Traveller is scrumptious, if you don’t gorge yourself

I regret the decisions that I make when eating at buffets. Time and again, I fall for the classic blunder of piling my plate high with a semi-enjoyable dish from near the beginning, only to curse fate when I find I don’t have enough space left for the thing that I discover I really love.

It’s easy to make the same mistake with classic sci-fi game Traveller. The current publisher, Mongoose, has produced a smorgasbord of content for the game, ranging from huge sandbox settings and multipartite grand campaigns to compilations (totalling 18 volumes!) of assorted alien species, small adventures, ships, equipment and lore. This frenzied cornucopia disguises a fantastic mercantile game tucked away in nothing more than the 2022 Core Rulebook, which, over the course of a campaign I’m still running, I have grown to love.

I recently ranted about how some TTRPGs are written with the expectation of irreverence towards their rules, while other games want you to treat their rulesets with the care, diligence, and trust you might afford a cast iron frying pan. Although the general Traveller product line finds itself in the former group, I think the trading rules, spread in a haphazard manner throughout the 2022 Core Rulebook, are certainly more befitting of the latter. The final chapter contains procedures for creating a ‘subsector’ of charted space: an 8x10 hex grid populated with around 40 planets, which I managed to roll up in about 90 minutes. This was the only prep work I needed to do for the whole campaign.¹ For each planet, the procedures generate a meticulous characterisation in terms of technology, geography, and culture, all of which is wrapped up into an 8-digit hexadecimal code, the Universal World Profile (UWP). This seems ridiculous: how can something as complex and multifaceted as culture be reduced to three numbers, without rendering all the constituent elements hollow and one-dimensional? You might breathe a sigh of disappointment when I tell you that the trick, of course, is that you have to bring it alive yourself. But with Traveller, the process of squeezing out your creative juices feels more like well-supported artistic craft than stressful slog, because of a clever design trick: including a default activity for the players to do.

The best GMing happens when you have a few moments to stop and think about the world, its inhabitants, and their interrelationships. Sure, it’s a good skill to be able to come up with things when you’re under the gun, but I frequently find my second idea is better than my first,² and the most common reason I’m not able to go with my second idea is the frenetic pace of the typical TTRPG session. This is alleviated when a dungeon includes a puzzle, because it gives me time to look over the keys of the neighbouring rooms, thereby allowing me to broaden my theatre of operations and draw in extra ingredients to enhance whatever I’m brewing. Traveller’s trade system serves a similar function. This charming mini-game, involving a table of 36 trade goods, is simple enough to run almost without GM input. Through a clever system of ‘trade tags,’ it is, however, tied so well to the worlds in your subsector that it carries real stakes for the players. If followed scrupulously,³ the ship mortgage rules leave the player characters financially off-balance, pushing them to fly across the subsector in pursuit of a good deal. The trade tags dictate on which worlds a given product will sell well, and at the same time secretly smuggle in lore about the world: agricultural worlds always need a big supply of robots for their planet-scale mass farming.

While players chew on the decisions posed by this system (which manage to remain meaningful without becoming overbearing),⁴ the GM is free to ponder details of the world, figure out how to best integrate the next random encounter, or quickly sketch out details of a five-node mystery. In my campaign, I had to satisfyingly explain why a watery planet happened to be one of the foremost exporters of robots in the galaxy. I decided that the robots are self-assembling nanites that bio-mimic coral, growing in iridescent underwater farms resembling reefs; had I been pressed for time, the results would instead have been doubtlessly more cliché. World-building was transformed into a pleasant paint-by-numbers job, where usually reconciling these inconsistencies is a minor source of stress and panic when I run games.

It would be remiss of me not to mention Traveller’s unique and brilliant system of character creation. You make broad decisions about your character’s career every four years of their life, but the specifics are determined by a set of random tables that feel alive. You might make enemies because you were a notorious prankster at university, ace the army recruitment exam then get thrown out because your superior officer was corrupt, go to prison, get married to a prisoner you meet, chug anti-aging drugs so you can stay fit and healthy long enough to rise the never-ending⁵ ranks of the corporate pyramid, all the while leaving rivals, enemies, jilted lovers, and the occasional ally in your wake. The game uses the list of careers (and the random event tables within those careers) to slip you some side-doses of world-building, while at the same time giving you dramatic moments where you could insert the other player characters into your backstory.

If you resist the temptations offered by flashy spaceship mods, spreadsheet-based armada management, or grand mega-adventures, the simple core of Traveller is a sleek trading caravan game that, while not necessarily offering the largest tank of imagination fuel on the market, contains one of the most fuel-efficient engines you can find.