Traveller: Collective Storytelling Sci-Fi on an Epic Scale

On Tuesday nights I am Talon "Tal" Graves, a 50-year-old survivalist, planetary surveyor, and recent widower.

I was a rebellious youth, branded a terrorist for spearheading illegal activities as an underground freedom fighter and forced to flee my home planet. After drifting from spaceport to spaceport, getting into debt and making enemies, I joined the Scouts Service to keep my head down and make a gainful living. There I met Samantha. We were married for twenty-four years. We worked for the Scouts on the frontiers of space together, turning our humble scout ship (The Garden) into a mobile home - much like the campervans of present-day Earth. On our retirement, the Scouts gifted us the ship as a reward for our years of service.

We travelled space, looking for a peaceful, nature-filled planet to rest and grow old together. Small freelance surveying jobs helped with cashflow and ship upkeep. On one such job, in a remote corner of an unpopulated planet, we were analysing core samples for an intergalactic mining megacorp, Sternmetal Horizons. Their briefing document said it was safe. No threats to life. None.

These huge powerful institutions, megacorps, governments, militaries; we individuals are nothing to them, mere puppets in their game. I will play no more. Cut the strings that bind you. Stoke the fires of anarchy.

Tear it all down.

And so ended my character generation mini-game. Now, the game itself! We have a Wiki for our game to keep track of the game world, you can see Tal and some of the other characters here.

Not your average RPG

Many RPGs are rooted in min-maxing; you start off young and not-very-good-at-stuff and grow to be awesome. In Traveller, however, you start the game having already lived a life and are probably very good at whatever niche skills your career(s) taught you. Then you hit 40-50 years old and something causes you to think "fuck this". You give up your ordinary life and go do something illegal in space. Maybe your life skills are useful here, maybe they're not, good luck.

As in the ordinary everyday world that we might refer to as the "real" world, a trigger moment that causes you to change the trajectory of your life might be something dramatic, like my Tal character's inciting incident. I believe my final dice roll table of my char gen session gave me: "someone important to you is born or dies" and I built the death of a spouse narrative from there. However, the reason you become a Traveller can equally be something fairly mundane; it is down to a combination of what the universe spins for you via dice rolls and how your own imagination reacts to that.

Session One

In session one I was drinking heavily in a run-down bar on the planet Arden.

It is a reasonably well-resourced and populated planet in the Vilis subsector of the Spinward Marches of chartered space. I'd just told my in-laws about their daughter's passing, when in walks a rowdy bunch of spacers celebrating raucously. My fellow player-characters had arrived.

They had spent the previous season of the game setting up a smuggling route for premium gin. "Arden Gin" can now be smuggled from one subsector of space to another at a fraction of the cost, result!

The balance of relations between player characters is managed initially via backstory. Some of the other player characters had also spent time working for the Scout Service and remembered Sam and I from work events. At this point, they didn't know she'd died and they still don't know how she died as I intended to reveal that in-game. (Well, they do now, if they're reading this, which I hope they are, hi guys! Yep, space wolves, sorry).

After some awkward and comical roleplay exchanges, they took me with them to work on their illegal gin enterprise, and so our story began...

Individual Narratives vs Collective Narratives

Even having joined a new crew, Tal Graves still pursues his own goals and ambitions of bringing down the megacorps, governments and military through any means necessary. With the support of a fellow player character who has a profession in law (thanks, Electra!), Tal recently founded a trade union to protect ordinary workers: the Interstellar Guild of Frontier Researchers. But, he's also training pretty hard in Explosives (a skill in the game) and is trying to find the planet where Sternmetal Horizons' headquarters is located.

The narrative arc of every individual player character is necessarily entangled with the story world. This is arguably true of any story, RPG or otherwise; character and world are mutually constituting, perpetually evolving with equal bi-directional influence. Such is life as we experience it day-to-day, but that's perhaps a discussion for another article in another Territory (see t/philosophy).

Any broader arc the Gamemaster might guide the story along, will always tie-in thematically if the world itself is well-realised. Therein lies part of the joy of collective storytelling; nobody knows where the story is going, nor could anyone know. The universe itself sits with us at the table, given a voice via the dice or other random chance mechanism. We play alongside its radically unpredictable motions, and what creative beauty and wonder it spins.

Story world scale beyond comprehension

You couldn't hold the scale of the Traveller story world in your mind any more than you can the scale of the real world universe. Allow me to demonstrate:

The world you see in the top-left, Arden, is where Tal Graves met the rest of the crew in Session One. The planet bottom-middle named 728-907 is where Samantha Graves was killed, but we've never visited this planet in-game as players. Top-middle, Tremous Dex is a very high-tech planet that is also fairly lawless - we had a fun shopping episode there. On the very right of the image is a planet called Dinomn, this is where the crew were when we finished the season some 8 weeks later.

Here, you can still see Arden for reference, in the top left of the subsector of space called Vilis, wedged between the subsectors of Lanth and Quirion.

Here in the centre you see the subsector of Vilis, where Arden is.

We can no longer see the planet Arden, or even its subsector, Vilis, at this scale. They are both in the middle of the map in the prime sector called Spinward Marches.

Here we can see the edge of charted space on the left, with the prime sector of Spinward Marches in the centre of the map.

This is the entirety of charted space, but not the entirety of the game world!

Here is where charted space sits in the Traveller universe.

Here you can see charted space in the known universe.

You can explore this vast map and zoom in and out at your leisure on the Traveller Map site. It loads very slowly because there is so much information there. Every sector, subsector, and planet in known space is linked to the Traveller wiki site. Try the map.

The Traveller wiki site itself is comprehensive in a scale comparable to our own "real" world Wikipedia. Any culture, planets, event, empire, organisation, significant person, plant, animal...you name it, there's info to be found. The game was invented in the 1970s and appreciated as a Sci-Fi parallel to the original Dungeons & Dragons. Generations of gaming enthusiasts have developed the Traveller universe since then. Enjoy 50 years of worldbuilding with depth and rigour: Traveller Wiki.

Where to get it

I highly recommend this game!

It is published by Mongoose Publishing and they've been refining it for decades alongside a very engaged fan community. The most recent core rulebook is the 2022 version. It is also worth picking up a copy of the Central Supply Catalogue to explore all the cool gear your character might acquire on different planets. The Highguard book is also great for getting to know and create spaceships of the Traveller universe, if your character is able to buy, rent, liberate, steal, or otherwise finds themselves with a spaceship to run! They aren't cheap but I suggest getting the PDF versions, cheaper and also you can simply press ctrl/cmd+F to search for specifics in this massive game, rather than flicking through hundreds of pages of hard copy books.

Note: I do not work for Mongoose publishing, nor do they pay me anything to say nice things. This is just an honest share from someone in awe of this game!