Traveller

What is the narrative purpose of the Black Ships in the Traveller mythology? When were they first encountered? Are they supposed to represent an ancient threat, like B5's Shadows? Are they technologically superior to the Third Imperium and thus an invasion risk, like Star Trek's Borg? Are they something you throw at your players when they're "doing it wrong" to discourage a given course of action? Help me understand where they fit into the setting.

Nearly 20 years ago a group of children were rescued by the Commander at the height of the Fifth Frontier War.

All survived, and all learned to thrive in large part due to his guidance and care. News of his death came as a shock and now his four "children" return to Efate for his funeral.

Action, intrigue, and adventure during the Hard Times in the Regina and Jewell Subsectors.

Errant Heroes Traveller 2027

Basically the title. I don't see a Traveller group on Eternal September, so I suspect even if it was a thing on Usenet, it's not anymore. I'm not sure how to perform a more thorough check off the top of my head.

I have no idea about Echomail.

If they existed, what were these communities like? Do they still exist and I just didn't find them when I looked?

New blog entry.

A lot of sales for May Day!v

I've long had problems picturing the way that the spoke in Death Station works. Hope someone here can help me understand it (or figure out a way to explain it).

The image provided is an excerpt from my version of Death Station, but I removed lots of stuff and added the lift shaft and a crude representation of the Pinnacle.

Anyway, if we look closely to the center, I'm assuming that gravitics would keep sophonts in the spoke always pointing towards the same surface, but the ones in the Pinnacle would point to the floor of the ship.

Assuming the airlock points to the left on this image, at some point, the person inside the ship would need to rotate to adjust to the new gravity, or have a weirly shaped ladder.

Alternatively, consider the Pinnacle stationed at 90°:

Here, a stair seems less likely, but rotation still unavoidable.

Have you thought about this? How do you handle it?

A topic for discussion.

Mayday is an annual online celebration of the Traveller role‑playing game. Players and referees from around the world gather for a day of games, interviews, community discussion, and prize giveaways.

Whether you are a longtime Traveller fan or completely new to the game, Mayday is a great way to explore the universe and meet other members of the community.

Surely most of you have already heard about this, but in case some of you haven't:

There's a crodfunding campaign (will launch on March 31st) to create a 5E compatible (as in, D&D 5E rules) version of Traveller:

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/world-s-largest-rpgs/traveller-5e/

Personally I think one of the greatest strengths of Traveller is the system. And even though I'd love to have some coins or dice, it's unlikely I'll take part.

Still, I wish the campaign is successfull and it brings more people into the genre.

Have you seen the upcoming Kickstarter for The Serpent for Traveller? It looks interesting, and has some interesting inspirations.

As someone who has developed RPGs in the past I find that Mongoose Traveller 1e seems more cohesive. Maybe it is the expansion of the setting and additional options, or maybe that there seem to be new systems or mechanics constantly being added. Mongoose 2e seems too unmanageable. Is it just me?

I would like to wish a joyous Holiday to all sophonts across Charted Space and best wishes for a prosperous year!

Fanatical has a bundle with a bunch of Classic Traveller books (PDF):

https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/traveller-classic-rpg-collection

• 61 products for $15.99
• 24 products for $8.99
• 3 products for $1.99

cross-posted from: https://ttrpg.network/post/30155262

Mongoose has a free christmas gift:

Orbital Reds is a free Traveller... Paranoia.... Travenoia mission, including everything you need to explore the utopia of Alpha Complex... using the Traveller rules set!

https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/products/orbital-reds

Orbital Reds is an adventure for Traveller set in the funniest dystopia around, Alpha Complex from the game Paranoia. It uses the same rules from the Traveller Core Rulebook but players take roles as Paranoia’s Troubleshooters trying to protect their utopia from an old weapons platform in orbit. It would be best if the team knew what space and orbit mean, but ignorance is not just bliss here. It is a survival trait.

https://www.reddit.com/r/traveller/comments/1pnfagv/free_christmas_present_for_everyone/

Cluster Truck is a complete campaign that will see your Travellers take command of their own small craft, hauling cargo across a system. They will steal potatoes, get covered in frozen beer in deep space, take part in a history-making riot, uncover corporate skullduggery, and smash a blockade while confounding local law enforcement!

Mongoose just announced this on their Discord and I’m really excited about the theme!

For some reason I love space deliveries and regular life in space, so I’m looking forward to seeing what they put in there!

cross-posted from: https://ttrpg.network/post/29574737

Just an FYI, as part of our migration off of our current host, it's become apparent that we're going to need to migrate our image hosting to object storage.

The change should be rather seamless from the front-end perspective outside of the migration window, but during the migration window, our image hosting capabilities will be offline. I'm not sure how long it will take (the current image hosting data is fairly large) so it could be a bit of a prolonged outage.

Text posts, and commenting should all work, image hosting and thumbnails will be broken. You can still link to external image hosting such as imgur.com, but it won't generate a thumbnail.

I'll update here when it is complete, but as of right now, i would plan for a potential multi-day outage.

cross-posted from: https://ttrpg.network/post/28022029

I think I haven't shared this on the Fediverse yet.

The Cepheus Engine SRD has this nifty table on page 104 (chapter 5: off-world travel) where travel times are specified, at several G's of acceleration, for some common distances.

At some time I wanted to know how much time would it take to get to the Kuiper belt... but the table in CE's SRD stopped short of 7 Au.

So I made this page:

https://rpg20.com/index.php/misc/interplanetary

I also added a column where I specified the distance in light-seconds. light-minutes, light-hours, or light-days (because I find it useful to know when a radio transmission would ideally reach it's destination).

Hope someone else finds it useful.

A quick con report for last weekend's Travellercon/USA

TLDR: I had a lot of fun, great games, wish there had been more people there.

TravellerCon USA 2025 is coming this October 24-26th. It's at the Double Tree hotel in Lancaster, PA.

I missed last year, but I'm definitely going to run something this year.

For my Mongoose 2E campaign, I made my own custom GM screen, with only the stuff I found myself needing on a regular basis. It's 3 landscape pages, designed to be put in a customizable GM screen.

You can download a PDF copy, and the original Affinity files I created it with, here: https://polyhedralnonsense.com/2025/10/09/a-custom-gm-screen-for-traveller/

There is a new Ship Builder in Traveller Tools at Mongoose. There are some issues, but it's a great start.