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. They require maintenance once a week or after any combat in which a hit is taken. Maintenance is a mechanics throw; failing (or not doing maintenance) penalises any DMs by 1 per missed maintenance window.

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.

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). 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.

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.

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. It now serves as a relatively busy stop-over point and transit hub for in-system traffic. Rumours of the abandoned mine shafts being used to hide dissidents and smugglers are vehemently denied. It is a comfortable stop and a good place to meet those in the employ of other companies, as well as get some relaxation in between trips between the inner and 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.

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. (Geomorphs, by the way, tile perfectly, so you can just replace one geomorph with another of the same shape, and the new one will fit everything around it correctly. See the examples a little later.) These are available as a fairly hefty CC-SA-NC licensed PDF.

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. (This is another thing that is being posted to here as a more permanent home than various discord messages and a file on my PC, but which was written a while back.)