Traveller stuff I got from eBay this week.

The PCs in my Classic Traveller campaign have all gained two skill levels over the course of several year of play, and are all currently “studying” for two more.

Originally I simply accelerated the process in the Classic Traveller books for character improvement, but after a few years of real time play, without years and years passing in-game, I simply told them to make those skills they were studying permanent and to add two more to the “studying” list.

We start every game from the exact in-game date we left off, and as of right now 412 game days have passed - just a little over one imperial year.

I need to rewrite the improvement guidelines on my campaign blog.

Really, the players don’t seem to care that much. The game has been a lot of fun and they don’t seem so focused on advancement as you find in games where you level up or whatever. One thing I love about Traveller is that it isn’t a power fantasy in that way. Still, I think it’s good for the PCs to gain some skills over time. It’s not like they’re going to become super human or it’s going to break the game.

We often to talk about Traveller skills being “big”, that they often include subskills.

In my campaign, for example, one of the PCs has the skill Forward Observer-1. Now this is a battlefield skill, obviously, and would be used to call in coordinates for air strikes, artillary, or even bombardment/attack from orbit. BUT – it would likely also mean the character is good at sneaking around a battlefield and not being seen. Essentially it is stealth on the battlefield. A forward observer who is easy to see would not be alive and useful very long. So I allow the PC in my game to use the Forward Observer skill to stealth around battlefield-like environments.

If a player can make a logical argument why a skill applies to a situation, and it doesn’t break the game or render a more specific skill superfluous, I’ll allow it to at least some extent.

I think most players would be bummed to roll up “Steward” skill, but I think that skill is more than cooking and entertaining. A good ship steward would go all over a ship, be familiar with what everyone on a ship does, see what’s going on, and really know the nooks and crannies of a ship. They’d be great at knowing where to hide, even on a ship they’ve not been on before, where particular kinds of items would be likely to be kept, etc. It’s only a useless skill of the Ref never puts the PC in a situation where it can be useful.

Omer Golan-Joel has the great old article about skills in Classic Traveller. I love it.

Keeping with Omer’s assertion that a level of 1 is good enough to get a job with a skill, consider Streetwise-1. It has to be more than simply finding underworld contacts or talking your way out of being stabbed. It means your streetwise nature is enough to make a living. You are good at it. Streetwise 2 or 3 ? Hell, you can probably pick pockets, etc. One of our PCs was a retired Merchant with Streetwise skill. I made the ruling that HIS streetwise was more related to business dealings - how to handle himself when bargaining, knowing if he’s being cheated, etc. (I have the player the choice and he thought this was cool.)

I don’t think this theory would apply to every skill. There are a few where it makes no sense. Like Bribery. You will probably not make a living at bribery. I think it is probably just a discrete skill, though I’d still listen to an argument about some clever application of the skill.

I posted Ref’s Notes to the campaign blog for our Classic Traveller campaign.

As I stated in that post, I’m exploring the idea of converting to the Cepheus Engine SRD. There would be a few advantages to it.

I saw yesterday that Mongoose has published their first new book for Classic Traveller, Book 9: Pirates. I have to admit that while I don’t have a bad relationship with Mongoose as a Traveller podcaster (I don’t really have any relationship at all with them), I have not found myself drawn to their products or even the Mongoose Traveller community. It seems somehow separate from the rest of the Traveller/Cepheus Engine world. There are reasons for that which I’ll not go into. I guess I just feel a much stronger connection to all the CE publishers and Classic Traveller. However, they now own the entire Traveller IP, so they own Classic as well.

Anyway, I watched this video from Page121 about the new Pirates book, and learned that longtime Traveller guy and actual local Traveller friend Rob Eaglestone is one of the writers. Now, Rob has done some really good work on his own. I was happy to see a full-on oldschool Traveller player involved in this, so I have pre-ordered the book, and I have the PDF now.

