Lore and Legends of the Dezzyverse

Category: The Dezzy Traveller Universe

Articles related to the Traveller Campaign Setting I GM in

  • O God, Thy Sea is so Great, and My Boat so Small

    O God, Thy Sea is so Great, and My Boat so Small

    Space is BIG

    One common quirk of science-fiction roleplaying, whether it be Traveller, Star Trek, or Battletech is that the Universe starts to seem rather small. The characters jump from world to world having adventures but they only stay as long as the adventure lasts. Once the adventure is done, they’re back on their ship and off to another world, light-years distant. The routine of interstellar travel shrinks an impossibly vast universe into a travelogue. Alien worlds, might be strange, but they’re not memorable, the planet of purple-people-eaters fades into the background along with the forest moon of cannibal teddy bears, and the world of cheese.

    Timekeeping

    One way to keep space feeling big is to keep track of time as it passes. The Universe is not a static place, everything is always in motion. Seasons change, years pass, even the stars themselves grow old and die. It helps to reinforce that your characters are on a voyage if the Universe continues to unfold even as the players hop from system to system. In Traveller, each jump between systems takes a week. Normally this is expressed in downtime, but the important thing for timekeeping is, that as the characters jump from world to world weeks pass as they are isolated in jumpspace.

    The Battletech Universe is different, jumps of 30 light years happen in an instant, but the drives require a week to recharge, and it takes days of sublight travel to reach the jump point where the drives can be engaged. Again, this is often considered downtime, but the time still passes.

    Even Star Trek, where warp travel doesn’t isolate the ship or it’s crew, the distance between systems is *vast*. It takes days or weeks for a vessel, even traveling hundreds of times the speed of light to transition from one system to the next. As Game Master, take advantage of this, let events develop without the characters needing to be involved. Keep the Universe a dynamic, ever changing place.

    Distance and Scale

    It’s time for a little Astronomy. Get out your notebooks and calculators. As I am writing this essay, I have just flown across the North American Continent from Washington DC to Sacramento. That trip of 3,000 miles (4800 km) took all day (actually it also took all night, because of an unexpected layover in Phoenix, but that’s a whole different story). One Astronomical Unit (AU) is 150 million km. One Parallax Second (ParSec) is 3.26 light years. To put all of this in scale, for Dezzy to travel to work takes about an hour (I live 30 miles from the office) by car. For Dezzy to cross the country (the US) takes a day (six-ish hours) by jet. If Dezzy was to fly to Mars, it’s a journey of eight months. Flying out to Jupiter’s moon Europa takes around 6 years. If Dezzy wanted to send a message home at light speed, it would be more-or-less immediate from most places on Earth, 1.25 seconds to the moon, 15 minutes to Mars and 35 minutes to Europa.

    Why am I throwing all these numbers at you? Well, it’s to illustrate a point. Like Douglas Adams famously said many years ago, “Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Traveling between worlds or star systems shouldn’t feel like driving to the next town over or even flying across country. In-system travel should take at least days, if not weeks unless the vessel is moving at 75% of C (light speed) or more. The point of emphasizing distance is to impart the vastness of space to the players.

    Because of the enormous distances involved, the setting needs to feel different based on scale. This can be accomplished not only with travel times, but with communication lag.

    The Mail Must Go Through

    On a planetary/ moon scale, real time communications is fairly straightforward. We experience it today in our decidedly non-science-fiction real world voice and video calls can be made in real time anywhere on the planet where a signal can be reached. The slight delay to lunar orbit can make conversation slow, and possibly awkward, but not impractical. Physical mail can be sent nearly anywhere in a mater of weeks, or even days or hours if extra resources are employed.

    On an interplanetary scale, real-time communications are not really possible. Even between nearby planets (assuming both worlds are in their close orbits), electromagnetic communications still take between fifteen minutes to an hour to reach their destination. Conversations start to resemble e-mail or messaging, even with voice or video

    Communication with the outer worlds takes hours or days. Relays are needed to even send an electromagnetic signal out that far that can deliver something as dense as voice or video communications. Settings at this scale begin to resemble the telegraph and rail eras of the 19th century. News travels over continental distances, but need to move between telegraph or railroad stations. If the recipient of the message is five days away from the closest station, then all news that recipient receives is at least five days old. Even if the setting is heavily populated, it is still possible and even preferable to present a tangible sense of isolation

    On an interstellar scale, unless Faster Than Light travel and communication is employed, news travel at generational speeds. Its simply not possible to maintain a cohesive society at this scale. Without FTL travel, an interstellar setting is a planetary or interplanetary setting. To use an example from fiction, in the novel Three Body Problem (spoilers), the invading fleet from Alpha Centauri (rougly 4.3 light years) takes 300 years to journey to the Sol system. That’s using technology so far advanced beyond what humans have developed that it may as well be magic.

