Think way back - how did you discover Traveller?

[Spenser TR]

I've left and come back to the game as a referee and fan many, many times since I first discovered it. I'm wondering how we all first came to the game... if you remember that far back.

My very first exposure was Dragon Magazine, through the ads. My first -real- introduction to the setting was as a kid, opening up Dragon #87 and finding an article written by MM called "Luna: a Traveller's Guide." I loved it. So much well-considered, fascinating detail about a place that couldn't be all that important in the "grand scheme" of things. That's one of the things I loved about the article, and by extension the setting. That article was a kind of keyhole through which I viewed hints and blurs of a much larger, compelling thing.

My first time as a player - later, in a MegaTraveller game when I was an undergrad at Illinois State, run by a buddy who did typing for GDW and who was paid in copies of product. Heh.

My first Traveller as a referee - GURPS, using Behind the Claw as inspiration for a campaign of adventure in SM and TR for retired Marines. Oorah.

How about you? Do you remember how you first discovered Traveller, or when you were first hooked? I'm wondering about the diversity of answers, and I've always been fascinated about how people come to RPGs.

 

[GypsyComet]

I arrived at RPGs via The Fantasy Trip, Tunnels and Trolls, and shortly thereafter, Traveller 77. D&D was fourth, or later, after Runequest. Most of my early steps came courtesy of reviews and articles in Space Gamer, starting about halfway through its initial Metagaming run.

 

[Vargas]

I remember seeing a poster that looked like the original black box cover in a game store. My first time playing it was in high school as a Supp 4 belter.

 

[robject]

I encountered the LBBs around 1979 at a small store in Phoenix near the corner of Bethany and 16th Street named "Sci Fi Emporium". However, I didn't buy or play the game until 1994, when a friend at work recommended it to me. I was hooked on the tools for creating my own starships and worlds, and the creativity in its processes.

I think I like Traveller because of its toolset.

 

[creativehum]

I'm pretty sure I have the years right: It might have been 1977, or it might have been 1978.

The father of a kid down the street comes back from DipCon. (He would be the US champion in '79). He arrives with a new copy of the Holmes Dungeon & Dragons. "This game came out, and I think you guy might like it." His son Tom and I open it up. Tom is not as amazed as I am, and eventually the game migrates to my home where I prep a dungeon. Tom really never plays after the first couple of sessions. But I'm hooked.

We realize one can by miniatures. (I don't really know how this happened. Was there some sort of telepathic-osmosis that occurs when RPGs are involved? One simply knows There is more out there?)

I want to go get my own copy. So my father does some digging for his over-creative son and discovers that in Manhattan, where he works, there's a store called The Compleat Strategist. I think he might have bought something for me there first. But eventually I go one afternoon.

I am blown away. It's a small shop, but crammed floor to ceiling with war games. Miniatures. Magazines. Like, there's this whole hobby there. Eventually I would buy Diplomacy, Imperium, Squad Leader, Tobruk, Jutland, 1776 and many other games. I pick up some fantasy miniatures to use for my D&D game.

But on one of these early visits I see this black box with stark red lettering on it. I pick it up and read the cover:

This is the Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone ...
Mayday, Mayday ...
we are under attack ...
main drive is gone ...
turret number one not responding ...
Mayday ...
losing cabin pressure fast ...
calling anyone ...
please help ...
This is Free Trader Beowulf ...
Mayday ...

And, you know, chills. And all I can think is... I want this.

Like, I wanted to create that scenario, tense and despite and in space, with my friends around a table so badly.

So I bought it. I bring it home. And I'm blown away again. Because the character creation, the generating subsystems and planets. It is crazy big and it is crazy fun.

As an early teen the game flopped for me. I wasn't sure what to do with all the economics, the psionics, the vector-based space combat. I didn't know how to translate it in a form to my friends who had not poured though the books to make it work. Also, I can see now my friends and I never had the same reference points of SF that would have allowed a shared setting to grow. (Star Wars was on everyone's mind, and it would be TV and Films, not the books of decades past, that seized imaginations and informed people of what SF was or could be.)

Also, I was on my own when it came to refereeing. I had no one to teach me what these crazy RPGs were about, and I wasn't growing my play out of the war-game hobby. I started at ground-zero with Holmes D&D on my own and cobbled together a patchwork of understand about what to do with the games on my own from trips to the Compleat Strategist. (My AD&D high school game ran for three years, but there was a clear focus there -- there's a dungeon. Traveller was wide open (wonderfully so) and I didn't know I need to be the one to choose a focus for play.)

But I've never lost that initial impulse that got me to pick up that black box... or the fascination with the game as an excellent toolkit for construction settings and situations.

Which is perhaps why I write about it so obsessively. And why, 40 years later, I'm prepping a convention game for this coming weekend.

