How did you get started in Traveller?
- Thread starter sabredog
- Start date
Where to start....
I have been a wargamer for the most part, chess lessons starting at age six, then not long after my father brought home Afrika Korps and the Russian Campaign by Avalon Hill, then moved on to Squad Leader. i posted a pic of all the mini-games I still have plus a bunch of boxed Avalon Hill and SPI games, started playing D&D in the late 70's, eventually sold a lot of this stuff like the first edition Deities and Demigods with the Cthulu mythos, still have a lot of my AD&D stuff, and Gamma World. In my chess club at school we would play Ogre & GEV, a bunch of the Steve Jackson games like Car Wars, Invasion of the Air Eaters, etc. .
I bought the Traveller boxed set in 1981, later on a few supplements, Snapshot, etc. First we played Twilight's Peak, it was a cool adventure, then I started GMing just some random adventures, still have Foreven and Trojan Reach sectors I drew up. Then of course with High Guard, the wargammer emerged and we played out an entire war for the Spinward Marches with Zhodani vs Imperium, sad enough to say I misplayed my fleets and the Marches were occupied. I found out you could erase the print in the Spinward Marches book, which I tried to restore later on, still I look to more current stuff for info. The occupied marches became a great background for adventuring as my players amased a huge pirate fleet of captured ships and played guerilla war vs the Zhodani ala book 4. The Imperium would raid through the Marches with fleets as well, however the campaign lasted until college work and girlfriends took up too much times. Bought Striker, liked the concept but didn't like the mechanics. Bought Azhanti High Lightning, played it some, played a good amount of Imperium as well.
I loved Traveller though, always came back to it, was accused of adding too much Traveller to my D&D campaign, such as: "this is D&D, not Traveller!" Bought Space Opera and used some of it in a homebrew, bought Star Frontiers, didn't use much of it all, used some Gamma World, gotta love the mutants.
Later marrige and life took up too much time, but I bought a Sega and eventually a playstation. Played plenty of pc games: Civ, Master of Orion, Starships Unlimited; then I found Panzer General 2, played alot of it, then started modding, making campaigns, icons and a equipment file for it, still do it some. Later In a box I found my old Traveller stuff, too bad I lost my martian metals mininatures. Now I am starting where I left off, developing the Fulani sector, planning an online campaign with what I call "Streamlined Traveller" and in my Imperium 1133 campaign, which follows some of the OTU, some not, like Strephon was assassinated but the Imperium didn't fall apart in the rebellion, a faction won and put Margaret on the throne, the virus happened, but was more of just a nusiance, etc; still much to go, but eventually...
-Robert
I have been a wargamer for the most part, chess lessons starting at age six, then not long after my father brought home Afrika Korps and the Russian Campaign by Avalon Hill, then moved on to Squad Leader. i posted a pic of all the mini-games I still have plus a bunch of boxed Avalon Hill and SPI games, started playing D&D in the late 70's, eventually sold a lot of this stuff like the first edition Deities and Demigods with the Cthulu mythos, still have a lot of my AD&D stuff, and Gamma World. In my chess club at school we would play Ogre & GEV, a bunch of the Steve Jackson games like Car Wars, Invasion of the Air Eaters, etc. .
I bought the Traveller boxed set in 1981, later on a few supplements, Snapshot, etc. First we played Twilight's Peak, it was a cool adventure, then I started GMing just some random adventures, still have Foreven and Trojan Reach sectors I drew up. Then of course with High Guard, the wargammer emerged and we played out an entire war for the Spinward Marches with Zhodani vs Imperium, sad enough to say I misplayed my fleets and the Marches were occupied. I found out you could erase the print in the Spinward Marches book, which I tried to restore later on, still I look to more current stuff for info. The occupied marches became a great background for adventuring as my players amased a huge pirate fleet of captured ships and played guerilla war vs the Zhodani ala book 4. The Imperium would raid through the Marches with fleets as well, however the campaign lasted until college work and girlfriends took up too much times. Bought Striker, liked the concept but didn't like the mechanics. Bought Azhanti High Lightning, played it some, played a good amount of Imperium as well.
