So I pulled out Traveller a little while ago and started revisiting the game and its canon setting. I suspect that I have several posts worth of things to say about this old gem of a game, but I’ll start with a little grognardian recollection.
Background. I played Traveller for several years before moving to the Spinward Marches. Traveller was first published in 1977 and it was not too long after when I got my first copy. There is a two year window between when the Traveller rule books are first released (in a little black box full of little black books) and when the most influential and long-lived deep space setting, the Spinward Marches, was published. To be fair, it was probably late 1978 when I got Traveller—so the Marches where only a few months away. But I lived in a remote corner of the world, and I was a poor kid, and they hadn’t invented the world wide web yet, so I didn’t hear about the Marches ‘till about 1981.
Traveller, as written, was designed so that “known space” would be procedural generated. When the group’s ship arrived in a star system, there are rules for randomly generating a string of numbers, called a Universal World Profile or UWP—famously recorded in hexadecimal notation—which describe the physical and social elements of the system. Now days there are all sorts of additional rules which create all sorts of additional details, but back then it was just a few numbers. Planetary population, technology level, Law Level, and Government type defined all the social elements of the world.
As a brief nerdly aside, I was in rural Northern California and what was to later be known as Silicon Valley, the global hub of computers and information technology, was just beginning to develop south of us. So it was very normal for science-nerd kids to lean into things like hex maps and hexadecimal notation—that was what science was like for us. So we loved UWPs and hex maps. Even to this day, graphic artists like to use the hexagon to represent “science”.
Typical play with my buddies would have been for the GM to randomly roll a few worlds, you know, six to eight. And the players—in a Scout ship, we always only had Scout ships—would explore these systems. Since the game was mapped on a hex grid, it was exactly what today we would call a hex crawl.
But it was before the “information age” hit mainstream America.
The coming of the Information Age and TTRPGs. If you want to understand how TTRPGs got to where they are today, I assert (with little evidence) that you need to understand its history and how that interacts with global, real-world, geopolitics. In the 1980’s mainstream America entered the information age. Computers went from being exotic, complex devices that only super nerds understood to common, everyday items that grandma used to find recipes.
Now it didn’t happen all at once, nor did it happen in all corners of the country at the same speed, but it did happen. Before this time, for most people, information was hard to access. If you wanted to know the distance, in kilometers, between the Earth and the moon, you would have to go to a reference book and look it up. If that was something you cared about, you might have the correct book at hand. If not, you would likely need to go to a library. Depending on how obscure your question was, like “What type of polearm would an English soldier use in the 1400s,” the answer might be very hard to find. I don’t think I would have been able to find the answer to the polearm question easily.
Other questions—simple questions about everyday life—often required talking to experienced people. “What store in the next town over would have a copy of Traveller for sale?” “What is the fastest route to drive to that store?” “What if I had to take the bus?” All common questions for which there would be no written answer, and for which you would either ask people about, or just head off and try and find the answer.
This is the real world Traveller was born in. Information is valuable and hard to access. People don’t just know what’s around them. Computers were monolithic machines that were hard to use and only solved complex mathematical problems.
And that’s the way we played Traveller.
My Early Traveller. We would randomly make a small group of player characters. There were never too many people interested in Sci Fi, so it would always be a small group. And this was before the rule which assigns a set of required skills to all the PCs so that they would be able to complete whatever adventure the GM had in mind. Instead, we would make characters who were thrown into a sandbox adventure and the GM had to come up with adventures as we explored.
And that is exactly what we would do. We would set off and explore. Just like in our real world, no one knew too much about the next planet over. The adventurers would make the trip—you were always worried about jumping to a system that didn’t have a gas giant—because then if the world was dry, there would be no way to leave the system and you’d be trapped. TPK for a few bad rolls.
The Spinward Marches Arrive. When I first got a copy of Supplement 3, The Spinward Marches, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It had 36 subsectors filled with planets and worlds, each described with a few paragraphs, a hex map, and a list of those Universal World Profiles. For me, the logical game was for the group to start on some world and start exploring outward.
At first, the characters wouldn’t even have access to the information in the book, though later it became clear that people would at least know the basics of the worlds around their home. But they would only know what was in the book—a few paragraphs per subsector and a map.
But just a few short, real world years later this would all change. Computers were permeating everyday life. Information was becoming progressively easier to access, and the old problems of knowing what is around you and how things worked, were rapidly disappearing.
Traveller computers. I recall conversations and jokes and whatnot – mostly (I think) in the early 1990s – about the computers in Traveller. The game designers had written specifications in modern, real world units, for computers by technology level. And, as we moved up one technology level in the real world, computers blow away all their expectations. What was thought would take centuries to develop took a few years. At the time of this writing, a typical person has a phone in their pocket which more computing power that original Traveller assigned to the Imperium’s best starships.
After this, game designers stopped using real world units to describe things. This avoids the whole “predicting technological change” problem.
But this does leave us with an odd “expectation gap”. I’m thinking about running Traveller, and if I did, my players would, rightfully, expect that their ship’s computer would contain petabytes of data about every world around them. Maps, satellite images, models of global climate, and close to everything that is known about the life forms living on any given system. And politics and trade agreements and legal systems... In fact, they would likely expect that the computer would have records of everything that our 1970s PC would have had adventures learning. So if I ran Traveller today, I would want to alter the adventures to allow for the modern information age.
But this is okay. It is easy to do and fun. I’m looking at setting my own adventure on the world of Tarsus, which is one of the classic Traveller adventure sites. And I’m having a lot of fun modernizing the world to fit my needs.
But there is one thing and it is going to feed into my future posts. When Traveller was written, we were living in a time when physics was the king of sciences. Everybody liked to worry about planetary rotations, interstellar distances, starship tonnage, “How many tonnes of hydrogen can we get from skimming that gas giant”, that sort of thing.
But the king of science today is biology. (Just look at funding levels if you don’t believe me.) And Traveller’s biology is really weak. So in my next post, I am going to look at fixing that. Until then, as always thank you for taking the time to read this, and as always, please feel free to leave any questions or comments below.
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