Traveller General: You can't teach an old Vargr new skills

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If you're looking for me
Better ask some Swordies
Because that is how you'll find me

Swoooord Woooorlds
Shit's named after Wagner
Swooooord Woooorlds
And also sometimes Nazis
Swooooord Woooorlds

> absolutely correct and unironic representation of the sword worlds.

Also don't forget darrians, guys basically blew up their home system, for science !

Still a better depiction than in GURPS Sword Worlds.

What's your prefered Traveller ships Veeky Forums?

The humble scout ship is both an excellent conveyance for small parties, and a ready-made plot hook, since it's owner has agreed to be given charge of the ship as part of "detached duty" meaning the Scout Service can nag him to do stuff for as long as he doesn't return it.
But that's the GM in me talking, I love gifts with a cost.

Good ol' Fat Trader. Can't go wrong.

I like that, it's a good way to give PC a ship and to control them better.

"Gifts with a cost" is the whole point of Traveller, though.

Whenever I need to describe it to someone, I say "Alright, so you've got a spaceship, but in order to afford it you had to take out a mortgage". If they can dig that, they can dig Traveller.

Jump-1

I wouldn't say it's the WHOLE point. It is a running theme, though, which may be why I like it so much.
I prefer to make them work for a ship rather than give them one -- they appreciate it more when they've had to hoof it for a while.

I don't think I've ever played a Traveller game where we didn't either start with a ship or obtain one inside the first session.

I can look at it intellectually and say "yeah, sure, have some sessions on one planet before you get a ship" but on a purely instinctive level, for me Traveller=spaceships.

Give it a try sometime, the vagrant life is entertaining too. Scraping up money for tickets, trying to get a working passage, trying not to get hosed in the deal, getting sent to another planet to do some dirty deed only to find that your return trip didn't show, needing to find a way to get off planet discreetly before the authorities catch you, knowing that a really uptight ship's captain might report you just for asking for unlisted passage.

Forgot the picture.

You know, that could be a really interesting campaign. You could compete with each other for who can hide the most stuff in weird places on your person. Every time you hop off at a new world it'd be like, "Man, are you a bit taller?" "Naw, I stuffed the soles of my shoes full of SKUB to smuggle it in and sell for profit. They're actually pretty comfy."

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I'm the only one underwhelmed be the Droynes being the ancients?

Frankly, I consider the ancients as a whole to be totally possible to do without. Even on the rare occasions when they're relevant, you could just pick one of the other races and go "yeah they did it".

They are good to have the occasional "you've never seen anything this advanced ever" objects, or to have a reason for research bases to exist in the middle of nowhere.

Solmani ships, Terran pride galaxy wide.

I kinda like the Tarsus Adventure, it's a module written with the idea of having an entire campaign on a single planet. Reward at the end is a 1000+ year old Sword World initial colony phase era 400t "cruiser" they find in some old forgotten bunker. Good luck finding spare parts for that thing.

ANIMAL-CLASS SAFARI SHIP, BITCHES

Asteroid ship, comes with free frozen loli.

What books have good pics from the solomani ships? Because the web isn't being very helpful finding good pics.

So you must have been pretty happy when Mongoose 2e included them in the core book.

GURPS Rim of Fire and the Alien Module for Solomani (the pic in the other user's post was from the latter). I always liked the Courier myself.

I've not read MgT2E user, but yes that is nice to hear. Are Hunters back? I will a little miffed they removed them as a class originally.

No hunters, I'm afraid.

On the whole, I'd recommend taking a look at it. It's just much a much nicer book than Mongoose 1e. They've remembered to actually have production values.

Dateline: Regina, 1117: Illegal quxozimat fishermen busted by Department of Sentient Molluscs raid, subscribe to read more

The shellfish anti-defamation league will be up in arms!

The Sol Courier is a great ship and outperforms the Imp Scout/Courier in every way except cost; 50% performance increase comes at a 200% price increase. Also it looks like an oversized B-Wing.

My favorite is Sol the Free Trader, mostly because of the bridge doubling as the ship's launch. I like ships with a unique gimmick.

But mostly I like the solomani ships because they're human built but not imperial built. Everyone flies a Suleiman Scout/Courier or a Beowulf Free Trader because they're iconic and by the setting they're the most common ships in space. Also Solomani ships aren't optimal for their jobs, in that they're not 100ton variants with varying cargo/jump/maneuver drives like the Imperial standards.

On the other hand I doubt anyone would have trouble finding a replacement part for the bog standard TL 12 Suleiman S/C that's been in non stop production for that past few thousand years.

