Howard: So, I recently pointed Todd to a nifty-looking Kickstarter for a deep space exploration expansion for Traveller, and it got the two of us talking about what is arguably the best-known science fiction role-playing game, and one of the first.
Todd: “Arguably” is right. We were arguing, because of how wrong you are.
Howard: Future generations will decide that, my friend.
Todd: Before passing this debate off to future generations, let’s spend a moment telling this generation why this is so important. Namely, what Traveller’s all about, and why it’s so crucially important to SF gaming, and science fiction in general.
Howard: Fair enough. Have at it.
Todd: Traveller was the first major science fiction RPG, and it’s certainly the most influential. It was released in 1977, just three years after Dungeons & Dragons, by the tiny Illinois game company Game Designers Workshop (GDW). The success of that first boxed set, which we call Classic Traveller these days, helped propel GDW to the forefront of adventure gaming in the ‘80s and ‘90s. The first edition was designed by Marc Miller, with help from his fellow GDW co-founders Frank Chadwick and Loren Wiseman, and Dr. John Harshman.
Howard: Just as you can see the influences of older fantasy fiction on Dungeons & Dragons, you can clearly see how older science fiction had an influence upon Traveller, which, like D&D, was shaped by certain speculative fiction traditions and then became a cultural force in its own right.
Todd: Absolutely right. It’s fair to say that Classic Traveller was basically a ‘50s/’60s science fiction simulator. It was deeply inspired and influenced by the mid-century SF of E.C. Tubb, H. Beam Piper, Keith Laumer, Harry Harrison, Isaac Asimov, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, and most especially Poul Anderson.
Howard: Classic Traveller was very light on setting—
Todd: To put it mildly!
Howard: —but it sketched the scene in broad strokes. Players adventured in a human-dominated galaxy riven by conflict, thousands of years in the future. The star-spanning civilization of that future looked an awful lot like the galactic civilizations imagined by Asimov, Anderson, Jack Vance, Gene Roddenberry and others.
Todd: It sure did. Gary Gygax famously cataloged his influences in Appendix N of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Unfortunately that first Traveller boxed set didn’t have an Appendix N, but its inspirations were obvious for anyone who cared to look. Game blogger James Maliszewski did a stellar job laying out Marc Miller and company’s influences from the forensic evidence in the first edition, in the cleverly-named “Appendix T,” published at Black Gate back in 2013.
Howard: But before you could START adventuring, you had to play a mini-game to create your character.
Todd: Yes! This was one of the uniquely idiosyncratic elements of Classic Traveller, and maybe the thing it’s best remembered for.
Howard: Character generation basically simulated your military career, where you picked up all kinds of interesting things like engineering, gambling, bribery, computers, administration, piloting, and gunnery. If you were dissatisfied with your skill set you could do another tour of duty before mustering out. Of course, another tour made your character older.
Todd: And possibly dead.
Howard: Yeah, there was a chance every tour of duty would kill you, which was a bitter twist when you were finally rounding out that hot shot space pilot. Traveller never sold quite as well as D&D—
Todd: Probably because that game didn’t kill you during character creation.
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Howard: Well, every game has its flaws. Besides, unlike its old school competitors like Space Opera or Universe or Star Frontiers, all of which faded away after a few years, Traveller never truly died. Sure, various Star Wars or Star Trek rules briefly outsold it from time to time, but those license holders eventually had to relinquish it, and then someone else would pick Trek or Star Wars up and invent a whole new game system for either setting. Traveller just keeps on flying.
Todd: Despite the generic setting.
Howard: Okay, now we’ve reached the core of our argument. Go ahead and state your case for the jury, please.
Todd: It’s pretty simple. For too long, Traveller didn’t have a setting. It was a generic science fiction simulator, and it lacked any real personality. That was a major flaw, and I think that’s why it never achieved the breakout success it deserved.
Howard: That’s too harsh. Classic Traveller was a simple way for players who enjoyed classic science fiction to replicate the same thrills in a role-playing game. It was sandbox rules set we could adapt to any setting we wanted. A default setting wasn’t necessary.
Todd: That might have been fine for 1977, but as role-playing games rapidly grew more sophisticated in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, a generic setting no longer cut it.
To its credit, GDW eventually realized this, and it gradually co-opted the more colorful setting it created for its other popular science fiction game in 1977, Imperium, a two-player board game that simulated the wars between the fast-rising Terran Confederation and a vast interstellar Empire in slow decline.
I played a ton of Imperium back in the day, and I’m glad that backstory found a good home. It was retconned into Traveller, providing the game with a conflict-filled galaxy split into a handful of political spheres, with plenty of lawless areas and opportunity for adventuring. But in some respects, it was too little too late, and it hurt the game.
Howard: Not nearly as much as you think. By the early ‘80s, just as role-playing games were starting to break into the mainstream and when I first started playing Traveller, GDW had developed the Third Imperium setting.
And what a cool setting it was! A loose federation of human and non-human races, the Third Imperium is rising out of the ashes of the interstellar disasters that precipitated the fall of the Second Imperium and the Long Night, and you know what that means—lawless sectors of space, forgotten technology, abandoned outposts, alien incursions, strange rumors, and all the delightful apparatus of classic science fiction adventure.
Looking back, it’s clear the Third Imperium still had its roots in GDW’s science fiction boardgames from the 1970s, which in turn were inspired by things like Asimov’s Foundation and Poul Anderson’s Psychotechnic League. But that just made it familiar, and maybe that’s what we were looking for in those days. It certainly fired my imagination, anyway.
