I've got a starship mortgage to pay and you can't jump when travel is restricted. Here's hoping for critical success rolls to those with Science, Medical, and Leader skills so the IISS can lift the interdiction. Red Zone classifications exist for your safety and the safety of others. Traveller Downport is a Web portal gathering together a sizeable number of Traveller sites.Congratulations, traveller! If you are reading this you survived 2020, which reminded us of the dangers of adventuring on a mid TL, balkanized world during a global pandemic. Wikipedia has a good article covering the history of the game, its many and varied editions, and the common elements of the setting.
If you’re looking to get into Traveller for the first time, I’d recommend Mongoose Publishing’s 2008 edition of the game (which is heavily based on Classic Traveller) as a good place to start.
It’s certainly a game I’d be happy to play or run again, which is pretty uncommon for an RPG of this era.ĭriveThruRPG has a wide selection of Traveller PDFs for most editions. But it also felt a long way ahead of its time in some respects, with a pretty uniform task resolution system and limited emphasis on mechanical character advancement. A strange dinosaur of a game that’s somehow survived through several editions, a lot of upheaval in its production, and some weirdly complex elements of its system (I swear it’s the only time I’ve had to calculate a square root as part of an RPG). If you’re willing to improvise a lot, a star map like the one below and a party of suitably inclined PCs could easily provide months of game play. I’ve got notebooks filled with randomly-rolled sectors of space, complete with trade routes, favoured imports and exports, notable locations and the supporting hex maps to go with them. I’ve always liked the exploration and hex-crawl aspects of Traveller. For a kid who was borrowing a lot of Clarke and Asimov from the library at the time, that was a big deal. It was the second sci-fi RPG I encountered (the first being the West End Games’ Star Wars RPG) and certainly the first that left me feeling it could tackle “hard” sci-fi narratives. I’ve only ever managed to run a couple of games of Traveller, and I’ve never actually had the chance to play it, but I’ve got a deep fondness for the game. I’m holding Colonel Hedgewick of the Marines largely responsible for this development, with his 12 ranks in Gambling and very little else to show for his glorious highly decorated seven term military career. While the core storyline of the game was fine, I completely ignored it in favour of shooting aliens and ripping off casinos. Behold the visual majesty of EGA graphics.Īdmittedly, this wasn’t exactly the deepest game play experience in the world.
#Classic traveller rpg Pc
However, I did play a lot of Traveller prior to that, thanks to the MegaTraveller: The Zhodani Conspiracy PC game. I didn’t actually get a physical copy of Traveller until my late teens – which was, through some real luck with the second hand bin in a local games shop, a copy of the original 1977 boxed set pictured above. For three colours and some text, that’s not bad! It’s a great hook into the game, and immediately makes you want to know more about what’s going on. But that cover caught my eye and made me want to pick it up.
The design of the game is pretty minimalist, with maybe two or three piece of art in total across the three books and a lot of tightly-packed text. (Which, in many ways, makes the Rogue Trader RPG a spiritual descendant…) While not the most noble of motivations, it certainly does get the PCs to engage with whatever is going on as long as they can see some profit in it. Cue all kinds of adventures, exploration, heists and trading to cover your costs. For any readers who aren’t familiar with Traveller, it’s a space opera RPG where the PCs are usually a group of ex-military or merchant navy veterans who are desperately trying to make repayments on their ship’s mortgage. Oh Traveller, a game as often discussed for its mechanical quirks like the risk of death in character creation as for its merits. Yes, it’s the Classic Traveller boxed set. We’re going back into the distant mists of RPG history, to 1977 and one of the earliest sci-fi RPGs.
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