Jeremy is a new friend of mine which also turns out to be the second person in Norway that I know owns Traveller and has played it before as a referee. Prior to meeting him in London just before we attended TravellerCon 2010 I had only spoken to him on the phone and msn.

As my players ended up pretty isolated in a kind of a backwater planet, I had to find a way to introduce him to the group. There was two options, give him a character that was created with TL2 as a standard or make him a marooned character too. The first would present some obvious problems as to how he would handle tech and be useful to the group when and if they manage to aquire a starship.

This setting however revolves around a 800 ton mercenary cruiser that has crashlanded on the planet during the FFW. This cruiser was a part of a covert Zhodani operation that managed to steal parts to a black globe so they could build one for their own. However, with some bad luck they ended up in an on going battle between the Zhodani and the Imperial navy, resulting in that the cruiser was hit a few times and it had to make a emergency landing on the low tech planet. Soon after, the Zhodani left the cruiser, but kept all security systems on and infiltrated a major city nearby.

To bring Jeremy into the greoup I decided that Jeremey could play the role of a Zhodani undercover agent that had grown tired of the mission and left the other surviving Zhodanis to their demise and try his luck on his own. He ended up owning a tavern in a different city a few days boat ride down a river.

I had prepared a lot of stuff for this part of the campaign, both in writing and in mind. So I decided this is as far I can bring the planning. My abandonned players manages to find their way to this minor river town and the intial encounters went more or less as planned. That was until Jeremy was brought on the scene. Rather than find out what kind of guys these players was, he went into the deep end and everything I had prepared went out the window. The next 4 hours I had to referee 2 groups of players with two different agendas. Things could go down south very rapidly from there.

But it didn't. Most probably because my group of players and Jeremy was very good at roleplaying their roles to a degree I hardly had to do anything in the beginning. I just needed to give a few cues to get the game going in a intended direction, without a script though.

The two sessions we have had has gone surprisingly well. In a week time we might conclude this scenario and the players may manage to escape Zhodani captivity, alert the Imperial Navy and earn a few bucks on it too. However, Jeremey's character got a few hard choises, his cover has been blown and he is not trusted by friend or foe. Which is which are at the moment hard to decide as he has more or less made himself unpopular in both camps by his double plays and constant turncoating.

Things has decidely not gone as planned, but it has been for the best and I hope my players has had a blast until now.

There is one thing that makes this a bit troublesome. Jeremy's character needs Jeremy to be played or else the situation as it developes will not evolve naturally. And this is a problem if he can't show to a evening of gaming. At the moment his character and person are too important to hand over to someone else.