Traveller Is 45 Years Old Today!

Traveller was first created by Marc Miller in 1977, published as a box containing three black, digest-sized books by Game Designer's Workshop. The game was the first to use a lifepath system for character creation (one in which, famously, characters could die before play even began!) These days, the game is published by Mongoose Publishing.

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[aramis erak]

Traveller was either the first or second non-D&D game I ever played. I don't think any of us got the source inspiration (I wouldn't read Andre Norton or Harry Harrison until decades later), so we always came at it from the Star Trek/Star Wars paradigm. Not an uncommon approach, though, I'd imagine.

Second non-D&D for me, as well. Star Frontiers was first non-D&D. But I never came at it from Star Trek nor Star Wars, tho' I was a fan of both. I came at it more from a Jason of Star Command, Space Academy, Buck Rogers, oBSG (there was no nBSG at the time), & Heinlein melting pot. Traveller directly lead me to read Doc Smith, Niven, Pournelle, Stirling, Drake, and Herbert. Friends made via Traveller lead me to Cole & Bunch, McCaffrey, and Bujold.
Traveller also lead me to Harrison's Bill the Galactic Hero... not a fan. Well written from a mechanical point of view, but very much not my cuppa... And to Asimov - who's only work I enjoyed in text was the short story Nightfall. (The radioplay of Foundatipon wasn't bad...)

And, of course, I read Agent of the Imperium. If one likes the style of Rutherford's Sarum, London, etc., Agent has a similar approach to time...

 

[R_Chance]

Traveller contains many very intriguing ideas and concepts, intellectually speaking. I had a blast marveling at the technology building rules.

But as a role-playing game, it falls utterly flat for me.

It desperately needs character, warmth, heart, engagement. I have never seen a relatively established brand of rpg with so few adventures worth the paper they're written on.

To be brutally honest, most scenarios come across as little more than a thinly veiled excuse for a wankfest trying out some subsystem (planet generation rules, plasma cannon construction rules) with next to zero thought on writing a compelling story.

Which is extra chilling given our hobby's generous definition of "compelling" where "there is goblins in a cave, go to cave, kill goblins, return with loot and XP" is considered an above average story-line... ;-)

I had a look round when I hoped to start a Traveller campaign using the starter adventure in the otherwise maligned New Era rulebook. That scenario was quite interesting. However, I found zero older scenarios worth even using as a starting point. When I realized I had to create absolutely everything except technical details myself, I moved on to another game.

I would even go as far as hesitate characterizing Traveller a complete role-playing game. It is not comparable to D&D or WFRP or Vampire or most other mainstay games. It is much more accurate to call it a toolbox for scifi worlds, with a high degree of specificity (just like D&D is only good at playing D&D like fantasy, not all kinds of fantasy).

Traveller gave you the tools to create the setting in 1977. The adventures were up to you largely. If you read Andre Norton, E.C. Tubb, A. Bertram Chandler, H. Beam Piper, and Poul Anderson (among others) it was pretty easy. Background genre reading and the real world provided all the inspiration needed. I've never run a published adventure (although I've read a lot of them) in any RPG. Published material is, like fiction and the real world, a source of inspiration and ideas, not a necessity imho.

edit Oops, forgot Pournelle and Niven.

 

[aramis erak]

I'm not quite as sour puss on Traveller as all this, but I understand where you are coming from. I do think Mongoose has been ramping up their efforts to provide better support and adventures. ITs pretty tough though as the market isnt really great for anything not named Star Wars. However, I find the less reliance on charop and strange monsters and beast, allows for a more flexible adventure telling. I spend a lot more time on exploration and social aspects of the game than I would in otherwise heavy combat focused systems. YMMV

Mongoose tried for the SW license...
Matthew knew FFG had gotten it, apparently before FFG's staff did.
Created quite a stir.

Of the adventures in Traveller...
Adv 0: excuse to wander the marches is a perfect description
Adv 1: Kinunir - espionage, a subsector to espionage within, and a relatively big ship, with crew.
Adv 2: Research Station Gamma - start of a multi-module Ancients arc. Details a planet. Includes a subsector. Includes a location to explore, with extreme danagers.
Adv 3: Twilight's Peak - multiple location adventure, alternate entry point to the Ancients arc. And a new playable alien species.
Adv 4: Leviathan - two subsector setting, excuse to wander it
Adv 5: Trillion Credit Squadron. really Book 5 part 2. Plus a 2 subsector setting. And tournament rules for Bk5 tournaments
Adv 6: Expedition to Zhodane - military espionage, 2 subsectors, a bunch of Bk5 designed ships
Adv 7: Broadsword - a subsector, and a series of short adventures for the titular class of ship with a mercenary staffing.
Adv 8: Prison Planet - survival horror, sans monsters. Perchance, a chance to escape.
Adv 9: Nomads of the World Ocean - exploring a world with some hostilities involved. Essentially, a single world setting.
Adv 10: Safari Ship - a ship, a world, a subsector, and an alien species
Adv 11: Murder on Arcturus Station - a murder mystery on a space station.
Adv 12: Secret of the Ancients - conclusion of the Adv 2/3 arc.
Adv 13: Signal GK - an alien, and a ship, both in detail. And a subsector sized chunk take from two subsectors.

