Traveller is a classic science fiction system first released in 1976. In its original release it was a general purpose SF system, but a setting was soon developed called The Third Imperium, based on classic space opera tropes of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, with a slight noir tint. Though it can support a wide range of game types, the classic campaign involves a group of retired veterans tooling around in a spaceship, taking whatever jobs they can find in a desperate bid to stay in business, a la Firefly or Cowboy Bebop.
So anyway, as it turns out Spinward Traveller was just a scam, but I've been watching this low-budget show called Dark Matter recently and it's almost like we got a Traveller TV series anyway. The jump drive works differently, but the setting is very similar to the Solomani Rim, with the Galactic Authority in place of the Imperium, and various megacorps and rebel factions vying for power. The basic premise is that six people wake up from cryo on a small vessel, their memories lost due to some kind of malfunction. They soon find out that they were a band of cutthroat mercenaries wanted for all sorts of crimes, and that there was no malfunction -- one of the crew deliberately wiped their memories.
Easton Cook
I found scans of a bunch of the Group 1 publications the other day. Theta Borealis sector is weird.
Ryder Ross
Dark Matter is fucking awesome. Four is probably one of the baddest asses on any scifi show ever.
>Three: "So you're with me on this right? No connections between us, so we sell the ship and go our separate ways." >Four: "No. We don't have enough information to move forward. We stick together until we do. >*pause* >Four: "Besides. I wouldn't sell the ship. I'd take it. For myself."
Isaac Long
More Group 1.
Oliver Hill
...
Adrian Wilson
Is there a PDF the summarizes the setting, Imperium or whatever, in a quick & dirty fashion without going into autistic million-planet stats and such?
Joseph Perez
...
Aaron Gutierrez
The MGT Spinward Marches book gives an acceptable overview, though the artwork is poor and still has the Aslan looking a less alien than they should.
Jonathan Howard
...
Hunter Evans
OK, thanks, I'll take a look at it. I just wanted a short synopsis of what the Traveller setting is like, without all the detail I seem to find on all the Traveller websites and PDF collections.
Matthew Roberts
Looks like I can't upload the maps, they're tif files. I'll have to do those separately.
Nathaniel Sullivan
Group 1 was a third party publisher that was given the distant Theta Borealis sector to publish material for. All this stuff is long out of print and hard to find.
From Freelance Traveller: >Theta Borealis Sector. The most far flung of all the Traveller campaign sectors is the Theta Borealis Sector, which was the land grant of Group One, another of the Traveller publishers of the 1980s. It's located five sectors spinward of the Third Imperium and two sectors rimward of the Zhodani Consulate, in a sector so far from the rest of the Traveller Universe that I'm not sure you could even call it part of Charted Space. >I suppose if you want a sector that doesn't have any of the traditional issues of the Third Imperium,you could go with this area, which was detailed through a number of world books and some ship-based adventures, all of which were connected together in the sector booklet, Theta Borealis Sector—but I've never seen most of the Group One books in my years of collecting Traveller.
Adam Brooks
...
Carson Reed
...
Nicholas Brooks
Man, some of these covers are so damn cool.
Levi Hill
Dangit, I accidentally the file.
Austin Rogers
...
Joshua Garcia
...
Brayden Reed
...
Jaxson Cruz
Last one I can post here, the remaining module, Hydronaut, is going with the maps up on uploadmb in a few minutes.
Matthew Johnson
Here we go, Hydronaut, and planetary maps for all the above.
Man, Classic Traveller was a... different... time. Hoo boy.
I wonder if our era of stuff will look this way to people when a similar interval of time has elapsed?
Carson Price
What about the New stuff? Are there any new books other than the 'core'?
Thomas Fisher
Okay, that's updated.
Keep in mind this is third party stuff from 1980 by a minor publisher, who went out of business. Shoestring budgets and all. Still, that's some unusual artwork there. I'm torn whether my favorite cover of these is Lomodo or Nystalux.
You mean MGT 2e? There's a couple of books out. I personally prefer Classic, largely because of Mongoose's poor editing. You'll find errors here and there in Classic stuff, but Mongoose is on a whole other level. Still, Mongoose and Classic are very similar, so it's generally easy to translate stuff between the two. The only real hangup is Mongoose switched its armor system to damage reduction instead of hit deflection, in keeping with recent unrealistic trends, so you have to translate some of the armor and weapon stuff. Oh, and characters are more powerful in MGT, more in line with the extended chargen from some of Classic's supplements.
