Drivethru|Publisher

$11.99 / 48pp

Released 2021-11-29

Reviewed 2026-01-03

Eneri’s Cantina at Affinity Highport is the quintessential starport bar where adventures begin, patrons are met, rumours are heard and weary Travellers wind down after weeks in jumpspace. It is a place to get a good stiff drink and have the chance to rub elbows with the movers and shakers of the Sylean Main.

The winds of change are blowing in the region, and the high-tech industrial world of Ase is making moves to establish itself as a power broker. Unfortunately for Affinity and worlds like it, they might become casualties of Ase’s master plan, but such is life in the politically charged, high-stakes Core where everything is done on a grand, winner-take-all scale.

The Travellers become embroiled in these events even though all they really want to do is save their favourite bar. They become pawns in a dangerous political game that might forever change not just Affinity, but an entire way of life… and not for the better. If they play their cards right, they might just find the key to saving Eneri’s Cantina and preserving the things they hold dear.

Last Call at Eneri’s Cantina includes:

• Deck plans, rules and illustrations of Affinity Highport.
• A new spacecraft, the Rammiakhildru, and a new vehicle, the Seaskimmer.
• World map and animal encounters for the wild waterworld of Affinity.

Spoiler-free review

4.3 / 5 stars. This is a wonderful adventure for refs looking for criminal intrigue on a spaceport that eventually includes some political drama and offering their players a choice between high-minded ideals or filthy, filthy lucre.

The remainder of this review will address the adventure in detail and without regard for spoilers. If you’re planning on playing this adventure, read no further (but do forward this to your ref!).

Initial Impressions

I’ve been a sucker for the starport bar since I first played Wing Commander: Privateer as a kid in the middle 90’s. I’m pretty sure all I ever had was a demo disc – I don’t ever remember encountering a real plot, but I remember spending a lot of time just soaking in the atmosphere. Grizzled spacers listening to rumors about fleet engagements and smuggling routes and picking up on dodgy deals.

Even these days, I’m vulnerable to just getting to hang around a cool space station and enjoy some space-station bar time. I’m not a hardcore Star Citizen player, but I do own a Freelancer and… I rarely fly it. I mostly just log in, mosey out of my hotel room on New Babbage and wander down to haunt the showrooms, convenience stores, fast foot restaurants and Wallys, a massive starport bar complete with palm trees and a retrowave bar. Star Citizen is an imperfect game, but it’s atmosphere on this front is impeccable; I could soak in this ambience for a long time.

So I’m already a sucker for a Traveller adventure that centers heavily on this standby of the genre. The blurb invoking some sector politics also draws me in; one of the things I love about Traveller is how scales interact with each other. Planets that are weeks away can still exercise outsized influence on fringe worlds – echoing all the way down to shake the ground under the Travellers feet. I’ve always loved some good old realpolitik driven black ops shenanigans!

I also love waterworlds and scifi boats, fingers crossed the Seaskimmer is something I can snag the next time I need a rad bluewater ship in a campaign.

Introduction & Referees Notes

We open with a description of the starport bar and their place in Charted Space – it’s mostly what you’d expect, hives of scum and villainy that are also a decent place to get a drink. Then we zoom in on some specifics; the adventure is set around Affinity and specifically its highport. This is over on the Sylean Main – a detail I particularly like. Most of my campaigns have centered around J-2 ships by my players preferences, but there’s something to be said about sticking to J-1 and wandering a big main, dealing with every world as it comes.

This is a world with a decent port but a low local law level and a permissive (or non-existent) local government. It’s the home of Eneri’s Cantina, the specific starport bar this’ll center on, and the intro emphasizes that it’s important that the characters develop an affection for the place as prelude to the adventure proper. It goes as far as suggesting you run a few patron encounters here to give the characters a chance to buddy up with Zashe, the owner.

That prologue is even provided in the form of a handful of patron encounters. Eventually that’ll lead to Zashe having some personal trouble with a missing adult child, whose rescue will coincide with a growing crackdown and unrest aboard the station. All of this is part of an outworld coup attempt to transform the freeport into a captive government.

All of this culminates with… good lord, a trip to Capital to make a case to the Moot and stop the takeover. That’s a pretty big swing! But looking at the map, Affinity is just a few jumps away from that world… so this flies.

Naturally, the adventure recommends reviewing the supplement The Third Imperium and given the setting, it’s obvious why.

