Oh no. Black Pants Legion plays Traveller. This is going to be terrible and hilarious.
Oh, even better. This is the folks who played the game attempting to recap a lost podcast recording.
Sit back, enjoy the DVD Commentary Track to a movie that no longer exists, and try not to have coffee or soda going through your nose.
Then listen to the first full episode.
Quoting the Description:
A group of Travellers each get a tip separately that a high dollar communique is passing hands at Heaven's Edge starport, but when they make it to the cantina it quickly becomes clear they aren't the only one trying to make payday, and the job spirals out of control.
Welcome to "Voidstein" a massive, classic science fiction tabletop adventure game using the venerable Classic Traveller! 17 players comprising patrons, factions and adventurers contest in a solar system in flames for credits and glory!
In this episode we begin by creating Classic Traveller characters with it's infamous and deadly Chargen! (Yes, characters die in creation!) Then we go into a deadly, live-session Type 1 Braunstein.
Mythic Mountains Folk Tabletop Club is an online tabletop club where we play games together weekly.
The version of Classic Traveller they're using can be had for free here.
This is how folks start unlearning Conventional Play and relearn the Real Game: by showing how it's done.
(Yes, saw that. Good times.)
Dunder Moose had on the gang behind last weekend's Spacestein.
This was quite the event.
Using Classic Traveller, this dust up in a backwater space station was one part Alien and one part Outland with a side of Ice Pirates.
This scenario had several widgets in play, each of which offered advantages to whomever got a hold of them and were valuable enough to fight over. Lots of things went down that everyone else was not necessarily privy to know at the time, necessitating After Action Reporting just to piece together things into a cohesive and coherent whole.
We have the player Session Reports below:
I'm sure that there's others, and those fine men will not hesitate to tell everyone where to read theirs in due course.
You too can enjoy playing Braunstein. Go download BROZER (or buy a print copy) today and get playing tomorrow.
More recent Session Reports:
The Bros are continuing to prove the correctness of what the Real Hobby is.
More and more Bros are having mans survive the early game, in large part to a general increase in System Mastery across the board; turns out that once you know how the game as it is works, you can actually get the results it promises to you when you use the machine as instructed.
This is good. The more that people spend time not fucking with the machine Because Reasons and actually using it as it is, the greater the number of people who can actually see how it works to achieve its intended results. You'd think this would be obvious, but one look at the retards in D&DTube will disabuse you of that notion.
The more hobbyists learn to actually master the games that they have, and learn to analyze how those games achieve their results, the better the discourse will be when it comes time to analyze other products and figure out why they don't work.
The Great Sifting is on the horizon.
A lot of products that claim to be games will be found wanting. Ultimately, after figuring out how and why they are dogshit that doesn't work (which will matter when comes to the rebuilding phase of the hobby post-Colony Drop), they will be tossed into the incinerator and replaced with actual games that work.
The hobby is in retrenchment. Wheat sifts from chaff, chaff gets burned, wheat gets kept, and the hobby carries on better because the boat anchors got cast off. Welcome to the start of the Big Move, the Big Bifurcation, the end of Conventional Play.
Check out this announcement by Mongoose.
Dive into RPG history and create Classic Traveller titles on our TAS programme at Drivethru!
— Mongoose Publishing (@MongoosePub) November 1, 2024
There is an easy-to-use set of templates (inc. MS Word!), along with guidelines on what you are able to use and how.
You can find the template pack at: https://t.co/gdgiG8DlLA#ttrpg pic.twitter.com/0x4UymAFxt
The link is here.
This is what that page says:
This package includes a range of templates with which you are licensed to use in content submitted for Classic Traveller to the Travellers' Aid Society programme and published under the Community Content Agreement for the TAS programme. You are not licensed to use these templates for any other purpose. All art owned by Mongoose Publishing.
You are allowed to use the Traveller setting as presented in the Classic Traveller edition books published by Games Designers Workshop as well as any Mongoose-published book using the Classic Traveller rules. This includes the names of all characters, species, and places and all gear, equipment and vessels; the capitalised names and original names of places, countries, creatures, geographic locations, historic events, items, ships, and organisations presented in those books.
No other editions of Traveller may be used at this time.
