HellHound
ENnies winner and NOT Scrappy Doo
I first discovered Traveller through the pages of Dragon Magazine back in the early 80’s. Traveller was THE sci-fi RPG – in fact I hadn’t heard of any others until the review of Star Frontiers in Dragon magazine (which lead me to purchase said game, see my second game a day entry for those experiences). Traveller is a classic game using nothing but 2d6 for most game mechanics, and a very random character creation system where you roll to determine your skills received during your service prior to becoming a Traveller.
An interesting twist compared to most RPGs of the era is that all characters share a common career once game play begins (that of being a Traveller – basically a wandering mercenary troubleshooter, explorer and merchant rolled into one), but are defined instead by what they were prior to this new occupation.
For those unfamiliar with the game, when generating a character for this game, you start with basically no skills, and then select a career appropriate for your character and his stats. Then you roll to see if you get into said career. If that fails, you try for another (with a penalty). If that fails, you get drafted into military service and roll to see what service branch you serve in.
Once you’ve determined what career you got (or got drafted) into, you roll for events in four-year ‘terms’. You roll to see if you survive the term (yeah, you can die every four years in chargen, although later editions made this non-lethal, instead you just muster out due to an injury instead of dying), if you get commissioned, if you get promoted (and in MegaTraveller – if you get ‘special duty’). Then you get skills from all this (rolled randomly, but you get to pick which of the four tables you roll on from the four available to your career for each skill). Then you decide if you are going to serve another term, and roll to re-enlist.
If at any point you fail to re-enlist, decide not to re-enlist, (or fail the survival roll in MegaTraveller), you muster out, and determine how much money and other goods you manage to retire with. Then you become a Traveller – independently well off people who, well, travel. Characters who survive many terms can have stupendously high skill levels as well as piles of starting money and equipment compared to those who only survive a few – in order to try to balance this out, only young people have much of a chance to unlock their hidden psionic potential if they should seek out a psionics institute and get training. For starting characters, this doesn’t make a lot of difference in game-balance, but it can start leveling the playing field a bit in a longer campaign.
My first introduction to the RPG itself was through a friend who would later become a member of my MegaTraveller group. He loaned me the starter edition boxed set in my first year of High School. I ran the game with the same grade-school friend whom I played most of my Star Frontiers with. It was only after a few sessions that we noticed that the beginner set didn’t include any experience or advancement rules. I returned the set and forgot about the game for a couple of years.
I was reintroduced to Traveller and the new edition of the game, MegaTraveller, while living in Atlanta at the age of 16. I got involved in a heavily house-ruled edition of the game held every other week at Titan Games and Comics III on Sundays (we played Car Wars and other RPGs every Saturday too, it was a great gaming getaway). I just remembered the house rules we were playing by because I found the character generation worksheets the GM would hand out to new players in my gaming boxes. After that exposure (and a few awesome games), I bought the books one at a time until I had the full set of MegaTraveller books.
I ran MegaTraveller later when I got back from Atlanta, for the first gaming group I ever was involved with that included women. We played a star-spanning adventure taking place on the scout ship belonging to one of the female players, hopping from planet to planet, checking out strange worlds. Of the sessions we played, two games are particularly memorable to me.
The first involved a wet landing of the scout ship at a floating research base on a water planet. The base and planet remind me a lot of Camino in Star Wars Episode II actually. The players are there to drop off an information packet and pick up some rare liquids mined much deeper in the ocean. However, they find themselves in a research station where the research has lead to the researchers forming a hive-mind. They try to steal the players’ ship to spread themselves across space (as they’ve been forcibly ostracized by the other research bases on the planet). The players rescue a few of the support staff, almost have the hull of their ship breached by shaped charges planted by kamikaze swimmers, and head off-planet in a rush.
The other game involved a plot stolen directly from one of the old Han Solo novels. The players have moved from the scout ship to a merchant vessel by this time, and take a job that requires they have life support equipment in the storage area (supposedly for shipping sensitive fruits and vegetables). When they land at the pickup point, they are ambushed by slavers who intend to use the ship to transport slaves across from an amber (no travel) planet to a planet where slavery is legal, across space where it is not. The players manage to outmatch the ambushers, losing one team member in the process. Doubly-mad for revenge, they track down the person who arranged the shipment and through him found out who the person behind the slave trade is. They encounter him and his companions on gravitic hoverbikes, blow out the bikes, but still have to deal with the leader who is wearing a gravitic belt harness also. The ensuing battle resulted in the death of another character and the near death of two others. The game is memorable both because of the emotional response from the players regarding the slave trade, as well as the emotional response towards character death in game, as this was the first session where they had dealt with a player character dying instead of retiring.
In the end, MegaTraveller became my gateway to CyberPunk. I loaned the rule books to a friend after that session, and a month later he ran a game using the rules, but involving backstabbing, double and triple dealing, drug trafficking, illegal implanted cyberweapons, and many other cyberpunk items. After that game we switched to using the CyberPunk RPG for our Cyber games instead of MegaTraveller, and MegaTraveller ended up languishing in my collection along with the huge sector map that Glenn and I had randomly created, one system at a time, using the rules for star system generation in the game.
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About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
An interesting twist compared to most RPGs of the era is that all characters share a common career once game play begins (that of being a Traveller – basically a wandering mercenary troubleshooter, explorer and merchant rolled into one), but are defined instead by what they were prior to this new occupation.
