Traveller (role playing game)

Game overview

Characters typically journey between various star systems and engage in activities such as exploration, ground and space battles, and interstellar trading. Traveller characters are defined not by the need to increase native skill and ability but by achievements, discoveries, wealth, titles and political power.

Key features

Key features derived from literary sources are incorporated into Traveller in all its forms:

Currently Active

Though nearly all older versions of Traveller are available in PDF format, Traveller5 and Mongoose Traveller 2nd Ed. are the two current rulesets. Both rely on six-sided dice exclusively, and both draw from the original Traveller rules.

Traveller5

The Traveller5 Core Rules contains pulls rules mechanics from Traveller adventures and toolbox material from supplements. It has a clean but "retro" black-and-white production style.

Mongoose Traveller 2nd Ed.

Now in its second edition, Mongoose Traveller has a modern, full color production style while resembling the original Traveller rules in scope, sans Traveller's animal creation and starship design rules. Additional supplements will flesh out rules further, including a revision to High Guard to handle all starship design.

Characters

Traveller introduced the 'lifepath'-style character generation system to role-playing games. Traveller characters get their skills and experience in a mini-game, where the player makes career choices that determine the character's life up to the point right before adventuring begins.

A character can be human, robot, alien, or of a genetically engineered species. A character can be civilian, military, or noble, a young cadet or a tried-and-true veteran, each with strengths and weaknesses.

Traveller also became infamous in that a character could die during the character creation process before the process was finished.

Characters are described by six primary characteristics: strength, dexterity, endurance, intelligence, education, and social standing. These characteristics are typically generated with a roll of two six-sided dice. Other general characteristics also exist, such as psionics and sanity. Some variant characteristics also exist, such as charisma and caste, which replace a primary characteristic, to add nuance to alien characters.

Psionics

Extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, telepathy, and other magical skills are organized and standardized into "psionics". Though rare, characters can be psionic.

Task systems

Each rule system has its own task mechanic for resolving character actions. Some systems use two or three six-sided dice, while others use multiple six-sided dice or a twenty-sided die. Target numbers are typically determined by the referee, who takes into account task difficulty, skill level, and a characteristic. Situation and equipment used can provide a bonus or penalty to a roll. Depending on the task, a success may require rolling above or below the target number.

Equipment

Equipment in Traveller typically emphasizes wilderness exploration, hazardous environments, and combat. As a result, equipment lists are heavy on vehicles, sensor equipment, communicators, rations, personal armor, and weapons.

Low-technology: Since primitive worlds exist near technological worlds, primitive weapons are also typically included, such as swords, shields, pikes, bows, and so on.

High-technology: And since high technology is available, cybernetic implants and non-sentient robots typically also show up in equipment lists, as well as artifacts from ancient, vanished technological civilizations.

Hard Sci-fi Flavor: While there are energy weapons in Traveller, there is also a strong presence of slug-thrower weapons such as rifles and pistols. The prevailing theory is that (usually) the most efficient way to stop someone is with kinetic energy (e.g. bullets).

Starships

Traveller's rules for starship design and combat are like games unto themselves with a complex balance of ship components fitting within certain hull volumes, technology levels, and modifiers based upon characters' skills. It is complex enough to be able to generically represent most starships used in role-playing games, and flexible enough to support custom add-ons to the system. (GDW published several board games allowing Traveller space battles to be played out as games in their own right - Mayday using the Traveller rules, Brilliant Lances and Battle Rider using the Traveller: The New Era rules.)

Computer programs have been created to model and predict starship combat using Traveller rules. The most famous case involved Douglas Lenat applying his Eurisko heuristic learning program to the scenario in the Traveller adventure Trillion Credit Squadron (TCS), which contained rules for resolving very large space battles statistically. Eurisko discovered exploitable features of the starship design system that allowed it to build unusual fleets that won the 1981 and 1982 TCS national championships.

Worlds

Worlds represent a wide spectrum of conditions, from barren planetoid moons to large water worlds, from uncolonized territory to planets with tens of billions of people. Most worlds tend to be only modestly colonized, though some worlds may be dangerously overcrowded.

The world generation system in Traveller is geared to produce a highly random mix of worlds. Extensions take star system generation into account, and modify the process depending on the fecundity and history of the targeted area of space. Similar to the use of the UPP for characters, worlds are represented by an alphanumeric Universal World Profile that encodes key physical, social, and economic properties of the world.

Adventures

Adventures in Traveller tend to come from a few key themes:

Setting

The original Traveller rule booklets were promoted as rules for running general science fiction role-playing games. Supplements soon followed with a default setting. This is known as the Official Traveller Universe (OTU) or Charted Space. The OTU is also known by the primary political entity in the setting, The Third Imperium. The Third Imperium is the largest and human-dominated interstellar empire in Charted Space. It is a feudalistic union of worlds: local nobility operate largely free from oversight, restricted by convention and feudal obligations.

Humans

There are various descendants of humanity, who are collectively called Humaniti:

Cosmopolitan

Despite the thematic dominance of the human race, with most adventures taking place in human space, the Traveller universe is cosmopolitan, and is divided into a handful of major races (six) and an unbounded number of minor races. These technological species are known as sophonts in Traveller jargon, a term borrowed from earlier science fiction material.

Major races: A sophont people that supposedly developed jump technology (FTL Technology) independently. The standard list of major races includes six races:

Minor races: Sophonts which have not independently developed the Jump Drive. Most have little or no significant background material.