I loved Traveller though, always came back to it, was accused of adding too much Traveller to my D&D campaign, such as: "this is D&D, not Traveller!" Bought Space Opera and used some of it in a homebrew, bought Star Frontiers, didn't use much of it all, used some Gamma World, gotta love the mutants.
Later marrige and life took up too much time, but I bought a Sega and eventually a playstation. Played plenty of pc games: Civ, Master of Orion, Starships Unlimited; then I found Panzer General 2, played alot of it, then started modding, making campaigns, icons and a equipment file for it, still do it some. Later In a box I found my old Traveller stuff, too bad I lost my martian metals mininatures. Now I am starting where I left off, developing the Fulani sector, planning an online campaign with what I call "Streamlined Traveller" and in my Imperium 1133 campaign, which follows some of the OTU, some not, like Strephon was assassinated but the Imperium didn't fall apart in the rebellion, a faction won and put Margaret on the throne, the virus happened, but was more of just a nusiance, etc; still much to go, but eventually...
-Robert
kaijupanda
SOC-9
It was somewhere in the late '90's and early '00's that I discovered Traveller. I do not remember the store, but I remember seeing only the one book on the shelf and the only reason it caught my eye was because of it's unusual shape. It was this malignant looking thing that seemed out-of-place. The book was an odd landscape shape being very short and extremely long... and very floppy. It wasn't very pleasant to hold and navigate through. However, it boasting to be a a collected reprint of the classic books seemed like a good deal. I knew nothing of traveller, and the only science fiction games I were involved with were either Rifts, D6 Star Wars, or Cyberpunk.
Flipping through the books, I found there to be something... appealing with presentation. Not so much the book shape, but all those tables for smart sounding things. I remember glancing at ship building and stuff about worlds and I felt I could do a lot with that, if I could figure out how.
I walked out with that book, returned home, and began reading it. I made several characters to figure out how it works, then tried out creating a ship which greatly intimidated me the first few times. There was so much neat stuff in that one book, I couldn't even settle on a start for a campaign.
Though, sadly, my book got sold back to a used bookstore for emergency cash before I could actually get some actual playtime with it. I kept telling myself I'd get it back, but eventually I forgot as other games and hobbies distracted me. It wasn't until about a year ago that it found me again. I purchased an iPad for myself and thought it be a great tool for my gaming (which is has been). I went to DriveThruRPG and started browsing their library for games to buy. That's when I stumbled upon Flynn's Guide to Magic, which was for Traveller, and that part of my brain that never reminded to pick up Traveller again finally woke up and said "Hey! Buy it!"
So, that's how I remembered and discovered Mongoose was putting out a new version, so that's the version I went with. I spent three days reading the core book and threw a campaign together. It ran for a year ending a few months ago. Now, I have physical copies to go with my electronic ones, and will be starting my second traveller campaign this thursday. The lot of us will be meeting at our favourite restaurant to roll up characters. Another day, each of them will be creating a subsector.
For my first game, I just dove right in. I learned character creation by making some NPCs, shipbuilding, by making two ships and calling them prototypes in the event they completely tanked in game, and all of us just figured things out as we went. We didn't have too many problems. We kept things very simple and slowly sank our teeth deeper and deeper.
As for dealing with the universe, I'm mostly making things up as I go. I don't do well keeping track of setting stuffs unless it's my own creation, so I just sort of go with the flavour given for things and my own inspiration for fleshing out my world. I do eventually plan to buy the Third Imperium book for further inspiration. With only one completed campaign under my belt, I'm very much still hashing things out.
Flipping through the books, I found there to be something... appealing with presentation. Not so much the book shape, but all those tables for smart sounding things. I remember glancing at ship building and stuff about worlds and I felt I could do a lot with that, if I could figure out how.
I walked out with that book, returned home, and began reading it. I made several characters to figure out how it works, then tried out creating a ship which greatly intimidated me the first few times. There was so much neat stuff in that one book, I couldn't even settle on a start for a campaign.
