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I found the Traveller Book for a good price, $10, and picked it up.  From what I've read, it's the first three Traveller books- 1-3, just in a hardcover.  I take it this is all one would need to play the full game, correct?

The Traveller Book is Traveller Books 1-3 with identical rules. It has all the rules you need to play the game. Later Books expand the rules and options of play. Some people believe those expansions are vital and complete the game. Some people are content with the core rules found in The Traveller Book. (Called "Basic Traveller" -- that is, the core rules, complete in and of themselves, requiring no more material.)

The Traveller Book also includes additional material covering GDW's official setting for the game. (The original three books contained no information about the official setting.)

If you get it, a terrific compilation of Errata for the Classic Traveller books has been collected in this document (https://talestoastound.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/consolidatedcterrata.pdf).

You can have my Book 6 Scouts with its Star System Generation rules when you pry it from my cold, dead, hands.

But you can play Traveller without it, for sure.

Book 4 adds some more science fiction weapons: snub pistols, gauss pistols and rifles, RAM Grenades, accelerator rifles, advanced combat rifles, and plasma guns.

Supplement 4 (it was 4) Citizens of the Imperium is invaluable for the careers it adds.  It also adds some primitive weapons.

Striker adds vehicle combat.

If you want the the Third Imperium setting you'll want The Spinward Marches and both Library Data supplements.

It's a bit like Basic Dungeons and Dragons, functional yes, complete, no.

Quote from: David Johansen;943009Book 4 adds some more science fiction weapons: snub pistols, gauss pistols and rifles, RAM Grenades, accelerator rifles, advanced combat rifles, and plasma guns.

Supplement 4 (it was 4) Citizens of the Imperium is invaluable for the careers it adds.  It also adds some primitive weapons.

Striker adds vehicle combat.

If you want the the Third Imperium setting you'll want The Spinward Marches and both Library Data supplements.

It's a bit like Basic Dungeons and Dragons, functional yes, complete, no.

As I said... there is disagreement on this.

For me, both the original Traveller rules and Basic Dungeons & Dragons are absolutely complete.

Will the Referee need to extrapolate from the rules or make up rulings on the fly? Absolutely. Exactly as designed.

Can one always buy more rulebooks to add more rules and details? Absolutely. Can the game of Traveller be played straight out Books 1-3 or The Traveller Book? That was the point.

That said, it is a matter of both taste and expectation. There's no right or wrong on this.

Which means, RunningLaser, you'll have to make up you own mind as to whether it is complete or not.

Basically, as long as you want to run ex-Military people. You really need Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium if you want non-military careers. Or make the tables up yourself (various old magazines of the day also had new non-military careers). Technically there is an "Other" career in The Traveller Book/LBBs, but it's seemingly meant to be a criminal and not very good compared to the others.

It's best to stick with that and Supplement 4. The problem with most of the other rulebooks, at least Books 4, 5, 6, and 7, is that they provide expanded careers for the various military careers that generate much more powerful characters, or at least characters with a lot more skills compared to the original Books/The Traveller Book.

You either need to stay away from advanced character generation or hand out four skills per term for other careers.

Book 4 expands the weapon list.

Quote from: RunningLaser;943002I found the Traveller Book for a good price, $10, and picked it up.  From what I've read, it's the first three Traveller books- 1-3, just in a hardcover.  I take it this is all one would need to play the full game, correct?

Yes.

I agree with most of the other posts so far. We played the black boxed set (books 1-3) as a standalone for quite a while before we expanded into supplements, and other than Book 4 I never really felt like any of the others were that critical, so I'd say that if your hardback is books 1-3 you are golden.

Quote from: RunningLaser;943002I found the Traveller Book for a good price, $10, and picked it up.  From what I've read, it's the first three Traveller books- 1-3, just in a hardcover.  I take it this is all one would need to play the full game, correct?

Yes. I played for almost three years just using the 3 lbb before I started buying the supplements. I started playing in 1977.

1980 was a golden year. Two supplements were out by then, Mercenary, and Highguard, both of which I purchased that year. I never did buy Trillion Credit Squadron though.  There were plenty of articles in Dragon Magazine that year as well, in earlier JG Gazeteers, and in Different Worlds too. One of my favorite articles came out in March of 1980 in Dragon issue #35, and then also in the June 1981 issue of Dragon Magazine, #50,  Edited by Ed Greenwood (he had written Traveller articles for Judges Guild even earlier). That same month The Space Gamer #40, a special Traveller Issue was released at Steve Jackson games and that included articles by Marc Miller, Steve Winter, Forrest Johnson and Bruce Webster. There was also Dragon Issue #51 a fourteen page Traveller spread by Roger Moore, Jeff Swycafier, Paul Montgomery Crabaugh, and Marc Miller a few days later, and finally issue #53 in September with additional goodness on Merchants by Dennis Matheson.

List of Traveller Articles and Reviews in Different Worlds Magazine:
TRAVELLER, ORIGINAL [GDW]
  Adventures, Spinward Marches:
    Race for the "Specter", by Doug Houseman      #20   pg 20-28
  Background, Misc:
    The Travellers' Aid Society, by Iain Delaney   #13   pg 10-11
  Background, Introduction:
    The Imperium, by Marc Miller and Frank Chadwick   #9   pg 16-20
  Background, Technology:
    Genetic Engineering, by Dave Bryant         #38   pg 16-19
    Terraforming, Part 1, by Doug Houseman      #22   pg 16-21
    Terraforming, Part 2, by Doug Houseman      #23   pg 28-33
  Campaign Design, Encounters:
    Make Love, Not War, by Terrence McInnes      #32   pg 24-26
    Planetary Encounters, by Mason Jones      #28   pg 26
  Equipment, Combat:
    Pistols, by Paul Crabaugh            #21   pg 17
  Equipment, Computers:
    A New Computer System, by Martin Connell      #11   pg 14-17
  Equipment, Ships, Misc:
    Battleriders vs. Battleships, by Paul Crabaugh   #26   pg 13
    Battleriders vs. Battleships, by John Harshman   #29   pg 21
  Equipment, Ships, Designs:
    For Sale : Three New Fighters, by Paul Crabaugh   #17   pg 10-11
    Starfreighter Athena, by Henry Padilla      #18   pg 24-25
    Terraforming, Part 1, by Doug Houseman      #22   pg 16-21
    Terraforming, Part 2, by Doug Houseman      #23   pg 28-33
  Rules, Misc:
    Effects of Mass in Traveller, by William Lowe   #25   pg 15
  Rules, Board Games, Azhanti High Lightning:
    Swords on Deck, by Paul Crabaugh         #18   pg 7
  Rules, Board Games, Trillion Credit Squadron:
    Changes for TCS, by Doug Houseman         #18   pg 8-9
  Rules, Character Creation, Misc:
    Make Love, Not War, by Terrence McInnes      #32   pg 24-26
    Traveller Mutations, by Iain Delaney      #10   pg 8-9
  Rules, Character Creation, Careers:
    Cops!, by Terry McInnes (1)            #46   pg 10-14
    More Citizens, by Paul Crabaugh         #15   pg 4-5
    The Underworld, by Jon Mattson         #33   pg 16-19
  Rules, Combat:
    Pistols, by Paul Crabaugh            #21   pg 17
  Reviews, GDW:
    The Traveller Book               #30   pg 33-34
    The Traveller Adventure            #36   pg 30-31
    Adventure 2: Research Station Gamma         #11   pg 26
    Adventure 6: Expedition to Zhodane         #44   pg 32
    Adventure 7: Broadsword            #23   pg 45
    Adventure 8: Prison Planet            #32   pg 37
    Adventure 9: Nomads of the World-Ocean      #33   pg 37-38
    Alien Module 1: Aslan            #37   pg 31-32
    Alien Module 3: Vargr            #43   pg 29-30
    Book 6: Scouts               #41   pg 31-32
    Book 7: Merchant Prince            #45   pg 31-32
    Double Adventure 2: Across the Bright Face/Mission on Mithril
                     #11   pg 26
    Double Adventure 3: The Argon Gambit/Death Station   #14   pg 34
    Game 3: Azhanti High Lightning         #11   pg 20
    Supplement 6: 76 Patrons            #22   pg 37
    Supplement 8?: Library Data (N-Z)         #30   pg 31
    Supplement 11: The Solomani Rim         #28   pg 45
    Supplement 12: Forms and Charts         #35   pg 37
    Supplement 13: Veterans            #39   pg 36-37
    The Atlas of the Imperium            #42   pg 31
    Beltstrike                  #38   pg 36-37
    Tarsus                  #34   pg 30-31
  Reviews, FASA:
    Action Aboard               #18   pg 42
    Adventure Class Ships, Vol. 1         #19   pg 40
    Aslan Mercernary Ships            #25   pg 36
    Deckplans: ISCV King Richard         #18   pg 41
    Deckplans: ISCV Leander            #18   pg 41
    Deckplans: ISPMV Fenris            #18   pg 41
    Deckplans: ISPMV Tethys            #18   pg 41
    Deckplans: ZISMV Vlezhdahl            #18   pg 41
    Far Traveller, Issue 1            #34   pg 34-35
    Fate of the Sky Raiders            #35   pg 34-35
    The FCI Consumer Guide            #28   pg 44
    High Passage, Issue 1            #15   pg 38
    High Passage, Issue 2            #18   pg 40
    Legend of the Sky Raiders            #21   pg 37-38
    Ordeal by Eshaar               #18   pg 39
    Rescue on Galatea               #23   pg 45
    Starport Module One : Hotel Complex         #27   pg 45
    The Trail of the Sky Raiders         #27   pg 44-45
    Uragyad'n of the Seven Pillars         #22   pg 37-38
  Reviews, Gamelords:
    Ascent to Anekthor               #40   pg 30-31
    The Desert Environment            #42   pg 31-32
    The Drenslaar Quest               #38   pg 34-35
    Duneraiders                  #42   pg 31-32
    Lee's Guide to Interstellar Adventure, Vol. 1   #46   pg 32-33
    The Mountain Environment            #40   pg 30-31
    A Pilot's Guide to the Drexilthar Subsector      #41   pg 33
    Startown Liberty               #37   pg 34
    The Undersea Environment            #36   pg 33-34
    Wanted: Adventurers               #47   pg 31
  Reviews, Judges' Guild:
    Crucis Margin               #20   pg 36-37
    Glimmerdrift Reaches            #20   pg 36-37
    Simba Safari               #18   pg 40-41
    Waspwinter                  #21   pg 36-37
  Reviews, Marischal Adventures:
    Flight of the Stag               #18   pg 39-40
    Salvage Mission Fleetwatch            #18   pg 39-40
    Trading Team               #23   pg 41
  Reviews, Paranoia Press:
    Merchants and Merchandise            #16   pg 41-42
    Sorag                  #15   pg 36

Awesome breakdown GameDaddy!!

