What Have You Used CT For?

[tbeard1999]

I just became of Bill's use of Traveller to roleplay in a Pulp-Chaco War setting and thought it might be a hoot to list the various non-Traveller uses we've put Traveller to over the decades.

Myself--

1. The Commonwealth Campaign, which deviates from Traveller canon by eschewing widespread gravitics and includes an earler, less reliable (but longer ranged) FTL drive that scattered many lost colonies throughout the setting.

2. Star Wars. Oh come on...you all know you did it too. Awhile back I even found my blueprints for the Millenium Falcon.

3. The Morrow Project. I found CT with the Striker combat system to be perfect for several After the Holocost campaigns. The original was based on The Morrow Project.

4. Star Trek. Ran by a buddy and went tolerably well.

5. Fantasy Campaign. Never ran it, but mused about it.

6. Weird West. Long before the term existed (1981) I transferred a Boot Hill campaign to Traveller, in a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War, and where cowboys found dinosaurs in a hidden valley...

7. The DM's Tower. Originally ran by a good friend (the best game master ever IMHO), then run by me as a sequel. A collection of adventurers from numerous different RPGs -- D&D, Traveller, Tunnels and Trolls, Runquest, Champions, etc., go on a multiversal quest to find and defeat the nefarious DM. He handled all system conversions behind the screen. You rolled to hit, damage, etc., in your system and you took damage, etc., in your system. Embarassing Traveller moment -- unconscious Marine commando's ACR is shattered by a barbarian who finds it to be a most unheroic weapon.

8. Top Secret. An abortive secret agent campaign using Traveller.

9. Pulp Traveller. A Pulp campaign; abandoned Traveller for Call of Cthulhu system.

10. Played around with a Gamma World/Traveller variant. Never ran it, but intended to.

11. Traveller TFT. Not really the same thing, but a Traveller conversion using The Fantasy Trip. Worked quite well, actually. Posted to the files section at COTI.

 

[Sturn]

Star Wars

Before Westend Games came out with Star Wars D6, I ran a fun Star Wars campaign using Traveller. I used the Big Black Book and it was enough. I still have pencil notes in the book expanding jump drive tables to allow them to be placed in small craft (such as an under 100 ton X-Wing). I altered Psionics to become the Force. I recall everything working quite well, maybe even more so then my later D6 Star Wars campaign.

Modern Mercs

Before Twilight: 2000 came about, I ran a brief modern day mercenary campaign (before Merc: 2000 had the idea) using Traveller. I don't recall having to alter any rules. But, I also recall I didn't like the CT combat system for this. I was using only basic CT (no Stiker, etc) and the modifiers to hit armor system (as opposed to damage absorption) didn't set well to me when it was so obvious in modern terms. Twilight: 2000 came about soon afterwards and I ended up using its more realistic system for modern combat games.

 

[The Oz]

I used Traveller to do Star Wars (who didn't?), Star Trek, and Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth. All together. In the same universe.

I also did fantasy adventure with Traveller, and used Traveller as the character and combat system for Space:1889. Traveller worked very well for Space:1889.

 

[saundby]

Cyberpunk, 19th century naval, prehistoric, WWI, WWII. Designed a naval ship building and combat system, produced wonderful horrid Victorian ships bristling with guns of mixed caliber and nowhere near enough armor, so something would always go boom!

Non 3I Traveller: Doc Smith style ships in a Piper/Vance/Harrison/Smith universe.

 

[aramis]

Tron, Trek.

 

[mbrinkhues]

Well the german translation made a nice flyswatter being A4-sized and sturdily bound. Also worked fine to prop up a table leg.

 

[rust]

Apart from a number of distantly Third Imperium-like homebrew settings, the
two I remember most fondly were:
- Thieves' World (a fantasy setting),
- Bloodtree Rebellion (based on GDW's boardgame).

 

[Sturn]

Tron

LOL.

Obligatory text to make my post long enough to submit.

 

[beowulf2044]

Time Travel (Temporal War). The campaign is still going on). Traveller provided everything needed (all manner of weapons and equipment throughout tech levels).

 

[tmerlock]

Hi! I'm new here. Been lurking for a bit, but found this thread amusing.

Aside from 3I Traveller, my old group did a Dr. Who "Keys of Time" mini-campaign, with the Master (who was pretending to be a good guy) as our patron. The various pieces were scattered about several CT adventures in an attempt to link them together.

We also did a Star Trek crossover - I forget whether something pulled some Trek ships into the 3I, or whether we jumped out of the 3I into Trek-space, but we found a type-M merchant can't stand against a Klingon D7 Battlecruiser.

Technically, these were still heavily 3I based, and quite fun (well, except when the D7 destroyed our ship with all hands on board).

 

[mike wightman]

Star Trek, Star Wars, Blake's 7, Dune, Stainless Steel Rat, EC Tubb's Dumarest, a WW2 based spy game, a modern day merc campaign and probably a few I have forgotten

 

[sabredog]

A couple of years before Chaosium released Call of Cthulhu there were a couple of Different Worlds in like 1980, 81-ish by the CoC team (Peterson, etc.) that had the bare bones rules to run Lovecraftian adventures using the Runequest rules for characters and combat. This was before they developed it all under the Basic Role-play systems many years later.

