Originally posted here: https://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2022/05/review-megatraveller-1987.html

It is 1987. The year I graduated from High School and my first year in University. I knew about MegaTraveller, anyone that read Dragon Magazine even as infrequently as I was then knew about it. But again it is not a game I played. I do recall seeing it* played at a local con (SIU had a bunch of them) but (and this is the asterix) I could not really tell if it was Classic Traveller or MegaTraveller at the time. They had a lot of cool spaceships on a black hex map. I would not actually read MegaTraveller until the late 1990s. I was working on my Ph.D. and commuting all over Chicago. I found a local library that would honor my U of I Chicago library card and they had a copy of the MegaTraveller Player's Manual. I can't recall my impressions of the time all that much, just a memory of being on the commuter train and reading it.

Rereading it now I find the rules are largely similar to Classic Traveller. I know some clarifications and changes have been made but I am not qualified enough to pick them out.

The thing that is most obvious is the setting. The Emporer has been killed along with all his heirs and his assassin is claiming the throne. And so are about half a dozen or more people. So the empire has fallen and this is called the "Time of Rebellion." Does Traveller have...Star Wars envy?? I am sure that is not 100% true.

I have NO data to back this up, but my perception is that MegaTraveller was a hit. I think it appealed to people that wanted to play but not have to get into 10 years worth of back product. In many cases my D&D analogy extends here with MegaTraveller as AD&D 2nd Edition. The Jim Holloway art certainly helps that along.

My understanding is that MegaTraveller came as a boxed set. With Players's and Referee's books. Today you can get them as PDF via DriveThruRPG or from Far Future Enterprises. I will be considering the PDFs from DriveThruRPG for these reviews. It is nice to have these now after so many years.

In general, the scans are ok to good. Some attempt has been made to clean them up, but they are obviously scanned from printed products and not the original files. They are OCR'ed and have bookmarks. The scans look fine on my PC and on my iPad, but I don't think they would work well for Print on Demand yet.

MegaTraveller Referee's Manual

PDF. 108 pages. Color covers, black & white interior art.

The Referee's Manual opens with the various factions vying for control in the Imperium. Just a page, but it really set the tone for me. I can see how this would be a great game to play with the various factions working with and against each other for ultimate control while the PCs work whatever angles they can to either get more power or just stay alive. I was skeptical of change when I first read it, but now re-reading it many years later I am very excited about it.

This book covers similar territory as the Players' book, save from the game master's perspective. Again I am drawn in by the parallels of the format and layout of this game as AD&D 2nd Ed. which will hit the stands in another 2 years. I am not suggesting TSR copied GDW but instead that this was something that was a logical extension of many 2nd Edition games released around this time.

There is a longer breakdown of Tasks and resolutions here that makes me happy to see. I never ran a Traveller game, but with this book I think I could.

Star System and World Creation is next including a discussion on world profiles. It is detailed, without being overly so, and will get any Ref going on world creation. It doesn't have the same feel to me as the Classic Traveller section doing the same thing, but I think that is fine. Lots of tables here and no equations to solve. Kinda miss that.

Sections on Animals and Encounters are similar to their Classic Traveller counterparts. Detailed enough to keep you going for a while

Trade and Commerce cover the next 10 pages. Again, brief but enough to start. I imagine that entire books can (and maybe have) been written on this topic. I also imagine that this is an area where the Imperium's fall would also be a prime place for adventures. Smuggling cargo, protecting shipping lanes, getting something like medical supplies to another part of the system but other factions want to stop you or steal what you have? Yeah, lots of ideas.

Craft Design and Evaluation cover the next 34 or so pages. More craft seem to be available to the MegaTraveller character/group than the Classic Traveller ones. If this review is late in posting it was because I was making starships again. With CT I like system building more, here I like starship building more.

This is logically followed by Starship Combat.

We end with a couple of stellar maps.

Reading through these now I kind of lament not getting in on this fun back then. Classic Traveller with all its supplements, and add-ons, and alien modules, and board games seemed like a steep hill to climb. I erroneously felt MegaTraveller was the same way. Just looking through was DriveThruRPG and FFE have on their sites it doesn't seem to be that much to me know. It is still far more than want to buy right now and far more than I'll ever play, but it is nice to know it is all there.

The electronic version I downloaded of the MT Players' Manual making searching a lot easier than my soft cover copy. I look forward to purchasing more material from DriveThruRPG.

While this is my favorite RPG Ruleset of all time, the scan suffers from a few major issues: 1) the inside cover map is unreadable at the DPI used in scanning it. 2) there are missing pages (2 of them, one of which has content of an introductory nature, the other has no significant content) 3) the OCR was horrid 4) The errata is neither included nor integrated (and there is QUITE a bunch of it).

It is, however, an awesome system.

I'd rate the rules a 4.9/5 I'd rate the PDF as 3/5 over all ignoring rules I'd rate the Layout as 4/5 I'd rate the editing as a 1/5 simply due to the massive errata errors.

Also, it is important to understand that the OCR searchable text makes the original text look well edited.

There are a few major problems with this PDF scan. Firstly, I have no idea where pages 4 and 5 are. The e-book jumps from page 3 (the Table of Contents) to page 6. I've never owned a hard copy of the MegaTraveller rulebooks, so I can't say for certain whether the two white pages illustrating the Spinward Marches sector map and the Third Imperium map are what are supposed to appear on pages 4 and 5 or not, but my gut is telling me "No", because the Table of Contents describes page 5 as the "Introduction"... and it looks as though page 6 is just a part of some main section that describes sci-fi roleplaying in more detail. Caveat emptor.

Another problem is the fact that the Spinward Marches map is completely illegible and thus entirely useless. Starport codes on the map are extremely difficult -- if not impossible -- to read and system names are entirely impossible to read. Even the map legend is illegible.

I'm rather disappointed with the scan quality, as the pages are quite obviously not centred and are not scanned at very high resolution to boot. Much of the file size is undoubtedly the little grainy dots on each page (treated as images by the PDF format) that surround all of the printed text; it's pretty much a direct OCR rip from a lossy JPEG scan of the rulebook. If the document were actually remastered, or at least scanned in full 24-bit bitmap with the contrast maximised to make it purely monochrome, I imagine the file size would shrink from 17.7 MB (18.5 MiB) to somewhere in the vicinity of 5 MB or even less. You'll also discover that the angled scans of the pages cause the select tool in Adobe Reader or whatever other PDF reader you use to jump between font sizes, a definite sign of overly permissive OCR.

As for the product itself, I'm feeling as though MegaTraveller is definitely the best version of the Traveller system. The other versions seem to make a habit of dumbing down the bits of the game that make it so much more detailed than other game systems... a real shame. The MegaTraveller storyline does go contrary to the methodology of being able to go anywhere and trade with anyone due to the civil war, but if you don't like that setting you can go ahead and create your own galaxy replete with background, which shouldn't be hard at all given how powerful the planetary generation rules are.

I tend to think of MegaTraveller as a significant spiritual ancestor of GURPS, especially with regards to its Tech Levels which are duplicated almost exactly in every GURPS system. There's even a GURPS Traveller out there which you might also want to pick up.

Finally, be wary of the price. The retail price of the book is, and always has been, $10.00. DriveThruRPG is charging $19.95 and then offering you the $10.00 price as a "discount". This seems a little underhanded to me.