Traveller: the iconic science fiction roleplaying game

Not DnD is a weekly show discussing tabletop roleplaying games. In September we are looking at tabletop RPGs for a sci-fi setting!

Traveller is a long-beloved science fiction roleplaying game first published in 1977. The game has had several editions published over it's almost 50 year history, including GURPS and d20. It's difficult to discuss sci-fi ttrpgs without mentioning this iconic game.

The Traveller Core Rulebook Update 2022 by Mongoose publishing provided new careers, equipment, hazards, world creation, psionics and shipbuilding. Come learn more about Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition with Matt and Chris from Mongoose Publishing on this weeks (29th September) episode of Not DnD.


Not DnD is a weekly show discussing tabletop roleplaying games. Each week EN Publishing’s @tabletopjess interviews the creators behind different tabletop roleplaying games that aren’t D&D!

You can watch the live recording every Monday at 5pm ET / 10pm BST on YouTube or Twitch, or listen on the podcast platform of your choice.

We've had many other sci-fi TTRPGs on Not DnD over the last three years such as Salvage Union, Terminal, Orbital Blues, You're In Space and Everything is F***ed, Day Trippers, Alien, Paranoia, Blade Runner, Star Trek Adventures, and Dune.

You can watch any of these previous interviews on youtube here. Or listen to the podcast episodes here.

 

[overgeeked]

For me in particular, Traveller fell off the map of games I sought out to play and run for two major reasons (with the usual halo of smaller ones).

1. Falling behind the times in both reality and sf. Now, I had an unusual position in the ‘70s and ‘80s: Dad worked with Jet Propulsion Labs’ Deep Space Tracking Network. I grew up seeing Pioneer and Voyager results before almost anyone else. I was watching Trav system generation become obsolete right before my eyes, and when I went with Dad to Seminar Day (what Caltech does instead of Homecoming), I’d get updates of the same process on a lot of other fronts. Meanwhile, I was reading folks Niven, Varley, Pohl, Bester, and so many others take space-spanning sf in directions Trav didn’t seem to me to have anything to help with. Both parts of this contributed to my ‘80s-‘90s enthusiasm for GURPS.

2. Tedium. I’m not trying to be mean here, it just seemed like Trav resolutely jumped away from attempts at excitement. Planetary cultures weren’t presented with any particular flair, Imperial culture without any baroque weirdness or cool details. No exotic touches like Retief or Van Rijn mighty exploit, no sense of the sort of deep struggle that could engage a Flandry or Gersen. Fundamentally I didn’t want to manage a mortgage, but the game seemed not to recognize that it could and should call out less grindy options.

Now, just recently, I had a surprising shift of perspective, thanks to reading some E.C. Tubbs. Whoa! Dumaerest and his story are cool. And suddenly I saw what Traveller wasn’t telling me: the life of a mostly-Low Passage traveler is a life of adventure. Going some place hoping to find info relevant to a long-term goal, making your way in the next exotic society and environment, suffering ups and downs, moving on, with room for derring do, skullduggery, capers and heists, the enchilada. The author of the Loner solo RPG plans to put a Galaxy Drifter book next year, and after reading the manuscript, I’ll be all over it.

(See The making of Galaxy Drifter for comments and a link to the manuscript.)

And now that I’ve been handed the ideas, I can see how to incorporate them into Trav, if I want to. And that in turn leads me to see how to similarly transform the implementation of other elements. But I sure didn’t feel any help from the game in doing so back in the day.

Yeah. All that.

For me Traveller works best when it’s the ultimate sandbox. I find the trying to pay off ship-debt angle boring. I don’t want to RP having a job. I think of it like Frederick Pobl’s Gateway books. Anything is possible out there. So go out there.

I also view the bones of the setting, the now laughably out of date tech in the same way I view the Alien universe. A quirky throwback to an earlier age of sci-fi. It doesn’t need to be up-to-date. Retrofuturism is fine by me. I just need the core stuff to be mostly cohesive and internally consistent. I can add all the warp drives, extra-dimensional aliens, psychic powers, sensawunda, Big Dumb Objects, etc.

 

[Autumnal]

Agreed a lot. Being very clearly past its era makes it easier for me to treat it as its own thing. So does being older myself, better read, and all that. I like to think of Imperial ships’ bridges with teak and chrome.

 

[pemerton]

For me in particular, Traveller fell off the map of games I sought out to play and run for two major reasons (with the usual halo of smaller ones).

1. Falling behind the times in both reality and sf. Now, I had an unusual position in the ‘70s and ‘80s: Dad worked with Jet Propulsion Labs’ Deep Space Tracking Network. I grew up seeing Pioneer and Voyager results before almost anyone else. I was watching Trav system generation become obsolete right before my eyes, and when I went with Dad to Seminar Day (what Caltech does instead of Homecoming), I’d get updates of the same process on a lot of other fronts. Meanwhile, I was reading folks Niven, Varley, Pohl, Bester, and so many others take space-spanning sf in directions Trav didn’t seem to me to have anything to help with. Both parts of this contributed to my ‘80s-‘90s enthusiasm for GURPS.

