"some fanboy's silly campaign world"? /boggle
Um.., its cool that you're starting with a blank slate here knowledge-wise and all, but whatever game you pick I'd say a little patience will pay dividends. Some of the 3rd party Traveller products were indeed crap (even silly, hehe), but all that stuff is way out of print. Pretty much anything you can easily get today (short of obscure ebay auctions) is good stuff. That includes the gamer-driven web & mailing list material. The online Traveller grongards are a
very discriminating bunch, and 'fan' material that clearly sucks won't get very far.
I'm not if you care, but I'm going out on a limb here to say that the Third Imperium setting for Traveller has more total product support in its history than any other RPG setting, EVAR. You just have to be willing to find what you want. The problem is that its scattered across various editions, and the setting itself is so huge (thousands of star systems over the course of a long future history). I could fill a page with internet links.
On a practical basis, for Traveller you pick a time period and a base sector, and work from there. The Classic Traveller material was mostly set in the Spinward Marches frontier sector at the height of the 3rd Imperium. GURPS also supports this era/location. The myriad GURPS supplements tend to be rules-light, and port easily to any ruleset. T20 has picked out the Gateway Domain at roughly the same time period as the starting point for their game (which is on the opposite side of the Imperium, heh). SJG is considering publishing a new Traveller era for GURPS - the Interstellar Wars period, which takes place in the not-so-distant future when Terra confronts the ancient, moribund First Imperium. Since the weapons, ships and other technologies are the same across all editions, you can pick your rules and the setting independent of each other. You can, for example, easily run T20 rules, using the GURPS Spinward Marches setting, and run the adventure scenarios in the Classic Reprints series from Far Future. You get the picture.
If your looking for everything to be pre-packaged with little-to-no work, Traveller might just be too much, depending on what gets released for T20 later this year.
On the otherhand, the Shadowforce Archer setting for Spycraft looks to perhaps be more heat-n-eat, if that's your speed.
I'll also say that (on the smaller d20 side of the market) Darwin's World looks pretty damn cool, IMHO.
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p.s. As a total aside, I always find it amusing when folks talk about the big 'canon' arguments surrounding Greyhawk or what-have-you... Traveller Mailing List, anyone? Bwa-ha-haaa!
