Fantasy Traveller. The unsung supplement?

[Blue Ghost]

This topic has been brought up before, but I'm curious what fantasy or fantasy like elements anyone here has incorporated used in their Traveller settings? Has anyone dumped their gun toting characters into a fantasy setting? What were the results? :smirk:

 

[hdan]

You mean besides anti-gravity and jump drives?

Psionics are close to magic, and though I don't make a habit of it, I did once do a "D&D World" which was a lost colony from the Long Night that still had all the aliens you'd expect to find in the Spinward Marches living in a High Medieval type setting. Marauding bands of Vargr and Aslan filling in for the "Goblinoids" and "Gnoll" types, Droyne acting as Kobolds, and some hostile local critters all menacing the various Human populations. It was long enough ago that I don't remember exactly what the setup was, but the players had to do some "fetch-quests" for the local nobility to get a "relic" part they needed to fix their power plant.

The "Wizard King" (An insane Zho from "beyond the sky") who ruled the place used his Psionics to make the players believe that their guns were ineffective, and they never tried to prove otherwise. In the end the players decided to leave the Zho in charge, take their repair part and run. But not before they had plumbed a few dungeons and recovered enough gold to make them happy.

 

[Hemdian]

I used the Thieves World box set once a long time ago. It had a write ups for using different rule systems including CT. But I was a little sneaky in how I ran it. I used psionics as a stand in for magic, but played fast and loose with the psionic rules to recreate ‘fantasy magic’ as best as I could.

In the middle of an established campaign (the group were the crew of a Gazelle CE), half way through a regular session I collected everyone’s character sheet and issued an alternative character sheet. These had attributes and a few skills (nothing technical or using education/knowledge). I told the group they had awoken in a field … naked and suffering from amnesia. In short order they had stolen clothes from a nearby low TL farm and headed in to a local city.

Thereafter the first half of each session was the normal Traveller campaign (with the regular character sheets), the second half was this AD&D-like fantasy campaign (with the other set of character sheets) with a quest to discover their identities. This went on for a number of sessions and out-of-game the players came up with some ingenious theories as to what was going on. They knew there was some connection between the two games but no one guessed correctly.

In the fantasy campaign they were eventually advised by a ‘good’ mage (or a neutral mage who was open to payment) that they needed to locate a fallen tower made of metal to recover their memories. Off they went in search of it.

Meanwhile, in the regular campaign, after some space combat they misjumped. As they entered orbit around an unknown planet they were psionically attacked and forced to crash land.

Meanwhile, in the fantasy campaign, they found the “fallen metal tower” and discovered it was their Traveller ship (a metal cylinder laying on the ground) and it was now the possession of an ‘evil’ mage.

On seeing it their memories returned and they realised they had been playing the same characters … just not in chronological order. A second psionic attack right after crashing had caused amnesia and given them a compulsion against anything high tech (thus not only had they fled their ship but they had shed their equipment and high tech fabric clothes too). The ‘evil’ mage had been the source of the psionic attacks.

 

[shadowcat20]

Back in the 80's I was running a 1st ed D and D game. One of my players mom objected to that game so we made him a Traveller character to play with. Just adjusted his stats from 2D6 to 3D6 and put 1st ed stats on his equipment. Many years later he was still playing that character as a minor Noble with a keep tricked out in hidden high tech items. It was kept low key enough that the locals just thought he was a mage. Grenades/Fireballs, Gauss pistol/Magic Missle, Laser/Beam of light. Safe to say years later he was running his own D and D games.

The funnest time was when the party was in a snow blown cavern trying to fight a white dragon. The party could not see it flying in the snow squall but he was able to pick it out with IR goggles.

This works when you put a choke point on Ammo and equipment. He found a source from another Traveller smuggler who was based on the planet. (Red Zone planets make good bases.)

 

[Washington]

Like Hemdian states, the Thieves World set from Chaosium was a good place to take Traveller to sword and sorcery.

Almost nothing needs to be changed to Marc’s first three books. Psionics are magic. Add two to four additional areas of psionic powers, and you are good to go. Just two additional ones really are needed, pyrokinesis and awareness other. The description of the effect is up to the player, the magnitude dependent upon the number of psionics points used, just like usual. I posted some of the converted non-player characters from The AD&D module Village of Homelet elsewhere here on a different thread. Below are the characters I posted previously.

Jaroo Ashstaff
76A7CA Magic [Psi] A
Cudgel 2, Medical 3 (TL 1), Leader 1, Administration 1
Telepathy, Teleportation, Awareness, Awareness Others

Burne
A7AB78 Magic [Psi] A
Dagger 2, Leader 3, Streetwise 1, Tactics 1, Administration 1
Awareness, Pyrokinesis, Teleportation

Rufus
A88779
Halberd 3, Tactics 2, Leader 1

So, ya, Traveller can definitely be used for high fantasy setting campaigns, with everyone running about at tech level one and psionics are magic. I've done it. It's fun, and it works just as well as other systems that are intended for medieval fantasy. Character generation is even the same, navy is aboard sailing ships, army is all about sword and calvary, scouts are like rangers, merchant ala Marco Polo, etcetera.