>But mostly I like the solomani ships because they're human built but not imperial built.
One of the books (I think it's either the BiTS or GURPS ship expansions) paints a picture of Solomani ships being cramped, smelly and generally on a par with stuff like the Nostromo in Aliens. It comes from that later view of the Solomani as quasi-Nazi/Soviet types but I did like it, because it reflects the idiosyncrasy of Terrans, and the way we LIKE our ships cramped and smelly because they've always been that way.

I wasn't aware having cramped and smelly ships was associated with the Nazis or Soviets.

I mean, sure, the U-Boats are famous, but I don't think there's any submarine that's actually pleasant to be in.

It's definitely a Soviet thing, that's for sure. British crews who did tours in their subs in WW2 were horrified at the state of them. But what (I think) I was getting at was that the Sollys came to be depicted as some kind of villain, and were given villainous trappings like gloomy spaceships (see also: the Klingons).

Right, now I get you.

>I don't think there's any submarine that's actually pleasant to be in
Nemo would like a word with you...

Depending on whether you were crew or a "guest", that would be a pretty creepy place in itself, user

I remember liking that film as a little babby user. Then again, babby user also quite liked Van Helsing. I rewatched that with a friend recently and HOLY SHIT is it a bad movie. It's woeful.

Its so bad it killed Sean Connery's career

This looks pretty comfy

What kind of campaign do you guys enjoy the most? I really like space based ones, specially Merc/pirate/privateers themes with spaceships of little tonnage.

What are the best books than have a traveller feel?
The vatta wars books for example reminded me to a traveller campaing with an ansible.

The Mote in God's Eye. It has the "Landed gentry in spaaaaace" themes you get at the higher levels of the Imperium, and I'm pretty sure the main ship's forcefields directly inspired Traveller's Black Globe Generators.

I have to read that one.

The Droyne are the remnant of Ancients, which is a bit different. And they're probably not the only Ancients that were, just the most prominent. (If you ask me, Grandfather is a liar, weaving some nice pat story for his grandkids)

If you haven't read Agent of the Imperium, do so, it's pretty damn good.
Poul Anderson's Dumarest series was one of the inspirations for Traveller, though Dumarest himself is more of a government troubleshooter than itinerant spacer. There's a couple of them up in the archives.
Eric Frank Russell's Wasp is a great old SF espionage book, also in the archive. It's a little obscure these days, but was well regarded at the time, and has some really brilliant bits. The aliens are basically humans with funny foreheads, though, which is a bit hokey. (I suspect if Mr. Russell had set it in East Germany instead of outer space it probably would today be regarded as a classic in the espionage field.)

It's a fantastic book, though I'd say it's overrated when some folks call it the greatest sci-fi book ever written.
Also I can't reread it anymore without seeing it as Jerry Pournelle Presents: The Menace of the Space Mexicans!
Gotta build that wall or they'll overrun us and put neon lights on the underside of our spaceships, man. They're a bigger threat than the robot nazis! We need a strong border patrol to protect us from the little brown guys that breed like rabbits and are constantly having wars and revolutions!

I had never made the Mexican connection before, and frankly I don't think I ever would have if you hadn't suggested it. Maybe you're just preoccupied with them?

It just occurred to me while I was reading it for the third time, (I really do like the book) and was a "cannot unsee" moment. Knowing more than I'd like about Pournelle's politics, I can tell you it's not a stretch for him to (knowingly or unknowingly) have made a parable about how we need strong immigration controls to keep Them out or else They will come here, outbreed us into a minority, and turn Our place into an overpopulated war-torn shithole like Where They Come From.
Now I can't think of the Moties without them wearing sombreros and laughing my ass off.
Niven probably had nothing to do with it. He's a sweet guy, but to be honest, I don't think he's had an idea all on his own since 1976. He's an expert recycler of ideas, but not an originator.

I don't know anything about either of them as people, so fair enough.

Isn't it a shame when talented authors turn out to be dingbats?

So exactly how crunchy is Classic Traveller? How advanced are the calculations, and how frequently do they have to be performed?

I hate crunchy as in "complicated buildgame", but on the other hand I'm one of those guys who chuckles at the >differential calculus meme about GURPS, on the grounds that compared to integral calculus, differential calculus is easy and straightforward.

Depends a bit on which Classic you go for. Starter Traveller is pretty light, especially since it swaps out the old book 2 vector-based ship combat for an abstract range-band one. (It also shaves down a few other bits, but that's minor.)
With just the core books, it'd mildly crunchy. Most of the crunch is tools for the GM to generate stuff, for players it's pretty light overall.

Damn, there's a lotta shit here. Where should I start?

