CT core rules have no setting to refluff. There are some tropes in the rules:
- The Imperium. It has an emperor, it has many high title low-authority nobles
- It has a military draft. And Vietnam War era survival rates.
- It has small independent merchants making a risky living on the often hostile space-lanes.
- Subsidy contracts ensure some worlds get trade at least several times a year...
- It maintains a comm net, sending couriers to carry the news... no FTL radio.
- Jump Torpedoes are given an off-hand mention in Bk 2-77; Bk 2-81 lacks that reference.
- Jump is committed to the moment you enter. Good or bad, the next 7 days you're stuck with the same group of people.
- It doesn't mention being humans... the character gen is, at first, just basically "any vaguely hominid alien your Ref lets you play."
- It provides a pension based solely on years of service, not rank. ANd not to Scouts nor Other.
GDW's answer was a chorus of, if two parts don't agree, take your pick.
CT has 2 personal scale combat systems across the RPG a minis wargame, and two counters on maps boardgames. mixing and matching was common. the RPG, and Snapshot (BG) were basically the same system, except with action points in Snapshot. Striker (MInis) was an adaptation of AHL (BG) combat mechanics, but adding vehicle designs...
CT Ship Combat has 3½ systems... Bk 2 is intended for pen on blotter or minis on table. The combat mechanics were also adapted to a Boardgame, Mayday. The 1979 ed of
Book 5: High Guard had a different combat system, and abstract movement. 1980
Book 5: High Guard had a different one, and a different design system. 1983
Starter Traveller was a mapless range band version of Bk2 - hence the half... ¼ each for Mayday and Starter.
Books 4-7 had much more detailed character gen... Which many of us ignored, because it gave too many skills
Book 5 was wehere the OTU really begins... but, apparently from playtest docs, Adventures 1 & 4 used mixed Bk 5-79 designs but a small ship setting. Both those were written by the UK's Games Workshop. (Jacson & Livinston's crew). 2 & 3 were done in house at GDW.
The CT materials are, for as haphazardly developed as they were, far more cohesive about the setting than the rules in play were.
During CT's run,
Supplement 3: The Spinward Marches got retconned a bit - a few minor UWP changes, and better graphics throughout. I've seen at least 3 variants of it - and have 2 of them.
The move to a "Big Ship" OTU was pretty much a done deal by 1981... but the core retained the 1981 "Small Ship" design system right through to 1987... GDW didn't run out of stock for at least a year...
THe big retcon of 1984 was just GDW decanonizing most of the 3rd party stuff, and ending most of the licenses. the change in canonicity is noted in the
Atlas of the Imperium.
MegaTraveller (MT) made some setting changes, but the JTAS magazine had covered a whole bloody war in the Marches.... they latched on to a bit of throw-away canon by Frank Chadwick (which I only found out this past week was Frank's doing) - the right of assassination. It's there in the Library Data from CT, in the Emperor's list... And had an Archduke attempt to assassinate the Emperor. He was said to have hit a body double... this wouldn't be confirmed until the New Era product line started. We didn't know if "The Real Strephon" really was the real Emperor Strephon... Lots of new canon added. Most gelled. What didn't? Well, due to the modularity of the design, Most of the fans just picked a view and ran with it. Most of the changes in canon were easily chalked up to "It's set a decade later, guys" - followed by late MT era, the official rules acquired a "how did this world survive the Rebellion?" And yes, sometimes, the answer was, "As a ghost town." Or "graveyard."
One interesting thing about MT: They hybridized Bk5 ships and Striker other vehicles, using striker armor ratings and damage ratings, but with a different range penalty mechanic, and a method of fast resolution for even large battles. Once you know those principles, you can see where most bits of MT originated in CT.
Traveller: the New Era advanced the timeline 70 years more, and had the Rebellion of MT's timeline ended by an AI virus that could remotely infect other computers via radio... Needless to say, many of us didn't care for TNE's setting changes. Most CT and MT fans were slow to adopt it, if they did at all. On the good side, "Real Strephon" fans got their canon answer... (In TNEs
Survival Margin: Gateway to the New Era.)
