Games - Traveller

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	Games - Traveller

Traveller is a series of related table-top role-playing games. The first edition of this game was published in 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop. Originally Traveller was intended to be a system for playing generic space opera themed science fiction adventures, in the same sense that Dungeons & Dragons is a system for generic fantasy adventures. However, a suggested setting called the Third Imperium was detailed with the publication of following supplements and since then this setting has become strongly identified with the game, such that to fans the name Traveller and the Third Imperium are synonymous.

The Traveller rules help construct a far future society that draws inspiration from the Foundation stories of Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert's Dune, Larry Niven's Known Space, Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium, Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League and several other works of science fiction literature. Characters are expected to travel between star systems, engage in battle on the ground and in space, and involve themselves in interstellar economics. Traveller characters are defined less by the need to increase native skill and ability and more by achieving positional advancement in the form of wealth, gadgets, titles and political power. While any version of the game system could be used in many science fiction settings, most published supplements have dealt in some way with the Third Imperium, also sometimes referred to as the Original Traveller Universe, or "OTU".

Setting

The Third Imperium is in the distant future—over three thousand years removed from our own time. Interstellar travel is facilitated, and limited, by the use of a technology known as the jump drive. Jump drives are capable of propelling a starcraft between one to six parsecs, depending on the individual drive's specifications. Regardless of the distance of a jump, the duration required for the trip is approximately one week. Communications are limited to the speed of travel; there is no "sub-space" or other form of FTL information transfer. This leads to a central principle of Traveller's original setting, that the restraint on the speed of information leads to decentralization and the vestment of significant power in the hands of local officials.

The primary nation-state in Traveller is the Third Imperium, a human-dominated feudalistic union of over eleven thousand worlds currently (as described in GURPS Traveller) ruled by its 43rd emperor, Strephon Aella Alkhalikoi. The Imperium is the most powerful interstellar polity, but it is surrounded on all sides by potentially hostile neighbors. Local nobility operate largely free from oversight, restricted by convention, feudal obligations, and the fear of being caught.

As presented in the original Traveller game, the Third Imperium had a tendency to seem monolithic and unchanging. Characters could work within its systems, but were considered too insignificant to affect matters on a galactic scale. However, the publication of MegaTraveller shook-up the status-quo by introducing the great Rebellion, begun when Archduke Dulinor assassinated Emperor Strephon in a bid for the Imperial throne. The death of Strephon touched off a terrible conflict involving imperial dynastic struggle, violent secession of large regions of the Imperium and the advance of foreign powers into the empire's territory. In other words, the sort of "interesting times" that gave characters a better chance at being involved in dramatic, important events.

The Rebellion was finally ended, at the conclusion of the MegaTraveller game line, by the inadvertent release of Virus, an electronic superweapon that invested any computerized hardware it infected with intelligence and a malevolence toward biological lifeforms. Unfortunately, this also reduced great numbers of worlds to a pre-technological state. The following game, Traveller: The New Era, presents the period seventy years after Virus during which the first attempts at reestablishing Interstellar commerce are made.

The Rebellion is an extremely controversial topic for Traveller fans. Some feel that the civil war (and the resulting apocalypse) ruined role-playing's most dynamic and developed setting. This sentiment was expressed most overtly in GURPS: Traveller, which utilizes an alternate timeline in which the assassination and subsequent apocalypse never happened. However, the established canon line has its own dedicated fanbase, and has recently enjoyed additional development by QuikLink Interactive's 1248 material.

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Games - Traveller

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