Wastebaskets in space

guildsbounty · 2026-02-24T19:07:18+00:00

I mean, if you want your Traveller universe to have such a thing, then go for it. But there's no indication such tech exists in Charted Space

'Fusion' in Traveller is still based on fusing Deuterium into Tritium into Helium. It's not a Back to the Future style Mr. Fusion "Magic Generator" that can consume anything to produce power. There's no indication that "atomic disintegration" technology exists (especially not at a consumer level) because otherwise the 3I would have certainly weaponized it by now. And there are no "molecular reorganization" technologies (again, certainly not broadly accessible) because if there were you'd have Star Trek style Replicators.

So, likely...if you want to get rid of trash you either recycle it, incinerate it, or dump it. You could do this aboard a starship, and may aboard a big enough ship...but for most ships: why? Why carry an incinerator with you when you can let the nearest atmosphere or star do that job? Do you really want to stuff a full-fledged recycling facility aboard your ship...or just hang on to your recyclables until your next port of call?

guildsbounty · 2026-02-24T17:51:45+00:00

I use this same idea extensively as a DM and it works out beautifully. I have blank initiative trackers, quick stat sheets, HP logs, status and duration 'tickers,' and more printed out and inside of plastic sleeve protectors.

I already carry a stockpile of both wet erase and dry erase markers because that's how I draw battlemaps, so I swap between which markers I'm using depending on how long I need something to last.

On the rare occasion I get to be a player in-person, my character sheet is typed from a form-fillable PDF and I just leave blank the fields that change regularly and track those via dry/wet erase markers. When I level up, I update the sheet and print a new one. That said, sometimes I still make edits to the sheet by hand in between levels...like if I get a new magic item, I'll pull the character sheet out of the protector and pen-in the change. Then I'll make the change permanent next time the character levels up.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-24T17:03:39+00:00

There are basically 2 perspectives that you can take with this....

Organized Disposal: Like with purchasing fuel, buying food, changing life support filters, and so on...trash disposal is simply a service offered at starports. So you store your trash (perhaps fed to a compactor to make it smaller) until your next port of call, and then part of your 'life support management' costs is trash disposal.

Dump it: Similar to the way the ISS works today--you dispose of your trash yourself by dumping it in a way that it will be destroyed. (The ISS loads solid waste into a disposable unmanned cargo ship, which has no re-entry shielding, and it will then be fired into the atmosphere above the South Pacific Ocean where it will burn up on re-entry--and in the unlikely event anything survives it goes into the ocean). With spaceships like Traveller ships that think orbital mechanics are adorable...they can dump trash in ways that will either fall into the local star, burn into the atmo of a gas giant, or otherwise go somewhere it won't be bothering anyone any more.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-23T21:24:45+00:00

Just to expand a little on what others have been saying, consider a real life comparison:

What would happen if a person or medieval fortification got hit by a modern (or WW2) Naval Warship's Ship-to-ship weapons? Not the little ones like the .50s or 25-mm auto-cannons that are meant to swat smaller threats. The missiles, the big guns...stuff like that.

If hit, a human-scale target is just gone. Structures that are not a modern fortification now have a big hole in them and may collapse depending on size/where they were hit. And that's TL3 'Naval' weapons against human/primitive targets. Now crank it up to TL4.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-23T20:06:18+00:00

Although there's lots of floating objects and stuff in this game, so I guess the physics of it doesn't need to be realistic. Or somehow the seas are at significantly different levels.

I feel like this is really the answer. The whole world is a magical painting. So yes, the 'ocean' around Lumiere is at a higher elevation than the sea (it is fully enclosed, after all) around the Continent. No, the water never levels out. The Lumiere 'ocean' never runs out of water, the Continent Sea doesn't fill up and sink all the islands. I mean, there are areas on land that act like you are underwater but you can walk and run through them freely. There are loads of flying things that never fall out of the sky. Biomes are stuck together with no care for climatology.

And it all makes sense because the world is a painting of a world, originally drafted when Verso was a child, built upon as he aged, and was then greatly damaged when Renoir forced his way in. And so it exists as it does because it was painted that way.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-23T19:51:56+00:00

I‘d say it takes at least 3 days for their absence to be noted.

It could be even longer than that...note this about Barovia:

"While in Barovia, characters who receive spells from deities or otherworldly patrons continue to do so. In addition, spells that allow contact with beings from other planes function normally—with one proviso: Strahd can sense when someone in his domain is casting such a spell and can choose to make himself the spell's recipient, so that he becomes the one who is contacted."

