Where to Start: Traveller Buyer's Guide

So, you’ve familiarised yourself (franchisely!) with Traveller. You know your Vargr from your Hivers. You want to delve more deeply into the game. How do you do this? Where do you start? How deep down the rabbit hole do you go? How much money are you willing to part with, from “none at all” to “lots, please?” Here is a potted buyer’s guide to ease you gently into all things Traveller.

As Mongoose Publishing are the new IP-owners for Traveller (though they’ve been producing material in the setting for almost twenty years at this point), it makes sense to focus on their current, 2nd Edition (Updated) of the roleplaying game, as it is the only version currently being developed and expanded on a large scale. However, you can pick up a lot of the earlier editions of the game, especially as PDFs, from Marc Miller’s website and online sellers like DriveThru RPG.

Get Free Stuff! For Free!

Everyone likes free stuff, and Mongoose has you covered here. Last year they released the Traveller Starter Pack via their website which is completely free, and packs in a surprisingly large amount of content.

Traveller Starter Pack

The Starter Pack contains an introductory, streamlined version of the rules, including character creation and combat, and two complete adventures.

The main focus here is the Traveller Explorer’s Edition, which is a 60-page book containing the rules for creating characters, resolving skills and tasks, running combat and encounters, buying basic equipment, crewing spacecraft and even basic world and universe creation. As a concession to this being a free starter set, there’s only two Careers included: Scholar and Scout. However, Traveller’s infamously flexible skill system does allow for characters even of the same Career to be very different to one another.

The two adventures are quite generous. Death Station is a 26-page modern rewrite of a Classic Traveller adventure from back in the day, involving the exploration of a wrecked spacecraft. The rewrite is by Seth Skorkowsky, whose YouTube channel is a rich source of Traveller rules explanations and adventure reviews. Stranded is a 32-page adventure seeing the heroes undertaking a difficult cross-planet journey without their usual resources. Both adventures are well-regarded, and the Starter Pack is worth picking up to just get these adventures even for veteran Traveller players.

This free Starter Pack gives an adventuring group all they need to run a campaign lasting half a dozen sessions or so, or potentially more.

To moderately expand your options, you can add in the PDF of the Traveller Merchant’s Edition for a very reasonable 75p (or $1). This alternate, introductory version of the rules focuses on merchant adventures on a cargo spacecraft. A cut-down version of the trading rules is presented, as well as the Merchant career option. In combination with the Starter Pack, this gives you a moderate version of the Traveller experience for almost no monies. A trip to the Traveller website will also avail free character sheets, spacecraft record sheets, sector and subsector maps, and more.

The ultimate free Traveller resources are also online: Traveller Wiki and the Traveller Map website.

Core Books

The free stuff has given you a taste, but now you want the full, real deal. Where do you go from here?

Your first port of call should be The Traveller Core Rulebook Update 2022. Despite the slightly unwieldy name, this is the 100% full, complete core rulebook for Traveller 2^nd Edition Updated. At 264 pages it’s nicely chunky without being as shelf-destroying as many core rulebooks for other TTRPGs.

The book features no less than 12 Careers (well, 13 with “Prisoner”) and has the full rules for character creation, using skills, resolving tasks, operating vehicles and spacecraft, even building and designing your own spacecraft, as well as rules for using psionics and on living the rich life of a merchant. This is the full rules experience, but has little setting information: the idea is you purchase other books for setting information or create your own (or consult the Traveller Wiki, of course).

With the Core Rulebook and the aforementioned Starter Pack adventures, you already have enough materials to get off to a flying start. But there are several other core books that are worth considering, though still absolutely optional.

Players absolutely love stuff, namely weapons and equipment. What else are they going to spend their mission rewards on? This makes the Central Supply Catalogue Update 2023 an easy early purchase, featuring as it does a vast array (185 pages’ worth!) of new guns, gear and gadgets to enhance and expand any Traveller adventure.

