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.

Background I do not really use any VTT tools for running games, but folks running Traveller of various kinds often like having deckplans, at least for the ship owned or used by the PCs. While there is no shortage of deckplans out there, sometimes you just need a new, custom one. A fairly common source for making one’s own deckplans is the set of Starship Geomorphs created by Robert Pearce a few years ago.

Classic Traveller has a moderately arcane combat system to modern eyes. For the most part though, it is not too bad. This is an example of how it can be interpreted. If you want to do things differently, there is no reason to assume that this is the only way it should (or can be interpreted to) work. In general though, I think that the following example is mostly sensible and will not cause too many feathers to be ruffled.

Someone told you that Traveller is a cool SF TTRPG, and you heard that Classic Traveller (CT) is a good version of it. So, how do you start? This was a (relatively) brief guide that I wrote in August/September 2023, with some edits in December. This is a more permanent home for it than a PDF uploaded to various discords. Contents Choosing a Core Book Additional Books and Supplements Books Supplements Other Conclusion A note about those letters Core Mechanics Character Generation What do players do?