I'm not doing the DAs right now.

 

[pemerton]

Traveller contains many very intriguing ideas and concepts, intellectually speaking. I had a blast marveling at the technology building rules.

But as a role-playing game, it falls utterly flat for me.

It desperately needs character, warmth, heart, engagement. I have never seen a relatively established brand of rpg with so few adventures worth the paper they're written on.

To be brutally honest, most scenarios come across as little more than a thinly veiled excuse for a wankfest trying out some subsystem (planet generation rules, plasma cannon construction rules) with next to zero thought on writing a compelling story.

Which is extra chilling given our hobby's generous definition of "compelling" where "there is goblins in a cave, go to cave, kill goblins, return with loot and XP" is considered an above average story-line... ;-)

I had a look round when I hoped to start a Traveller campaign using the starter adventure in the otherwise maligned New Era rulebook. That scenario was quite interesting. However, I found zero older scenarios worth even using as a starting point. When I realized I had to create absolutely everything except technical details myself, I moved on to another game.

I would even go as far as hesitate characterizing Traveller a complete role-playing game. It is not comparable to D&D or WFRP or Vampire or most other mainstay games. It is much more accurate to call it a toolbox for scifi worlds, with a high degree of specificity (just like D&D is only good at playing D&D like fantasy, not all kinds of fantasy).

Traveller (the 1977 version) was the first RPG I played - or maybe a better verb would be tried to play. With no knowledge about the game, or about RPGs, except what could be found in the box, it was too hard to work out what to do once you'd created a character, and what exactly the role of the referee was supposed to be.

In these respects, the contrast with Moldvay Basic - the second RPG I played, and the first I played successfully - was very marked.

But now, with the ability to impose my understanding of RPGing onto the Traveller rules, I regard it as brilliant. It's extremely playable, with so much capacity for play packed into those three books! (Here I'm echoing @AbdulAlhazred upthread.) My personal view is that it works best as a type of proto-PbtA: that is, all those "throws" make sense as PbtA-ish moves. So, when you <do whatever it is that you're doing that is triggering the subsystem> then throw 2d6, add/subtract the specified DMs, and <the specified thing happens on the specified result>.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Traveller was either the first or second non-D&D game I ever played. I don't think any of us got the source inspiration (I wouldn't read Andre Norton or Harry Harrison until decades later), so we always came at it from the Star Trek/Star Wars paradigm. Not an uncommon approach, though, I'd imagine.

Maybe. I must have gone to see Star Wars right about the time I started playing Traveller, but I don't recall any mixing of genre conventions. Traveller is definitely Norton, Harrison, Asimov. While the PCs are very often scoundrels of one sort or another, I never got a Star Wars sort of feel from it. For one thing its darn hard to outrun trouble in Traveller. You shoot it out with a revenue cutter and your ship registration and probably your captain's name, etc. are all going out in all directions at Jump 6... You can forget all those nice starport refueling stops and routine maintenance now! Logically its a bit hard to see too many 'pirate bases' and such lasting long, nuclear tipped missiles are a bitch, and the Navy is happy to lob a few at you! So, the milieu tends to be a bit less 'anything goes' than Star Wars, where you can just jump to any random one of a billion worlds by next Tuesday.

Of course the authors of Spinward Marches did manage to create various grey areas and whatnot, though they mainly exist more due to "if we go mess with those people in that system the Zhodani will get pissed." or "Its in Hiver space, technically..." vs "the Navy cannot find us here."

The other element with Traveller is, the PCs are SMALL. You don't really have plots that involve things like battling the Third Imperium to decide the detiny of Man. Its more like grubbing around on one of the 5 million planets in the Empire trying to make some money to pay rent on your Free Trader. It would take at least a year to reach the Imperial capital, and probably involve 100's of sessions of play, so really the Empire is a completely abstract concept in practice.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Traveller gave you the tools to create the setting in 1977. The adventures were up to you largely. If you read Andre Norton, E.C. Tubb, A. Bertram Chandler, H. Beam Piper, and Poul Anderson (among others) it was pretty easy. Background genre reading and the real world provided all the inspiration needed. I've never run a published adventure (although I've read a lot of them) in any RPG. Published material is, like fiction and the real world, a source of inspiration and ideas, not a necessity imho.

edit Oops, forgot Pournelle and Niven.

Right, I do get what @CapnZapp is saying, Traveller's flavor of milieu is pretty dry. Its quite a gritty game, and a lot of play involves simply taking the PCs from the end of the chargen lifepath process and 'heading out', using the various subsystems (trading, patrons, scout work) and implied setting elements to 'work something up'. The GM can definitely use one of the published adventures, but I really never found them to be super compelling on their own. They all seem to work best as something like "well, now you're in a pickle! You're stuck at this muddy class D spaceport, good luck finding a cargo. The mortgage is due in a week..." and then some patron just happens by, or you hear some rumor in the cantina about some alien ruin down south. "Hey, our aircar can get us there, and we have a mottley assortment of firearms, what can go wrong?"; "Oh, its a red zone. Ah well, nobody's looking, right!?"