Though, sadly, my book got sold back to a used bookstore for emergency cash before I could actually get some actual playtime with it. I kept telling myself I'd get it back, but eventually I forgot as other games and hobbies distracted me. It wasn't until about a year ago that it found me again. I purchased an iPad for myself and thought it be a great tool for my gaming (which is has been). I went to DriveThruRPG and started browsing their library for games to buy. That's when I stumbled upon Flynn's Guide to Magic, which was for Traveller, and that part of my brain that never reminded to pick up Traveller again finally woke up and said "Hey! Buy it!"
So, that's how I remembered and discovered Mongoose was putting out a new version, so that's the version I went with. I spent three days reading the core book and threw a campaign together. It ran for a year ending a few months ago. Now, I have physical copies to go with my electronic ones, and will be starting my second traveller campaign this thursday. The lot of us will be meeting at our favourite restaurant to roll up characters. Another day, each of them will be creating a subsector.
For my first game, I just dove right in. I learned character creation by making some NPCs, shipbuilding, by making two ships and calling them prototypes in the event they completely tanked in game, and all of us just figured things out as we went. We didn't have too many problems. We kept things very simple and slowly sank our teeth deeper and deeper.
As for dealing with the universe, I'm mostly making things up as I go. I don't do well keeping track of setting stuffs unless it's my own creation, so I just sort of go with the flavour given for things and my own inspiration for fleshing out my world. I do eventually plan to buy the Third Imperium book for further inspiration. With only one completed campaign under my belt, I'm very much still hashing things out.
The 'not so little black book'
The last post caught my attention. Many of us grognards and completists born way too long ago remember fondly the LBBs. But the key word there was little. I remember picking them up when SFB was the other rage. Traveller was the sci-fi game where I grew up and I happened into it in 1981.
But anyone coming to it through the reprints (as great a value as they are) will be remembering the 'big awkward floppy black books' (BAFBB). That's not as easy off the tongue. Big-arsed black books (BABBs) might do okay.
I'm glad to see the game is still pulling in people. T20 and the MgT version are pretty good.
The thing that's amazing the longer you spend in the game is the depth of history there is to it, the variety of development, and the feeling that this *is* the game for poli-sci majors and history majors (and maybe engineering and economics majors at times). Understanding the vehicle construction, pocket empire, and various military strategic rules and studying the ebb and flow of historical events pretty much gives you a macrocosm of challenges of running a country and explaining why our real history is so windy and Byzantine.
Not many games can deliver that many good lessons about how the world works and what sorts of constraints apply.
And look at me, 30 years this game and I'm starting my first TNE campaign after being an inveterate MT player. There's always something new to explore.
The last post caught my attention. Many of us grognards and completists born way too long ago remember fondly the LBBs. But the key word there was little. I remember picking them up when SFB was the other rage. Traveller was the sci-fi game where I grew up and I happened into it in 1981.
But anyone coming to it through the reprints (as great a value as they are) will be remembering the 'big awkward floppy black books' (BAFBB). That's not as easy off the tongue. Big-arsed black books (BABBs) might do okay.
I'm glad to see the game is still pulling in people. T20 and the MgT version are pretty good.
The thing that's amazing the longer you spend in the game is the depth of history there is to it, the variety of development, and the feeling that this *is* the game for poli-sci majors and history majors (and maybe engineering and economics majors at times). Understanding the vehicle construction, pocket empire, and various military strategic rules and studying the ebb and flow of historical events pretty much gives you a macrocosm of challenges of running a country and explaining why our real history is so windy and Byzantine.
Not many games can deliver that many good lessons about how the world works and what sorts of constraints apply.
And look at me, 30 years this game and I'm starting my first TNE campaign after being an inveterate MT player. There's always something new to explore.
It was the summer of '78 and I was at a college for an Upward Bound stay. Found a group at Virginia's VPI. One week they played D&D and my character died. One week they played Traveller and I have no idea what happened but they talked about building a starship and talked about UPPs for planets and going from system to system. Saw Star Wars too, I think. So I spent a good bit of time mentally making planets to travel between, just like Han Solo. Being a Jedi is okay but being able to move from one planet to another is great for a kid in hicksville.
Leitz
Leitz
saundby
SOC-14 1K
Hemdian: I was right there with you in my sense of decor. NASA photos, self-drawn spacecraft, made up planets and star systems graced my walls alongside photocopies from the Star Trek Technical Manual and odd posters bought at SF cons.