It’s really cool. What I really like is that Marc Miller wrote a forward to it. That is cool. Apparently the physical copy will be in a size very close to the original Traveller books, which I also like.

Anyway, I like that Mongoose isn’t just sitting on the Classic Traveller IP and doing nothing. As a Traveller/CE/2d6 podcaster I own a lot of their 2nd Edition stuff. I feel like I need to be familiar with it, even if I don’t use it. It’s all very nice. The books are all beautiful, the layout is great. Still, I prefer the concise and compact format of the Classic Traveller books. That’s why I LOVE the Traveller Facsimile Edition. No matter how nice a set of rulebooks is, I hate lugging them around. Yes, of course you can get them on your tablet or laptop, but I also like having the physical book at the table.

I’m rambling now. Summary – Pirate book is cool. Rob Eaglestone does great work. Marc Miller is cool. Small books are cool. Mongoose producing new stuff for Classic and having a true fan and expert on it like Rob as a writer is cool.

We played our Traveller campaign yesterday. Four hours of fun on Roll20. So happy to be back at it.

Session report is here.

Tonight I watched the Boys from the Baltic Star actual play Traveller stream on Twitch while I fiddled around on my own campaign. I like these guys. They are the only actual play I can even watch. It was nice, and really helped keep me inspired after a day of work and house cleaning.

Honestly, I find most actual play streams overly performative. The Boys are just dudes playing a real campaign. They keep it real.

A few things I’ve noticed and/or thought about this week.

SRDs Compared

I compared the online reading/use of the Cepheus Engine System Reference Document on the web version, the original PDF version, and a PDF of Moon Toad’s print version, using my iPad Mini.

Not surprisingly, the HTML version is simply easier to use on the iPad and on the computer. HTML resizes for screen size by its very nature better than PDFs. The other two documents are great, they are well-designed for print, but for older eyes like mine I find them a bit harder to use. I don’t really like having to constantly resize the PDF. Maybe it’s just me. Now, they are usable. I’m not saying they aren’t. They are both well-bookmarked. It is fairly easy to move to desired sections in the documents. It’s just the reading.

Full disclosure - I love all three versions. I understand that no one is getting rich off publishing these documents. They are pretty much doing a public service, which is much appreciated.

Stuff I like and stuff I want

I’ve got pretty much every version of Cepheus Engine, Classic Traveller, and both editions of Mongoose Traveller. Running my Classic Traveller campaign one thing I had to invent was a system for vehicle combat. So I invented one, and it worked really well, then I found Omer Golan-Joels vehicle combat stuff on his blog Den of the Lizard King as well as his versions in Cepheus Light and Cepheus Deluxe and some other systems. Mine is pretty good, but these other systems are all better. Not my fault. I was just getting started on all this!

But I’d like to see a vehicle combat system actually added to a base Cepheus Engine SRD. Given the importance of vehicle chases, combat, and dogfights in SF movies, it was kind of conspicuous in its absense from Classic Traveller. To me it should be part of the core of any SF RPG. Now, since it is all based off the Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition SRD, I have no idea if it is possible to add stuff. I’m just blabbering.

So I have downloaded the MS Word Version of the Samardan Press’s version as well as the entire HTML version available from GitHub. When I have an extra month in my life I’d like to add vehicle combat to a core SRD.

Skills

Thus far, comparing skills between Classic Traveller, the SRD, and other versions, in general I prefer the SRD as an improvement on Classic Traveller. I think they (Mongoose, I suppose) got it right in this version (Right for me, at least. To each his own). In particular, I like the way they adjusted the various weapon skills, other cascade skills, and the background and service skills. The addition of all service skills at level zero makes a lot of sense to me. I like that Engineering includes all the major ship systems. For me that is the right level of granularity.

