What is Traveller?

What is Traveller?

Back in 1977, Dungeon and Dragons was a big hit and role-playing games suddenly were a big mainstream phenomenon. The race was on to produce other role-playing games and alongside Fantasy fiction, Science Fiction was a huge area people were keen to game. Around at a company called Games Designers Workshop (GDW) a board game designer called Marc Miller produced the first published Science Fiction role-playing game and he called it Traveller.

Dungeon and Dragons based its game around the Dungeon. Dungeons were maps of rooms and corridors that players could explore. But science fiction adventures are much more wide open than that. There is space to travel, whole worlds to explore, a thousand different things players might want to try and do from flying spaceships to discovering the cure to a deadly alien disease. How do you handle all of that in a role-playing game?

Unlike Dungeons and Dragons that basically said here is how to build a dungeon and this is what to put into it, Traveller basically provided a whole toolkit. It did not dictate how you set up and ran the game, it just provided you with some core rules such as the skill system and the task system that goes with it, and a whole bunch of other things to help the referee set up and run science fiction adventures and campaigns.

Traveller is still around today and been through numerous editions, but the scope of the rules remains essentially the same. I bought the very first edition of Traveller, a boxed set of three little black books, and have been fascinated by the game ever since. The game I bought and learnt was simple, fast, completely wide-open, let you free to create your own setting, and was fun.

Over the years there has been a mountain of material created for Traveller. Talking to some people trying to get into the game I have discovered some of the latest editions of the rules can be very off putting and give the misleading impression of a 'rules heavy' game. That was never the intention of the original rules, so I thought I'd write this guide to help new players understand what Traveller is all about, understand the game from the basics up, and help them get started quickly whatever version of the rules they want to play with. The 'Classic' Traveller rules still provide a pretty good game and the Starter Set is available for free. They provide an excellent basis for understanding later editions of the rules, and there is huge 'backward compatibility' in the various versions. You can usually take Classic Traveller material and plug it straight into later versions.

So what do you get in the Traveller RPG rules?

This essentially still applies to any of the editions available.

For all players you get:

1. A Character Generation System

2. A Task System - Very simple system. Roll two die 6, add skills score 8+ to succeed 

3. An Equipment List. Items players can buy with their money. Descriptions, prices other details. Everything from weapons to vehicles.

4. A Personal Combat system - Simple system. Task based.

5. Starship Combat system - Again a simple, task-based system

For Referees you get:

6. Sector generation system - Create a 'Space Map' for your game setting

7. World generation system - Generate details for the worlds in your universe

8. Encounter tables - A selection of tables to help referee run their game

9. Animal Encounter Table generation system

10. Starship Design system

11. Starship operations guide - Running costs, getting freight, cargo and passengers

12. Trade and Commerce System for buying and selling cargos for profit

....plus other things to help the referee run their game including lots of pre-written adventures, supplements, and expansions...

We are going to take a more in-depth look at all those components, starting looking at Characters.