# Traveller tags: #game/rpg/traveller ![[Traveller (cover).jpg]] **Traveller** is the granddaddy of science-fiction role-playing — Marc Miller's 1977 creation from GDW, and the hobby's most indefatigable re-issue. It's the game that decided you needed a *career* before you could go adventuring, that could kill your character during character creation itself, and that boils a whole human being down to six numbers between 2 and 15. If you've owned a sci-fi RPG, you've probably also owned three different **Travellers** that all insist they're the "same" game — because the edition sprawl isn't a bug, it's the **Traveller** business model. This is a **meta note for the line as a whole** — the shared premise, the signature mechanics, and the parade of editions. A per-edition breakdown is on the future list; this is the entry point that ties the whole sprawling thing together. ## Setting The setting lives in the **Far Future**, thousands of years out, under the **Third Imperium** — an interstellar empire so vast, so old, and so bureaucratically entrenched that it treats paperwork as a weapon. You play a traveller in the original sense: not a soldier fixed in a war, not a hero with a prophesied destiny, but a capable nobody — most often a **free trader** captain — moving through the cracks of a huge, indifferent society. You trade, you dodge imperial politics, you try to stay solvent and outrun your debts. Different editions and spin-offs have played fast and loose with the specifics — a few famously blew the Imperium up on purpose, or parked the timeline just before the whole thing happened. The through-line survives every reset: competent people, enormous spaces, and a vast machine of commerce and government that does not, collectively, give much of a damn about you personally. ## Mechanics ### Characters — the lifepath **Traveller**'s signature is **character generation**, a mini-career called a **lifepath**. Instead of rolling a class, you run the character through terms of service — Navy, Scout, Merchant, Marines — aging them a few years per term, stacking up skills, enemies, and debts, and, notoriously, running a real chance of **dying during chargen**. A forty-year-old veteran with four terms and a ship is a *good* result. It's the rare game where making your character is itself the first little adventure you survive. ### The six digits Everyone is reduced to the **Universal Personality Profile (UPP)**: **Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Social Standing**, each a 2d6 roll compressed to a 0–15 hex digit. The presence of **Social Standing** on your stat line tells you everything you need to know about what kind of genre this is. ### Tasks and skills Skill use runs on **2d6** plus skill and characteristic **DM** (modifiers) against a target number — **8+** is the classic default. Combat has its own crunchy subsystem, starships have their own, and trade has its own; **Traveller** is a toolkit that expects you to make peace with a great many interlocking tables rather than a single elegant core. ### Jump, trade, and the universe The famous **Jump** drive moves ships in 1–6 "parsecs" per week, which is exactly why the maps are what they are: big three-dimensional **subsectors** gridded into hexes. Commerce is the real engine — buying low and selling high across the frontier is half the premise, and the reason the free trader is **Traveller**'s signature protagonist rather than its footnote. ## Editions The parade, at a glance (a dedicated per-edition reference is future work): - **_Classic Traveller_** (1977) — the original three "little black books." *In the library (Facsimile reprint + Starter Edition).* - **_MegaTraveller_** (1987) — a unified ruleset threaded around the Imperium's collapse ("The Rebellion"). - **_Traveller: The New Era_** (1993) — a post-collapse reset that tries to rebuild what got destroyed. - **_Marc Miller's Traveller_** (T4, 1996) — a controversial return toward the basics. - **_GURPS Traveller_** (1998, Steve Jackson Games) — the setting under GURPS, parked just before the Rebellion. - **_Traveller 5_** (T5, 2013/2019) — the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink maximal edition. - **_Mongoose Traveller_** (1e 2008, **2e 2016/2022**) — the current flagship. *In the library (Core Rulebook 2022, Explorer's Edition, and a large shelf of supplements, including the Pirates of Drinax campaign).* - **_Cepheus Engine_** (2016, open license) — the SRD-derived fork that every budget Traveller-alike runs on. ## References - [Traveller - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_(role-playing_game)) - [Traveller RPG - Mongoose Publishing](https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/collections/traveller-rpgs)