Is there a Different World's compilation available online?

I remember some of those articles from way back when, but not all.

Quote from: David Johansen;943009It's a bit like Basic Dungeons and Dragons, functional yes, complete, no.

That isn't a bad comparison.

I've run whole campaigns from the BD&D red book, and many more just using the Traveller LBBs.

Everything you NEED is there, but everything you WANT may require more books...or some DIY.

A crapton of support and supplements exists for Classic Traveller, so if you want more, its easy to get lots and lots.

I just ordered the Classic Traveller CD, that should keep me in reading and imagination fodder for a while.

Quote from: Baron Opal;943418I just ordered the Classic Traveller CD, that should keep me in reading and imagination fodder for a while.

Don't forget about the two third party CDs for classic Traveller ;-) The Gamelords and FASA CD is the better of the two.

Also I wrote up a short How to make a Traveller Sandbox (http://batintheattic.blogspot.com/2009/04/how-to-make-traveller-sandbox.html) that work fine with just the 3 LBBs.

• Roll up two subsectors side by side.
• Note all the high population planets.
• Write a short paragraph on each placing them in the context of your background (Empire, Federation, Free Space, etc)
• Find any high tech planets (the highest ones you rolled )
• Make notes on them.
• Find all class A and B starports
• Make notes on them.
• Scan the remaining planets pick out 4 to 8 that grab your attention.
• Make notes on them.
• Look at your notes and come up with two to four "plots" that ties one or more locales together.
• For each of the planets you have notes make up four "patron" encounters for each. They should start as one sentence each and be self contained in respect to the major plots.
• Come up with 6 to 12 general patron encounters that can be placed anywhere in your subsectors. Make them flexible like (set in a seedy starport, etc)
• Make up a rumor chart with 10 to 20 items that feeds the players into what you prepared.
• Then use the NPC resources that were suggested to make a list of NPCs. Assign them to the various items you created above.
• Look at your notes and decided where recurring NPCs will occurs. (Captain of the subsector Revenue Patrol, Custom Offical, Badger the Broker, etc). Probably need 6 to 12 of them. Give them a paragraph description in addition to their stats.

Traveller played with just the 3 LBB's has a scope and structure a bit like playing boxed-set OD&D, IF the DM has a deep understanding of the game and a lot of experience running. The games are similar in their parsimony when it comes to rules and options, but arguably grander scope than most more modern and complex games. On the other hand, I think the 3 LBB's are actually far better suited to a new player who comes to the game fresh. Most incarnations of Traveller are indistinguishable from the original in basic rules, and the game never mutated or bloated far beyond its original structure. In this way, it is quite different from D&D, which changed its mind about lots of things over a few years, and today is mostly played using rules that are distant descendants of the original. This is because the people who wrote the 3 LBB's kicked ass both at game design and technical writing.

Quote from: Larsdangly;943426This is because the people who wrote the 3 LBB's kicked ass both at game design and technical writing.

The UWP code system is pretty elegant. As well as the subsector mapping system, the starship construction system. The trade system works but has exploitable loopholes which is why there has been multiple trade systems over different editions.

I will note (because I'm a dick on this subject) that by 1981 the Traveller line focused primarily on GDW's Official Traveller Universe (The Third Imperium). As a specific setting the Third Imperium makes lots of assumptions about how to apply the Traveller rules.

However, the original three books make no mention of the Third Imperium or any official setting. (The 1977 has not mention at all. The 1981 edition of the books has the Third Imperium creeping in slightly with the introduction of Communication Routes and Travel Zones. And notice how light those two elements are.)

My point is that original Traveller was designed for the players to create the setting they wanted with some implied setting details: Worlds full of adventure outside of any centralized government proper. Interstellar travel is rare; people who spend lots of time traveling between worlds ("travellers") are a unique kind of person. If you look at Traveller through the lens of later material you will see it one way. If you look at it through the lens of pre-imperial material, you will see it a different way.

In particular, SF elements and tech. In original Traveller the SF elements are actually quite light (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2016/05/08/traveller-out-of-the-box-the-peculiar-lack-of-science-fiction-in-original-traveller/). It is my belief that this is because the game is setting a conservative baseline for the PCs to be aware of so the Referee can introduce stranger and more exotic elements (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/traveller-out-of-the-box-an-invitation-to-invention/) for them to investigate and interact with during play.

But this isn't how the Third Imperium is built out. Apart from a few mysteries that the PCs can't interact with (the mysteries all took place millions of years earlier with a long vanished race) the tech is as conservative as it is in Traveller Books 1-3. Now that's fine if that's what you want.

But because this view of SF is conservative in The Third Imperium, lacking the exotic and full range of strange wonders found in the SF books Marc Miller wanted people to create for their games, this conservative view became codified in the source material and conflated the rules of Traveller with an SF conservative setting.

And I've always found that sad.

The Traveller Book came in today:)

Quote from: Baron Opal;943418I just ordered the Classic Traveller CD, that should keep me in reading and imagination fodder for a while.

That was my first thought. Why limit yourself to the 3 LBBs when *everything* is so cheap?

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943447My point is that original Traveller was designed for the players to create the setting they wanted with some implied setting details: Worlds full of adventure outside of any centralized government proper. Interstellar travel is rare; people who spend lots of time traveling between worlds ("travellers") are a unique kind of person. If you look at Traveller through the lens of later material you will see it one way. If you look at it through the lens of pre-imperial material, you will see it a different way.

While I agree with the bolded sentence. The only thing that implied by the 1977 version is that communication is at the speed of travel. The rest are subjective, you can easily run it with a setting that has centralized interstellar polity, and interstellar travel is common.

With that being said, yes Traveller became focused on the Third Imperium very quickly. However regardless of editions it never lost it ability to be a toolkit for some other setting. Precisely because of the conservative nature of the science fiction of the Third Imperium. Third Imperium material was and is easily re-purposed to other types of settings.

But one of the virtues of Mongoose Traveller is the explicit callout and support given to other science fiction setting. Before it was just a side effect of the how the rules were designed, now alternative setting had explicit support.

And because of this and the TAS fiasco, I feel that alternative settings have a permanent niche in Traveller fandom. In a sense the problem has been "fixed".

Quote from: Baron Opal;943418I just ordered the Classic Traveller CD, that should keep me in reading and imagination fodder for a while.

Cool, I have that too, and also the Travellers Aid Society collection CD.  They are really fun to look back at. I haven't played in years but have great nostalgia for Traveller :)


To the OP,   We had pretty much everything GDW ever made for Traveller, it was the game we played the most by far.  The 3 books will cover you for the game, but if you like space combat and ship building then High Guard was very nice, and we used the crap out of Mercenary, we were always mercenaries in our campaign.  We were the A-Team in Spaaaace!   :)

Quote from: RunningLaser;943448The Traveller Book came in today:)

You can game for years with just what is in that book. Enjoy!

(Oh, if you are on Facebook, there are several Traveller Groups there.)

Quote from: estar;943463While I agree with the bolded sentence. The only thing that implied by the 1977 version is that communication is at the speed of travel. The rest are subjective, you can easily run it with a setting that has centralized interstellar polity, and interstellar travel is common.

With that being said, yes Traveller became focused on the Third Imperium very quickly. However regardless of editions it never lost it ability to be a toolkit for some other setting. Precisely because of the conservative nature of the science fiction of the Third Imperium. Third Imperium material was and is easily re-purposed to other types of settings.

But one of the virtues of Mongoose Traveller is the explicit callout and support given to other science fiction setting. Before it was just a side effect of the how the rules were designed, now alternative setting had explicit support.

And because of this and the TAS fiasco, I feel that alternative settings have a permanent niche in Traveller fandom. In a sense the problem has been "fixed".

Hi Ester,

First, I think that blog post about setting up a Traveller setting is great.

Second, a couple of points about what I see in the "implied setting" found in the first three books. Note that what I'm about to type is not arguing with you. What I'm seeing and paying attention to in Books 1-3 may be of no interest to you (or anyone else!). Moreover, as I always say, the rules of original Traveller were a simple, smart toolkit (in the same spirits as OD&D) so people should use them to build the settings they want and the gameplay they want.

That said...

Yes, the first and most important setting detail in original Traveller is that communications moves at the speed of travel. That, in fact, is the really only SF-premise in the rules that really defines the setting. (There are other SF concepts, but nothing is as important as this one.)