These WD rules had some basic monsters, books, spells, and my favorite: sanity rules wherein if your character made his sanity throw then he was considered to have "realized the awful significance of what he saw" and went mad.

Anyway I used them to set up a Traveller campaign set in the Alien universe and having the players discover the planet of the Mi-Go, the Yith, and a couple others. Low tech (like 9-10), no jump drives, low berth is the way to get there.....

Later, another WD article had a CoC adventure in it using the CoC rules...I just used Traveller.

Also, a short Hammers Slammers / BOLO campaign using Traveller and Striker.

 

[Ishmael]

I don't remember what I did with CT.
I think I traded it all for a couple of SPI games and dumped the rest.
If I had only known that ebay was going to happen, I'd have kept them to sell.

 

[RKFM]

3. The Morrow Project. I found CT with the Striker combat system to be perfect for several After the Holocost campaigns. The original was based on The Morrow Project.

Holy Flashback Batman! I had totally forgotten about The Morrow Project. Among my friends there was a divide between those that liked Gamma World, and my left-hand writing, engineer wanna-be, math nerd friend.

 

[ShapeShifter]

Pulpy SciFi a la Flash Gordon (classic Buster Crabbe serials, mister--not the 1980 movie, nor that recent crapola). (I've been taking notes of the serials for later development ideas, but it may take time...) I'd love to design a race/"career" of raygun-wielding hawkmen! :rofl:

I've been rewatching Classic Battlestar Galactica on HULU, enjoying it immensely, and would love to have a brief campaign based on it. The Ralph McQuarrie conceptual artwork alone gives me loads of inspiration.

A campaign inspired by the Alien tetrology would rawk.

 

[tbeard1999]

Holy Flashback Batman! I had totally forgotten about The Morrow Project. Among my friends there was a divide between those that liked Gamma World, and my left-hand writing, engineer wanna-be, math nerd friend.

TMP (the game system) was actually pretty good, especially after they added a Chaosium-style skills system (used with Chaosium's permission IIRC).

It's one of the very few RPGs that tracked blood loss (characters had blood points), which could have interesting adventure ramifications. Its combat system included a system to use real world data to generate game ratings for weapons.

But at the end of the day, I found Classic Traveller (with the Striker combat system) superior.

And the scenario envisioned by TMP was an excellent roleplaying setup -- one that bears more than a passing resemblance to the Reformation Coalition angle in TNE...

 

[Commander Truestar]

Not so much what I did with the LBB's outside of Traveller a what I did with other stuff in Traveller. My only major departure from the OTU was the invention of a one of a kind ship cloak a la the Romulans. Though not nearly as fully functional... I had a group loose almost all their ships "ambushing" a small convoy after bribing some one to get the convoy's itinerary through the asteroids of the Robin System from a super secret Imperial Research station. I allowed for a random number of cargo containers to survive...each with its own "almost fully functional" techno-wonder. The players lost all their ships except for one scout s/c that flew wide to "hit from behind" and came in only at the end and a neat shattered R Class merchie. After recovering three boxes they figured out one was the equivelant of a zero point energy device based gun and sold it to make the cash back to mostly repair the Merchie. Then went on trying to figure out the other two. They never did figure out the replicator(and its facinatingly ulcer-causing quirks) but they figured out the glitchy cloak.

Anyway,, I have been known to co-opt pretty much anything non-Traveller in the many magazines I have seen(as well as stuff from many websites) into my games. I also have added in things like my travels. I loved the reaction, years ago, to my inclusion of things I picked up in Iceland, in a Battletech campaign I ran >

Marc

 

[Mithras]

A campaign inspired by the Alien tetrology would rawk.

Come on, what's stopping you, that would be easy. Just take notes from Alien and Aliens, maybe bu the Colonial Marines Manual (I think its called, awesome book BTW) and go for it. 2300AD was basically Alien with the serial numbers filed off, you could use that. I believe the Marine gun featured in Traveller: 2300 but was dropped from 2300AD. (I had T:2300, but gave it away when I bought 2300AD).

 

[The Hinterworlds Rambler]

Old School Star Trek, UFO/Space: 1999, Tron, Dune (one of the most badass games we ever ran), Foundation, John Carter Warlord of Mars, Neuromancer

 

[Max]

Not so much what I did with the LBB's outside of Traveller a what I did with other stuff in Traveller.

My experience, I personally have never used the system for anything other than sci fi. I do recall using a system which was obviously a Mercenary rip-off to generate a Roman legion character for an ancient Lovecraft (I think) based adventure, but it wasn't my system and the rest of the rules were not Traveller.

The Star Trek adaptation never got off the ground although the Star Wars one had some legs. I consider anything sci fi based as modifications to CT, not as using the system for something else.