Todd: I have to admit, that sounds a lot better than I remember.
Howard: Did you ever try any of the later editions of Traveller?
Todd: Not really. I mean, there’s a lot of them—Wikipedia lists no less than a dozen editions from various publishers since 1977, including MegaTraveller (1987), Traveller: The New Era (1993), GURPS Traveller (1998), and even a Traveller Customizable Card Game from Marc Miller (2017). The latest role-playing game, Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition, came out in 2016.
I haven’t kept up with them all. Are they very different?
Howard: Aside from the card game? Not that much. I mean, there has been some tinkering and some attempts to get people who liked other rule sets to try out the Third Imperium setting. The main line basic rules system, however, remains pretty similar to what it was in the 1970s. There have been changes—there are far more universe-specific details available to bring the default setting to life, and you can no longer be killed during character creation!—but the system is still based primarily on the rolling of 2d6 against a target number modified by skills and attributes.
Todd: I don’t know. Is it really Traveller if your hotshot space pilot can’t die during character creation? It seems unnatural somehow.
Howard: It’s less quirky, I’ll give you that. The various editions over the years had interesting elements, but they never caught on the way the original did. There were brief experiments with a D20 setting, and a Hero setting, and Steve Jackson licensed Traveller’s Third Imperium setting for GURPS in the late ‘90s. But the recent Mongoose Publishing release, the second version of its own take on the license, is a full-color deluxe edition, and well worth a look. While you can still use the Traveller game system to create any kind of setting you want, the Third Imperium is the default, and it’s astonishingly rich.
I think Dungeons & Dragons is the best parallel here, because it’s the closest thing we have to a fantasy game system that’s as popular as Traveller.
Todd: But D&D doesn’t have one setting that continues to prosper. It’s had several, like the Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, and Dark Sun, and they all have their followers.
Howard: But none can compare to the depth and complexity of the Third Imperium. Generations of writers have continued to create worlds and aliens and adventures, populating entire sectors with interesting places to visit, wonders to encounter, and terrors to avoid, not to mention curious trade goods and nifty-looking space ships. Just reading the setting material takes you down a wonderful rabbit hole.
Todd: I made the mistake of visiting the official Traveller Wiki the other night and it was midnight before I came back out. It’s incredibly detailed, as you can see here.
Howard: Like that aforementioned fantasy game, Traveller has impacted modern science fiction. A certain Whedon fellow has admitted that his show was inspired by a popular science fiction role-playing game that he played in college…
Todd: You’re the only person I’ve ever met who uses “aforementioned” in casual conversation. That’s why I love you, man.
Howard: Thank you. Here’s an interesting post breaking down the case for that game being Traveller, and I think it’s fairly convincing. If you don’t feel like clicking through, the writer points out a correlation between what was in print when Whedon was in college, the fact that Regina and Bellerophon and other Firefly planet names are well-known destinations in Traveller’s Spinward Marches, or even small things like the way Wash shouts “Hang on, Travellers!” or that the Reaver’s Deep expansion for Traveller came out while Whedon was in college…
Todd: Even if you don’t notice those connections, I think most players will find the feel of the game is very Firefly-esque. As you said, while it’s possible to play Traveller with any kind of science fiction concept— Star Trek style exploration, Honor Harrington-esque space battles, space mercenaries or pirates, or even Star Wars-style space fantasy—from accounts that I’ve read online it seems like most players ran campaigns that felt A LOT like Firefly, decades before Firefly existed.
Howard: I know the campaigns I joined were like that—we were playing characters with a small trade ship wandering from planet to planet having adventures, while trying to make ends meet.
Todd: While I loved reading about later editions of Traveller, I never got to play them much. So I’m going to phone a friend.
Howard: Can we do that?
Todd: Actually I’m just handing a phone to a friend. E.E. Knight, author of the Vampire Earth and Age of Fire series. Plus his brand new book Novice Dragoneer just came out last month.
Eric: Hey Howard!
Howard: Hey Eric—what are you doing at Todd’s?
Eric: He invited me over to help him build his new Lego Star Destroyer.
Todd: Pew! Pew!
Eric: I’m a big Traveller fan from way back. What I wanted to expand on here was the reason for Traveller‘s amazing longevity. It was like these Legos: you could build anything with it.
I don’t think the early lack of a setting hurt the game in the least. We all talk about Dungeons & Dragons’ famous Appendix N as a way to get additional ideas for your D&D campaign. Traveller was a game system built so you could use your personal science fiction Appendix N and make a campaign out of it.
Back when my group played it, our universe was a melange of ideas from authors we liked. There was a lot of H. Beam Piper’s Federation/Space Viking stuff, some Laumer Retief and Bolo gear, and of course Heinlein-style armored battlesuits. Alan Dean Foster’s Thranx and AAnn were running around, or something very like them. You could snap on just about anything. I remember we tried Universe and it was just too science-y and not fiction enough, and Star Frontiers, while it was an amazing world, wasn’t “ours” in the way the little favorite SF-gumbo we’d created felt.
Howard: That’s a great point. The more period science fiction I read, the more influences I discover in Traveller itself. For instance, having finally read the first two Dumarest novels by E.C. Tubb, I discovered the low berths, high passage, and middle passage, which figure prominently in the Traveller game. And some of the characters in the Dumarest books are even referred to as travellers!