But here are some of the other setting details that are baked into the text that I was talking about:

The sixth characteristic is Social Standing. Here is how the rules define this: "Social Standing notes the class and level of society which the character (and his or her family) come." Again, this characteristic is right up there with Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, and Education. So we know this characteristic is supposed to matter. And so it is implied that somewhere in the polity the characters come from the society is stratified along social classes and that these class distinctions matter.


If one looks at the average cots of living expenses listed in Book 2 and compares them to the cost of a travel (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2016/05/26/traveller-out-of-the-box-rewards-for-the-player-characters/) from star system to star system in Book 3 one finds that per Jump the fare is almost the equivalent of a year of living expenses. And that is one jump.

   Ordinary Living averages Cr4,800 year
High Living averages Cr10,800 per year

High Passage: Cr10,000
Middle Passage: Cr8,000
Low Passage: Cr1,000

If you have to take several ships across the stars to reach your destination that is years of living expenses you are spending to travel. Especially since the ships in Book 2 range in Jump capability from Jump-1 to Jump-3.

This implies a great deal, I think, about how rare space travel is in the implied setting found in the books. Or, to put it another way, most people don't travel. Much like that Age of Sail that original Traveller used as a analogy, most people stay home their worlds and never set foot on a sailing vessel, just like most people in Europe never left their home town or their shores. The man who heads off down around the tip of Africa or journeys to the Indies, or hell, goes whaling, is thus the man who comes back with stories. He is the unexpected man. He is a traveller.

This view of the rarity of starship travel can also be seen if one looks at the income that can be earned by starship crews:

Pilot Cr6,000
Navigator Cr5,000
Engineer Cr4,000
Steward Cr3,000
Medic Cr2,000
Gunner Cr 1,000

This means that if you are a starship pilot you are earning, per month, what an ordinary person spends in a year on living expenses. Thinking in terms of supply and demand, I'm assuming then that Pilots and Navigators and starship Engineers are in demand. There certainly is interstellar commerce going on... but it isn't so common that the flight crews are common.

Further leading to the rarity of starship travel are all the dangers listed in Book 2 (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/traveller-out-of-the-box-subsector-basic-assumptions/). Highjacking, pirates, risk of misjump. In particular, ships risk a 3% chance per jump of various drive failure if they are not using Refined Fuel. But refined is available only at A and B-class starports. After that you are buying Unrefined Fuel from C and D-class starports or skimming from gas giants. Using the random Main World generation system as written on average 42% of the worlds will be A or B class starships. Meaning more than half of the worlds in a subsector will not have refined fuel. Which means that travel between A and B worlds (when possible) will be frequent, but travel to most worlds in a subsector will involve a 3% risk of misjump either on the way, on the return, or both ways. For a lot of poeple what risk would not be worth it. Again, travelling is the activity of a rare breed of folks.

We also know that even neighboring worlds have utterly different cultures and governments, implying a lack of immediate trade and cultural cross-pollination. Space is not cosmopolitan (at least not in the setting of play (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2016/02/11/traveller-out-of-the-box-the-setting-and-the-setting-of-play/) implied by the rules, which are assumed (as far as I can tell) to be at the remote edges of a larger polity that might have very different economics, technology, and much more common space travel.)

Finally, the bottom of the Tech Level chart in Book 3 is full of empty space (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2017/01/18/traveller-out-of-the-box-an-invitation-to-invention/). It is assumed that the Referee will be adding all sorts of cool Science Fiction ideas and technology for the Players to explore and interact with via their PCs. The tech listed in Book 1-3 is not the be all and end all of a Traveller setting, but a baseline to start from. But if you look at the Third Imperium, you'll note that there really isn't that much strangeness on all those worlds and that the tech assumptions in the setting are never more than those found in Books 1-3.


Now, there's no reason to stick to these elements. Again, people should make the settings they want. And my guess is most people don't even notice these details.

But to my point about the Third Imperium:

The Third Imperium removes social class issues entirely, as far as I can see. The "nobility" are just bureaucrats with fancy names.

Space travel in later editions of classic Traveller is described as being "as common as airline travel is today" (which, again, is not the case implied in the economics and dangers described above). (The game changes utterly with Book 5, which allows any ship to carry its own fuel purification plants, for example. Before that only military vessels could do this -- and I assumed they did this at great cost and needed extraordinary maintenance to clean their systems out regularly.)

The technology ignores the potential of all that lovely white space in the lower 25% of the tech level chart.

All of this only matters to me (and perhaps only to me) because when I first picked up a copy of Traveller (the boxed set, 40 years ago) I fell in love with the implied setting in the books: A strange and exotic frontier of isolated worlds (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/traveller-out-of-the-box-the-distant-isolated-worlds-of-original-traveller/) with its stratified society and promise of exotic technology and SF strangeness.

And then GDW produces the Official Traveller Setting which seems to blow off all of that. The fact is you can't get The Third Imperium from the rules found in Books 1-3. You need all the changes added to the rules to justify and allow the Third Imperium setting to exist.

Again, not a big deal. Change the rules to build the setting you want. The Third Imperium is, after all, a terrific example of a Traveller setting!

I simply liked what happens if you grow the setting from the actual text and rules in Books 1-3.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618Second, a couple of points about what I see in the "implied setting" found in the first three books. Note that what I'm about to type is not arguing with you. What I'm seeing and paying attention to in Books 1-3 may be of no interest to you (or anyone else!). Moreover, as I always say, the rules of original Traveller were a simple, smart toolkit (in the same spirits as OD&D) so people should use them to build the settings they want and the gameplay they want.

Having read the rest of your post your reasoning looks solid. My comments follows.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618The sixth characteristic is Social Standing. Here is how the rules define this: "Social Standing notes the class and level of society which the character (and his or her family) come." Again, this characteristic is right up there with Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, and Education. So we know this characteristic is supposed to matter. And so it is implied that somewhere in the polity the characters come from the society is stratified along social classes and that these class distinctions matter.

(Shrug) All human technological cultures larger than the tribe have class distinctions. B-F are defined as Nobles of various ranks so that in there. But the system doesn't break if you consider E to be member of the Subsector Politboro instead of Count and F is the Subsector Chairman instead of Duke.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618one finds that per Jump the fare is almost the equivalent of a year of living expenses. And that is one jump.

Good point, although to me it more like late 19th, early 20th century steamship travel with low passage as steerage. Middle and High Passage are for those of means or are on some official business.


Duke.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618This view of the rarity of starship travel can also be seen if one looks at the income that can be earned by starship crews:

This part is NOT like 19th oceanic voyages. But then again we are talking about a technologically advanced society.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618Further leading to the rarity of starship travel

The steamship era of the late 19th century had it dangers and problems as well yet there was no question that the world was knit together in a global civilization.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618Now, there's no reason to stick to these elements. Again, people should make the settings they want. And my guess is most people don't even notice these details.

Sure, however even with the defaults there are several interpretations available.  Moreso the entry on pirate encounter specifically leaves it to the referee whether the P means that a pirate encounter has occurred. Probably Miller put that in recognizing that not everybody will want the spacelanes be infested by piracy.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618The Third Imperium removes social class issues entirely, as far as I can see. The "nobility" are just bureaucrats with fancy names.

More or less but it quickly developed there are three types of nobles, high nobles, rank nobles, and honor nobles. The high nobles are true nobles in every sense of the world. The rank nobles are the bureaucrats, and the honor nobles are a form of lifetime achievement award. Imagine how the daily duties of Queen Elizabeth II would look to King Henry V.  Her life outside of ceremony is far more bureaucratic than anything that King Henry would imagine it to be. Although even medieval king had to deal with paperwork.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618Space travel in later editions of classic Traveller is described as being "as common as airline travel is today" (which, again, is not the case implied in the economics and dangers described above). (The game changes utterly with Book 5, which allows any ship to carry its own fuel purification plants, for example. Before that only military vessels could do this -- and I assumed they did this at great cost and needed extraordinary maintenance to clean their systems out regularly.)

My view is that Classic Traveller was science fiction first, Third Imperium second. Later editions until Mongoose were Third Imperium first, science fiction roleplaying second. The changes are part of the shift to  focus on the Third Imperium and it premise. Luckily even with that shift, the foundations of the Third Imperium are loose enough to make it the game flexible enough for other types of settings with different premises.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618All of this only matters to me (and perhaps only to me) because when I first picked up a copy of Traveller (the boxed set, 40 years ago) I fell in love with the implied setting in the books: A strange and exotic frontier of isolated worlds (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/traveller-out-of-the-box-the-distant-isolated-worlds-of-original-traveller/) with its stratified society and promise of exotic technology and SF strangeness.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943618That great that it it inspired. I hope I demonstrated that it is possible to read the original another way to produce a similar yet different setting.

Having lived through the evolution of Traveller, I disagree. The Third Imperium always seemed to me a natural extension of the classic rules. The only thing to me that was disappointing that when expanded material came that there wasn't a lot of words devoted to alternative visions. The classic core is a flexible lite science fiction RPG. The classic core plus the entire line of books, supplements, and adventures is about roleplaying in the far future of the Third Imperium

For me the key links were jump drives, communication at the speed of travel, the diversity of the social part of the UWP, and the noble titles. The fact that those far were woven into the Third Imperium setting made it seem Traveller to me. While I admit I didn't notice the disparity between travel costs and income, I will contend that what was published still make sense as even 1% of a trillion citizens is a very large number floating around in space.

Also I will point out that even with the detail it got the Third Imperium setting was only a sketch. My Third Imperium is not the same as my friends Third Imperum nor it is the same as others. This make even the official setting a pretty flexible thing. Which is why unlike other RPG the Third Imperum never totally pushed aside the generic science fiction part of Traveller.

Quote from: estar;943631Having lived through the evolution of Traveller, I disagree. The Third Imperium always seemed to me a natural extension of the classic rules.

