This is the best version of traveller. I highly recomend this version to anyone wanting to get into traveller or for anyone who used to play traveller.

Traveller was the RPG I cut my GMing teeth on in high school. it brings joy to my heart to see that there are people out there still making stuff for this game!

I still have both the 1977 and 1981 editions of CT, with the supporting cast of Supplements, Adventures, et alia. I bought a copy of this and paired it with an extra copy of Citizens of the Imperium to give players a better choice of Career other than Other. Quite satisfied with the print quality and having the Errata handy is a good addition.

This is literally the 1981 boxed set 3 books in a single volume, plus the errata and clarifications since 1981. The original format was about 5.5×8.5 inches, while this one, when printed, is about 6×9 inches. There are margin markers for errata, and the errata is in the back. If one likes old school gaming, and sci-fi, this is where I started in September 1983. ¶ There is no included setting in the core rules, but some skeletal elements are present due to rules, most especially the world generation. The crew requirements for starships, the lack of Up-Or-Out in military service, the 6 included careers (Navy, Marine, Army, Scout, Merchant, and Other. (I've always read Other as essentially mobsters, drifters, and lowlife, due to the skills they can get).¶ The game has a strong "shotguns & starships" element, shared with IPs such as Firefly and Cowboy Bebop. Only two energy weapons are presented for personal combat: laser carbines and laser pistols. Information travels via ship between systems, and the FTL drive is a fixed duration for up to the drive rating's distance in parsecs.¶ There are rules for starship construction, operation, and combat. There are rules for small tramp freighter trade. There are rules to help you build encounter tables, and building critters for out-of-urban encounters. There are psionics rules, too - but PCs do not start with those abilities.¶ And, yes, in this edition, your character can die in character generation.¶ The POD quality is excellent, too. Just note: The book is white cover, not the usual CT Black.

Just as you remember it! In one book not 3 - but no less easy to use. You have literally everything except D6 you need to get started playing here. I still like the old "can die during character creation" method - it stops people from shooting for old mega skilled types all the time. The rules are very "hard sci-fi" and suit Star Trek more than Star Wars style campaigns - and they do it well.

This is a reprint with some notes. Being the original SCI FI RPG it was a bold experiment in roleplaying especially with the lack of an experience system that encouraged more roleplay then number crunching. This is a good thing because the number crunching in this game can get seriously complex. If you want to give the original a try then go ahead this is a great introduction. Younger gamers may want to try one of the later editions.

This is a nice way for people to get their hands on the 1981 edition. I bought the print edition, and if I end up running a game, then my players can easily get hold of the same edition either free as a PDF or relatively cheaply in print.

The only disadvantage compared to the original is that it doesn't lie flat. So I'll probably use my 1981 books for consulting tables during play, but this copy is great for quickly checking rules or for having with me while away from home.

A fine toolkit for making one's science fiction RPG.

Lots of implied setting with space to make one's own.

Avoid even with discount.

This is an incredibly low quality product, not only is it a low effort, badly put together, incomplete mess, you can even see text with different font and size pasted over the original text so badly you can still see bits of the old text peeking around the shody patch of newer text.

$20 is a joke, I paid $3 and I still feel ripped off.

Overly complicated. Almost no pictures. The author rambles and uses unnecessarily complex language in order to sound smart. Instead you get a clunky RPG that promisses a lot and delivers little.

I bought it because it's often concidered a classic. I can't see myself ever actually playing this.

Very playable even today. This reprint is a very practical introduction to the mechanics of Classic Traveller. And will feel very familiar to anyone playing other editions of Traveller or clones like Cepheus Engine. I bought the print edition and it was very readable in the slim paperback form, maybe not the easiest to reference at the table but lots of bookmarks and print outs in a binder cheaply solves that problem. You can get a lot of gaming done with just this book and some 6-sided dice. If you've never tried Traveller, grab this and roll up a character. You'll immdiately want to go on an adventure once you get a taste!

A wonderful piece of nostalgia, put together with skill. The scans are clear, with the possible exception of the blank subsector map, but these days a cunning Traveller can easily find that elsewhere. And it's not only nostalgia: the rules still work, and the game is playable. Excellent package.

Good job. I ordered the print on demand version. It's very well made and quite cheap. I never had the original LBB but I always wanted a print copy of them, this seemed to be the next best thing. I was correct, I'm very satisified and glad I. have this book.

So great! No more flipping back and forth (wasn't there an errata on that?? let me find it...) Great, great job that keeps this game alive another few decades.

