Page 18 finishes off the vehicles with a short bit on water vehicles. Bigger vessels require crews, smaller ones can be handled by a single person. The options are small steamships (tech-4), motor boats (tech-5), and submarines (tech-6). No aircraft carriers or battleships, though. No cruise ships, either. There's nothing special about these boats, they're what you would expect them to be. They don't even get weapons options.
So, we move on to page 19. And thus begins...the Encounters! Ah, yes...the actual 'adventuring' part of adventures. We are introduced to the concept of NPCs, characters controlled by the referee (everyone that isn't controlled by the players). There are three types of encounters in Traveller: Ordinary/routine encounters, random encounters, and encounters with patrons. Who are patrons, I wonder? Sounds like 'quest-givers' to me. But then, I've played quite a few computer games in my time.
For any of these encounters, the identity or occupation of the person in question needs to be determined, then what they think of the PCs (reaction table roll, of course, because this is old-school gaming), and then the response from the PCs. These encounters can be informative, combative, or deceptive, depending on the nature of the character and, occasionally, the needs of the adventure.
Routine Encounters are just that: routine. Normal, ordinary people that you see every day and never notice. The villagers at the beginning of the Disney Beauty and the Beast fit the bill; people living their lives and just trying to get along. A store clerk is an example given; they're doing their job and that's the extent of it. Characters like that don't need a full write-up, just a sentence or two, if that, depending on the point of the encounter.
Random Encounters are different. These are people who are doing more important jobs, things that might involve the PCs in some way, whether as antagonists or complementary, depending again on the situation.
Interestingly, the Traveller version of 'random encounters' is far, far different from that in games such as Dungeons & Dragons. You don't roll these on a table; these aren't necessarily people who just happen to be in the neighborhood. A guard patrol at a building the PCs are trying to break into is an example of a random encounter. It's not routine, and it might lead to conflict. And combat. We are informed that the referee can always add these types of encounters to further the adventure, and sometimes, they are required to do so.
Ah, then we get to literal random encounters, where you do roll on a table. Once per day, roll a die, and if you get a 5 or 6 there is a random encounter of some sort. This is with people, not animals (those come up later). Cool, we are going to get alien wildlife here, too.
And yes, we get a random encounter table to determine what kind of person is being encountered. It's a two-die roll, reading the two numbers individually to get a result on the matrix (which isn't on this page). This table gives a basic description or identity, a dice range for how many there are, and other information that might be pertinent to, say, a pitched combat in the middle of a space station.
These characters also get the fundamental combat stats: strength, dexterity and endurance. But these people will generally be clones of each other (generate one set of stats and use it for all the people in the encounter). Later, if necessary, the other stats (intelligence, education, social standing) can be generated.
And that takes us to page 20, which we will look at next time. So far, so good.
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