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). There are of course a few digressions on the way, such as GURPS Traveller being an alternate timeline, GURPS Interstellar Wars being a jump back to the early part of the setting, Traveller 4 which is set around the start of the Third Imperium, T20 which is about 200 years before the the original (and current Mongoose) edition. Most of the official Traveller material is set in around 1110, give or take a few years, with earlier editions from Game Designers Workshop pushing that timeline forward through to around 1248. Mongoose has come back to the 1110s for their own published campaigns.

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. This post if going to talk about a few considerations of how to shrink the whole OTU setting down to something more manageable.

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. Werewolves are the souls of those who [fragment burnt and missing]

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. Not everyone approves of this, in particular the traditional long-distance communications provider, the Royal Post Office, considers this as encroaching it on their territory.

I have recently been rereading the Pern series by Anne McAffrey, and thinking about it as a RPG setting. Spoilers are going to crop up in this, so if that bothers you, you might want to avoid this particular tag. This first post will give a high level overview of the setting and how people are organised within it. Follow-up posts will think about possible adventures and provide more details about dragons in particular.