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Old 08-25-2021, 10:28 AM   #1
Mark Caliber
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Central Florida
Default Did this setting ever work?

No I am not tossing interweb napalm nor am I busting out my inner internet troll persona.

I LOVE the GURPS Traveller setting. Glancing at my shelf I own 13 GURPS Traveller splat books and studied all of them with great interest. (Mind you I purchased most of those when I was a REMF hanging out in the "sand box" in the Afghan Theater, and had some time on my hands).

However, when the opportunity came to roll all of this material, as a GM, I realized that I had NO IDEA what the point of an RPG group was in this setting!

I even asked multiple times on these forums for examples and times when this setting WAS successfully employed.

Back when these books were being originally published and this particular corner of the forum was VERY busy, I would have thought that an answer would have been readily available! However, I'm still awaiting ANY answer.

But to my point.

Has anyone out there ever seen a Traveller RPG work successfully?

Heck, I remember as a teenager trying the original Traveller (and yes my first PC died during character creation . . .) and even back then, I couldn't shake the uneasy question, "What is the point of this adventure?" At the conclusion of that abortive RPG session there just didn't seem any point in going on. So we didn't.

So, once again. Has anyone run a successful Traveller campaign that lasted more than 6 months (IRL)?

Just curious.
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Old 08-25-2021, 11:57 AM   #2
thrash
 
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Default Re: Did this setting ever work?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark Caliber View Post
Has anyone run a successful Traveller campaign that lasted more than 6 months (IRL)?
Several.

One pretty straight classic Traveller campaign ran for two years back in high school. We played many of the adventures as they were published.

One on-again, off-again campaign throughout university.

Three non-OTU campaigns at various points as an adult. Each lasted between six months and a year.
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Old 08-25-2021, 12:29 PM   #3
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Default Re: Did this setting ever work?

The GURPS Traveller setting, like any Traveller setting, other than New Era, is not a setting in the sense that most role-players use the word. Usually, they mean a campaign setting, which often has a built-in, "this is what your characters are up to."

If you play in TSR's Dragonlance setting, you were out to stop the draconians and the evil dragons. If you played any WEG Torg setting, you were out to reclaim the Earth from the cosms of the High Lords. If you played FGU's Space Opera you were mostly involved oriented ito missions where your star nation (probably the Terran Union) thwarted the latest plot from one of its rivals. If you played TSR's Top Secret you were a spy out to complete whatever mission your agency had currently assigned you. If you played GDW's Twilight: 2000 you were looking for a way home from Europe and, whether you got home or not, you were also trying to keep your local scrap of civilization going for just a little bit longer before everything falls apart. And on and on it went.

Traveller was different from other RPGs from the get-go. Once you generated your character, that was it. The rules didn't provide for character improvement, so you didn't have the motivation of "my character needs to kill/defeat opponents and collect treasure to get experience points to level up" in D&D-inspired games or "I need to use my skills to have a chance of improving them" in RuneQuest-inspired games. Traveller characters could be motivated by money, "I can improve my ship/buy this piece of equipment if I can only get this many credits" or by wanting/having to deal with the adventure.

Traveller can support a number of different campaign settings but you have to decide what kind of campaign you want to run, and what changes you may want to make to run it. Traveller character generation was based in a little sub-game the designers made for themselves as a side-game to GDW's Imperium. Unsurprisingly, if you want to run an interstellar military campaign, Traveller does that well. The Alien books were a while before they came out and set the major races up as each having their own interstellar area, finding a place where more than two or three major races meet is a problem if you want a "team with one of every kind of alien" but you could have the major races abroad to a greater degree than canon, although Traveller makes a point of having aliens be aliens and not "humans in a rubber suit," so there's that. The Scout book was a long time coming, but an exploration campaign was pretty easy to do until Atlas of the Imperium came out. For a long time the actual explored part of the Imperium consisted of just eight sectors: The Spinward Marches; Solomani Rim; Ley Sector; Glimmerdrift Reaches; Crucis Margin; Marantha-Alakhest; Vanguard Reaches and Reavers Deep. My merchant campaign degenerated into a pirates campaign pretty quickly.