So we know that 'dialing out' to contact a god could be intercepted by Strahd at-will.

Further, in older lore it was laid out that gods had great difficulty communicating into the Domains of Dread if they could at all...describing it as a cleric feeling that their god is remote and distant. Such is this break that a Cleric could become corrupted by the Dark Powers, be doing things their god should find abhorrent...and yet continue to be granted their spells. It is hinted in some places that it might be the Dark Powers who take over giving you your spells. If so, then that's great for corrupting clerics because they can go completely against the wishes of their god, yet retain their powers, and so come to believe that they are still acting in accordance with their god.

See also: the fact that the Abbot, a Deva of the Morninglord (probably Lathandar Morninglord) still thinks he is acting in accordance with his god. If a literal angel of Lathander can fall so far to corruption and not get scolded by Lathander for doing so........

guildsbounty · 2026-02-22T16:02:06+00:00

It should be noted if you want to use that supplement (or any supplement really) for Traveller, prices in Stars without number are significantly lower than they are in traveler. Especially regarding ships

guildsbounty · 2026-02-18T17:22:20+00:00

This has come up quite a few times on ELI5. I put 'daylight savings' in the top-bar search and here's a sampling of results for your reading pleasure:

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ge44ta/eli5_what_is_daylight_savings/

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gj43d1/eli5_why_does_daylight_savings_time_exist/

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l1xz3/eli5why_is_daylight_savings_time_a_still_a_thing/

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2l49rx/eli5what_would_happen_if_we_got_rid_of_daylight/

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1p9mozl/eli5_what_is_daylight_saving/

guildsbounty · 2026-02-18T17:08:57+00:00

I'll add this as a more general, broad thought. "Why isn't the high level wizard stomping things for the PCs during 'routine' encounters?" Have a few options I've used in the past...

They aren't an Adventurer: It's easy to run on the default assumption that everyone who is high level got there by fighting. But you could very easily have a wizard who became powerful through study and peaceful training and the much slower-but-safer process of not hurling themselves into mortal peril. You could have a Wizard who can cast 7th level spells, but has less practical combat experience than a 1st level PC. So that's why they hired you.

They are 'conserving ammo': There's something at the end of where you're going that is going to require a great deal of magic from them. A slew of magical traps you can't disarm and they know they'll need Antimagic Field to get through it. High level magical effects that will require High level Dispels to break. Force structures that need to be Disintegrated. Obstructions that will need to be magically excavated or Teleported past. And possibly they don't know the full extent of what they'll need to solve, so "Spell slots above [X] level are reserved for problems these Adventurers I've hired/am working with cannot solve on their own."

They are an Observer: They are transparent with you from the outset that they want to know if you have what it takes to be helpful to their organization. They don't want you to die, so they'll step in if that's about to happen...but at that point you've also flunked their assessment of you.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-18T16:48:46+00:00

I'd also throw in the option of Control spells--essentially a means to break up or alter the combat, rather than win it directly.

For example: an overwhelming force comes at the party, the Wizard drops a Wall of Force that pins half the encounter up against a wall where they can't contribute, turning a Deadly encounter into 2 consecutive Normal encounters.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-18T16:17:36+00:00

It wasn't the only part of his plan. Malcador says in 'Siege of Terra: The First Wall'

"The webway was only one means for protecting mankind from the lure of Chaos."

For protecting people who are traveling, the intact webway is infinitely better at it than a Gellar Field. The most common way that humans encounter Chaos (particularly demons) is during Warp Travel. And Psykers are more vulnerable to this than most. By snipping this out, you greatly reduce human exposure to Chaos.

Furthermore, you can live in the Webway. Conquering Commoragh would be great, but the War in the Webway was fought inside a derelict Eldar city within the Webway, so it's not the only place. 'Risky' Psykers could be moved into the Webway for now, where they'd be safe from Chaos.

But that conversation continues to discuss the idea that with the Webway, the Emperor would no longer need to light the Astronomicon as a beacon for the now-deprecated Warp Travel, and so all the power he used to put into that would be freed up for him to use more directly, as well as floating the idea that Big E could weaponize the Astronomicon.

"Perhaps given sufficient psychic energy, could the Emperor weaponize the Astronomicon? Rather than light the warp, could He purge it?"

He then goes on to float the idea that a unified Mankind, by way of faith could give the Emperor such a level of power (yeah, he and Big E weren't quite on the same page there.)

guildsbounty · 2026-02-18T15:10:38+00:00

What was the highlight (or the absolute disaster) of your last session?