For those unfamiliar with the game, when generating a character for this game, you start with basically no skills, and then select a career appropriate for your character and his stats. Then you roll to see if you get into said career. If that fails, you try for another (with a penalty). If that fails, you get drafted into military service and roll to see what service branch you serve in.
Once you’ve determined what career you got (or got drafted) into, you roll for events in four-year ‘terms’. You roll to see if you survive the term (yeah, you can die every four years in chargen, although later editions made this non-lethal, instead you just muster out due to an injury instead of dying), if you get commissioned, if you get promoted (and in MegaTraveller – if you get ‘special duty’). Then you get skills from all this (rolled randomly, but you get to pick which of the four tables you roll on from the four available to your career for each skill). Then you decide if you are going to serve another term, and roll to re-enlist.
If at any point you fail to re-enlist, decide not to re-enlist, (or fail the survival roll in MegaTraveller), you muster out, and determine how much money and other goods you manage to retire with. Then you become a Traveller – independently well off people who, well, travel. Characters who survive many terms can have stupendously high skill levels as well as piles of starting money and equipment compared to those who only survive a few – in order to try to balance this out, only young people have much of a chance to unlock their hidden psionic potential if they should seek out a psionics institute and get training. For starting characters, this doesn’t make a lot of difference in game-balance, but it can start leveling the playing field a bit in a longer campaign.
My first introduction to the RPG itself was through a friend who would later become a member of my MegaTraveller group. He loaned me the starter edition boxed set in my first year of High School. I ran the game with the same grade-school friend whom I played most of my Star Frontiers with. It was only after a few sessions that we noticed that the beginner set didn’t include any experience or advancement rules. I returned the set and forgot about the game for a couple of years.
I was reintroduced to Traveller and the new edition of the game, MegaTraveller, while living in Atlanta at the age of 16. I got involved in a heavily house-ruled edition of the game held every other week at Titan Games and Comics III on Sundays (we played Car Wars and other RPGs every Saturday too, it was a great gaming getaway). I just remembered the house rules we were playing by because I found the character generation worksheets the GM would hand out to new players in my gaming boxes. After that exposure (and a few awesome games), I bought the books one at a time until I had the full set of MegaTraveller books.
I ran MegaTraveller later when I got back from Atlanta, for the first gaming group I ever was involved with that included women. We played a star-spanning adventure taking place on the scout ship belonging to one of the female players, hopping from planet to planet, checking out strange worlds. Of the sessions we played, two games are particularly memorable to me.
The first involved a wet landing of the scout ship at a floating research base on a water planet. The base and planet remind me a lot of Camino in Star Wars Episode II actually. The players are there to drop off an information packet and pick up some rare liquids mined much deeper in the ocean. However, they find themselves in a research station where the research has lead to the researchers forming a hive-mind. They try to steal the players’ ship to spread themselves across space (as they’ve been forcibly ostracized by the other research bases on the planet). The players rescue a few of the support staff, almost have the hull of their ship breached by shaped charges planted by kamikaze swimmers, and head off-planet in a rush.
The other game involved a plot stolen directly from one of the old Han Solo novels. The players have moved from the scout ship to a merchant vessel by this time, and take a job that requires they have life support equipment in the storage area (supposedly for shipping sensitive fruits and vegetables). When they land at the pickup point, they are ambushed by slavers who intend to use the ship to transport slaves across from an amber (no travel) planet to a planet where slavery is legal, across space where it is not. The players manage to outmatch the ambushers, losing one team member in the process. Doubly-mad for revenge, they track down the person who arranged the shipment and through him found out who the person behind the slave trade is. They encounter him and his companions on gravitic hoverbikes, blow out the bikes, but still have to deal with the leader who is wearing a gravitic belt harness also. The ensuing battle resulted in the death of another character and the near death of two others. The game is memorable both because of the emotional response from the players regarding the slave trade, as well as the emotional response towards character death in game, as this was the first session where they had dealt with a player character dying instead of retiring.
In the end, MegaTraveller became my gateway to CyberPunk. I loaned the rule books to a friend after that session, and a month later he ran a game using the rules, but involving backstabbing, double and triple dealing, drug trafficking, illegal implanted cyberweapons, and many other cyberpunk items. After that game we switched to using the CyberPunk RPG for our Cyber games instead of MegaTraveller, and MegaTraveller ended up languishing in my collection along with the huge sector map that Glenn and I had randomly created, one system at a time, using the rules for star system generation in the game.
---
About three months ago a very close friend and one of the core team of the original Ambient d20 team committed suicide. This really struck deeply into me, and I haven't been able to concentrate on anything RPG-related since then - I haven't prepped a game, written a supplement, edited anything, or even put anything through layout. I even dropped off the RPG message boards I love, especially ENWorld.
So, I've started to think back over all the games I've played over the years and what makes gaming fun for me. And I'm collecting them into roughly 1,000 word posts about the various games, with the intent to write and post one every weekday that I'm not on the road, and then re-invest this energy into running games and writing again.
), so we took it a lot less serious than we would normally do, and we were not above the occasional PvP playing. 
It turned out to be my dad 
That was some of my best GM'ing and it was 98% improvized!