Wouldn't it just depend on how you filled in the voids of Traveller's open framework? What your influences/experiences/tastes were?
When I first had the Traveller box and read it the visions it sent dancing through my head were nowhere near as... bland as the OTU has always struck me as being. It had more to do with music videos and Heavy Metal and the Arduin Grimoire. I hadn't read lots of old scifi at that point so those pictures weren't in my head. My Traveller universe was way more Moebius and Druillet than it was Frederick Pohl.

Quote from: estar;943631(Shrug) All human technological cultures larger than the tribe have class distinctions.

Except there is a lot of science fiction based on societies without those distinctions, Star Trek most famously but also in the short stories of John Varley and some of the novels of Le Guin and Delany. Or the far future stories and novels of Moorcock and Vance which are essentially classless as everyone is a super rich and powerful 'noble.'

Quote from: estar;943631Many things...

There's no point going through most of it, we agree on most. (Even parts where you say, "Yes, but you could interpret Social Standing this way..." is something I already stated in the previous post.)

The misimpression I want to correct is that I don't think the Third Imperium is an expression of Traveller. I definitely think it is. It is a terrific implementation of many of the ideas found in Books 1-3 in a specific way for a specific setting.

But I also know that without, for example, Book 5: Highguard one simply cannot have the Third Imperium as written. Like, it just can't happen. The size of the ships is required and the ease of all ships being able to install fuel purifiers is required. This is the boldest distinction that separates The Third Imperium from Books 1-3, but there are others as well.

Please note I'm not saying the Third Imperium is wrong for being different. I'm simply pointing out the places where Books 1-3 end and The Third Imperium begins.

Quote from: Voros;943644Except there is a lot of science fiction based on societies without those distinctions, Star Trek most famously but also in the short stories of John Varley and some of the novels of Le Guin and Delany. Or the far future stories and novels of Moorcock and Vance which are essentially classless as everyone is a super rich and powerful 'noble.'

Yes however a Starfleet Admiral (F) has a bit more influence and resources than a drifter stoned out of his mind on Risa (0). Traveller Core does equate it in terms of noble rank, it is easily re purposed to some other relative social scale. Just use your imagination.

Quote from: estar;943668Yes however a Starfleet Admiral (F) has a bit more influence and resources than a drifter stoned out of his mind on Risa (0). Traveller Core does equate it in terms of noble rank, it is easily re purposed to some other relative social scale. Just use your imagination.

Exactly. The moment you see those values as widgets (throughout the game) to be re-labled as needed a whole magical thing happens.

They are like powers in CHAMPIONS. The rules provide mechanical effects, but the color for each power can be created and defined in character creation and applied and defined in specific ways through play.

A lot of Traveller's concepts seem to have been taken from Sci-Fi books.

No FTL communication (and computer size) seems to be from H. Beam Piper's TerroHuman stories. Imperial Nobility seem to be from Poul Anderson's Flandry stories.  Space travel being expensive enough that people freeze themselves to travel cheaply and risking death is from E.C. Tubb's Dumarest novels.

I think Kubasik is definitely on to something is that the additional rules changed some of the basic assumptions.  I wasn't playing Traveller, but I had read the Little Black Books, and later I heard people talking about this gigantic Imperium, and I thought "How the hell did they do that?"

Kind of like how you can't get The Forgotten Realms 3e directly from the Little Brown Books, only not that extreme.

So Chris, if you run with the idea that the LBBs are sort of an Ur-Traveller, and High Guard is more of an OTU specific supplement - what about the others?  Are there any more supplements that are on the LBB side of the "OTU Shift"?

Quote from: JeremyR;943706A lot of Traveller's concepts seem to have been taken from Sci-Fi books.

No FTL communication (and computer size) seems to be from H. Beam Piper's TerroHuman stories. Imperial Nobility seem to be from Poul Anderson's Flandry stories.  Space travel being expensive enough that people freeze themselves to travel cheaply and risking death is from E.C. Tubb's Dumarest novels.

In an interview  (https://talestoastound.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/screen-shot-2015-11-29-at-7-36-00-am.png)from 1981 Marc Miller referenced  (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2015/12/13/traveller-was-never-supposed-to-be-hard-science-fiction/)many  (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2016/08/22/more-classic-traveller-literary-inspiration/)of the inspirations  (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2016/08/24/even-more-literary-inspirations-for-original-traveller/)for Classic Traveller.

As far as I can tell Miller read voraciously. Several decades worth of pulp-adventure SF up until the time he wrote Traveller are mixed into a stew, with references that can be traced directly back to a dozen or more short stories and novels.

Importantly, Traveller was at the printer the summer of 1977 the weekend Star Wars was released. Star Wars was going to redefine SF in the minds of almost everyone (even as it was harkening back to the Flash Gordon serials). So what Science Fictions was before Star Wars is what inspired Miller. (That isn't to say people haven't used Traveller to run Star Wars campaigns. They have.)

Poul Anderson had nobility in his Flandry series. But the Dumarest books, King David's Spaceship as well as others, also had a noble class.

Significantly psionics, which many, many people think was shoehorned into Traveller as a sop to "D&D Magic" can be found in the Dumarest Books, The Stars My Destination, Jack Vance's Demon Princes books and the Planet of Adventure books and countless others. It was a given that there humanity would develop psionic powers in the future in much of 50s, 60s, and 70s SF.

Reading these books now, after having read Traveller, always provides me with an "Ah-ha" moment. The same found when one reads OD&D or Basic D&D and then reads the tales of say, Conan or the tales of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. Everything clicks in a way that makes things that seemed either disconnected or extraneous fall into place.

Quote from: CRKrueger;943722I think Kubasik is definitely on to something is that the additional rules changed some of the basic assumptions.  I wasn't playing Traveller, but I had read the Little Black Books, and later I heard people talking about this gigantic Imperium, and I thought "How the hell did they do that?"

Kind of like how you can't get The Forgotten Realms 3e directly from the Little Brown Books, only not that extreme.

So Chris, if you run with the idea that the LBBs are sort of an Ur-Traveller, and High Guard is more of an OTU specific supplement - what about the others?  Are there any more supplements that are on the LBB side of the "OTU Shift"?

That's an interesting question. But work and meetings have me enslaved for a good part of the day. I will get back to you soon.

Quote from: JeremyR;943706A lot of Traveller's concepts seem to have been taken from Sci-Fi books.

No FTL communication (and computer size) seems to be from H. Beam Piper's TerroHuman stories. Imperial Nobility seem to be from Poul Anderson's Flandry stories.  Space travel being expensive enough that people freeze themselves to travel cheaply and risking death is from E.C. Tubb's Dumarest novels.

We (kids in the 70s) always figured computer size was based on the sizes of computers in the 60s and 70s. Even in the 80s, the space shuttle simulator computers (not the simulator, just the computers) at NASA's JSC still took an entire room. I know, because I worked on it. This was then replaced with a half filing cabinet sized computer, and then latter a desktop.

Quote from: David Johansen;943017You either need to stay away from advanced character generation or hand out four skills per term for other careers.

Book 4 expands the weapon list.

If I go beyond CotI, I go full MT, 'cause that's what it is: integrated Book 4 and integrated and balanced rework of the advanced CharGen.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943729Significantly psionics, which many, many people think was shoehorned into Traveller as a sop to "D&D Magic" can be found in the Dumarest Books, The Stars My Destination, Jack Vance's Demon Princes books and the Planet of Adventure books and countless others. It was a given that there humanity would develop psionic powers in the future in much of 50s, 60s, and 70s SF.

My collection of Astounding Science Fiction zines attests to that... stories featuring psi are common, as are non-fiction write-ups of its potential (though, I'm not sure other zines shared Astounding's degree of interest on the subject).
Scifi radio shows of the time also featured a good number of stories involving psionic characters. It was usually presented as a next step in technology or human evolution, not a rediscovery of ancient knowledge or magic.

Quote from: Settembrini;943739If I go beyond CotI, I go full MT, 'cause that's what it is: integrated Book 4 and integrated and balanced rework of the advanced CharGen.

But the errata, oh god the fucking long errata (http://www.farfuture.net/ConsolidatedMegaTravellerErrata.pdf).

Quote from: estar;943746But the errata, oh god the fucking long errata (http://www.farfuture.net/ConsolidatedMegaTravellerErrata.pdf).

LOL I have games that are smaller than the errata.

Quote from: estar;943746But the errata, oh god the fucking long errata (http://www.farfuture.net/ConsolidatedMegaTravellerErrata.pdf).

71 Pages of Errata?  Mein Gott in Himmel.

Quote from: estar;943746But the errata, oh god the fucking long errata (http://www.farfuture.net/ConsolidatedMegaTravellerErrata.pdf).

Quote from: Tod13;943748LOL I have games that are smaller than the errata.

Quote from: CRKrueger;94374971 Pages of Errata?  Mein Gott in Himmel.

Quick thread derail here.......

This is one of the many reasons why the Traveller Community suffered when it lost Don McKinney. Not only was he a great guy, but he was the one who spearheaded the efforts to create errata for all of the different versions of Traveller. That he was able to do so much is a testament to his dedication and ability.

Quote from: jeff37923;943821Quick thread derail here.......

This is one of the many reasons why the Traveller Community suffered when it lost Don McKinney. Not only was he a great guy, but he was the one who spearheaded the efforts to create errata for all of the different versions of Traveller. That he was able to do so much is a testament to his dedication and ability.

Did they ever do a reprint with those 71 pages merged in?

Quote from: jeff37923;943821Quick thread derail here.......