How I started with Traveller:
I started wargaming with an older crowd when I was about 10. There was one other guy, about 16, that I looked up to in the group, as well as the friendly guy who got me into the group originally. We'd just moved from the Midwest to California, were staying with a friend of my mother's in an adults-only apartment complex, and I was bored out of my skull. This guy took pity on me. He introduced me to:
Tolkien
War gaming, and
Op-Amps.
All three were pivotal for me.
In late '73 I got to talking with another student at school about war games. He had a locker near mine, and didn't treat me as a total whack-job for having a patch of the starship Enterprise on my jacket. He'd played Chainmail, it turned out, and his cousin was coming out to visit that Christmas with a new game being written by Gary Gygax that was based on Chainmail.
It was, of course, D&D. Some time before the first box sets were printed. I missed the game with his cousin, but I managed to make it when they ran another game after the cousin had returned home. They had photocopies of the photocopies of the hand-written notes from GG.
We enjoyed it a lot, and we tried some SF adventures, too, but they always gravitated back into medieval fantasy.
In 1976 I jumped on Metamorphosis Alpha as soon as it came out. Finally, an SF RPG, I thought. Well, sort of. It was more like SF in a can. Leaving out the bits that aren't enough like D&D to make it easy to write. I ran a sort of Starlost adventure as a back-up to our regular D&D game, but it never got all that popular. I picked up a copy of Triplanetary, and that helped me get a bit of an SF fix even though I could really only talk people into playing the basic race game, combat was too involved for all but one of my friends to want to take time to learn it.
The guy at the militaria shop where I got my games (Centurion Militaria, Walnut Creek) knew I was a sucker for anything with space ships in it. One day he let me know he had a new game, that he'd thought of me when he ordered it. That was Traveller. I bought it, took it home, and it was exactly what I'd been hoping for.
There were systems for creating star ships, star systems, planets...oh yeah, it had characters, too. It was about three weeks before I even felt the need to have a player. I built subsectors and planets and explored them in my mind. I wrote stories about the places and people in them, and the progress of exploration across the subsector. I played my own game of mapping out the subsector with ships I built, exploring as I rolled up the worlds.
Then I tried out rolling up various characters as I played solo. These became my first NPCs, and were included in the stories I wrote.
One day I realized I had a campaign. About that time our regular DM wanted a break, so I offered to run Traveller. The group grudgingly accepted. They hadn't enjoyed MA much, it ended with them purposely trying to destroy the spacecraft to kill all their characters while pretending they didn't realize that would happen. But I told them how different this game was and they agreed to a single game trial, if it didn't work out we'd play Risk or something for a few weeks while our DM caught his breath.
My first experience with real players in chargen was difficult. When by myself, I'd wanted to use the system to explore and create characters. There was no wonder in the system at all for them. First they complained it was weird because it wasn't D&D. Then they complained because I was going with RAW and wasn't letting them "spice up" the characters as they pleased or do goofy things. And this was all before they even got to careers.
Careers, however, interested them. One player cottoned on to the fact that they wouldn't be starting as unskilled kids in the game. "It's like starting at Level 8!" he said. After that everyone else got into it. A couple of characters died. Fortunately this group was used to high mortality, they grabbed new sheets of paper and started over. Other characters died as the players tried to max out their characters "I want an Admiral!"
Eventually I tried to drag them away from chargen, though time was running short for the evening. We got in the final rounds of retirement and mustering out, then just had time to get them established on their starting world with a commission to go out and find a missing exploration craft (one of my solo game ships that came to a bad end on a bad world.)
So they were ready for more on our next game night. Risk was forgotten. Unfortunately, my reffing skills weren't completely up to the promise of that first night. We had a pretty good game, and we continued to play Trav as a fill-in game, but my sense of when to let information out wasn't very good and I ruined some of the mysteries in that first game. Plus I still got flustered easily when playing, wanting to look up how to do tasks and combat in mid game, since I didn't use the rules for these when I was playing solo, I just made it up as I went along and wasn't bright enough to do that with the players, too, until I got better at knowing the rules.
