Traveller Rule 1: Adventure
Show of hands – how many of you have seen a documentary featuring the life of an average truck driver that you would consider “epic?” As a young GM, I found myself running up against this very problem. No[...]Read on >>
For Those Of You Playing Along At Home
The question’s been raised as to precisely which books I’ll be using for our upcoming Traveller campaign. The following are what’s being counted on as of now.Traveller Core Rulebook OR Pocket Rulebook (Mongoose Pub[...]Read on >>
My Traveller Character Generation Rules
To my mind, there are few purer joys in gaming than creating Traveller characters.Below is my draft for my Traveller character generation rules for our upcoming Imperial Navy campaign. I think doing it this way should cr[...]Read on >>
5 Traveller Rules
The first rule is: design games like adventures. It might sound simplistic but novice and long-time Game Masters alike have stared across the table wondering why their players seem bored. This is actually quite common[...]Read on >>
Enter Traveller
I can count on one hand the number of Total Party Kills I've had as a Game Master over the years. Friday night, I almost added one to that number.I won't go into all the gory details, save it to say the group rolled two[...]Read on >>
VasaLoppet – The Space Race
The big long-distance ski-race Vasaloppet is on today. It is run from Sälen to Mora (9o km). This has inspired me to think about a long distance space race. We are all familiar with the planet Mora in the Spinward March[...]Read on >>
Traveller Subsector Coding Hell
I started thinking that maybe I should start looking at automatically drawing communications and trade routes. I started writing some code that calculates the distance between two hexes. And I started wasting hours.[...]Read on >>
Structure is Essential to Design
Since beginning Free Spacer, I have found one process more useful than any other; Organisation or Structure. The structure of the work has a much greater effect on my ability to write or design it then I would have ever [...]Read on >>
My Life And Roleplaying: Changing The Rules…
When Rachel and I were packing up a year or so ago, ahead of our big move, we came across some of my old family board games.Inside one of the boxes was a hand-written sheet of 'house rules' for the game that Gublin and I[...]Read on >>
Traveller and games Before the Long Night
Traveller was one of the first role playing games I ever learned. For the longest time, science fiction role playing to me was synonymous to Traveller. Due to the unavailability of published game material where we lived,[...]Read on >>
Burgess Shale Traveller
To further reinforce what Grognardia says about Traveller here. Here is this article from a long time fan site - Freelance Traveller which speaks about the pre-imperium days of Traveller when campaign were one or two sec[...]Read on >>
What Matters Most in Sci-Fi RPGs
Big computers, small computers - bah! Double bah! Such trivialities matter not. The prime quality I care about and the surest factor of sci-fi game worthiness is whether or not it features chicks with purple hair.All p[...]Read on >>
Traveller and Computers
Grognardia has an interesting post about Traveller and Computers here.Around the mid 80s it began to drive many Traveller fans crazy that it's computers were so limited compared to what was coming out. Most just accepted[...]Read on >>
Just in Time and Space Dungeon
For my [Campaign:Kaylash Traveller game] I have been using just-in-time dungeons: I invent atmosphere and details on the fly and skip right to the . . .[...]Read on >>
Basic Traveller Templates
These templates were made to reflect basic proficiency with regards to the hours of training that would into their contemporary real-world counterparts. I plan to emphasize on specialized intelligence, because IQ is t[...]Read on >>
T Pyxidis
T Pyxidis is a star that we have heard about in the news recently. The scientist Dr Sion claims that it will go supernova quite soon and threaten the earth. Other scientists say that this is not the case. In any case, T [...]Read on >>
Adventures in the Nth Imperium
So here's a campaign idea I've been kicking around in my head off and on for a couple of years. Feel free to steal it for your home game if the spirit moves you. One of my favorite popular science books of the last decad[...]Read on >>
Links? On a Thursday?
Who would have thunk it? Charles Stross writes on the issues to do with spaceships. Lev Grossman chooses his top 5 fantasy books of all time! (via i09.com) Something Awful dissects the art of Traveller. Paizo are having[...]Read on >>
So Traveller Isn’t About Going Back In Time To Steal U Boats?