Nonetheless, I had a Traveller naval campaign that lasted for longer than six months and an exploration campaign that could have lasted that long, though neither saw much more than one evening a week of play, compared to most of my other campaigns which tended to run every other night until we burned out. At the time, I was still looking for a universal system, so I was switching games (and more particularly gaming systems) frequently.

The lack of character advancement in the original game made it better suited for episodic campaigns. Traveller doesn't have the USS Enterprise, but drop the warp drive for a jump drive and change shields to armor and very few Star Trek episodes wouldn't feel at home as Traveller adventures. GURPS Traveller does allow for level progression, so something like GURPS Traveller's Honor Harrington would be a workable campaign.

The really short answer, you have to decide where in the setting you want to focus, or chose the stories you want to tell and look for the best location in setting to tell those stories. The Traveller is setting is a montage of pictures any one of which would be suitable for a successful campaign, but you have to decide which picture is your picture.

Last edited by Curmudgeon; 08-25-2021 at 12:41 PM.
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Old 08-25-2021, 02:10 PM   #4
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Default Re: Did this setting ever work?

I personally think focused campaigns work best for any version of Traveller. I'm currently running a Pirates of Drinax campaign using GURPS 4th edition. Drinax is a very open world campaign but you do start off with a goal. If you want to complete that goal is up to the players. My group is currently doing well.
I have played in Traveller games where we are all retired characters from whatever service we were in and just started travelling around in our ship going from one planet to the next just scrapping by. I was fun but it did get weird at times on how we got our adventures.
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Old 08-26-2021, 11:03 AM   #5
hal
 
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Default Re: Did this setting ever work?

I ran a self-made campaign set in Lunion, where two of the player characters were Nobility, and one player was playing a former Naval fighter pilot. The characters were translated out of Classic Traveller characters that were pre-generated before the campaign started and continued on.

Basic thrust of the story was trade between Lunion and Adibicci - where the higher control rating of that world resulted in some rather unpleasant skirmishes between one noble household on Lunion and some nobility on Adibicci. Net result, the one began to supply low tech adapters for high tech chips, helping the resistance to the current Adibicci government form an underground resistance. It didn't help too, that the Subsector criminal cartel were using the exact same approach for their own clandestine message system - but I digress. What started the adventure was the fact that a man offered to hire an Empress Marava Model B ship and investigate who was poisoning the anagathics being used by the rich and powerful. It wasn't a deliberate poisoning, but anyone who took the anagathic AND entered into Jump Space suffered a Parkinson's Disease like effect that grew worse with every jump. The main protagonist of this was dying.

Enter into the picture the one player character's mother having disappeared, leaving her and her brother to be raised by a really nasty piece of work, the former Baron of Lunion. I won't get into it, but the end result of that thread was going to be that the player would discover why her mom just abandoned her and her brother - her mother was kept in low berth, pregnant with her unborn sibling - all because her grandfather HATED her "common born" mother and arranged for her to leave. Knowing that if she tried to get custody of her children in a Lunion court, her father-in-law would thwart her, she tried to get the case heard in her own birth world's court of law. That is when she was waylaid, and placed in a low birth stolen from a ship reported to have been broken at the shipyard (ie, destroyed - it wasn't).

There was the assassination attempt on Peter, heir to the Barony of Lunion, which occurred on Adibicci soil. It almost succeeded. Then there was the follow up attempt at assassination by ramming the ship he retired to at the starport, only to have the air raft destroyed before it could come near - thereby causing the world to be declared a Red zone for a time by the Starport Authority (investigations found that the assassination attempts were being done by the Industrialists of Adibicci). And when the ASP (Adibicci secret police) attempted to poison the sitting Baron of Lunion at Lunion - well, the kid gloves came off and an Imperial Raid was conducted where every single major industrialist found themeslves waking up next to a dead animal's head - as a pointed warning next time it might be them who died.

