Traveller General

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This Kickstarter project is to create a brand new box set for the Traveller roleplaying game, detailing the three main classes of cruiser within the Element cruiser family, together with 10 massive double-sided blueprints that will allow you walk through each deck of the ships as if you were there...

>The Element cruisers have a highly flexible 'pod' system that allows them to be configured for specific mission roles, and we have covered them in this book - from the 'standard' missile pod fit most commonly used on these ships, to long-ranged strike craft, light carriers, troop transports, and orbital assault ships, all are possible with the Element cruisers and have been included.

>Stretch Goal 1 - £25,000: This will be a 64 page (at the moment at least, veterans of Traveller will know our projects have a habit of growing in size!) book giving referees everything they need to know to create and run a navy bridge crew campaign, with the Travellers in command of an Element cruiser (or any other capital ship) as they explore the galaxy and become the front line of defence for the Third Imperium.

[They are ~10,000 away from this stretch goal, but have made the main funding goal, at least.]

Interesting. Looks like an "update" of AHL without the combat rules. Thanks for posting it.

Which ship design system will they be using? I'm guessing MgT seeing as the goals are marked in pounds.

Yes, this is MgT2.

Then I'll be giving it pass. Hope the reach their goals though.

Will there be more than just deckplans and some naval campaign stuff? AHL at least included a wargame.

As-is, it is just the blueprints (non-gridded, which is puzzling/annoying), the book about the vessels with some new High Guard rules, and the current stretch goal for the book about playing in naval campaigns. I wish there was more "meat"/game material than what has been revealed. I don't think they will have the same momentum as they did with The Great Rift set, which had material that was a lot more applicable to different campaigns, and more new/non-reprint stuff. The blueprints are secondary to me, but they are touted as the big draw of the set. [Shrug] I'm pledging PDF-only.

>As-is, it is just the blueprints (non-gridded, which is puzzling/annoying), the book about the vessels with some new High Guard rules, and the current stretch goal for the book about playing in naval campaigns.

So, non-gridded deckplans you can't use in either regular session play or combat, more HG rules to further complicate and confuse things, and - if they get enough money - something about naval campaign? And people pledged for that?

What was it that Barnum said about suckers?

Like you said, the Great Rift materials could be used in many different ways. As for this stuff? It doesn't look that way.

If anyone needs naval campaign rules, go to the T4 folder and d/l Imperial Squadrons. The stuff in it nearly system-free.

I'm kickstarted out at present. And to be honest, this one doesn't inspire me - MGT2e spacecraft design and a few vague sounding stretch goals.

Now, if they'd bundled the promised shipboard miniatures combat system...

Suppose an user had a copy of The Traveller Book that his uncle gifted him.

Suppose said user wanted to use the game to run a Cowboy Bebop inspired setting. Our own solar system, set about 100 years from now.

Is there anything in particular that would need to be tweaked, rules-wise, gear cost-wise, or gear capability per tech level-wise?

>Is there anything in particular that would need to be tweaked, rules-wise, gear cost-wise, or gear capability per tech level-wise?

Bebop doesn't have FTL, right? In fact an FLT experiment fucked up Earth and forced the colonization of the Solar System, right? All you really need to do is cap the listed tech levels to prohibit jump drive. That means you're using TL8 and lower equipment. It's really that simple.

From the few episodes I've seen, Bebop is more about tone and tenor than gadgets anyway. You ability to pull it off is going to rest more on your abilities as a GM and less on the rules.

>and a few vague sounding stretch goals.

And for £25,000 too. Just what the fuck are they promising that's worth that much? Another bloated splat book with some vague campaign rules?

>Now, if they'd bundled the promised shipboard miniatures combat system...

It's Mongoose. Ask people about the naval miniatures game they've been promising for the last several years.

>Looks like an "update" of AHL
It's not deckplans suitable for playing on, which AHL had, right? It's just pretty blueprints. Way off in size.

Anyone has tried to mix Swn and Traveller?

The faction system bolts on really well. Some of the other bits are neat, but I can't say I'm too enthusiastic about the core rules or the reskinned B/X classes or anything.

Are you supposed to fail most qualification/advancement/survival rolls? I recently ran through MGT1e chargen with a friend to test it out, and he failed basically every roll until he got 'stuck' in the drifter career. Was he just unlucky or is this normal, and are there ways to mitigate this?

