Scientist term 1
Sciences-2 (social sciences)
Commission and Promotion in first term - rank 2
Admin-1
Animals (Survival) -1
term 2
Linguistics (precursor dialects?)-1
term 3
advances to rank 3
adds Computer-1 for rank 3
2 new skills
Advocate-1
+1 DX from Personal Dev
Musters Out
+1 Ed, +1 SS from material benefits
Mid Passage
Service skills at level 0 from Rogue
Mech-0, Gun Cbt-0 (slug pistol), Melee Cbt-0 (slashing weapons), Recon-0, Grav Vehicle-0
Service skill at zero from scientist
Elec-0
Age: 18+6 (for 1.5 terms) +12 (for 3 terms)= 36 years
Aging roll: 2-4 - -2
Reduce each physical characteristic by 1
Final Character: Ral Partha
6B49B7
Background Skills: Melee-0 (bludgeoning), Zero G-0, Medicine-0, Carousing-0
Service Skills:Mech-0, Gun Cbt-0 (slug rifle), Melee Cbt-0, Electronics-0, Melee-0(slashing weapons), Recon-0, Grav Vehicle-0
Earned skills: Gun combat-1 (slug pistol), Streetwise-1, Sciences-2 (social sciences), Admin-1, Animals-1 (survival), Linguistics-1, Advocate-1
36 years old
20,000cr
Mid-passage
Background: Grew up poor in an asteroid colony, resulting in low endurance due to low gravity. Highly intelligent but no guidance - fell in with the wrong crowed and became somewhat of a street rogue. Injured during a burglary gone wrong and lost his position in the gang. Reevaluated his life, used high intelligence to go to university, studying social sciences. Field work on primitive worlds as well as bureaucratic work on a couple of colony planets. After 12 years of such work found his jobs boring. Retired, mustered out, and now seeks adventure and riches.
I found it pretty easy to use. There is a bit of flipping back and forth on the site, which might be easier to do with the printed book, but it wasn’t bad. I did this while sitting in my chair, watching TV with my wife. I used an online dice rolling application as well.
As most RPG players know, one of the best way to learn a big chunk of a system’s rules is to roll up some characters of various different types. It will lead you through the process of learning about the game, from the players point of view, without being overwhelmed. I found this to be the case with the Cepheus Engine. Even though I’m an experienced player of Classic Traveller, there are enough differences that I need to study the Cepheus Engine to really understand it.
Anyway, without going through the whole character, I rolled the dice and put them down on the character record sheet as rolled. No third “drop-die” or an extra “drop” roll. I just rolled ‘em and took ‘em. Ran the character through a term as a Rogue. He failed the survival roll for term 2, which gave me a chance to try out the Mishap table rather than killing him. Ended up with an injury.
This in turn let me make the roll and succeed to begin a second career - this time as a scientist. Doing this forced me to learn the rules for 2nd careers as far as skill learned and all that. I ran him through three terms as a scientist before rolling to see if he was able to retire, which he could. So that is 4.5 terms of service (the failed second term in Rogues equals a half term. So that is 18 years of service, for a total age of 36.
I’ve not finished the character yet. Tonight I need to make his Aging roll, which is different than in Classic Traveller. I forgot about that this morning.
I’ve look through some of the other rules in the SRD, and they are all faithfull to the “feel” and tradition of Classic Traveller while really being an improvement. I like that in the first term of service a character gets all the skills from their profession’s Service Skills table at level-0. This makes a lot of sense to me. There are other changes to the skills that I think are entirely positive.
My initial excitement over the online version of the SRD seems well-justified. It is very useable, and of course the game is just great. I feel like especially for people doing a homebrew campaign who don’t need a bunch of setting material the Cepheus Engine SRD is really a perfect modern SF RPG.
I’m going to explore converting my Classic Traveller homebrew campaign to Cepheus Engine. At this point, only a few skills would change, and addition of 0-level Service Skills would make sense for our campaign. Frankly it would codify a lot of things we’re already doing, that I wrote into our House Rules.
A confession. When I’m creating non-player characters for my Traveller game I don’t even roll a dice. I just decide what their characteristics and skills are. I suspect almost everyone probably does this. If I need a non-player character on the spot I grab the 1001 Characters supplement or Citizens of the Imperium. I will however also roll up non-player characters to have on standby, and really develop their personalities a little bit beforehand in a simple paragraph, because I like the chaos that the dice imbue into the character.
Successful Classic Traveller Tuesday Night! Spent two hours prepping for our next session. It’s going well. It feels really good to be deep back into the campaign. God I love this game. It’s just the best game ever.