 

[snapshotbygdw]

But isn't tech level just another form of time travel

Have never really used a fantasy/magic setting as such but have had players adventure in: the wild west, as musketeers, at the equivalent of Waterloo and even as mammoth hunters all thanks to tech level. Once had them lose their memories as a result of a local spirit brew and forced them to survive as flint armed savages till they could figure out how to get inside the magic cave of their ship (used the old gamma world tech discovery routines when they tried to work anything)

 

[Garyius2003]

There was the Jump Ghosts module in one of the GSW issues one October. That one broke the Traveller sytem fairly well.

 

[Nathan Brazil]

There are three official supplements which can easily be used to make fantasy/"swords and sorcery" settings. All are available in ebook format at least.

Mongoose Traveller published an entire magic system in the Strontium Dog supplement.
I am not a big fan of that magic system, but it is one point of view and I guess works well in that setting. It also has "special techniques" (they look a lot like D20 feats to me!) and mutations which can be used to describe non-human beasties and all their "powers". Judge Dredd has more "special techniques", but many of those are campaign specific.

Samardan Press has two supplements which, to me, have far more use
Flynn's Guide To Magic in Traveller
Flynn's Guide To Alien Creation

I am working on getting the entire D20 SRD converted over to using purely Traveller rule set. These two are excellent in creating/converting the D20 SRD using the Traveller rule base. As is typical for people like me, I modified what I found in these three supplements to suit my own my conversion system. But I could not have gotten there without the insight provided by the three supplements. For me the money was well spent. YMMV

 

[Blue Ghost]

Some good anecdotes.

I recall someone here posting about how their fire team faired well against orcs, goblins, and a plethora of baddies ... until their ammo ran out :grin:

Anyone else?

 

[fiat_knox]

Sounds like standard fantasy fare. Too standard.

Nobody ever wanted to try out a fantastic setting more in line with, oh I dunno, King Monkey, or something epic that didn't have elves, orcs and goblins? A huge, sweeping story like Jason and the Argonauts, the Odyssey or the Iliad?

Something creepy and Gothic, worthy of Poe or Mary Shelley or Bram Stoker or Lovecraft's Dreamlands or Mervyn Peake - Hell, even of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol or Michael Moorcock's Elric or Robert E Howard's Conan the Barbarian? (I know, somebody else has the licence for that, but ...)

Or a journey across a low tech world, charting out a new overland Salt Road for your Patron to bypass the nefarious Bethalamel Empire and its stranglehold on oceanic trade? A road that accidentally leads to the discovery of a whole new continent that lies just across a very narrow undiscovered land bridge?

No. "Fantasy" seems to mean "adventurers, swords, crossbows, fighters, thieves, users of magic who are actually psions, clerics, rangers, elves, orcs, kobolds ..." sheesh. Disappointing.

 

[aramis]

Many people moved to traveller to get away from Fantasy, fiat_knox...

 

[fiat_knox]

Good point.

As a matter of personal history, guys, I started roleplaying with Traveller, and got introduced to fantasy RPGs with RuneQuest - not D&D. So I guess I never got indoctrinated into the D&D mindset of "fighter, paladin, cleric, wizard, ranger, bard, thief" - I was more into "barbarian, rune priest, swordsman" and a more Conanesque style of roleplaying, with a much greater sense of realism and even a larger nod towards the laws of physics.

For me, "heroic quest" means anything from chasing down the Holy Grail in La Morte D'Arthur to Cervantes' Don Quixote tilting at windmills or the long trek of the Voyage of the Dawn Treader to the world's end, or surviving the streets of Lankhmar or Ankh-Morpork. Dungeon crawling doesn't get a look in when the adventures to be had take place across city rooftops.

Whether wielding swords or laser pistols, an Adventurer's mindset of "take the Patron's job, do the job, get paid, move on" and reliance on his skills is pretty much indistinguishable from his SF cousin.

I have been trying to create a brand of fantastic setting using the Mongoose Traveller engine and running it instead of the usual burnished chrome and gleaming steel spaceships and robots setting. You'd be surprised how well the mechanics mesh when the ships are all creaking wood and snapping sail.

 

[aramis]

There have been several attempts over the years to provide a wood & wind Traveller experience... but the only fantasy setting I've run in Traveller was Tron.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Admittedly was did mean the classic medieval Europe fantasy realm, but ancient Egypt or a Roman or Greek setting work. Or something out of the Gothic 1800s works just as well. I'm just curious what you've all tried.