When publishing for Classic TAS, you must use the cover templates provided here. You are permitted to change the colour of the bands and the Traveller logo, and also the text labelled ‘Extended Title’ and ‘Main Title Here’.
You may not use Classic Traveller series titles (such as Book X, Supplement X, Adventure X, or Double Adventure X, etc), but may certainly create your own series for Classic Traveller!
Remember what I said about all these publishers having to make a choice? As Mongoose now owns all of Traveller, Mongoose has to make a choice on what to do about Traveller and it has made that choice. Those templates are free; you might as well snag and download them. The terms here are reasonable enough for practical use; there are Intellectual Property issues to consider, but note what is not in those terms: that you must sell them for profit.
You can give away the digital versions and sell print copies at-cost, so you can do this in a proper hobbyist mode if you want- and, quite frankly, you should.
Old-timers clearly see what the intent here is: to recreate the effect that the original Open Game License had for D&D3e. The idea was that by creating a vast network of people making useful stuff for that edition, adoption of that edition would increase exponentially via Network Effects. Dancey was right because that is what happened.
Mongoose has chosen. They chose the Clubhouse.
A different happening occured.
News seems to have broken that the Emperor, Marc Miller, has officially passed the Traveller torch onto us here at Mongoose.
— Mongoose Publishing (@MongoosePub) August 28, 2024
We have a little Q&A thread running on ours forums if you have any questions:https://t.co/SkGyXE3sr1
That Q&A link is here.
The important thing is here:
Will Mongoose support previous editions?
We will keep previous Traveller editions available in electronic form, but active support is... a lot, and probably not financially viable, if we are being honest.
That said, over time, we hope to return to some of these PDFs and update them, which will then be made available to anyone who picked them up from our website or Drivethru (we will also make them available to Marc, as he is still selling his Traveller CDs from his website). For example, there is a T4 book that was fully laid out but never given a cover - we have already commissioned a new cover for it, and will be putting it up on our website (and sending out a free update via Drivethru for existing owners) in the next month or two.
Beyond that... our passion is for the Traveller universe and the stories that can be told within it rather than a particular set of mechanics, so older editions are going nowhere.
We would like to expand both their mechanics and timelines to the TAS programme (for example) but efforts are going to have to be made to avoid that turning into an unholy mess. We are going to be adding Classic Traveller to the TAS programme (so you will be able to publish and sell your own Classic Traveller titles) first, for no other reason than we think it will be the easiest. Expect to see that happen relatively soon (before the end of the year certainly), and we will see how it goes.
There is only one thing to say about this:
If you do not have copies in your library--and I mean real books, not PDFs--you had better source and acquire them now lest Mongoose (for purely Commercial reasons, not anything to do with the Death Cult; we're dealing with Mammon here, not Molech) decide that they can't even be bothered to offer Print On Demand options going forward.
And if there are only PDF options, then consider getting the PDF and setting up a guerilla POD offering because retroactive editting of publications is a thing now. Get the real thing while you can, then archive it and set up secure routes so others can follow later.
Jeffro and Jon Mollison had a chat yesterday.
It's good to see that the Bros are not yet a static, spent force. There is dynamism yet in the scene, as solutions are being refined into Best Practices and Best Practices are in turn refined to be tailored to specific use-cases.
This is what all those Totally Played For 40+ Years people should have been doing all this time but inexiplicably failed to do (mostly because they're Boomers), but they didn't so someone else picked up that crown they threw into the gutter, cleaned it off, and put it on their own head with predictable effects.
Jeffro's the most experimental of the Bros. That's why he's usually running the scene through, for lack of a better term, Violence of Action ("Violence of action means the unrestricted use of speed, strength, surprise, and aggression to achieve total dominance against your enemy.") as applied to redevelopment of forgotten hobby game techniques.
That doesn't hold for all of them, nor should it, but it is clear from this interview why he's the leading man in the hobby and thus the one responsible for creating the viable alternative to what Sorcerers By The Sea wants things to go. The rest of the Bros just pick up what he puts down and runs with it in their own directions. Collectively, this is how the Real Hobby gets to clear out its space and hold it against the oncoming collapse of the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play once SOBS does its Big Move and pulls out of Tabletop entirely.