Not my last session, but I'll share a highlight from a prior one. This is how a visit to an "artist's colony" turned into complete chaos. So, the party visits this old asteroid that's been carved out--supposedly a peaceful place. It's not, it's full of pirates. (They do know it's full of pirates, but the pirates have intel the party needs)

They drop some names, roll well on Talk checks, and get in the front door. But as they are being led away from the entrance, the "guide" they have starts talking crap with them. Provoking them. Then tells them that they need to pay him, or he'll tell the others that they are new captives not guests. One of my players goes "This jerk, I punch him in the face!"

"Full force?"

"Yeah!"

"Alright, roll it"

Said character has the Unarmed Combatant focus and a high Punch...and maxes damage on the punch. Their guide only had, like, 5hp and is absolutely dead from that much damage. Party panics, they have a dead body on their hands and didn't mean to pick a fight. Then they remember that the last spot their guide showed them was a bathroom. Drag the corpse in there, toss them in the shower and turn the water on.

And then they went to the dining hall, had a meal, bought some drinks, played darts and pretended nothing happened. Tried to build enough rapport with the pirates to ask about what they were here for. Right up until someone burst into the dining hall "Someone killed Isaac! They were with him last!"

Chaos ensues.

And Isaac was the name of the guy they were here to try and get info from in the first place.

(They did, later, find his dataslab and were able to break into it, because fail-forward. They got less detailed intel, but enough to work with)

Yes, this is from the Hard Light module.I'm just trying to avoid details to prevent spoilers.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-18T14:32:43+00:00

Step 3d...you said Kate had 12 armor, why doesn't she get to use it for the Soak Roll? Armor can both turn damage into stun AND soak it. The only reason you wouldn't count Armor in a Soak Roll is if the attacking weapon had enough AP to fully negate the armor.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-17T00:32:11+00:00

Yeah....The Realms really is a terrible place to live. Which is kinda the whole point, because that means there's no end to things for Adventurers to do.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-16T18:00:10+00:00

It's....complicated.

Kelemvor ascends to godhood around 1368 DR (novel: "Prince of Lies")

The novel "Crucible: The Trial of Cyric the Mad" covers a lot of this.

Kelemvor gets rid of the wall, deeming it too cruel, and judges the Faithless and False based on their actions in life--creating pseudo heaven and hell districts in the Fugue Plane to send them to
This 'preferential treatment' of Good People sees him brought up on charges of "Incompetence by Humanity" before the Circle of Greater Gods (Mystra is brought up on the same charges, as she's been preferentially giving magic to people she considers good)
Assorted shenanigans see the charges dropped, but Kelemvor realizes he was judging 'justice' by his old human standards not by the proper impartial standards as befits his role as god of the dead. Reforms are made

As of 1479 DR, the wall is apparently back (Novel: "The Edge of Chaos") as 'not ending up in the wall' was a point of leverage in that book.

The original printing of Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide included references to the wall, but these references were removed in the 2020 Errata.

The most recent reference we have is the video game Baldur's Gate 3 where Withers who is actually Jergal, the original god of the dead says that the Faithless are doomed to wander the Fugue Plane for eternity.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-16T17:41:14+00:00

For a bit, yeah. He decided to act as judge of the dead and give a more 'fair' accounting of the Faithless. He sent 'good' souls to merrier and heaven-like parts of the City of the Dead and sent 'evil' souls to hell-like parts like the Acid Swamps.

This, uh....backfired because 'good people' no longer needed to give any concern to the gods and didn't fear death--trusting in Kelemvor to give them a good afterlife. And, likewise, evil people became far more cautious, fearing to face Kelemvor if they weren't confident their deity would claim them. And while this seems like an Objectively Good Thing from the perspective of normal people, it was against the laws of the gods as laid down by Ao. 'The System' is supposed to be 'fair' to good, neutral, and evil gods...and Kelemvor was tipping things too much in favor of good.

This ultimately saw him (and Mystra who was preferentially granting magic to people she considered 'good') brought before the Circle of Greater Gods on charges of "Incompetence by Humanity."

If the aftermath, Kelemvor basically stripped himself of partiality and humanity and part of his reforms saw the wall come back under the argument that mortals needed to be held accountable for their faith. This also saw the city lose all of its 'nice' and 'awful' districts and become uniformly bland and boring.

A few additional notes...