Eric: The fingerprints of numerous science fiction classics are all over the game.
Howard: I love that, but I think the thing I love most, apart from the rich setting, is that the system is nearly “invisible” and not so much about rolls and classes. After you create characters you can pretty much just get to gaming and not worry so much about rules consultations.
Eric: Maybe it was just my GM’s style, but we found that to be true as well. Sometimes we’d just argue that our character had the skills and tools to do a job and we wouldn’t even roll. There’d be whole encounters with NPCs where no dice were ever picked up. Combat was rare-ish—and we liked combat, we were a bunch of guys who mostly played Avalon Hill or SPI wargames. But murdering your way through an SF story just felt wrong.
As I was relating to Todd earlier, I had this galactic archivist-by-way-of-Retief character with Admin-4 (a skill that helps you interpret and, when necessary, cut through red tape). Perhaps because we all had a Laumer-like sensibility that bureaucracy sends its tendrils into every corner of the universe, my GM found it amusing to take out a Final Boss with that skill: “With that third success, Dek discovers that the Compensated Quit Claim to asteroid DZ0-2188A, although apparently properly filed by Ratstink Galactic Minerals after Uncle Pete’s Last Chance Mining and Exploration Partnership was chased off, did not originate with the Mining Commission, therefore it’s undoubtedly a clever forgery inserted into the Archives by RGM agents after the discovery of those Valubinium deposits.”
Todd: I love that story! It’s a classic Traveller tale if I ever heard one. There aren’t many games that value admin skills—and give you the tools to turn them into great stories.
Howard: Battles were a lot more realistic, too. More than in, say, that fantasy game. I remember that we tried to avoid them unless we were wearing battle suits, because characters tended to die when hit with laser guns, or slug-throwing side arms.
Eric: We almost always had one major battle every session. We had the Snapshot supplement, which was a Traveller-based wargame of close-quarters battle on small starships, and tons of maps. So many maps. I even owned the Azhanti High Lightning supplement as well, which came with 14 deck maps for a huge military spaceship. If a Snapshot game was a shootout in a sub-level cargo hold, Azhanti High Lightning was like Nakatomi Plaza from Die Hard mapped out as a multi-level spaceship. But you’re right, if you wanted to survive, you’d better be wearing armor!
Howard: It’s still one of my favorite settings. When I think of D&D I always think of home-brewed campaigns and certain moments when just the right number came up on the dice. When I think of Traveller, I remember the Third Imperium and the stories, somehow more divorced from the dice rolling.
Eric: Traveller fills my emotional gravy boat because it’s the one game I mostly experienced as a player rather than through running it. The universe was ours, rather than Gary Gygax’s or George Lucas’s or Gene Rodenberry’s or who-have-you. I couldn’t wait for the next session to get back into it.
Todd: Gentlemen, I don’t say this very often, but you’ve convinced me. As much as I cherished that copy of Classic Traveller I bought back in the ‘70s, I think I was playing it wrong. Rather than lamenting the lack of a setting, I should’ve brought one of my own. Even it was cobbled together from my favorite SF novels and a teenage imagination. Maybe especially a setting like that.
Howard: It’s never too late, you know.
Eric: Exactly. I’ve still got my dice, and an extra chair for you Friday night.
Todd: Seriously? With my luck, my character will die during character generation.
Howard: Well, character death during creation is only possible now when you’re using optional alternate rules. But use them if you want: all great science fiction has an element of tragedy.
Eric: Or humor. Depends on how you look at it.
Todd: I’ll be there Friday. But I’m bringing my own dice.
Howard lives in a tower beside the Sea of Monsters with a wicked and beautiful sorceress. When not spending time with her or their talented children, he can be found hunched over his laptop, mumbling about flashing swords and doom-haunted towers. In 2019 St. Martin’s published the first two novels of his newest fantasy series, For the Killing of Kings and Upon the Flight of the Queen. Paizo has published four of his Pathfinder novels and St. Martin’s/Thomas Dunne two of his critically acclaimed historical fantasy novels starring the Arabian sleuth and swordsman team of Dabir and Asim. He edits Tales From the Magician’s Skull and for the Perilous Worlds publishing imprint.
Todd McAulty’s first novel The Robots of Gotham was published by John Joseph Adams Books in June of last year. He lives in Chicago.
E.E. Knight is the author of the Vampire Earth, Age of Fire, and Dragoneer Academy books. He and his family live in Oak Park, IL.
I had heard of D&D but never played it when I saw the little black box on the shelf a couple of months after Star Wars.
Cliche though it is, it changed my life. I still play Traveller today & have a copy of the The Traveller Book signed by Loren (RIP) & Marc. My son who turned 18 yesterday has run Traveller for about 5 years now.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Scout ship ready to lift and make it’s way down the main to Aramis in the Marches.
There really haven’t been any other science fiction TTRPGs that have evidenced anything like the staying power of Traveller. Starship Alpha and Gamma World both faded very quickly. You could make a case for Shadowrun, but the fantasy elements there are very strong.
My own Traveller setting was a mix of Piper and Niven. I spent hours rolling up detailed star systems while watching TV. All those notebooks are long gone, but I still have my rule books.
Speaking of Niven, Known Space was another clear influence on the Third Imperium stuff. The Hivers are clear analogues to the Puppeteers, as are the Aslan to the Kzinti.