It is 3:48pm Sunday afternoon. I have a list of things I wanted to do for my Traveller game today, but apparently I’m incapable of really working on anything before about 8pm at night. Not sure why. So I’m writing this blog post instead. Most people reading this will already know everything I’m about to write. That’s fine. This is really just me thinking “out loud.”
In a previous post I wrote about the Cepheus Engine. When I returned to the world (universe?) of Traveller back in 2016 I found variations on Traveller very confusing. What was Mongoose Traveller? What was the Cepheus Engine? What was all the stuff coming from Omer Golan-Joel? Independence Games? The list of things to be confused about seemed endless.
It took a while to sort this stuff out. Now I understand that the “mess” I had encountered is actually a thriving, healthy, vibrant ecosystem of gaming material all inspired by the original Traveller game. While we now have publishers like Stellagama and Independence and others who’ve diverged sufficiently from Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition that they are really their own things, they all still share a love of science fiction roleplaying.
Since really exploring the online Cepheus Engine Reference Document for the last week I can’t seem to get it out of my head. I have owned a hard copy (seen in the image below) of the SRD for several years now. I’ve imported several of its useful systems into my Classic Traveller campaign.
Rather than writing a crappy explanation of what The Cepheus Engine is, who who publishes what, I’l just link to this page from Paul Elliot Books. It shows that the original SRD came from Jason Kemp, and is available on a pay what you want basis.
Conversion of the SRD to this hypertext document really made it pop for me. I have actually downloaded the entire hypertext SRD from GitHub in case it should ever disappear
Maybe it’s because the online version just looks so good on my computer and my iPad. Like so many people, I feel like the internet has destroyed my attention span. I think it more likely, however, that the way it’s presented in the online version is just easier on my eyes. It’s very easy to navigate. Like - super easy. Easier, I think, than flipping through a book. The stripped-down nature of the SRD certainly facilitates this. This is the basic DNA of an SF RPG campaign. You supply the setting and all that.
Actually, I just figured out why I can’t get this out of my head…
Imagine.
A 15-year old with no money for expensive game books finds this stuff. They download the SRD and/or bookmark the online version on their computer, tablet, or phone. They go to the generator page and create a random subsector. They save the star map to their device, along with a screen shot or the text of the subsector details. They look at those numbers and rules. They share this with a few friends. The friends generate characters using these free materials. The original kid uses imagination to give life to that subsector. They steal a few six-sided dice from a sibling’s board game. Suddenly you have a whole new gaming group born with zero expenditure of money.
That’s powerful. That is accessible. Even a kid with no computer, tablet, or phone could go to the public library and print out everything they need.
A few years ago we had the OGL debacle. The potential revocation of the Open Gaming License held great peril for the publishers who’ve come to depend on it. Disrupting all of that would be been bad for those businesses. At least inconvenient, potentially disastrous.
But when I consider that averted calamity in light of my little story above – I think that would be the real loss. To sell professional gaming materials companies need gamers. And the old ones are…old. We need new gamers. We need new 2d6 SF gamers. Allowing these inexpensive or free materials to exist and flourish is an investment in the future. Those kids will grow up and buy your hardbacks if they are nice.
It’s the beauty of that original Traveller box, with three little black books and two tiny dice, for a very small price. BUT it’s even cheaper, and a kid with no gaming or comic store nearby can get it.
Creating an EPUB eBook for my Traveller campaign star map and descriptive material.
I’m very inspired by this campaign. Jeff and I are going to discuss it on SAFCOcast, but I thought I’d mention it here. Actually as a first “original” post on this blog I felt compelled to. The Campaign Pitch page really sold me on it, and then reading the first few session reports made me love it even more. It reminds me a lot of our Into the Void campaign, but it seems better.
They’ve been on hiatus for a while now, which I can understand. So have we. It’s been almost a year since we’ve played. Sometimes that happens, but that doesn’t mean the campaign has ended. I hope they start up again soon.
A few things that really struck me about this campaign as a GM.
They just use the online Cepheus Engine System Reference Document (linked to above)
They play relatively short sessions. 2 hours per week. That makes it easy on everyone
They don’t appear to have used any purchased materials. All the stuff seems to be free and online
Now, I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t buy cool stuff from publishers. Frankly, I need to do that. I suck at designing ships, for one thing, and I love finding great maps on DriveThru RPG and adapting them to my game. But the ability to run a really good campaign using only free, online materials shows how accessible this hobby is. I’m blown away.
I’ll leave you with this. Peter runs a more general RPG blog, and on it he did this One year of classics 2d6 sci-fi adventure summary, which I really loved. I want to do it for my campaign.
