This article about Dear Leader Kim Jong-il being denied his right to import iPod made me think of the good old Traveller-style trading game. I think it could be fun to do this in the modern day.

In our modern day, a lot of smuggling goes on. Not just drugs and guns, but all sorts of luxury goods, as well as raw materials like diamonds and coltan. And when you smuggle between two places, at least one of them is going to be some crazy confict-ridden place where the officials all require heavy bribes. So you could have some interesting adventures... the PCs have a ship, and travel the world with their pallet of iPods and AK-47s and zirconium tubes...  

Madness or genius? What do you reckon?

Genius!

There's more than enough crazy going on in the South China Sea for a lifetime's worth of pirates and smugglers.

It could also be fun in a "Layer Cake" way, looking at the lives of criminals up and down the food chain.  The PCs would see the fatcats who run the whole show and the burnouts who're in just to keep fed.

QuoteMadness or genius? What do you reckon?

Both, you BASTARD All of a sudden I'm getting a warm Wages of Fear, Air America and yeah maybe even a little Lord of War tingly sensation with a dash of Thank You for Smoking...

Regards,
David R

Hell yeah, all of SE Asia is practically the Spinward Main. This would be an interesting idea to see fleshed out a bit. Only difference - no "Imperium" ensuring order among all the worlds/nations. A total free-for all.

Quote from: WerekoalaHell yeah, all of SE Asia is practically the Spinward Main. This would be an interesting idea to see fleshed out a bit. Only difference - no "Imperium" ensuring order among all the worlds/nations. A total free-for all.

Hey, and don't forget pirates.  Lots of pirates.  An old friend of mine used to ship with the US Merchant Marines, and as he told it, the only time he ever got scared was on the run between the Red Sea and Taiwan.  In particular, rounding Malaysia past Indonesia, and into the South China Sea made him feel spooked even aboard a supertanker.

!i!

Could be fun and you could easily justify long (several to 7+ days) travel times (boat, slow prop plane, foot/rough terrain).

Ruleswise T20 breaks down the trade categories more than previous versions (except possibly GT's Far Trader which I don't have). There's a utility for it. Convert skills, ranks (4 T20 -> 1 CT/MT for example), etc. if using a different system.

TNE had some good ideas on barter/local value variation and GT: Starports has some great bits on ports, what goes on there, and moving lots of cargo.

Being modern you could also fold in as much current real life info as needed to taste.

(catching up on threads)

This is a brilliant concept.

RPGPundit

Yeah, more I think of it, more I like it.

Traveller in real life. There are many ways you could run it, too. You could run it

• shoot 'em up style, shoot up anyone who gets in your way, get piles of cash, then much-needed work on your ship in dodgy small ports in south Asia, complete with deals in smoky taverns with mysterious hooded strangers.
• Gritty realism style, complete with moral dilemmas - there's a starving land in Africa, and a warlord wants to buy food. So he'll use the food to save people's lives, but it'll increase his power base, and he's only going to feed one of the ethnic groups. Still, lives will be saved, and cash will be made.
• Firefly-style, not very gritty, but enough grit to give enough dilemmas to show the character's personalities - not enough dilemmas to make them feel bad, just enough to show who they are.

And so on. I'm sure others can think of more? Tell us!

I think that's a good setting, where you can play it in a variety of ways.

I might add it to the pitches for my run of campaigns in the new year. Of course, I would need to do research, types of ships and cost, etc. I wonder if tramp steamers have forty-year mortgages?

I think I kept the Twilight 2000 Bangkok: Cesspool of the Orient module for something like this in mind. It's written for both Twilight and Merc 2000 which makes it even more tweakable (for what if? or more plausible).

Of course, aircraft are another possibility. However, light aircraft can't carry much cargo, though they can land in obscure and quiet places. Heavy aircraft can carry quite a bit of cargo, but need long airstrips, which puts the characters in major airports. In general across the world, airport security is tight, seaport security is very lax. For some reason, the Western world is very concerned at one or two plane hijackings a year, but is relatively unconcerned about the hundreds of ships taken or raided by pirates, the millions of people and thousands of tonnes of drugs, arms, coltan, diamonds, etc etc smuggled about. So for the sort of dodgy - ie, "fun" - things PCs like to do, a ship seems best.

Ships come in several categories. I assume PCs wouldn't want a small yacht or the like, would want to be able to carry a few hundred tonnes of cargo, and the occasional passenger or few. So we're left with cargo ships. "Tankers" just take oil. "Reefers" are refrigerated ships for the obvious sorts of goods. "Container ships" take the standard containers. "Bulk carriers" take stuff like coal and grain. "General cargo ships" are for things which don't fit in containers well, nor can they be piled up - like coils of wire, uncut logs, etc. As far as I can tell, tankers tend to be the biggest (100,000 tonnes or more), then bulk carriers (75k-100kt), then container ships(25k-100kt), and general cargo ships are the smallest(500-15kt).

"Tramp freighters" still exist. That is, rather than say Toyota renting out a ship to take automobiles from Korea to the USA, and iron from the USA to Korea, on a steady run, the owner-captain sails around from port to port looking for cargo. Modern computerisation has meant that less ship's officers are needed - you don't need an engineering officer on watch in the engine rooms if you have enough dials and measures going up to the bridge. Extremely lax international standards of ship safety also means less officers than in the past.

A modern tramp freighter would of course have to be a "general cargo ship". Some photos of them can be found here. My favourite is the old Abdullah, 670 GWT, built in 1879. Not bad for over a century old,



Online there's a sort of ship's ebay, Ship Traders. It appears that ships are like cars - old clapped-out ones from dodgy people are 10% or less of the price of new well-constructed ones from reputable people. You can get a serviceable ship suitable for PCs for well under a million Euros.

It even lists a few warships!

I dig this.

I dig it a lot.

Whatever you do with this idea, you should update us on it as often as possible.

I'd go the local route. (And surely ships is the answer not planes )  Having the pcs play natives smugglers servicing the warlords/oppresive regime in the Firefly mode in your earlier post...untill it all gets to much and they scream ..."TONIGHT WE DINE IN HELL"...sorry, the influence of an upcoming movie is stronger than I first thought...

Regards,
David R

Possibly theres mileage in salvage and looking for sunken treasure?

There are shoestring companies who make their living from bringing up wrecks and selling them for scrap, and marine salvage can be big business:-

http://www.marine-salvage.com/overview/index.asp?page=history.htm

LOF is the most widely used “no cure-no pay” salvage contract. In return for salvage services, the salvor receives a proportion of the “salved value” (the value of the ship, its bunkers and cargo). Traditionally, reward depends upon success and the recovery of property. In the past, if there was no recovery, there was no payment, whatever the expense of the operation. This has changed in recent years, to reflect the public interest in prevention of damage to the environment. The salvor can now contract in such a way that he is shielded from loss when responding to high risk or low value casualties.

And don't miss the weekly piracy report!

http://www.icc-ccs.org/prc/piracyreport.php

ALERT

Chittagong anchorage, Bangladesh
Forty one incidents have been reported since 28.01.2006. Pirates are targeting ships preparing to anchor. Ships are advised to take extra precautions.

Oh, I forgot to say in my last post - the reason there being less ship's officers than in the past is significant, is that ships built in the 1970s and earlier would be built for the old number of officers (6-12), but around the 1990s, they'd only have around 3 officers. This leaves 3-9 largeish cabins on which you can take passengers.

People actually do take cruises on tramp freighters, paying around US$100 a day. I'm sure that among all the smuggling and piracy going on, there'll be the occasional person who'd like to disappear for a few weeks or months, then reappear in some foreign port, perhaps under a new name...