2025 has been absolutely crazy for me, readers! And not necessarily in a good way. I haven't had much time for hobbies since my Christmastime Dead in Space solo game. But I have had some new things land in my lap and on my hard drive over the Holidays.
Cairn 2e arrived on my doorstep as a late gift last week, and it looks amazing! I am trying to steal some time for a solo game to sink my teeth into it so that I can give you all a fair review. I was also able to replace my ruined copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia with the generosity of everyone who picked up Strange Ways last month.
But the more interesting thing that landed in my lap was synchronicitous.
Spending My Holidays in Outer Space
This Christmas I wanted to travel to outer space, so I brought my hard copy of Death in Space along. Death in Space is awesome, and I played a lot this holiday, but I wanted a bit of variety...
For years I have had wanted to give Traveller a try as well. Originally written by Marc Miller for the impring Game Designer's Workshop in 1977. It was one of the first role-playing games, and was designed to be able to handle a wide range of different kinds of Science Fiction. It's fans have supported the game with such devotion that it has been in publication pretty much constantly since 1977 in some form or another, and the game remains backwards compatible with products released in the 70s today.
It's biggest influence was the book Space Viking by H. Beam Piper (the second of a trilogy), and a lot of elements, including how hyperspace works in traveller, the Sword Worlds faction, and elements of the history of its original setting, The Third Imperium of Man are lifted straight out of Space Viking.
Interestingly, a lot of pop sci-fi makes reference to Space Viking, but if you missed it (which is easy to do) you wouldn't catch them. For example, Space Viking includes a planet called Hoth and a starship called the Rozinante, which are borrowed respectively by Star Wars and The Expanse.
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I also made sure that Cepheus Deluxe, Enhanced Edition, was on my tablet so that I could finally give myself a taste of Classic Traveller.
If you missed it in my Old-School Science Fiction Roundup, Cepheus Engine is a thrid-party retroclone of Marc Miller's original Traveller RPG, with a few minor quality-of-life tweaks. It was created a few years ago in order to have an open-source version of the game during a lull in its production by its current IP-holder Mongoose Games.
My wife took an interest in Cepheus Engine when I described its life-path character generation Although she didn't enjoy it in practice it led to us both taking a deep dive into the history and various versions of the game.
So imagine my surprise and delight when I saw that Bundle of Holding had a Traveller Bundle featuring a stack of manuals including both the 2024 update of the core rulebook, and the light-weight Traveller: Explorer Edition.
It has been an engrossing process looking at them and comparing the concepts.
I also dusted off my copy of GURPS Traveller to use as a reference, as it has the most well-developed notes on the original setting of traveller, as well as some notes on Marc Miller's original engine. It also helps that I had the Cepheus Engine SRD available to me for other rules comparissons.
So here are some observations that I made after looking over a mountain of Traveller products and their clones.
Some Comparative Notes
- Classic Traveller was originally made with only a mostly-generic setting. It made some general rules to make it functional as a role-playing game. The Third Imperium setting evolved throughout the 80s, and only became central to the game in the 1987 Mega Traveller edition. Mongoose Traveller includes the Vargr and Aslan as playable alien species in the core rulebook, but otherwise makes the Third Imperium less of a focus in the core rules.
- There were several rules that needed to be included about the setting to make Traveller make sense: nanotechnology had to be rare and restricted, armed robots had to be illegal, and true AGI had to still be technologically beyond reach. A cash economy was also necessary. Cepheus Engine as a more general system includes rules that allow for AI and nanotch, but makes them an exception and not a rule. Mongoose Traveller makes AGI and nanotechnology more likely and possibly even already present in the setting. The Mongoose Traveller Robot Handbook has a lot of detailed rules on the creation and use of MEMs / nanbots. This is a bit of a change in the canon of Traveller.
- Classic Traveller and Cepheus Engine both use systems where vehicles do not have hit ponts, but rather tables are used based on the power of a weapon versus the armor being used to determine which table is used to determine whether systems on a vehicle are damaged and whether it is still operable.
- In Mongoose Traveler, vehicles have a Hull rating which is used as hit points. Only exceptional hits destroy systems. This makes vehiclle and ship combat a little simpler, but less narratively interesting.