Players also love more options, more ways of playing the game, more stats, skills and character generation ideas. This makes the Traveller Companion Update 2024 an easy recommendation. This book features ideas on how to convert the rules to handle genres such as horror or comedy (the book opens with a Douglas Adams quote), with different (and faster) character generation methods for those who want to get into the action more quickly. There are also rules for much more in-depth combat, including zero-gee vector battles, and more detailed rules for terrain, allies and recurring enemies.

The next step is spacecraft. Traveller is all about blasting into the big black on a trusty stellar cruiser, so having a variety of ships to choose from is fun. High Guard Update 2022 features tons more information on spacecraft operations, combat, ship weapons, designing new ships, crew roles, fleet actions and boarding actions. The book is rounded off by a massive 150 pages featuring numerous spacecraft from the Third Imperium setting, from tiny fighters to massive capital ships.

Other books in the core range are more specialised and you should only consider them if planning a campaign heavily revolving around those concepts. The Robot Handbook is excellent for anyone planning an adventure revolving around robots and cybernetics, but of limited utility to anyone else. The Vehicle Update 2025, due out later this year, expands the repertoire of ground and air vehicles for the setting beyond the basic types in the core book. The World Builder’s Handbook is great for any Referee (the Traveller version of a Dungeon or Gamemaster) more interested in creating their own worlds, whilst Bounty Hunter is useful for adventuring parties filled up with wannabe Boba Fetts.

 

Setting Material

Like Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller was designed as a generic roleplaying system allowing the players and Referees to create their own worlds, star systems and sectors, in their own setting. However, after a while the team found themselves adding names, locations and factions in a consistent manner. The result was Traveller’s official campaign setting: Charted Space, also known as the Third Imperium (earlier editions explored different time periods in the setting, but the current edition has returned to the original time period). Unlike D&D, which eventually developed over two dozen campaign settings joined together by a common multiverse, Traveller developed only a few settings, with the others becoming their own games: 2300AD and various ports of other science fiction universes to the Traveller rules, such as iconic 1990s space opera TV series Babylon 5. 

Getting to grips with the Third Imperium is straightforward. The sourcebook The Third Imperium gives an overview of the entire empire, with a strong focus on the planet Capital, the Sylean core worlds and the surrounding Core Sector. Whilst it’s a good book, the civilised Core Sector is more a setting for adventures revolving around diplomatic overtures, political intrigue and corporate espionage, rather than frontier adventuring. A new Traveller crew might wish to start with the rough-and-ready frontier.

Behind the Claw details the Spinward Marches and Deneb sectors, the original setting for the Classic Traveller adventures and material in the 1970s and 1980s. The Spinward Marches are Traveller’s answer to, say, the Sword Coast or Free City of Greyhawk, a highly-detailed border region between the Third Imperium and Zhodani Consulate where adventure is both frequent and dangerous. Many great Traveller adventures take place in this area, and the sector capital of Regina is the starting home of many a seasoned Traveller crew. The current meta-event campaign The Fifth Frontier War takes place partly in these sectors.

Meanwhile, Solomani Front details Terra (Earth), Sol and the entire Solomani Rim and Alpha Crucis sectors, where the Third Imperium borders the Solomani Confederation, as well as the Vega Autonomous District. This is for adventurers looking for more of a Cold War setting between rival powers, plus those who really wish to visit 57^th Century Basingstoke.

Ah, but what about aliens (even the human kind)? The Aliens of Charted Space has you covered. Volume 1 exposits on the Vargr, Aslan, Zhodani and K’kree. Volume 2 covers the Solomani, Droyne and Hivers.  Volume 3 features the Darrians, Geonee, Dolphins, Orca and Bwaps. Volume 4 explores the Suerrat, Za’tachk, Gurvin and Tezcat. Of the four books, Volumes 1 and 2 covers the iconic seven Traveller species, with 3 and 4 going into more obscure and lesser-known species. All four volumes also have information on equipment and ships developed by those species.

Clans of the Aslan is also worth a look for a deeper dive on the lion-like Aslan, a powerful alien species with mixed relations with the Third Imperium and Humaniti. The book explorers the Aslan social structure and hierarchy, the internal politics of a clan and how Aslan characters might come to be working alongside humans. This is very useful for those players who want to depict Aslan as an alien civilisation with their own motivations and history, rather than just furry humans.

