Traveller is a classic science fiction system first released in 1968. 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.
Does user typically play the same careers, or do you mix it up?
Luke Evans
Most people I've seen stick to a single career, however I've seen the results of good rolls across multiple careers and it can be quite good.
Personally I prefer to stick to a single career unless I need to move due to failed survival rolls.
Lucas Ortiz
Half my players can't get even get in the career they actually want to so they mix it up.
David Stewart
Kilrathi you mean?
Brandon Martinez
I finally ran a game for my GF last Saturday. It was her first time with any RPG and my first time after a long time as a GM so I was a bit rusty but she had a blast. She wanted to roll a Navy Officer and it went great (low SOC and STR, high INT and EDU), despite failing entry for military academy she managed to get an event with +4 DM to advancement and got comissioned during first term. I accidentally robbed her of few skill points during chargen because i forgot about gaining skills on advencement, but nvm (my first time running Traveller). I started her off with High and Dry, and to supplement her with some different characters for future adventures the ship is owned in parts by her character, some young belter thug, and older-merchant type + two other owners hired a technician to go with them and fix the ship. I streamlined the adventure a bit (I noted some things from it but didn't want to pull out notes all the time) so some plot points like Vargr limo driver went out of the window. My GF turned out to be a very perceptive, she called me out on fudging roll results when she rolled 3 piloting during landing and I just called a broken landing gear. Despite that, she had a blast and we'll probably run another game this weekend. I noted a few possible adventures for a future game: - Murder whodunit in the belter stations of Bowman, - Scouting a rival corporation camp on lush but non inhabited Debarre, - Trade (gun run) visit to medieval world of Faldor.
Thanks for all the anons who advised me last week, and sorry that I didn't listened to you, but chargen is heart and soul of Traveller and even the new player as she was she had a lot of fun.
Michael Watson
Character generation in Traveller is already hip deep in the story your player wants to tell. Players who like that, and female players often do, will dig the process of Traveller character generation.
The process in some editions is just one career and into play, but I've found the multi-career enabled editions (both Mongoose editions, TNE, and an easy switch to flip in CT and MT if you know how Mongoose does it) are that much more immersive.
Ryder Gray
So does anyone have Solo? It sounds rad as fuck, but I've been burned in the past. Mostly by Mongoose, and this isn't Mongoose, but cool-sounding Traveller stuff often ends up mediocre.
Kilrathi may very well have been influenced by Traveller's Aslan, though the Aslan themselves are a distillation and development of a bunch of old SF tropes, so it's hard to say.
Bentley Roberts
Neat. I haven't seen it, but I'll keep an eye out
Aaron Parker
I mix it up. However, recently I have been tending away from military careers as a whole.
Luis Miller
The Star Trader rules somewhere in the trove are basically one part of it, but they're also the simplest part to get right, so a hot new expanded version that adds all kinds of new stuff that *isn't* the simplest part...
Eh, I'm tempted to buy the hardcopy anyway, but I don't want to buy the PDF and the Lulu print.
Justin Russell
What SF predating Traveller would you say had the strongest influence on its aliens? The predecessors of the Third Imperium and the Solomani are obvious enough, but I can't really think of anything that directly leads to, say, a Vargr or a K'Kree.
Isaac Bennett
dog people are rad, so you don't really need an inspiration for them.
k'kree always made me think of pierson's puppeteers, but they're not much like them at all so that's probably me being weird.
Oliver James
I love the idea that the Solomani look at all their uplifted ape and dolphin bros and feel like the Vargr should probably also be working for them, but the Vargr themselves don't give a shit because "Yaharr, piracy!"
Brandon Fisher
I've heard some people say there was something like the Vargr in an old Poul Anderson story, but I haven't read it. Marc Miller seems to have been very well read in SF, and to have drawn inspiration from a ton of different sources, and rarely just copied things wholesale. I think the K'Kree are formed from whole cloth, but I can't say for sure there wasn't some short story that inspired them. I'm pretty sure the Vegans are all original, too.
The puppeteers are more in line with the hivers. Though I think the hivers are more believable biologically
Parker Barnes
Well that's sort of the shtick of Traveller isn't it, to take some classic SF nonsense and go "Right, but how would it actually work?"
Luis White
Life is fun when you're in the Marines.
Jayden Cruz
New stuff in our Library Data this week:
Cepheus Engine's got enough stuff to deserve its own folder now. We've got a new setting for early interstellar adventures in the region surrounding Earth, with These Stars Are Ours, and from the same publisher we get Near Space, which gives you a straight sector book without any fluff, to do with as you please.
Doc Grognard's MGT1 fantasy hack, Adventurer, is going up in MGT1/Settings/Other
And lastly we've got a variety of new MGT2 stuff: Pirates of Drinax - Torpol Cluster Reach Adventure 2 - Theories of Everything Referee's Briefing 5: Incidents and Encounters Referee's Briefing 6: Garden Worlds
Remember, if you have something that's not in the archives already, post a link!
Jordan Ortiz
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David Powell
Just bought the mongoose black cover rulebook and was wondering if you guys have any tips for a beginner gm?
Any good websites, books, or blogs I should check out?
Hunter Bennett
Just wanted to point out the mongoose 2nd edition core book is missing hull value on starships
Elijah Stewart
>Thanks for all the anons who advised me last week, and sorry that I didn't listened to you, but chargen is heart and soul of Traveller and even the new player as she was she had a lot of fun.
As long as she had fun with chargen, that's all that matters.