Could be just poor dicing luck, or maybe you guys missed something. Are you adding the correct modifiers to the rolls? When it says a Scout Courier's Survival roll is End 5+, that means you roll 2d6 and add your End modifier and try to hit a target of 5 or more.
Even with a +0 End mod, you should be passing that ~83% of the time - the average roll on 2d6 is a 7.

It has plenty of cool shit (all the sups are gold), I hate the OSR parts tough.
I was thinking to de-OSR SWN an use it as a ight sistem for space opera instead of traveller, also taking the Setting parts. Using 2d6 for combat instead of 1d20, Armor deducing damage instead of AC,and that stuff. Probably killing all the classes and leaving only the new adventurer class (and nerf the Psionic stuff), the level shit I'm on the fence in how to tackle it, the players like or don't care much for example, while I dislike it, but being fair is useful for the PC becaus they can plan it better how to proceed each level... Basically I want to retain the useful and elegant stuff and bolt out some OSR than doesn't feel right, having some internal debate about what to take and what not while making this Traveller/Swn unholy concotion.

He was trying for Rogue Enforcer. He basically failed every single roll for his first three/four terms with no penalties on the attributes he was rolling against. I think I need to roll a few more characters before I decide what changes to make, but it was just odd to see that many failures the first time around attempting to be a criminal.

That's Dex 6+ to qualify, End 6+ for survival, and Str 6+ for advancement. With a +0 in all three stats (which seems low, why would you pick a Rogue Enforcer if you're not really cut out for it?) that still gives you 72% odds of succeeding on each roll you do, which means just by random chance your average +0 in everything schlub should succeed at about 3 out of every 4 of those checks.

And how do you fail every survival/advancement roll and still do three terms in your career? That's somewhere in the neighborhood 0.01% odds, and against the rules to boot - if you fail your survival roll you wash out of the career.
It sounds like you're doing some things wrong, and your dice are badly loaded to boot.

He did terms in other careers, mostly drifter. He was just wildly unsuccessful in all his careers before that.

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Just another day in the IISS

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>I think I need to roll a few more characters before I decide what changes to make

You don't need to make any changes, you just need to follow the rules correctly. As pointed out, what you've posted is not statistically impossible but failed survival & advancement rolls should have washed the PC out of their career.

There was an user in the previous thread asking about whether a PC they'd made was useless for combat and it turned out they'd ignored the basic training rule which would have given them gun combat at level 0.

>It's not deckplans suitable for playing on, which AHL had, right? It's just pretty blueprints. Way off in size.

The user who backed it at the PDF level later explained that in . It sounds like a really strange Kickstarter. I don't know what useful material(s) anyone will be getting.

>Anyone has tried to mix Swn and Traveller?

All the time. Not the actual B/X stuff, but the various tools in it to detail setting, backgrounds, worlds, adventures, etc.

There are tons of tables which help you quickly describe worlds, cultures, and governments along with motives for NPCs and others. The Faction system can quickly give you a "living" setting, that is a setting in which events are occurring whether the players are involved or not. Those events will have continuity with each other too, they just won't be random results. Suns of Gold introduces the concept "friction". The "friction" any deal may generate becomes a way for the referee to turn trading from blase math into tabletop adventures.

Every mechanism and system in the core book and supplements is designed with directly applying the results to tabletop play firmly in mind. As I wrote above, the trade system is designed to produce adventure seeds, not just money and numbers. The espionage, army, and navy supplements don't just contain special chargens and list of gadgets (hello Mongoose) but focus on creating & running espionage, army, and naval campaigns.

I won't ever play SWN, but I began borrowing stuff from it as soon as I got a copy of the core book. There's simply too much really good stuff to borrow from SWN to try to explain here.

Love the Jetson houses in the background. Anyone else get an underwater vibe from this one?

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So i want to run a game set in a single solar system where the players are basically scavangers/cowboys/oddjobs and civilization exists alongsite the still functional ruins of a previous one.

My plan is that it would involve alot of fighting against leftover/still being produced robots of the precursors.
Pic kinda related.

If i want to use vehicle rules for all robots, what I need to consider for combat between them and the PCs.
I also heard that travellers vehicles are rather sturdy, how do i prevent death and boredom by action economy, so a single big robot doesn't just wait a full turn, just so i can anounce "he attacks X" and wait a full turn again.

I saw here once a long time ago that in Traveller, you could die during the Character Creation. Please tell me this is real, this is so ridiculous it is amazing.