To me, if you have Engineering-3, you are at Montgomery Scott Miracle-Worker level. You should be able to fix anything on the ship. How do I arrive at this conclusion? In the old Citizens of the Imperium supplement, the writeup of Darth Vader gives him Pilot-3. If Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader is Pilot-3, then I feel that Engineer-3 should be Mr. Scott. Honestly, I kinda play it like this. Level-1 = bachelors degree. Level-2 = master’s degree. Level-3 = PhD. Anything over level 3 is super grandmaster overlord level (Vader is given Blade Combat -5 in CotI).

Well, I’m rambling here with my not-that-well-thought-out opinions.

This is the first Cepheus Engine character I have rolled up (see previous post). I have not equipped him. Just wanted to see how it all worked.

S 6
D 11 +1
E 4 
I 9 +1
E 11 +1
SS 7

Background/Homeworld Skills
High Law Melee-0 (bludgeoning)
Asteroid - ZeroG-0
Medicine -0
Carousing-0

Rogue terms: 1.5
Gun Combat-1
Streetwise-1
Musters out: 20,000cr

Injured in term 2: reduced E by 1

Scientist term 1
Sciences-2 (social sciences)
Commission and Promotion in first term - rank 2
Admin-1
Animals (Survival) -1

term 2
Linguistics (precursor dialects?)-1

term 3
advances to rank 3
adds Computer-1 for rank 3
2 new skills
Advocate-1
+1 DX from Personal Dev

Musters Out
+1 Ed, +1 SS from material benefits
Mid Passage

Service skills at level 0 from Rogue
Mech-0, Gun Cbt-0 (slug pistol), Melee Cbt-0 (slashing weapons), Recon-0, Grav Vehicle-0

Service skill at zero from scientist
Elec-0

Age: 18+6 (for 1.5 terms) +12 (for 3 terms)= 36 years
Aging roll: 2-4 - -2
Reduce each physical characteristic by 1

Final Character: Ral Partha
6B49B7
Background Skills: Melee-0 (bludgeoning), Zero G-0, Medicine-0, Carousing-0
Service Skills:Mech-0, Gun Cbt-0 (slug rifle), Melee Cbt-0, Electronics-0, Melee-0(slashing weapons), Recon-0, Grav Vehicle-0
Earned skills: Gun combat-1 (slug pistol), Streetwise-1, Sciences-2 (social sciences), Admin-1, Animals-1 (survival), Linguistics-1, Advocate-1
36 years old
20,000cr
Mid-passage
Background: Grew up poor in an asteroid colony, resulting in low endurance due to low gravity. Highly intelligent but no guidance - fell in with the wrong crowed and became somewhat of a street rogue. Injured during a burglary gone wrong and lost his position in the gang. Reevaluated his life, used high intelligence to go to university, studying social sciences. Field work on primitive worlds as well as bureaucratic work on a couple of colony planets. After 12 years of such work found his jobs boring. Retired, mustered out, and now seeks adventure and riches. 

I was off work this morning so I rolled up my first character using the online Cepheus Engine System Reference Document.

I found it pretty easy to use. There is a bit of flipping back and forth on the site, which might be easier to do with the printed book, but it wasn’t bad. I did this while sitting in my chair, watching TV with my wife. I used an online dice rolling application as well.

As most RPG players know, one of the best way to learn a big chunk of a system’s rules is to roll up some characters of various different types. It will lead you through the process of learning about the game, from the players point of view, without being overwhelmed. I found this to be the case with the Cepheus Engine. Even though I’m an experienced player of Classic Traveller, there are enough differences that I need to study the Cepheus Engine to really understand it.

Anyway, without going through the whole character, I rolled the dice and put them down on the character record sheet as rolled. No third “drop-die” or an extra “drop” roll. I just rolled ‘em and took ‘em. Ran the character through a term as a Rogue. He failed the survival roll for term 2, which gave me a chance to try out the Mishap table rather than killing him. Ended up with an injury.