There really isn't a strong kind of 'feel' to CT in a lot of ways. Tech is kind of downplayed, it matters but it doesn't seem to shape culture that much. Frankly Marc and Co never really seemed to bother with that kind of element. I'd say though if you want a more colorful milieu it isn't exactly hard. You could draw from stuff like Dune for instance. Just come up with odd cultural details, attitudes, practices, religions, etc. I mean, D&D doesn't define any of that either, but nobody really ever missed it. I think Traveller just seems a bit less fantastical right off the bat, until you start running your mind a bit and thinking about all the sci-fi you've read.

 

[pemerton]

nuclear tipped missiles are a bitch, and the Navy is happy to lob a few at you!

<snip>

so really the Empire is a completely abstract concept in practice.

We ignore nuclear weapons in our Traveller game. Lasers seem more exciting! (Though not that exciting, given the reality that is Traveller ship-to-ship combat.)

We're not using any sort of published setting, just the implied background and an Imperial Navy, Marines and Interstellar Scout Service. So the Imperium figures through the presence and actions of those various institutions.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

We ignore nuclear weapons in our Traveller game. Lasers seem more exciting! (Though not that exciting, given the reality that is Traveller ship-to-ship combat.)

We're not using any sort of published setting, just the implied background and an Imperial Navy, Marines and Interstellar Scout Service. So the Imperium figures through the presence and actions of those various institutions.

Well, I think the idea with nukes is that the Navy isn't going to pop one off on some random free trader that just happens to turn pirate, but if you are a BASE for pirate ships, a few excess megatons cures all!

Honestly, back in the day when I regularly ran Traveller my description of things was that the 'nobility' were hereditary planetary leaders and/or families that had been rewarded with Imperial holdings back in the day. The Empire itself we imagined on a much smaller scale, like a few hundred inhabited systems or something. That was also back in the day, there wasn't any Book 5 and TCS. Azhanti High Lightning was basically as big as ships get. I always liked that interpretation of the milieu better, it means that indeed PCs can assume large roles in society, potentially.

 

[payn]

Well, I think the idea with nukes is that the Navy isn't going to pop one off on some random free trader that just happens to turn pirate, but if you are a BASE for pirate ships, a few excess megatons cures all!

Honestly, back in the day when I regularly ran Traveller my description of things was that the 'nobility' were hereditary planetary leaders and/or families that had been rewarded with Imperial holdings back in the day. The Empire itself we imagined on a much smaller scale, like a few hundred inhabited systems or something. That was also back in the day, there wasn't any Book 5 and TCS. Azhanti High Lightning was basically as big as ships get. I always liked that interpretation of the milieu better, it means that indeed PCs can assume large roles in society, potentially.

That tends to be the way I run it too. Pirates are a nuisance that only get attention when they become too annoying to accept. The best pirates are the ones who keep moving and vary their tactics. Only a fool operates next to their base.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That tends to be the way I run it too. Pirates are a nuisance that only get attention when they become too annoying to accept. The best pirates are the ones who keep moving and vary their tactics. Only a fool operates next to their base.

In terms of piracy the problem for a pirate in the Traveller is that you HAVE to operate close to your base. I mean, suppose you have a 'hot' ship, Jump 3! OK, you can maybe cover several systems, but you constantly need to refuel, certainly after every jump. You can do it way out the back of beyond at some smelly gas giant, but the fact is, the Navy is going to pretty soon know that your base is in a certain volume of space. If its extensive enough to service ships, then there must be SOME way to supply it, so its location cannot remain perfectly hidden.

So, I'd posit that pirates may exist in areas where there is 'red' territory within Jump 2 or so such that the Navy can't go there. They KNOW where the pirates are, certainly within a small region of space, but some other empire, aliens, whatever prevents them from acting on that information. Of course most merchants will just NOT GO THERE! Or they will stick to a few very heavily defended jump points close in to destination worlds.

Basically pirates are going to be stuck going for free traders that are dumb/desperate enough to work routes out in known dangerous space away from patrols and such. Its not much of a living.

Contrast this with the Age of Pirates situation back in the 17th-18th Centuries. A sailing ship of the late 18th Century could easily cross entire oceans without needing to make stops, and there were MANY places to hide and resupply. A ship crew could basically 'live off the land' for years at a time, travel to various parts of the ocean with little chance of being spotted, and then strike. The oceans were also a legal no-man's-land where ships of many competing polities freely sailed. Governments could simply issue letters of Marque & Reprisal to any old Joe with a boat, and they could pretty much go where they wanted. There WERE a few 'pirate bases' in various places at various times and that worked because you could slip out, sail far away from any patrolling warships, and take up your trade.

Piracy actually seems pretty non-viable in the Traveller milieu for basic technological reasons, really. I'm sure it would exist, to a degree, and that might be all that matters for an RPG, but I doubt it would be very prevalent.