This is one of the many reasons why the Traveller Community suffered when it lost Don McKinney. Not only was he a great guy, but he was the one who spearheaded the efforts to create errata for all of the different versions of Traveller. That he was able to do so much is a testament to his dedication and ability.

Don McKinney will be missed. I never talked much with him but I appreciated all he did for the Traveller community.

Quote from: CRKrueger;943722So Christopher, if you run with the idea that the LBBs are sort of an Ur-Traveller, and High Guard is more of an OTU specific supplement - what about the others?  Are there any more supplements that are on the LBB side of the "OTU Shift"?

I was making this awesome graphic chart with columns separating Books, from Supplements, from Adventures... and then it became a "What the Fuck Am I Doing???" moment when I went too deep. So here are my notes.

This is not authoritative, and I am no authority. The following is how I see thing, filtered through my interests and obsessions.

Let's go:

I dived the Classic Traveller line into three broad categories or "phases":

• Original Traveller
  
• Proto-Traveller (a term developed by the gang at COTI)
  
• The Official Traveller Universe
  

Each grows from the one preceding it, but each is (in my view) distinct.

Original Traveller is playing without any concern for GDW's house setting at all. That means playing with:

• Books 1-3 (Either 1977 or 1981 editions. There are differences between the editions (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/traveller-out-of-the-box-interlude-the-1977-edition-over-the-1981-edition/), but one can cobble together elements from each of them to taste. The real differences setting-wise are the Communication Routes and Travel Zones found in the 1981 edition but not the 1977 edition. Those two elements are concrete parts of the The Third Imperium I prefer to play without them. Meanwhile, the 1977 edition of the rules has Jump Routes, which I prefer.)
  
• If you want you add Supplements 1 & 2 (Setting agnostic and helpful for the Referee!); Supplement 4 (for people who like those new prior services and bow weapons); and maybe Book 4 (though I think this starts pulling the game away from it's rag-tag adventure paramilitary roots and makes it more straight up military game (http://spacecockroach.blogspot.co.il/2016/05/what-is-proto-traveller.html?m=1). I also think the expanded skill list and service generation is bloated and unnecessary. But whatever.)

Proto-Traveller is playing with Books 1-4, Supplements 1-4, and Adventures 1-4, using these for the rules and the sum total of what you know about the Spinward Marches and the Third Imperium. As noted below, the Imperium in the early Traveller materials was a long-lived political power in decline. It committed dark deeds, the distances between the Spinward Marches and Core mattered more, and all in all it is not the bright, shiny competent Third Imperium that came as it was developed in later decades.

When I talk about the Official Traveller Universe in this post I'm talking about the Classic Era history that was developed again and gain. As this history got developed over and over for different product lines the shadows that were part of the early Classic Traveller product line were removed. Travel became easier, and travellers were just any old tourist hopping onto starships. That simply isn't the feel if you look at the text and rules of the original three books. What started as a "large (bordering ultimately on the infinite) universe, ripe for the bold adventurer’s travels" (Traveller Book 1) felt pretty much like First World 20th Century Europe by the time GURPS was done with it.

A note: Keep in mind I'm all for people making up their own settings and tweaking to their hearts content. I'm not trying to trap anyone in any cannon issues. All of my rooting around in Traveller materials was my effort to see if there was still a game called Traveller if you took the Third Imperium out. There is! But it's amazing many people are utterly convinced that Traveller is the setting and I actually got confused enough after talking with them I thought I'd look into it.

A final note, and an important one I think: Until Book 6: Scouts (1982) not a single one of the Traveller Books mentions a specific setting or any details of the Imperium. All of that material is inside Supplements and Adventures. Thing change with Book 6. With Book 6 the implicit message is if you are playing with the Traveller rules it is assumed you are playing in OTU.

Finally, the OTU was an ad hoc creation. There was no plan to published more Traveller books, and certainly no plan for a grand 11,000 worlds. The fact that things had to be retconned over the years as ideas rubbed each other the wrong way isn't something I care about. My point is I preferred the way things worked in the Traveller material before the changes that required retcons came along.


ORIGINAL TRAVELLER
TRAVELLER BOOKS 1-3 (1977)
GDW publishes the book with no intention of publishing any more material for the game. Marc Miller and the GDW assume people will build their own settings and make adjustments to the game as they need for those settings. (Gary Gygax assumed the same thing about OD&D, for the record.)

General Notes:

• No mention of The Imperium or any specific setting
• “Generic” to the degree the Traveller draws on the countless 1950s- 1970s SF adventure novels and short stories Miller has read (Thus there are implied setting details drawn from these many sources)
  
• A few named details (Psionics Institute; TSA)

Pertinent to this discussion:

• Jump Routes rather than Communication Routes (Jump routes are concerns of PCs; Communication routes will rarely, if ever, be the concern of the PCs)
• No Travel Zones (In the implied setting of play (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2016/02/11/traveller-out-of-the-box-the-setting-and-the-setting-of-play/) the power and influence of the centralized government is weak)
  
• Play is assumed to be centered on one or two subsectors created by the Referee
• Ship size capped at 5,000Dtons
• Travel for civilian and commercial ships limited in part by the need for refined fuel, which is limited to A and B-Class starports
• Starship Critical Hit Tables have no “Explode” result (Space combat is a game of resource management for RPG play; ships can be horribly damaged, but not blown up. Later editions will move space combat toward the feel of a board game with “Explode” result

--------------------

SUPPLEMENT 1: 1001 CHARACTERS (1978)
Setting agnostic material to aid the Referee in using the Traveller rules

SUPPLEMENT 2: ANIMAL ENCOUNTERS (1979)
Setting agnostic material to aid the Referee in using the Traveller rules

************************

A BRIDGE TO PROTO-TRAVELLER
BOOK 4: MERCENARY (1978)
Setting agnostic expansion of the Traveller rules
Pertinent to this discussion:

• The phrase “The Imperium” is introduced, but as a placeholder for the Referee’s setting. From the text: “Traveller assumes a remote centralized government (referred to in this volume as The Imperium)”
• As noted in the quote above, an implied setting detail from Books 1-3 is made explicit (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/traveller-book-4-mercenary/): There is a centralized government (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/traveller-out-of-the-box-the-remote-centralized-government-pt-i-where-the-adventures-arent/) but it is remote from the assumed setting of play (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/traveller-out-of-the-box-the-advantage-of-being-remote-for-rpg-play/)
  
• Details of how “The Imperium” might function are offered within scenarios, but these are examples providing context for the scenarios and not proscriptive

*************************

THE IMPERIUM ARRIVES:
PROTO-TRAVELLER

SUPPLEMENT 3: THE SPINWARD MARCHES (1979)
Concrete details about The Third Imperium, including government structure, history, and alien races of the setting
A maps and quick-sketch details of the sixteen subsectors of the Third Imperium

SUPPLEMENT 4: THE SPINWARD MARCHES (1979)
Setting agnostic expansion of rules and new prior service  paths for Player Characters

Pertinent to this discussion:
The information is sparse, with an enormous about of room (and expectation) the Referee will fill in details

• The Imperium in described as “in decline”
• In many respects the Marches can be seen as a Frontier
• There are no Jump Routes (using rules established in Book 3)
• There are Communication Routes belonging to the Imperium
• The Imperium imposes Travel Zones to prevent travellers from reaching certain worlds

ADVENTURE 1: THE KINUNIR (1979)
Scenarios set in the Spinward Marches

Pertinent to this discussion:

• The Battle Cruiser described in the book use the High Guard rules for design, but is 1,200Dtons, keeping it within the ship size range found in Book 2
• The Library data and Rumors Matrixes describes a darker Imperium than what is later portrayed, with abuse of power against citizens of the Imperium and even members of the government
• In many respects the Marches is still a Frontier

ADVENTURES 2-4: (1980)
Scenarios set in the Spinward Marches and beyond

Pertinent to this discussion:

• Ships are built using the High Guard rules, but tonnage remains withing the range established in Book 2
• The Library Data and Rumor Matrixes continue to paint a darker, less powerful Imperium than what was portrayed later

DOUBLE ADVENTURES 1-6: (1980-1982)
Scenarios set in the Spinward Marches

Pertinent to this discussion:

• The Imperium remains dark and more dangerous that later material would suggest
• Ship sizes remain within the scope found in Book 2

***********************************

A BRIDGE TO THE OFFICIAL TRAVELLER UNIVERSE

BOOK 5: HIGH GUARD (1979 – 1ST  ED.; 1980 2ND ED.)
Almost setting agnostic expansion of the Traveller rules. “The Imperium” as a term is introduced exactly as in Book 4, but details of  naval structure are made explicit

Pertinent to this discussion:

• In Book 2 only military and scout vessels could use unrefined fuel without penalty. Book 5 introduces Fuel Purifiers that can be installed on any ship. This makes civilian travel and trade much easier for any interstellar civilization unrefined fuel can now be acquired at any C or D-class starport or any gas giant
• New rules for constructing ships that increase the possible size from 5000Dtons to 1,000,000,000Dtons
• Significantly, though the rules are supposed to be generic tools for any Referee to build ships of whatever size he wants, The Official Traveller Universe introduces ships of sizes well beyond those found in Book 2. In this way, the “Battle Cruisier” found in Adventure 1: The Kinunir clearly no longer makes sense due to its now relatively small size and limited armaments. (Countless years of retconning will be spent trying to explain why The Kinunir was ever called a “Battle Cruiser” in the first place. )
  
• The above point is tied to another important point:
• A shift away from Player Character driven play to a focus on the large scale strategic concerns of running an empire of 11,000. In other words, a shift from an RPG focused setting to a setting ready made for board games and large scale tactical deployments. (We can see this in the shift from Jump Routes to Communication routes; we can see this in the addition of “Destroyed” results for starship combat; we can see this the larger ships and ease of travel (and thus communication) introduced in Book 5.)
• The text introduces and formalizes the naval structure at the world, subsector, and sector level. The nature of The Imperium as an explicit setting is for the first time built into a Traveller Book.
  