So that's how I got started. Looking up task resolution and trying to make sense of it when it wasn't a hard and fast system in a game where so much else was hard and fast, while eight guys yelled things at me faster than I could keep track of them all.
How I started with Traveller:
I started wargaming with an older crowd when I was about 10. There was one other guy, about 16, that I looked up to in the group, as well as the friendly guy who got me into the group originally. We'd just moved from the Midwest to California, were staying with a friend of my mother's in an adults-only apartment complex, and I was bored out of my skull. This guy took pity on me. He introduced me to:
Tolkien
War gaming, and
Op-Amps.
All three were pivotal for me.
In late '73 I got to talking with another student at school about war games. He had a locker near mine, and didn't treat me as a total whack-job for having a patch of the starship Enterprise on my jacket. He'd played Chainmail, it turned out, and his cousin was coming out to visit that Christmas with a new game being written by Gary Gygax that was based on Chainmail.
It was, of course, D&D. Some time before the first box sets were printed. I missed the game with his cousin, but I managed to make it when they ran another game after the cousin had returned home. They had photocopies of the photocopies of the hand-written notes from GG.
We enjoyed it a lot, and we tried some SF adventures, too, but they always gravitated back into medieval fantasy.
In 1976 I jumped on Metamorphosis Alpha as soon as it came out. Finally, an SF RPG, I thought. Well, sort of. It was more like SF in a can. Leaving out the bits that aren't enough like D&D to make it easy to write. I ran a sort of Starlost adventure as a back-up to our regular D&D game, but it never got all that popular. I picked up a copy of Triplanetary, and that helped me get a bit of an SF fix even though I could really only talk people into playing the basic race game, combat was too involved for all but one of my friends to want to take time to learn it.
The guy at the militaria shop where I got my games (Centurion Militaria, Walnut Creek) knew I was a sucker for anything with space ships in it. One day he let me know he had a new game, that he'd thought of me when he ordered it. That was Traveller. I bought it, took it home, and it was exactly what I'd been hoping for.
There were systems for creating star ships, star systems, planets...oh yeah, it had characters, too. It was about three weeks before I even felt the need to have a player. I built subsectors and planets and explored them in my mind. I wrote stories about the places and people in them, and the progress of exploration across the subsector. I played my own game of mapping out the subsector with ships I built, exploring as I rolled up the worlds.
Then I tried out rolling up various characters as I played solo. These became my first NPCs, and were included in the stories I wrote.
One day I realized I had a campaign. About that time our regular DM wanted a break, so I offered to run Traveller. The group grudgingly accepted. They hadn't enjoyed MA much, it ended with them purposely trying to destroy the spacecraft to kill all their characters while pretending they didn't realize that would happen. But I told them how different this game was and they agreed to a single game trial, if it didn't work out we'd play Risk or something for a few weeks while our DM caught his breath.
My first experience with real players in chargen was difficult. When by myself, I'd wanted to use the system to explore and create characters. There was no wonder in the system at all for them. First they complained it was weird because it wasn't D&D. Then they complained because I was going with RAW and wasn't letting them "spice up" the characters as they pleased or do goofy things. And this was all before they even got to careers.
Careers, however, interested them. One player cottoned on to the fact that they wouldn't be starting as unskilled kids in the game. "It's like starting at Level 8!" he said. After that everyone else got into it. A couple of characters died. Fortunately this group was used to high mortality, they grabbed new sheets of paper and started over. Other characters died as the players tried to max out their characters "I want an Admiral!"
Eventually I tried to drag them away from chargen, though time was running short for the evening. We got in the final rounds of retirement and mustering out, then just had time to get them established on their starting world with a commission to go out and find a missing exploration craft (one of my solo game ships that came to a bad end on a bad world.)
So they were ready for more on our next game night. Risk was forgotten. Unfortunately, my reffing skills weren't completely up to the promise of that first night. We had a pretty good game, and we continued to play Trav as a fill-in game, but my sense of when to let information out wasn't very good and I ruined some of the mysteries in that first game. Plus I still got flustered easily when playing, wanting to look up how to do tasks and combat in mid game, since I didn't use the rules for these when I was playing solo, I just made it up as I went along and wasn't bright enough to do that with the players, too, until I got better at knowing the rules.