 

[Spenser TR]

I love these writeups, seeing how this game and other RPGs came into our lives is pretty gratifying, and makes me think about the things that were important, the things that just happened by chance, and everything else that led to the whole lifetime-love thing.

As to roleplaying games in general, I was in Scouts as a kid and on one my my first campouts I saw the older Scouts playing some mysterious game on the tent floor with the most oddly-shaped dice I'd ever seen. just that detail was compelling, but the fact they were doing much of it from their heads without anything in front of them also made quite an impression.

My family was not very affluent when I was growing up, but mom did manage to get me a copy of the DnD basic boxed set, and brothers and sisters I was hooked. On DnD, and the RPG idea in general. I picked up a few of the AD&D books at a local garage sale very soon thereafter, and discovered Traveller soon after that as I've described.

There was a used bookstore near our house, a little ramshackle thing next to the train station. The woman who seemed to live behind the counter was 120 years old if she was a day, chain smoked, and encouraged my hanging out and reading the gaming, fantasy, and scifi books as long as I bought something every now and then. They sold minis, Dragon, and the other AD&D rulebooks, and that place was my second home for a big chunk of my childhood. I'm not sure how important it was to my lifelong love of gaming to have a space like that, but it definitely influenced me.

 

[MThompson016]

In my case it was from my dad pulling out his old Deluxe Traveller Boxed set, and books 4,5, and 6 when I was 13-14. I rolled a few characters (an Admiral, a Scout), and started looking into the speculative trade system.

I put it on hold for a few years, picked up GURPS Traveller, and since then I've been looking at it on and off.

 

[flykiller]

'81. picked up the box.

"This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone...Mayday, Mayday...we are under attack...main drive is gone...turret number one not responding...Mayday...losing cabin pressure fast...calling anyone...please help...This is Free Trader Beowulf...Mayday...."

yeah, I'll look it over.

whoa.

heh. still have the box ....

 

[robject]

The father of a kid down the street comes back from DipCon. (He would be the US champion in '79). He arrives with a new copy of the Holmes Dungeon & Dragons. ...

We realize one can buy miniatures. (I don't really know how this happened. Was there some sort of telepathic-osmosis that occurs when RPGs are involved? One simply knows There is more out there?)

I knew this, too, so I figure it was telepathic osmosis. Well, really, the stores put the miniatures next to the RPG stuff. I knew there were Science Fiction miniatures BEFORE I knew about D&D minis.

... The Compleat Strategist. ...

I've heard of this store.

But on one of these early visits I see this black box with stark red lettering on it. I pick it up and read the cover:
[...]
And, you know, chills. And all I can think is... I want this.

I envy you. I missed out for YEARS.

So I bought it. I bring it home. And I'm blown away again. Because the character creation, the generating subsystems and planets. It is crazy big and it is crazy fun.

++wonderful.

 

[robject]

'81. picked up the box.

Envy!

 

[mike wightman]

1980, a friend of mine bought LBB4 Mercenary for the equipment section to help flesh out a sci-fi dungeon crawl game of his loosely based on D&D.

He told the shop where he had bought it and a couple of weeks later I went in and found all these strange games.

But I was after the little black book with the red logo...

Then I found the supplements and the very first Traveller item I bought was Traders and Gunboats due to my fascination with spaceships. High Guard was my second.

It was a month or so later when another friend bought the first boxed set of LBB1-3 and we started playing it by the rules as written, I finally got my first LBB box set not long after.

 

[DickNervous]

It was the early 80's, probably around 1981-1982 (maybe 1983.. not sure) and I lived in Franklin Square, NY (on Long Island). I would have been around 13 or so, in Jr. High (aka Middle School) and only mode of transport was my bike. I don't remember if my mom even drove at the time, and dad worked in NYC, so getting rides was difficult (especially since I had 3 younger siblings).

My friends and I were already playing D&D (I don't recall how that started, probably someone's older brother....) and we had just finished some adventure, probably the Giants series or something, and wanted something new. We had heard of a gaming store in Mineola called "Waterloo" (if I recall correctly), which was about 5 miles away. So being the brave (stupid) kids we were that didn't realize just how far 5 miles was by bike, we decided to go there. After consulting someone's dad's road atlas to figure out how to get there (several of us were Boy Scouts so we knew how to read maps!) we plotted our expedition.

So one summer day we made the trek to the store and it was like walking into another world. There were games and miniatures and just all kinds of awesome stuff we had never imagined existed. Unfortunately for us I think we had maybe $10 between us, so all we could do was get the latest D&D adventure (probably Ghost Tower of Inverness or something like that), but we soon became regulars at the store and we all started picking out games we wanted to try, as soon as we could save up the money to buy them. My eye was caught by this black box with red lettering on it about some "Free Trader Beowulf" that was in trouble. Since my birthday is in October, I asked for as it my birthday gift. My friends and I experimented with a lot of games between then and 1986 when we graduated high school (Champions and Top Secret are two that I recall), but we always seemed to come back to D&D and Traveller. Then we all went to different colleges.