    FTL Travel Changes Everything

    Interstellar settings with Faster-Than-Light travel flips communications on it’s head. Even in settings where direct communications through subspace, or hyperspace relays are possible, it is often quicker to send a ship from place to place delivering messages. This can be physical media, where a mail ship drops off packages and mail to the starport, but it can also be electronic or digital media where the mail ship simply flies in-system and transmits their messages to their destinations.

    This brings an Interstellar setting to resemble the world-spanning empires of the 16th to 19th centuries. Worlds take weeks or months to interact, large interstellar empires and megacorporations lay most of their authority on colonial governors or directors of local headquarters.

    There is a brilliant map in Megatraveller that displays how news of Emperor Strephon’s assassination spread throughout the Third Imperium. The common communication routes were the Express Boats that could jump 4 parsecs in a week, which was the limiting factor for the spread of the event. There was a second communication route used by the Imperial government and the Navy that used Couriers that could jump 6 parsecs in a week. Using this map, the GM could see who knew about the assassination, when, and how they would react.

    The map also illustrates how much distance the news had to travel. In the setting, Emperor Strephon was assassinated on the 132nd day of the Imperial Year 1116. That news took 200 days to reach Terra, on the rimward fringe of the Imperium. That was from Emergency jumps running a Pony Express route (delivering the mail through a relay of riders and fresh horses) at a pace of around 850 C. That shows that the Third Imperium is really, really vast.

    Keep Real-Time Communication Exclusive

    The Star Trek and Star Wars settings have tropes where conversations over enormous distances occur. Which works against the scope of the setting. The Enterprise is often shown as the “only ship in the Sector” that can respond to the inciting incident of the episode. The orders are delivered from StarFleet headquarters in a direct Subspace communication. Even though the Enterprise was thousands of light years distant Captain Kirk could have a video chat with the Admiralty, and receive updates while delivering progress reports. Lord Vader has video chats with Emperor Palpatine from the Phone Booth on board his Super Star Destroyer while the Emperor is at the heart of the Empire on Coruscant. This shrinks the universe to planetary scale. It’s no more inconvenient to phone HQ for info than it is to open a Zoom Call to Hong Kong from London.

    Both settings retain their sense of scale by showing that these real-time communications as requiring equipment that demands resources that are unavailable to the average citizen. Vader is the Dark Lord of the Sith, he has the biggest and bestest, literally a “Super” Star Destroyer. The Enterprise is the Flagship of the Federation. Subspace and Hyperspace Communications are not available or even a component of adventure sized ships like the characters would be crew of. A small colony carving out a settlement may not have the resources to build such a communications array.

    The Star Trek movie Into Darkness and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith really undermines the scope of their settings (spoilers for both movies). In Into Darkness there’s a scene where “John Harrison” escapes capture on Earth by teleporting to the heart of the Klingon Empire. Using technology explained as “Transwarp Beaming” but it was effectively instant teleportation over hundreds of light years. The Enterprise follows at Warp and arrives close enough to threaten Harrison with a long-range bombardment in an indeterminate, but very short interval. This is a planetary scale event. The distances are just numbers because there is no appreciable time investment.

    In your campaigns, if your adventures travel interstellar distance this casually, then alien worlds become little more than exotic cities that can be reached by tourists on vacation. The sense of wonder is erased.

    Time is Relative

    In settings where Near-Lightspeed and Faster than Light travel is a factor, characters can age faster or slower than the rest of the setting when traveling. This is another way to emphasize the distances involved.

    When traveling at Near-Lightspeed, the subject of relativistic speeds age slower. Characters who regularly travel at these velocities start to subjectively move forward in time. They leave one world, travel for a week at relativistic speeds, and when they arrive at their destination, they have only aged a week, but the setting has gone through months of time. The GM needs to juggle three periods of time. The time from the origin passes quickly as the characters are in transit, the time on board ship seems to pass normally, and the time at the destination would be the distance travelled divided by the velocity of the vessel. This allows characters to experience vast spans of time over the course of their career while their physical life spans are unchanged.