Probably the last thing to look at here, though maybe not for brand-new crews, is the recently-updated Great Rift boxed set, which explores the gigantic Great Rift, a large region of lightly-settled space almost dividing the Spinward Marches from the rest of the Imperium, and dividing the Aslan from much of the Third Imperium. The set explores five entire sectors (Corridor, Reft, Riftspan, Afawahisa and Touchstone) with a large array of maps and details on worlds, alongside ideas for adventures. This is quite a lot of material and probably isn’t for the newcomer, but does provide a huge sandbox for adventures created by Referees.

 

Adventures

Of course, pre-made adventures are something a time-poor Referee may find themselves grateful for. A lot of the work is done for you, and some of these adventures are based on classic material published almost fifty years ago, with a corresponding amount of time of refinement, rewrites and Referee suggestions on how to improve them.

 

The best-place to start here is, again, the Traveller Starter Kit, which includes the Death Station and Stranded adventures for free. Even if your bookshelf is groaning under the weight of bought Traveller material, these two adventures are pretty solid and either could make a reasonable jumping-off point for any campaign.

Mongoose has many adventures for the game, and has started publishing omnibuses including five adventures at a time. These are a great way of getting a bunch of adventure content more cheaply, sometimes with exclusive new adventures added.

The Marches Adventures 1-5 is set in the Spinward Marches and includes two of the all-timer classic Traveller adventures, High & Dry (in which the party is given a starship, but has to first recover it from the crater of an active volcano) and Mission to Mithril (in which the party’s ship is immobilised, forcing them into a hazardous overland journey), along with three other solid adventures.

The Great Rift Adventures 1-5 is set in the Great Rift region and makes a great companion to the Great Rift boxed set, but can be enjoyed by itself. This includes three classic adventures, namely Islands in the Rift, Deepnight Endeavour and Flatlined, along with two other good adventures.

Not available in omnibus yet are the Reach Adventures line. This includes several notable adventures, most famously Marooned on Marduk, another well-regarded starter adventure for a new Traveller campaign.

Similarly well-regarded is Mysteries on Arcturus Station, which combines an updated version of the Classic Traveller adventure Murder on Arcturus Station with a new set-up adventure, The Hunt for Sabre IV.

Of course, these are all adventures designed for short or medium-length play, maybe between 1 and 5 sessions max. Traveller is renowned for its mega-adventures, huge campaigns that will last months or years. Again, I wouldn’t necessarily start with these (unless you are a very experienced GM from other games) but they are very impressive.

The most famous of these – and fortunately the most concisely-presented and cheapest – is Secrets of the Ancients. One of the iconic Traveller adventures, variations of this campaign have appeared for multiple versions of the game, and even inspired the 1992 video game MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients. This adventure blows open the backstory of the Ancients and explores what happened to them, over a 10-part campaign which moves from being a heist scenario to a combat adventure and even the most elaborate exposition/flashback adventure I’ve ever seen for an RPG. Seth Skorkowsky has a mind-boggling full campaign review exploring what happens in each part of the campaign (spoilers!).

Even bigger in scale, ambition and shiny stuff is The Pirates of Drinax. This is the ultimate sandbox campaign, in which the players arrive in the Trojan Reach Sector and join forces with the King of Drinax, who wants to re-establish the pocket space empire of his forebears, buffered between the Aslan and the Third Imperium. How the players accomplish this is completely up to them, from faking pirate attacks on nearby unaligned worlds (making them amenable to accepting Drinax’s protection) to fancy diplomatic footwork to blackmail to large-scale military campaigns. The boxed set includes a huge map of the Trojan Reach, several tentpole adventures (to take place at different points in the campaign), information on a new, advanced ship for the team to use, and tons of setting information and suggestions for how to guide the players, including what happens if they lose interest in working for Drinax and betray the king, or even trigger a large-scale war with the Aslan. There are also ideas on how to incorporate the Reach Adventures line into this campaign. The boxed set even has its own optional helper book, The Drinaxian Companion, which adds more ideas, adventure seeds and oversight help, and another adventure called Shadows of Sindal which ties into the backstory for Pirates and can be used to either enhance a Pirates campaign or be used as a standalone adventure. Some players play Pirates as a focused linear adventure lasting 10-15 sessions, and others as an absolutely massive campaign lasting five or more years. It may represent the ultimate Traveller experience.

