$100 Traveller Recommendation
Feb 09 2023
For Traveller 1E you can cheat and go to Far Future Enterprises where Marc Miller will send you all the GDW Traveller and JTAS on two CD-ROMS for $35 each. Years of gaming for $70 plus shipping. (I wouldn't recommend MegaTraveller nor Traveller: The New Era if you haven't played Traveller.)
For current Traveller there is Mongoose's 2nd edition (1st edition didn't click with me for the simple fact that presentation kind of sucked with old-style plain covers and black and white pages). Unfortunately they no longer sell Traveller Starter Set which is most of the rules and a campaign to play with. Paired with The Pirates of Drinax ($50 pdf, I'm assuming TSS would have been $50 or less) that would have been epic.
For Mongoose Traveller 2E there are two options for rules: Traveller Core Rulebook, Update 2022 ($30 pdf) and Traveller Explorer's Edition ($1 pdf, that's one dollar!). At 74 pages the Explorer's Edition is 30% the size of the core so it's quite stripped down (for example Explorer's has two careers and Core has a dozen). You could run a campaign with Explorer's but seems a bit restrictive.
There are two great Mongoose Traveller campaigns. The Pirates of Drinax ($50 pdf) with the optional Drinaxian Companion ($30 pdf) puts the PCs as pirates (hired guns really) going into the Trojan Reach (unclaimed by any big stellar entity) to lay the work for Drinax to reclaim its lost territories.
Deepnight Revelation ($40 pdf) is a campaign where the PCs are part of the crew of a long-range explorer on a multi-year journey far outside known civilized space. By itself it is a nice campaign with gigantic blank spaces for the Referee to fill in (with the help of the world generation rules in Core and Explorer's). You kind of want the six supplements, the first five of which detail five sections of the trip and the last has adventures you can run throughout the campaign. But those six supplements are $165 pdf so kills our budget.
Back to Pirates of Drinax. Question is whether to run it with Core and just Pirates or Explorer's so you can include the Companion. In the end I think I'd rather have the Core so my $100 recommendation is:
Traveller Core Rulebook, Update 2022 ($30 pdf)
The Pirates of Drinax ($50 pdf)
Reach Adventure 1: Marooned on Marduk ($9 pdf) - PCs are taking an intra-planetary shuttle that crash lands in the wilderness
Reach Adventure 5: The Borderland Run ($9 pdf) - PCs are hired for a dangerous delivery job
I added two adventures set in the same area as Pirates and can be adapted for the campaign.
Traveller being an old game there must be a fair number of free adventures. One good source of material is Freelance Traveller, a bi-monthly fanzine started in 2009 and still going strong.
For current Traveller there is Mongoose's 2nd edition (1st edition didn't click with me for the simple fact that presentation kind of sucked with old-style plain covers and black and white pages). Unfortunately they no longer sell Traveller Starter Set which is most of the rules and a campaign to play with. Paired with The Pirates of Drinax ($50 pdf, I'm assuming TSS would have been $50 or less) that would have been epic.
For Mongoose Traveller 2E there are two options for rules: Traveller Core Rulebook, Update 2022 ($30 pdf) and Traveller Explorer's Edition ($1 pdf, that's one dollar!). At 74 pages the Explorer's Edition is 30% the size of the core so it's quite stripped down (for example Explorer's has two careers and Core has a dozen). You could run a campaign with Explorer's but seems a bit restrictive.
There are two great Mongoose Traveller campaigns. The Pirates of Drinax ($50 pdf) with the optional Drinaxian Companion ($30 pdf) puts the PCs as pirates (hired guns really) going into the Trojan Reach (unclaimed by any big stellar entity) to lay the work for Drinax to reclaim its lost territories.
Deepnight Revelation ($40 pdf) is a campaign where the PCs are part of the crew of a long-range explorer on a multi-year journey far outside known civilized space. By itself it is a nice campaign with gigantic blank spaces for the Referee to fill in (with the help of the world generation rules in Core and Explorer's). You kind of want the six supplements, the first five of which detail five sections of the trip and the last has adventures you can run throughout the campaign. But those six supplements are $165 pdf so kills our budget.
Back to Pirates of Drinax. Question is whether to run it with Core and just Pirates or Explorer's so you can include the Companion. In the end I think I'd rather have the Core so my $100 recommendation is:
Traveller Core Rulebook, Update 2022 ($30 pdf)
The Pirates of Drinax ($50 pdf)
Reach Adventure 1: Marooned on Marduk ($9 pdf) - PCs are taking an intra-planetary shuttle that crash lands in the wilderness
Reach Adventure 5: The Borderland Run ($9 pdf) - PCs are hired for a dangerous delivery job
I added two adventures set in the same area as Pirates and can be adapted for the campaign.
Traveller being an old game there must be a fair number of free adventures. One good source of material is Freelance Traveller, a bi-monthly fanzine started in 2009 and still going strong.