The Referees Information section includes a few items;

• a rundown on the Sylean Main, highlighting that this major economic heartland for the Imperium is both vast and somewhat fragile.
• The Shaaki Cluster, a sort of also-ran to what eventually became the Third Imperium, the Naples to the Sylean Federations Rome. This is where our antagonists are from, as the world of Ase pushes for more and more economic power.
• An extensive write-up on the Justice for All Initiative, an authoritarian push across a number of worlds driven by industrial worlds hunting for new captive markets. If the measure passes, it would effectively allow captive worlds law levels to be set to their owners… which could result in a number of relatively free worlds suddenly having law levels in the double-digits.
• A rundown on political factions active in the area, with a centrist (“orangist”) Imperial faction and several more specific to certain members of the Shaaki cluster
  • Ase has the Gold (plutocratic) and Zircon (authoritarian) factions.
  • Umgadin has the Orange and Sparkle (traditionalist) factions.
  • Xalm has the Orange and Aglow Greens (environmentalist)
  • Affinity has the White faction (anarchists).
• The section concludes with a note about Ase and its tech level; despite its high development, much of the tech here is stolen from the surrounding regions. This dirty little secret is whats propping up these authoritarian regimes, supplied by criminal syndicates in Sylean space.

All-in-all, this paints the region pretty vividly; a bunch of authoritarian plutocrats trying to wedge things to their advantage, pushing interstellar politics to crank up their control. It feels believably broken, corruption right at the beating heart of the empire. On the whole I found this a pretty strong opening; I’m certainly intrigued to see how all this grand-scale intrigue maps back down to the story of the adventure.

Adventure proper

Now we’re on to Affinity and its highport – this is a high traffic section of space, an interstellar intersection. Not quite big enough to be a true hub – it’s a class B port – but still a buzzing center of commerce. It’s a really, really big truck stop.

After a brief opening we’re straight into a detailed description of Affinity Highport, including a massive writeup with a full statsheet straight out of High Guard. This is an impressive amount of detail and really drives home how central this location will be; though I’m hazy on how important it will be to know that the station has 1200 missiles stored aboard. Still, it’s just fun to read over and an impressive amount of work to have calculated out.

There’s also a detailed map of the station, split into three decks. I quite like this map – it includes a side-view and some color-coding. All the important bits you might expect are highlighted; where the manoeuvre drive is, the shuttle port, fuel tanks, various residential districts, etc. As a space to improvise adventures, this is a nicely fleshed out tool for the Ref.

Then we’re on to the cantina itself, up on the highest deck, a “pan-sophont friendly” spot that sounds nicely plush, with a penchant for reserving a single barstool (engimatically “for the captain”) and with a small casino upstairs. The comfy air here continues with the owner/operator Zashe, who’ll pick the PC’s up as regulars after just a few visits. Between her and her bartender robot (which gets a full page writeup) I can easily see slotting this place in as a hangout for a patron meet before it transitions to being the focus of an adventure.

Then we’re onto the promised patron encounters, each mapped to an icebreaker somewhere in the bar. This is a great choice – meeting a dude over a game of poker and finding it turning into a job is a cool way for an adventure to start. There’s four – covering the gamut from snatching a few tons of luxury goods off the docks on over to joining an amateur boxing league. Solid little outlines of adventures that would fill, I dunno, a third or half a session depending on how much you want to improvise on top of them? The heist I could see inevitably blooming into a full session, but my table really loves complicating that stuff.

This prelude closes out with a rumor table, covering recent happenings around the station. These could easily support some freeform adventuring around the station.

The real Eneri-centric stuff takes off in the following section, when Zashe’s son Calago goes missing. He’s a distinctive person, being a chimera mix of human and reptillian alien genes. He’s adopted and now an adult, albeit one who gets in trouble regularly. She points them toward the sees of Affinity – and that’s where the Seaskimmer comes in.

We get a description of Affinity, a high gravity waterworld that is highly tectonically active and abundant native life. Another solidly produced planetary map accompanies all this.

I might stick a few red-herrings on the station, or take some notes on what Calago’s apartment is like with hints pointing toward him taking a fishing trip – or just have Zashe explicitly say he’s gone missing fishing. The adventure is clear that the Travellers need to go looking down on the planet to find this guy, after all.

There’s some solid notes for what the search will involve, including a table of random events that’ll dress things up nicely. It’ll take a handful of sensors rolls to get everything straight…

If I were running this, I’d take a few notes on some of the regular spots Zashe knows her erstwhile son likes to fish at. Finding him absent from his favorite fishing holes will push the tension just a little higher and make the following search a little more dramatic.