For those who prefer a more Star Trek-ish experience, the Deepnight Revelation boxed set has your crew joining a long-range exploration mission into very deep space. And recently succeeding on Kickstarter is the Singularity campaign, which explores posthuman and transhuman ideas in the Traveller setting.

There is of course a lot more Traveller stuff than this. More specialised books about naval personnel and mercenary companies, books on designing entire sectors, and tons more adventures. But this is more than enough to be getting on with. Something useful to take a look at is the Journal of Uncharted Space series, which is effectively a series of magazines/compendiums of articles, background material new rules, mini-adventures and worldbuilding covering a vast array of subjects. There are now 18 editions of this tome, each adding more than 120 pages of material to the Traveller universe.

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Franchise Familiariser: Traveller

If you’re looking into tabletop roleplaying games and want to move beyond the obvious recommendation of Dungeons & Dragons, and maybe laser cannons are more your jam than wizards casting fireball, there is at least one other very long-running candidate out there to consider: Traveller. The roleplaying game of space adventure in the distant future. But where are you travelling to? We’re here to fill you in on the franchise.

The Basics

Traveller is a science fiction, space opera franchise co-created by Marc Miller. The primary medium of the franchise is the tabletop roleplaying game, which was first published in 1977 by Game Designers’ Workshop (GDW) out of Illinois, of which Miller was the co-founder and owner along with fellow designers Frank Chadwick, Rich Banner and Loren Wiseman. Traveller was primarily developed by Miller, Chadwick, Wiseman and John Harshman.

Traveller was a smash hit on release in July 1977, perhaps helped by the release of a certain movie just seven weeks earlier that saw an explosion in demand for anything with spaceships, lasers and robots. Traveller also tapped into the nascent roleplaying market, where D&D was by far the most dominant game but was already being criticised for somewhat clunky rules. Traveller was revolutionary in its approach which eschewed multiple dice types for just using six-sided dies (d6s) and not using levels for character development, instead creating a robust skill system. Traveller also pioneered what would later be called the “Lifepath” system, where players generate their characters’ backstories, skills, aptitudes and relationships before the campaign itself begins. This was usually done in a pre-campaign special session, what we would now call “Session 0.” Though prep sessions for D&D were not unknown, Traveller arguably codified them as an integral part of the campaign. Famously (though somewhat exaggerated), the career system in Traveller could theoretically kill characters during character creation, leading to the game being dubbed the most hardcore and deadly roleplaying game around, though subsequent editions rolled back on this approach.

Traveller quickly became a mainstay of the TTRPG industry and one of its best-known games and constant sellers, and possibly the first TTRPG after D&D to crack a million sales. Its initial rules were extremely well-received, with a simple core concept which allowed for a huge amount of complexity in the form of rolling 2 six-sided dice, adding positive modifiers from skills, and trying to beat a target number depending on difficulty. This simple core had a very large number of modules built onto it through expansions, allowing for starship and robot construction, military operations and exploration (a nod at creating scenarios similar to Star Wars and Star Trek), planet and sector creation and so on. This system inspired the rules of various other games, including the official Star Wars roleplaying game from West End Games that came out in 1987, which was similarly d6-based.

The original version of the game is known as Classic Traveller and is identifiable from its minimalist plain black books with striking red text in the Optima font. The first three books were released in a boxed set to form the core rules system. The main books have no other artwork on the covers, and it was only later in the early 1980s that adventures started adding artwork to their covers. Classic Traveller ran for ten years, with a large number of sourcebooks and adventures published. GDW also encouraged third-party contributions, with numerous other companies and fans (individually or in groups) writing adventures and sourcebooks, some accepted as official canon. Famed TTRPG company FASA started life publishing Traveller adventures, for example, before they developed their own BattleTech aka MechWarrior universe, partially inspired by Traveller (especially the starmaps). Games Workshop also reprinted Traveller rulebooks for the UK market and created a range of miniatures for it, some of which were later repurposed for their Warhammer 40,000 game.