I don’t have my original “Traveler” books to hand (if I remember correctly, I actually gave them away when I gave up RPGs, then bought an updated edition in a fit of remorse a few years later), but my recollection is that some early volume did actually contain a list of influences or, as they may have put it, “recommended reading”. I know this because I used their reading list as my own introduction to a lot of SF, or at least a particular kind of SF. And that is why I own, among other things, the first 29 volumes of E.C. Tubb’s interminable “Dumarest” series.
As I say, my memory is that such a list was part of some early official volume, but perhaps they just repackaged James Maliszewski‘s summary.
Andre Norton was also one of the authors Traveller drew on. Well, except Traveller explicitly allowed male and female PCs, whereas the Solar Queen stories seemed to set in a universe where men reproduced by asexual budding.
(Btw, I submitted my next piece before this one was published. You’ll understand why I mention this when it comes out)
I think Scouts had the worst chance of surviving [1] but if they did, they could get a sweet 100 ton Scout ship.
1: Five randomly generated CT Scouts, courtesy of an online chargen:
† Scout Rosalie Satō DB9379 Age 26 2 terms Service History: Automatic Enlistment accepted. Voluntarily reenlisted for second term. Death in service.
† Scout Lena Zhang 563872 Age 22 1 term Service History: Automatic Enlistment accepted. Death in service.
† Scout Thomas Davies 76B954 Age 26 2 terms Service History: Automatic Enlistment accepted. Voluntarily reenlisted for second term. Death in service.
† Scout Antonio Shin 567659 Age 26 2 terms Service History: Automatic Enlistment accepted. Voluntarily reenlisted for second term. Death in service.
† Scout Said Wood A545B6 Age 34 4 terms Service History: Automatic Enlistment accepted. Voluntarily reenlisted for second term. Voluntarily reenlisted for third term. Mandatory reenlistment for fourth term. Death in service.
Traveller was also my formative RPG in a way that D&D wasn’t – I refereed a couple of long-running Traveller campaigns and even after I stopped playing bought piles of additional material, rediscovering it in the tear-down era of Traveller: The New Era.
I do agree with the thought that the original 3 books in the box were slightly too minimalist. Aside from a lack of background, they also had a lack of significant technology – there wasn’t really a weapon much more powerful than a semi-automatic rifle (with the exception of some clunky backpack-fed lasers.) That’s also reflective of the source material to some extent – A.Bertram Chandler’s Grimes stories are another significant influence – but did make it hard for things to feel SFish. That was rapidly corrected in two additional rule books, one for ground combat (“Mercenary”) and one for space (“High Guard”).
With those, it did become a open-ended toolkit. And the 3rd Imperium setting was always open enough that one could shape it for any kind of adventure.
One additional feature of Traveller that has also been influential was the ability to design your own spaceships. I spent hours using the High Guard rules doing this with paper spreadsheets, and then later with TNE’s incredibly detailed system. (I helped playtest the next edition after that, and tried to write up useable physics-driven rules for sensors and a combat system that recreated the ease of High Guard.)
Yeah, I only played a session of Traveller once or twice, but I spent untold hours designing warships using High Guard (and then trying to create deckplans with varying degrees of success) and designing solar systems using the extra-detailed rules in Book 7, Scouts.
I lost almost all of my Classic Traveller stuff to a flooded basement in the summer of 1993; I picked up the FFE reprints when they started coming out, but a few years ago I broke down and just ordered used copies of all of those little black books from Amazon or eBay or what have you.
I followed the subsequent editions (MegaTraveller, TNE, T4 and now Marc Miller’s new Fifth Edition) but I admit that they didn’t grab me in the same way, in large part because every subsequent edition seemed determined to make the design sequence rules (for ships and, eventually, for vehicles and weapons) even more detailed and impenetrable. For my money, the original High Guard design sequence still can’t be beat.
I was also a (classic) Traveller player as a youth. It was the first time I’d ever heard of projectile weapons as “slug throwers” (and after playing with painstaking D&D maps, it was refreshing that combat in Traveller only really cared about how far apart you were).
At the time, I didn’t get a classic SF vibe from it at all. I remember some annoyances from the rule set that now looking back are completely reasonable.
The first thing I didn’t like was the character generation system where you pretty much had to come from the military or merchant marine. I used to wonder why I couldn’t just be some dilletante, playboy adventurer, but now I get that there aren’t many life paths that would give you the needed skill sets.
I also didn’t much like jump drive at the time because my personal vision of space opera was Doc Smith style inertialess, but I’ve opened my mind to this over time.
If I were to play again now, I think Traveller would be great for something like the James Schmitz Telzey Amberdon Hub setting, or maybe something like Christopher Anvil’s Interstellar Patrol setting. So, yeah, I guess classic SF after all.
As far as Traveller not having a setting, I think it did. But what hurt it most, IMO, is that it never had breakout expansion sets and tie-in fiction like Greyhawk or Dragonlance.
(someone remind me, was it possible to play as a Zhodani? Or were they NPCs only?)
It was possible to play as Zhodani eventually … In the waning days of Classic Traveller ( after CT had moved from LBBs to standard 8.5″x11″ books, but before the move to MegaTraveller), GDW published a series of alien modules — Aslan, Vargr, K’Kree, Zhodani, etc. — all of which took a much more detailed look at the species in question, including custom chargen rules and adventures for a party of, e.g., Aslan.
