Chris Kubasik’s series of “Out of the Box” posts on Classic Traveller got me re-thinking about Traveller. It was the first game I ever owned, and I’ve long had nostalgic feelings about it, but I’ve never played as much of it as I’d have liked. I think that’s down to various reasons, but I think one of them was a distorted view of how complicated I felt it was. Not only “so many rules” but also “so many unwieldy rules”.
In retrospect, I put that feeling down to not having really looked at the core game in years, and having my memory piled over with acres of “official Traveller content” over the years (various editions of the rules, various piles of source material).
Chris’ posts got me to rethink my assumptions, and my recent re-embracement of old-style games (mainly through a years-long campaign run using Lamentations of the Flame Princess had shifted my perception on how the old-style games could be better played – in a more freewheeling, improvisational, talk-first-rules-later approach.
Core principles
Fuelled by Chris’ posts and a desire to see a new year usher in a new game, I organized my thinking for preparations along several core principles.
smaller scale. There seems quite compelling evidence that the original Traveller game was really intended to play out over a much smaller scale than later content for the game would suggest. One or two subsectors would provide for “years of play”, and thus the vast Imperial sprawl of sectors upon sectors of worlds offers play groups little more than cognitive load.
This lines up well with sandbox style of play as well: don’t prep more than your players need, and prep it when they need it. Given that players are unlikely to ever have reliable access to travel that can extend more than a parsec or two at a time, and given that each subsector is liable to house tens of worlds, the “one or two subsectors” approach seems quite compelling.
I resolved to align my prep along the principle of smaller scale along two lines: only a handful of sub-sectors of play, but also I decided I wanted my entire area of “central authority over known space” to be on a smaller scale; four subsectors, or a quadrant, comprise all of my setting’s known space.
modest tech levels. The original game’s main setting seemed targeted at modest levels of technology: space-flight, yes, but the elevated levels of tech that could be found within the Imperium’s core worlds were not necessarily to be found on the outer rim worlds where the original game proposed that most play might take place.
Keeping the tech levels more modest would have two effects: it would clamp down on the reliability and distance of travel, so that players really would be constrained to a smaller scope of worlds to examine; and, it would increase the relative value of higher tech equipment, to the players, and to the other factions in the setting with which the players would interact.
home-built setting. The original game proposed that the referee would build their own setting, using the random world generation tables as fuel for creativity. Honour the dice to create weird results, and then exercise your creativity to explain why those results happen. Or merely leave the incongruities as unexplained corners for emergent discovery during play. But, overall, build your own sandbox. Later publications in the Traveller line fleshed out a fully built setting that, in the early days, was really only subtly implied and even then, more along thematic lines and less along factual ones.
Since I knew that the players I would have playing in my game would not necessarily be Traveller nerds, or even more than casual RPG players, I felt that having a setting that was a bit more solidly connected to their own understanding of things and this lead me to think I had two approaches I could use:
I could take an established setting from a media-property, file off the serial numbers, and then build up a setting around that: “like Star Wars, except…” and so on.
I could build up a setting that had our own solar system and nearby stars as the anchor point; rather than make up a set of stars in a galaxy far, far away, I could build up a future that presumed Earth at the centre, and thereby giving players some cultural anchor point they could identify with. Earth, even tens of centuries forward, is, I think, still more generally relatable, than “the planet Tardox and its vast star empire”.
Having then discovered the Near Space supplement for the Cepheus Engine, it provided me with exactly the foundational pieces I could use for the second approach – four subsectors of world data built up around the Sol system, with only the raw physical characteristics roughed in: no starport or base information; no population, government, or law-level. In short, a near-space toolbox for building out your own version of those areas of space.
Deciding on the rules
Chris’ posts lead me to a brief consideration on the rules I wanted to use to play, and to build out the setting, and why I might want to make certain changes.
I decided to use the 1981 rules with some small alterations:
No travel zones.
Jump route determination from the 1977 rules, not the communication routes from 1981 and onward
The travel zones and communication routes were artifacts of Third Imperium setting details that I didn’t want in my setting. Additionally, I was seized by Chris’ point that the feel of a real frontier, out of the reach of effective central authority, was more bolstered by this approach. (I knew that, later on, I would have to also adjust encounter tables to consider more of the 1977 approach, to adjust for the varying level of presence of central authority and its effects on piracy.)
I also decided on a few house-ruled die-modifiers for use with some of the system and world tables, to help build up a feeling that “worlds near the centre of the map” would be better connected, and better equipped, on the whole, than worlds near the edges of the map. I noticed that the original rules themselves suggested that this kind of thing was expected: something that I had forgotten, but which Chris’ close reading had reminded me of.
Rolling dice
I printed out the relevant pages from Near Space, and then with my little black books at the coffee table, and the printed sheets, I started rolling dice to fill out the details of the worlds. I haven’t finished yet, but I have already started to notice that the random generation has sparked odd results that got me thinking about the setting and why some patterns might be the way they are.
The “roll first and then explain” approach to old-style gaming really does seem core to the original Traveller experience, as I continue to flesh out my Terran Commonwwealth setting, I expect to see the effects of this approach to become more and more prominent.