cassette from a station. Systems without jump routes may be traveled to using a navigation program if installed on a ship.

Coming Up

I'm running another game tonight. I'm borrowing the GM seat from Vivanter's mini-campaign series, where I'll be spinning up a 2-3 session GLITTER SECTOR game. I'm hoping for something similar to this game: Roll up characters for half the session, figure out a patron and sketch out the basics of a mission and write up enough for 2 sessions before the next game.

Although, honestly I hope we end up with a ship this time, we'll see. It'd be nice to see some ship game-play. I want my core group to work for it though. They've got about 5 million credits to go however.

Thanks for reading <3

#CT #GLITTER SECTOR #traveller