    At Faster than Light Travel, the relativistic equation starts to flip on it’s head. Especially in settings where Jump Drives crosses the distance instantly, but the vessel has to spend a period of time (usually a week) in hyperspace, or jump space. The characters age, but the setting doesn’t. This starts to age the characters faster than the universe around them.

    In Warp-Drive settings, the ships spend travel time in a bubble of real space while the universe outside slows to a standstill. When the ship emerges, the crew, like a Jump Drive crew have aged the time they were at warp, but the universe has only aged a much smaller interval. It takes the Enterprise much, much less time to move through the galaxy at warp than light does.

    This allows adventurers the possibility of outrunning the consequences of their actions (for a time). So long as the adventurers can travel faster than the news of what they did, they can arrive in a new system before anyone can know what they’ve done. Of course, the trap here is that the adventurers need to keep moving. At least until the consequence exhausts it’s urgency.

    Setting Scale and Campaign Scope

    It’s important to apply the scale of your setting to complement the scope of the campaign you wish to run. It is tempting, especially with a game like Traveller with it’s procedurally generated system for creating worlds to create sectors’ worth of star systems, worlds, and moons. It can be fun, dreaming up pocket empires, cities, starports and NPCs to populate them. However, unless you plan to run a series of campaigns over the course of years, developing anything beyond a subsector beforehand is mostly futile. The same goes for system detail. Unless an extended adventure takes place in a single system, most groups of adventurers will never explore any given place beyond the world where the adventure takes place, and even then, the adventurers often only encounter those locations described in the adventure itself.

    Point being, unless the adventurers choose to visit a location, they won’t. You as the GM can encourage the adventurers to visit a location, but the ultimate decision is with the players. It’s the GM’s job to seed reasons for the players to want to visit the interesting locations that are designed. That being said, as GM you can present a campaign that happens in a single star system, with a plot similar to the Expanse. That type of campaign will resemble an Interplanetary Setting, with it’s distances and travel/ communication times. Everything outside of the campaign system doesn’t need any real detail. News can arrive as the GM chooses, but it is not anything that needs to be designed beforehand. Don’t make more work for yourself than you must.

    There is a balance for a campaign that revolves around travel. For example, in a Battletech campaign where the characters make up a mercenary company, contracting their military service with planetary governments and empires for c-bills, interstellar travel is common. The Company fulfills a Contract on a world, gets paid, and then they’re off to the next contract on the next world. System Detail only needs to be relevant to the current contract, and possibly outlines of the next contracts on offer. This is more of an example of a Interstellar scope on an Interstellar scale. While the campaign may never visit more than a dozen worlds or so, you as the GM can make the setting seem big. That’s part of the appeal. The mercenaries aren’t stuck on just one world or in one system. The conflicts cover hundreds of systems and thousands of light years of distance. Part of the appeal of a campaign like this is adventuring in space.

    Deep Space Exploration, like Star Trek is the ultimate expression of Campaign Scope and Setting Scale. Leaving the familiar stars behind to explore… (dare I say?) strange, new worlds. Here, the GM can use time dilation to illustrate how vast the universe is. Traveling from world to world, and revisiting some can show how much time passes on the worlds left behind. Friends who stayed on the outpost the adventurers visited at the beginning of the campaign, can have aged significantly by the time they return and the adventurers have only aged a couple of years. Campaigns out here are stories of isolation and self-sufficiency. Like the crew of a ship far beyond the boundaries of Empire, help is months or years away if it can be reached at all. News from home can be years old. I’d even go so far as to make FTL communication like subspace or hyperspace have significant delays. The goal for campaigns of this sort is, like the crew from Star Trek: Voyager, is to turn the characters’ starship into it’s own little world sailing through the stars.

    West Marches, Distant Stars

    A gaming group can adopt a setting to run a multiple-campaign game using science fiction. In this framework, GMs develop different areas in the setting, and multiple groups of players can experience adventures travelling between GMs and their areas. Coordination is key, understanding where each group of players are in time and space will inform what is occurring in the universe as it unfolds. Groups that encounter one another can exchange news and even crew. As a campaign like this matures, it becomes epic. Like a science-fiction franchise, the more campaigns that play becomes identifiable as unique expressions of the setting while remaining a part of the greater setting.

    Conclusion

    I’ve presented, a lot in this essay. Turns out, since space is big, discussing role-playing in a space setting starts to get big as well. All of this doesn’t need to be applied to any given rpg as a whole. Like all science fiction gaming, the freedom to pick and choose what works for you is a part of the fun.

