Tabletop Roleplaying Games
Traveller
English
Rules-light
Sci-fi
Traveller is a science fiction tabletop roleplaying game of starship crews, trade and survival among the stars, published by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW) in 1977. Marc Miller designed it with Frank Chadwick, John Harshman and Loren Wiseman. The original edition came as a boxed set of three digest-sized rulebooks known as the "little black books", which were later collected into a single volume. It is regarded as a classic of the hobby, and reviewers have praised its production quality, consistency and scope, while criticising its slow character growth and dated weapons. Traveller has since been republished many times, from MegaTraveller in 1987 to Mongoose Publishing's Traveller 2E in 2016 and its 2022 update.
The system is the first edition of Traveller, and it was later succeeded by MegaTraveller (1987) and, much later, by Mongoose Publishing's Traveller editions.
Description
Players take on Travellers, former career professionals such as scouts, merchants, soldiers and navy officers who have left service and now work, trade and scrape a living across a human-dominated galaxy. The default setting is the Third Imperium, a feudal interstellar empire ruled by local nobility, and the Game Master (GM) uses the rules to generate worlds, trade routes and encounters.
The game is a sandbox, not a story engine. Sessions revolve around jobs, cargo, debts, mortgage payments on a starship and getting from one world to the next, and the rules do not promise a plot. It also asks a table to accept risk at the very start. Character generation is a game of its own, in which a character can die before a first session, and a hero's capability comes from the career they survived rather than from levels.