This in turn let me make the roll and succeed to begin a second career - this time as a scientist. Doing this forced me to learn the rules for 2nd careers as far as skill learned and all that. I ran him through three terms as a scientist before rolling to see if he was able to retire, which he could. So that is 4.5 terms of service (the failed second term in Rogues equals a half term. So that is 18 years of service, for a total age of 36.

I’ve not finished the character yet. Tonight I need to make his Aging roll, which is different than in Classic Traveller. I forgot about that this morning.

I’ve look through some of the other rules in the SRD, and they are all faithfull to the “feel” and tradition of Classic Traveller while really being an improvement. I like that in the first term of service a character gets all the skills from their profession’s Service Skills table at level-0. This makes a lot of sense to me. There are other changes to the skills that I think are entirely positive.

My initial excitement over the online version of the SRD seems well-justified. It is very useable, and of course the game is just great. I feel like especially for people doing a homebrew campaign who don’t need a bunch of setting material the Cepheus Engine SRD is really a perfect modern SF RPG.

I’m going to explore converting my Classic Traveller homebrew campaign to Cepheus Engine. At this point, only a few skills would change, and addition of 0-level Service Skills would make sense for our campaign. Frankly it would codify a lot of things we’re already doing, that I wrote into our House Rules.

Finally restarted our podcast about Traveller, the Cepheus Engine, and other 2d6 SF RPGs. This one I interviewed Adam Kovac, of Boondock RPG Adventures, about his new Hard Vacuum series.

A confession. When I’m creating non-player characters for my Traveller game I don’t even roll a dice. I just decide what their characteristics and skills are. I suspect almost everyone probably does this. If I need a non-player character on the spot I grab the 1001 Characters supplement or Citizens of the Imperium. I will however also roll up non-player characters to have on standby, and really develop their personalities a little bit beforehand in a simple paragraph, because I like the chaos that the dice imbue into the character.

Successful Classic Traveller Tuesday Night! Spent two hours prepping for our next session. It’s going well. It feels really good to be deep back into the campaign. God I love this game. It’s just the best game ever.

It is 3:48pm Sunday afternoon. I have a list of things I wanted to do for my Traveller game today, but apparently I’m incapable of really working on anything before about 8pm at night. Not sure why. So I’m writing this blog post instead. Most people reading this will already know everything I’m about to write. That’s fine. This is really just me thinking “out loud.”

In a previous post I wrote about the Cepheus Engine. When I returned to the world (universe?) of Traveller back in 2016 I found variations on Traveller very confusing. What was Mongoose Traveller? What was the Cepheus Engine? What was all the stuff coming from Omer Golan-Joel? Independence Games? The list of things to be confused about seemed endless.

It took a while to sort this stuff out. Now I understand that the “mess” I had encountered is actually a thriving, healthy, vibrant ecosystem of gaming material all inspired by the original Traveller game. While we now have publishers like Stellagama and Independence and others who’ve diverged sufficiently from Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition that they are really their own things, they all still share a love of science fiction roleplaying.

Since really exploring the online Cepheus Engine Reference Document for the last week I can’t seem to get it out of my head. I have owned a hard copy (seen in the image below) of the SRD for several years now. I’ve imported several of its useful systems into my Classic Traveller campaign.

Rather than writing a crappy explanation of what The Cepheus Engine is, who who publishes what, I’l just link to this page from Paul Elliot Books. It shows that the original SRD came from Jason Kemp, and is available on a pay what you want basis.

Conversion of the SRD to this hypertext document really made it pop for me. I have actually downloaded the entire hypertext SRD from GitHub in case it should ever disappear

Maybe it’s because the online version just looks so good on my computer and my iPad. Like so many people, I feel like the internet has destroyed my attention span. I think it more likely, however, that the way it’s presented in the online version is just easier on my eyes. It’s very easy to navigate. Like - super easy. Easier, I think, than flipping through a book. The stripped-down nature of the SRD certainly facilitates this. This is the basic DNA of an SF RPG campaign. You supply the setting and all that.