Sales of Traveller began to fall off in the late 1980s and the game was replaced by a new edition called MegaTraveller (1987), in which the Emperor of the Third Imperium is assassinated, triggering a rebellion and civil war. This era saw the publication of the first (and, to date, only) Traveller video roleplaying games, MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy (1990) and MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients (1991), for the PC, Amiga and Atari ST.

MegaTraveller was supplanted by Traveller: The New Era in 1993, which adopted a full-on post-apocalyptic setting with a powerful computer virus ravaging human technology. It was controversial amongst fans and the fanbase fractured after its release, with many small groups developing third-party material ending their development of the franchise.

Game Designers’ Workshop collapsed during The New Era and the rights reverted to Marc Miller. Marc Miller developed Marc Miller’s Traveller, better known as Traveller 4^th Edition or T4, for release in 1996. The game’s setting is “Milieu 0,” set during the founding of the Third Imperium and avoiding awkward questions about canon.

Steve Jackson Games licensed the setting to release GURPS Traveller in 1998, using their GURPS (General Universal Role-Playing System) rules, which is set in a parallel timeline where the fall of the Third Imperium never happened. This was followed by Traveller 20 or T20 in 2002, an adaptation of the setting and rules to the Dungeons & Dragons, 3^rd Edition (or D20) rules system. In 2006 GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars was released, which chronicled the first contact between the Terran Confederation and the First Imperium. Comstar Games also released Traveller Hero, using their own Hero rules system, in 2006.

Marc Miller developed his own newer version of the game, called Traveller 5, for release in 2013, with a revised edition in 2019. This version of the game is incredibly deep, complex and simulationist, with less of a focus on the established setting in favour of allowing the Referee to create their own setting. The rules are broadly compatible with Traveller, T4 and Mongoose Traveller and can be used to enhance a campaign using those rules.

The current mainline development of Traveller was taken over by Britain’s Mongoose Publishing in 2008. Mongoose Traveller (an informal name, the official name is just Traveller) became the most successful line since the original edition. In 2016 Mongoose Traveller 2^nd Edition was released with hugely updated production values. In 2022 this was superseded by Mongoose Traveller 2^nd Edition Update, a minor revision of 2^nd Edition with new rulebooks. This has become one of the most prolific and best-selling modern tabletop roleplaying games, with many dozens of supplements, adventures and rulebooks released.

In 2025 Marc Miller sold all remaining IP rights to the Traveller game to Mongoose, confirming their status as the official producers of all Traveller materials. Mongoose continue to develop Traveller, including the Fifth Frontier War sub-line.

For a more detailed look at the publication history of Traveller, please check out This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller by Shannon Appelcline.

MUCH MORE AFTER THE JUMP:

This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller by Shannon Appelcline

Back in 1977, Game Designers' Workshop released a curious black box emblazed with a line of dialogue: "This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone...Mayday, mayday, we are under attack...main drive is gone...turret number one not responding...mayday...losing cabin pressure fast...calling anyone...please help...this is Free Trader Beowulf...mayday." Underneath, in striking red on a black background, was the name TRAVELLER, which we were told means, "Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Future."

Traveller is to science fiction what Dungeons & Dragons is to fantasy: an in-depth, rich roleplaying game which allows players to take on one of a myriad of roles, from soldier to explorer to engineer to medic to socialite, and explore the galaxy of a distant future. Players and Referees can create their own worlds, star systems and areas of space, or use an incredibly-detailed setting with almost fifty years of worldbuilding and detailing behind it, the Charted Space of the Third Imperium in (roughly) the year 5626 CE. Thanks to the stewardship of Mongoose Publishing and the popularity of YouTubers like Seth Skorkowsky, Traveller is enjoying possibly the greatest level of popularity in its history, with high sales and successful Kickstarters resulting in one of the most prolific release schedules for a contemporary roleplaying game, all of an unusually high and consistent quality.