Yeah the first edition had that.
But people decided that this wouldn't be fun so they toned it down that you only get crippeled and maybe drowned in medical debt.
But death by fucking up is still present with the "optional" ironman rule.
It's a really fun system.

>So i want to run a game set in a single solar system

Orbital. It's in the Archive.

>If i want to use vehicle rules for all robots, what I need to consider for combat between them and the PCs.

Various MgT splats like Vehicles and Cybernetics. Mongoose leans towards a cinematic rather than nitty-gritty style of play so it will have the kind of combat you want.

Nice b8 m8.

Yep. Chargen was originally conceived as a minigame you played before the session, generating characters was a kind of gamble. Every term in a career could net you more skills and a bigger retirement package, but each term had an associated risk that your guy would bite it, varying depending on which career he was in.
You had to weigh the risks of dying against the potential rewards of going back for another term and decide whether to chance it or not. If you gamble and lose, you roll up another guy.
It helped that chargen was fast and fun.

Removing it to the optional rules has meant adding in rules for wounded or crippled characters, and most refs also enforce an upper limit on the number of terms you can have, as a way of braking the player's greed for more stuff to start with, because "oh no, I lost a hand, guess I'll get a robot hand" doesn't really deter them

But how something like that even works? You roll a dice during character creation to see if somehow you fucked up something?

oh god wat

Why do we get this question every thread?

TIL my mom loved Traveller models so much she kept them hidden in her nightstand.

Yep,. it's crazy, but it works.

A related thing is how Traveller puts all the "level up" nonsense at the beginning, and starts you out as competent adults, which is very different from D&D where you start out as a greenhorn and eventually level your way to competence and beyond. and then the system starts to fall apart because high level D&D kinda sucks

It's a REALLY unusual feature for an RPG to have, so you're naturally gonna attract some curiosity.

Because trolls and assholes will always be with us. It's the Traveller equivalent of "Why didn't they fly to Mordor?"

You don't actually think asked that "question" seriously, do you?

Those were vibators, user, not spaceships.

Actually I did very serious about it, because clearly it sounds as one of the most ridicule premises ever.
And then these guys answered it, and god damn, it doens't sound that bad at all.
And besides, it seems strange that you don't want to talk about the game you play, specially about a mechanic that no other game ever had, ever.

Relax, user. It's just a question, and not even a bad one.

This did answer exactly zero of my two questions.
I mean, thanks, but... eh.

I plan on using MGT1e already but vehicles still seem pretty tough.
Could i just slap more attacks onto a robot that have their own initiative?
Like, i use tha car values and act like there are 4 npcs in it, one driver and three shooters, but instead saying "there is a car with four people in it, three of them shoot at you" i say "It's a bigh honking robot and he attacks you with three turrets"?

Well, if you want an alternate set of vehicle rules, check out the rules from Classic's adventure Across the Bright Face. They're simple (pic related is like 80% of them) and pretty easy to adjust for other vehicles.
(I've never used MgT's Vehicle rules, but I hear tell they can get a bit wonky at the table)

If you did ask in seriousness, then sorry. I'm the user who asked why people ask this question every thread.
It's not that we don't mind talking about the game, it's that we get this question every thread, but usually it's because the asker *is* a troll.

Dying in character generation was only a rule in first ed, what, 30 years + ago, but the trolls who ask still believe that its still in it as anything other than an option.

>This did answer exactly zero of my two questions.

Orbital is a setting in a single solar system, just like your setting. That means there may be ideas you can borrow.

Cybernetics covers robots, robots which have multiple weapons, and robots in combat. That means it might have some answers regarding your combat questions.

>Actually I did very serious about it

I still don't believe you. What you asked is the question most often by trolls and other assholes. That, plus your hurried posting style, tells me you're here to troll and learn about the game.

If you think someone's a troll, the correct response is to ignore them, and report them if they're breaking the rules. Anything else is just an invitation to troll you more.
See the OSR general, which is 90% trolls trolling trolls right now.

okay that's helpfull.
Thank you user.

My explanation was more for the rest of you and less for the troll. Fortunately, the troll's poor composition style make them easy to spot so I'll be able to ignore them from now on.

Nobody needs you to explain the internet to 'em, gramps. Especially when your troll-meter is so clearly defective.

mining conversion, expanded cargo hold to d40 tons, reducing fuel space and staterooms. made one of the staterooms double as a galley. galley had a wall sized fish tank (edible fish and lobsters) using up more fuel space.

Mining laser in turret, basically a laser rifle, too puny for ship combat. Turned long attic access way into a hydroponics room (strawberries).