    Happy Star Trek Day

  • The Dezzy Traveller Universe

    The Dezzy Traveller Universe

    A ten term career of Traveller Gaming

    I’ve been playing and running the first Science Fiction Role playing game since 1985. My high-school buddy Chuck R ran an amazing multi-session adventure based on the Aliens movie released in ’86. It was brutal and so much fun. We made so many characters during that game. Xenomorphs are freakin’ deadly.

    So are player-characters. We killed as many PCs as the Xenos did. One of our players was super-proud of the Armored Fighting Vehicle he custom-designed, and the first time he rolled it out, his character lost control of the vehicle and ran over five characters he was coming to rescue.

    Good times!

    Life-Path Characters

    Traveller was also the first game to use a life-path method of character generation. Instead of generating a bunch of stats, choosing a class and diving into the life of an adventurer, Traveller characters start as 18 year old (or the age of majority for their species and culture) young adults. Players then start choosing career options. Choices are not guaranteed, the player has to make a check for their character to qualify for and join a career. If this check fails, the player can subject the character to the Draft, start a background as a Drifter (think “Space Hobo”), or can just begin game play with the background skills their character earned growing up. Players then roll checks for their characters in four-year terms, earning skills, advancing in their careers, having life-events, and most infamously, rolling Survival checks.

    In the early editions of Traveller, failing the survival check during character generation means the character died in their career. Start over, roll some new stats, make a new 18 year old character. This made character generation into a mini-game of it’s own. Because the careers that offered skills and benefits most effective for adventures were often the most dangerous, such as Marines or Scouts, there is a risk/reward decision. Every term spent in a dangerous career can return coveted skills like Pilot (Starship), Gun Combat, Recon, Heavy Weapons, you know all those cool action-adventure skills. But every term runs the risk of the character dying in service and all those skills are lost. But, they died a hero! Probably. Maybe.

    In latter-editions of Traveller, the survival check has been re-contextualized as less lethal. Failing a survival check now results in a “mishap” and often the end of a career or character generation. But, the character is alive and with an interesting story in their history.

    There are also less risky careers, just Citizens of the galaxy. Administrators, Academics, Scientists, and the like. Survival rolls are easy to succeed with (though there almost always is a slight chance the character fails and is “hit by the Space Bus”) and though the skills are really useful (try to get your Marine friend out of the local lock-up without any Advocate skill), they won’t cover shooting guns, stabbing goons, or flying space-fighters. Players can also choose to change careers during this process, and with that, the diversity of character options is, well… galactically huge.

    This often resulted in beginning adventurers having long histories and high skill values. It wasn’t unusual to see a group of Travellers start campaigns in their 30s and 40s, with high military ranks and contacts throughout Charted Space.

    In more recent versions of Traveller, the concept of character connections have been introduced. So instead of a half-dozen random strangers being thrown on a tramp-freighter, characters can be old service buddies, ex-lovers (or ex-spouses), and all sorts of other potential connections. This encourages players to not just care about their own character, but about the other players’ characters at the table. It’s easier to abandon some guy you met an hour ago in the spaceport bar to the ravenous tooth-beasties than it is to leave the person you served with during the best times of your life.

    Charted Space and the Third Imperium

    The default setting for Traveller is called “Charted Space”. Located in a slice of the Orion Arm of our galaxy and including Terra, it echoes the universes of Asimov, and Niven, Herbert and the sci-fi fiction just before Star Wars changed everything. Traveller was first published in 1977, the same year Star Wars entered theaters. The Third Imperium is a feudal interstellar empire that rules over eleven-thousand worlds. Charted Space includes the Imperium as well as empires of alien soceities such as the Aslan (Kzinti-inspired feline aliens), the Hivers, Vargr (terran wolves uplifted by an ancient alien culture), K’kree, and dozens of others.

    While many sci-fi settings use “galaxy” as a short cut to a large interstellar setting, Charted Space illustrates just how big space is, and how unwieldy a galactic empire would be. I’ve been playing in Traveller for 40 years and in all of that time I’ve barely scratched the surface of Charted Space. Fifty years in this sandbox has created a setting as deep as those of the Foundation, Known Space, DUNE, the Star Wars Galaxy, or the Star Trek Galaxy.

