contraterrene

I’m pretty sure I knew about Traveller almost as soon as I knew about AD&D or any other RPG. I was a chronic haunter of gaming stores as a kid. I bought plenty of books, but in the mid-90s Traveller eluded me. I think this was mostly bad luck; for a variety of reasons, the era just wasn’t a great time to get into Traveller specifically. Classic was long dormant, Megatraveller had run its course by ’92, and The New Era (TNE) was in the midst of a similarly short run.

I have clear memories of spotting the classic Free Trader Beowulf poster and flipping through (and being very impressed/intimidated by) Fire, Fusion and Steel, but being unable to find a copy of the core rules it referenced, it always went back on the shelf.

I was in my 20’s when Mongoose released their take on the Traveller ruleset. I snagged a copy of its pocket edition from the shop down the street from my parents house and devoured it between stints running the lights for a handful of small theatre companies and delivering food for a local caterer. The game sucked me in with clear rules that threaded the needle between simulating a believable world and overwhelming me with mechanics. I was still drying out from years of being immersed in the deluge that was D&D 3.5.

I don’t think its possible to recreate the magic of that slim little black book. Mongoose Traveller in its first edition was not perfect, but it packed a lot of power into a relatively small pagecount, and that was enough to make me fall in love. I have clear memories of sitting in a Starbucks, oblivious to the biology homework I ought to have been studying, obsessively rattling 2d6 in a clenched fist as I rolled up what would eventually become The Sagan Subsector.

Thirty-five pages later and I had a fully fleshed out subsector for my players to wander in a hazily thought out far future. The one campaign I ran was a short one, perhaps ten sessions, ending for no particular reason than someone else wanting to run some D&D. It was fun but not memorable; a scout ship crew kicking around a Hawaii-themed water world, then daring an amber-zoned dictatorship to rescue a friend.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t a super inspired GM during this period; I had a great time rolling up my subsector, but I never wrote more than about a paragraph for each of those worlds, even when they were visited. The adventure I ran was cribbed heavily from the excellent opening fiction from, of all things, T20; the d20 adaptation of the Traveller ruleset. I’d snagged a copy during a bookstore visit on a whim – where it became my first brush with the official Traveller Universe, Charted Space.

We hit a few satisfying climaxes, and then my next semester of university came around and we switched to another friends D&D campaign. I’m not sure I even tried playing around with building a starship or engaging with the trade rules. I circled back to run a few one shots, but these never went past a few sessions. D&D, Shadowrun, and The Dresden Files (among many others) occupied the following years.

Around 2018, I came across the excellent blog Tales to Astound. His Classic Traveller: Out of the Box series set the hook once again. I had moved across the country; first for graduate school, then again to take a job on the west coast. I was a year into a challenging (and often unrewarding) job that I had mixed feelings about; I needed an escape, and Traveller got its next chance.

The intervening years had seen bunch of different games come across my table, and my maximalist years stemming from being a 3.5 DM had waned. I still favored games that aimed at “simulation” over narrative. That preference still existed; I vastly prefer a game rule intrude to enforce some “physics” or sense of immersion than needing to justify a narrative beat a game demands. I’d rather manage the story myself and have the rules be a source of surprises and elaboration. I dunno, not staking out any ideological ground here, just talking about what gets me going. Knuckling under because I’ve been offered a FATE point doesn’t feel good to me, but failing a will save I don’t mind.

So anyhow, Classic Traveller jumped out at me as a fun thing to explore. A lot of what I had been messing around with prior to this was (shakily) within the OSR, sorta. I wasn’t reading any blogs or in the movement, but I’d had some of my best gaming moments in campaigns where I’d gone back and run AD&D 2e or the Rules Cyclopedia. RC in particular is a masterpiece of packing a very playable, very fun game into a single volume.

So I was primed for this moment. I already loved how much I got out of a single volume from Mongoose 1e (which was still kicking around in a box from several moves before), but I decided to give Classic Traveller a try.

The brilliance of the Box method is the simplicity; it’s using books 1-3 and nothing more. Just the very core bits of the game, sans supplements, and restraining yourself to rolling up just two subsectors.

This minimalist approach made me slow down – with just two subsectors to work with, forbidden to roll more… well, it didn’t stop me from being excited about rolling up those sectors, but it sure meant them feel more consequential. Whatever I came up with here was going to be the situation. So I took it seriously, and I eyeballed every UWP I generated. I grew more comfortable with my future history being vaguer and more out of focus.

That focus got me running something even more quickly. I ran a stellar campaign – one that is still fondly remembered by the whole crew even when I only get to see them once a year or so. It centered on a bunch of dodgy miscreants, ex-marines and criminals and a very offputting merchant captain, running heists in their starting system, then immediately misjumping the starship they’d gotten via romancing a particularly lonely captain straight into unexplored space.

I’ve unfortunately lost all of the setting material I’ve developed for this game outside of a players guide I’d provided, which censored everything beyond the boundaries of the Union, but that sort’ve suits my purposes here. The blank section on the right is the Frontier, unsettled territory the Imperium equivalent for this campaign – the Union – had forbidden explorers to visit, a sort of Empire-scale urban growth boundary. The Travellers misjump, naturally, had carried them far across that boundary into entirely uncharted (but not uninhabited) space.

What followed was more delightful shenanigans; crash-landing on a tidally-locked garden world, meeting some friendly-ish locals, falling prey to the Space Taliban, seizing on a rival clans raid to fight their way free, fighting their way out with locally made muskets and escaping in a rickety biplane, then fighting pirates for control of their subsidized trader with cutlass and musket.

Central to those adventures was Lucky, an Other ™, a character with awful statistics (2 strength and 3 endurance), a skillset centered on hacking and knife-fighting, and several amputated limbs. Defying death both during character creation and in-character, I still get a crooked smile thinking about her managing to escape the scene of a heist using a remote controlled garbage bin as a ride.

I found my professional life becoming more complicated and so I chose to suspend this campaign after maybe twenty sessions. I regret walking away from this campaign; it likely had legs for much longer and my players were keen. I was sliding into professional burnout and something had to give, however, and so we wrapped right as I began running the Classic Traveller adventure Leviathan, which had a much more distinctly Sci-fi vibes to it, being set on an ocean-world with rebellious natives that evoked Dune and mysterious giant whales.

I put Traveller back on the shelf once again. A lot would change before I picked it up again.