****************************

THE OFFICIAL TRAVELLER UNIVERSE

SUPPLEMENT 5-LIGHTNING CLASS CRUISERS (1980)
A 60,000Dton Cruiser is now part of the . We have left the "small ship" setting of original Traveller behind. The 1,200 "Battle Cruiser" found in Adventure 1 now officially makes no sense.

TRAVELLER BOOKS 1-3 (1981)
The new edition of the rules are almost identical to the 1977 edition, although cleaned up and better laid out. The reason I bring it up is only to note that in this new edition the Communication Routes and Travel Zones introduced in Supplement 3 are now a standard assumption. My only issue with these items is that they make the default "remote, centralized government" a Traveller setting more intrusive and more involved with the setting of play -- even though the original, implied assumption was to put the PCs at the edges of the government (you know "remote"). There's nothing inherently wrong about these two items. But they do shift the dynamics of the setting of play.

So technically the 1981 edition mentions nothing about The Third Imperium and so is still setting free (apart from the implied setting details). But it adjusts the text to reflect certain elements of the OTU.

BOOK 6: SCOUTS (1983)
For the first time details about the Third Imperium (of the sort that had only appeared in Supplement 3 and Adventures (proper nouns, dates, and specific details of The Third Imperium)) are now in a Traveller Book. If you are playing with the Traveller rules, you are playing in the Third Imperium.

Quote from: CRKrueger;943910Did they ever do a reprint with those 71 pages merged in?

Unfortunately, no.

Quote from: estar;943914Don McKinney will be missed. I never talked much with him but I appreciated all he did for the Traveller community.

I talk to his son on Facebook, but Don was unique. He could hold several antagonistic opinions in his mind with a nod to them all which formed a consensus from that chaos.

Speaking of Don's work and Classic Traveller here is the last version of Consolidated Errata for Classic Traveller (https://talestoastound.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/consolidatedcterrata.pdf)Don put together before he passed. I never knew the man, but I was grateful for the work he did.

As for the errata it is relatively slight and can be scribbled into any text version one has.

Also of note: Frank Filz has done an amazing thing and created a side-by-side comparison of the text of the 1977 version of Traveller Books 1-3, the 1981 version of Traveller Books 1-3, and the The Traveller Book (1982) (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jsH-EgKvaR0mdbtJMj_Xj7X3TcYyZTqQGf-Gwu58PX0/edit).

This might be too far into the weeds for some people! But it's been useful for me. There are lots of changes from the 1977 version -- some large, some small, and some have rather far reaching implication about how to play the game that I think a lot of people blow past without really thinking them through.

Wow! Thanks for sharing all that. Quite interesting, even though my foray into Traveller was quite limited.

Don's difference table is interesting. I studied it until I could figure out that I had the 1981 edition. There sure was a quite a number of fiddly but significant differences in the details between the versions and the errata.

I just had books 1-3 and rolled up & mapped out a couple of generic sectors and planets, made a few ships and NPCs and ran adventuring long enough for the PCs to get in some fights, sign up as crew on a ship, take over the ship, and get in a spaceship battle. I liked the vector-based ship movement in combat, but the players started to get concerned that I was enjoying the naval combat resolution while they felt a bit helpless and out of their depth as crew aboard a ship that could get blasted based on what other ships were like and how they moved in space.

I also had GDW's Imperium board game (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3661/imperium) which covered war between Terra and Imperium, and I wondered if it was supposed to be the same setting as the Traveller setting which I had no books for, or if it was just a coincidence of naming. In the board game, the Imperium is relatively generic and since it was distant to Terra, I assumed it was mainly non-human space aliens (yes?). It looks like from the comment chatter on Board Game Geek, which I've only skimmed, that the answer is that it is sort of the same Imperium, perhaps as an afterthought to original Traveller, but that the map is 90 degrees off, flipped, with a few stars and jump lines removed, moved, or renamed.

So... the Imperium is non-human space aliens who developed before Terra and fought a long-distance war or several with Terra... and then eventually Terra joined the Imperium, and that's where the human PC's come from? Is this "Spinward Marches" (I always read it as Marshes - LOL) part of the Imperium map?

Quote from: Skarg;944091So... the Imperium is non-human space aliens who developed before Terra and fought a long-distance war or several with Terra... and then eventually Terra joined the Imperium, and that's where the human PC's come from? Is this "Spinward Marches" (I always read it as Marshes - LOL) part of the Imperium map?

The Imperium game takes place in the Sol sector. Traveller was eventually placed in that game's setting, two Imperiums later.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943950I was making this awesome graphic chart with columns separating Books, from Supplements, from Adventures... and then it became a "What the Fuck Am I Doing???" moment when I went too deep. So here are my notes.

This is not authoritative, and I am no authority. The following is how I see thing, filtered through my interests and obsessions.

This is amazing! Thanks for sharing.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943950I was making this awesome graphic chart with columns separating Books, from Supplements, from Adventures... and then it became a "What the Fuck Am I Doing???" moment when I went too deep. So here are my notes.

This is not authoritative, and I am no authority. The following is how I see thing, filtered through my interests and obsessions.

This is amazing! Thanks for sharing.

Quote from: The Butcher;944170This is amazing! Thanks for sharing.

Quote from: Skarg;944091Wow! Thanks for sharing all that.

You are welcome!

Quote from: Skarg;944091Don's difference table is interesting...

To clarify, Frank Filz created the difference in edition table.

Quote from: Skarg;944091So... the Imperium is non-human space aliens who developed before Terra and fought a long-distance war or several with Terra... and then eventually Terra joined the Imperium, and that's where the human PC's come from? Is this "Spinward Marches" (I always read it as Marshes - LOL) part of the Imperium map?

Shawn has the right of it in terms of the history. Also: the Imperium has always been human based. The Ancients in the OTU scattered human genetic material across the stars a long, long time ago. Humans (or human-based stock) are at war with each other in the board game Imperium. (I owned it, too. Loved it.)

GDW tended to cram things together (again, ad hoc). They had been working on a much larger board game for interstellar war and used that game's background (involving the Vargr, the Aslan and so on) to create the background for their Traveller RPG. From everything I've read all of this was built up on the fly... which is why you can find Traveller mailing lists and forum boards filled with people arguing about how to make all the contradictory bits of the setting make sense.

But as this happens you can see how the Classic Traveller's game line shifts focus from RPG support to being more about a board game, whether shifting para-military personal combat to skirmish combat; PCs on board a ship starships combat to flee combat (Adventure 5: Trillion Credit Squadron); and the shift of away for material focused on the concerns of adventuring PCs to generating fluff about the politics and concerns of running an interstellar Imperium.

Given the original premise of Traveller (ex-military with a particular set of skills head off to worlds beyond to carve their own fate and fortune) this shift is, in my view, pronounced.

The Imperium is a solution.
The problem with the future that the past doesn't have is agreement.
Once something has happened, it can be agreed upon to be a certain way.
With the future there are an unlimited number of directions things can go.
This fragments peoples vision and makes it hard to get people into a "shared" image of how things are.
History and popular fantasy doesn't have this problem.

Star Wars and Star Trek provide shared visions of the future but, if you don't want to play in those, it is much more difficult to get agreement.
In 1977, Star Wars had not yet swept popular culture so it wasn't something Traveller could depend on as a unifier, besides being an owned property.
Without The Imperium and Spinward Marches, I don't think the game would have survived till now.
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Quote from: Greentongue;944206The Imperium is a solution.

Without The Imperium and Spinward Marches, I don't think the game would have survived till now.
=

Eh? Only two times have I used the Imperium and the Spinward Marches for my Traveller game.

The first was in 1981, When I ran a game for awhile that was set in the Spinward Marches. I had purchased The Fifth Frontier War, and was using that game as a campaign setting for my players. The other was in 2015, When I started a Spinward Marches campaign for my son.  So, for thirty-eight of forty years I was using one of my various homebrew Traveller game settings. Traveller didn't survive because I played in the Imperium. Traveller survives because I like the game.

Quote from: Simlasa;943744My collection of Astounding Science Fiction zines attests to that... stories featuring psi are common, as are non-fiction write-ups of its potential (though, I'm not sure other zines shared Astounding's degree of interest on the subject).
Scifi radio shows of the time also featured a good number of stories involving psionic characters. It was usually presented as a next step in technology or human evolution, not a rediscovery of ancient knowledge or magic.

Psionics was an obsession of Astounding's editor John W. Campbell and if one wanted to be published regularly there you had to accomodate his quirks. Many of the better writers tired of his demands and restrictions (eg. humans must always be better and defeat the aliens). So while psionics was a popular idea in 50s sci-fi that accounts for the overabundance of psionic stories in Astounding.

In 70s scifi it feels like psionics were often a rebuke to materialism and a metaphor for the psychedelic experience (note all the drugs that allow psychic powers, most famously Dune's spice).

Quote from: Greentongue;944206Without The Imperium and Spinward Marches, I don't think the game would have survived till now.

Traveller has still survived after all the various settings that each edition used. The two most popular editions of Traveller to this day are just core books with no setting in them.

Thanks, Kubasik, that was a very informative breakdown, and one that effectively makes your argument for underlying changes in assumption.

The next bit I guess is why?  Both OD&D and Traveller, which seemed to start from the assumption that GMs would create their own campaigns/milieus with them moved towards having a sort of "default setting" as a example/explanation of the rules, but really, you could argue the settings changed the rules more than the rules changed the setting (an example of Vreeg's Rule).

