Says Who

Many Traveller adventures (and in similar systems/settings) are geared towards the PCs being fresh out of a career, with ‘assets’ amounting to massive debt, a half-collapsing rust bucket of a ship, and someone who can give them a job that might not kill them. Sometimes they do not even have the ship (but common advice is to get one fairly quickly: the game is titled “Traveller” after all). Incidentally, a similar thing happens in the various OSR scenes: there are squillions of starter dungeons and one-page adventures and so on, but very few published adventures aimed at sustained high level play (and even fewer good ones).

There have been a few people who have asked about starting Traveller. This needs something to be asked of them before answering properly: do they mean Traveller-the-setting or Traveller-the-rules. Traveller-the-Setting Traveller-the-setting is something that is dealt with in the mainline Traveller editions, starting from a loosely sketched out one in 1977’s Little Black Books and running through to Mongoose’s recent second edition revised. This provides increading details about Charted Space, the Official Traveller Universe (or Original Traveller Universe).

One of the major hassles folks seem to have when running factions in RPGs is deciding what they are trying to do and what assets they have available. One possible framework for thinking about this is to steal from the military, who need to evaluate threats within an area on a routine basis. There are a few frameworks that are in common use (and someone has already covered one: SMEAC). This post will look at the METT-TC framework, along with some examples.

Charted Space, the Original Traveller Universe is big. It is pretty too big for most practical purposes. There are a few ways to approach this. The most common is to find places that are more interesting for games to take place in (I have some suggestions for interesting places my intro to Classic Traveller post). One can also just roll up your own setting, which is the assumption in the original books.

One thing that might be useful for thinking about in SF settings is what information ships broadcast. While all sorts of things could be, a good model for what information might be valuable is to look at the Automatic Information System (AIS) used by shipping here on Earth. This is a transmitter that broadcasts a position and other identifying information reguarly, originally for collision avoidance, but which is now used for a variety of other things.

This is an entry for the SFRPG Secret Santa. Doubloon asked for a space truck stop, and well, here it is. Welcome to Jan’s Landing: Summary Jan’s Landing is an old, rundown asteroid base built and used by Mzansi Minerals during the mining boom in the near belt a few decades ago. When Mzansi finally pulled out 13 years ago the manager, Jan Huysamen, took over the site for pennies on the dollar and repurposed it as a supply hub, since it was on one of the main routes inwards from the outer system.

The following was intended as a short adventure seed for a simple Traveller adventure, but grew a little in the telling. It is based on the (largely improvised) game that I ran at Festival Draconis in October 2024, but has been formatted to match the style of the Freelance Traveller Active Measures. It is suitable for starting a campaign with or as a one-shot, but should a Referee wish to introduce the adventure into an ongoing campaign, it should work fine, although note that it takes place at the opening of the Fifth Frontier War.

Editor’s note: The following is an extract from partially burned papers from the church of St Almat. They seem to be from the notebooks of one Magister Garius Kal. They may prove to be of use during our current predicament. [Werewolves] are misunderstood. Our folk do not change their form to some sort of bestial wolf during the fool moon. That is how one makes orcs, and it appears to be irreversible once the rage has taken the poor souls.

The Clacks and Post - a Magical not-Victorian Matrix Game Welcome to the city of Endon: greatest city in the world. It is a dynamic, go-getting city that is moving with great velocity into the Century of the Fruitbat. While a great many things are changing, the speed of communication is not one of them. Until now. The New Clacks Company is looking to change that with the power of engineering.