The ship and vehicle rules were cleaned up, then made more detailed than MTs... and the biggest retcon wasn't setting fluff.... it was that TTNE had particle accelerator fuel-using n-space drives... High Energy PLAsma R (something. I forget). One of the engineer types worked out that the fuel was doing at least 0.2 C. It had the same trade system as MT, but increased n-space travel times due to acceleration limits meant the numbers, fine tuned for 2 systems per month, were now woefully inadequate...
It added several pages to world generation, so as to figure out if the world survived both the rebellion and the short night of the virus that followed...
TNE was also built upon the framework of Twilight 2000 2.2e... using d20's for skill checks, d6's for damages and a number of character gen elements. It wasn't a failure, either. Late in its run, a survey was set up by a fan.. about 1 in 4 TNE fans had converted from CT or MT. But less than 1 in 10 fans of CT or MT made the switch to it. (I've run it. It sucks for the OTU, IMO...)
T20 and T4 both went backwards in the timeline. T4 went back to the first century of the 3rd Imperium... The rules were different... It has its fans, but there's a lot of bitter, and Ken Whitman is front and center for the blame.
While T4 was doing its thing, SJG got permission to do a GURPS version. It's an alternate timeline, where, for whatever reason, Dulinor doesn't try to assassinate his best friend for the good of the Imperium, doesn't botch the job, and doesn't start a civil war, and thus never releases the AI Virus that made TTNE's setting suck to play in.
Later, after T4 folded, Marc licensed QLI to do a VTT preconfigued for CT, and with an omnibus of CT Books 1-3... and to sell PDFs of CT.
Plus, the new D&D edition was open licensed. Through the 1990's there were jokes about playing Traveller with D&D rules... Hunter Gordon and MJ Daugherty created the T20 Traveller's Handbook. a massive tome with an updated version of Bk5-'80 design, a polyhedral useing combat system that worked well from about 80 Td up (Jump capable requires a minimum 100 tons).
Several "Lead Playtesters" were squirreled away in a private section of TravellerRPG.Com (QLI's forums at the time, now FFE's; I lead the zoo crew that runs it) helping them get it going. It's good. It's the best d20 adaptation of any game I've played both pre-d20 and d20 version. (Including D&D, IMO...) Still, if you want to play the game we playtested ... just cut all XP awards in half.
When Mongoose got the license in 2008, Hunter's license for T20 was terminated. But not the board. GRIP, QLI's VTT, was not a contender anymore by then.
Mongoose has been retconning rapidly ever since. MGT1 had a SSU-like design system, but smaller maximum ship size for it. It had a lot of little changes... but it also had an OGL.
And so, when MGT2 was announced, and the Community Content Protocol was announced, a lot of MGT1E fans got motivated. Jason Kemp's Cepheus Engine was the clear winner - he moved it a few steps closer to CT, and most of the 3pp migrated to CE instead of MGT2.
Every thing Mongoose has done that I've read (most of MGT 1E, only bits of MGT 2E) has some retcon or WTF? material. To be honest, my MGT 1E game was pretty fun, but I retconned it quite a bit from MGT1 SRD...
T5 is T4 on ... "good nyborg, Dude!"....
For many of the "Old Guard", CT is Traveller. Nothing else. Well, no other edition as core, but many do as the game advises: use what works for you, replace what doesn't. Steal from later editions. Or older ones. Twist Traveller to your favorite setting... or twist that setting to Traveller.
And as for assassination of Emperors... Read Marc's
Agent of the Imperium. I'm hoping for a sequel. Not going to spoil that more.
My house rules? MegaTraveller. MT tasks with minor modifications. A 3rd party handling of high social in character gen originally for TNE. T20 ships and trade rules, AHL personal combat, but with MT damage mechanics. CT or MT settings, often the Judges Guild 4 sector block.
Currently, I'm running Edge of the Empire... but the tone is so Traveller that it more than scratches the Traveller itch.
