Untramps - a different kind of merchant campaign

Introduction

2300AD provides gamemasters with the opportunity to run a very different type of merchant campaign; One where the merchants do not own or rent their own starship.  Instead they buy/barter/beg passage on someone starships that belong to and are operated by others.

I like to think of them as "untramps" ( merchants without a tramp freighter).  They are a welcome change of pace from the typical Sci-Fi novel or rpg's "burned-out semi-ethical crew of odd-balls and their barely-functional tramp starfreighter" ( which can still be fun, but finding "new/unique" plot ideas to surprise experienced players is increasingly difficult to do as the years go by).

The "Untramp"

The genesis of this idea came from rereading the description of the "Independent Trader" career on page 17 of the Adventurer's Guide.

"Untramps" prefer to ride the big cargo ships.  These starships have the advantages of:

• Regularly scheduled routes, which allows you to plan longer trips using several different starships, and ensures you will not end up "stranded" en-route, or at your destination, because no freighter is departing the direction you need to go next.
• Often carry a few passengers and may be willing/able to round-out their load with ( squeeze in) the "untramp's" one to one hundred tons of highly speculative cargo ( especially if bribes are passed around).
• Safer for both the ship ( more anti-piracy patrols and news) and its crew and passengers ( less chance of passengers "disappearing" mid-flight, or trying to seized the starship).

Occasionally they also will purchase passage on a tramp freighter, if it is going to/towards their destination.  The risks of this are higher ( but may be worth it, in terms of profit):

• On a multi-starsystem journey, there may be long delays as the tramp ship sells its other cargoes, and hunts up new cargoes in the intervening systems.
• Tramp crews compete with "untramps" for the same small highly profitable cargoes going to out-of-the-way ports.
• Tramp crews ( given their small size) tend to be more paranoid about their passengers, that combined with possible economic hardship, makes the risk of the "untramp" passengers "disappearing", and their cargo "mysteriously" changing ownership mid-flight an uncommon, but significant one.

A typical "untramp" journey would be to: grab a load of cutting edge medicine or cyberparts on Earth, and dead-head ( trading menial work for passage) their way to Tirane on a returning bulk freighter ( which does the Earth-Tirane run), sell them to a shady contact, then grabs a load of older-tech fuel-splitting plant parts, and hitch a ride on a Thorenz-class courier heading out to the Barnard's Star outpost.  And so on, and so on.

Advantages of this campaign type

It makes for an interesting campaign setting for a small group of PCs ( say 2-3), as each trip they meet a different crew ( and occasionally hitch a ride with old friends).  One where interpersonal skills ( "wheeling and dealing") will count as much as the typical "combat-themed" campaign's skill mix.

Plus since the players are not stuck with a starship mortgage and maintenance costs ( requiring them to make the next flight as soon as possible, before these two major expenses eat up all their profits), they can decide to linger on a planet and have a planetside adventure or two, before the departing with their next speculative load.  This allows a creative gamemaster to insert just about any type of adventure into an "untramp" campaign, to provide a change-of-pace.

Note if they lost their shirts on the last "sure-thing" speculative cargo load, they may be forced to take a "dubious" mission or two on the planet they are currently standing on, in order to rebuild their "seed money"/"stake".  [ Insert wicked gamemaster chuckle here.]

Using this idea in other types of campaigns

I wanted to use this as an adventure setting for my players, several years ago, but they didn't want to do a merchant campaign ( they prefer more military/police-themed campaigns).

Still, I used this idea in the Tirane Police campaign ( now in its fifth year, real-world), and drove them crazy at one point with an irregularly occurring string of unsolved murders on various stations in the Tirane system.

They kept looking for a common starship being in port ( suspecting a regular crewmember), or someone up visiting from Tirane.

They finally figured it out that it was one serial killer, who was traveling about as an "untramp", and was skilled at disguise, had an assortment of forged documents ( all from colonies, as those are easier to fake), and who never rode the same ship twice.