The adventure notes that the areas covered are quite broad, and so that the Travellers vehicle range will have to be considered. This is great, and something that doesn’t always get proper attention. Traveller has a lot of stats floating around; having one become critically important is a great way to draw players into the action; “told you we shoulda bought the higher TL air/raft!”

We get some alien wildlife to menace things, including a sort of tuna-shark and gecko-flyingfish. They’re straight out of Subnautica and a nice bit of local color. I’ll excerpt the whole page, since it’s available as part of the publisher preview.

One of my big wishlist items for the current iteration of Traveller is a big book of alien species like this, and maybe some notes on randomly generating critters and ecosystems a’la the biome encounter tables from Classic Traveller. I love including wildlife as encounters or obstacles – sometimes just as local cover. I once ran a whole adventure about trying to reach a downed scoutship that had crashed into a vast mudflat haunted by equally vast lungfish; a very squishy, very deadly area my Travellers had an awful time salvaging in.

Enough searching turns up Calago’s downed shuttle, the Rammiakhiidru, floating out in the middle of nowhere, thousands of kilometers from anything. There’s an excuse for the Seafarer skill to get some use, which tickles me – my characters always seem to end up picking up a rank or two in that skill and I’ve never had a chance to actually use it.

Getting aboard, they find the vehicle bay is empty and the ships computer shows a flightplan, now about 12 hours old, indicating it was last visiting island J-49.

Investigating there the Travellers find Calago being tied into his drivers seat by a pair of thugs looking fake a fatal case of the bends. Things have a nicely scifi action potential here, as aggressive parties will find Calago launched skyward at high speed (where the pressure change will kill him) while they abscond by air/raft. This is a great excuse for a Traveller all-timer event; an air/raft v air/raft gunfight. The adventure assumes the mobsters are taken care of or run off and Calago rescued. A mild ding here as the adventure includes a map of the little archipelago this kerfuffle happens at, but without any sort of scale! Drastically reduces the maps usefulness.

The mobsters are affiliated with a Sylean syndicate – it’s not clear what they might reveal if they were captured, which is a modest flaw. My table takes interrogations very seriously!

Here we get a look at the promised Seaskimmer, and it isn’t a boat! It’s more like a little private blimp, which does feel like something a fisherman would enjoy using. I quite like the art, and I’d absolutely let players store one on the Free Trader at half tonnage if they don’t mind deflating the gas bag!

There’s a note that Calago was actually here to cut a deal with an outworld research company set up nearby (and actually part of the event table!) to help protect his mothers business, but that he was ambushed by the mobsters to collect on his debts.

Back at the highport, Zashe is thrilled by her sons rescue, but things are getting grim on the street. Security goons from Ase are putting on their jackboots – we get some notes on their standard gear, and we’re given a brief events table that’s updated to reflect the fact that the cops are shaking down the whole station.

The oppressors are split between a few different groups, including military police and paramilitaries – so a mix of professionals with law enforcement training and dangerous idiots with off-the-rack uniforms. Ref’ing this seems almost too easy; roll a few events, let the PC’s get involved and sprinkle in a few violent dorks to really boil the kettles.

I’d avoid letting this go too off the rails immediately; in fact, I’d probably come up with another 2 patron encounters for the Cantina, at least, to let the PC’s really soak in the tension as the stations mood grows gradually uglier. Then offer another job that’s outright sabotaging either the outworlders (or the local government) and suddenly the choice feels a lot more acute.

Then we move on to three rival groups moving to recruit the PC’s – all aiming to get them into contact with the NPC that will carry them all the way to Capital. These are the Yirsh Poy syndicate (same guys that tried to off Calago), Ase security forces (aka, the jackbooted thugs), and a regular at the cantina.

The syndicate is the most amusing option; there’s even the possibility of the two negotiators being the same guys that tried to murder Calago! If I were ref’ing this I’d absolutely contrive to make this the case! They want to bring the Travellers in to have a little talk with their boss, see, and they’ll resort to kidnapping to make it happen, Syn To Rei.

He’s pushing to collect on Calago’s debts and he’s going to take it from Zashe and her business. Interfering with the Calago situation means the Travellers have taken on the debt, and so they can pay it off by helping him take over the cantina by forcing her off the station and into exile with her extended family a few systems away. He even offers to bring the Travellers in as the bars “owners” making an eye-popping 100k a month, up to 200k if they negotiate hard.