This was for a firefly game that worked out pretty well. The jump drives became just part of the STL drive

For a Belt Miner campaign, what are some interesting wrenches to throw into the works without breaking too heavily from things, at least immediately?

Serpent-type hulls should've been the real Type-S equivalent of the OTU. They're cool airframes with sexy lines and the same overall capabilities.

Instead we just got the Space Wedges(tm).

Sorry, I misread that as wenches!
Maybe you find those to be good wrenches in the works though? Every belter has to stop at a port sometime!

Claim jumpers is a classic. You could complicate it with having someone show up to your dig with a legitimate claim document.

Follow that up with finding out what happened to your legitimate claim paperwork. Was it lost? Did someone miss-file it? Did the bureaucrat who filed it take a bribe to make it go away? Was that guy not the local bureaucrat but actually a criminal who "filled in for the other guy" so he wouldn't be caught right there?

Another one is a larger mining company is buying up all the local claims and getting rough with anyone who doesn't sell. The companies offers are well below market value, but not god-awful.

Most planetoids are rubble/sand piles held together by microgravity and static electricity, so you can always play up that angle when the players are "mining" some "load"; i.e. shifting rubble, the need to shore up or otherwise capture materials, dust causing "white outs", static discharges screwing with equipment, etc.

Similarly, sunlight will "warm" up those surfaces it hits causing all sorts of changes, so a slowly rotating planetoid will see changes as "night" turns to "day" and back again.

Getting "anal" about life support, and suit endurance are other ways. Forex, while that suit is rate for 8hrs, it's not rated for 8hrs of heavy manual labor. Firefighters "down rate" their bottle's life for that reason.

You can throw a lot of wrenches at them with fairly normal stuff. That means you can save the aliens, spores, and artifacts for later!

>Serpent-type hulls should've been the real Type-S equivalent of the OTU. They're cool airframes with sexy lines and the same overall capabilities.

You're right. Sadly, the Book 2 rules didn't include stuff like hull shapes, streamlining, and all the rest.

>>Instead we just got the Space Wedges(tm).

Wedges are easier to draw, especially when it's the late 70s and the only CAD-CAM programs exist on Fortune 500 mainframes.

I took drafting in middle school because all the boys took drafting while all the girls took Home Economics. Do you know what a french curve is? Could you use one if I handed it to you? Could you draw a Serpent-class hull by hand?

i got the "Robot" supplement from the Krauts.
So far it looks good, betther thatn the mainframe calculations in the official supplement.

RIP. Fair enough user.

Is there a 'Simple Forces' equivalent of the GURPS Ground Forces rules, only to make Air Forces?

Ball ships are pretty cute.

>i got the "Robot" supplement from the Krauts.

He means 13Mann Verlags' 3rd party supplement, user. You find it in Mgt1 > 3rd party content > rules and careers > MgT1 Traveller ROBOTS

Neato, so the "german engineering" meme from /srg/ is true, huh ?

>>Fair enough user.

I'm not saying I like it. I'm just saying I understand it.

>Is there a 'Simple Forces' equivalent of the GURPS Ground Forces rules, only to make Air Forces?

There's COACC for MT, but I haven't looked at iti n years so I don't know how simple the combat system is. Knowing how complex building anything in MT is - GDW used Striker as a model - I wouldn't bet on it being useful.

The GT:GF system was based in part on GURPS3e's mass combat system. Maybe those would be worth a look? IIRC, 3e's Compendium II has the mass combat system, including how to rate units, all in one place.

I don't know what the meme is, but the German third party robots book is much easier to use than the official Mongoose (or Classic) supplements.
(Classic's JTAS version of Robots is pretty good, though.)

>(Classic's JTAS version of Robots is pretty good, though.)

That's a good one too. Book 8 is too fiddly.

The only use I see is decorating a wall with the blueprints. I'll pass.

Rate my deck(plan).

I'm starting a mini-campaign Tuesday with my podcast group. We're all new to the system except for one guy who's followed the game since Classic. I plan on the DMPC giving them a space jalopy with a jump-4 engine for deep space exploration reasons.

Nothing jumps out at me as a problem on a once-over. Good job, I'd say.

Looks real good. Nice big airlocks, CO's SR and office aft of the bridge, even a laundry room! Are those low berth on the port side of the cargo bay?

Used for deep space exploration, right? But no small craft?

I'm stealing it. Is Frontiersman the class or name?

