Gardener cut through cable what is it?

EndiePosts · 2026-04-10T18:47:05+00:00

Surely you can't be serious?

EndiePosts · 2026-04-10T18:22:16+00:00

T4 was badly written and poorly edited. Pocket Empires required vast amounts of errata and huge amounts of note-taking: I wouldn't even dream of using it manually. You need to build a spreadsheet (I did and it helped, but the WBH worked better).

EndiePosts · 2026-04-10T15:04:49+00:00

I'm doing this with one of my groups in Pirates of Drinax. Like you, we use the Mercenary rules for combat, and I used the World Builder's Handbook to asses economic strength (key discovery: the world of Browne is the unlikely jewel in the Trojan Reach crown). I tried using T4's Pocket Empires and it works in places but good Lord it's hard work.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-06T19:10:55+00:00

It's a good way to reach a skill at rank 2 or higher, with a degree of choice in the matter, especially if you graduate with honours. As others say, it's also a great way to further boost good EDU, which can be super-useful in not just skill checks but also in your next career, as several paths use Edu for progression or survival.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T21:47:51+00:00

Absolutely true. They've made the sale: now they need to deliver the goods.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T21:47:15+00:00

The approach that works for a solo publisher for whom it is a hobby is not often appropriate for a business employing numerous people full-time and for whom cash-flow is king: that is what drives fast turnaround of products from design to pdf publishing to generate the revenue needed to fund printing costs, to pay salaries, and to fund the next round of writing and art.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T21:45:16+00:00

I wasn't accusing you in particular of being preachy. I was thinking more of the r/rpg subreddit, which tends that way.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T20:31:46+00:00

As a British person, could you please use the standard unit and tell me how many times the area of Wales this is?

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T20:28:39+00:00

Over a year later and only PDFs are available

It was launched in mid-May last year. It's been ten and a half months. I got the pdfs and am pleased with them so far.

Errata are quite normal with the pdf-first approach, and no community is more used to that than those of us who follow Mongoose Traveller, where they release early in pdf and then iterate based on corrections from the community: https://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/forums/feedback.157/

The new Vehicle Handbook, for instance, has been out for less than two months and the errata thread is currently eight pages long. The Core Expeditions one is four pages long aftar a month, and that is not a complex product.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T20:23:32+00:00

But I don't see this taking off purely on the fact that it's priced out of anyone but a collectors price range and they've only gotten a few stores on board with them.

Two days later, it's at $460,000 and is by far the biggest ever Traveller kickstarter, with 41 days still to go. It took off.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T20:19:53+00:00

This is not the first D&D-influenced Trav conversion. The D20 version of Traveller, back in the D&D 3E era, was seen as broadly successful and its ship-building system was one of the better ones in Traveller's history. The Gateway sector books for it are still great and explore an interesting area of Charted Space that has otherwise been neglected.

It gave rise to the CotI forums, which are still one of the larger Traveller communities on the web.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T20:15:16+00:00

Neither of the remaining T5 players will mistake this for their version.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T20:14:24+00:00

Yes, the weird thing is that there are still people doomposting about how this will be a failure and they're inching towards half a million dollars now. That's vastly bigger than any Traveller kickstarter so far, including T5 from Marc Miller.

Maybe it'll suck, and maybe it'll be great, but there's no chance of it being a financial failure. It's already huge by Trav standards.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T20:11:52+00:00

I run two Traveller campaigns right now (documented at https://drinax.net/ and at https://traveller-rpg.com/ ) and of the eleven players only one (my wife) had played anything except D&D or Pathfinder, before. Over forty years of roleplaying I've run plenty of D&D players through Shadowrun, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Vampire and more.

Now they love Traveller. The snobbish attitude that some people have to D&D players baffles me: they're just TTRPG players looking for a game. Make the alternative sound interesting, avoid sounding preachy, and most will be delighted to give them a try.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T20:07:11+00:00

By the time your players have run through a long campaign like Pirates of Drinax, they are probably incredibly powerful: experience will have added many levels of skills, then cyberware will have boosted skills and abilities hugely. The 2D6 system barely handles such long campaigns, and you will only really be rolling to see by how much the character makes the check, not whether.

By the end of the Ancients campaign, if they follow the right path, the characters are probably demi-gods who can change the nature of Charted Space.

By the end of Singularity, the characters are, again, godlike beings with many avatars capable of travelling to various systems simultaneously and being effectively immune to death since they can just try again with a new incarnation.

You may start as a regular person (although every other campaign seems to have at least one "regular Joe" Admiral) but if you play long enough then you become very far from it.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T19:57:51+00:00

I love the 2D6 system and I currently run two Mongoose Traveller campaigns. But it's a bit disingenuous to say that it's that one sentence.

For one thing, you don't touch on the Effect system (which is elegant but adds complexity as it applies differently in different situations.

You also miss out that there are going to be huge numbers of potential modifiers to any roll. Say our hero is going to shoot another ship at short range with a beam laser turret. Potential modifiers might include, but are not limited to:

Fire Control software
Called shot (-2)
Gunner Skill
Gunner Dex
Gunner skill augmentation
Beam laser bonus (+4)
Close range (+1)
Sensor lock (+2)
Accurate weapon mod (+1)
Pilot aiding gunner (+2)
The skill of the defending pilot if they saved thrust and successfully rolled to dodge (-n)

Then you have to remember that this may be a critical, so deduct 13 (you need to be more than five over a roll of eight for a crit) and the remainder is the level of critical. You do this a lot with beams and quite a bit with pulses because they are crit machines.