One day in high school - way, way back in the dark ages - some guys were playing Traveller in the library. They had their nifty little black books, which I thought were very cool. I sat within earshot, trying to figure o[...]Read on >>
The Week In Geek…
A round-up of geeky news you might have otherwise missed...(1) State Of The Mongoose: Matt Sprange delivers his annual summation of what's going on at Mongoose Publishing and the companies exciting plans for the future. [...]Read on >>
Mongoose Publishing Doing Grand
Mongoose Publishing has posted their 2009 “State of the Mongoose Address” and it’s great to see a RPG company doing so well! In general, they say “you have to work hard but you can still do well i[...]Read on >>
You’d GM it if you could (but probably never will)
November 25, 2009 from Temple of Demogorgon
Filed under: Champions, Mutant Future, RPG, RPG Hub, Traveller
Since the 80’s, I’ve always tried to have an alternate game to do for my D&D groups whenever I was feeling a little burnt out, or if a player important to the current scenario was missing. From the late 80’s un[...] Filed under: Champions, Mutant Future, RPG, RPG Hub, Traveller
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The Starwolf Crusades
Today I woke up thinking the Gateway Quadrant needed more menace. So I wrote this:The Starwolf CrusadesImperial psychohistorians have long considered free trade and the regular exchange of ideas that accompany it as the [...]Read on >>
Traveller: Where to begin?
I have a couple of players who are very interested in trying out the Mongoose Publishing Traveller RPG. To be honest, I don’t even know where to start. I tried looking up background and in-universe history, but it&[...]Read on >>
Traveller or Diaspora
I'd love to read more comparisons between the two.[...]Read on >>
Filling Billets 2
Today I'm continuing my attempt to hire a crew for the Leviathan, the merchant cruiser appearing in the Traveller module of the same name.2nd OfficersPosition 07: Computer OfficerNavy 107*Scout 67, 100Suprisingly I coul[...]Read on >>
Filling Billets 1
I've talked about the Traveller adventure Leviathan a couple times before. The eponymous spaceship flown by the PCs in this module has a full complement of 55 officers and crew, making it a much bigger affair than the M[...]Read on >>
Travelling continued, An alternate look at RPGs
Here some more on the what-if history of Travelling.Forward to Adventure Part 2A retrospective of 30 years of Adventure Games.Imagination #225, October 6th 1970Travelling and World War 2.Travelling 2nd edition became a m[...]Read on >>
Travelling: an alternate vision of RPGs
Now for something completely off of the wall. A what-if story about a world where RPGs developed earlier than our own.Forward to Adventure Part 1A retrospective of 30 years of Adventure Games.Imagination #224, September[...]Read on >>
All Your Classic Traveller Are Belong To Us
And it fits in my mailbox… This has nothing to do with Chimera or Welsh Piper, but the Classic Traveller CD-ROM I ordered from Far Future Enterprises arrived today. The obvious result is that I’m super-please[...]Read on >>
Organized Sci-Fi Play
Last night, I got to thinking about the lack of organized play opportunities for sci-fi RPGs. Now, I look at the play experience generally offered by the current iteration of the RPGA, and that’s not something that wou[...]Read on >>
Twilight Sector Campaign Setting Sourcebook
Divided, mutated, improved… the human race has taken to the stars, colonized worlds, and blown each other up over the last thousand years according to the Twilight Sector Campaign Setting Sourcebook. Written by Michae[...]Read on >>
Twilight Sector – A new TU
Cool, a new traveller product to review. First we need to understand that Twilight Sector is not located a few sectors rimward of the Solomani Rim. It is not even located in the Official Traveller Universe. It is locat[...]Read on >>
From the Attic: Zhodani Courier
At some point I lucked in a desktop blotter that was a pad of 1/4" graph paper. We are talking huge sheets that were about 17" by 22". My first thought wasn't about making a megadungeon.Nope.My first thought was now I ca[...]Read on >>
A comment on POD and shipping
Print On Demand, being a new technology, has its share of wrinkles and bugs. Shipping costs are one of them, and I jabber about them some while enthusing about Diaspora in a sidelong fashion.[...]Read on >>
My take on the Third Imperium
Probably the biggest thing for a GM using the Third Imperium to get a grip on is figuring out how the Imperium works. Frankly there is a lot of ways it can happen. From where it doesn't do much at all to a really dark em[...]Read on >>
And the winner is…
The votes have been counted. The winner of the first Summer Zhodani Base 76 Patrons Writing Contest is Raz with his Patron called “Universal Health Care“. w00t! Image from wikimedia. License: Creative Comm[...]Read on >>
Finding The Third Imperium
Jeff Rients yesterday addressed a pretty good question: which version of Traveller should one get if interested in the Official Traveller Universe (but lacking any experience with it)?His answer's a pretty good one: the[...]Read on >>
What the best for gaming in the Third Imperium?