More people are going to end up going down the road he paved, just as more people are catching up to me about SOBS, Conventional Play, and the (lack of a) future for the hobby. I agree with Jon that the sign of success will be the Questing Beast sorts plagarizing the Bros (as they have before) in an attempt to grift off of a promising trend. I look forward to that, as I look forward to calling them on it and posting the receipts proving their theft and fraud (and thus thwarting their clout-farming).
The next few years are going to be wild, folks. Hope you're ready.
Tonight Jeffro Johnson joins Black Lodge Games to talk about his recent experiments in Traveller and his total Muppet ban.
I'll be there in the chat. You should be too, and if you miss it then watch later and leave your takes in the Comments.
It's okay to talk to Jeffro, folks.
Friend of the Retreat Jon Mollison cut another video about that book about Blackmoor.
Did you see the way the games ran back then?
Everyone had their own region--Blackmoor, Greyhawk, Tekumel, etc.--but played the same game. Different regions, different cultures and politics, same game. Players' mans would go from table to table--region to region--with aplomb because the game was the same.
For the Bros running AD&D1e games, this is how things work. As Jon notes, the Bros use something straight out of Twin Peaks to connect the various tables together into a single campaign.
You can also see the beginnings of the error that would, in time, lead to the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play (commercialization) and the suppression of the Clubhouse as those incentives seized hold of the minds of those old-timers that went into business and thus ruined a brilliant hobby scene by and for amateurs.
Now we're seeing that Classic Traveller can be run the same way.
This is all great stuff and it is all very much a confirmation that Braunstein play will force you to use pretty well everything that your classic rpg rule set has in it. Independent action combined with 1:1 time produces such a wide range of situations you end up using way more rules than people that are bogged down with wrongheaded “conventional” type assumptions about how these games should work. The rules end up doing more of the work of holding your campaign together and giving it the sense that it is an actual model universe you and your players are developing together.
We're seeing now what the Winning Formula for the Real Hobby is: Many Tables, One Game.
The implication is that this formula can, and will, lead to The Grand Campaign where everyone plays in one massive campaign without needing top-down command and control- in short what all those old Living Campaigns organized by publishers attempt to do, but fucked up because Conventional Play cannot achieve what the Real Hobby does without any effort at all just by playing Rules As Written.
This is sufficient now to act as a sifting filter to cut out non-games from games, and man do a lot of products get sifted out as non-games.
This past Wednesday Jeffro got on with Dunder Moose and Gabriel to talk shop. And talk they did.
Notice that Jeffro points out something here that tends to be overlooked and dismissed: the people playing the game now DO NOT UNDERSTAND IT! They do not understand it because they do not know the foundational knowledge that makes it work. Yet anklebiters and low-IQ fuckwits consistently dismiss this as the reason for not grokking why the game is as it is.
Yet as soon as that knowledge is put back into place, it is as if the missing cog in a non-functional machine is replaced and the machine comes back to life.
Read the foundational literature and things that don't make sense suddenly do, and now that the game makes sense you can play it as intended without issue. That's how the scene was back then, and it is the failure of the Boomers to recognize that this lack was part of the reason for the younger cohorts' miscomprehensions of the games that lead to the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play arising and overtaking the real hobby.
The result of this remedial reading is that you'll arrive where the Bros are: Braunstein is the root of the hobby, not Le Adventuring Party. For the videogamers, it means that the hobby is PVP at its root, not PVE; this is PVPVE with the "E" in a depreciated state because the Referee shouldn't be intervening like this unless it is absolutely necesssary to maintain the integrity of the game or the campaign.
Then it's down to Just Do It. You'll fuck up. That's fine. Figure out what you did wrong, fix that, go again. Iterate your way to Mastery, learn to #winatrpgs, and become an #EliteLevel hobbyist.
Moonstein, the Classic Traveller Braunstein, was so good that Jeffro decided to do it again.
First off, if you can’t run a Traveller campaign on a combination of zero referee prep effort and total player autonomy, then you do not have a Traveller campaign at all. Secondly, not everyone was happy with this event. People that were eager to play were dismayed to be eliminated before the game had even really got going. Still others intent on forming a cooperative party to go out on a more conventional adventure were shocked when they were all betrayed and then shot in the face at close range with a revolver than never missed. And thirdly, we do not know how these techniques function in the context of either regular session play or a more stately weekly turn cycle.