I've read very little sci-fi, but when I first encountered Traveller (in the late 70s, so I was fairly young) it didn't match the sci-fi I was familiar with: Star Wars, Star Trek, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Marvel Comics. When I cam back to it more recently, I told my players (a couple of whom work in the tech industry, one as a fairly serious electrical engineer) that they had to imagine that all the effort that in our world has gone into infotech improvement, in the Traveller universe went into developing fusion and warp drives.

(That doesn't deal with the astronomy issues, but my group has not astronomers in it so that's not so bad.)

When I ran a couple of sessions for one of my daughters, she did express surprise that, in a game with the tagline "Science Fiction Adventure in the Far Future", people drive cars and use walkie-talkies. When I was her age (and younger), the widespread use of bullet-firing guns as opposed to "blasters" disappointed me a bit. These days, I just see this as part of the setting and accept it.

2. Tedium. I’m not trying to be mean here, it just seemed like Trav resolutely jumped away from attempts at excitement. Planetary cultures weren’t presented with any particular flair, Imperial culture without any baroque weirdness or cool details. No exotic touches like Retief or Van Rijn mighty exploit, no sense of the sort of deep struggle that could engage a Flandry or Gersen. Fundamentally I didn’t want to manage a mortgage, but the game seemed not to recognize that it could and should call out less grindy options.

Now, just recently, I had a surprising shift of perspective, thanks to reading some E.C. Tubbs. Whoa! Dumaerest and his story are cool. And suddenly I saw what Traveller wasn’t telling me: the life of a mostly-Low Passage traveler is a life of adventure. Going some place hoping to find info relevant to a long-term goal, making your way in the next exotic society and environment, suffering ups and downs, moving on, with room for derring do, skullduggery, capers and heists, the enchilada.

<snip>

And now that I’ve been handed the ideas, I can see how to incorporate them into Trav, if I want to. And that in turn leads me to see how to similarly transform the implementation of other elements. But I sure didn’t feel any help from the game in doing so back in the day.

This fits my experience pretty closely, as far as the game is concerned. (Not the reading - I've heard of Dumarest, I think only ever in the context of Traveller, but not read any.)

When I came back to the system nearly 10 years ago, with the intention of running it, I had a lot more resources to work with: the notion of "implied setting", for instance; and also all the ideas set out by Vincent Baker in Apocalypse World (and his design blogs/essays over the preceding 10 years). I'd always thought of Traveller as a very simulationist system, but looking at it through the lens of Apocalypse World helped me see it in terms of "if you do it, you do it" - with the GM making moves in response, within the parameters established by the relevant resolution systems and the setting that they help to imply.

I also wrote up my own version of the rules, to help bundle together stuff that was spread around different parts of the rule books. Here's an example:

Spoiler

Officials and Bureaucracy: Day-to-Day Interactions
To avoid harassment and arrest by police or other enforcement agencies, and to avoid close inspection of documents by officials (eg police, customs agents, clerks, etc):

Throw law level or higher, once per day and whenever officials are encountered (DM -1 if acting illegally).​

To resolve normal interaction with officials when they are approached (eg avoid close inspection of papers necessary for bank transactions, cargo transfers, personal identification, etc; ensure prompt issue of licence; allow approval of application; etc):

Throw 10+ (DMs +5 if Admin-1, +2 per additional level of expertise; or +2 per level of Liaison expertise; a reaction DM may also apply, and inspection always occurs on a reaction result of 2);​

To be found in compliance if inspected, throw 7+ (DMs +1 per level of Admin expertise; -5 if anything illegal on person, in ship, in papers, etc that are subject to inspection);​

To avoid discovery of forged or faked documents that are inspected, throw 9+ (DM +2 per level of Forgery expertise).​

The referee will exercise control over blatant use of forged documents worth over Cr 200, or repeated use in the same location.​

To bribe a petty official (whose reaction is non-committal or better) to ignore or circumvent laws or regulations, or to ignore poor documentation:

Make a cash offer and throw 13+ (or 20+, with additional DM + law level of the world, as set by the referee) (DMs +6 if Bribery-1, +1 per additional level of expertise, +2 if the official’s reaction result is 12; other DMs as appropriate, including if the official is not so petty or the cash offer and/or act solicited are not reasonable); if the result is 9+ (16+ if law level DM is applied), a second throw may be made with the cash offer doubled; if the result is 8 or less (15 or less if law level DM is applied), the bribe is not only refused but reported.​

To learn the name of an official who will issue licences without hassle, or the location of high quality guns at a low price, or for other activities or to obtain specified items:

Throw 10+ (official), 14+ (guns), or an appropriate throw set by the referee (DM +6 if Streetwise-1, +1 per additional level of expertise; or +3 if Liaison-1, +1 per additional level of expertise).​

This way of thinking about the game helped me work out how to make it "go". So did the implied setting, which arises from the service/occupation lists, the skills on their various tables, the rules for cargo and passengers and starships, etc. Here's how I've described it:

The other thing that I was struck by is how bleak the default setting of Traveller is. The chance of dying during low passage transit is 1 in 6 for an ordinary person (1 in 12 with proper medical personnel overseeing the process). That's really high, and yet the rules are full of starships with low berths and passenger tables that show plenty of people willing to pay to travel in them. So the impression one gets is of worlds full of poor people willing to face a really high risk of death in order to travel to worlds that offer better prospects (but only 1 jump at a time!), while nobles lord it over the populace in their ridiculously expensive yet largely pointless intersteller yachts.