    To me, one of the fundamental technologies of Traveller that is strongest is communications. There is no “Subspace” or “Hyperspace” real-time communications. Instead communications travel at the speed of the fastest ships carrying them. There are dedicated couriers called Express Boats (or “X-Boats”) that deliver the mail and communications along established X-Boat routes between systems. However, not all inhabited systems are along the X-Boat routes, and it falls to smaller courier outfits to take the mail to the backwater systems (which is an opportunity for adventurers to earn some quick credits). This results in news taking weeks or months to cross the Imperium before it arrives at a given destination. This makes the Imperial frontier a bit like our world before the Telegraph was adopted. This also allows for people to outrun their past, or to make a living tracing those who hope to do so

    IMTU: In My Traveller Universe

    Traveller can be run in nearly any science fiction genre, not just the Third Imperium. Over the years it’s been adapted, inspired, or been incorporated in all sorts of setting. I’ll borrow a page from the creator of Traveller, Marc Miller and ask the rhetorical question, “How many different worlds can you think of?”

    Most of us can imagine different biomes grown to planetary scale, desert planets, forest moons, jungle worlds, swamp worlds, worlds covered in oceans and ice, so on and so forth. But, this method is ultimately limited. There are only so many forest planets that we can design until they all start looking and feeling the same. (Star Wars really has this problem, Tattooine, Jakku, and Pasaana are different worlds, but they all feel like the same desert world.)

    For Traveller, the solution was a game mechanic where the profile of a given world can be randomly generated. Instead of classifying worlds by biome, or by it’s ability to support live (like the class M planet in Star Trek), Traveller designs worlds by Size, Atmosphere, Hydrographics, Population, Government, and Law Level. Different combinations of World Profiles can identify different, multiple trade classifications such as agricultural, or industrial, or garden worlds, offering details that can make worlds feel different, and more diverse. Referees (the Traveller title for Game Master) can fill in entire subsectors of worlds for exploration in the course of an evening. Or, if necessary, on the spot.

    Every Referee applies the Traveller rules differently in their own campaign. In the community, we refer to this as “In my Traveller universe” (IMTU). My favorite part of this, is that the Traveller Univers is large enough to contain all of this diversity in setting and campaign. Mechanically, everything in Traveller, whether it is Classic, TNE, Mongoose, or 5.1 is similar enough to be useable with nearly everything else. Honestly, in that high school campaign where I played in Chuck’s adaptation of Aliens, I played an Aslan. Big ol’ lion dude with a pulse laser and RAM grenade launchers fighting Xenomorphs. If you want to make a Wookie, or a Vulcan, or a Geminon from Battlestar Galactica, they can fit into Traveller alongside the standard Vilani/Solomani human characters and the Vargr. IMTU becomes the shorthand for the setting differences that the player can expect from this particular instance of Traveller. It has been this way for 50 years almost.

    IDTU: In Dezzy’s Traveller Universe

    I should give you all a little bit of context here. When I first started playing Traveller in the ’80s, it was the first “Classic” version. The Third Imperium was set in Year 1105 (1107, by the time the Fifth Frontier War started). I mostly ran my games in the Solomani Rim sector because my two go-to Alien Modules, Aslan and Solomani were set near this area.

    In 1987, Traveller’s publisher, Game Designer’s Workshop and their partner Digest Group Publications produced the next version of Traveller, dubbed MegaTraveller, this expanded the mechanics, updated them a bit and advanced the Third Imperium to the year 1116. It also introduced a major change to the setting, dubbed the Rebellion, or the Shattered Imperium.

    In MegaTraveller, the Emperor Strephon is assassinated by the Archduke of Ilelish doman, Dulinor, and the stable Imperium fractures into a multisided civil war. Like all major changes to RPGs (and pop culture for that matter), this was a huge controversy. Even back in 1989 gamers were really eager to dive headlong into arguments and fights over the media they felt ownership of. In My Traveller Universe, I’d chosen to ignore the Rebellion War, and continue my Solomani Rim campaigns without jumping the timeline ahead nine years. It was still 1107 (or so) and the events taking place in the Rim were still in a (relatively) stable Third Imperium.

    1n 1991 I saw a supplement for MegaTraveller that caught my imagination.

    It was the Hard Times, and that cover just scratched all my Sci Fi Adventure itches. I still have my now 33 year old copy. The Hard Times advanced the Third Imperium timeline nine more years to 1125. The Rebellion War never ended with victory for anyone. Instead, all the factions fighting one another had exhausted their resources, and in the last years of war, had destroyed the infrastructure that allowed the Imperium to run. Economies collapsed, worlds failed, and communications broke down.

