Traveller General-- Homebrew and Moonshine Edition

Traveller is a classic science fiction system first released in 1977. 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.

Previously on Traveller General: //mega.nz/#F!lM0SDILI!ji20XD0i5GTIUzke3iv07Q


Galactic Maps:
travellermap.com/
utzig.com/traveller/iai.shtml

Resources:
1d4chan.org/wiki/Traveller
zho.berka.com/
travellerrpg.com/CotI/Discuss/
wiki.travellerrpg.com/Main_Page
freelancetraveller.com/index.html

Music to Explosive Decompression to:
>Old Timey Space music
youtube.com/watch?v=w34fSnJNP-4&list=RD02FH8lvwXx_Y8
youtube.com/watch?v=w0cbkOm9p1k
youtube.com/watch?v=MDXfQTD_rgQ
youtube.com/watch?v=FH8lvwXx_Y8
>Slough Feg
youtube.com/watch?v=ZM7DJqiYonw&list=PL8DEC72A8939762D4
>Goldsmith - Alien Soundtrack
youtube.com/watch?v=3lAsqdFJbRc&list=PLpbcquz0Wk__J5MKi66-kr2MqEjG54_6s
>Herrmann - The Day the Earth Stood Still
youtube.com/watch?v=3ULhiVqeF5U
>Jean Michel Jarre - Oxygene
youtube.com/watch?v=nz1cEO01LLc
>Tangerine Dream - Hyberborea
youtube.com/watch?v=9LOZbdsuWSg
>Brian Bennett - Voyage

Anyone ever use traveller for single planet games, or games that weren't...traveller? (not space trading/mercenarying) give me your homebrews anons

Other urls found in this thread:

zho.berka.com/stuff/generators/random-subsector-generator/
enneadgames.com/generators/name-generators/
fantasynamegenerators.com/planet_names.php#.VpxD91K7cy4
chriswsh.com/craft/random-alien-generator
katfeete.net/writing/names.php
scifiideas.com/tag/name-generators/
members.ozemail.com.au/~jonoreita/deckDraw.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

I'm pretty sure he's just some grumpy old veteran roleplayer who's sad that his favourite systems have fallen out of fashion, and that lately his hobby has been invaded by all those kids who are having wrongfun and WON'T GET OFF HIS LAWN.

So, if you are a decades-long veteran, grumpy-sama, I beg you, regale us with tales of yore.

bump

...

What's your prefered tech level to play anons? 10-12 here.

Same, though I like to go as low as possible. It's more fun if you don't have a hypertech solution for everything

>So, if you are a decades-long veteran, grumpy-sama, I beg you, regale us with tales of yore.

Sure, let's see if you can actually learn anything from it.

>40yo RPG being discussed
>Noob asks "What about A?"
>Grog explains "People brought that up 40 years ago, lots of people tossed it around for lots of time, and the consensus is that A won't work because of B, C, and D. But you should do what you want."
>Noob replies "What about A if X, Y, and Z?"
>Grog explains "Still no and still because of B, C, and D. But do what you want"
>Noob replies "What about A if 1, 2, and 3?"
>Grog explains AGAIN "Still no and still because of B, C, and D. But do what you want."
>Noob asks "But what if A,,,"
>Grog replies "DO WHAT YOU WANT."

Traveller is FORTY YEARS OLD. That means NOTHING you noobs think of hasn't ALREADY BEEN THOUGHT OF multiple times over the decades and ALREADY FOUND either workable or unworkable within the bounds of the game.

That being said, you can still DO WHAT YOU WANT.

Make the game your own. If you want to ignore something as basic as ground pressure and have huge mechs, do it. If you want near-c rocks popping planets like balloons, do it. If you want everyone to have psionic powers with no limits, DO IT.

However, when you ask about A, B, or C and are told that's an idea which was first raised 30 or 40 years and shot down repeatedly ever since, BELIEVE IT and then do whatever the fuck you want. Understand?