There was also supplement 4, Citizens of the Imperium, which provided a whole bunch of alternate career options (including, IIRC, scientist and barbarian) if you wanted to get away from the actual military background.
If I was running a campaign and a player wanted a non-services character, I might just say “pick something out of 76 Patrons and we’ll run with it”. And if the character was a Bertie Wooster type without applicable skills, I’d assign them a Jeeves…
@2: True. Probably the next longest-lived SF RPG was Cyberpunk 2020, and even that was about a decade after Traveller and obviously not concerned with interstellar travel.
My memory of Traveller is one attempt at playing with it in 1989 one weekend at university. A friend said we have to try this, but we didn’t really get much further than creating a character (with very little notion of what we were doing) and then getting onto some sort of cargo hauler and… well that was it.
It could have been that Roger didn’t know how to run the game, or that we didn’t know how to play the game, but we never attempted it again. Sounds like in the right hands it might have been a lot more engaging.
I never played the game, but I painted miniatures, and there were lots of great 15mm figures that came from Traveller. And many resembled famous SF figures from literature, which made them lots of fun.
I never played it and didn’t really know anything about it, but sat in on the tail end of a character generation session once in the mid-’80s. I didn’t know why everyone was so relieved when they finished and congratulated themselves, so they had to explain that none of them died. That was a really weird concept.
Also noteworthy for being one of the first RPGs to be skill-based rather than level-based – characters were defined by their set of skills (“Pilot 3, Computers 1, Administration 2”) rather than level (“Level 3 mercenary”). That’s also stayed pretty standard for SF RPGs ever since.
In my first semester of college, fall 1980, my roommate came back from a meeting of the Society for Creative Anachronism, telling me about the D&D game they had started. I wasn’t very interred, commenting that I likedscience fiction a lot more than fantasy. Then he introduced me to Traveller. Ah, yes, dying during character creation was so much fun.
I actually just read through the GURPS version of the game last week after I found it buried and unread in storage. I thought it had a very cool setting — though being late-stage GURPS, most of the text was devoted to incredibly detailed numbers-crunching to build spaceships…
Ooooh… If PCs can be Zhodani, I wonder if an ersatz Lensman-verse could be run… Gonna have to see if I can dig my rulebooks out of storage.
My love of TRAVELLER started in the 80s when I got to play Octavain…In Space! From there it went to collecting with all the starship and subsector building and lots of dreaming of working on it. Turns out those 30+ years of messing with it led to my living the dream, I helped with development of T5 and now publish new T5 content. TRAVELLER has always been my favorite game. Even if it does kill you in CharGen. And it’s not so much the Survival Roll, that gets ya, it’s the Mandatory Reenlistments that make you make another Survival Roll. But if you do make that roll, man seven Terms hooks you up with Skills and Muster Out benefits!
Nifty article.
Let’s see how many true old timers are here:
“Exit Visa”
LOL!
“The K’kree evolved independently of Earth’s biosphere, Sir, unlike some other Major Races. I would advise against publicly comparing them to any of your family’s livestock, no matter how prized.”
Speaking of aristocrats, I always thought that having hereditary titles of nobility was both unusual and made the setting more specific than I expected. But maybe that was just very common in the classic SF it was inspired by.
EXIT VISA isn’t that bad…as long as you have Bureaucracy and Admin, maybe some Bribery and Forgery. Got those and it’s totes cake. Just people tend not want those unsexy skills. Me, love me some Bureaucracy and Admin so much of TRAVELLER is so much easier with those skills.
Also the Big Blue Book was awesome and much used and loved.
@1: “Cliche though it is, it changed my life. I still play Traveller today & have a copy of the The Traveller Book signed by Loren (RIP) & Marc. My son who turned 18 yesterday has run Traveller for about 5 years now.”
That’s what I like to hear! Stories of parents who pass on their love of role playing to their children always warm my heart.
I taught my three children how to play D&D when my youngest turned 8. They loved it, and we played a homegrown campaign until they left home. My daughter eventually founded a D&D club in high school.
I don’t know how much of the current boom in tabletop role playing can be credited to second generation players, but I’m sure second-generation gamers are part of the mix.
Anyway, I’m glad to hear about your son. What version do you play?
@2: “There really haven’t been any other science fiction TTRPGs that have evidenced anything like the staying power of Traveller. Starship Alpha and Gamma World both faded very quickly. You could make a case for Shadowrun, but the fantasy elements there are very strong.”
Yeah, you’re right about that. GAMMA WORLD probably come closest. It’s had 7 editions through the year, but the latest was in 2010.
I have high hopes for STARFINDER, which is probably my favorite among the current crop. But it’s only been out for three years… 30 years less than TRAVELLER!
Does anyone remember the TRINITY RPG from White Wolf? A game with some really fabulous adventures and supplemental material.
@3: “my recollection is that some early volume did actually contain a list of influences or, as they may have put it, “recommended reading”. I know this because I used their reading list as my own introduction to a lot of SF”
angusm,
Really? I hope you’re right, as I’d LOVE to see that.
Can anyone out there confirm this? Is there a Recommended Reading list in at least one of the many editions of TRAVELLER?
I’ve been playing this since it was first published. Just ran a short campaign last year.
@@.-@: “(Btw, I submitted my next piece before this one was published. You’ll understand why I mention this when it comes out)”
James,
Excellent! Great minds think alike (or so they tell me!) I’ll keep an eager eye out for your next column.