But it wasn't always this way. Traveller has enjoyed periods of popularity before but also long hiatuses due to publishing problems, companies going bust and licences being moved around. For the first time, someone has attempted to tell the full history of the Traveller roleplaying game from its inception to the present. Shannon Appelcline is best-known for his magisterial four-volume Designers & Dragons series, which tells the story of roleplaying games from the 1970s to the 2000s (a forthcoming fifth volume will cover the 2010s). Here he takes that wide-ranging focus and here narrows in on one game and tells its full history over a generous page count of 300 A4 pages. It's entirely possible that no roleplaying game, except maybe Dungeons & Dragons, has had its story told in such detail before.

The book is divided into 14 chapters, exploring each edition and sub-edition of Traveller in a lot of detail, with additional chapters on various licensed producers of material and the history of the fandom. The early chapters cover the founding of Game Designers' Workshop and the early development of the game, created by Marc Miller, with sterling support from the likes of Loren Wiseman, Frank Chadwick, John Harshman and many more. There's discussion of the differences between Traveller and other SF games, in particular its strong focus on a hard science fictional approach (hyperjumps aside) rather than the science fantasy of the likes of Gamma World, Starfinder and Star Wars. There's also some interesting discussion on the early tension between those who wanted Traveller to remain a setting-less rules system and those who wanted to develop a detailed setting; the latter won the argument, very quickly. Appelcline's enviable industry-ranging knowledge means he can also contrast Traveller's position in the industry at any given time versus contemporaries, so we get frequent check-ins with what D&D was doing, what other games were coming out and what the trends were in gaming.

This is all accomplished in impressive depth. A lot of these kind of books can feel superficial, but This is Free Trader Beowulf certainly does not. Appelcline goes above and beyond the call of duty in referencing third-party sourcebooks and licences, and getting art from the most obscure corners of the fandom and the franchise, and setting it all in the context of the wider industry. He notes how Traveller's history impacted not only itself, but also other games, such as Warhammer 40,000, BattleTech (FASA started as a licensed Traveller production company), Stars Without Number and Alternity, and how its lifepath system inspired Cyberpunk, the darker tone of which inspired (for good or ill) Traveller's "darker and grittier" period as MegaTraveller and Traveller: The New Era. This era is when GDW learned that building up a beloved, detailed setting and annihilating it will not win you goodwill from the fans, something both Wizards of Coast and Games Workshop failed to learn from later on.

Appelcline's attention to detail extends to providing regular maps of various sectors in Charted Space showing where the various adventures released in one era take place relative to one another, as well as possibly the most exhaustive checklists of Traveller products ever put together, covering not just official releases but also licensed sourcebooks and even individual issues of fanzines.

The book has less art than I was expecting. It still has a lot of imagery, including iconic images from the various game editions, but rarely full-page spreads. This is not an art book in the same way that Dungeons & Dragons: Art & Arcana is, for example. The focus here is on the text and incomparable detail.

Appelcline's writing is engaging and detailed, with occasional bursts of wry humour as he considers the sometimes preposterous swings of fortune that accompany the history of the game and its various editions. I was a bit surprised to see that Courtney Solomon, who directed the risible D&D movie released in 2000, at one point owned a stake in Traveller's main licensee. At other points, a Traveller TV show was under development, and multiple video games (though only three ever saw the light of day). Fortunately, the story of Traveller never gets really dark as Marc Miller was very careful in maintaining ownership of the franchise and, whenever a business decision looked like getting totally out of hand, he'd pull the licence. Several times, this stopped Traveller from going under or getting stuck in development hell. If the book has a weakness, it's an unavoidable one in that it was published just a few months before Marc Miller sold the Traveller IP in its totality to Mongoose, finally satisfied (after a mere sixteen years of proven hard work!) that he had found a company who would do his vision and legacy justice. This would have provided a stronger ending to the book.