Originally posted here: https://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2022/05/review-classic-basic-traveller.html

It's May and I want to spend the entire month talking about Sci-Fi RPGs, and most of this month talking about Traveller. Traveller has a long and storied history in both the RPG world and for me personally. It is the second (or the third, more on that) RPG I ever owned after D&D.

I say second but my memory is foggy and it could have been Traveller or it could have been Chill. I think for my horror cred I like to claim it was Chill, but in the early 80s, I was all about Science Fiction. So really it was most likely to be Traveller. I picked up the Traveller Book and tried to teach to it to myself, but my groups were very D&D focused and no one wanted to play it. The groups that did play it were all older than I was and they did not want some "D&D kid" in their "Serious Sci-Fi" groups. I was able to more traction on Star Frontiers a few years later. Must have been the TSR bias of the time. I do wish I still had my original Traveller Book though. I did manage to score an Original Traveller boxed set of the "Little Black Books" so I guess that is even better.

Today I am going to review Traveller and start at the very beginning. There is just no way I could through everything for Traveller. I'd need more than a month, I'd need a whole new blog, so instead, I was going to going to concentrate on some core products to get people into the game and a few choice ones that have meaning to me.

I will admit right up front that I am no Traveller expert. So it is very, very likely I will miss a few a things. Just let me, and others, know in the comments.

Classic Traveller

For this review, I am going to be referring to my 1977 Game Designers' Workshop edition of the boxed set of Traveller. I am also joining to be comparing them the PDFs of the Classic Traveller Facsimile Edition from Game Designers' Workshop / Far Future Enterprises on DriveThruRPG.

Side Note: Far Future Enterprises bought the rights to various GDW games a while back and published this pdf as far back as 2001. They own the rights to republish Traveller, 2300 AD, Twilight: 2000, and Dark Conspiracy. They also work with Mongoose and other publishers of Traveller material. But more on that in future posts. Suffice to say that from my point of view they have been carrying the torch of Traveller high since 2000. Among other things they publish a full CD-ROM of Traveller material that I would love to grab someday.

The Boxed Set

The Traveller Boxed Set from GDW was released in 1977. GDW was located in Normal, IL which is along what I learned was a trail the lead from Lake Geneva, WI, and Chicago, IL all the way down to the University of Illinois in Urbana, IL, Illinois State in Normal, IL down to Southern Illinois Univerity in Carbondale, IL. Tim Kask was an SIU grad, GDW was in Normal, Mayfair would later be founded in Skokie just outside of Chicago, and Judges Guild was founded in Decatur, IL. I basically grew up surrounded by the growing Table Top RPG scene.

Much like Dungeons & Dragons of the time, Traveller came in a digest-sized box with three books. Instead of there being "3 Little Brown Books" there are "3 Little Black Books." Also, like D&D future printings would combine these books though in different ways.

PDF Note: The Classic Traveller Facsimile Edition also includes a preface for the whole set of books and gives a brief history of their publications. This is a great value-add for the PDF. According to it what I am reviewing today is "Basic Traveller" and published in 1981. Basic Revised was published in 1981 and the Traveller Book (my first purchase) was in 1982.

Book 1: Characters and Combat

This is the character generation book and maybe one of the most famous bit of RPG lore ever. Yes. In Traveller you can die in Character creation!

I should also point out that very, very often in my conversations with people over the years that Character Creation for Travelller was very much in line with what we would call "Session 0" today. Everyone worked on their character, developed a back story (yes in 1977) and then got together. Even the starting character example is a 42-year-old with a pension (and a cutlass it seems). Trust me, at 42 I already had backstory (and a wife, kids, a mortgage, bills...)

Character creation is largely a random affair, but not wholly so. There are choices to be made along the way. How a character acquires skills and expertise largely depends on which service they were in and how they got there. You can enlist or you can be drafted. At this point, all characters were assumed to have served in some form of the service. Citizens don't mortgage their pension on a beat second-hand starship to go galavanting across known space.

As you work through character creation you can go for a few terms of service. This gives you more skill, more experience, more credits, and makes you older. As in real life, there are benefits and detriments to age.