Speaking of which, I really enjoyed your November piece “Celebrating Five Favourite Works by Poul Anderson.” Even if I did just read it last week. I shamelessly cribbed from it in my article at BLACK GATE on Wednesday (under my O’Neill identity). Then I spent 90 minutes reading through some of your other articles on Poul Anderson at Tor.com. Keep the flame alive, my friend!
@5: “Aside from a lack of background, they also had a lack of significant technology – there wasn’t really a weapon much more powerful than a semi-automatic rifle (with the exception of some clunky backpack-fed lasers.) That’s also reflective of the source material to some extent – A.Bertram Chandler’s Grimes stories are another significant influence – but did make it hard for things to feel SFish.”
bmac,
You know, that’s a very good point. At the time I didn’t really notice it, because (as you note) the science fiction I was reading at the time, which was very much in line with the source material, had the same feel.
I never tried HIGH GUARD, but now you make me wish I had!
@24: Not quite: https://www.blackgate.com/2013/10/08/appendix-t/
Traveller sounds fun but dying during character creation sounds bizarre. I never played it . I should see if I can find someone to run a game for me. I stuck to D&D which I still play. I’ve played Shadowrun and Rifts. I learned the joys of battle suits in Rifts. I have Starfinder books just need to finish up a few things before I start a game.
@22 He runs Mongoose in the Spinward Marches. I do CT with the MT task system. My campaigns have been homebrew and official- I liked the bitter ending of MT and the New Era.
But the best time was when we crewed the March Harrier out of Aramis for The Traveller Adventure.
@7: “If I were to play again now, I think Traveller would be great for something like the James Schmitz Telzey Amberdon Hub setting, or maybe something like Christopher Anvil’s Interstellar Patrol setting. So, yeah, I guess classic SF after all.”
vinsentient,
Good picks! And yeah, I wish there had been supplements for both of those settings. I would have paid good money to adventure beside Telzey and Trigger Argee.
“As far as Traveller not having a setting, I think it did. But what hurt it most, IMO, is that it never had breakout expansion sets and tie-in fiction like Greyhawk or Dragonlance.”
It eventually had The Third Imperium of course, but you’re definitely right that the setting didn’t become huge literary properties the way DRAGONLANCE and FORGOTTEN REALMS did for D&D, spawning multiple best selling franchises. Of course, few RPG had anything like that kind of luck.
Marc Miller’s Far Future Enterprises did launch a short-lived line of TRAVELLER novels a few years ago, starting with Robert E. Vardeman’s Fate of the Kinunir. I don’t know how well received they were.
https://www.blackgate.com/2013/08/17/step-into-the-traveller-universe-with-fate-of-the-kinunir/
There was an earlier Traveller inspired series that’s so obscure the titles and author’s name escapes me. Happily, I know I was sent it to review and I have a folder filled with aging reviews…
Jefferson Putnam Swycaffer’s Concordat books, which credited Traveller without being much like CT. The books I read had a rather dour interstellar federation and not an Empire. Huh. ISFDB tells me there was a Concordat book published as recently as 2016….
@6: “Yeah, I only played a session of Traveller once or twice, but I spent untold hours designing warships using High Guard (and then trying to create deckplans with varying degrees of success)… For my money, the original High Guard design sequence still can’t be beat.”
Joe,
(I already responded to this once, but I think my reply got eaten, Apologies if you end up with two responses.)
I only bought a handful of the supplements to Classic Traveller, and HIGH GUARD wasn’t one of them. But based on your comment and the one from bmac (above), it seems I really missed out.
The RPG supplements I most cherished were the ones the ones that inspired creativity, and it sounds like HIGH GUARD fits the bill. I didn’t think a starship design toolkit would do that for me…. but it looks like I really missed out!
@31 — Paul Brunette wrote two Traveller: The New Era novels (Death of Wisdom and To Dream of Chaos) back in the 1990s — I think it was supposed to be a trilogy, but was never completed. I think I read the first one years ago? but don’t recall being impressed; I was also never as much of a fan of the TNE setting (post-Rebellion, post-Virus, post collapse).
Miller himself also recently (well, 2015) wrote the novel Agent of the Imperium; that one I haven’t read yet.
Someone adapted Traveller for the Mediterranean: https://www.freelancetraveller.com/magazine/2010-04/mercator.pdf
SEVEN editions of Gamma World? I knew about the 4e reboot, but that’s all. And that reboot, as I understand it, changed just about everything but the basic premise (with a whole lot of “Mutation does not work that way!” in it as well).
I don’t know much about Green Ronin’s AGE system, but The Expanse TTRPG probably has a shot at longevity thanks to the popularity of the source material. Kind of amusing, given that Ty Franck originally created the setting as an RPG.
And @36, these days you can find online ship design tools:
http://www.downport.com/amv/software/hgs.html
As opposed to when I was doing all of my ship design by laboriously writing everything down in pencil and doing math on my scientific calculator (and probably making a botch of things).
Many, many years ago (like, 20+ years ago, that is) I had found a really nice downloadable version of the Traveller random word generation tables (as introduced in the Alien modules), which I also found incredibly useful. Sadly, the particular version that I downloaded seems to no longer exist anywhere; and I’ve found other wordgen programs online, but nothing quite so simple and accessible.