The Cepheus Journal online fanzine has this great page with a random subsector generator.

Actually, I just figured out why I can’t get this out of my head…

Imagine.

A 15-year old with no money for expensive game books finds this stuff. They download the SRD and/or bookmark the online version on their computer, tablet, or phone. They go to the generator page and create a random subsector. They save the star map to their device, along with a screen shot or the text of the subsector details. They look at those numbers and rules. They share this with a few friends. The friends generate characters using these free materials. The original kid uses imagination to give life to that subsector. They steal a few six-sided dice from a sibling’s board game. Suddenly you have a whole new gaming group born with zero expenditure of money.

That’s powerful. That is accessible. Even a kid with no computer, tablet, or phone could go to the public library and print out everything they need.

A few years ago we had the OGL debacle. The potential revocation of the Open Gaming License held great peril for the publishers who’ve come to depend on it. Disrupting all of that would be been bad for those businesses. At least inconvenient, potentially disastrous.

But when I consider that averted calamity in light of my little story above – I think that would be the real loss. To sell professional gaming materials companies need gamers. And the old ones are…old. We need new gamers. We need new 2d6 SF gamers. Allowing these inexpensive or free materials to exist and flourish is an investment in the future. Those kids will grow up and buy your hardbacks if they are nice.

It’s the beauty of that original Traveller box, with three little black books and two tiny dice, for a very small price. BUT it’s even cheaper, and a kid with no gaming or comic store nearby can get it.

Creating an EPUB eBook for my Traveller campaign star map and descriptive material.

Last year I came across this blog, Adventures in the Distant Fringe, which I immediately loved. It’s run by blogger Peter C., whom I have no idea who he is. Except that he’s running a great 2d6 SF game using the Cepheus Engine and the Distant Fringe Setting.

I’m very inspired by this campaign. Jeff and I are going to discuss it on SAFCOcast, but I thought I’d mention it here. Actually as a first “original” post on this blog I felt compelled to. The Campaign Pitch page really sold me on it, and then reading the first few session reports made me love it even more. It reminds me a lot of our Into the Void campaign, but it seems better.

They’ve been on hiatus for a while now, which I can understand. So have we. It’s been almost a year since we’ve played. Sometimes that happens, but that doesn’t mean the campaign has ended. I hope they start up again soon.

A few things that really struck me about this campaign as a GM.

• They just use the online Cepheus Engine System Reference Document (linked to above)
• They play relatively short sessions. 2 hours per week. That makes it easy on everyone
• They don’t appear to have used any purchased materials. All the stuff seems to be free and online

Now, I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t buy cool stuff from publishers. Frankly, I need to do that. I suck at designing ships, for one thing, and I love finding great maps on DriveThru RPG and adapting them to my game. But the ability to run a really good campaign using only free, online materials shows how accessible this hobby is. I’m blown away.

I’ll leave you with this. Peter runs a more general RPG blog, and on it he did this One year of classics 2d6 sci-fi adventure summary, which I really loved. I want to do it for my campaign.

Reposting from March 11, 2017

Well, thanks again to the Ebays, I now have the Traveller boxed set from 1979, as well as the High Guard, Citizens of the Imperium, Mercenary, and Spinward Marches supplements.

Of course the first thing I dug into was book 1, Characters and Combat.

The books are in amazingly good shape considering they are 38 years old.

It’s pretty weird going back into such an old gaming system. After many years of playing games that use point systems to create the character you want to play, Traveller seems like quite the throwback. The character generation process is a game in-itself — the PC can die before he/she gets out of generation! Then there’s situations like rolling up a character with a Strength of 12 (on a 1-12 scale), Dexterity of 12, and an Endurance of 4. It’s hard to make sense out of those sorts of stats, but you know, it can be done, and at age 52 (rather than 15), I can see the fun of doing it. How about, a big fat guy who is really strong, and has great hand eye coordination, but is just TOO HEAVY. That works! And it might make the character kind of interesting as well.