Skills are detailed next. This is going to come up again and again, but let's talk about it here first. The Computers of Traveller are the computers of 1977. Not very advanced and require special expertise to use them. Today of course I am writing this post in one window, monitoring email and chat in another, watching the weather in another, and reading the PDF in yet another. I have dozens of active programs running that I am paying attention to and who knows how many more running in the background. I am not going to apply 21st-century biases though to these rules. Let's just leave them as-is for now and see how future versions of this game treat it. For me I am going to assume there are computers (with a lower case c) that do all the work we think of today and anyone can use and then there are specialized Computers (with an upper case C) that do specialized work, like today's supercomputers.

Side Note: The best super-computer of 1977 was the 80mhz, 64 bit Cray-1. It cost $8M and was capable of 160 MFLOPS. For comparison, my three-year-old smartphone runs at 130ghz and is capable of 658 GFLOPS. Newer phones are more than double that. 4000x's the power at 1/10,000th of the cost. And I can put it into my pocket.

After your terms of service are figured out along with your skills then comes the time to learn combat. Combat always gets more ink than say hacking a computer since there are so many things going on and a failure usually means death. Also, as an aside, there are a lot of bladed weapons in Traveller. I attribute this to two different elements. The first and obvious is Star Wars, though Traveller obviously draws more from Dune than Star Wars which only came out in May of 77. The other and likely more important source is D&D. For the obvious reasons. The end effect is that officers in Traveller often carry swords in my mind.

Combat gives us our basic roll for the game and the introduction of the Traveller basic mechanic. The PDF is a little clearer on this than my print book. Roll 2d6 and beat a roll of 8. This is modified by various skills and experiences.

Wounds affect the character's Strength, Dexterity, and Endurance. The more wounds you get, the worse those stats are. D&D would not do this in earnest until 4th Edition.

PDF Notes: My copy is dedicated "To Mary Beth" and the PDF (and I think the Traveller Book) are dedicated "To Darlene." There are other minor differences as well. The PDF for example has a "Personal Data and History" aka a Character Sheet on page 28 (36 for the PDF).

Book 2: Starships

This is what makes Traveller, well, Traveller. There are two types of travel dealt with here, Interplanetary (worlds within the same star system) and Interstellar (different star systems). Also if you are afraid of math this book is going to give you a bad day.

The main focus of this book in my mind is buying a starship and keeping it running. Starships are expensive and in Traveller, those expenses are more keenly felt than say keeping up a castle in D&D. If your castle runs out of food you can leave to go buy some. In a starship, in space, your options are more limited. In space, no one can hear your stomach grumble.

I have no idea if the economies of Traveller work. I mean is 2 tons of fuel really worth the year's salary of a gunner? No idea. I am going to handwave that and say it works.

There is also a lot on Starship construction here too. Before I could get anyone to play I would write up sheets of starships and their costs based on what I thought was cool. Kinda wish I had a couple of those. The only one I can remember was the FTL Lucifer. It was designed to be small, but fast. It would later make it's way into Star Frontiers, but that is another tale.

We get some details on starship combat and some basic world data.

Book 2 also covers experience and various drugs. I get the feeling these were put here to pad out Book 2 so all three books were the same size; 44 pages.

PDF Notes: The PDF has more art, in particular how to orbit a planet and the necessary equations made more clear. Like Book 1 for Characters, this volume has sheets for ships. The PDF also adds a Trade and Commerce section.

Book 3: Worlds and Adventures

This book covers worlds. And if there was one thing I did more than creating starships that never traveled to other worlds, it was to create worlds that starships would never travel to. World creation was fun.

This book also covers various personal equipment and various encounter types.

Note at this point there are no aliens, no Imperiums, and really nothing other than the most basic adventuring outline. Very much like OD&D in that respect. I like the psionic system in Traveller and maybe I should explore the differences between it and the one in Eldritch Wizardry for D&D.

The last part of this book covers Psionics. Maybe one of the reasons I like to draw a pretty hard line between Magic and Psionics is that one is for Fantasy (and D&D) and the other is for Sci-Fi (and Traveller).

PDF Notes: The PDF again has more art (vehicles) as well as hex maps for working out star systems.

Final Notes

How does one review a classic like Traveller? How does one compare an RPG from 1977 to the standards of 2022? It's not easy under normal circumstances, but with Traveller it is easier. Why? Because so much of this game was ahead of its time you could brush it off, get some d6s and play it out of the box as is today. More so than OD&D is I think.

But both games are classics, no, Classics. With that capital C. It is no wonder that now, 45 years later, Traveller is still the goto science-fiction game.

As I move through the editions and versions I'll also talk about all the other materials that have been used with Traveller (board games for example) and how these "3LBBs" expanded to cover an entire universe.