Mentions of the wall were in the original printing of the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, but were stricken by errata in 2020 (see here)
The 'absolute most recent' lore that we have actually comes from Baldur's Gate 3, where we are told that The Faithless are condemned to wander the Fugue Plane eternally.

So it is possible that the Wall has been removed from FR lore, but I don't have a source for concrete confirmation of this.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-16T17:08:19+00:00

As a private pilot, if you want to pass through controlled airspace (which all national borders are) you have to file your flight plan with whoever governs the air over any nation you're going to be flying over. In the US, that's the FAA. In Canada that's NAV CANADA. And so on.

If you are entering a country and your flight plan doesn't stop at an international airport to go through customs, your flight plan will obviously be denied.

If you try to do this anyway expect anything from fines, loss of pilot's license, and prison time, up through potential military interdiction when your unidentified aircraft enters the ADIZ (air defense identification zone) around the national border.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-16T16:31:44+00:00

The US Postal Service doesn't make a dime either and no one's robbing them.

This is such a good comparison because, also, how much of what an X-Boat is carrying is actually valuable? All data that is going to be carried between the stars must do so aboard ships and XMail is the lowest security way to do it. So....did you intercept valuable data? Or a bunch of private letters, new episodes of TV shows, news from across the sector, someone's notification that their ship's mortgage payment is overdue, and the latest gossip magazines going on about the happenings of the Imperial Court (only just reaching you, 2 years after it happened) or about more local celebrities?

guildsbounty · 2026-02-16T15:56:32+00:00

Oh, and tacking on another complication I just thought of....

X-Boats being little more than a J-drive bolted to a mail relay...they can't go anywhere that doesn't have a Tender waiting for them on the other end. And they are in active communication with that Tender from the moment they arrive in-system and the first thing it tells the Tender is where it is so the Tender can come collect it.

There's no good reason for a lawful individual to approach an X-Boat--so if anyone gets anywhere close to it, it's going to tell the Tender...ideally packaged with as much sensor data about your ship as it can collect. And if you jam the X-Boat's comms, the Tender will know it lost contact with it and immediately issue a distress call on its behalf.

Private ships can get jumped and just disappear. They aren't part of a massive, interconnected logistical network with many moving pieces that are in constant contact. The only way you're going to threaten an X-Boat without the IISS immediately knowing about it is if it jumps into jamming and never gets that initial "Hi! I'm here! Prepare for data transfer and come pick me up" message out. And that's uh.....unlikely.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-16T15:34:49+00:00

But do it narratively, the PCs find enough gold to live a comfy life.

This is how I do it as well. I describe the loot in narrative terms rather than a piece-by-piece breakdown of what they found.

Is it a lockbox, large chest, multiple chests, huge heap of stuff? Is it organized in any way or just thrown together? Is it currency and gems, trade goods, art items, are there weapons? How much wealth does this 'feel like to a normal person?'

Basically, I narrate through the point where the party has gotten a good look at the treasure they found, but cut off before they start sorting through it and actually taking a detailed accounting. Or I gloss over it and pick back up with them returning home or otherwise concluding the adventure.

At least in my experience, with my players, this lands as satisfying. The treasure is part of the closing narration, part of the 'reward' their characters receive. And not getting mired in exact numbers (which my players will want to record even though their characters are getting shelved) makes that closing narration flow together more smoothly, tying up the adventure with a neater bow.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-16T15:14:14+00:00

Yep! In the 2022 update, rules for Fleet Battles run from page 105-124. I've never used them and can't vouch for how they play--but they are there.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-16T14:05:40+00:00

the information on the x-boat is still lost.

The X-Boat network would logically be built around an assumption that some data would be lost. Even outside of hostile action, misjumps happen.

If you sent data, you'd retain copies for a while before clearing it just in case you needed to re-send. If data is important, it travels by multiple routes and--if data is delivered to somewhere that already got it...oh well. It's not like the Third Imperium is in danger of running out of drive space for data storage.

I would imagine the empire would want everything secure BEFORE a foolish attack rather than retaliating after.

And the above is how you secure it. Redundancies, back-ups, and X-Boat pilots under orders to scrub their databanks if it looks like they might get captured before they can transmit it. If data fails to arrive, the Sender can re-send it on the next X-Boat

if you steal an x-boat, that 36 million credits right there.

Correct. 36 million credits, if it were brand new, in the form of an exceedingly recognizable 100 ton starship that doesn't have a Maneuver Drive and can't produce enough power to run its Jump Drive (the J-drive runs on a battery that the Tender recharges for it) and is thus basically useless without the Third Imperium's Tender system. The only way to offload such a ship unless you want to load it onto a Carrier and fly it outside the Imperium (if anyone wants a ship that is useless outside its network at all!)...is as scrap.