    Library Data, the thing that the Imperium kept up to date so Travellers would have some idea of what to expect as they journeyed from system to system, lost it’s regular updates. Travel data stopped being accurate. The system you left three months ago, might be completely different when you return. It might be dead. It might have had a change in government and isolated itself from the rest of the sector. It might have become part of a Pocket Empire, and no longer recognized Imperial Law. A rival fleet could have flown through and saturation-bombed the main world. The most valuable asset that a crew could have was often the records of the recent systems they visited. Hell, in the Hard Times, even the X-Boat Routes became unreliable. The mail couldn’t get through.

    My Traveller Universe advanced to the Hard Times on the spot.

    Then, I moved to California and GDW changed Traveller again! Another controversy, another round of edition wars. This time it was 1993. I was excited to find a new Traveller version to go along with my new city and new state.

    The New Era advanced the Third Imperium timeline to the year 1201. The collapse of the Hard Times had become a complete Apocalyptic catastrophe in year 1130 with the release of a superweapon, VIRUS. Essentially VIRUS was self-aware, weaponized software that spread through computer networks. So long as a given system was powerful enough to host an iteration of VIRUS, the weapon would turn that system against the societies that used it. Think Skynet from the Terminator Franchise. A malicious, aggressive, weaponized artificial intellect that desired the genocide or enslavement of all organic sentience it could find. VIRUS would infect a starship, and without warning purge all the airlocks (and crew) then if it were in proximity, turn any weapons on any nearby un-infected ships it could sense. VIRUS would set powerplants to overload, open habitats to vacuum, or poisonous atmosphers, or the ocean. Even most household appliances in the Imperium had enough processing power to host a fragment of VIRUS. Maybe your toaster couldn’t kill you on it’s own, but it certainly could infect the rest of your home, or vehicle and find something to murder you and your family with.

    By 1201 the survivors of VIRUS had started the long road to recovery. That’s what the New Era was about, reconnecting interstellar civilization and avoiding Vampire Fleets and Murder Warbots. There were parts of the New Era I enjoyed, and there were parts I really didn’t. For me, it had changed too much. The adventures and setting supplements presupposed that Traveller was specifically taking place in this setting with these environments. If you wanted to play Traveller In Your Traveller Universe and not in The New Era, you’d have to do a fair amount of extra work. In short, The New Era didn’t feel enough like Traveller for me to really enjoy it.

    My appreciation for VIRUS would come later.

    I was surprised to see the 4th edition of Traveller “Marc Miller’s TRAVELLER” when I found it in my FLGS in 1996. I picked it up on the spot, but it’s setting “Mileu 0” had the same issues for me that The New Era had. It was just too different from the Traveller I enjoyed, and the game mechanics had been changed again from the system used in TNE, which was different from the system used in MegaTraveller. For me, TRAVELLER 4 wasn’t the Traveller I wanted.

    Quick Link Interactive adapted Traveller to the d20 OGL in 2002. It drew me back to Traveller for the first time in almost ten years. I’d been running a lot of 3rd edition D&D in this time and Traveller20, as it came to be known, was really effective in introducing a whole new group of D&D gamers to the universe of Traveller. One of the elements of Traveller that was carried over to Traveller20 was the Life-Path mechanic adapted to the d20 system. Which I really adored!

    Mongoose Publishing came to my rescue in 2008 with it’s retro-design of Classic Traveller. I remember finding a copy of Mongoose Traveller in the dealer room at KublaCon. The hardback cover was an homage to the original little black books of Classic Traveller. That became my new go-to version of Traveller. I blew the dust off My Traveller Universe and happily returned to the Far Future.

    Since then, and the date of this writing, Marc Miller, with Far Future Enterprises published a Fifth Edition of Traveller, TRAVELLER5, in 2013 and a cleaned up revision 5.1 in 2019. Mongoose updated their version of Traveller into a Second edition in 2016 and published updated revisions in 2020 and 2022.

    In Dezzy’s Traveller Universe, I’m mainly using the 2022 version of Mongoose Traveller 2nd edition with a fair amount of the crunchy menchanics from TRAVELLER5.1 in the background. I am setting my next campaign in Diaspora sector during the Hard Times of 1125.

    Conclusion

    If it’s not clear by now, I really enjoy Traveller. It’s my favorite Sci-Fi game, and I think it’s enjoying a renaissance among the older generation of gamers. Recently, Mongoose Publishing has purchased the rights to Traveller from Marc Miller and Far Future Enterprise, which places the game in good hands for the foreseeable future. I’m excited to see what Mongoose Publishing does with their stewardship.

    As a role-playing community I think Traveller players have an opportunity here. We can introduce a whole new generation of gamers to Traveller and it’s rich history. Show them Your Traveller Universe.