So that's how I got started. Looking up task resolution and trying to make sense of it when it wasn't a hard and fast system in a game where so much else was hard and fast, while eight guys yelled things at me faster than I could keep track of them all.
Last edited:
oldgamergeek
SOC-9
OOH the memories, I walked into the local hobby shop and the game guy told Me about this great new sci fi game called Traveller then He let me sit in on a game and I was hooked from that day on. I have played every version of Traveller since there has been Traveller even the D20 stuff and proud of it.
Icosahedron
SOC-14 1K
Somewhere back in the mists of time I took an interest in military history. I can’t remember why or when, but I recall wondering ‘what if Alexander the Great hadn’t died? What if Mark Anthony had defeated Octavian? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo?’ I was destined to discover wargames.
Apollo 8 saw lots of space stuff appear in my room, followed by Apollo 10...
When I got to High School a new friend showed me how to re-use my toy soldiers in an ‘adult’ way using dice, and we picked through the books of Featherstone and Grant. Then I joined a wargame group.
I got tired of the elitism/canonistas - “you can’t paint them like that, the 65th Hussars had gold buttons, not silver,” so when someone introduced me to Tolkien and I discovered you could get Middle-Earth wargame figures, I got hooked on this path - though there were canonistas here too.
Armies got more and more expensive - particularly if you were interested in several different periods - and at college I was introduced to D&D, where you only needed a handful of figures (but eventually more and more books...)
Then a Star Wars fan in our D&D group brought in a set of Little Black Books and handed them to me, as the resident science geek, for translation. I was impressed and fascinated by the 'realism’ and gearheadedness of the books - if humanity was ever going to explore the stars, this is how it would be done - but also in the adaptability - you could play Star Wars with it too, and you could build ships from scratch - mental Airfix - and create armies and navies - back to my roots - it was limitless, yet contained in three books - finite but unbounded, like the universe itself...
I got my own set the next weekend and we began to play D&D and Traveller games alternately until the group disintegrated with the usual girls, jobs, etc.
I couldn’t completely let go of Traveller, though, and off and on for the next twenty years I played solo, building ships, worlds, creating a universe. I was unaware of LBB 7 and 8, the OTU, MT, TNE, etc, until I got one of these computer things for work, learned about the internet and discovered that there was a Traveller community out there. The embers were rekindled and the rest you know.
Apollo 8 saw lots of space stuff appear in my room, followed by Apollo 10...
When I got to High School a new friend showed me how to re-use my toy soldiers in an ‘adult’ way using dice, and we picked through the books of Featherstone and Grant. Then I joined a wargame group.
I got tired of the elitism/canonistas - “you can’t paint them like that, the 65th Hussars had gold buttons, not silver,” so when someone introduced me to Tolkien and I discovered you could get Middle-Earth wargame figures, I got hooked on this path - though there were canonistas here too.
Armies got more and more expensive - particularly if you were interested in several different periods - and at college I was introduced to D&D, where you only needed a handful of figures (but eventually more and more books...)
Then a Star Wars fan in our D&D group brought in a set of Little Black Books and handed them to me, as the resident science geek, for translation. I was impressed and fascinated by the 'realism’ and gearheadedness of the books - if humanity was ever going to explore the stars, this is how it would be done - but also in the adaptability - you could play Star Wars with it too, and you could build ships from scratch - mental Airfix - and create armies and navies - back to my roots - it was limitless, yet contained in three books - finite but unbounded, like the universe itself...
I got my own set the next weekend and we began to play D&D and Traveller games alternately until the group disintegrated with the usual girls, jobs, etc.
I couldn’t completely let go of Traveller, though, and off and on for the next twenty years I played solo, building ships, worlds, creating a universe. I was unaware of LBB 7 and 8, the OTU, MT, TNE, etc, until I got one of these computer things for work, learned about the internet and discovered that there was a Traveller community out there. The embers were rekindled and the rest you know.
1981 ish....
