Referee's Guide: Animal Encounter Tables

When the designers of Traveller came to designing 'Animal Encounters' they could have approached it in a number of ways...because let's be clear we are talking about 'all alien life' here...apart from actual intelligent alien races, in this category falls just about any living thing you could find on a planet...

...not exactly a small subject!

Now they could have gone the route of 'Starseeker' its competitor at the time being developed by TSR, creators of Dungeon & Dragons, and gone for 'pulp sci-fi' monsters...four eyes...six limbs sort of thing...

But instead they decided to go a whole different route. A sort of 'pseudo-science' route where they did not in fact tell you anything about what the animal looked like, whether it was like a starfish, insect, reptile or mammal. Rather they would stick to how big the animal was, whether it flew, swam or walked and what its position was in the eco-system, which would dictate its behaviour when encountered.

So the Traveller Animal Encounter table let it up to you whether it looked like a centipede, six-legged lizard, bear-dog or some sort of dinosaur analogue and just worried about whether it was a Hijacker Scavenger or a Grazer.

Now before we get too heavily drawn into a heavy biology/ecology class it is worth asking the question what do we actually need Animal Encounters for in a role-playing game.

There is a variety of answers to that....