I played some Traveller in college, but it was "old" by then and Megatraveller had not come out yet, so people weren't to keen on it. So I got involved in Twilight 2000, Car Wars, and was exposed to more board games than I can hope to remember. Between that, studying, and drinking there wasn't time for Traveller. Fast forward to about 2-3 years ago and my son (12 at the time) gets into Magic which gets me into learning it and finding a new FLGS that I become a regular at, get back into role-playing games in general, and decide that I want to play Traveller again.

 

[agorski]

'81. picked up the box.

Me, too. I've always been a huge SF fan and had to have it.

The first time I played was at a NanCon in Houston around '85.

 

[ffilz]

I don't remember exactly when I got Traveller. I do remember the first time playing. We rolled up some characters, a sub-sector, and played the trade game with a merchant. That game wasn't very satisfying.

Fast forward some time, and I had made up some SF rules based on RuneQuest, marked some stars on a piece of paper (no hexes), adapted Starfire ship construction for a small ship RPG and ran a scenario. It didn't go so well, and the next week or so I abandoned my rules for Traveller (perhaps because in the meantime I had observed Paul Gazis run his Eight Worlds Traveller). I kept my ship design system and the star map (still no hexes).

As to how I got into the hobby...

I slowly joined the war gaming hobby, starting with Avalon Hill's Tactics II, checking Little Wars out from the library, eventually deciding between D&D and Tractics at a hobby store (choosing Tractics woth its miniatures over this ambiguous pencil and paper game). Fall of 1977, I attended a birthday weekend at my war gaming friends house. He got Holmes Basic, and I got hooked on D&D and RPGs (it helped that I figured out you COULD use miniatures with D&D - I guess originally I didn't read the cover very well - "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures").

Now I resisting the urge to tinker too much with the rules of Classic Traveller. I've been a tinkerer practically my whole gaming life (I made an alternate game board for Tractics II and even made my own Revolutionary War board game for the battle of Lexington and Concord - quite literal on the "board", I used a wooden plank to draw my board on...).

Frank

 

[Quint]

A buddy of mine in Jr High School had the box set, my first distinct memory of a Traveller book is High Guard on the racks at the local hobby shop - as well as my copy of SORAG and The Beyond. We played the hack out the game, very "gonzo" games with stuff pulled from the Hitchhikers, Dr. Who, etc.

Lots of fun, not canon in the slightest.

Eventually we settled down and were running games on the outskirts of the Spinward Marches (mostly down in Paranoia Press Country), but those early games were the crazy stuff only Jr High and High School students could come up fueled by Dr. Pepper and Pizza...

LOL!

D.

 

[Leitz]

In the summer of '78 I was in Upward Bound at VPI. Had been doing Avalon Hill board games for a while and heard about some college students doing something. Found them one evening. The first game was D&D, they wanted my character to test a potion. It was poison, character died. The next week they were talking about building space ships and doing stuff.

Since Han Solo was my Star Wars hero I went back after the summer and spent time dreaming of travel from star to star as a merchant. When life was bad but I had found the rules I made up a subsector and did trade runs.

Moved into fantasy RPGs for decades, but occasionally read or tried stuff in Traveller. Finally found CoTI and have been in a few PbP here since finding a face to face game seems impossible. Besides, sometimes the story telling capabilities of PbP are better for me.

 

[Reban]

Some time in the early 90s I picked up an old and tattered copy of White Dwarf No.31 which contained a fascinating article called "Prior service in Traveller" by John Conquest.

It had lots of details on how to create officers and specialists of the Navy and Marines and worked like a mini-game. I was hooked and had to find out more about the thing called "Traveller".

 

[flykiller]

Besides, sometimes the story telling capabilities of PbP are better for me.

given the character you put up for the lu hao voyage, I can see that.

"as the worlds turn"?

Now I resisting the urge to tinker too much with the rules of Classic Traveller.

why? tinker! show us what you got.

 

[robject]

Since Han Solo was my Star Wars hero I went back after the summer and spent time dreaming of travel from star to star as a merchant. When life was bad but I had found the rules I made up a subsector and did trade runs.

I still like doing this.

 

[robject]

Then I found the supplements and the very first Traveller item I bought was Traders and Gunboats due to my fascination with spaceships. High Guard was my second.

It was a month or so later when another friend bought the first boxed set of LBB1-3 and we started playing it by the rules as written, I finally got my first LBB box set not long after.

Nice nice nice nice.