The folder named Core Books, of course.

Ah, GDW - Core Books, not just Core books. I see it now. Thanks!

Grab The Traveller Book and/or Starter Traveller. Grab extra core books for anything you think is important (Scouts or Robots or what have you) though be aware some of them have careers that use the Advanced chargen which takes longer and makes stronger characters than the Basic chargen found in the core rules and Supplement 4: Citizen of the Imperium.

Check out Rule68A for a bit of rules explication on how rulings work -- if you want a more structured task resolution, use the Universal Task Profile or Universal Game Mechanic.

Look through the supplements, there's good stuff in there. The aforementioned Citizens has good stuff, as does 76 Patrons and Traders and Gunboats.
Under Games Modules, I'd modestly recommend Snapshot, which translates basic combat onto a grid for indoor combat -- if you like that sort of thing, it's fun. It will slow combat down, but also make it a touch less immediately fatal.

Third party stuff is sorted by publisher, 'cause it's a natural fit what with the old Land Grant thing where each publisher got its very own sector to publish stuff for:
FASA does some of the best third party stuff. Cargonaut, Gamelords and Paranoia are pretty good. The Marischal sector is largely by J. Andrew Keith, who's also behind some of FASA's best stuff. (Anything with one of the Keith brothers behind it is going to be decent at least) Group 1 has some faintly 2000AD type stuff, a little out there from stock Traveller, but interesting. Judge's Guild's work is kind of crappy, but they were clever enough to combine the range and armor tables into one for their referee's screen, which is nice.

I've got a question. Is there a source for names for the nonhuman races?

As in vargr names, aslan names ect.

Not that I'm aware of. The old books have a way to randomly generate words in Aslan, Vargr, and other languages from some tables and rules. Weird, but kinda fun.

Would this work for you?

spacecorsair.com/wordgen.html

Neat! The sentence generator seems to use too many polysyllabic words, but it's still pretty handy.

Repostan this

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>Also don't forget darrians, guys basically blew up their home system, for science !
There's an adventure where you can find out exactly how they did make their stellar bomb. Probe sent to get readings from their sun's core, low tech and any empire capable of space travel can make one. Learning that secret puts the player in a very big danger because every intelligence agency will want to learn it, and then the galaxy will have a very short life once the secret gets out.

What books do you prefer to use for making space ships? I'm starting traveller and the new high guard is interesting, but perhaps the older ones are easier to use or have more options so I'm interested in opinions.

I like the mongoose stuff, classic but cleaned up.

Megatraveller has more detailed rules but I don't think it helps the game. Then there's TNE, 4th, 5th... getting progressively more complicated and difficult to use or even read.

How would you guys handle interspecies love?

If I have a humanoid race that came to be in similar environments as humans, would it be plausible that they could, you know, get together? Even in star trek the klingons were able to copulate with humans, even though the pregnancies were difficult iirc

Is moongose 2nd edition good or is better the first? Or are more or less the same.

Well, in Star Trek, humans and klingons (and most other humanoid races) are sort of related due to meddling by Trek's own ancients. That's not quite true in the OTU. There are a lot of human subtypes, who would be cross-fertile, but beyond that pretty much nothing like that's gonna work.
That doesn't mean it can't in your Traveller universe, where you could say "you're fertile, midichlorians did it" or whatever, or go halfway and say they'd have to spend a year or two travelling out past the frontier to find the mysterious alien masters of bio-engineering to get your weird cross-species baby, complete with g-engineered womb interface layer so she can carry it to term like it was all biological and shit.

It's prettier, I don't know about better. It looks to me like it's MGP's usual practice of "change some things, seemingly at random, and ship it."

I use classic's High Guard. MGT1's High Guard as a whole left me unimpressed, but the shipbuilding part seemed solid. I haven't read MGT2's High Guard yet, but some folks in past threads said it's got some problems vs 1e.

Ok, so it would be easy to use MT1 for MT2.
What problems? Any old guard said them?

>Ok, so it would be easy to use MT1 for MT2.

Shouldn't cause any problems, I don't think. There might be differences in what builds are "valid" under one system or another, but the High Guard statistics themselves are basically the same as they've ever been, so it should be compatible with all the ships that have been built over the years.

>What problems? Any old guard said them?

You'd have to dig through the archives for the old threads from a couple of months back, but there was some detailed discussion of stuff involving engines and power requirements and so forth.

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> Probe sent to get readings from their sun's core, low tech and any empire capable of space travel can make one.

Not exactly and definitely not low tech. It was the probe's cooling plume interfering with a twin meson beam interferometry experiment.

