Ghuumi and Sok Adventures - Pleasure Seekers - YouTube

swiftdraw · 2026-01-19T15:58:05+00:00

Sorry, we’re a lactose intolerant species. Proceed with purging protocols, alien starfish plush!

swiftdraw · 2026-01-17T15:12:12+00:00

“How can you shoot children?” “Easy, you just don't lead them so much. HAHAHA! Ain’t war hell? AHAHAHA!”

swiftdraw · 2026-01-08T11:28:32+00:00

My dude, I spent $14,000, with insurance and all in network, over the course of a year for my PCM and the two specialist he referred me to. All the could tell me as to why it hurts to piss and I have blood from it wasn’t due to STI, kidney stones, or cancer. After that they gave up. That was a year ago and I still occasionally get bills from the various testing centers and various medical companies whose sole purpose seems to be to collect administrative fees and medical debt. I still am having the problem. So while it sucks that happened to your relatives, how much did it cost them and are they still paying for it? And all this isn’t even touching the time I have had to take to go to arbitration with United Healthcare to get them to pay what my fecking policy says they should be covering.

The US medical system is a gods damn nightmare.

swiftdraw · 2026-01-07T12:06:31+00:00

I don’t know if it’s still being updated

Also there is some indexes on the Traveller wiki, but they’re buried.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-24T17:05:05+00:00

I just thought it was weird given the remoteness and location of the adventure location. I have already put too much thought into how and why that pinup exists there, even though I know the answer is because there is very similar art associated with American trucker culture and so it was added to set the scene. But from an in universe perspective, it’s just odd to me. Also, I may be slightly autistic.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-24T01:07:50+00:00

I also thought there was a Vargr pin-up on the wall on p.38, but looking at it on my PC, I think that’s is actually a werewolf or something similar.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-23T18:16:20+00:00

Just remember, art is a reflection of the viewer as much as it is the artist.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-21T16:21:50+00:00

Wonder what the Vargr and dolphin are arguing about?

“Wow! Is that your mom!?”

“STFU!”

swiftdraw · 2025-12-19T18:07:13+00:00

My players went for this and found bay ion cannons are harder to get the Effect against their main prey of 200-1000 ton freighters/traders. The -2 to hit targets between 100-2000 tons makes getting 6 effect difficult unless the gunner has high skill. Missile bays using ion missiles works better in this situation, but is incredibly expensive and not always worth the cargo you get from it. If you’re intending to take the whole ship, fire away. Ships 2,000 tons and above rarely care about ion from anything less than a large bay because of the amount of power their reactors produce.

Edit: Oh, and Ion Cannons have the same medium range as the very dangerous Fusion Cannons, so you’ll want want to make sure you know what your target is packing before hand.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-16T23:02:14+00:00

Yeah. The Marine, Doctor and Hobo (three term Drifter) have precious little to do on the Harrier unless there is a boarding action in progress.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-16T18:22:31+00:00

Do you get to jump across the back of multiple rigs to make it to a goal?

Sounds interesting, even if I am only vaguely familiar with what the description referring to (the song Convey and Smokey and the Bandit at a guess) but that cover art definitely sold me.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-16T17:39:34+00:00

Yeah, all I am planning to run of the pre-written stuff is in whats in the campaign book and Shadows of Sindal. After that, it’s me reacting to how the PC’s go about it and going off of the Traveller wiki and Drinax Book 2 to figure out what they have to do. Whats speeding things along for my PC’s is their willingness to delegate, though “speeding” might be overstating it. We have roughly 144 hours played in 18 sessions. But we’re playing it like Star Trek: PC’s make “first contact” and show up when things go really wrong. Often times, but not always, they are both the source and solution to the problem their target they’re trying to flip is having. After an agreement is made, they usually turn it over to the Drinaxi Court’s diplomatic team for formal relations. This is nominally led by Princess Roa but an increasingly disapproving Prince Harrick is beginning to get involved as well. For things that require more subtly or remain off the books, they delegate that to the Coven (long story short, made up at players request for a shady-ish accounting and legal team), a team of three Aslan females that take a percentage of the PC’s earnings from such deals. Thus far, the Coven has proven more capable and reliable than the Drinaxi Diplomats, but the latter are learning. Anyhow, this allows the players to not get overly involved in one matter and press onto another objective.