Which he did. He rolled up another planet, folks rolled up new mans, and Hijinx Ensued.
Expect others to have Session Reports soon, so look forward to seeing their perspectives on how things went down.
It's good that Jeffro got all het up to do this with Classic Traveller, as his games tend towards the exciting and provide plenty of receipts to show others that the Bros are not only right about AD&D1e but about tabletop adventure games generally. Imagine how this will go down if he decides to do Call of Cthulhu.
Jeffro's Traveller game has gotten people noticing and talking.
If you haven't followed his blog, go there and read up on Moonstein. That's the Traveller game, and it's been something straight out of some Space Western stuff like Outland (and its successors, like a certain well-known animated series.)
As Jeffro has already called an end to the scenario, this stream will be something of an immediate post-mortem and After Action Report.
It's also a great way to start a regular Traveller campaign. Someone is going to want answers for what went down there. Who? Hell if I know, or why they want those answers, but they have questions and want answers and are willing to pay to get them.
Tune in, folks. It'll be good times.
We have a one-two punch of Conventional Play Cargo Cultists exhibiting everything I talked about yesterday.
Every single product mentioned in these two videos conforms to the business model that the Cargo Cult's publishers, following the commercial incentives inspired by Mammon, made into a Standard Practice: a incomplete "core manual" that is deliberately published as Crippleware in order to make room for Endless Trash of Supplementary Product that "patches" the "holes".
In the case of Dark Heresy they go one step further and do the Palladium thing where products for another product line are defacto supplements for that product line and thus are implied to be de rigeur therein also.
What do you need out of 40K that you can't do with Classic Traveller, Gamma World, or AD&D1e? What do you need out of any other Pink Slime fantasy game that AD&D1e doesn't do just as well if not (and usually does do) better?
A lot of products on the shelves--in the store and in your homes--is Useless Filler Bullshit.
Furthermore, due to this hobby being wholly and utterly reliant on Network Effects, your odds of actually USING that products are slim to none because most people won't give anything that is not The Game That Matters the time of day.
Don't think so? The business-savvy folks do, which is why "Reskin Current Edition and add some House Rules" is the go-to answer for these corpos and strivers when it comes to answering the question of "What RPG do we use for our Brand?"
You can, and you should, strip your library down to D&D and the D&D-like game in other market niches (Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Gamma World, etc.).
That is, if you're talking things you use and not just keep for sentimental value. (You can pry my copy of Lancer's Rockers from my cold, dead hands.)
Learn and master the real games, those few that actually exist, and you will soon find that most of what is on those shelves is Useless Filler Bullshit meant to satisfy CONSUME PRODUCT and not to fulfill a need that actually exists.
Conventional Play Problem: "I can't do anything without Narrative contrivance to shake things up."
Explanation: In order to keep a Conventional Get Along Gang together as a cohesive unit focused on a single objective, there needs to be a violation of player agency that imposes a burden of performance upon the players' characters in order for them to do anything but the safest route to success.
Players come to resent this over time, especially if the game explicitly grants their characters the ability to foresee such threats to their agency and thus pre-emptively work to negate them. As the Conventional Play Cargo Cultist is, at best, unfamilair with alternatives to the Narrative structure that the Cargo Cult promotes--especially with publishers, incentivized by commercial gain to push more and more product consumption on the promise of fulfilling the lack that the game has, having no incentive to tell users otherwise--all he knows how to do is to piss them off (or, worse, habituate them to a Learned Helplnessness akin to what you see in videogames that force results on you even if you otherwise would be able to avoid them). The Cargo Cult's insistance on this reminds me of a Blackadder bit.
Decades of forum and Reddit threads, and before them decades of Letters To The Editor and magazine articles, provide copious receipts- receipts that would later become fodder for comics like Knights of the Dinner Table, Order of the Stick, etc. as well as parodies like Munchkin! and many more.
Bro: "Have you ever just let the players run the parties contending in this scenario?