>Anyone ever use traveller for single planet games, or games that weren't...traveller? (not space trading/mercenarying) give me your homebrews anons

A COTI member occasionally posts about using Traveller to run an "Indiana Jones"-type campaign set during the 1930s Chaco War in South America. They said they used Traveller because it was the only RPG they had access to which had guns, airplanes, radios, etc.

They capped the TL at about Classic's 4, re-skinned psionics as magic for the spooky natives, and ran everything pretty much straight out of the box.

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No

Nice. Ever look at a pic and begin thinking about a campaign based on it?

The one thing I understand is that you are maybe the most nofun, nardiest of grognards I have ever met, and you are shitting up a thread full of otherwise nice people with your negative vibes.
Maybe you should take a break from shitposting and go outside. Weather's real nice

Ohhhh... did the old bad man make babbies cry?

I'm the only one than finds the third imperium vessels too big for games? Like really, they are gigantic, specially if you compare them to player vessels. Thousands of lasers, missiles launchers etc.

Not those guys, but they've got a point. You really are an annoying piece of shit.

Not to be That Hiver, but is there some sort of ninja method for using Mega.Nz that I am unaware of? Any batch download gives me nonsense about a memory error. Thanks.

It's a problem which 1st popped up a couple months back. Folks in sharing/request threads on several chans noticed it. No one has an answer yet 'cause no one really knows what the problem is. It also comes and goes.

One work-around has you open a new borwswr window, type in mega DOT nz Dot com, wait for the page to load, and then paste the remainder of the folder address you want. The rest of the address being everything after the # sign.

Some anons have posted that trying different browsers works too.

Ohhh,,, did you cry too? Suck it up, faggot, or go find a hug box.

got a link? that sounds cool

There's a link to COTI in the OP. IIRC, the member's name is flykiller.

He didn't post maps, stats or anything specific. It was just a few paragraphs explaining the campaign. The PCs wee merc fighter pilots hoping to be hired by Bolivia for the Chaco War against Paraguay. They're in Peru on the border waiting to smuggle weapons & ammo for their planes into Bolivia when they meet the Prof & his Cute Daughter.

The Prof has found a mcguffin that the spooky native want, the usual burglaries & fights take place, and the natives steal the mcguffin and the Cute Daughter. The PCs and the Prof eventually trail the native to a lost city in the Chaco region, right in the middle of the war.

The natives had limited psionic powers and poisoned blowguns while the lost city was full of traps and trained guard jaguars. There were biplanes, rifles, Thompson SMGs, Lewis guns, trucks, etc.

He said everyone had fun and knew it was supposed to be an Indiana Jones pastiche from the start.

All the time user

This one reminds of the chapter in Miller's "Agent of the Imperium" where Bland is activated to deal with an "infestation" of von Neumann machines on a backwater mining world. A few machines had shown up a couple years earlier, started building some sort of mining & refining & manufacturing facility.

The miners didn't even notice them at first and the machines completely ignored everyone else. When the miners started nosing around trying to figure out what was going on, the machines started taking "measures". The IN gets called in and Bland manages to "scrub" the "infestation" before the machines can launch a huge sublight Orion drive vessel.

The most interesting part of it all is how blase Bland is about it all. He basically comments that von Neumann machines from who the fuck knows where are occasionally encountered by the 3I and dealt with.

Your earlier pic in sort of reminds me of a JTAS adventure seed about a merc vessel sent to an airless mining world to locate and "steal" a shipment of crystals which were "lost" during a recent revolution.

Me too. After a certain size ships start being less like ships and become more like locations. of course, just what that size is depends on the group.

>Weather's real nice
Maybe where you are. Been odd around here.

This is why there is a significant "small ship universe" crowd within Traveller fandom. CT Book 2 already provides a 50-scale difference in starships, from 100 tons to 5000. The weaponry limits of Book 2 aside, that's plenty of size range.

