Sparks from the Past - Traveller RPG Live Play

Avorial Productions
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Sparks from the Past is an actual-play Traveller podcast set in the far future, where survival often comes at the expense of freedom. The Solomani Confederation claims to be the last true guardian of Humanity. Loyalty is mandatory. Citizens are watched constantly, political reliability determines every opportunity, and questioning the state is enough to make someone disappear. When a group of strangers are accused of crimes against the Confederation, they awaken together inside a government detention facility. Some are innocent. Some are guilty. All have already been judged. Faced with execution, labor camps, or political disappearance, escape becomes their only hope. Their flight carries them far beyond the borders of the Confederation into the fractured politics of the Third Imperium, where forgotten wars, ancient technology, and long-buried conspiracies begin to surface. As the truth unfolds, they discover that their imprisonment was only the first spark in a story that reaches across the stars. Sparks of the Past is a cinematic science fiction campaign about survival, exile, loyalty, and the search for freedom in a galaxy that is vast, indifferent, and dangerous. Sometimes the past refuses to stay buried. Sometimes the smallest spark can change the course of history.

Episodes

  1. Oct 6

    Game 7: Echoes Beneath the Sea.

    Back aboard the TSS Profondeur, the crew must prove their worth to Transstar by hunting suspected terrorists in the Crushed Trench. A perilous descent and a near-fatal pressure emergency lead them to a hidden community of clones, where familiar faces reveal unsettling truths about the price of a second life. As they uncover dwindling resources and a conspiracy to exploit stolen memories, the Travellers must decide whom to protect and whom to deceive. With explosives in hand and corporate scrutiny looming, they gamble on a cover story that could preserve both the settlement and their own freedom.

  2. Sep 8

    Family Ties

    In Session 6 of Sparks of the Past, the crew starts with a prize that barely deserves the word: the newly raised shipboat, the Volante, dragged up from more than a century underwater and now technically breathable, mostly functional, and absolutely disgusting. After selling salvage to make it orbit-worthy, they catalogue its many quirks: damaged thrusters, unreliable startup power, a hacked ghost transponder, mismatched repairs, and a smell that may outlive them all. The crew then unlocks Senator Mercer’s datapad and uncovers the larger conspiracy behind his assassination. Mercer had discovered that key political families were being genetically altered over time, likely as blackmail or control. His research points toward a faction within Social Solidarity using psychic clone research to manipulate bloodlines and eventually compromise the highest levels of Jardin society. Following the trail to Mercer’s penthouse, part of the crew finds Home Guard officers already searching the place. A brutal firefight erupts in the elevator and apartment, leaving Victor badly wounded before emergency first aid keeps him alive. Saichi and the team put the attackers down, uncover Mercer’s hidden cache of genetic samples, research notes, suspect photos, a hidden communicator, a laser pistol, and 200,000 credits. By the end, the crew has the proof Mercer died trying to protect, a fragile dead-man switch plan involving trusted contacts and a crusading journalist, and a dangerous choice ahead: keep using Transtar’s protection as cover, hide Mercer from whoever still wants him dead, and prepare for the next lead on Providence.

  3. Aug 25

    Dead Men and Sunken Ships

    Alan Mercer is alive, sort of. The crew learns that the man they were accused of murdering has returned through a pre-grown clone, and Mercer offers them access to his old evidence if they can get him safely off Jardin. With political violence spreading on the surface, the group turns to a forty-year-old wreck on the ocean floor, salvaging a smuggler ship packed with secrets, contraband, and some very useful surprises.

  4. Aug 11

    Game 4: Into the Hadal Deep

    That fits the session well: the crew joins the Profunder, descends into Jardin’s deep ocean, explores the abandoned Hadal research site, finds survivors, and ends up at Undersea Base Aelion.

  5. Jul 28

    Have a Transstar Day

    With the identity veils hours from failing, the crew has to choose between bad options: trust a criminal patron, reach out to SolSec, find new disguises, or disappear into corporate territory. They cash in their favor with Lucin to get Mercier’s evidence into Inspector Valois’s hands, only for Mercier’s locked pad to suddenly start broadcasting its location. With police closing in and their window shrinking, the crew flees to the Transstar Sector Exchange, a corporate enclave where Jardin law loses its grip. What begins as a desperate bid for shelter becomes an employment gauntlet, as the fugitives take Transstar aptitude tests, gain corporate protection, and accidentally sign themselves up for underwater salvage work. They are safer now, but only inside the machine.

  6. Jul 14

    Sparks from the Past S01E02

    In this episode of Sparks of the Past, the crew wakes up in hiding after being framed for Minister Mercier’s assassination. With their disguises running out, Saichi needing a charge, and the authorities tightening control of the investigation, the group splits up across Nouvelle Sainte-Jeanne to gather supplies, scout the Hall des Futurs Choisis, and find new allies in the city’s underworld. Their search turns up a SolSec investigator being blocked by Social Solidarity, a strange mobile data courier hidden in the Hall’s plumbing, and a data broker named Lucin who offers them a risky but useful errand. By the end of the session, the crew has new wheels, secure comms, a deeper underworld contact, and explosive evidence that Mercier may have died over genetic research connected to impossible, almost psionic abilities.

  7. Jun 30

    Bureaucratic Registration

    Episode 1: Bureaucratic Registration What should have been a routine government appointment becomes a nightmare. On the Solomani world of Jardin, a group of veterans, officials, and an autonomous AI answer a summons to the Hall of Chosen Futures for what appears to be little more than bureaucratic paperwork. As they wait among government workers and fellow citizens, chance reunions and small talk quickly give way to unease when a senior minister rushes past, gunfire erupts, and the impossible happens. Suddenly trapped in the middle of a political assassination, the group must decide in an instant who to trust: the authorities they’ve served all their lives, or their own instincts. In a society built on loyalty, even the wrong decision made for the right reasons can change everything. The spark has been lit. There is no going back.

  • 7 Episodes

About

Sparks from the Past is an actual-play Traveller podcast set in the far future, where survival often comes at the expense of freedom. The Solomani Confederation claims to be the last true guardian of Humanity. Loyalty is mandatory. Citizens are watched constantly, political reliability determines every opportunity, and questioning the state is enough to make someone disappear. When a group of strangers are accused of crimes against the Confederation, they awaken together inside a government detention facility. Some are innocent. Some are guilty. All have already been judged. Faced with execution, labor camps, or political disappearance, escape becomes their only hope. Their flight carries them far beyond the borders of the Confederation into the fractured politics of the Third Imperium, where forgotten wars, ancient technology, and long-buried conspiracies begin to surface. As the truth unfolds, they discover that their imprisonment was only the first spark in a story that reaches across the stars. Sparks of the Past is a cinematic science fiction campaign about survival, exile, loyalty, and the search for freedom in a galaxy that is vast, indifferent, and dangerous. Sometimes the past refuses to stay buried. Sometimes the smallest spark can change the course of history.

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