Review 4: Nomads of the World Ocean
One of the things that I love about this hobby is seeing the various ways in which content for TTRPGs has evolved over the years to meet with the expectations that players have and the sort of demands that they have for adventures, combined with how things were written and formatted in the early days of the hobby. One of the really interesting developments was in Classic Traveller, which is the system that "Nomads of the World Ocean" was written for. Published in 1983 by Game Designers' Workshop, it was written by J. Andrew Keith and William H. Keith, Jr. This was several years after the release of the original "little black books" for CT, and the game had already undergone some serious evolution. CT started as a completely open-ended game system that could be used to run any type of science fiction game, with the assumption that GMs would prefer to use the tools to build their own personal galaxy to explore. Enough people clamored for a full-fledged "setting" to be presented to them that the Third Imperium was born, and many adventures were written that were based solidly in that setting. Many of these adventures I don't find particularly useful, because of how closely they are tied to the Third Imperium-- "Nomads" is an exception, in that the meat of the adventure is encapsulated on a unique world that can easily be plugged into any setting you like.
Getting it to the Table
This is the first (but probably won't be the last) adventure that I review that actually required a fair amount of work on my part to get it ready to play. Adventures written at this time for most systems were dense. There was clearly a need to cram as much information as possible into a small booklet, and the result is lots of tiny text. However, reading through the premise of a water world that is home to a nomadic group of sailors who live in harmony with a gigantic aquatic life form (the daghadasi) that just happens to be the only source of a powerful pharmaceutical substance and is thus the target of exploitative harvesting by megacorps, I felt like I wanted to run it anyway. (Yeah I know it's basically Dune, but with water instead of sand and less eugenic witches and sexism).
The adventure is approximately 47 pages of tiny tiny text, so I set to the task of going through and essentially transcribing it with an eye towards making the text usable. After a fair amount of work, I was able to boil down the content into about 7 pages of bullet points, which was a lot easier to reference as I guided my players through it. A significant amount of text was simply not necessary for running the adventure-- historical and environmental data about the planet and its inhabitants, history of the megacorp, etc. It was interesting to read through, but when it came to getting it to the table, it was simply fluff.
Part of this process included trying to understand the actual mechanics of a couple of different "minigames" that were included in the adventure-- gaining political influence and working with factions amongst the nomads, and the great daghadasi hunt. I put more focus on getting the latter into an understandable form, and I'm glad I did because it turned out to be super fun-- essentially it's a big team speedboat battle against a gigantic island-sized fish, navigating hazards until you can get close enough to attempt an attack along with waves of other hunters working together to capture the beast. I also decided to do some VTT work to make this easier to manage, since I was running it online.
All in all, it took me several hours to do the prep required for this adventure, and I think it about balanced out-- my group completed it in about three 2.5 hour sessions. Not the most efficient process, but now I've got it all prepared if I ever want to run it again for a different group. The most time-consuming bit was teasing the relevant information out of the walls of text, which is a common thing for adventures written in this era.
What Worked?
- Daghadasi hunt! More speedboat squadron battles!
- No predetermined "solutions" to the adventure; the players are presented with a situation and it's largely left up to them to decide how to proceed, which is a rarity for adventures from this time period
- Dynamic NPCs. Lots of interesting people and factions to meet and interact with, and not everything was black and white-- there were allies to be found in the megacorp, and opponents among the nomads
What Didn't Work?
- Wall 'o Text. So much small print, so much fluff
- Cut Scene Intro. A huge portion of the beginning of the adventure was pretty much on rails, and I had to do a little reworking to make it flow a bit faster and less rigid in order to let the players get to the "game" part of the game
Final Thoughts
This one definitely took a lot more work than I prefer to prepare for a game, but since it was a concept that hooked me, I felt like it worth the time I put in, especially from a historical viewpoint. I love looking at early adventure modules and try to imagine what it was like reading and playing it in 1983 when this was all still pretty new. I recommend it if you're a dork like me, and maybe not if you want something that is a lot more table-ready!
You can get a pdf of "Nomads of the World Ocean" at DriveThruRPG. Thanks for reading!