Jordan Jenkins
I play GURPS. I just like having a shit-ton of books to compare one to the other. And I like the pretty pictures. MGT 2e had REAL pretty pictures.
Jace Collins
The synopsis in the basic GURPS Traveller book is a bit shorter and very good.
The setting emerged from post-WWII SF for the most part, though there is still a little Lensman and Family D'Alembert in there. With that understanding, it will also happily support post-Star Wars movie and TV SF play styles, as it is intended, in most editions, to be tool boxy enough that making up shit as you go along has lots of support. Missing a particular toy from a TV show? TLAR that thing.
The setting encompasses about 200 years in good detail some 3000 years in less detail, another 7000 as an overview, and a pre-history going back 300,000 years that is, understandably, mostly a mystery.
Different eras encourage different styles of play and in-setting narrative, though not all have been properly handled by the teams that wrote for them.
Joshua Reed
...
Leo Brown
Anyone know where to find the late-80s Megatraveller Imperial Encyclopedia? Everywhere I'm looking just has the other two core books, Players Manual and Referees Manual.
Easton King
...
Austin Reyes
I've got that, though it's kind of massive at 48 megs -- it needs an OCR, because it's just images right now. I'll upload it in a minute. Here's my Megatraveller directory if you're looking for anything else:
>Tiffany Star 00.pdf A bunch of these are on one of the old archive sites. They useful or just a completist thing?
David Fisher
Hey, new to traveller. If I wanted to DM a campaign with players on a ship as they travel the cosmos and deal with problems between crew members, what with a fuck huge ship as well, would it be better to use Mongoose or Classic?
Either one is fine. If it's a "fuckhuge" ship, the way I'd do it is that I'd use Classic with just the basic chargen (because it's faster) and then let players sit down at the table and generate a nice set of crew members that they could pick and choose from for various missions. Sort of an ensemble cast thing. If some of them die, you draw from the remaining crew, and when that stock starts to get low you have the table spend a few minutes next session generating a few more.
Caleb Rogers
I don't know, I haven't really looked at it.
Christian Cox
My goal is to kinda make it as if my players are on board a large ship, just as if they're people living on board a ship out of Battletech or Halo. They could be doctors or pilots or marines etc...
Michael Robinson
Either is fine, though you might want to look at bits of other editions for assistance. The late MegaTraveller adventure Arrival Vengeance is a big ship on a mission adventure, and talks about ways to play that. It also has a big ship, the Lightning class Cruiser. This ship has a larger set of plans in a boxed set for CT ("Azhanti High Lightning") in case you want to have the occasional problem onboard.
Real cosmos exploring, where-no-one-you-know-has-gone-before style, requires heading for the edge of the map, assuming you use the default setting, or playing in an era of that setting where things have gone to hell and your old information is no longer reliable.
Alternately you can use another type of FTL and head for the far stars.
Austin Edwards
Yeah, you can do that with either edition just fine. Classic with Citizens of the Imperium will cover all your bases. Mongoose Core is pretty good, but you might want to grab a few careers from the Spica Career books. Those are a bit uneven, but generally pretty decent.
Michael Bennett
This type of game can change a lot based on what that large ship is doing. Active military can range from the wartime pressure cooker of the new Galactica to the gunboat recon of Star Trek, and a few modes in between; a big commercial ship can be Quark, Red Dwarf, or The Love Boat, or something a little more serious
Levi Rogers
>user delivers
Thank you!
Looks like I'm good on the rest of your list. Hopefully, one of the OP folder maintainers will add the Encyclopedia to their Megatraveller stuff, so no one else will have to ask...
Except I'm probably the only one who plays MT: everybody else is either classic or Mongoose...
Adam Hall
A Lightning
Jackson Williams
There are certainly MT players out there. It has its issues, but so does every other edition.
Jack Wood
Or, utter peacetime mission, where the adventure is personal drama among the crew, with the occasional temporary deployment or shore leave.
Hudson Hall
It takes the right Ref AND players, but is a viable mode of play.
