Other Traveller Settings

[Evo Plurion]

Has anyone had any success adapting Traveller to a completely non-Traveller setting, either home-brewed or pre-existing?

For example, the OTU was inspired by classic SF, most notably Asimov's Foundation series. Anyone run a Foundation-based Traveller campaign? There's also his Robot series. Or how about Larry Niven's Ringworld? Chaosium published a Ringworld RPG in 1984 but it's been out of print for a long time. There's also C.J. Cherryh's Earth/Union series, Hamilton's Night's Dawn series, etc.

I'm asking because I'm developing my own SF RPG setting - inspired by the aforementioned works - for which I may use the Traveller rules as a basis. Just curious about others' experiences in doing the same.

 

[ScottB]

Freelance Traveller has some articles on non-standard settings, that make a fun read if nothing else:

http://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/othroads/index.html

There's also an "In My Traveller Universe" board here that details peoples' various additions to and subtractions from the standard 3I setting. I personally prefer a non-standard setting - a smaller Imperium with small (Book 2 style) ships - just because it's easier for me as ref to wrap my head around. But I still use most of the Traveller rules and conventions, with some additions from sci fi.

 

[Evo Plurion]

D'oh!

I should have posted this in the IMTU board. Maybe a moderator will move it.

 

[Malenfant]

I've used the star system generation er, system and the ship/tech design system from FF&S in my own backgrounds quite successfully (they needed lots of modifying - the former for realism, the latter for the tech assumptions in my setting).

I didn't have any kind of Imperium at all, there was just an interstellar community that mankind entered and was a small part of.

 

[Ranger]

When we first played Traveller a long, long time ago (when there was no OTU yet) I used the Star sytem generator to do up about half a sub-sector and populated it as a colonial fringe of the FGU Space Marine background (which FGU eventually developed into Space Opera). Much fun was had by all.

I've also been working on a Firefly setting for a Traveller campaign of and on lately.

 

[aramis]

I used it for star trek with limited success.

CG was HG2, space combat was a variation of SFB and SFBM.

 

[kafka47]

Dragon Magazine had an article called the Asimov Cluster that dealt with converting Traveller into the Foundation universe.

Parallel to OTU, there was always Swycaffer's Concordant...and I finally found a way to deadlink from the AAB Proceedings that talks about the Conversion to the Traveller setting.

To find the AAB article

Step 1. Go to Google type aab
Step 2. Use command "Search with results" type: "Swycaffer"
Step 3. Find result "www.geocities.com/Area51/Matrix/1302/AABP/AABP41.PDF" and View as HTML
Step 4. Then on Page 10 enjoy the article...

Hopefully more articles from the AAB Proceedings can be made more aviable rather than trying to understand the mixed up format found on HIWG CD ROM (although that also has its treasures).

 

[Evo Plurion]

Originally posted by Ranger:
When we first played Traveller a long, long time ago (when there was no OTU yet)...

Ranger, you've made me so happy. You must be at least as old as I! My first exposure to Traveller - and to RPGs in general - was the deluxe boxed edition. I can just hear the "All In The Family" song now..."Those were the days!"

 

[Keklas Rekobah]

I've adapted Traveller (CT) to a 'Stargate' universe. The stargates are located on marginal worlds (those with no specific trade class) far from the main shipping lines. These worlds have been scarred by the Grandfather wars, and are sometimes uninhabited, sometimes inhabited by something really nasty, and usually inhabited by a culture of TEC-7 or less.

Some stargates connect to only one other stargate, some are one-way only, and some have the same defects and effects listed in the Judges Guild 'Portals of...' series.

The 'Ancients' were more than one race:
- The Droyne ancestors, including 'Grandfather'.
- The Illithids (adapted from AD&D Mind Flayers), who worship a deity called Chtulhu.
- The Trieste, a marsupial and tripartite race that resembles the Terran Koala and that fills a niche similar to the 'Watchmaker' moties from Niven's "The Mote in God's Eye".
- The Migne, who trade only in information, and who are scrupulously honest - they just don't always tell the whole truth (unless the price is right).
- The Grehs, who resemble the Asgardians from the Stargate TV series, at TEC-15+, and who practice a very strict form of the 'Prime Directive'.
- And, of course, the Gua'uld, four-jawed snake-like parasites that invade and take over the bodies of other creatures, also from the Stargate movie and series.

Standard Traveller FTL transports have replaced the Gua'uld ships, but that doesn't mean that a Gua'uld can't take over the command of a 'High Lightning' class ship and make a few improvements...

Strephon's double was assassinated, and Strephon himself led a covert campaign against the rebellion.

Virus was indeed virulent, but did not develop into vampire ships and fleets. It only caused a certain type of commonly available computer hardware to fuse its internal circuitry. Unfortunately, these chips were used in 70% of all circuitry in the Maranan Cluster (DM +5% per TEC above 7).

The Torasians (a Solomani sub-race) are getting back to the stars from almost a century of being planetbound. On one of their home sytem's outlying worlds was found a stargate.

The rest of the Maranan Cluster's history is in the making.

 

[Ran Targas]

I've run a CT campaign for years in a hybrid Star Wars / B5 / Trav universe. An evil Empire, bent on galactic domination, oblivious to the real danger from ancient evils, with a small group of independence minded individuals willing to risk all to restore the Old Republic.

I was looking for a system that was structured but still allowed for great adventuring. CT was the perfect counter to the the extreme open-endedness of even the latest SW RPG. Rocketing half way across the galaxy in an afternoon was not the feel I wanted plus it was too easy to abuse. I was looking for the players to feel trapped in a situation that they had to fight against, not one that could be easily escaped from.

 

[Shadowdancer]

I've used Traveller to run a Marine campaign in the "Aliens" universe. It worked pretty well. I had to develope a few of the weapons -- squad support MG and flamethrowers.

 

[Blue Ghost]

Originally posted by Evo Plurion:
Has anyone had any success adapting Traveller to a completely non-Traveller setting, either home-brewed or pre-existing?

For example, the OTU was inspired by classic SF, most notably Asimov's Foundation series. Anyone run a Foundation-based Traveller campaign? There's also his Robot series. Or how about Larry Niven's Ringworld? Chaosium published a Ringworld RPG in 1984 but it's been out of print for a long time. There's also C.J. Cherryh's Earth/Union series, Hamilton's Night's Dawn series, etc.

I'm asking because I'm developing my own SF RPG setting - inspired by the aforementioned works - for which I may use the Traveller rules as a basis. Just curious about others' experiences in doing the same.

Traveller as originally published was always meant to be a generic sci-fi RPG. Myself and other veteran players have always used a variety of settings for our gaming sessions. True, later on our group did stick with the "official" Traveller setting, but that was largely because the background material became richer than just a set of rules. Otherwise, at least when I GMd, I used to take our group to places outside the hard fiction of the official Traveller Uniserve.

From "Aliens" to "Soylent Green", we went everywhere.

 

[mike wightman]

I used MT to run a game based on the early Alliance years of C.J.Cherryh's Universe for a while.

Like a lot of the old-timers here MTU began with the CT rules and a homegrown background, which gradually introduced a lot of the early Imperium (small ship, repressive Imperial government) library data.