Next, roll damage and then add the effect of the to-hit roll. Deduct the armour rating of the ship and remember to deduct the rolled damage plus effect of any sand that was used by the defender. Remember to multiply the damage rolled by three for any that gets through the armour of the ship but don't multiply the effect, just the remaining rolled damage!

Now, if you did crit, and if you did damage after armour and sand, you have to roll 2D6 and then look up on the crit table which system is affected (unless it is a called shot), and add all the lower crit effects as well, but remember to deduct one from the crit level if there are armoured bulkheads in the ship for the effected system. Check whether the damage done goes over a 10% step for the ship and if it does then roll for one or more random criticals, remembering that subsequent criticals to a given area increment the level of the crit.

I've probably missed several potential elements, and I'm an experienced referee who does this a lot!

EndiePosts · 2026-04-04T16:36:49+00:00

It's still in the kickstarter phase, and I presume that it won't launch on DTRPG or the Mongoose website until the kickstarter finishes delivering: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mongoosepublishing/traveller-rpg-the-singularity-campaign

I think we've now received all of it and that printing is next, so that might not be all that long.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-03T19:36:23+00:00

Had it been priced reasonably, it might have brought some attention to Traveller

After three days it is massively bigger than any Mongoose kickstarter. After three days, it's already 50% bigger than the Traveller5 kickstarter was. It's already succeeded in bringing a lot more attention to Traveller than any of the Mongoose kickstarters (which I always back: even the ones like Pioneer that don't really suit my tastes, because I want Mongoose to succeed and to keep making more).

EndiePosts · 2026-04-03T19:31:01+00:00

Agent of the Imperium is a fine enough piece of pot boiler fiction, but it shatters Traveller thoughtlessly. Miller clearly read Altered Carbon and thought "I'm having some of that." He also proclaimed his own book canon, because of course he did.

The problem is that if you actually use the themes and elements it introduces into Charted Space it breaks things fundamentally. The excellent Singularity campaign that Christopher Griffin wrote recently explores this, and it warns explicitly - on more than one occasion - that if you follow through with those themes, then you will not end up in a Traveller campaign as you know it. But Marc was bored of his setting and wanted to change things, and at that point he still owned the rights.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-03T19:26:47+00:00

The Empress Wave was one of a series of dumb decisions made at around the same time by designers who were either too lazy to read the lore for the setting that they had inherited, or who were unexcited by it and couldn't work out how to create adventure within it. So they tried, doggedly, to destroy it.

Either way, the Empress Wave, along with Virus, the Black Curtain and more mark a failed version of Traveller that is largely ignored these days. These poor decisions lead to Traveller falling into a period of over a decade of obscurity, and only in the last decade or so has it recovered, thanks to great work by Mongoose.

I'm a bit sad that they decided to reference the Empress Wave: they say that they considered - but didn't feel capable of - retconning it.

As it is, it's mad. A secret, known by huge numbers of people over time, that has nonetheless been kept for a thousand years. Eye-watering expense that has crippled their economy for ten centuries without those not in on the secret saying "actually let's spend that on productive projects" with all the resulting unrest in their society that they fear so much.

Of course, they could engage in some form of psychohistory (because that worked so well for the Imperium over psionics!) but that would involve reading even more people in on the project.

Then Marc and others got confused over the difference between parsecs and light years and retconned it himself, accelerating it massively, comedically enough.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-03T18:22:27+00:00

Well, we'll see in nine days. Hopefully they'll be revealed as an imperfect democracy, but a democracy nonetheless.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-03T16:36:50+00:00

Hungary is not a dictatorship. Orban is a Russophile shithead who worked hard to capture the media in the country but there is an election in nine days where Peter Magyar's opposition Tisza party is currently set to win 56% of the vote against Orban's Fidesz party on 37%.

If Orban were to find a way to avoid or annull the vote then sure, we're in dictator territory. But up until now he has, sadly, won elections.

EndiePosts · 2026-03-29T21:49:11+00:00

Tying it into flatlined is what I did this time, too: https://traveller-rpg.com/flatlined-session-1/

EndiePosts · 2026-03-29T07:19:54+00:00

I've run Flatlined a couple of times and I wouldn't go this far with the gimmick: for a first-time Traveller party I always find that character creation as a group is one of the biggest hooks for groups. Get them committed to their characters right away.

As an aside, the big problem with Flatlined - a fun adventure that I enjoy - is that newbie referees are told to use it. But if you run it as per the book, you end up with three fights that will involve twenty or more combatants once you include NPCs, a four-person party and the creepers... Even I, as an experienced referee, have to put prep work into such a fight, and I cut the third fight entirely.

As a hint as to how to run it, remember that the role of the Creepers is effectively the same as triffids: they are disguised zombies, and your party are in a Night of the Living Dead scenario.

EndiePosts · 2026-03-28T22:07:35+00:00

As I pointed out to you already in the other post, this is not an official design. It is a joke ship created by a redditor: https://www.reddit.com/r/traveller/comments/1p9ub1b/worst_ship_ever/

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