Traveller: Accountancy in Spaaace!

I've been running a Traveller game for our local role-playing group since last September. We started out with the characters as children using the latest iteration of my rules for children characters for Traveller. The old rules were published in Freelance Traveller. The updates I added bring the child character development more in line with other Mongoose Traveller classes. It includes Events, Mishaps, and Benefits for youngsters. Background skills are acquired as characters age.

I started or current game with a children's adventure, which went very well. It was a sort of "Three Investigators" or "Nancy Drew" style mystery. The party barely managed to find and solve the mystery behind the mystery.

All Grown Up

Once that was complete, we brought the characters up to 18. Then, depending on their relative ages, the characters got either 3 or 4 terms in standard Traveller careers.

Now we're well into the adventure. The group has a working starship and they just made their first interstellar flight as adventurers. They own one corporation, inherited from the eccentric old man of their childhood adventure, and they bought a second one on their first trip out of their home system. The second one was up for sale on account of 99% of its executive staff being suddenly dead. Probably just some paperwork error.

The party just sold 50 dTons of foodstuffs on an industrial world, and are backhauling lots of valuable food processing machinery. They'll be able to sell it for plenty, assuming the customer that the customer they have lined up isn't a smoking hole in the ground when they get back to their homeworld.

However, the party has started to engage in commerce in Traveller.

One of my players, new to Traveller, looked at me after the game and said, "So, basically, money is XP for Traveller. Right?"

I admitted that both money and equipment serve that role. After all, some things have a more than monetary value.

Raising Money and Beautifying Public Libraries

Brad Schenck is an old friend of mine, and a great artist. He and I are both lovers of literature, and of places that bring literature to people, like public libraries. I spent my childhood ransacking any nearby library's collections of science fiction, fantasy, and science books. I would never have been able to read and learn so much if I'd had to track down and buy those books.

At one point, everything I had to read came from a Public Library Bookmobile that stopped in my neighborhood every week. That's how I first read George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, as well as Richard Adam's Watership Down.

Even in the age of the internet, books hold a unique place. Libraries provide resources both for getting information to people, and for helping people learn what information they need to acquire knowledge they seek. And libraries mean a lot more than books these days. They are also an entrance to the information that is on the internet, helping people get information past the confusion of advertisements, unreliable web sites, and social media noise.

Brad's started an IndieGoGo campaign to produce promotional posters for public libraries--his own as well as those of contributors. And to raise funds for libraries. Plus, you can get copies of the magnificent posters for yourself.

Brad's Own Words
Have a look at what Brad says, then consider throwing in a few bucks. Or a few more.

A Larger View of the Posters

More Traveller RPG Than You Can Fit in a Low Berth

In the 1970s I regularly shopped at a local militaria/war game shop in Walnut Creek, CA called The Centurion. In 1977 they had a new game, called Traveller. When I bought it, the guy at the shop commented "I thought of you when I ordered this one. You're the first one to get it, let me know what you think of it." I was a sucker for anything in the way of science fiction games, so he had me tagged. If there was a blurry mimeograph in a ziplock bag with a spaceship on it, I'd buy it.

I still have the game today:

My original Traveller game from 1977

What's inside the box.

Needless to say, I like the game. A lot. For lots of reasons.

Fast Forward to 2007
Then, about three and a half years ago, I found out that Traveller had become available on CD. Not just the original game that I owned, but all the expansions that had been offered by its publisher, Game Designer's Workshop.

The Classic Traveller CD and the JTAS Magazine CD

All the expansions means:

All the additional rule books.
All the scenario, campaign, and adventure books.
The several board games related to the game.
The later editions of the rules.
Etc., etc.

In other words, a HEAP of stuff to read and enjoy.

As you can see from the picture above, I also bought another CD with it. That one contains the magazine "Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society", the magazine for the game. What a treasure trove of gaming stuff!

Fast Forward to TODAY
The Classic Traveller CD got an update earlier this year. It's got more versions of the rules, corrected and improved scans of some of the material from the new CD, and so on. For those that purchased the original CD, the new one costs only $7.

Unless you order an additional CD when you order the update. In that case, the $7 cost of the update CD is refunded. Since there are many different CDs for many different editions of Traveller available from Far Future Enterprises, it wasn't going to be hard for me to take advantage of that offer!

But Wait, There's More!

Not only that, but there's a special sale going on called 443. Buy three CDs and the fourth is free (thus Four for Three: 443), four for the price of three. Since two more CDs of "Classic" Traveller material were out, I was halfway there already. Add to that the CD of the latest version of Traveller, still under development (Traveller 5), and the forthcoming Traveller 4 CD (I have the core book for this version, but not some of the other books I've seen widely touted by other players on the web, which will be on this CD), and I'm good.

Today the mail held this:

My Amazing New Traveller CDs. One more will arrive after it becomes available at the end of August.

The T4 CD was a pre-order, so it's not in the picture. It'll be here soon enough. I've got plenty to keep me occupied until it arrives!

Here's the new Classic Traveller CD:

Bling! The new CT CD. Not just an amazing game collection, it also makes a great diffraction grating! Read the books as you use it to analyze spectra of far off stars!

Duke Norris has my back. There's nothing like having the nobility of the Third Imperium of Man keeping an eye out for your data. Beats counting on some drunken X-Boat driver to get it to you.