An early publication from Games Designers' Workshop noted that The minor races, of which there are hundreds within the area of known space, will be largely left up to individual referees. GDW's quarterly publication, The Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society, sketched out about one race per quarter, starting with Aslan in Issue 7, with no signs of letting up. Taken together with aliens casually mentioned or introduced in separate scenarios or adventures—often arbitrarily—there is therefore no indication that the number of minor races is limited in any sense.

Ancients

The Ancients were a major race in the distant past; their ruins dot planets throughout charted space and their artifacts are more technically advanced than those of any existing civilization. For unknown reasons, they:

Publishing format

The original Traveller gamebooks were distinctive digest-sized black pamphlets (the so-called "Little Black Books" or "LBBs") produced by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW). The main rules were detailed in three such booklets, sold as a boxed set while the same format was used for early support material, such as the Adventures, Supplements and further Books. Later supplements and updated versions of the main game system introduced full sized booklets, complete re-writes of the game system and significant changes to the Third Imperium.

Traveller

The original version was designed and published by GDW in 1977. This edition is also sometimes, called, retroactively, "Classic" Traveller. The core rules originally came as three distinctive "Little Black Books", in a boxed set. Supplemental booklets included "advanced" character generation, capital ship design, robots, and more. Eight boxed wargames were released as tie-in products.

MegaTraveller

A major overhaul published by GDW in 1987, but designed by Digest Group Publications. The game system used revised rules developed in DGP's Traveller's Digest periodical. The game was set during the Rebellion era which shattered the Imperium. Supplements and magazines produced during this era detailed the progression of the Rebellion from the initial assassination of the Emperor in 1116 to the collapse of large-scale interstellar trade in roughly 1124 (the beginning of the supplement Hard Times).

Traveller: The New Era

Published in 1993, this was the final edition published by GDW. Set in the former territory of the Third Imperium after interstellar government and society had largely collapsed. TNE introduced the AI Virus, a silicon chip-life form that infected and took over computers. The game mechanics used GDW's house system, derived from Twilight: 2000, 2nd ed. The game used a more realism-centered approach to science fiction, doing away with reactionless thrusters, shortening laser ranges to a reasonable distance, etc.

T4: Marc Miller's Traveller

Published by Imperium Games in 1996, T4 is set in the early days of the Third Imperium (Milieu 0), with the small, newly formed empire surrounded by regressed or barbaric worlds. The mechanics and text resemble a mix of Traveller and The New Era.

GURPS Traveller

The game uses the third edition of the GURPS system and takes place in an alternate timeline in which no Rebellion occurred and the AI Virus was never released. Steve Jackson Games produced numerous supplements for the line, including details for all of the major races, many of the minor races, interstellar trade, expanded world generation, the military forces of the Third Imperium, and starships.

Traveller 20

Published by Quick Link Interactive in 2002, this version uses the D20 system as its base and is set at the time of the Solomani Rim War around Imperial year 990, about a century before the era depicted in the original game. The preferred setting is the Gateway Domain region of the Imperium.

GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars

In 2006, Steve Jackson Games released Interstellar Wars (GTISW, sometimes GTIW) for the recently released 4th edition of GURPS. The timeline was rolled back to 2170, which is earlier than the usual Traveller setting, to the early days of Earth's presence in space at the time when Earth first started to send out interstellar ships to include the period just after the Third Interstellar War between the Terran Confederation (Earth) and the gigantic Ziru Sirka Empire (Vland).

Traveller Hero

A port of the Traveller setting to the Hero System, produced under license by Comstar Games in 2006.

Mongoose Traveller

Mongoose Publishing published this version both in a traditional format and as an open gaming SRD around which other games may be built. It is adapted from Traveller, with updated careers and technology. It is referred to as "MgT" or "MGT" to differentiate it from "MT", or MegaTraveller. The core rule book was released in April 2008, with a regular series of supplements following.

Traveller5

In 2013, Far Future Games published a new set of rules by re-working and integrating concepts from earlier rulesets.

Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition

Mongoose Publishing released an updated 2nd edition ('MgT2.0') in 2016 with 60 more pages, a modern look, and lots of color illustrations.

Software

GDW licensee Paragon produced two video games based on the Traveller universe:

Novels

Several novels have been specifically set in the various Traveller universes:

Periodicals

Gaming magazine White Dwarf ran a comic strip called The Travellers by Mark Harrison from 1983 to 1986. The strip spoofed Traveller and other space opera settings.

Television

In May 2014 game designer and film producer Ken Whitman announced that his company, D20 Entertainment, had procured a license from Marc Miller to produce a Traveller television pilot. The pilot is to be titled Spinward Traveller and will follow the adventures of Jon Spinward, who is pressed into service aboard a pirate ship.

On June 1, 2014 Whitman launched a Kickstarter campaign for the film. The campaign sought to procure $30,000 to produce a 22-minute pilot, but has stretch goals for up to a 96-minute film. The campaign received over $49,588, just shy of its $60,000 stretch goal, which would have extended the length of the film to 44 minutes. The release date of the short is unknown.

2300 AD

2300 AD is a hard science fiction alternative to the looser space opera of Traveller. Presented as a future extrapolation of the speculative World War III of GDW's popular military role-playing game Twilight: 2000, in which the various nations of Earth were only just beginning to explore and colonize the fifty light year sphere of surrounding space. Originally titled Traveller 2300, the 2nd edition of the game was renamed 2300 AD and introduced some Cyberpunk rules and adventures.