Classic Traveller as PDF – ends 7th April

[Andrew Beasley]

Humble Bundle have a pile of the Classic Traveller books on offer here

76p gets you started (basic rules / ship plans / NPCs)

£19 for the majority of the original books and extras from Rasmussen

No Travellers Aid Society books though 🙁 as they are still over on the Mongoose site

Would hate to work out the printing costs and what version each company / person owns – got VERY mixed up at many points. I do know that Mongoose are still releasing things though and the ‘classic’ stayed with Mark Miller but never did a page by page comparison when we played. I think it was the classic we stopped at and never moved onto the hardback version (ex. Frog God Core Rules) despite buying it.

Yes Humble Bundle is legit – see here as an introduction.

[Mike Headden]

Humblebundle also have a Ukrainian Refugee Charity Bundle with $2,500 worth of computer games, books, manga comics and .stls for a minimum donation of of £30.58!

It includes the addictive “Satisfactory” sci-fi survival game and both the Starfinder and Pathfinder base rulebooks. Which would have made it worth the price of admission, for me, without the charitable donation angle.

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Darkest Star Games]

Saw this and decided to count the number of Traveller version I have and realized I may have a Traveller collecting problem…  Interestingly enough it’s only the T4 and T5 versions that I don’t have, which Mark Miller wrote!

Humble Bundle are good peeps, have gotten loads of stuff from them.  And they really do help good causes.

"I saw this in a cartoon once, but I'm pretty sure I can do it..."

[Shaun Travers]

@Darkest Star Games – without looking I know I have every Traveller version except Mongoose 2nd edition (I have the 1st). So you may think you have a problem – I know I have a problem 🙂   I also hope by not being interested in 2nd edition I may have finally cracked the habit!

[Darkest Star Games]

Shaun Travers wrote:

I also hope by not being interested in 2nd edition I may have finally cracked the habit!

I dunno man, the latest version is really good!  They’ve even simplified starship construction further but in a way that works and is kinda fun, without requiring hours of >shudder< math!  Not sure yet if I prefer it over the LBBs as they do have different feels, but I’ve also moved to having fewer rolls in favor of more story (and less time dealing with mundanities).

"I saw this in a cartoon once, but I'm pretty sure I can do it..."

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

some of the facsimiles are fairly poor resolution and borderline readability.  Still a good deal, despite what looks like including individual chapters of the planetarium guide as separate titles of the 41 titles bundled together…but still including the parent guide in the same bundle. ( a beast to download)

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[Cacique Caribe]

Just curious, what is really the minimum needed to get started gaming Traveller with 15mm?

Thanks!

Dan
Loads of WIPs: https://www.flickr.com/photos/9593487@N07/albums/with/72157710630529376

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

The original core books plus mercenary were all i had for a very long time…but the skeleton is very, very bare considering how vastly open ended campaigns can be and how mobile players can be.  The dedicated  time required to develop a planet or culture (and the story on it) can be a bit overwhelming, particularly if the players spit out your hook and fly off to the edge of map, here be dragons areas of your sector. Experienced GMs can handle it but it was a bit daunting when I was 14 and most RPGs, dungeon crawls. It’s still more daunting in need for sheer amount of background building then running a D&D campaign. every scenario book you can get will be of great help.

 

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[Andrew Beasley]

Cacique Caribe wrote:

Just curious, what is really the minimum needed to get started gaming Traveller with 15mm? Thanks!

Assuming you have never played it and are unsure then I would go for the free Book 0: Introduction as a PDF.

If you then like it, I would get the starter box as a set of PDFs by buying the Traveller Book and after a few games you and the players can decide the way the game is going before splashing out on the hundreds of different supplements.

Most of the supplements act as fluff rather than vital rules – you can create your own subsector and have the characters fly around (heck you can even stay on one world) without using any additional books, mix bits that are fun (some of the corporations or adventures can be used independently from the universe) or go whole hog and recreate the timeline and wars if you want.

I honestly would work with the players in creating the style of play as soon as possible. It’s pointless spending hours creating a planet based adventure if the players want to trade and become pirates, conversely you may create a low combat game and find they want to be military and shoot everything in site (not wise – combat is deadly).

edit: Forgot to say that applies after the 79p Humble offer has gone 🙂

[madman]

Challenge. Who else has the Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (GDW) issue 1?

[Aethelflaeda was framed]

I owned it back in the day but it went with everything else when i quit playing Traveller in the 80s.

The pdfs replacements are quite nice for me now that my interest has been rekindled.

Mick Hayman
Margate and New Orleans

[Andrew Beasley]

madman wrote:

Challenge. Who else has had the Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (GDW) issue 1?

Corrected for you so I can answer yes 🙂

[Cacique Caribe]

Thanks!  I’ve never played the game before.  Never even seen it played.  But the name keeps popping up so often that I just had to ask.

 

Dan
Loads of WIPs: https://www.flickr.com/photos/9593487@N07/albums/with/72157710630529376

[General Slade]

I’ve got the original Traveller three-book box set, which I bought when it came out.  I loved the design.  It looked  great. It had a really good typeface. It also smelled really nice, which was a bonus.  But after that it was all down hill and it is a mystery to me how anyone picked up those rules and played a game with them.  From memory (and it probably is forty years since I last read the rules), character creation took forever (and I think your character could actually die during the process, meaning you would have to start all over again), you needed a maths degree to understand how to fly a spaceship, the combat rules were unplayable and the section on alien life forms was perfunctory and lacking in any kind of colour or interest.

It has always amazed me that the game became popular, or for that matter how the rules got published in the first place.

[Sane Max]

character creation took forever (and I think your character could actually die during the process, meaning you would have to start all over again), you needed a maths degree to understand how to fly a spaceship, the combat rules were unplayable and the section on alien life forms was perfunctory and lacking in any kind of colour or interest.

Yes, we gave every RPG available a go back then, but after spending a day and a half generating characters and not liking the results either (and yes, I remember characters dying mid-process) we gave up as well. It’s a pity, we were all Rabid SF fans but we all ended up up playing Runequest or D&D.

[Ruarigh]

We loved Traveller and I still have most of the LBBs. Yes, you could die in character creation, but we house-ruled that to a horrific injury that forced you to muster out instead, and I don’t recognise the description of character creation taking ages.

Like a lot of games of the era, it was clunky in places though, and the joke about ‘Do maths for fun, play Traveller’ certainly held true in some parts of the game. Ship design is one area that springs gazelle-like to mind. Despite that, I have a lot of fond memories of the game and love the Third Imperium as a background.

Never argue with an idiot. They'll only drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

https://roderickdale.co.uk/
https://emidsvikings.ac.uk/

[Etranger]

We regarded character creation as a sub-game in itself. Any casualties during the process were either handled as Ruarigh’s group did; or were put aside for further use as NPC’s.

Some of the rules were clunky and the technology (especially for computers) now looks rather quaint, but we managed a number of campaigns, including a Blakes Seven campaign more or less made up from scratch.

The major issue was making the Liberator superior to the Federation ships but not so good as to be totally invulnerable. The rule of thumb was to make it Tech +1 or 2 above the Fed, and equal in combat power to 3 or 4 patrol ships; so, as in the series, a couple of patrol ships were fair game, but it was best to run away from larger numbers.

[Shaun Travers]

i have Journal number 1.  I also have the LBBs and almost all of the Classic Traveller LLB adventures/supplements. CT was my introduction to SF RPGing.  While I did not play much Traveller, the times I did was mostly with MegaTraveller but without the Hard Times background.

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