The problem here is that Conventional Play presumes that all the players are cooperating against a single opponent. This works when it's a delve into a dungeon. It is terrible for anything else, but the older games--being built as derivatives of Faction-based wargames--presumed (because Boomers couldn't be bothered to actually teach this to anyone, like responsible hobbyists do) that players would be playing Faction-based play as well as cooperative delves.
In short, this is a hobby where Long-Term Prisoner's Dilemmas apply. Y'know, like Diplomacy.
The folks who, due to commercial incentives, feel threatened by the revival of the real hobby and its true paradigm of play, are those most vocal and vehement about how heretical this is as it offends the dogma of the Cargo Cult.
What I now suspect is that, while the Soup Aisle Rejects are the ones ankle-biting, the motivation at this point comes from Fear Of A Dead Grift. If a critical mass of players learned that they didn't need to buy Yards Of Product to keep the playable content rolling, but instead could make their own for free, forever by playing the level of the game where the conflicts that generate that content come out of then a hell of a lot of Also-Rans and Never-Were would die off swiftly over a few years (or, at most, diminish to the self-funding hobby that Gonnerman is at with Basic Fantasy).
Sure, we can talk about how breaking the CONSUME PRODUCT dogma also fucks over the Molech Cultists' attempt to socially engineer the hobby into a Death Cult propaganda front, but that is secondary to the fact that the stalking horse they use to do that--the Mammon Mob's Commercialize ALL THE THINGS obsession--is the driver for all of this. Break that, and the poz vector also falls away.
The Bros saving the hobby by de-commercializing it may not be what you expected, but the results speak for themselves.
And if you want to see it be done more or less in real time, read Jeffro's Session Reports for his Traveller event now ongoing.
Jeffro's expanding his reach again, this time to Classic Traveller, with a Braunstein event that starts at 8pm today. If you want in, I hope you see this in the morning and haul ass to get involved. Let me help you get started there, champ.
This is a solid scenario, but I advise you to read that post carefully. He's going for a rapid pace of decision here, and that may not be your thing.
Even if you either choose not to play, or miss the admissions deadline, I would advise you to read the follow-up posts reporting the scenario's progress and conclusion. Jeffro's aiming to prove what a lot of people, including myself, have already deduced: Classic Traveller is for space adventure gaming what AD&D1e is for sword & sorcery adventure gaming.
But he's not the only one. My own is moving to the launch pad.
I took something I'd posted here previously, cleaned it up, revised it, and posted it over at the Clubhouse.
As the posts show, this too is meant to show how the real hobby is meant to work. I need only one player to take up the Halfings and this too can launch. Twitter or Discord DMs are prefered, but email will do.
And I'm sure that everyone will want to see things go down.
One of the things I noticed with the serious exploration of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition is that having a single, settled, static edition of the game turned out to be a massive benefit to attracting and retaining new people.
Having a ruleset that does not change because it is not subject to commercial considerations is a massive boon to any hobby campaign built upon that cornerstone foundation. This is confirmed by how Car Wars and BattleTech endured for so long despite neglect or even hostility by the controlling Publisher; the rules manuals could be had online, and before that the used market, that remained as they were since publication as well as less-than-legal sources (photocopying and mimeographing).
Therefore the conclusion is obvious: a stable, healthy hobby scene cannot be subjected to Edition Churn. It must use one unbending, unyielding, unchanging Forever Edition such that someone learning the game today learns exactly the same rules to play exactly the same game as someone a thousand years from now.
Yes, this means that Product Development is going to completely change. Good.
Rules are not shoes. Rules are not cars. They are not goods to be used, worn out, and discarded when no longer fit for purpose.
Rules are like software, in that it is a pile of mechanics and procedures that operate like a machine. They are better than software in that you do not need electricity or a computer to use it.
That means two things: it is possible to hit "good enough" during development, and it is viable to aim for "perfect" as the end goal of development. The former term is self-explanatory; the latter merits qualification, so here it is: "Perfect" is defined as having achieved a state where any further changes can only damage the ability of the rules to achieve the stated outcome to be had by playing the game.
"Good enough" is where development starts. "Perfect" is where it ends. The transition between the two is what development is: the refining from a rough, but usable concept into the final finished product that does what it is meant to do- no more, no less.