Ian Rogers
General consensus usually lists H. Beam Piper and Poul Anderson for the Vargr. The K'Kree are rather harder to pin down however.
The Centuars are definitely NOT Niven's puppeteers and neither are they Poul Anderson's Adzel. No one has ever been able to point to some pulp story which contains anything remotely like the K'Kree. One or both of the Keith brothers had biology degrees, so it's very possibly the K'Kree were something new.
Chase Cox
>The Centuars are definitely NOT Niven's puppeteers Yeah, I was thinking of hivers when I posted that.
I'm still fairly sure vargr are there because "we have cat aliens, why not dogs?" rather than some specific source.
Cameron Russell
Guys, if we have one hardpoint and we slap a tripple turret on there, and then put two missile racks and a beam laser: Can we fire all of the three weapons every round? Or just one? And can we fire multiple missiles from the same rack?
Also, is there any reason to have battledress over one?
We're running mongoose 2008.
Michael Murphy
P-please help
Kayden Phillips
yeah sure as long as you've got the software running and you're not something with weird restrictions like the original classic traveller small craft
Jose Roberts
Software being fire control, right? Which ends up as... 2d6 damage from the beam laser, 1d6 per missileb which is 2 a round, right?
Isaiah Edwards
I really like the hazard tape on the floor.
When we start colonising space, that shit is going to be EVERYWHERE.
Robert Bennett
You will already be aware that chargen takes a while.
What you need to know is that chargen takes A FUCKING WHILE. Seriously, allocate time for that shit. Luckily, it will to a large degree take care of itself.
Easton Williams
>Software being fire control, right? Yes, you'll need at least fire control/3 to fire all 3 at the same time (you don't get the bonus to DM if you do so).
>And can we fire multiple missiles from the same rack? IIRC you can't, at least in the same round, but you'll want to check with High Guard for those rules. Personally I'd use the Mongoose 2e missile rules as they're somewhat more generally useful than 1e's.
Brody Harris
>Yeah, I was thinking of hivers when I posted that.
I wasn't calling you out. I referred to the Puppeteers because they're best known sentient herbivore aliens and because other people repeatedly & incorrectly equate the Pupperteers with the K'Kree.
>I'm still fairly sure vargr are there because "we have cat aliens, why not dogs?" rather than some specific source.
The Alsan aren't cats and the Vargr aren't dogs. The Ancients took samples of Canidae, family which includes among other things JACKALS.
Both Alsan and Vargr are also of similar vintage in the game. That is they're 1st mentioned in the same product.
Hudson Moore
>Any good websites, books, or blogs I should check out?
Why did you ignore the links at the top of the thread?
Anyway, as already explained, chargen takes a while. Some people like it right off the bat, some people don't. 's experience with his GF aside, I'd recommend using pregen PCs and running your players through one-offs so they can learn the rules without fear of losing "their" PC.
Get them shooting, trading, & traveling as soon as possible. Once everyone feels they have a handle on the rules, have them sit down and use chargen to make the PC they want.
William Adams
The K'kree have elements from a wide range of places. Their religious surety I relate to a Gordon Dickson (I think) book or short from years ago that featured an invasion of Earth by a race that was convinced that IT was God's Chosen, in ways that parallel the progression of the Abrahamic faiths already on Earth. While the aliens themselves and the religion bore no other resemblance to the K'kree, the unshakeable faith in their god-given right to do whatever the fuck they pleased does resonate.
Adzel is more in line with the Virushi, one of the few Traveller sophonts larger than the K'kree and completely unintimidated by them.
Aiden Robinson
>That is they're 1st mentioned in the same product. A set of handouts on developments in Traveller that appeared at the seminars GDW did at Cons in the late 70s, followed closely by Library Data cites in the first Adventures.
Logan Gutierrez
>Adzel is more in line with the Virushi,
Yes, exactly.
Joshua Scott
Are some of those .pdf's fucked up? I'm looking over a couple of books from the classic Traveller and it looks like there are chunks of text missing here and there.
Easton Peterson
Shouldn't be. What PDFs are these? Screenshot one?
Adrian Evans
Sorry about the delay. Anyways, if you look at any place where there's a break in the paragraph, it ends abruptly and picks back up in another sentence.
Asher Morales
If it helps, the location is 01 - Classic Traveller> GDW - Core Books> CT Book 04
Kayden Jones
ugh, I know that issue. Different readers sometimes work on the same file, it's weird.
Liam Watson
Yep, as the other user said, that's an issue that certain readers have.
Brayden Allen
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James Sanders
It's because the file uses JPEG2000 compression. If someone opens it in a modern Acrobat and optimizes it, it should work again.
Oliver Sanders
I always loved how Zho helmets hark back to the now extinct Qiknavrats/Droyne who were their psionic mentors.
It's little touches like that which really enhance a setting.
Dominic Martin
>JPEG2000
Weak. I'll see about fixing it with my PDF editor and replacing it in the archives.
Charles Baker
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Jaxson Myers
bless
Ryan Carter
...
Jace Murphy
When playing amber zone adventures do you really roll the dice or just go with the scenario that sounds like most fun?
Liam Sanchez
Do both. No reason not to use random tables take their choices interesting, or to help them decide if they can't make a choice.
Asher Lee
Up to you, really. If a Ref looks at four of the options and isn't feeling inspired, but the fifth could be good and the sixth has his mind seeing useful campaign connotations for the next six months, the dice are really not necessary.