Jeff gives his recommendation for what to get for gaming in the Third Imperium.I heartily agreed with his choice of the Traveller Classic CD-ROM from Far Future Enterprise and his specific recommendation of using the Tra[...]Read on >>
Traveller: What version?
A couple days ago Gameblog reader Erin asked "if one were interested in the OTU, but didn't know what version to pick up, what would you recommend?" In case Erin missed it I wanted to point out that donm61873, a.k.a. Do[...]Read on >>
Rull Subsector – HCS Map with dark background
In the free download form Hell Creek Sanitarium there was a map with a printable background. Here is the not so printable version of the map for those who like a darker background. This map is based on the data (by Dylan[...]Read on >>
And Now for Something Completely Different…
Different than what I'd planned on posting today, that is.I was hoping to get some of my scanned horror resources (mostly hand-drawn maps and floor plans) posted this week. However, it seems that the image files of the p[...]Read on >>
quick Trav item
A glance at this wikipedia page suggests that the largest real world commercial ships top out at about 5 times the displacement of the largest military vessels, with many commercial vessels three times the size of the la[...]Read on >>
Traveller 20,000Dton Carrier
This 20k Carrier includes its fighter, based on the Terran fighter. This is designed mostly from ISW RAW. The only differences is in the ranks of the Fighter Pilots. The Terran light fighter has been modified to have an [...]Read on >>
Size Is Important…
Picture shows (from left to right): a 15mm 'not-Firefly' character from Ground Zero Games, a 20mm 'not-Stargate' miniature from a long-vanished range, and an "oversized 28mm" figure from Killer B's GAFDOZ selection.In th[...]Read on >>
My latest cheap Ebay score… Traveller
And not just any Traveller, but the original 3 LBBs. No box, but that's OK. It's the books I want so I can go back to the beginning and enjoy what I remember, and maybe even play a game or two in the future.Price? $2.99.[...]Read on >>
Start voting
You may now vote on which of the “Patrons” you think are the best. The Patrons You can vote for are: Luck Handi by Jeff Universal Health Care by Raz The Hermit by Matt Only registered users and participa[...]Read on >>
A comment about my Traveller experience
I've realized that maybe I should not have tried to be so subtle. The medium isn't good for subtleties. So, what I felt might need clarification about my former post about Traveller is that it was consciously written wit[...]Read on >>
More thoughts about rules and play
I have been listening to the podcast Theory From the Closet lately. In it, Clyde interviews Mike Holmes and Mike Mearls in two episodes. I have forgotten why I downloaded just those, but in tandem they turned out to be v[...]Read on >>
a size comparison chart
Key1. Type S Scout2. Type A Free Trader3. Type Y Yacht4. Type R Subsidized Merchant5. Type M Subsidized Merchant6. Type C Cruiser7. Lightning Class Cruiser (white)Ships 1 to 6 are the silhouettes for the Judges Guild ver[...]Read on >>
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