Very true. People either forget or weren't too clear in the first place just how big seemingly small Traveller ships are. That "tiny" 100dTon scout/courier? It's about 90% the size of a 747 jetliner.

Trav's dTon is 14 m^3 or about 500 cubic feet. That means a Beowulf's cargo hold can fit the equivalent of 8 to 10 railroad boxcars.

Unarmored ships work out to ~5 gross tons to 1 dTon. A WW2 Liberty Ship roughly equals 2400 dTons and a late WW2 US destroyer equals 600 dTons.

Lightly armored ships work out to ~6 gross tons to 1 dton. So Graf Spee equals ~2400 dtons and the WW2 Enterprise was ~4500 dtons.

Heavily armored ships work out to ~7 gross tons per 1 dTon. USS Arizona is ~5000 dTons and HMS Dreadnought ~3000 dTons.

Even "small" Traveller ships are BIG.

And yet, from a different POV, even large Traveller ships are small.

And Cepheus Engine does 5kdT ships with a few more weapon options, if you're into that.

I always forget... until I consider building a Type S or Modular Cutter for my 28mm toys. Aha, fuck no.

And...

Interesting that the two pics compare the Lightning and the Tigress with different results.

A Nimitz-class CVN works out to ~18,000 dTons.

>until I consider building a Type S or Modular Cutter for my 28mm toys. Aha, fuck no.

Oooo... A Type S for 28mm would be beautiful, but it would also be so fucking big...

that's not 28mm, it's 20mm

geocities dot ws/ciocc_cat/typej.html

A Type J, also 20mm because no bugger's dumb enough to build one in 1/56 or 1/48.

While the Tigress' displacement in dTons has been known since Classic's Supplement 8, it's physical dimensions have been the subject of much conjecture, mostly because of the stern "block". We only had one illustration to work with for decades and people were reduced to actually measuring the ship in that picture to try work out the ratio between the volume of the sphere and the volume of the "block". GT finally "solved" all that by presenting physical dimensions for the Tigress in it's Starships book.

The two pics here are a result of those fluctuating size estimates of the ship.

OTOH, the physical dimensions of the the Lightning/AHL have been known since the AHL game box set with Supplement 5 came out.

Fucking beautiful. Thank you for the pics and the link.

Holy shit! He scratch built the "So ugly it's cute" Krupp cargo ship from 2300AD too!

He's got some non-trav stuff too. And this, friends, is why the people who frantically downloaded all of geocities when they announced it was closing are fucking heroes.

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Does anyone have a good source for generating lots of names for planets? Generating a sector for my upcoming campaign and the only thing I've got real writers block with is naming the planets.

Check out the Zhodani Base Subsector Generator:
zho.berka.com/stuff/generators/random-subsector-generator/

Personally I always like to think a reason why a planet would have a particular name, when I create one; having Solomani-focused campaigns mean I tend to draw from Eartn history, mythology and literature, as well as stuff like planets named for their explorer or the explorer's vessel, and so on.

As the other user pointed out, the Zho Berka site produces random names as part of it's subsector generator. Most other subsector generators do the same.

Here's a link to one for CE:
github DOT com
/makhidkarun/worldgen

Here's another for SWN:
swn DOT emichron DOT com

Traveller has had 2D6 language/word generators for most Major and a few Minor races since Classic. You can find them in the Alien modules and use them to roll up planet names. Some have automated and you can most likely find links to them at the Traveller Wiki.

As for Anglic (English) planet names, I generally open a text book, go to the index or bibliography, and pick a bunch of surnames.

>20mm because no bugger's dumb enough to build one in 1/56 or 1/48.
1/72 is still pretty big, though. Not the full meter long of a 1/48 version, but still large enough.

A cyborg or robot wolf?

