Much of this is adapted from the ATV rules in Across the Bright Face. Basics Mechs are a type of vehicle and use the Vehicle (Mech) cascade skill. While a variety of designs exist, most are about 10 tons in weight and about 4-5m tall. They can travel at about 80km/hr consistently, with only extremely rough terrain slowing them down. They normally have only a single pilot. Mechs are generally a little complicated and finnicky.
oldhawkeyes put together a great post about combat styles in Classic Traveller. When it was first posted, I threatened to make some of my own, so here here we are. Some of my fighting styles use special abilities from oldhawkeyes’ post, because CT is generally fairly breezy, and needing to remember a squillion special attacks is just a pain, even if they are player-facing, so adding too many should be avoided.
It bears repeating. One of the cheapest ways to build depth in a TTRPG setting is to reuse things. Need to introduce a NPC? It was the one that the PCs ran into a few sessions ago. Need a temple? Use the one that they went to get healing from before. Want to reinforce a theme of some kind, say oppressiveness? Have them get stopped by the guards. Again. That is it, really.
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.