I tried introducing Traveller to a younger group a few months ago with mixed results. I have such fond memories from the game as a kid, from exploring new worlds to an adventure at OwlCon (Rice University) on year where we came into the classroom for our turn at the module to see a list of crimes on the blackboard. We thought perhaps we were in a law classroom until the GM told us those were the crimes committed by the last group.
While we also played Space Opera (FGU) on occasion, it was Traveller that was our go to game for space adventures.
As I recall, almost all of the published adventures pretty much required the players to commit crimes just to get through the adventure.
And one adventure was called Prison Planet, and the hook was basically that the players would be arrested, tried & convicted for some of their multitudinous crimes and be sent to the pokey (planet).
It’s called Polesotechnic League, in fact.
Yep, Anderson had two confusingly named settings
Man, I’ve played a ton of Traveller over the years, mostly in someone’s interpretation of the Third Imperium setting.
Some reasons for it not being MORE popular was that there were few adventures for it that – as pointed out – didn’t turn you into a criminal. And the infamous ‘dying during char gen’ – even though most gm’s didn’t bother with that rule – the reputation of it was enough to make people give the game a hard pass.
And that you started as, well, old people. (Indeed, as the Black Gate article points out, the ONLY ILLUSTRATION in the original book is of a fat old guy as a merchant leader). To get anything like decent skills you usually were mustering out in your late thirties or early forties, and maybe took stat disads due to age. Since we mostly started playing Traveller during 1980-1990, this was in the era of cyberpunk and the beginnings of transhumanism, but it was decades before Traveller started allowing cybernetics or anything like that. Shoot, it was several years before they even included a laser pistol, citing it was ‘unrealistic’.
Also there was, well, the smell of the military all over it. To the kids growing up in the anti-war 70’s, it was a little weird that the only careers in Traveller were ex-military, or ‘other’ (criminals). It was several years before we got a book with other possible careers.
Later editions of the game did much, much better. More careers, more adventure possibilities, etc. MegaTraveller Digest – IMO the finest bit of lore ever done, had a massive mega-campaign where you actually travelled, and dealt with strange aliens and mysteries instead of robbing someone’s house for a necklace.
Still a correct statement though ;-)
@42: Two words: ‘waste heat’.
@44
That and the necessary power source…
Well this has been a fascinating look at an RPG I vaguely knew of.
It really does seem the limitations of popularity is that as that excellent Black Gate post pointed out, most of the strongest influences were a particular subset of authors from the mid-century who themselves seems to have a varying but undeniable amount of military experience themselves, with an inherent libertarian feel. It came out before Star Wars and before cyberpunk so while I have enough perspective to get the basic idea of what the “standard” feel of the game is intended, it seems a little old fashioned and square to newer generations who’d rather play Jedi knights and Warhammer-style Space Marines.
For myself, going by the the characters I created using online character generators, I’m at a point in my life where playing a rebel colonist turned corporate black-ops agent, a muckracking journalist, or a disgraced Naval officer is more my jam.
@42: “Also there was, well, the smell of the military all over it. To the kids growing up in the anti-war 70’s, it was a little weird that the only careers in Traveller were ex-military, or ‘other’ (criminals). It was several years before we got a book with other possible careers.”
You must have lived through a different 80s than I did. That was the era that MilSF became a subgenre in its own right and every other mainstream film was pretty gung ho pro-military. As for being criminals, that meshed pretty well with cyberpunk. An awful lot of the career options in Shadowrun certainly walked the line of dubious legality.
That’s not to say that the game didn’t lean rather heavily on older SF, with its libertarian philosophy and militaristic leanings.
@23/Todd McAulty, I have a copy of AEON, before WW was forced to change the name to Trinity because Viacom thought it was too close to Aeon Flux that ran on MTV’s Liquid Television. Played a couple of games, but we didn’t stick with it too long.
So many memories bubbling up. Now that I’m reminded, I also had issues with playing “old man” characters in their thirties and forties. It’s actually a great game mechanic but to this shallow teen it was unappealing.
Oh wait, is Traveller the game where you had to do vector addition for space combat? That can’t have been good for wide popularity either, haha!
Oh wait, is Traveller the game where you had to do vector addition for space combat?
Triplanetary had this as well. Recently got it and most games turn out to be terribly pacific because no one can be bothered with the gun combat rules.
SPI’s Universe RPG had many elements that seemed to be reactions to Traveller, one of which was that of the 23 standard professions, at least 13 were non-military/law enforcement. You could have a campaign where everyone was civvies.
In retrospect, it’s odd that Universe has as many military career paths as it did, since there was one human government, the Federation, and in the basic box set no aliens. Who exactly were the astroguards, space troopers, and star marines being deployed against?
The Mayday boxed game did potentially make vector-based space combat a LITTLE more manageable because it used position counters to track everything; but it still didn’t do much to address the fact that Traveller space combat is often not very exciting because either oops, you encountered a larger ship that massively outguns you and your ship exploded and let’s dig out the chargen rules again, or if you have two relatively evenly matched ships (especially small civilian ships with just one or two turrets each) you may or may not ever actually hit each other and may or may not ever inflict disabling damage on each other.
Also, with the way the maneuver drives scaled (1G-6G in whole number increments), in any engagement the ship with the faster maneuver drive will be able to completely dictate the terms of the engagement.
(Oh, and also another problem with using “realistic” vector movement in a space combat game is that there’s a non-zero chance that the first several matches will just be the two opposing ships shooting past each other at ever-increasing velocities and vanishing into opposite sides of the system.)