Now THAT is something it might be fun to build!

d o g - s h a p e d ~ r o b o t ~ b u d d y

Amateur GM here- really want to run a traveler campaign. I only have the core rule book. I've read/watched/played a ton of sci fi though. What tips can Veeky Forums give me?

well, one of the most repeated points tends to be to be aware of how lethal it can be, unless you're armored to the gills getting shot sucks. So if your players are the type that are likely to try and be Space Rambo that point is worth getting across.

>And Cepheus Engine does 5kdT ships with a few more weapon options, if you're into that.
I'm actually into this, I didn't know about Cepheys engine, how it compares with other Traveller games? I'm doubting now about go for a modified Stars without numbers or Mongy Traveller (probably I will make an unholy mix of both...), and with a quick search on google it seems to be more or less a OR version of traveller.
I'm more for making a small ship games, with space ships of the size of the yamato or star treck, 50.000dt big bad battleships/dreadnaught big.

My players are normally murder hobos so... this will be interesting.

Don't feel like you have to throw everything at them in the first session, take it in stages to introduce different parts of the system.
If they don't get a ship in chargen, don't feel obligated to hand them one, let them deal with buying tickets, hoofing it, and negotiating with potential patrons for transportation to and from the target site. When they manage to acquire a ship on their own, it'll mean a lot more. (It also means you won't have to deal with all the ship mechanics and money and trade stuff and can focus on the skill and combat parts)

Cepheus is a clone of MGT1 with some nods to compatibility with CT. It seems to have all the third party momentum.

Combat is deadly in all versions, so much so that I generally run a getting-to-know-the-game session first with pregen PCs so the players can "unlearn" all their bad habits without losing a PC they spent time creating.

As wisely suggests, keep things small at first. Ease yourself and your players into the game. They don't have a ship? Then make getting one an early campaign goal.

Add stuff only when you absolutely have to. There's 40 years of stuff and you can quickly DROWN in it.

Also, don't get too big too fast either. It's very tempting to roll up hundreds of worlds right off the bat, but you only need a half dozen or so.

As explains, CE primarily uses SRDs from MgT with some of it's own wrinkles and MgT is an "update" of sorts of Classic.

SWN is excellent for creating setting materials quickly. You can "detail" a planet, government, corporation, etc. very quickly and the faction system simply cranks out adventure seeds.

You can use CE for "nuts & bolts" stuff like combat and ships while using SWN for the "fluff" that brings a setting to life.

Noice, thanks anons. Btw does the trove get all the cepheus engine third party ?

Yup. IIRC, look in the MgT2e 3rd party folder.

Mark my words, CE is going to be IT. The products, supplements, settings, and whatnot using CE are coming out fast & furious relative to historical Traveller releases.

Mgt2e is handicapped because Mongoose is Mongoose. Their changes to licensing not pissed off nearly all the 3rd party writers but made people leery of ever working with them because most of the 3rd party folks were also prospective writers for Mongoose!

T5 may have had some promise but Miller is 70yo, his inner circle is dying off, and apart from the core rules which took over a decade to produce nothing of any note for T5 has yet been released. There's one setting, Cirque, a novel about the same, and some noises about a player's manual "sometime".

Meanwhile CE has complete setting Orbital, TSAO, Clement Sector, and several others chugging along with multiple books and future releases while setting-free supplements like Trader and Solo are out with more on the way.

Reppin' the 2300ad side here user. (OG 2300ad setting with mongoose system. Fuck Mongoose for writing the Twilight war out of 2300ad)

A few interesting random generators for you.

enneadgames.com/generators/name-generators/
fantasynamegenerators.com/planet_names.php#.VpxD91K7cy4
chriswsh.com/craft/random-alien-generator
katfeete.net/writing/names.php
scifiideas.com/tag/name-generators/
members.ozemail.com.au/~jonoreita/deckDraw.html

Thanks user. Can't have enough random generators.

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Some incredibly rich dude's lunar "vacation" home.

