An Old Friend Returns

I was browsing the shelves this past weekend at my local FLCS when I spotted something I hadn’t seen in years, a book sporting one of the most low-key but iconic cover images ever. Red lettering for the title, a smattering of white explaining the title, and an all black background.

Folks, Traveller is back!

I remember reading a few months ago that a new edition was landing but hadn’t thought about it since then, so it was a pleasant surprise to see it sitting there. When I brought it to the counter to have rung up the guy mentioned they couldn’t keep it in stock.

No surprise. It’s classic Traveller. Not Traveller 2300, Mega Traveller, Traveller The New Era, Traveller d20, or any of the other abominations that the Traveller name was associated with.

Now I do know that someone a few years ago had the rights to reprint a lot of the old classic Traveller material, and did releasing them in both electronic format and hard copy, but for some reason I just never got around to looking into it. Not sure if the author of this edition has anything to do with that revival.

The new edition is published by Mongoose and is a hardbound edition with 188 pages. Binding seems decent enough, although at $39.99 the book seems a tad expensive. Then again, what’s not expensive at this point? Besides the price point the only initial negative is the artwork leaves a lot to be desired.

The book is fairly well organized and thankfully includes an index, something that seems to be often missing from RPGs. I still have my old ruleset someplace around here but I haven’t found it to do a comparison of what’s changed. It would be nice if they spelled out the differences, but all I know from looking through it is that the say it’s the classic edition with some modern revisions. What these revisions are? Dunno.

Flipping through the book it sure looks like classic Traveller. Bad things can still happen to your character during character creation, spacecraft design is still fun, as is fleshing out the universe with creating your own worlds. Even weird ones.

The book covers character creation, skills and tasks, combat, encounters and dangers, equipment, spacecraft design, common spacecraft, spacecraft operations, space combat, psionics, trade, and world creation. So no real campaign information, but that’s okay. We don’t need no steeken pre-gen campaign. Though sparse of info the default setting is still the Third Imperium.

If you’ve never played Traveller the genius of it is how effortlessly a game can unfold with practically no prep time. Characters become fleshed out during creation in a way that other RPGs could learn from, while the GM can easily generate adventures though the generous tables. With a few quick rolls a stowaway can recruit the party to retrieve a historical artifact from an asteroid base. From there the GM only needs to add a little bit of imagination and creativity.

Another great thing about Traveller is that while yes, there is a default setting, the game is generic enough that you can pretty much create any science-fiction setting you want. Much like how D&D has always been the ultimate generic fantasy RPG for doing everything from running campaigns based on Norwegian myth to the works of Raymond Feist, Traveller allows you to do everything from Star Trek to Foundation with only a little tweaking.

If you’re a fan of classic Traveller, or are looking for a sci-fi RPG (pretty rare these days), it wouldn’t hurt to flip through this new edition when you get a chance.