> Learning that secret puts the player in a very big danger because every intelligence agency will want to learn it, and then the galaxy will have a very short life once the secret gets out.

It does make the players targets of everyone, but the tech is an "I'll Kill Both Of Us" weapon because it also somehow fucks up systems 10+ parsecs away from the actual target.

MAD seems to work in the OTU, otherwise near-c rocks would have smeared everyone by now.

>How would you guys handle interspecies love?

I'd tell the player who raised the idea to go play Albedo and then kick their "furry" ass out. I'd then use the idea for laughs and an indication of an NPC's profound psychiatric issues.

Let's face it. People who insist on inserting sexual situations in RPGs are people who aren't getting any in real life and people who insist on inserting weird sex are merely being weird for weird's sake.

>What books do you prefer to use for making space ships?

I use Classic's High Guard because it gives a solid base I can then detail or not depending on the group's needs/desires.

>otherwise near-c rocks would have smeared everyone by now.

Well, that's assuming you can get near-c from maneuver drives. If they lose efficiency as you gain speed relative to the nearest gravity well (and we know gravity wells affect the older grav drives that preceded the M-drive) then you'd find your acceleration falls off before you get to high relativistic velocities.

[No fun allowed intensifies]

Not everything is because of a fetish, dude. What he's talking about's a venerable old staple of sci-fi, and space opera especially.

>Well, that's assuming you can get near-c from maneuver drives.

They needn't even be near-c. Plain old kinetic bombardment works just as well. "Agent of the Imperium" actually has warships called "Sieges" which do just that it. Yet the 3I hasn't smeared Cipango, Gram, and Home. The Zhos haven't smeared Regina, Mora, and Rhylanor. The Swords haven't smeared Lunion. the Darrians haven't smeared Narsil, the Sollies haven't smeared Dingor etc. etc. etc.

MAD seems to work in the OTU

>[No fun allowed intensifies]

More like "No Fucking Freaks, Thank You."

>Not everything is because of a fetish, dude.

In this case, yes it very much is.

>What he's talking about's a venerable old staple of sci-fi, and space opera especially.

Which can and has been be met in the OTU with the dozens of human minor races.

>More like "No Fucking Freaks, Thank You."

You sound like an unpleasant person to game with.

>In this case, yes it very much is.

And that's a lot of >inferring you're doing there. As was pointed out, they did it on Star Trek all the time. Are you saying you'd kick the Trek writers out of your table for being "fucking freaks?"

Okay so I have a LFG running for MTraveller 1E and the first player to join directly asks why I'm not using 2E.

Up till now i disliked 2E for the chasgrab marketing of "put ship construction in high guard", the seemingly half heartet boon/bane system and the fact that it somehow still managed to be 60 pages longer.

Am I missing out ?

Also
>2E's equipment is more balanced.
So It's a bad thing that metal plate armor is not effectiv in a sci-fi setting ?

>Am I missing out ?

I don't think so. It's not like a huge improvement or anything.
Maybe grab the pdf from the archives and give it a skim, though, so you can at least say you looked before you tell him "we're playing MGT1, like it or lump it"

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Nice quality of this piece.
What other alien races do you guys like to use? I tend to fall for babylon 5 ones and Star wars.

I like the minor races in the GURPS Traveller books, but I try not to do races from recognizable franchises. (I will steal from classic SF I know nobody's read but me, though)

It mostly comes down to taste IMO. There are some things that are slightly better in 2e, some weird things (introducing radiation damage & protection in combat just so they can tack it on 1-2 weapons). IMO there's not really any bad changes, just odd ones & stuff that's different for difference's sake (changing task difficulty from a modifier to a shifting target for example). Boon/bane is imo was put in there because they went something like this: "D&D 5e's advantage/disadvantage seems popular, why don't we put that in?"

Overall I like 1e better, but 2e is neither a good or nor a bad choice. It's just different.

I don't export them 100%100, but for example a marsupial war-like race inspired in the Narn exist. The setting has a scale a lot lower than the third empire.

Destructor bump.

What are the best zines ?

Well, JTAS is a goldmine obviously, but looking past the official one, there are some standouts. Freelance Traveller is excellent. High quality, long running, and full of all sorts of good stuff.
Travellers' Digest was pretty good too, run by the folks at DGP who gave us might-as-well-be-canon stuff like the Grand Census book back in the CT days.
High Passage was FASA's house magazine, and while it doesn't seem to have lasted very long, its contents are up to FASA's usual fairly high standards.

That said, even the minor ones sometimes have a gem in them. Pic related.

Sweet, I will get the fasa ones, I liked some of they stuff.