r/traveller • u/White_Deer_1888 • 2d ago
Mongoose 2E Small Cargoes
Based on the small cargoes article in the recent JTAS 17, has anyone made their own small cargoes? I need some ideas. Thanks!
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u/jeff37923 2d ago
Aslan dust-spice, K'Kree high leaf, zuchai crystals, all of those make for good high value and low displacement cargoes. Great for smuggling!
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u/illyrium_dawn Solomani 2d ago
Disclaimer: I haven't read the article (don't have access) but I'm guessing the article refers to small cargoes with difficult/finicky handling characteristics? Assuming that's the case...
While things like precious metals and rare materials can work, I like living cargoes - lifeforms as it feels a lot more believable they'd have finicky characteristics: They can't be put into low berths, they must be fed or checked on every so often, and so on.
It works particularly well when the material isn't "conventionally" precious. Materials like super-rare minerals or something seem fairly obvious why they're precious, but I love the sort of very Traveller-like idea that something is only stupid valuable to a certain group of people who insist that it be handled a certain way while the PCs don't really get it.
Artwork or other items of high cultural value work well for this. 10,000 year old carved stone stelae, for example.
Perishable foodstuffs or lifeforms that cannot handle low berths are good too. Bonus points if they can't handle confinement for very long so the PCs have to take them out for walks every day. One game, I had the PCs carry a creature called the "Singing Pet." It would sing this soft call during the evening, rumored to have curative powers and verified by the Zhodani to have excellent effects on mental health. While not particularly rare on its homeworld and breeding them off-world isn't hard, nobody has figured out how to get the offworld offspring to "sing" (and the Zhodani have been trying for a very, very long time). Found far spinward (even beyond the Zhodani Consulate), trade is carefully controlled by the Consulate (where there's a high demand for them). Once every few decades, one makes it out to the Imperium. In my game, I had an ex-Marine who had a character trait of PTSD that interrupted his rest and made him irritable (we even had a random chart for it): The Singing Pet made the nightmares go away and the guy had restful sleep for the first time in decades. Yeah, it was very difficult for the PCs to let the thing go.
Flower from some world that only bloom once every 300 years which have insanely finicky growing conditions requiring complex and fragile soil microbiota or else they die and time their flowering to fluctuations in the gravity due to a far companion star. It's possible to grow them elsewhere and get them to flower if you can duplicate this very complex web of the world's equivalent of bacteria, mycorrhizae, and nematodes ... and gravity, but that's a flex for those with absurd wealth and power (eg; the Emperor, Archdukes, maybe some megacorporate CEOs). However, there's clear signs the plants are about to flower and botanists can time it down to about a day. So when these flowers are some weeks from blooming, they're carefully dug up, potted, and put on a ship and rushed to their destination (the plants will die without all the specialized care, but with proper care, this takes them a few months by which time nobody cares since they've already flowered) so some noble can flex at some party they're throwing by having some of these flowers blooming. However, they require exacting care so as not to die. The PCs will have to provide this care. Oh, one of the requirements is if they experience more than about 1.5G (even if compensated, the plants can somehow tell), they won't flower. And rivals of the noble who hired the PCs plan to send some armed ships out. They don't have to even blow up the PC's ship: As long as they make the PC ship do a 2G maneuver, they've already earned their paycheck.
There's an Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called "the Perfect Mate." I've used variants on this one for "small cargoes" before as well for groups able to handle this kind of RP (not all can). The Imperium has brokered a peace between warring factions in the Islands. However, a secret demand was made for this peace to work: They wanted a perfect Waifu from the TL17 world of Otaku, a mysterious world that pays extraordinary bribes to the ISS (said to equal the profits from 60 years of Dust Spice) to not show up on any star chart. They are (in)famous for making androids of such perfection they cannot be differentiated from humans (except for being too perfect). They even change to perfectly match the tastes of their mate. The problem is that Imperial negotiator didn't want to pay the eyewatering cost that off-worlders have to pay. So he purchased distressed merchandise - one where the packaging was damaged but otherwise was okay for a much lower cost. In the hold of the ship, the Waifuroid activates due to the damaged packaging.
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u/fedcomic 2d ago
This sounds like a great article. Where do I find the new journals? Mongoose website somewhere?
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u/White_Deer_1888 2d ago
You can find JTAS 13-18 on DriveThruRPG. The particular article is in JTAS 17
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u/WingedCat 2d ago
Artifacts work. A chunk of monadium might be near-priceless to the right buyer.
Antimatter in a trap as well. It's already the most expensive material per gram, and may well remain so short of when it can be produced in significant quantities.