Angel Gray
The plot as I see it consists of the payers playing out the usual hands as crewmenbers, maybe redshirts, until they get pulled out of warp and into battle, where they barely survive. Did the engine malfunction or was it sabotage? We're the intelligence spooks up to something or potential mutiny? Where do we find replacement materials? Where are we now; how to get home?
How would these work?
Chase Edwards
You might want to read "The Long Way Home", one of the few really good bits to come out of the T4 and T20 period. Much smaller ship, though.
Jose Bailey
Misjumps are a thing in Traveller canon. You can wind up 36 hops away from your departure point just by the roll of the dice. Further jumps may also be possible, especially if you throw in psionics or some weird experimental tech. It's a big galaxy, and there's a load of unexplored space. Pic related, it's the reach of Charted Space in the official setting. Outside the zone once controlled by the Ancients, you'll find no more humans, but a load of minor races stuck with slower than light drives.
David Taylor
>You can wind up 36 hops away Hop is, as of T5, a different drive than Jump. Hop-1 is ten parsecs (hexes on the sector maps), so a Hop-36 misjump is a looong way out.
Daniel Flores
What's T4? Is it like how DND has 3e, 5e, etc?
Jumps are funky eh? I can get behind that.
Jack Nelson
But if the misjump was accidental, there won't be ships waiting there to attack you. You're in a giant void, a year, year and a half normal-space travel from anywhere inhabited. Nobody's gonna be there unless they were expecting YOU to be there. So, sabotage, most likely.
Getting back? If the jump drive doesn't work, and you can't capture/salvage one of your attackers ships, you put everybody in cold sleep, put out a distress call, point the ship towards the nearest friendly world, and hope they rescue you before your power plant runs out of fuel.
Elijah Hall
>as of T5
I haven't read it, but I might.
Traveller suffered from a crazy edition bloat for a while. Pic related.
It goes: Classic Traveller (1977) MegaTraveller (1987) Traveller: The New Era (1993) Traveller4 (1996) GURPS Traveller, which is the setting in GURPS TravellerHERO, which the same in the HERO system T20, which is an awful D20 version because everyone was doing it MGT, the Mongoose one T5 which was a trainwreck MGT2, the second edition of Mongoose, coming out now
Aaron Martinez
>What's T4? There are nine editions of Traveller. Each uses a different core mechanic, though several are related. As a general rule, subsystems like starships and world building can cross-pollenate.
CT = Classic Traveller (and actually two editions all by itself) MT = MegaTraveller TNE = Traveller The New Era T4 = "Marc Miller's Traveller", dates from the mid to late 90s, and had a very short run T20 = Traveller20, designed to somehow take advantage of the D20 thing; before D20Modern came along GT = GURPS Traveller TH = Traveller Hero MGT = Mongoose Traveller, now in a second edition itself T5 = Traveller 5
Brayden Perez
>as of T5 >I haven't read it, but I might. The hardcover is a bit of a train wreck. The current "5.09" revision is much easier to absorb.
Tyler Anderson
>there won't be ships waiting there to attack you.
Depends on where you go. Due to the cost of fueling and moving large ships, major powers like the Imperium and Zhodane will keep them spread around in various systems until a war breaks out and they get moved toward the front. If you ended up in somebody's back yard they may attack you, especially if they're interdicting that system for some reason.
If you've jumped into some old minor race's home turf, you may have a lot of exotically armed system defense boats coming at you hoping to steal the awesome FTL tech you so obviously have -- a race without FTL might spend centuries exploiting its own star system, including having interplanetary wars in their own back yard. That can be a nasty surprise waiting for Scouts and other explorers.
Benjamin Scott
Misjumps are also hard on the drives, and sometimes on the crew.
Leo Jackson
>but a load of minor races stuck with slower than light drives.
Good thing, too, given that the Imperium just happens to occupy a huge choke point between the tow halves of the spiral arm.
Joshua Kelly
It's possible to cross the gap in various spots despite the scarcity of stars. The Aslan have found their own little corridor through the Riftspan Reaches, while the K'Kree have moved through to press the Vargr on their Trailing edge.
Jace Fisher
Going to be house sitting in a cabin in west virginia for like 2 months with shit internet and looking for some stuff to do.
What books do I need to play Traveler alone?
Christian Kelly
Classic Traveller books 1-3 (the core rules)
There are random tables for sector generation, merchant ship cargoes, spaceship encounters, animal, people encounters, and patrons for one-shot adventures. It's honestly one of the best games for solo play.