So where did the "setting shift" come from?  Were people specifically asking for it? Does a specific setting make for more concrete examples?  We kind of see the same thing with the Perrin Conventions merging with White Bear, Red Moon and becoming the very setting specific RuneQuest.  Did RuneQuest have a market effect on injecting more system into Traveller and D&D?

Quote from: CRKrueger;944278So where did the "setting shift" come from?

My own theory, as suggested in the follow up post (http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?36012-Traveller-3-black-books-all-you-need&p=944179&viewfull=1#post944179):

It began as GDW began finding more and more ways to build out the setting to handle board games (Snapshot, Dark Nebula, Mayday), miniatures games (Striker), and war games (Fifth Frontier War, Invasion:Earth). Given the scope that started with, I could imagine someone in the GDW offices hoping to end up with something on the scale of their Europa series, but in space.

A rules set and implied setting designed for awesome RPG play (the value of communication moving at the speed of travel can never be oversold as a terrific conceit for an RPG setting) slowly left the focus of Player Characters and stretched itself to the strategic concerns and political operations of an emperor of 11,000 worlds.

I think it's right there.

Quote from: GameDaddy;944222Eh? Only two times have I used the Imperium and the Spinward Marches for my Traveller game.

I was not implying that it was _required_ for play just that to give a framework for diverse players to have a shared vision of assumptions.
Sci-Fi is so diverse a genre that it is hard to establish a mutually agreed framework without the players studying the GMs personal setting in depth.
With an established background, it made it a lot easier to recruit players.
Without players, games die.
Looks at how Pathfinder does compared to rule systems without established setting.
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Quote from: Greentongue;944435Looks at how Pathfinder does compared to rule systems without established setting.

Pathfinder had the advantage of using a D20 die, and the hate for D&D4e. To most "role-players", a 20-sided die means that a game mechanic is awesome.

As the guy who probably kicked off this sub-topic, I want to say a few things:

I have nothing against GDW having a house setting. Greyhawk helped D&D, and it makes sense for a publisher to create more material for sale.

D&D managed to have multiple settings. Traveller could have done this as well. I'm baffled as to why this did not happen.

The setting of the Third Imperium, while grand and intriguing in many respects, became too stale and bland for my taste. It began as a place of intrigue and adventure at its fringe and became (I'll repeat) pretty much 20th Century First World Europe in Space... which I will never find enticing. Note that they had to destroy it to make it feel like exciting things could happen.

The fact that the setting ultimately did not match the tone and the rules of Traveller Books 1-3 will always be a weird disconnect for me. Ultimately, I prefer the sense of danger, distance, and non-cosmpolitian feel of interstellar space implied in the original Traveller rules against the "Space Travel is Just Like Air Travel" text found in the Traveller Book and beyond.

Now, I get that any setting will have to tweak those rules. But in this case the house setting blew past the rules and implied setting I like and gave me something I didn't care about.

Moreover, given the conflation of the rules with the setting one often finds oneself trying to talk about Traveller the game online (which is a fun thing to do) and is constantly confronted by people declaring how you're doing everything wrong with Traveller the setting and going on at length about some supplement from Steve Jackson Games which one has never read and doesn't care about -- which is not as much fun.

Let there me a house setting! It makes sense. But how it all shook out... that as I'm not much of a  fan of.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;944457I have nothing against GDW having a house setting. Greyhawk helped D&D, and it makes sense for a publisher to create more material for sale.

D&D managed to have multiple settings. Traveller could have done this as well. I'm baffled as to why this did not happen.

Traveller does have multiple settings, particularly after it was opened to OGL.  Admittedly, most of those have moved away from Traveller to The Cepheus Engine after Mongoose stuck these nice shiny knives in our backs, but there was once a thriving group of third party publishers which produced several quality settings for the game which, IMHO, were far less bland and dated as the OTU.  Our Clement Sector setting (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/180536/Clement-Sector-Core-Setting-Book-2nd-Edition), the Orbital setting, Outer Veil setting, the Terra/Sol setting.  And, of course, the 2300 setting.  

Almost all of those third party publishers are now involved with The Cepheus Engine which, if you haven't looked into it, you really should.  The Cepheus Engine was born from the OGL portions of the Mongoose first edition and a few other games.  We modified it to produce Clement Sector: The Rules (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/194731/Clement-Sector-The-Rules).  

And the Cepheus Engine is now doing quite well and growing every day.  Seriously, check out this page (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=0_0_45550_0_0) to see what the former Mongoose third party publishers have been doing in just a few short months following The Great Stab in the Back.  

Simply put though, there are multiple settings for Traveller which are, IMHO, more entertaining than the OTU.  Of course, your opinion may vary.

I grew up reading the Andre Norton/North Solar Queen series (http://www.andre-norton-books.com/index.php/worlds-of-andre/series-by-andre-l-thru-z/solar-queen-series) and "Space Travel is Just Like Air Travel" is not at all how I envisioned Traveller.

I wish the Solar Queen universe had been made an available product.
=

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;944179...
Shawn has the right of it in terms of the history. Also: the Imperium has always been human based. The Ancients in the OTU scattered human genetic material across the stars a long, long time ago. Humans (or human-based stock) are at war with each other in the board game Imperium. (I owned it, too. Loved it.)

Ah thanks for that (and to Shawn). Interesting. So the Imperium would have a long pre-Terra history, too - did anything ever get published about that?

Ya I quite liked the board game too. Seems like it could be a good setting for a Traveller RPG. If I were to run Traveller, I'd probably set up an Imperium game and have that going on at the same time, to generate a context for what's going on, even if the players chose not to get involved in the war fighting. It doesn't seem like the technology would be particularly different except for the ship equipment available (especially the jump drives)... from what I remember from my now ancient never-deep acquaintance with the tech available - the personal combat gear available was sort of 20th Century guns, medieval weapons, and some high tech armor and lasers were somewhat better but that didn't make those entirely obsolete.

QuoteGDW tended to cram things together (again, ad hoc). They had been working on a much larger board game for interstellar war and used that game's background (involving the Vargr, the Aslan and so on) to create the background for their Traveller RPG. From everything I've read all of this was built up on the fly... which is why you can find Traveller mailing lists and forum boards filled with people arguing about how to make all the contradictory bits of the setting make sense.

But as this happens you can see how the Classic Traveller's game line shifts focus from RPG support to being more about a board game, whether shifting para-military personal combat to skirmish combat; PCs on board a ship starships combat to flee combat (Adventure 5: Trillion Credit Squadron); and the shift of away for material focused on the concerns of adventuring PCs to generating fluff about the politics and concerns of running an interstellar Imperium.

Given the original premise of Traveller (ex-military with a particular set of skills head off to worlds beyond to carve their own fate and fortune) this shift is, in my view, pronounced.

Yeah, I see what you mean.

It seems to me though that the scope of the setting both in terms of time and space should leave near-infinite room for variety. I agree it seems more interesting if there are at least many regions and times where civilization is not dominating things and making things peaceful and organized, and as usual, limits, obstacles and difficulties tend to create interesting situations, while easy conveniences like cheap common space travel tend to make things both more generic and mean the GM may need to make many more worlds available, which is both a volume challenge and can make it less likely that specific situations are important. e.g. The GM sets up interesting local situations and the PCs book travel to Timbuktu instead.

Quote from: Gypsy Knights Games;944463Traveller does have multiple settings, particularly after it was opened to OGL.

Your post is spot on -- especially regarding the current situation. I was specifically referring to the period under GDW's development, however.

Quote from: Greentongue;944467I grew up reading the Andre Norton/North Solar Queen series (http://www.andre-norton-books.com/index.php/worlds-of-andre/series-by-andre-l-thru-z/solar-queen-series) and "Space Travel is Just Like Air Travel" is not at all how I envisioned Traveller. =

I agree with you about this.

However, when I open The Traveller Book (1982), here are the first two sentences I read (emphasis added):

QuoteWelcome to the universe of Traveller! In the distant future, when humanity has made the leap to the stars, interstellar travel will be as common as international travel is today.

Can you see where I'm coming from? You and I agree about the nature of travel in a cool Traveller setting. But then I open a set of rules published in 1982 which focuses on the Third Imperium and find a statement of a sort that was never in the original Traveller rules. Moreover, the statement is at complete odds with the rules that will be found later in The Traveller Book -- since the rules are the same as those found in Books 1-3, and those rules suggest space travel is often dangerous, difficult, and rare.

The second paragraph of The Traveller Book begins like this (again, emphasis added):

Quote"Traveller postulates that mankind has conquered the stars, and that travel from one stellar system to another is commonplace."

Which, again, if you read the rules -- in which there are pirates, hijacking, limited fuel options, risk of drive failures for lack of proper fuel, freelance merchants being paid by governments to carry mail between the stars, and more -- doesn't really click with "commonplace." (I will state once more that in the deeper parts of the government (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2015/10/23/traveller-out-of-the-box-the-remote-centralized-government-pt-i-where-the-adventures-arent/) setting interstellar travel might be commonplace. But in the implied  (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/traveller-out-of-the-box-the-advantage-of-being-remote-for-rpg-play/)Traveller setting in which the government is remote (https://talestoastound.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/traveller-book-4-mercenary/) I don't think it seems commonplace at all.)

That's what I'm saying. You and I are in agreement. I don't see interstellar travel like air travel at all either. But the text of The Traveller Book (and later iterations like GURPS) says it is.

That's my point.

Quote from: Gypsy Knights Games;944463And the Cepheus Engine is now doing quite well and growing every day.  Seriously, check out this page (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=0_0_45550_0_0) to see what the former Mongoose third party publishers have been doing in just a few short months following The Great Stab in the Back.