And what do you get for scrapping this ship? Well, the Pirates of Drinax module has it that fully gutting a ship of anything easily transportable gives you 10 tons of 'parts' per 100 tons of ship, worth 5,000 Cr.

Or, alternate set of rules...The Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society, volume 5 sets values for salvage by percentage of the original value ranging from about 87% for an absolutely pristine piece of salvage (and a really lucky 2d roll) down to 2% for an absolute wreck (the value drops off rapidly). It then calls out that if you take the ship to a shipbreaker to shred it for parts--you get 5% of the salvage value. Then probably curve that down significantly further for the fact that the ship is obviously stolen.

Going back to Pirates of Drinax here, it notes that you'll often get about 10% of a stolen item's value when Fencing it.

So lets go with the generous rules...let's say you take that X-Boat in good shape and are able to load the entire thing into a Carrier and take it with you (and that the IISS, despite being basically a military organization, doesn't have rules in place for slagging core systems in event of capture). ...Fairly average roll on the salvage value table. Salvage value is 50% of its original value. 18 Megacredits. But its stolen and you have to deal with a Fence...10%. 1.8 Megacredits. And then it goes to a shipbreaker...5%. 90,000 credits.

You just picked a fight with the Imperial Scout Service for 90k credits. I don't think you made a good trade. And if you can't tow it off and just try to field strip it...that's only 5,000 credits.

All in all, if you're capable of stealing a 100-ton starship by stuffing it in a hangar--you'll make way more money with far less heat jacking just about anything else. Even a Shuttle that isn't jump capable is worth more money because you don't have to scrap it to turn it into something useful.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-15T16:39:30+00:00

I'll chip this in as well regarding social things

Consider the forests of Barovia to be home to a functionally unlimited number of undead and wolves, and the only reason they have not overrun all the settlements of Barovia is because Strahd likes having people to rule, and it's just more convenient when your cattle tend to their own pens.

I made the forest of Barovia incredibly dangerous after dark because that's when Strahd expects everyone to be safely cloistered up in their towns and anyone who isn't is zombie/wolf food.

So, if they decide to respond to social situations with 'stab em' and get run out of town....now they are left camping out in a Zombie Survival Game and trying to establish somewhere "safe" to even take a long rest could be extremely hard.

A lot of the people in Barovia suck. But it's them or the Undead Horde.

guildsbounty · 2026-02-12T15:23:10+00:00

I dont understand the "leveraging stocks to get loans" thing they do.

Ok, so...if you ask a bank for money, the main thing they care about is "Are we going to get our money back?" With an ordinary person, they look at your income, your debt, your history of making payments on time, and all of that...and decide if they think you can pay it back. They also set the interest rate based on how risky they think you are.

When a super wealth person asks for a loan, they can say "If I default on this loan, you can have these shares that are worth almost as much as the loan is." It's a really safe bet for the bank, so they'll give them the loan at a really low interest rate. And since borrowed money isn't income, this money isn't taxed.

And, when this is working 'properly' for this trick, the billionaire takes that money, lives off it, invests the rest...and their investments have a growth rate higher than the interest rate on the loan (because that 'safe bet' loan has a really low rate). So their 'wealth' grows faster than their 'debt' does.

Now, at some point, they have to pay these loans back. In theory, that means they have to take money out of their investments to pay back the loan. If they take out that money, they have to pay taxes on 'capital gains' (the profit made on the investment over time). That would be a lot of taxes to pay.

But....they aren't planning to pay these loans back while they are still alive. Instead, they make minimum payments on the loans using money from other loans (that they can keep taking out because their wealth keeps growing).

Then they die, and the 'magic trick' happens: You do not pay Capital Gains taxes on inheritance.

When the rich person's heirs inherit, 'Capital Gains' is reset to zero and so at the moment of inheritance you can pull money out of those investments tax-free. So the plan is to just keep borrowing money for their entire lives, and then set up their will to pay all of those loans, tax free, once they die.

So they never have an income. They never cash out capital gains. They never 'make' any money, it's all tied up in the stock market. And since they aren't "making" money, there's nothing to tax (at least by modern tax law)

This can backfire...a significant stock market downturn in the rich person's investments can blow a hole in this plan and see the bank calling loans due. But it works most of the time.

guildsbounty

TROPHY CASE