That this is at odds with what is considered Best Practices for commercial operation, be it in physical or in digital products, should not be a surprise to anyone. Edition Churn is a commercial practice that is at odds with the fostering of a healthy hobby environment, and it has been known as such since Stupid British Toy Company deliberately weaponized it as a business practice in the 1980s.
This practice needs to be taken into the town square, strung up at the gallows, and hanged for all to see before being doused in jet fuel and lit up to burn to ash.
There is one very obvious reason for why this needs to die: it is no longer necessary to do this at all.
The technology now exists for a rules manual to be posted online for all to see, and to study, at their leisure. It's been around for over 30 years at this point; there is no need for anyone to churn editions anymore for any form of tabletop game of any kind. Put the rules online; mirror that site, make PDFs available for offline use, and sell Print On Demand copies at-cost.
Once the rules have achieved their final form, lock the site down as well as its mirrors. Do similarly for the PDFs and POD listings.
Now you have that game that shall be the same for the rest of time. Good.
To kill the threat that Muh Officialdum, almost always fostered as a headscrew by Publishers to weaponize Fear Of Missing Out to induce a cult-like dependency upon the Publisher via control over the Brand, has upon a hobby.
If a rulebook from 10 A.D. and a rulebook from 3010 A.D. are exactly the same, then the Hobbyists will be able to enjoy the game for generations on end without any worry that some dangerhair dumbass, some status-striving slut, some grifting guru, some poncy politico, etc. will seize control over the game via legal fuckery and shit-can the game and its Brand.
Keeping cultural institutions out of the hands of obvious attack vectors for bad actors is part-and-parcel of good stewardship over one's culture. That includes games, especially those who have a habit of teaching people ideas and practices that some folks would rather not spread around.
There's something else that needs to be kept in mind when we talk about how Vidya beats Tabletop for a lot of adventure game stuff.
Vidya, for certain games so far, does a far better job realizing how a man in that environment has to think and act to succeed than on Tabletop. The game that illustrates this best is BattleTech. Both the Harebrained Schemes adaptation and the Pirahna Games one handle all of the actual campaign stuff better than tabletop because it's shoved into the faces of the typical player; you have to master logistics to win the game.
Notice that both of these games have their own ways of doing Conventional Play's disregard of Strict Timekeeping because both of these are single-player games with no pressure upon them by hostile actors; they are both games with Narrative at their core, so you have to trip Plot Triggers for things to happen that matter- just like Conventional Play.
When you go to an Open World mode of play (which both of these videos do), even that is gone. You can do all the refits, train up pilots, go wherever, and the only costs that matter are time and (sometimes) availability. Yes, this is exactly same thing as the old joke about JRPGs where you have to Save The World Right Now, but you spent as much or more time doing sidequests than the main quest because that's where much or most of the game is.
As JD Sauvage said on Twitter the other day, Operational Tempo matters. Conventional Play does not have this. It cannot because it is taken as Referee cheating players, and due to several infamous episodes that got turned into comic strips and running jokes there is substance to that seeming.
Pressure comes from outside the player. Want your man to get that loot in the dungeon? Got to get down there and grab it before some other man does, and that someone else is run by a player- not a NPC run by the Referee.
That player can be you, as you may be forced to bench your first choice man due to what goes down at the table and have to resort to a backup choice to secure that bag instead. (Get used to the idea of having a roster of mans when you play in a real campaign, rotating them on and off the bench as required.)
That player can also be someone else, whom you do not know, and you will not know until that treasure is taken or otherwise removed from the campaign and thus no longer relevant.
That's how things really work when you play a real tabletop adventure game, and you play it in a proper campaign environment. It will not feel like a Narrative; it is not play-acting. It will feel like war, like business- like the competition that it is. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose- and sometimes you win or lose for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
And the experience is vital to achieving the full power of the tbletop adventure game as a medium.
Friend of the Retreat Jon Mollison has a new Solo Play game.
If you're wanting to see things done, this is a good start.
As you can see, a lot of what I and others have said about Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition applies to Classic Traveller: you don't need the official setting because Your Campaign Map will be a bespoke creation unique to your campaign, created--generated--as you go.