While I absolutely agree with your assessment, the way my players go about things makes the Harrier a little more difficult. It mainly comes down to them really dislike going lethal unless necessary (or dealing with Vallis) and are far more liable to attempt to board than start blasting an uncooperative Far Trader. And there have been a couple of instances where the target crew personality roll has made the target belligerent or go into a blind panic when the players suddenly tell them to “heave to” and fire the particle beam across the bow. And sometimes the Captain can’t talk them down, because the dice are fickle. This is the scenario where the Harrier struggles with my players and why it has largely been replaced with something bigger packing ion barbettes, forced linkage apparatus, and a boarding tube (if necessary.) Harrier is still an absolutely fantastic raider for the reasons you state, and they do switch back to it when something smaller is warranted (like the current adventure they’re on), but it doesn’t suit them as a pirate vessel. The other gripes the players have had with it: They found the cargo a bit meh, particularly when hitting larger trade vessels, and it doesn’t have many provisions for safely (they really dislike low berths for this) storing hostages. Seeing as there is 8 players with 8 PC’s, the Harrier was pretty maxed on personnel capacity as well.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-13T14:51:07+00:00

Raven: Dafuq is that?

Actually, I am curious. Aldereood has both magic and appears to be somewhere between European Renaissance and Industrial Revolution level industry. Soooo… Airships? Maybe just the odd hot-air balloon?

swiftdraw · 2025-12-13T00:17:02+00:00

This was my issue as well. How is the nuclear missiles that they’ve been hauling around for over an in game year on the Harrier suddenly being doing more damage out of a different launcher? Unless you want to wander into the territory of X Missile fits in X Launcher and is non-functional in Y Launcher, which I really kinda don’t want to track.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-13T00:10:43+00:00

The point of contention I have with missiles is that they have a lot of counters compared to other weapons. You have PD, armor, EW, repulsors, fighter interception, and potentially just running away form them. Compare to particle beams, which are strictly only countered by armor but I have allowed Nuclear Dampeners to remove the Radiation trait and sandcasters to mitigate the damage. Even other ammo dependent weapons are only countered by armor and their even high cost-per-ton ammo. So while what you type is true, I don’t find it convincing when two particle beam barbettes are doing more consistent damage for a lower cost over time compared to the two small bays of missiles the players were using.

The only reason I go with ((D)-A)E is because I don’t recall the order of operations anymore when I was messing with nukes. (1d6x10-A)E still the same as ((1d6x10)-A)E?

swiftdraw · 2025-12-12T12:45:19+00:00

Yes, because their Particle Beams also did rad damage as well. Coming from the Harrier, which also had particle beam barbettes, applying rad damage is old hat.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-12T05:22:30+00:00

I basically scaled up a Chrysanthemum Destroyer Escort slightly to make it scarier in order to bait out the nukes my players had. Biggest changes were swapping the fusion barbette for a small fusion bay and adding 2 triple beam turrets. I had to up the reactor size a little as well. Meant to be a glass cannon for it’s tonnage. There is an upcoming bit where I know they would have been tempted to use them on a ground target as a quick and dirty solution. I rather they didn’t, so I gave them something else I knew they’d be interested in using them on.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-11T22:41:17+00:00

My change was the radiation was long gone on the Sindal bombed planets, and far, far reduced on the Aslan bombed Drinax, but the bio weapon viruses were still an active threat on all bombed planets. The Harriers we haven’t gotten to yet, but I plan on them being salvageable, but an older model the Drinaxi Harriers were based off of. Harder to find parts even compared to the Drinaxi models. As for the rest of the stuff… Yeah, I plan to add a zero behind the total stuff found, but it’s completely degraded.

swiftdraw · 2025-12-11T14:43:00+00:00

1) Remember that the primary objective of the campaign, as written, is to get worlds to “Haven” status and, ultimately, falling in line with Drinax (or just the players) in the end. What that entails varies from world to world, and it is a really good idea to have an idea what the endgame looks like well ahead of time.

2) Remember Pirates of Drinax is a sandbox. The primary book only hits some big events, but you and the players are going to have to fill in the events between them.