And this bleakness came out even in the worlds I generated - who would want to live in the universe of Ardour-3, Byron and Enlil?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I always suspected that it was more than the chance of character death during character creation and that younger characters by default were pretty green and nearly unplayable.

IDK.

My first Traveller PC back in the 70s was indeed a “casualty” of the ChaGen process. I thought it was a cool mechanic, and that character creation was sort of a minigame in and of itself. It actually hooked me on the game AND quashed certain notions about game balance before they had a chance to form.

 

[Swanosaurus]

I think I never played any edition of Traveller beyond chargen, though I always wanted to ... but yes, it was hard to figure out what kind of campaign to actually play with it, and the trade game is definitely not for me, and I yet have to encounter anyone remotely interested in it.
Another stumbling block is that both the implied and the explicit setting feel very rooted in Asimov/Heinlein to me, and while I respect the classics, I'd love to have a hard-ish science fiction game that takes its cues from more current authors like Ann Leckie or Adrian Tchaikovsky.

On the other hand, I love life-path creation, slow/no progress besides what you learn in-game and the simple resolution system. So I'm very curious about the two new Traveller-adjacent games Mongoose is developing beyond Pioneer and Dark Conspiracy (one, I think, is supposed to be science fiction, I reckon the other will be fantasy).

 

[Autumnal]

@pemerton , your example doing-stuff roundup is amazing. I love that kind of thing in my games. Discussion of related actions is often a goad to my imagination as well as a handy reference.

 

[pemerton]

@pemerton , your example doing-stuff roundup is amazing.

Thank you - very generous. It's all taken from the rules, but put together in a way that (I think) makes it easier to adjudicate situations, both from the "what do the players roll?" perspective and the "what should I, as GM, do next?" perspective.

For me, at least in how I think as a RPGer and how I approach GMing, a lot of RPG rulebooks aren't edited very effectively: stuff that you might need altogether is split up. I like to create my custom edition of the rules that bundles it together in a way that works better for me!

 

[Enaknomolos]

When I came back to the system nearly 10 years ago, with the intention of running it, I had a lot more resources to work with: the notion of "implied setting", for instance; and also all the ideas set out by Vincent Baker in Apocalypse World (and his design blogs/essays over the preceding 10 years). I'd always thought of Traveller as a very simulationist system, but looking at it through the lens of Apocalypse World helped me see it in terms of "if you do it, you do it" - with the GM making moves in response, within the parameters established by the relevant resolution systems and the setting that they help to imply.

I think this is exactly right. There's a reason why Traveller is the first system Ron Edwards mentioned in the intro to Sorcerer, and why a bunch of Trav fans were so enthusiastic about FATE that they made Diaspora. The core game lends itself extremely well to loosely structured narrative play.

It's true that there are about 10,000 different simmy modules you can add to the game if you want, but they're all just that - optional modules you can ignore. I think GDW knew that - that's why they were happy to give so many different possible ways of, for instance, resolving starship combat. I think it's unfortunate that succesive editions have failed emphasise this in the core books.

On trade, the Classic Traveller rules are more streamlined. If you're looking for a cargo, then you role d66 to determine what the best available trade good 'available for the purpose' is. It would probably be easy to do something similar with the Mongoose tables, for those that prefer that system.

For those that want something more narrative, there's also the BITS supplement 101 Cargoes (reprinted in 1st ed Mongoose supplement 13) which adds narrative complications to a bunch of cargoes.

 

[Parmandur]

I've read very little sci-fi, but when I first encountered Traveller (in the late 70s, so I was fairly young) it didn't match the sci-fi I was familiar with: Star Wars, Star Trek, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Marvel Comics. When I cam back to it more recently, I told my players (a couple of whom work in the tech industry, one as a fairly serious electrical engineer) that they had to imagine that all the effort that in our world has gone into infotech improvement, in the Traveller universe went into developing fusion and warp drives.

I was a weird kid in the 90s on terms of my readong choices, so I was pretty familiar with the influences on Traveller. The fact that Star Wars came out about the same time it went to the printers is perhaps another reason for it's lack of deeper penetrstion into the RPG zeitgeist: it does. Avery good job imitating sci-fi genre material that went out of style around 1978, and was probavly pretty niche prior to that.

Mongoose sort of moves the clock forward on tech in-setting, every edition of Traveller sort of subtly readjuated that.

 

[dragoner]

The original edition is still available for free: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/355200/classic-traveller-facsimile-edition

Back in 1979 I was very familiar with the influences: Asimov, Tubb, Piper, Vance, etc. it was the RPG of the dime store sci-fi book carousel, and Saturday afternoon sci-fi film on TV.