Characters are easy to roll up and incorporate. The Lifepath system suggests plenty of possibilities in itself for your man, and the systems for Planet and System generation do the same for where the fun happens.
Figuring out how it all works, and works together, is where the opportunities for play are because they are where the liminal spaces reside.
Now to just add some recent ex-Servicemen looking for a payday and a way to get where they want to go and be.
Jon posts on Twitter. You may want to read his threads and participate that way if you can't make the livestreams.
Also, there's a new post up at The Clubhouse, where I deliver on what I promised last week.
One more game that is best done in a clubhouse environment, and without Muh Official Setting dragging things down.
You approach this game exactly the same way as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition.
You print off a blank hex map. You roll up one planet. You run adventures on that planet. Other players in the campaign can pick another hex and roll up their own planet to run adventures there.
That planet you rolled up, using the tables in the rulebook, can produce some wild results that are open to interpretation and will prompt questions whose answers cannot help but to generate playable adventure scenarios and factions on-world sufficient to have planetary (or intrasystem) Patron Play conflicts in themselves.
Then there's going to be intersystem Patron Play, which will build upon that intrasystem layer, leading to a fractal explosion of playable adventure scenarios.
And yes, there's going to be room for bigger actions.
You don't need the Third Imperium. You don't need anything but what you and your fellow players generate off the procedural content generator tools in the rules, and the setting you generate as you play will be more substantive, more real, and more visceral than anything Games Designers' Workshop (or any of the fansites or successors) ever published.
And yes, you can find this stuff used; don't buy new unless you're out of options. This is the space adventure counterpart to AD&D1e, and it should be honored accordingly.
(Honorable Mention goes to Renegade Legion; good luck getting all of the subgames, but you do have an ideal clubhouse campaign product line with that.)
Jeffro Johnson had this to say yesterday:
Classic Traveller RAW including death in character generation does more to immerse a player in a rich game environment than anything a referee really does to elaborate on it. https://t.co/52ErcSR8MW
— Cardinal Jefforieu (@JohnsonJeffro) August 26, 2023
Classic Traveller is one of those games where Tourists and Cultists can and do get filtered out before reaching the real game. Instead of being filtered by some form of tutorial encounter, they take issue with character generation and the lack of control over it. Having no control over their man, not the risk of dying during generation, is what turns them off.
"But I want to play (X)!"
Yeah, that's nice. I want my leg back. That ain't happening either.
Traveller, like AD&D1e, is all about seeing what the dice give you and making the most of it. Sometimes you score big and you have plenty of leverage to work with. Sometimes RNGesus abandons you and you're playing a one-term Army draftee that terfed out on re-enlistment. Enjoy having Rifle-1 and one other skill above 0; try not to die.
Tourists don't do "Deal With It" anymore than they do "Git Gud". Cultists aren't much better, as they fail to comprehend why it is that way so they make changes heedless of consequences two or three degrees removed that end up screwing things right into the dirt.
I won't sugar-coat it. Sometimes your man just gets in over his head and things end badly- and that too can be quite enjoyable, as the BBC figured out generations ago.
But characters are free and the hobby is Rogue-like by its nature. Reroll and go again.
Learning how to play what your man has as best you can is part of developing Player Skill. Learning how to pay attention to what is going on in play is also part of Player Skill. Learning what questions to ask, and when to ask them, is also part of it. Learning to accept that your function in the group is "role-playing" is part of it. (Made explicit in AD&D1e's Dungeon Master's Guide.)
Combined this means learning how to MacGuyver your way to victory. Sometimes you have a lot to work with. Sometimes you don't. You still do your best with what you've got, and if that isn't enough then you learn from your mistake when you play your next man.
And yes, sometimes fantastic adventures end badly. Someone has to be the Doomed Prior Party, and that means you from time to time. It happens; because this is all Rules As-Written, (a) it's likely your fault and (b) when it's not it's a Black Swan so you still have no one else to blame. Rub some dirt on it, walk it off, reroll, and go again.
If you persist, and if you improve yourself as a player, you will iterate your way to winning over time- just like in real life. (There's that Transferable Skill thing again.)
Don't be a Tourist or a Cultist. Persist, Git Gud, adapt to things as they are, and you too can win.