Well, thanks again to the Ebays, I now have the Traveller boxed set from 1979, as well as the High Guard, Citizens of the Imperium, Mercenary, and Spinward Marches supplements.
Of course the first thing I dug into was book 1, Characters and Combat.
The books are in amazingly good shape considering they are 38 years old.
It’s pretty weird going back into such an old gaming system. After many years of playing games that use point systems to create the character you want to play, Traveller seems like quite the throwback. The character generation process is a game in-itself — the PC can die before he/she gets out of generation! Then there’s situations like rolling up a character with a Strength of 12 (on a 1-12 scale), Dexterity of 12, and an Endurance of 4. It’s hard to make sense out of those sorts of stats, but you know, it can be done, and at age 52 (rather than 15), I can see the fun of doing it. How about, a big fat guy who is really strong, and has great hand eye coordination, but is just TOO HEAVY. That works! And it might make the character kind of interesting as well.
Then there’s the skills. This isn’t like GURPS where there are dozens of skills and you decide how good your character will be at them. There are fewers skills, but they tend to be a bit broader in focus. Medic. Pilot. Engineer. Gun Combat (pick a particular gun). Jack of All Trades (I’ve always loved this one). So you don’t have the really detailed differences in PC stats that you might seen in GURPS or the Hero System. It’s more on the player to create an interesting backstory and give the PC some personality.
Looking at all the books together, it’s pretty clear why our games back in 1979-1981 always involved going to a planet, buying new guns, killing a lot of people, running to another planet, and repeat. We were young, immature, and really didn’t know that much about science fiction, and frankly we didn’t really do that much real roleplaying. The boxed set give you such a flexible framework within which to build a game that we just didn’t know what to do with it.
Finally (for now), I have to admit that the lack of a very workable improvement system for characters still kind of puts me off a bit. On the bright side, it encourages good storytelling and roleplaying. However, it does kind of suck to go through a lot of games and your character doesn’t really improve. A PC has to age four years, during which he/she studies like a maniac, to learn new skills or improve at old ones. I’m sure some of the newer versions of Traveller probably address this issue. I could see using the GURPS version of Traveller, and using the old books as source material and inspiration.
I’m thinking that after our next GURPS CyberTex game I may have my players roll up some old Traveller characters and see what we can do with this.
I had the bug the other night, so I ordered an old boxed set of the Classic Traveller core books, plus some supplement, off of ebay. Looking forward to getting them and maybe running a game.
This is a repost of something I wrote several years ago as I was returning to Traveller, the greatest RPG even created.
As I think back over my early days of gaming and GMing, the memories are flooding back. When I started in 1979, there weren’t hundreds of RPGs. Most of the time my friends and I played D&D, but one guy had the game Traveller, so we played that too. Eventually we all bought the game.
Traveller was great because it was about space, and was really flexible. The basic set came in a box and had 3 little black books of rules. They sold a lot of supplements. I don’t think there was a single illustration in the core set. Something about the books made you feel smart.
The game mechanics had rules for spaceship combat, interstellar commerce, and other cool stuff, but at 15 we mostly just blew stuff up. Get in the spaceship, go to a planet, get drunk, find a weapons dealer, buy some plasma rifles, and start killing. When the Law got on our asses we’d hop in our ship, the Hellfire, and take off, usually destroying more people and ships on the way out of the system. Mass murder and mayhem on a glorious scale.
It helped that our GM 1)just wanted his friends to be happy and 2)didn’t seem to have actually read any of the rules beyond character generation. His answer to any question of skill was “roll two dice”. We had no idea what we were rolling for, and neither most likely did he, but we all had fun and that’s all that mattered. Clearly, we never got bogged down in game mechanics…heh heh.
Our GM got into gaming really early. Every Wednesday night he went to this huge gaming meetup at Richland Junior College, here in Dallas. He was friends with lots of older gamers. One of them was a computer programmer. He gave our GM this gigantic hex map, with planets dotting it. Each planet had a number, and there was a computer printout on which the characteristics of each planet were given — randomly generated by a program this guy had written. Pretty cool. We were in awe.
As we got older, and better game systems were released, we tended to gravitate toward the new stuff. Hero Games’ Champions was a prime example. Flexible, great combat system, etc. Game Designer’s Workshop, the authors of Traveller, have continued to release new editions of the game, but we never played them. We stuck to the original when we wanted hot space action. There was something really cool about that little box, with the 3 original books, and maybe having a couple of the supplemental books and a bunch of dice crammed in there. It was stripped down roleplaying. It was all on you and the GM.
This is a test post for a blog about 2d6 science fiction roleplaying games. More later. Testing themes.