I had joined the SF society at University, a friend of mine (who I still keep in touch with) ran a Traveller scenario and pulled out the LBBs...and the rest, as they say...
Not sure if it's already been said but those were the days when we were still reading Asimov, Clarke, Niven, Philp Jose Farmer etc. as 'front line' SF and Cyberpunk was the 'new' SF on the block. Traveller just slotted into classic SF like a glove.
It may seem like old hat now, but the graphic design of the LBBs was just phenomenal for the time. The black covers and the red text, the sector maps and the size of the books... it was just so cool, modern and sleek.
I think Traveller was definitely something 'of its time', (late 70s / early 80s) and if you caught the wave, it just became part of your make up. I'm just so glad I was at the right place at the right time.
I remember back then thinking how complex and varied the character generation system was, lol! But then for the time, it was.
I had joined the SF society at University, a friend of mine (who I still keep in touch with) ran a Traveller scenario and pulled out the LBBs...and the rest, as they say...
Not sure if it's already been said but those were the days when we were still reading Asimov, Clarke, Niven, Philp Jose Farmer etc. as 'front line' SF and Cyberpunk was the 'new' SF on the block. Traveller just slotted into classic SF like a glove.
It may seem like old hat now, but the graphic design of the LBBs was just phenomenal for the time. The black covers and the red text, the sector maps and the size of the books... it was just so cool, modern and sleek.
I think Traveller was definitely something 'of its time', (late 70s / early 80s) and if you caught the wave, it just became part of your make up. I'm just so glad I was at the right place at the right time.
I remember back then thinking how complex and varied the character generation system was, lol! But then for the time, it was.
l_c_jackson
SOC-9
1977 introduction to RPGs and CT
In 1977 I came from a wargaming background ("Strategy & Tactics" magazine) and in my first year at university encountered first the original D&D then the classic Traveller Little Black Books.
What a year that was! Our first D&D DM was the William King (of Trollslayer fame and Manticore Games). He dropped out of uni to write, but somehow I kept on going.
One of my other friends at Edinburgh university started running classic Traveller, but we had no background materials. I was (and am) mad about Science Fiction, so I loved it and bought my own copies. I had to create my own unique background (based on Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy and the SF novels of Andre Norton and Ursula le Guin), which I have maintained to this day. Goodness, over 30 years of Traveller!
In 1977 I came from a wargaming background ("Strategy & Tactics" magazine) and in my first year at university encountered first the original D&D then the classic Traveller Little Black Books.
What a year that was! Our first D&D DM was the William King (of Trollslayer fame and Manticore Games). He dropped out of uni to write, but somehow I kept on going.
One of my other friends at Edinburgh university started running classic Traveller, but we had no background materials. I was (and am) mad about Science Fiction, so I loved it and bought my own copies. I had to create my own unique background (based on Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy and the SF novels of Andre Norton and Ursula le Guin), which I have maintained to this day. Goodness, over 30 years of Traveller!
Way back in the eons of time (1979) while I was at tech school at Sheppard AFB I came upon this Quaint little black box with a starship on the cover at the hobby store. As a Star Trek fan fron the start I thought it would be a good diversion from from training and war gamming, so I forced the gamming group to play the game (RPGs were new then) and never stopped.
LeperColony
Traveller Card Game Dev Team
My dad played Traveller in the 70's, but eventually his gaming group fell apart due to moves, attrition, whatever. In the early nineties, when I was in jr. high, he started running a game for my friends and I. That was CT.
Back at Kent State we played a LOT of D&D, and while we had great fun with that Traveller gave us the break we needed when we burned out with fantasy. Traveller allowed our minds to shift over to something fresh, and the radically different setting and mechanics gave us different experiences.
To this day I remain a fan of both, and hope to introduce a new group to the far future soon.
To this day I remain a fan of both, and hope to introduce a new group to the far future soon.
Gray Pennell
SOC-12
My older brother who introduced me to role playing naturally introduced me to Traveller when our mother said no more fantasy games. I still played both. I am back in to Traveller because my brother wished a SF game as a break from a fantasy game.