Can’t believe no one has mentioned the size of the computers! Even then fitting out a 100 ton ship with a 20 ton (may be smaller its was a long time ago) was a bit much and nowadays its positively funny. I assume the later version changed this.
We played it some but our group was more into Space Opera – which brings its own list of problems and memories!
I don’t think they’ve ever changed the size of the computers; I remember at one point (an issue of Dragon Magazine, maybe?), Marc Miller tried to justify it by pointing out that on the Traveller deck plans, one ton = 2 squares = a chair and a desk. And I suppose you could assume that part of that volume is, e.g., a server room for the ship.
@54: My GM rationalized this as including all the cables running all over the ship. Doesn’t help much.
If I ever run Traveller – any space RPG, really – I will rule that Moore’s Law crapped out in the Sixties, because I really do not want computers in my tabletop gaming.
@54 I remember them later “clarifying” that since tonnage was being used more a measure of volume than mass, the tonnage for a computer included (essentially) the room you sat in to *use* the computer. That worked for a *little* while as computers got smaller, but then wasn’t enough any more.
Let’s google and see…ah, here: a “ton” of spaceship represents 14 cubic meters of space (the volume of a ton of liquid hydrogen). So a 10 ton computer actually represents 140 cubic meters…let’s give the room 4 meter vaulted ceilings and that gives 35 square meters…almost a 20’x20′ room. I’m picturing a guy sitting at a laptop (that probably does a lot more than those “10 ton computers” were actually described as doing) at a desk in the middle of this huge room. “What? I want my privacy.”
Obviously folks haven’t dealt with serious clinet servers:
The Traveller ship’s compuer runs every workstation and each of them is customizable using a holographic interface ; it provides entertainment for everyone- library, games, videos and etc to personal crew cabins , high and mid passage passengers and the lounge spaces; navigation; engineering; sickbay and the low passage ice sickles; and probably a myriad of other functions. The computer is everything and everywhere.
CPU and storage will continue to shrink. Interface elements and equipment that needs to be monitored will not. There will be pc equivalent s on every desk, tablets and handsets for everyone, game systems like the current Nintendo Switch and all of that is rolled up in that little bit of space that is not just a room with some wimpy windows laptop in it. It’s the whole huge mass which is why Virus would later be so polarizing.
@58: Virus never happened. This is a hill I will die on.
Hehehehe. I will say no more ;)
It’s funny how hung up people get on the death during character creation thing. Like it’s such a problem. Compare to a 1st level D&D character who you flesh out, name, and then dies in the first session (I’m talking 1e or 2e, since 5e is overhyped easy advancement wankery).
“I shamelessly cribbed from it in my article at BLACK GATE on Wednesday (under my O’Neill identity).”
Todd, if you are “John O’Neill”, you make like to know I posted a section of your Gary Gygax tribute to the recent (about a week ago) FB tribute page, and it received a “like” from his daughter.
It’s where “John” says it was about finding acceptance at the game table, and finding out about accepting others as well.
It’s on my Taglines page at Beowulf Down starport, along with many, many, MANY Traveller-inspired quotes I’ve gathered over the years.
(As I write this, I’m on the platform waiting for a train for work, wearing my 4518th Lift Infantry Regiment (the Duke of Regina’s Own Huscarles) T-shirt, ready for casual Friday.)
http://members.tip.net.au/~davidjw/
You guys rock! I haven’t played Traveller in about 25 years. I did not really mind the generation death. I think my favorite version was Traveller 2000. My favorite ship was the Corsair.
I picked up Traveller in 1980 or 81, and still have my original LBBs in the (much dilapidated box). I also have a number of supplements and a few adventures, too. I never really tried to GM a Traveller game, being pretty much stuck in the D&D DM’s mindset, which doesn’t really fit Traveller. A friend of mine took on the duties, and nailed it. Traveller isn’t really a set adventure game. It’s a sandbox game with lots of possibilities that happen either at random or solely due to player choice— you fly your merchant vessel to this system, and on the outer edges encounter a Solimani cruiser whose captain politely invites you to dinner. You accept, it’s a pleasant evening, and both ships go there separate ways— and then an Imperial Navy patrol cruiser shows up to ask what you were doing docking with an enemy vessel for four hours… Oops. And on and on it goes, with you trying to make a living and survive, no matter what the Universe throws your way.
Loved it then, still admire it now.
As for characters dying in generation, we treated that as a game in itself— it was just fun to take your chances and push your luck. And if a character was one we really wanted, we followed the optional rule of a failed survival role not being death, but instead a severe injury that forced a departure from the service, which made it an opportunity for backstory— why did this character barely survive that 4th term? Maybe he’s got a scar, or an artificial limb, maybe even a grudge, etc., etc..
Finally, I now point everyone to The Most Awesome Traveller Site Ever, which is nothing less than a fully interactive hex map of pretty much the entire Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy (if not more). 8-O. https://travellermap.com/?p=-0.433!0.5!5.5
For the record, I have no affiliation with that site. But it’s frackin’ cool!
> Todd, if you are “John O’Neill”, you make like to know I posted a section of your Gary Gygax tribute to the
> recent (about a week ago) FB tribute page, and it received a “like” from his daughter.
@62 — David, thank you so much for sharing that! And apologies for taking so long to see your comment.
I wrote that tribute at work, about two hours after David Kenzer called to tell me Gygax was gone. It’s enormously gratifying to know Gygax’s daughter appreciated it.