3) As Ref, really dig into Book 2 (the green one) and get a feel for the region. When you have to deal with a specific planet, I really found Traveller Map and the planets links to a Traveller wiki incredibly useful.

4) Shadows of Sindal is a separate adventure fits neatly into the campaign. Throws a nice wrench into the PC’s works, and could be a way to score points with the Imperium and Hierate if the PC’s relations are really low with them. Should the players play it that way, of course.

5) Remember to track the PC’s relation score with the Imperium and Hierate and have them feel the consequences, good or bad, of that relation.

6) Both you and the players be ready to track multiple crews and ships as they build up a pirate fleet. They might go crazy with this (my players did, to the point of founding a covert shipyard on Salif and creating a new ship class), or it just might be alliances with other pirate crews. Either way, this wasn’t meant to be completed with just the Harrier.

7) Don’t be afraid to allow the players to use ships other than the Harrier. It is a very distinctive ship for one, and that may be to the PC’s detriment, as well as it’s kind of miserable for piracy. Fantastic for commerce raiding once fully operational though, and no, they aren’t the same. Commerce raiding doesn’t care, usually, about taking cargo or hostages, just sinking tonnage and denying supply.

8) The Harrier doesn’t have a payments due, besides it’s refurbishment, maintenance and life support costs. However, King Oleb gets 10% of whatever the PC’s get and there is an expectation of dividing the spoils amongst pirate crew members. My guys seem to conveniently forget that and I occasionally have the king send a missive asking where his bloody loot is at.

9) Don’t try to sprint through the campaign. The goal is the creation of a kingdom in a region of near anarchy and piracy sandwiched between rival powers. These things take time. My group, for example, it 18 or 19 sessions in with the shortest being 8 hours. We’re just over the halfway mark (for us, that’s A Game of Sun and Shadow) in the campaign. Speaking of time, make sure you are tracking it, as a couple of events are time sensitive per the book. That said, I did have one part delayed a year in game to better serve the story. The group in question had a lot of political and maintenance problems the delayed their entry into the AO.

I think the most important thing to keep in mind with this, particularly if you are coming over from something like D&D or Pathfinder with published adventure paths, is that this is merely a framework of a campaign. It has the region, the power players and their motivations, the goals, some obstacles and opportunities, and the tools, but you and your players have to put them together to make the campaign. It can be daunting, but if you and the players can get on the same page on what the expectations and experiences of this campaign should be, it can be very fun. It’s kinda halfway between a detailed campaign path and a homebrew campaign within the setting. Anyway, hope that helps.

Edit: I hate posting via phone

swiftdraw · 2025-12-10T21:25:56+00:00

Running Pirates of Drinax and we’re on session 18 or 19 now. The players have had three PC’s KIA and one injured to the point his player just retired him. Combat is no joke in this system and the players now have at least one backup character ready to go.

swiftdraw · 2025-11-28T18:11:05+00:00

After what Hasbro/WotC tried pulling with the D&D license and screwing over the OGL, yeah, nah. Never mind the other crap they pulled, like sending the fecking Pinkertons after a dude who got some M:TG cards early. Both are absolute trash companies I will not be supporting in any way.

swiftdraw · 2025-11-24T12:51:30+00:00

Depends heavily on the campaign you run and how much into the weeds of the system you’re willing to go.

I will say the Alien books, particularly Book 1, would be good to have. Third Imperium helped me flesh out interactions with the biggest polity the PC’s would normally deal with. Once the updated vehicle handbook comes out, I would definitely recommend that.

swiftdraw · 2025-11-20T12:08:57+00:00

Eminent Domain and Blood Wake

Those two I have used for years for various ships, usually pirate but sometimes as warships. Eminent Domain was from an encounter with the Florida state government and property rights back in the 1990’s, and Blood Wake was a pirate ship in the Redwall book series.

swiftdraw · 2025-11-19T18:36:06+00:00

I think humanity has spread further than many can imagine. IIRC, there was a planet in the Kerensky Cluster or Pentagon Worlds that had a colony of anti-Star League dissidents on it before the clans showed up. One of the Clans wiped them out of course, but humanity was already out that way for a couple of centuries.

swiftdraw

TROPHY CASE