My table is unlikely to take that offer; once they adopt an NPC like Zashe, they’re pretty rabid about it. It’s a pretty cold-blooded move, but I could see a suitably morally gray party having a great time running a bar and playing local politics.

There’s some shenanigans about the Fusing Core (a rival bar) trying to “recruit” the travellers as customers, with anyone partaking from the house special ingesting a tracking device. Very curious to see what this connects to?

Then we get some details as the situation devolves and riots break out as the paramilitaries and the locals butt heads. I quite like the updated maps provided, showing off where the riots are centered and suggesting a few events on each deck of the station that the Travellers could get involved with. There’s even notes on how the PC’s treat other neighborhoods and what effect that’ll have when they interact with those decks later.

The whole station goes under martial law as the riots are quelled and the outworlders start breaking things up… including dismantling Restoration Plaza, where the Cantina is. So it’s the title of the adventure, Last Call at Eneri’s Cantina! I love a good title drop.

The bar is called out as a place of free speech and hosts freelance journalists covering the riot… which is a bit of an expansion from its role as a place to find dodgy work. Running this, I’d maybe salt this ideological stance earlier in the adventure, just to avoid any whiplash when this comes into focus.

Zashe introduces the crew to Betro, who works for Countess Vandia of Bendo. He explains the greater political situation, cracking down and imposing outside law on places like Affinity. There’s some good attention paid to the established lore of the Third Imperium and its non-interventionist free-trade focused policy, and how Ase is twisting that ideology to advance their interests. He wants their help to escape the station, convince her to travel to the Moot, and help block the impending initiative.

I like this idea, but I’d maybe also salt the Justice For All bill into things a big more aggressively, like having porters grousing about it, or a patron explicitly noticing it. Otherwise this feels a bit like a local problem the Travellers could solve. Making it something encompassing multiple worlds and being pushed by a massively powerful political faction will help sell why getting off the highport is so crucial.

Getting off the port is a challenge, one that might be easier if they (shudder) helped the paramilitaries out during the riot. A bureaucratic option is available to all groups, however, and I appreciate that – like I’ve said before, I love skills like Advocate and Admin, and having a chance to use them here is great! Otherwise the group will have to contrive a way off the station, and given that they may or may not own their own ship, I’m fine with this mostly being left to the ref to figure out, as there are a lot of ways to get out of here; sneaking, getting smuggled, fighting their way out, etc.

There’s a bit here about the Asei trying to recruit the Travellers. The hard-nosed captain here lays it out; nobody can stop the industrial titans or their expansion of power, and he’s willing to offer an incredible amount of cash – a million credits, up to two million with some dickering – to buy their allegiance as double agents against whatever Betro has planned. This is another opportunity for the party to reverse course in a big way and cash in doing it – hopefully the implications of their doing so will get some coverage. My table would likely be very interested in taking the cash, but then playing triple agent and staying on the “moral” side…

Tertha is a single J-1 jump away, a mostly empty system with a few planetoid belts where the Countess of Bendo (8 parsecs away) lives in a secluded asteroid station. We get a description of the station and how difficult it is to find, and in fact the whole thing relocates itself to a new place in the system on a semi-random basis.

I love eccentric nobles – it’s one of the best things about Charted Space, in my opinion. You can have crazy, oppressive whackjob planetary governments that demand recourse, but you’ve gotta go talk to some dippy dork who spent his whole life living in a TL15 paradise space station and convince them that the problem is worthy of their august attention?

Finding the place involves some sensors checks and potentially asking around with some locals. Ultimately finding it is just the first step; the Countess is not happy about being bothered.

She’s definitely one of my eccentric nobles I love – making a grand entrance after threatening the Travellers with security drones using a grav belt to float around “like a sylph”.

Then we have some notes about the villains following along with this, and if the Travellers allied with them this’ll be a consequential moment, as their bosses instruct them to kill the countess. If they didn’t sign on with that offer, they’ll just ambush them when they leave the Asteroid.

Some stats are provided for cat-shaped security robots. They’re beefy and tough, armed with very nasty lasers – fucking with the Countess is a very bad idea.

Now the Travellers have to make their case; apparently Betro needs help convincing his boss to act in her own interests. There are notes on how to do this, but… I find this to be a moderate flaw. Betro is her seneschal and ought to be one of her closest advisors – his influence is outsized and ought to be playing a much bigger role than a bunch of folks he snagged from his favorite Cantina! This can work, but I think it’ll work best with Betro making the case (in sketchy form) and the Travellers contributing as witnesses, or perhaps even providing dramatic evidence of Asei meddling by revealing the proposal they were offered (or perhaps took). I understand that the designer is trying to keep the Travellers “in the drivers seat” but I think you can do that without dumping it on the characters laps unexpectedly.

