Finders, Incorporated. A potential Traveller campaign.

I've got the itch again. I want to run a game for a local group. I'm ready to go back to Traveller. Specifically, Mongoose Traveller v2. And the campaign I want to run is my old Finders, Incorporated campaign.

The premise is simple enough. Space is huge, and things and people get lost. Finders, Inc. locates those items and returns them to the client, or at least issues a complete report on why the target could not be recovered. Recovery operations fall into a few categories:

• Skip Tracing Starships are massively expensive and meeting the mounting costs of loan payments and maintenance fees, plus fuel costs, crew salaries, etc., are sometimes more than the owner can handle. So they bugger off, changing transponders, forging ship papers, and trying to put as much distance between them and the bank as they can.
  
  Skip tracing brings in the biggest bounties, as recovery is usually measured in a portion of the ship's value. Of course, shipowners that have skipped out on their payments are not going to hand over the keys when asked politely. Getting a ship back requires planning, guile, and in the end, violence most of the time.



• Bounty Hunting This isn't just tracking down fugitives from justice but tracking down anyone who has fled their usual situation. The heir to a planetary throne who ran off with the servant she fell in love with; the archeologist who went missing in the Trojan Reach and his family and university has posted a reward; a megacorp executive who has fled is suspected of trying to defect to a rival. . . all are fair game along with the usual criminals on the run.
  
  Of course, laws differ from world to world, so getting your target back on the ship might be an adventure in itself! Again, Skill trumps violence in this case, for the most part. It's Traveller, the guns will come out at some point.



• Objects of Art or Historical Value Things get stolen, lost, or misrouted all the time.Tracking down a minor Imperial Count's heirloom chair can be quite rewarding. Recovering a lost masterpiece by one of the Vegan (the race, not the dietary option) master sculptors? Priceless. Finders might also be sent to search for obscure legal papers, family genbn=anks, or anything under the 11,000 suns of the Third Imperium.
  
  Each of these adventures will be a bit different. Recovering a stolen art piece from a crimelord's mansion will be different from getting access to the centuries-old archives of Strouden's family records. As a GM, I could've fun putting a rare bottle of Terran wine at the center of a firefight.



• Debt Collection The reality of interstellar commerce means that debtors can avoid judgments from courts on different planets. The Imperium steps in these cases and will issue writs ordering the payment of the debt or seizure of assets to be auctioned off. Finders, Inc., is one of the companies bonded by the Imperium to carry out these writs.
  
  If you want to know how much fun this can be, look up Can't Pay? We'll Take It Away on YouTube.



• "Special" Missions Sometimes, Finders get handed a mission so sensitive they don't even know what they are after. These usually come from the heights of power, A Count-Elector, the Imperial Navy, or a Megacorporation Regional Vice-President; and usually come with an NPC who oversees the mission. These can be quite nasty and even be used for deniable black ops. In which case, the Finders crew better realize that dead sophonts can't spill the beans and guard their collective lives.

The campaign would be episodic, so there would be downtime between assignments rather than continuous "what are you doing this week?" push. Four Player-characters would be optimal, with a mix of investigators, starship skills, and combat abilities.

I'd be looking to play every 2-4 weeks, based on everyone's schedule.