Citizens of the Imperium lets you generate civilian NPCs, and 76 Patrons is basically a book of mini adventures. Spinward Marches or Solomani Rim are useful if you don't want to build your own sector from scratch.
Gavin Rivera
The long-standing solo modes for Traveller include ship building, world building, character/crew building (chargen being a sub-game in many editions: survive to retirement!), and then using those things to solo the merchant game, speculating on cargo, filling the gaps with freight and mail, and seeing if you can make enough profit to stay ahead of the bank and keep flying.
Nearly any core book or set will allow this, though a few editions have bumped ship building to a separate book.
Aiden Reed
Thanks.
Last time I agreed to do this, I read the series of books I brought with me in the first 10 days and took to making tooth picks and screwing with people down the mountain with a ghillie suit.
Jason Jenkins
Depends on what you want to do. If you like wargaming, there's plenty of stuff to do on that end with the various rules for combat. Striker has support for minis, so you can set up a battlefield in one room of the cabin and play space general.
A merchant ship game can easily be done solo. I'd suggest getting Merchant Prince from Classic, or maybe getting the GURPS Far Trader book and using its trade rules, which are allegedly the best, according to some guy on the internet. (The standard trading rules in Classic and Mongoose are a bit thin; they assume you're not going to go into trading seriously, and so you wind up with stuff like golden pairs where you can just fly back and forth between two stars and have a guaranteed profit forever. Fine if trading's just an adjunct to adventure, but not enough if it's the main deal.)
If you want an adventure I'd suggest getting a GM emulator to handle that, like Mythic, CRGE, or one of the other ones. The published adventures for Classic could be used with that, as most of them are basically skeletons that a GM has to flesh out himself, leaving plenty for the GME to do.
Mason Young
>Striker has support for minis, so you can set up a battlefield in one room of the cabin and play space general. Well, Space Captain. Striker is basically an RPG for Captains and Lieutenants. You give your troops orders, then the game handles the question of whether or not your troops got enough of their self preservation trained out of them. Playable solo with a little more OpFor setup.
Gavin Myers
Cool, I haven't read Striker yet, so I didn't know how broad it got. I know you can be space admiralty with Fifth Frontier War, though.
Lincoln Harris
Striker also hits the "Design Stuff" solo button, as it has the earliest version of the vehicle construction rules. It can build a wide variety of military hardware and *emulate* modern stuff as that term was defined at the time. Don;t expect it to match weights and fuel durations with real life, though. Thirty pages of frames and components is just not the same as a century of mechanical engineers tinkering with gear ratios, funky armor ideas, and stupid design decisions fixed by the guy on the front who has already lost a crew to the mistake...
Liam Sanders
Fifth Frontier War, Dark Nebula, Invasion: Earth, and Imperium
Nathan Ramirez
...
Cooper Hill
...
Parker Reed
...
Camden Parker
...
Liam Brown
Anyone wanting to do Solo Traveller should look at this
Dylan Ortiz
...
Elijah Hernandez
Anyone know if there's a MgT version of this here fighter?
Both forgetting the second GURPS Traveller edition? Shame. GURPS Traveller Interstellar Wars is a new edition! Was a new edition. RIP GURPS Traveller. :(
I play CT, but GT1 has an entire supplement about the modular cutter. It's beautiful.
Ryan Jenkins
May as well ask while this thread lives - anyone have PDFs of the 1977 edition of Classic Traveller? The original versions of LBB 1-3, with less references to some weird "third imperium" nonsense, and slightly different ship design rules.
Joseph Cox
The GURPS4 book for Traveller is in the same "sort of" position as Mongoose 2e and CT1977v1981.
Nicholas Rivera
Ignore Peter Gray. Look at the original
Camden Cox
And the art.
Henry Lee
Does anyone have a pic of a Corsair that actually looks like a corsair (i.e. not the pic in Mongoose 1E)? That's the ship my players got for our upcoming campaign and I'd like to be able to see what it looks like.
Chase Ross
I'd definitely call both GTIW and RTT2 new editions. 77/81, less so, but you could argue it.
All pales before the clusterfuck of T5, anyway.
