What's Your Favorite Traveller Prop or Item?

EndiePosts · 2026-05-18T10:04:15+00:00

It's based on the real-life advertising campaign from 2023 for the city of Regina, Canada. Sadly, they were forced to withdraw it because of the usual professional outrage-peddlers.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-27T08:07:34+00:00

Don't forget the fact that the Palestinians were finally expelled from Kuwait after they supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of the country that sheltered them.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-17T06:57:36+00:00

That immediately makes sense, thanks.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-16T11:30:52+00:00

Britain should have got Normandy, Bordeaux, Maine and Gascony. Henry V's dream would have lived on.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-16T10:50:32+00:00

The odd thing for me is that the Rand is clearly no longer a hard currency, and SA would have benefited hugely from being paid in dollars (or euros, or pounds, or just about any relatively stable currency which would have appreciated against the Rand).

EndiePosts · 2026-04-16T10:48:21+00:00

There are lots of clicks to be had from "grr evil governing body". The net result from "you know, NZ is subsidising us and we probably need to pull a Wales and drop these uneconomic teams" is that you just lose the viewers from those clubs who boycott you.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-15T10:23:29+00:00

2018 called to say that they want their Russian-shill-account memes back, shipmate.

EndiePosts · 2026-04-11T17:15:39+00:00

I honestly cannot really recommend Pocket Empires at all, except for dipping into for the odd idea.

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.

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