Classic Traveller is Quickly Becoming my "Desert Island" RPG

If you or anyone you know struggles with the joys of ADHD, you know that sometimes it means you are going to hyperfixate on something for no particular reason. That thing will have you captive in its clutches until you have given it the proper attention it deserves, and fuck all your other priorities.

For me, this has been Traveller; the nearly 50 year old Science Fiction RPG originally created by Marc Miller and the folks at the long since defunct Game Designers' Workshop. I had seem some OSR types talk about Classic Traveller, the original iteration of the game that was produced between 1977 and 1987 and how well suited it was to sandbox play. My only familiarity with the IP up until this point was knowing that it was a game where you could die during character creation and that it was something my grognard dad had played back in the 70s and 80s and enjoyed.

So of course this sent me down the rabbit hole; it turns out somehow that Traveller editions are more confusing than D&D editions, which is quite the feat. Even now for "modern" incarnations of Traveller you have 3 options you could pick from; Mongoose's Traveller 2nd Edition (probably the most commonly recommended option), Marc Miller's own Traveller5 (A confusing behemoth of a game that tried to unify 40 years of disparate mechanics into one toolkit), or the Cepheus retroclone (A game hobbled together from Mongoose's OGL content to create a framework for 3rd party publishers to release their own settings).

After a brief read through of This is Free Trader Beowulf , a pretty detailed history of the game, I decided to do what any sane, rational person currently obsessing over a niche media product would do; acquire all of it.

It turns out that for the low low price of $35, Marc Miller himself will mail you a fucking CD-ROM with every single thing ever made for Classic Traveller in PDF format. Which is honestly kind of amazing (less amazing was needing to dig out my external CD drive in order to get the contents off the damn thing). There is so much here, well over 100 files including rulebooks, adventures, and even companion board games that were released during the games' run. It was a lot to parse through, and there were several iterations of the classic rules that had been released (the original 3 books, a starter set, a deluxe set, and even "The Traveller Book").

So after some research and a dive into the badly categorized and split up remains of CT on DriveThruRPG, I landed on the Classic Traveller Facsimile Edition. There were a couple of benefits to this; the pdf was free and preserved the original 3 books but with added errata, and ordering it as a POD meant it came as an adorable little 6" by 9" digest book for the low low price of $11 plus shipping.

The Classic Traveller Experience

What I found within these freshly printed on demand pages honestly blew me away. Sure, the formatting is a little old school, it's basically all blocks of text or tables with very few pieces of art throughout. And some of the phrasing is a little antiquated, since the text predates a lot of the codified terminology we use to describe RPGs today (for example the rules refer to a solo play option as "solitaire" play).

But honestly, the rules are just so elegant you might forget you are reading something originally written in 1977. The Life Path character creation is fast and easy to follow, the entire game uses just 2d6 for dice rolls, and even combat rules take a relatively simple range banded approach and are designed to not last more than a few rounds.

As someone who loves some old TSR era D&D (and is currently running an Arden Vul game using OSE), it pains me to say this; but these rules blow anything Gary Gygax wrote out of the water. In a lot of ways they evoke for me many of the NSR games I've enjoyed reading like Into the Odd, Cairn, or Shadowdark. There is a certain lightweight focus to them in so many respects (outside of the ship building rules which are quite complicated and for some reason involve taking on a 40 year mortgage).

Why take this on a Desert Island though?

So one of the more cliche questions one might get in any media is "What is your desert island X" where X is the only thing you're allowed to have with you when you get stranded Castaway style. This is a bit of a silly question in most respects, but it can also be a fun thought exercise; narrowing down the limitless options we have of games to play today to just a single concrete answer. With that said, why Classic Traveller?

• The completeness of the rules is insane. Everything you need to run years of campaigns is here, great procedures, enemy encounter tables, subsector generation rules, etc. And that's without necessarily needing to modify or come up with rules yourself.
• The support for multiple modes of play; the book details the ability to play the game solo and GM-less as well, pretty innovative for 1977.
• Speaking of subsector generation, the rules for creating a compelling sandbox in Classic Traveller are some of the best I've seen period, and certainly the best I've seen from a 70's ruleset.
• The rules themselves are pretty easy to understand, every roll is 2d6 vs. a target number, you get modifiers based on your skills and the situation, and that's basically it. Not difficult for most people to grasp quickly during the course of a few sessions.

In short, I'm amazed Traveller never became more popular (probably just due to the relative unpopularity of Sci-Fi RPGs). This game is damn good, there's a lot to love here. And that's just in the core books, before we get to the dozens of supplements and setting books that can meaningfully expand your game. They even recently released a brand new sourcebook for the classic game! If you do play CT or are interested in giving it a thought, lemme know your thoughts below!