The new Mongoose Traveller edition
Most of you don’t know this, but other than a dark fantasy fan I’m also into sci-fi gaming. As in fantasy gaming I prefer dark and hard sci-fi over space opera. As a matter of fact, it was my interest in 2300 AD and Traveller that brought me back into the RPG hobby back in 2006. At that time I haunted the Citizens of the Imperium forums and vaccuumed eBay to re-buy old Traveller stuff that I sold off long ago.
My relation with Traveller has been long and complicated. When I started gaming back in the early 1980’s, Deluxe Traveller was there on my shelf together with b/x D&D and RuneQuest. Later, I sold my deluxe set to afford AD&D and the guy who bought the rules became our new Traveller referee.
At some point later, I got the Traveller itch again and bought the Starter Traveller box, but didn’t like it and swapped it for some other game.
Anyway, from 2006 to 2009 I managed to scrape together a complete T4 collection (bought the lot cheap), an almost complete MegaTraveller collection (including the DGP books – not so cheap) and finally a complete Traveller: TNE collection (some very cheap, some quite expensive). And I must say I’m glad I did it then as shipping prices were very cheap and the retrogamer market wasn’t as hot as now.
Sadly, my carefully crafted game never took off as my gaming group wanted to play fantasy and not sci-fi.
Then Mongoose Traveller happened. I bought some of their books, but never quite liked the new rules so I sold them a while back.
So in summary I have a lot of Traveller stuff for different rule sets and Traveller eras and I like them all. At this point I’m planning to run a Traveller game despite my players’ preferences, and I guess they will like it when we finally take off.
The question now is what rules to use… As for the setting I’ve almost decided to go with the Traveller: 1248 4th Imperium setting that I bought from ComStar Games shortly before Mongoose got the Traveller license and shut down the new ComStar line of Traveller supplements. Those books are awesome in that they are system agnostic and that they mix the best parts of classic Traveller with post-virus possibilities. There’s also vast expanses of the old Imperium that was plunged into chaos during the Virus and that hasn’t been explored or re-visited again. Cool.
This will be a short series of posts where I discuss various editions of Traveller and various eras or settings for Traveller. It’s a way of “thinking aloud” to better help myself to choose a system/era that I will use henceforth.
Nerd-O-Mancer of Dork 
Traveller is one of those games that I always wanted to try. Having got back into gaming in the last few years I’ve lurked on ebay, eyeing a variety of rulebooks and getting confused. What edition would you recommend? Love the aesthetic of the old black books but want something that isn’t unwieldly (I’ve read that character generation can be a pain in the old versions..)
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Well, Traveller’s char gen is considered a feature by most. If you want simple with lots of material to draw from choose Classic Traveller. You can get the Traveller Rulebook on DriveThru for a very reasonable sum. If you want a more modern variant, choose Mongoose Traveller. It’s quite similar to Classic but updates the game to more modern standards. However, right now Mongoose is in the process of play testing and releasing a 2nd ed of MgT. I think it will come out in March or something.
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Cheers – I may have a gander at the Mongoose site…
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Reblogged this on Delta Quadrant and commented:
From my main RPG blog – thoughts on my Traveller re-boot!
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