Enoki
SOC-14 1K
I started out board wargaming in the late 60's. Then progressed to miniature wargaming which is my main interest in this area. Traveller, unlike D&D (derisively called Faries and Lizards by most of the miniature wargaming bunch I know.. There was usually a sign at conventions at the entrance to the miniatures wargaming area "Participants must bathe before entering!" 
o: ) interested me because it was at least reasonably based on science and engineering principles and played more like a role-playing wargame than simply an adventure game where the rules got made up as you went along.
Given a good GM and players who looked at it from both a wargaming and reasonable science / engineering POV I enjoyed it. So, I retained an interest in Traveller. In fact, Striker formed the basis for a WW 2 miniatures wargame I developed later. It did grow far beyond what Striker had in it in terms of play but the conceptual basis came from that game.
o: ) interested me because it was at least reasonably based on science and engineering principles and played more like a role-playing wargame than simply an adventure game where the rules got made up as you went along.Given a good GM and players who looked at it from both a wargaming and reasonable science / engineering POV I enjoyed it. So, I retained an interest in Traveller. In fact, Striker formed the basis for a WW 2 miniatures wargame I developed later. It did grow far beyond what Striker had in it in terms of play but the conceptual basis came from that game.
Growing up as a Military man's dependent, (He was a air rescue pilot), I found myself drawing war game pictures with stick figure troops and aircraft while in the 5th grade, saw the Apollo rockets and watched live as the First Man took the giant leap for mankind. Had a bunch of SPI board games and such through high school, tending towards the big games like War in Europe by SPI. Attended 2 years of college, and met Steven V. Cole there at Texas Tech, living in the dorm room just down the hall, I played Panzerblitz on his hand drawn map of about 4 ft by 5 ft, saw his Starfire ideas. I was unimpressed by his ship designs, with them just being a string of letters but with no details under the letters a L was a laser and every laser was exactly the same. In 1975 I joined the USAF myself and was introduced to D&D towards the end of that year, I had seen several Game Designer's workshop board games and had their catalog sent to me from time to time. I found their Traveller offering in 1977 and having been introduced previously to D&D role-playing, bought it, and subscribed to JTAS getting issue #4 as my first one. Nearly all of my CT was ordered mail order direct from GDW, shipping to me overseas to Germany. To this day I still tend to observe the Varger tradition of the three day wait before opening up my new prize Traveller supplement or rule book. I found that I'm not great shakes as a DM or GM not enough time to devote to the game. So I gearhead to my heart's desire.
During the great gaming boom of the late 70s to early 80s, when such classics as Starfleet Wars, the Star Trek Battle Manual, SFB, Task Force Games and Avalon Hills various tactical offerings, as well as SPIs mega hits had hit the shelves.
My good friend and sailing partner bought me Star Smuggler and Trailblazer for my birthday, and I bought "The Traveller Book" hard bound with blue dust jacket and cover art by Bill Keith. The rest is history.
OGRE, G.E.V., Car Wars, Tunnels and Trolls, all a hell of a lot more fun than Monopoly or LIFE. Not as fun as sailing nor acing a chem lab, or even writing, but great stuff on a summer weekend night in the atrium with nothing but the stars overhead. Boy that was fun as anything. A coke, some dice, some chips, play pieces and paper with some good 80s tunes or sci-fi score playing in the background. Lazy summer weekends with a bud and sharing your imaginations. We even got his sister to play a few times, and she was into glitter, boys, teeny-bopper music ... girl stuff.
I had been playing D&D and AD&D with some friends in middle school. I think there was as ad in Dragon Magazine for the LBBs. Having always been more of a scifi fan than a fantasy fan, I *had* to have those books. I saved up allowance money for who-knows-how-long (GDW had to compete with Estes and Revell for my allowance money) and finally got the books.
"Tween-age" flavored Traveller is full of space pirates, custom star ships and dangerous alien monsters, in case you wondered. And everyone walks around with combat armor and FGMPs all the time. Well except for my character, who insisted on using a flak jacket and revolver.
"Tween-age" flavored Traveller is full of space pirates, custom star ships and dangerous alien monsters, in case you wondered. And everyone walks around with combat armor and FGMPs all the time. Well except for my character, who insisted on using a flak jacket and revolver.