I left out a few other odds and ends, including where a former SEH recipient tried to smuggle an underaged girl through the XT line and bungled it badly. I won't get into the other fun stuff involving an admin's former assistant joining the cast. I won't mention the fact a certain prominent Admiral who'd later play a major role in the Fifth Frontier war was behind (hell, his entire FAMILY) some pretty dodgy illegal stuff as a means of gaining wealth and power. Nope.

So, can Traveller work as an RPG environment? Ask my wife. She was SO disappointed the gaming crew dissolved before she could finally find her Mother. Her brother became the new Baron of Lunion after her father finally realized what his father had done to his marriage. An aging Father going with hish an adult daughter - hunting for his wife / her mother who was biologically HALF her daughter's age. Such a reunion would have been bittersweet at best.

Ah well, the fun we had, mixing in espionage against the "bad admiral", engaging in trade, meeting people at new places, rescuing a stricken ship, finding out what simple luxuries a frozen world's population craved more than anything else. The anger at finding out that a surface to air missile had been stolen from an Imperial arms locker from an Imperial naval base - only to be used when they were all together trying to attend the Duke of Lunion's ball. The SHEER disgust at discovering a criminal admiral trying (successfully too darn it) to cover his tracks. The sadness of losing a comrade to a downed air car when the structural member pierced her lungs. The joy of being able to help down on their luck Marines... We had it all.

Does that help answer your question? :)
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Old 08-26-2021, 12:15 PM   #6
mstlaurent
 
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Default Re: Did this setting ever work?

When I was in high school I ran Twilight's Peak for my friends over the course of a couple of months one summer, and to this day, almost forty years later, they still bring it up as one of the best adventures they've ever played in.
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Old 08-26-2021, 01:08 PM   #7
Whitestreak
 
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Default Re: Did this setting ever work?

Between 1983 and 1985, I was involved in a Traveller campaign (using just the original Little Black Books), that took the crew of the Fenris Wulf from one side of the galaxy to the other.

My character was a disaffected Imperial agent, who signed on as security chief with Captain Daniel, whose cousin had a much smaller smuggling craft. we ended up dealing with some very questionable people, including a couple who had light sabers.

Daniel's last name? Solo.

Yep, we had a great time playing Star Wars with Traveller.

That's pretty stretchable for a game system.
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Old 08-26-2021, 01:26 PM   #8
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Default Re: Did this setting ever work?

It sounds like you are looking for high intensity, destroy-the-dark-lord type of things. In fact Traveller does not have dark lords though Grandfather can be made into one easy enough just to start. But if you bring him back it will up end the system (though bringing back one of his creations can do).

Traveller expects something more like Vatta, or David Falkayn, or Chanur, or Firefly. It is on the level of what a small team does. For that reason if you want to pump up the intensity you can focus on the corporate survival of a small identity as your goal. A tribe or a dynasty or a city. The free trading style campaign is good if you have the discipline for it. Or you can center it on a small city state and make it 1632 style. Pocket Empires gives some clues how to do a dynastic game as does Nobles and that can be played at any level.

Add lots of chrome to make you care what happens to your group. That is of course what real groups do to pump up morale. Every kind of group however laudable or distasteful or ambiguous their actual deeds has this in common.
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Old 08-27-2021, 08:10 AM   #9
Mark Caliber
 
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Default Re: Did this setting ever work?

Quote:
Originally Posted by hal View Post
Does that help answer your question? :)

It does indeed.

I appreciate the responses and the stories. They help get the creative juices flowing!

Thank you to everyone for helping me on this topic!
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Last edited by Mark Caliber; 08-27-2021 at 08:17 AM.
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Old 08-29-2021, 03:23 PM   #10
Tinman
 
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Default Re: Did this setting ever work?

Quote:
Originally Posted by jason taylor View Post
Traveller expects something more like Vatta, or David Falkayn, or Chanur, or Firefly. It is on the level of what a small team does.
I think it would do a Babylon 5 campaign very well too.
I've run a campaign beyond the Imperial worlds of Imperial mercs going to a Cybermech Damocles setting world & helping the humans against the Gebbroth.
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