What do you think those lenses in the lower right corner are for?

TSAO?

I know Orbital, but could you explain the other 2 to me?

Old-school solar panels would be guess, given the sun being in that direction in the reflections.
>reflective solar panels

Maybe it's to reflect light onto that ridge so it makes an ideal photo spot?

TSAO = These Stars Are Ours. It takes the "plucky Terran rebels recently regained their freedom from evil old empire" trope and rewrites it for Traveller. The evil old empire are the Reticulan Greys, that's right, the anal probe boys.

The idea behind the Clement Sector setting is that a wormhole is found and used for a century or so. After it collapses, there's enough people & tech left on the far end to keep exploring & expanding so you've got a big frontier with a small settled region with multiple gov'ts.

Both work for me. Along with "natural" light to enhance the scenery, maybe it can project images too? So the other ridge across the valley become a giant display screeen? I dunno.

That dome isn't as big as I thought when I first glanced at it. You can see several people standing along the rim so the structure(s) inside aren't a city but instead are more like a very baroque lodge.

...

...

>The idea behind the Clement Sector setting is that a wormhole is found and used for a century or so. After it collapses, there's enough people & tech left on the far end to keep exploring & expanding so you've got a big frontier with a small settled region with multiple gov'ts.
That sounds cool, and I like the premise. Reminds me a bit of this one Traveller/GATE: Thus the etc crossover, where the 3I starts rolling through the gate, overwhelming and diplomatically handling the locals, and then realise "oh, shit, we're not recognising the stars." IIRC they're on track to have a self-sustaining civilisation on the far side in case the gate shuts down, and are all excited about all the new stars they get to explore.

also cutter modules. cutter modules everywhere.

>TSAO = These Stars Are Ours. It takes the "plucky Terran rebels recently regained their freedom from evil old empire" trope and rewrites it for Traveller. The evil old empire are the Reticulan Greys, that's right, the anal probe boys.
This setting was a pleasant surprise to me. It's got little 30dT saucers! (and larger saucer transports that haul them between systems) It's got space-nomadic scrap-ships inhabited by insectpeople families and clans!

(except, you know, clement sector isn't fanfiction based on a crossover with a shitty fantasy/modern series)

This is what I want to do as well, but I am rubbish with coming up with ideas in a vacuum. I need something to latch on to and then I can build out from there.

My campaign is actually based on subverting I think I saw here a couple of Traveller General threads back, about how only ships with a sentient mind can jump, and that is why the x boat has someone on board. I don't know if that's strictly true in the actual traveller universe (?) But it's what I'm doing with. Before that I had no idea what to do.

We don't have any clement sector for 2nd edition in the trove, but for what I in the mongy trove, it's pretty cool, I love the space ships, they are the right size for player characters and seems to have a good variety.

That made me think of the classic story Scanners Live in Vain.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain

Thanks for the link, this is something similar to what I was thinking. Sentient minds are required for Jumping, but psions are negatively affected in jump space with the more powerful affected more. Eventually I'm going to have the academies start teaching a method to protect oneself from Jump pain.

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...

That's from the Dyson's Dodecahedron guy, right?

I didn't know he did sci-fi or sci-fantasy "dungeons".

>My campaign is actually based on subverting I think I saw here a couple of Traveller General threads back, about how only ships with a sentient mind can jump, and that is why the x boat has someone on board. I don't know if that's strictly true in the actual traveller universe (?)

While it's not true in Traveller, it's a long used "reason" for why jump ship have to be at least 100 dTons; i.e. you need a sentient mind aboard, which needs life support for 168 hours, which requires a certain amount of volume, etc. (Many people point to the sentient mind requirement for hyperdrvie Niven's Known Space setting as the inspiration for it.)

It's a fun "reason' to explore and, regardless of it not being part of "real" Traveller, you should go ahead and DO IT. Make it part of YOUR setting.

That's the start of Marooned...