Frontiersman is the model name, Nanjani is the manufacturer. In the setting, this is a short-lived model used to deliver supplies to fringe worlds. Unfortunately, due to issues of reliability and a fringe market the company that made them went under. The players are getting one because it was the cheapest ship with a Jump-4 drive available in the sector. They are this setting's equivalent of a GEO Metro.

Love it. Excellent backstory with all sorts of built-in hooks to bedevil the players with.

"Yeah, you need a new 49-J frommitz board for your tokamak field controller but the company that made shut down the line after Nanjani went under. Maybe a newer 49-K will work and maybe it won't..."

Stats for this ship.

Talk about a rattletrap! A burned out stateroom, another turned into a spa, another full of hydroponics lab, and yet another into a meth lab!

I don't quite get the computer though. The ship has drives rated at jump4 but the computer is a 1(bis) which can only run a jump2 program. Is the drive-to-computer mismatch part of the ship's damaged & limping along condition?

"One crew cabin converted to chemical refinery, one gutted by fire."
Story, please?

>Story, please?

Agreed, there has to be a good story behind that! Is the burned up one where the "meth lab" used to be? Or was there a really careless passenger?

I ran a subsidized merchant campaign once where the players were newly hired to crew a Type-R which had been flying the same "loop" for decades. They made a few jumps with the old captain and two senior crew learning about the ship and it's ports-of-call. One of the "legends" about the ship was that every death aboard had occurred in the same stateroom.

It was just something I'd made up, but the players really ran it with it. They were so jittery and joking about that it that I just had to kill a NPC in that cabin. That really set them off. They eventually went to the trouble to find an empath to get a "psionic reading" on the stateroom to see if it was "haunted" in some manner.

I'll admit that the computer thing is a fuck-up on my part but now I might make it a plot point. Perhaps when the previous owners upgraded the sensors from civilian to military they had some sort of software incompatibility, something the PCs will have to deal with.

No concrete story, I'm afraid. I want to give my players the feeling of inheriting someone's weird old house. This ship is 50 years old and it's been used by pirates, pioneers, smugglers, and half a dozen different hands. The wiring's all fucked up because somebody put in a jerry-rigged patch, then someone else went and jerry rigged that when it failed again. The things that have happened inside that ship have depreciated it significantly, which is why they get it so cheap.

>I'll admit that the computer thing is a fuck-up

Whoa whoa whoa, hold on now. It's NOT a fuck up. It's something which adds to the ship's back story. Think of it as a happy accident on your part.

Let's see, you need a rating of 20 to run jump4 program, (bis) designation gives you a +5, and a Level 3 computer is rated at 15. So, the ship originally had a 3(bis) until "something happened". It either now has a 1(bis) kludged into where the original was or the 3(bis) is running so poorly it only rates as a 1(bis).

>I want to give my players the feeling of inheriting someone's weird old house.

I can see how they got it cheap! I don't knwo about your setting, but mine are generally OTU-ish in that a government or governments run or monitor most ports in order to keep an eye on things. In my settings, if the players made orbit or landed at most ports aboard *that* ship, they'd wouldn't leave until it was fixed or scrapped. (Did you know you can use nuclear dampers as a "denver boot"?)

Classic's Book 6 introduced the idea of satellite or secondary ports in a system. The port listed in the UWP was the main one on the mainworld. The could be others else where in the system on various moons, planetoids, KBOs and whatnot. That's where my players would be forced to "operate", there and in backwaters they know might be friendly.

However you run it, your players are in for a great campaign.

man, how do you even end up with a fringe world at jump 4? fringe worlds are at the end of a j1 chain, or j2 off a minor world. j4 is... what, "we captured/colonised this world right on the edge of territory we can't go into but want to keep an eye on"? so there's a listening post there, and a basic colony that basically has to be self-sufficient for almost everything because no-one's going out there, maybe some weird isolationists or just people who want peace and quiet. maybe the world's positioned just right for something. it's probably not some obscure natural resource the megacorps are mining, because then you'd have a company town with small freight tucked in the corners of the megafreighters.

I have a question about jump drives.

What does it look like when people are travelling through exospace/subspace/hyperspace? Rainbow colours? Infinite void? Lovecraftian vistas?

I'm not sure there's a canon answer. I like this pic, it kinda makes my eyes hurt to look at it.

I'm sorry, "bis"? Is that an acronym?

Wow.... staring at it for a while makes me feel like I took shrooms, without the nausea.