You want a piece of art... that matches the ship's stats? And plausible deckplans, I assume? I mean, best of luck, and the Corsair is _relatively_ sane compared to something like the mercball, but good luck. Really. You'll need it.
(deckplans, art and stats are only loosely connected to each other and any notion of reality)
Interesting that the later version had two extra crew and a stateroom. Maybe a long range version that didn't have to run back to the carrier after a dogfight?
It's a pretty standard 50-t, 6g fighter. Just build it in your edition's ship construction rules and see what you get?
Levi Morgan
>You want a piece of art... that matches the ship's stats? And plausible deckplans, I assume? The Corsair has relatively consistent art from CT/MT and GT, but like most ships is going to vary a bit.
The one part of the original description that really doesn't stand up is the ability to dock a Scout ship internally. Nothing you try will make it not look like a snake that swallowed a speedboat.
Samuel King
Not sure about the utility of a ship that effectively has "I AM A PIRATE" painted on its side. A surplus patrol cruiser, or a standard merchant ship with engine and armament improvements would make more sense.
Possibly the original hull was a low-end patrol/system defense design the Navy sold cheap to planetary governments, so that's what the pirates had to work with?
Michael Perez
50 tons leaves a lot of space for extras, depending on your design system.
Nathan Rogers
How would I go about statting the volume of an internal mall, Veeky Forums?
I'm trying to make the equivalent of a modern luxury sea liner for MgT, and, never having been on one myself, took to looking at pictures of them. Turns out a lot of them have a setup where there's a huge central mall with a bunch of stuff on it (and empty space) between two "walls" of suites. Would it be sufficient to just convey this as "luxuries"? How should I determine mathematically how large a space it would take up?
William Moore
Given the original spec, it may have started as a Scout design, but I'm inclined to think of it as a multi-purpose design that happens to be decent at pirating. The variable identity features don't mean squat unless there are thousands of these running around in legitimate pursuits per sector to hide amongst. Think of it as an alternate Type R in origins. Fit the bigger drives and fuel and make the stateroom and turret changes, and now its a Corsair.
Carter Hernandez
Luxuries (per MGT) is probably the right way to cost it, but it can literally be however large you have room for.
Asher Bell
Have an amount of empty space equal to the tonnage of whatever staterooms face onto the promenade? If your looking for actual dimensions, a "ton" of space is 13.5 cubic meters, or about 2.3 meters square, with a 2.5 meter ceiling.
If you want an actual shopping mall, just make each "store" the equivalent of 2-3 staterooms.
Tyler Kelly
Okay, thanks! P:
Benjamin Gutierrez
For illustrative purposes, the hotel that one of the conventions I attend has a little shop for soda, candy and travel goods next to Check-In. It's about a half ton (5'x5'). Another hotel has a similar space but about twice that size. A museum gift shop will typically be about one to two staterooms (2 to 8 tons) in size, as well a typical small shop in a modern shopping mall. A typical four anchor shopping mall with two floors, wide promenade, food court, etc is going to run to 30,000 dtons.
Colton Gomez
Thanks! And whoa, that's already well into the capship size for my setting. Though I guess it makes sense; modern pleasure liners are like floating cities unto themselves. I wonder if a smaller megacorp would -have- the dosh to field something that big and still turn a profit after the maintenance/life support fees?
Actually, I wonder about corps and megacorps themselves, a lot. I wish there were some way to get a good grip on just how big a business' budget was based on what they do and what their holdings are like.
Carson Smith
The average subsector will have 2-3 worlds of Pop-9 (4-6 billion, about as populated Earth), plus almost always at least 1 world of Pop-10 (40-60 billion, 10x Earth population). So a full sector of 16 subsectors is going to have ~180x the population and economy of today's Earth. I'd say battleship tonnage cruise ships in space is no big deal.
Your passenger list is likely going to be rich, noble, and/or well connected, which makes it the perfect setting for corporate or political intrigue.
Colton James
Good point. I guess I'm worried mainly because I'm limiting my setting to the Islands, so most corporations will be restricted to 1, maybe 2 worlds, with a handful of "multi-state" corporations. So I was worried they might have a lot less individual resources in comparison to the Imperial megacorps given as examples in the source material, and that their individual capabilities for building ships might be much less, since the average TL in the Islands is about 11.
Nathaniel Reed
Still working on that cruise ship; jesus fuck capships need so much fuel per jump.