- Ship combat is likely to be slightly more punishing in older versions of Traveller, as weapons and systems fail more often, potentially causing a cascade of bad events for the losing ship... but combat is going to be slower and more table-intensive than the more streamlined Mongoose Traveller.
- Classic Traveller and Cepheus Engine have two stats to determine a character's stealth: Stamina and Lifeblood. A character who has lost Lifeblood has a penalty for each time an attack has reduced Lifeblood. Lifeblood comes back slowly, while Stamina comes back quickly. In Mongoose Traveller, damage goes straight to character statistics, depelting Endurance first, then Agility and Strength. This makes the penalties from injury appear more quickly. Characters in any version of Traveller I have seen have a health total somewhere between 6 and 36, with the average character able to take about 21 damage, despite the very different ways they are handled.
- Cepheus Engine uses an assigned score system for ability scores, with optional random stat rolls while Traveller originally handled ability score generation with random rolls by default. Mongoose Traveller uses random generation, but has a range of alternate geneation methods mentioned in the Traveller's Companion.
- Choosing your homeworld determines the skills your character starts with at 18 years old during the characters' generation process in older Traveller editions and Cepheus Engine, while homeworld is explicitly described as useful to understanding the character, but not salient to character generation; 18 year-old characters start with a handful of skills at level 0 based from a list.
- Characters in older versions of Traveller and in Cepheus Engine are generated by following their lives through one or more of several careers. Characters roll for events in every four year period that will determine their rank and status within the career, and that will affect which skills they developed, improve stats, and otherwise determine starting benefits.
- Mongoose Traveller makes this more complex by adding in additional specializations within the careers so that the benefits from a term within a career are rolled from your choice of six or seven tables. In Cepheus Deluxe, characters choose a single upgrade from one of three tables instead.
- Characters in Cepheus Engine and earlier versions of Traveller level up by spending mutliple terms or their "mustering out" benefits from ending a career to improve their rank. Characters in Mongoose Traveller roll to see if their rank improves at the end of every term. Gaining rank ocasionally comes with free automatic skill upgrades.
- In Mongoose Traveller, characters also roll to see if they were successful in their career, with a chance of a disaster having forced them to change careers separate from the table to determine what happened in the last four-year term. This includes possibilities on very high or lows of hitting a dead end in the career and being forced to leave, or being strongarmed into stayng in the career longer than you might have liked. Your character is also required to roll to enter their new career, and may end up being drafted or drifting as a space bum in Mongooose Traveller.
- In genreal, Mongoose Traveller has a much bigger skill list than older versions of Traveller or Cepheus Engine, and more skills require that you choose a specialization. This was a gradual process, 1987's Mega Traveller had a significantly larger skill list than Classic Traveller had. As a result characters genreally have more opportunities to increase skills during character generation in newer editions than older ones or Cepeheus Engine.
- The result of this is that Mongoose Traveller PCs will have a few more skills (albeit ones with narrower application), be slightly more specialized, and have a more detailed backstory than characters generated in Cepheus Engine or Classic Traveller.
So What Would I Play?
I love the Third Imperium pre-Mega Traveller, and Mongoose Traveller leans into it well, and so I definitely would not say "No" to running the game in mongooose traveller. Especially as the Mechant Edition and Explorer Edition of the game allow my players to get pared-down versions of the core manual for only $1 USD.
But here's the thing... I like using tablets and phones for my role-playing games less and less. And as I have found many of my digital purchases slowly vanishing (curse you, Google Music!), I am less and less inclined to buy things on PDF. I want hard copies of my games. And getting a hard copy of Mongoose traveller in Canada? yeah... not happening.
Mongoose does not do POD and shipping Mongoose Products to Canada costs more than the book does. there are some Amazon sellers who buy and resell Mongoose products in Canada, but a copy of Mongoose Traveller bought from one of them would cost me well over a hundred dollars. For a game I am not sure how often I might play it, I am having a hard time justifying that cost.
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| MEDIC!!! |
Cepheus Deluxe, on the other hand is POD very affordably, even in hardcover. And so I was happy to treat myself to a hard copy of it. As they are so close, I can easily use my Mongoose PDFs to supplement the rules I have.
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