If the book has a weakness it might be that it's too detailed, though given that's the point of the book, that's like going to a Chinese restaurant and complaining the menu is a bit heavy on noodles and rice. But the richness and completeness makes the book as successful as it is. Another weakness is a couple of glaring typos that slipped through the net, but this is not a major problem.

This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller (****½) is simply the last word on the history of the world's oldest hard(ish) science fiction roleplaying game, and one of its most consistently popular TTRPGs. The wealth of detail may make this a bit more appreciable for hardened Traveller veterans rather than newcomers, but this is still an impressive, richly interesting work. The book is available now from Mongoose Publishing as PDF and print editions.

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Classic SF RPG TRAVELLER turns 45

The classic science fiction roleplaying game Traveller has celebrated its 45th anniversary. One of the oldest and most iconic tabletop roleplaying games of all time, Traveller has inspired vast amounts of fiction and video games since its release.

Traveller was inspired by the success of Dungeons & Dragons, which had been released in 1974. Mark Miller realised there was scope for a science fiction roleplaying game with spaceships and technology and developed the Traveller game rules, with help from Frank Chadwick, John Harshman and Loren Wiseman. The game was released on 22 July 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop with a striking black cover.

It was an immediate bestseller, answering the demand for "Dungeons & Dragons but in space," as well as people who were interested in the idea of roleplaying games but not a classic fantasy setting. Traveller was also bolstered by the launch of the movie Star Wars just a few weeks earlier, which created a hunger for everything science fiction.

Traveller was originally a rules set without any setting material, but subsequent expansions introduced a far-future setting where humanity has colonised the stars with an FTL drive, but without FTL communications the various colonies and nations of humanity have splintered into small states, divided between different "strands" of humanity. Aliens exist in the setting but are mostly rare or extinct. Alternate SF settings for the game were created by fans and other creators.

An interview with Marc Miller at Dieku Games.

Traveller introduced innovations to the RPG space, including the idea of "life paths." Rather than characters being relative youngsters meeting in a bar and deciding to join forces (the standard D&D setup), Traveller characters are older and have usually had extensive training or education before deciding to become adventurers. Characters can be former soldiers, bureaucrats, medics, pilots or almost anything else the player can conceive of. Creating a character involves playing a mini-game of its own as players work out their heroes' backgrounds and their career. Infamously, it is possible for a character to die in character creation! This system also rewards extended service but also introduces penalty: the older a character is when they start the adventure, the more skills they have, but also the greater the possibility of injury or a degrading of skills due to old age.

Traveller also focused heavily on a skill system, a stalwart of every RPG apart from Dungeons & Dragons, which didn't really develop a skill system until 3rd Edition (earlier editions experimented with "proficiency" rules which tried to covers skills with a very broad brush). Most notably, this skill system allowed for a greater variety in resolving tasks and situations without combat. Traveller also emphasised its "social" skills to encourage roleplaying.

Traveller has been reissued in multiple editions since its original 1977 release: MegaTraveller (1987), Traveller: The New Era (1993), Marc Miller's Traveller (1996), GURPS Traveller (1998), Traveller d20 (2002), GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars (2006), Traveller Hero (2006), Mongoose Traveller 1st Edition (2008), Traveller 5.0 (2013), Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition (2016) and Traveller 5.10 (2019).

The game is notable for using its own rule system, which relies heavily on six-sided dice rather than the plethora of different-sized dice favoured by D&D. However, over the years the game has been "ported" to other systems, including the D&D 3rd Edition "d20" system, the universal GURPS rules set and the Hero System. Players have also created homebrew variants based on other systems.

The Traveller setting has been used as the background for sixteen novels, published sporadically from 1993 to 2015. Surprising, only two video games have been developed from the setting: MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy (1990) and MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients (1991), both from Paragon. The games were critically well-received and apparently successful, but no further video games based on the system have since appeared.

Traveller was a very forwards-thinking TTRPG when it was released and its influence on the genre remains very high. Here's hoping it carries on for many years to come.