Foss, right? I never much cared for his stuff. Far too twee.

twee?

Look it up. I'm not here to fix your shit tier education.

Yes, that's one of Dyson's.

Reverse Hipster detected

I like what I've seen of his stuff. I'll have to look through it to find the sci-fi and sci-fantasy pieces.

I have two questions
How hard is Traveller for first time GMing, and how flexible is it setting wise? I proposed some ideas for a game I want to run and from what I could tell Traveller is probably the best option for them unless there's some obscure scifi spess system out there I havent found yet.

The default setting has some big assumptions baked in, but if you want to put in the time to build your own with different assumptions, it is not hard to adapt Traveller to most space settings.

>How hard is Traveller for first time GMing...

System wise, versions like Classic and MgT are dead simple. Even the more complex versions are relatively easy.

Apart from the "nuts & bolts" of the rules, there's a mindset which players of other RPGs may find offputting. Combat is DEADLY and combat doesn't care if you're a 1 term noob or a 8 term marine.

At it's heart, Traveller is about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Your PC will NOT be a 16th level half-drow/minotaur multi-class paladin, thief, sorceror, demigod who can level continents without getting a hangnail. PCs and their players must THINK and PLAN and accept their LIMITATIONS.

>>how flexible is it setting wise?

Extremely flexible. It only depends on how much work you as the referee want to do. ForEx: up thread there's a post about Classic being used to run a 1930s pulp adventure.

Great!

>Combat is DEADLY and combat doesn't care if you're a 1 term noob or a 8 term marine.
This is fine, our normal GM runs L5R and generally the only reason we dont get ooneshot in a lot of cases is pure luck.
>At it's heart, Traveller is about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Your PC will NOT be a 16th level half-drow/minotaur multi-class paladin, thief, sorceror, demigod who can level continents without getting a hangnail. PCs and their players must THINK and PLAN and accept their LIMITATIONS.
That was my assumption but I wasnt sure, really good to know.
>Extremely flexible. It only depends on how much work you as the referee want to do. ForEx: up thread there's a post about Classic being used to run a 1930s pulp adventure.
Perfect

Thanks guys

>This is fine, our normal GM runs L5R and generally the only reason we dont get ooneshot in a lot of cases is pure luck.

That's great to read. Your group will have no trouble with the "combat = deadly" concept that trips up so many.

The Freelance Traveller site linked above has lots of adventures, adventure seeds (what Trav calls Amber Zones), and an entire section called "Getting Off The Ground" for "quickies" meant to start longer campaigns.

I thought Amber just meant "be extra careful in this area"? I mean, I guess yeah it calls to adventure, but so do the other planets.

>I thought Amber just meant "be extra careful in this area"? I mean, I guess yeah it calls to adventure, but so do the other planets.

My bad for not explaining better. There are two uses.

The first is the one you've heard of. It's a, IN-GAME travel rating published by the Traveller's Aid Society to inform members of existing conditions in various systems and/or on various planets. A war, plague, flare star, xenophobic natives, etc. earn a system an amber zone rating as a warning. Also, IIRC, in the 3I/OTU setting, any world outside of the Imperium is labeled an Amber Zone for Imperial citizens.

The second is a META-GAME label for a specific writing format. GDW started using the term "Amber Zone" to denote articles in their JTAS magazine. Each issue would have one or more short, bare bones, adventure seeds with (usually) six short variants appended.

That format was quickly adopted because it let people share their own adventures which, thanks to the limited amount of details & fluff plus the 6 variants, could be easily adapted by other people for their own campaigns.

Because GDW called those articles "Amber Zones", the people writing their own called them "Amber Zones" too. So you have the in-game travel warning and an meta-game label for a specific adventure format.

I should have made that clear in the 1st place. Sorry.

As someone newer to the game, I just wanted you to know that I approve of everything you said in this thread and the last. I am sorry this thread is full of fuckwits. Have a nice day.