Then there’s the skills. This isn’t like GURPS where there are dozens of skills and you decide how good your character will be at them. There are fewers skills, but they tend to be a bit broader in focus. Medic. Pilot. Engineer. Gun Combat (pick a particular gun). Jack of All Trades (I’ve always loved this one). So you don’t have the really detailed differences in PC stats that you might seen in GURPS or the Hero System. It’s more on the player to create an interesting backstory and give the PC some personality.

Looking at all the books together, it’s pretty clear why our games back in 1979-1981 always involved going to a planet, buying new guns, killing a lot of people, running to another planet, and repeat. We were young, immature, and really didn’t know that much about science fiction, and frankly we didn’t really do that much real roleplaying. The boxed set give you such a flexible framework within which to build a game that we just didn’t know what to do with it.

Finally (for now), I have to admit that the lack of a very workable improvement system for characters still kind of puts me off a bit. On the bright side, it encourages good storytelling and roleplaying. However, it does kind of suck to go through a lot of games and your character doesn’t really improve. A PC has to age four years, during which he/she studies like a maniac, to learn new skills or improve at old ones. I’m sure some of the newer versions of Traveller probably address this issue. I could see using the GURPS version of Traveller, and using the old books as source material and inspiration.

I’m thinking that after our next GURPS CyberTex game I may have my players roll up some old Traveller characters and see what we can do with this.

Reposting from something I wrote in March 2017

I had the bug the other night, so I ordered an old boxed set of the Classic Traveller core books, plus some supplement, off of ebay. Looking forward to getting them and maybe running a game.

This is a repost of something I wrote several years ago as I was returning to Traveller, the greatest RPG even created.

As I think back over my early days of gaming and GMing, the memories are flooding back. When I started in 1979, there weren’t hundreds of RPGs. Most of the time my friends and I played D&D, but one guy had the game Traveller, so we played that too. Eventually we all bought the game.

Traveller was great because it was about space, and was really flexible. The basic set came in a box and had 3 little black books of rules. They sold a lot of supplements. I don’t think there was a single illustration in the core set. Something about the books made you feel smart.

The game mechanics had rules for spaceship combat, interstellar commerce, and other cool stuff, but at 15 we mostly just blew stuff up. Get in the spaceship, go to a planet, get drunk, find a weapons dealer, buy some plasma rifles, and start killing. When the Law got on our asses we’d hop in our ship, the Hellfire, and take off, usually destroying more people and ships on the way out of the system. Mass murder and mayhem on a glorious scale.

It helped that our GM 1)just wanted his friends to be happy and 2)didn’t seem to have actually read any of the rules beyond character generation. His answer to any question of skill was “roll two dice”. We had no idea what we were rolling for, and neither most likely did he, but we all had fun and that’s all that mattered. Clearly, we never got bogged down in game mechanics…heh heh.

Our GM got into gaming really early. Every Wednesday night he went to this huge gaming meetup at Richland Junior College, here in Dallas. He was friends with lots of older gamers. One of them was a computer programmer. He gave our GM this gigantic hex map, with planets dotting it. Each planet had a number, and there was a computer printout on which the characteristics of each planet were given — randomly generated by a program this guy had written. Pretty cool. We were in awe.

As we got older, and better game systems were released, we tended to gravitate toward the new stuff. Hero Games’ Champions was a prime example. Flexible, great combat system, etc. Game Designer’s Workshop, the authors of Traveller, have continued to release new editions of the game, but we never played them. We stuck to the original when we wanted hot space action. There was something really cool about that little box, with the 3 original books, and maybe having a couple of the supplemental books and a bunch of dice crammed in there. It was stripped down roleplaying. It was all on you and the GM.

This is a test post for a blog about 2d6 science fiction roleplaying games. More later. Testing themes.