Is there a forum where everybody hanging out or is it still //www.travellerrpg.com?

For everybody else note the disparity between the two.

Cepheus Game Engine (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=0_0_45550_0_0) 105 products

Travellers Aid Society (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/45/Mongoose/subcategory/161_25550/Travellers-Aid-Society) 37 products

Quote from: estar;944478Is there a forum where everybody hanging out or is it still //www.travellerrpg.com?

For everybody else note the disparity between the two.

Cepheus Game Engine (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=0_0_45550_0_0) 105 products

Travellers Aid Society (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/45/Mongoose/subcategory/161_25550/Travellers-Aid-Society) 37 products

And a lot of those products in TAS are Mongoose "clip art" and the like.  Meh.

I'm a bit grumpy about it because I was doing my taxes today and was reminded of just how much the complete changeover cost GKG.  Grumpy John is grumpy.

But as for where folks are hanging out that are involved with such things, there's a bit of action on COTI but, for the most part, it's all on Facebook and Google Plus.  There are some nice thriving communities there discussing The Cepheus Engine as well as several groups dedicated to specific settings such as our "Clement Sector Discussion Group."

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;943447However, the original three books make no mention of the Third Imperium or any official setting. (The 1977 has not mention at all. The 1981 edition of the books has the Third Imperium creeping in slightly with the introduction of Communication Routes and Travel Zones. And notice how light those two elements are.)

Don't they have thinly disguised sci-fi characters, including darth vader, or am I misrembering?  I seem to recall something like that, which pointed to the openess and flexibility of the system.

Quote from: Votan;944539Don't they have thinly disguised sci-fi characters, including darth vader, or am I misrembering?  I seem to recall something like that, which pointed to the openess and flexibility of the system.

The only character mentioned in Books 1-3 was the sample character presented during character generation.

You are thinking of the unnamed characters drawn from science fiction and presented as puzzles in Supplement 1: 1001 Characters and Supplement 4: Citizens of the Imperium. A short biography was presented as well as characteristics and skills. The first set especially (in S1) provides a guide to the kind of fiction Miller used as inspiration for the rules. (The game was written before Star Wars came out.)

Here is the first description from S1:

Quote1.   Heroic Adventurer   CCC78F   Immortal   Cr - Unconcerned
Broadsword-6, Blade-6, Dagger-6, Leader-5, Gunnery-2, AirIRaft-4, Tactics-3

An expert with tech level 4 guns and a brilliant swordsman, this arrogant and confident hero has climbed to the heights of power on his adopted world (450870). His Terran physique has given him extra abilities on this low gravity world. He is capable of limited telepathy, and of an uncontrolled interplanetary teleportation.

The characters from S1 were:
1. John Carter of Mars, from Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter of Mars series.
2. Kimball Kinnison, from the Lensman Series by E. E. "Doc" Smith.
3. Jason dinAlt, from the Deathworld Trilogy by Harry Harrison.
4. Earl Dumarest, from the Dumarest Saga, by E. C. Tubb.
5. Beowulf Shaeffer, from At the Core, and other stories of Known Space by Larry Niven.
6. Anthony Villiers, from Starwell, and The Thurb Revolution, by Alexei Panshin.
7. Dominic Flandry, from the Flandry Series by Poul Anderson.
8. Kirth Girsen, from the Killing Machine, one of five Demon Prince novels by Jack Vance.
9. Gully Foyle, from the Stars, My Destination, by Alfred Bester.

The characters from S4 were:
1. Luke Skywalker, from Star Wars, by Gene Lucas.
2. James "Slippery Jim" di Griz, from The Stainless Steel Rat, by Harry Harrison.
3. Sargeant Major Calvin, from Sword and Sceptre, and The Mercenary, by Jerry Pournelle.
4. Senior Physician Conway, from the Sector General series, including Major
Operation and Ambulance Ship, by James White.
5. Jame Retief, from the Retief series, including Galactic Diplomat and Retief's War, by Keith Laumer.
6. Lord Darth Vader, from Star Wars, by George Lucas.
7. Harry Mudd, from Star Trek.
8. Simok Artrap, from The Stars, Like Dust, by Isaac Asimov.

Quote from: Gypsy Knights Games;944463Traveller does have multiple settings, particularly after it was opened to OGL.  Admittedly, most of those have moved away from Traveller to The Cepheus Engine after Mongoose stuck these nice shiny knives in our backs, but there was once a thriving group of third party publishers which produced several quality settings for the game which, IMHO, were far less bland and dated as the OTU.  Our Clement Sector setting (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/180536/Clement-Sector-Core-Setting-Book-2nd-Edition), the Orbital setting, Outer Veil setting, the Terra/Sol setting.  And, of course, the 2300 setting.  

Almost all of those third party publishers are now involved with The Cepheus Engine which, if you haven't looked into it, you really should.  The Cepheus Engine was born from the OGL portions of the Mongoose first edition and a few other games.  We modified it to produce Clement Sector: The Rules (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/194731/Clement-Sector-The-Rules).  

And the Cepheus Engine is now doing quite well and growing every day.  Seriously, check out this page (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=0_0_45550_0_0) to see what the former Mongoose third party publishers have been doing in just a few short months following The Great Stab in the Back.  

Simply put though, there are multiple settings for Traveller which are, IMHO, more entertaining than the OTU.  Of course, your opinion may vary.

Is the Cepheus Engine core available in print?

Quote from: Celestial;944630Is the Cepheus Engine core available in print?

Not yet though I do know that they are working on it.

On the other hand, our version, Clement Sector:The Rules is available in print. Here is the link:http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/194731/Clement-Sector-The-Rules

Our version differs in that it is geared to our setting with changes to how FTL travel works, our character generation is more like Mongoose's, and we have made some additions to space combat that match our setting.

So if you want to try us out, ours is in print from. If you'd like to wait on the base version, I know they are working on it but I don't know when it will be released.

You could play the rest of your life with just Books 1-3. You have to be very careful after that. Characters made from Book 4 Mercs are just plain better than characters made from Book 1. There is power creep, unfortunately.

With regards to the issues about Traveller's open licence, I'd prefer to let the various parties involved to resolve it themselves. As far as I, a consumer, am concerned having products labelled '2D6' rather than 'Traveller compatible' is really no different to products labelling themselves as '5E' rather than 'D&D compatible'. If the products are good enough, then I hope people keep buying them.

For the question about why Traveller only stuck with one official setting, I think the main reason was that GDW had decided to keep evolving new game systems at the same time as releasing new settings. So when they released classic settings like 2300AD, Space 1889, Twilight 2000 and Dark Conspiracy, they all had new systems and were released as complete new games. By the time that Traveller: TNE came about, they attempted to unify these games with a single house system, but it wasn't well received.

Mongoose Traveller also had multiple settings for their edition of the game - The Third Imperium, 2300AD, Hammer's Slammers and the 2000AD games (mainly Judge Dredd, although I thought that Strontium Dogg was also pretty good) all operating from the same core system. If fact, I think they possibly missed a beat by not bringing back more of the original GDW settings (especially Space 1889) as they may have tapped into a pretty loyal fanbase.

Quote from: TrippyHippy;944711If fact, I think they possibly missed a beat by not bringing back more of the original GDW settings (especially Space 1889) as they may have tapped into a pretty loyal fanbase.

I would have bought a hardcover of that, depending on who the writer was. The original Space 1889 had terrible game mechanics, so I never bought into it. I always liked that setting though.

They re-released Space 1889 with an apparently improved game system. I want to pick it up sometime too. Looks fun.

Yep the Ubiquity system that powers the new Space 1889 is a good, simple dice-pool system with some genuine merit.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;944067Speaking of Don's work and Classic Traveller here is the last version of Consolidated Errata for Classic Traveller (https://talestoastound.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/consolidatedcterrata.pdf)Don put together before he passed. I never knew the man, but I was grateful for the work he did.

As for the errata it is relatively slight and can be scribbled into any text version one has.

Also of note: Frank Filz has done an amazing thing and created a side-by-side comparison of the text of the 1977 version of Traveller Books 1-3, the 1981 version of Traveller Books 1-3, and the The Traveller Book (1982) (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jsH-EgKvaR0mdbtJMj_Xj7X3TcYyZTqQGf-Gwu58PX0/edit).

This might be too far into the weeds for some people! But it's been useful for me. There are lots of changes from the 1977 version -- some large, some small, and some have rather far reaching implication about how to play the game that I think a lot of people blow past without really thinking them through.

And please note, I didn't catch everything... Every couple months, someone pops up with some difference I hadn't noted. If you see things I missed, please request access to comment and I'll grant you that access.

Quote from: estar;943423Don't forget about the two third party CDs for classic Traveller ;-) The Gamelords and FASA CD is the better of the two.

Three... Though much of the material on the third one is older versions of the Gamelords material.

I actually like Apocryphia-2 the best, the Judges Guild stuff is just more wacky and feels more like the ur Traveller of Books 1-3 than the more "Imperium" feel of the FASA and Gamelords stuff. Even the Paranoia Press stuff is more wacky.

I wish they would do the Group One supplements...

The three black books were literally all you need.  Of course, there was a lot of additional material that you might WANT.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;944558the Stan, My Destination, by Alfred Bester

This seems to be out of print. Was that an Ollie Hardy autobiography? :D

Quote from: Dumarest;967014This seems to be out of print. Was that an Ollie Hardy autobiography? :D

Good catch.
Fixed.

No, it was an obscure Lexx reference.

Quote from: ChristopherKubasik;967039Good catch.
Fixed.

Yet I didn't catch my own autobiography by a third party gaffe! I should've just written "biography."