Alternatively, parties looking to betray Affinity and either stop or off the countess have the adventure conclude here. They’ll have a nasty fight killing the countess; her security bots are very formidable. It’s a bit of an anticlimax, but I think it suits the mercenary flavor well, and an enterprising Ref could probably find future work for the pro-Asei leaning group. Myself, I’d find it a bit unsatisfying – I like the party being tempted but you just know any Travellers that accept a deal from these kind of authoritarian types are primed to be double-crossed by them. I know which way the crew of the Serenity would take this’un, y’know?

Assuming the party doesn’t betray the Countess, she wants to visit Affinity first and stage a political rally before heading for the Moot, and she will only travel on her personal yacht.

The Asei agents are well-armed and have an armed pinnace, but there aren’t many notes on what approach they’ll take other than that they’ll go after the Countess when she leaves. This has some big implications; if the party has a well-armed free trader a pinnace isn’t going to be much of a fight. I’d probably go with an ambush set up in the pinnace-docking bay of the asteroid station, and have the fight happening mostly in-person.

After getting back to Affinity, the Countess wants a march. It’s left to the Travellers to organize this, and I think that’s great. It’s all about recruiting their erstwhile employers and drinking buddies to come out and support the cause. There’s a few notes about recruiting more broadly, and potentially even ending up at the podium during the rally. I have at least one player that would eat this stuff up so all of this is great!

The last portion of the adventure is accompanying the Countess to Capital, and the book explicitly directs the Ref to The Third Imperium supplement for information on that world. There are brief notes on Ase trying to head off the Countess and her votes, including running some counter-intelligence on other voting nobles that are being blackmailed. All of this is a single page, however, and minimally developed.

The adventure ends here, with the Justice for All bill being defeated in the Moot and the Travellers departing for another round back at Eneri’s Cantina.

Aftermatter

The rest of the book is taken up with NPC stats. Nothing sticks out as being particularly problematic, and the sketch portraits all have a nice amount of personality. Short and sweet!

Closing Thoughts and Scoring

I really liked this adventure – while Errant Lightning had some great imagery and exciting ideas, this has both of those while delivering a structure that is far more usable at the table.

My critiques are mostly mild. The beginning of the adventure is rock solid, the only stumbles come well into the end game, where the Countess (where I’m dubious about her needing convincing) and the run to Capital (which is perhaps undeveloped) being the only prominent examples. Otherwise this is something I’d be excited to put on the table when I’m looking for something strongly location-based that’s a mix of criminal shenanigans and politics, and would have a relatively long runtime. This would probably take me five sessions to run to completion. Completing the story might run even longer as my table wouldn’t be satisfied with a conclusion on Capital that doesn’t get at least a few sessions of screentime! There’s also one dangling thread with the Fusing Core and their tracking device in shots of liquor – I assume this is something the Asei did? It could have been tied into things a bit better, maybe.

Read/Run – 9/10. I’m psyched to run this, and I feel like I’ve got enough support from the adventure to have it on the table tomorrow night while still having a lot of space to improvise on top of things in the later arcs.

Hook/Sinker – 8.5 /10. A great hook that will ideally pull the players into and get them invested in their little coterie of barmates! Loses a few points as the final third of the adventure trails off; joining Betro and going off to persuade the Countess is very heroic and exciting, but I’m still shaky on why these particular Travellers are being singled out for it.

Specific/Portable – 8/10. The adventure is very specific. The parameters of the primary setting, a class B port over a low-law water world, aren’t hard to find elsewhere. Many starports will have bars like Eneri’s, too. Taking this adventure out of its specific location, however, will drastically change the last half of the adventure. I suppose you could always make the Justice for All bill something being voted on by the local Duke or other, more local noble, but that subtracts from things a bit. You’d also be discarding quite a bit of the material on why Asei is doing all this. So not bad, just much more specific than portable.

Cohesion/Agency – 9/10. The players are given three divergent paths of varying levels of bastardry here – betraying Zashe is pretty low (but highly profitable), joining Asei will get you rich (but maybe dead) and being a good guy won’t get you much other than a friendship with a Countess and some drinks at the bar. This is great! Some of the options might have been further developed (the mobster path particularly is pretty sparse) but that they’re all given some attention means this adventure might never run the same way twice.

Overall 34.5/40 or 4.3 / 5 stars.