# Traveller - Classic *Created:* 2026-11-01, *Modified:* 2026-11-02 ![[Traveller - Classic (cover).jpg]] The original science-fiction role-playing game is not a story about heroes. **Traveller** opens on a mayday from a broke free trader and hands you a forty-year-old with four terms of service behind them, a pension, a couple of skills, and a mortgage — and then asks what you can make of a galaxy that has been getting along without you for ten thousand years. This is the 1981 edition of the game in its **basic books** form, the revision that folded the original 1977 little black books into one volume. It is a small, severe set of rules that assumes the referee will invent whatever isn't covered, and its reputation — careers, dying in character generation, the six-digit character — is almost entirely earned. ## Setting The stage is the **Far Future**, inside the **Third Imperium**: an interstellar empire of thousands of worlds, governed through a feudal hierarchy of noble Houses and administered by a bureaucracy that treats procedure as a form of warfare. **Social Standing** is the sixth characteristic on every character sheet, and it is the whole thesis of the setting in one number — who your family is matters as much as what you can do, and the answer to both is a hex digit. The player characters are **travellers**: free traders, scouts, ex-navy officers and discharged marines, moving through the cracks of that empire. Most campaigns put them on a **free trader** with a jump drive and a debt, running cargo between worlds, taking the occasional patron's job, and discovering that the most dangerous thing in the galaxy is a mail subsidy you didn't read carefully. There is no metaplot to save the universe from. **Traveller**'s fiction is economic and procedural — mercenary tickets, speculation, the cost of fuel — and the grand politics happens above the characters' heads, which is exactly the point. ## Mechanics ### Characters Character generation is the game. You pick or are drafted into a **service** — Navy, Marines, Army, Scouts, Merchants, or the catch-all Other — and serve **four-year terms**. Each term you roll that service's **survival** number; in this printing, failure means **the character is dead and you generate a new one**, though an optional rule lets you convert it to an injury and a half-term instead. You may also roll for **commission** and **promotion**, and each term, commission and promotion entitles you to a skill from the service's tables. The classic result is a character who has lived: four terms, an age in the late thirties, a scatter of skills a civilian would never have assembled, and a **mustering out** roll that pays in cash or in benefits — the most famous benefit being a ship. ### The profile Every character is the **Universal Personality Profile**: **Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education**, and **Social Standing**, each 2d6 written as hex. `777777` is an average human; `777B77` has an Intelligence of 11. **Social Standing** above `A` carries a noble title outright — B knight, C baron, D marquis, E count, F duke. ### Combat Combat is personal, lethal and short. Damage is applied directly to **Strength, Dexterity and Endurance**: lose one to zero and you are unconscious, two and you are seriously wounded, all three and you are dead. There is no hit-point buffer between a character and the consequences of being shot, which is why the game's reputation for fragility is not exaggerated. ### Starships, trade, and jump **Jump drives** are rated 1 to 6 — the parsecs crossed in one week — and any jump takes about a week regardless of distance, so the map is a lattice of one-week hops and the route you can afford defines the campaign. **Book 2** covers the rest of it: ship design and construction, starship combat, computers and software, experience, drugs, and the **trade and commerce** tables that turn speculative cargo into the game's actual engine. **Book 3** is the universe toolkit: world generation, equipment, encounters, animal encounters, and **psionics** — the last of which is the closest the game comes to a magic system, and is treated in the fiction as something between a rumour and a crime. ### The shape of the rules There is **no universal task system**. **Classic Traveller** names a throw where it needs one — "throw 8+", with dice modifiers for skill and circumstance — and leaves the referee to extend the pattern to anything the rules didn't foresee. That absence is the single biggest thing later editions set out to fix, and the reason two **Traveller** players can describe entirely different games to each other and both be right. ## Editions - **Traveller** (1977) — the original three little black books: Characters and Combat, Starships, Worlds and Adventures. - **Traveller** (1981) — the revised edition, gathered into the single **Books 1-2-3** volume with errata folded in; the edition this note describes. *In the library (as the **Far Future Enterprises** facsimile reprint, itself revised a third time).* - **Traveller Starter Edition** (1983) — the boxed introduction that split the same rules across a rulebook, a charts booklet and an adventures booklet. *In the library.* ## References - [Traveller (role-playing game) — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_(role-playing_game)) - [Far Future Enterprises — Classic Traveller reprints](https://www.farfuture.net/)