nezach
Level 3 Conjurer
Posts: 87
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Post by nezach on Feb 9, 2011 16:45:28 GMT -6
Hey folks, I just saw that DriveThruRPG has a freebie bundle of all the sectors Judges Guild did for the Gateway Quadrant - Crucis Margin, Glimmerdrift Reaches, Ley Sector, and Maranantha Alkahest. rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=88299&affiliate_id=35844I never picked these up back in the day, so I'm interested to see this bit of Traveller history from the Classic era. |
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Post by Finarvyn on Jul 6, 2013 12:31:02 GMT -6
If anyone is interested, these are still free.  |
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Post by Otto Harkaman on Jul 6, 2013 17:00:26 GMT -6
Awesome! Thanks for the heads up!
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Post by battlebrotherbob on Jul 7, 2013 6:22:17 GMT -6
Starter Traveller is also still free. Good way to start a campaign. I know it may speed me along.
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Post by Finarvyn on Jul 7, 2013 8:09:33 GMT -6
I dusted off my GM screen and black books the other day just to look them over again. A great game, even if I haven't played it in years....
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Post by Otto Harkaman on Jul 7, 2013 15:10:53 GMT -6
I dusted off my GM screen and black books the other day just to look them over again. A great game, even if I haven't played it in years.... Was it really as good as we thought it was? I wonder now. I had bought the black book box set in '78 I think, which would have made me 14 at the time. I remember reading, pondering and gloating over the books for endless hours but I never really understood anything beside the character generator. Oh yes I rolled up endless characters just dreaming of using them. I think I remember a few attempts of my friends and I to run combat, I don't know what we did now. Have you ever run a successful combat sequence? I couldn't afford snapshot at the time. Also, I made a very sincere attempt at one time to figure out the space combat in book 2. They never made any sense but I dreamed of my own scout ship and made sure I rolled up a scout character who received one when he left the service. Also I never saw Mayday available at that time in our gaming store nor could I have afforded it. I always read that it replicated traveller space combat on a hex grid. A year or so ago I ended up focusing on the Mayday rules that I bought as a pdf from Paizo and using Mycenae's vassal module. I realize after a few attempts that it was impossible, many rules when you really dug into them were very vague. Missiles are a good example, really read them and see if they make sense. With that said its fun to look at these creative third party products that were made to fill in the gap for adventures that GDW, besides a couple adventures, never seemed to fulfil. |
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Post by battlebrotherbob on Jul 8, 2013 6:03:12 GMT -6
Otto I hear what you are saying. We are very similar in our ages, it sounds like, and initial experiences. I saved for weeks to get the box set and poured over it for days. Looking back at the rules it was a very confusing mess of concepts and errors. I supposed I wanted it to work so I made it work. I tweaked combat to get it to play, Designed lots of sectors and planets. Like you loved the Scout service and always went for the Type S for mustering out. I found the additional Books helped smooth stuff out.
Looking back on it, it was no more or less a confusing mess than OD&D or AD&D was at the time. That is part of the charm. Traveller did have problems with errors that got "fixed" over time. The definitive edition would be either The Traveller Book or Starter Traveller. That has all the errata in it. It has the same flaws of all the early RPGs seem to have, the fact they are working through unknown territory. On the whole it worked for the same reasons that OD&D worked, it opened up whole new realms to get with your friends together and have fun. Fudge what you had to and keep what works. Very Old School.
Not trying to be mean. Like I mentioned earlier I hear exactly what you are saying about the flaws. With it being the second SciFi game and one that has lasted as long as it has, for me it became my real love for RPG. Even if I couldn't get a lot of people to play to regularly back in the day. I've come to embrace its quirks and am currently working on getting something going on a regular basis around here.
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Post by Otto Harkaman on Jul 8, 2013 6:14:32 GMT -6
Couldn't agree more!
Didn't take you at all that way. Unless that was your intention?
We should move this to a new thread and people should show actually play examples instead of jingoism.
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Post by thorswulf on Jul 8, 2013 7:31:38 GMT -6
I think I was 12 when I got Traveller. That's about 1982 for those of you counting! My mind was focussed on Star Wars, Star Trek and so on. Traveller was fun, but I didn't re4ally get why it couldn't do space opera at the time. Flash forward to about 2000, and I'm reading classic sci-fi like H. Beam Piper, early Niven and so forth. Suddenly Traveller makes a lot more sense. Yes the rules were clunky, and I couldn't wrap my head around some of the space combat either (Still Can't). But then a 12 year old kid does not really have a degree in military tactics and theory either!
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tec97
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 157
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Post by tec97 on Jul 15, 2013 7:22:54 GMT -6
I played a butt-load of Traveller (LBB version) in jr high & high school. Combat was pretty straight-forward, and rather lethal. The abstract range-band system is pretty workable. I recall even writing a Traveller combat calculator program in my BASIC class back in 83-84!
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Post by Finarvyn on Jul 15, 2013 9:17:33 GMT -6
I think that the key is that in the old days the rulebooks were more guidelines than anything else. Now, rulebooks are encyclopedias.
Games like OD&D and Traveller were designed to give you a nudge in the right direction, with some degree of rules but otherwise to allow for the GM and players to "run with it." That's part of why they could be so small and (for me, at least) that's part of the charm.
Nowadays, you have these thick rulebooks with an attempt to anticipate every possible option and rule on it. I just can't play that way. I remember in the early 1980's when half of my group went gung ho AD&D and we'd be playing for hours, then take a 20 minute break because the DM rememberd that he'd seen a key rule somewhere on the situation that had arisen. This really nudged me back into the "seat of the pants" style of OD&D more than anything else -- I didn't want to have to look for rules any more than I had to, but instead wanted a "just roll something" style of play.
Otto asked if the rules were as good as we remembered? Yes, and no. Yes, they are still short and to-the-point and fun; no, they don't cover everything as thoroughly as modern rules systems do.
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Post by Otto Harkaman on Jul 15, 2013 10:00:35 GMT -6
Well put Finarvyn. I took up the argument more heartily than I wanted or meant to. There is good and bad, it definitely stirred my imagination at the time.
Cheers
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Post by barrataria on Jul 20, 2013 7:35:06 GMT -6
This is kind of a funny thread, because most of you have the same recollections I had. I never got into CT, I started with MegaTraveller, which IMO gets a bad rap or is unloved. I still enjoy playing the "character roll-up" game from time to time, and I still use it to generate characters for my homebrew d6 space galaxy (I convert the stats after mustering-out).
Anyway, when I think back to the MT games we played when I was a freshman in college (I think), I for the life of me cannot recall what I was doing with the rules. I'm pretty sure I misunderstood the core task system. I vaguely recall running starship combat encounters, but I'm pretty sure I grossly simplified that too. But the funny part of the memory is that I THOUGHT then I was using the rules, when looking back I must have been doing what I do for d6 and D&D now... make up a task number and ask for a roll.
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Post by ravenheart87 on May 16, 2014 13:47:00 GMT -6
Doing some thread necromancy...
How good are the Judges Guild Traveller products? What's worth checking out? What should I avoid?
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Post by ffilz on May 16, 2014 18:17:53 GMT -6
I had purchased several back in the day and never made much use of them, but for the price these days (I got the Apocryphia II CD-ROM with all the JG products plus Games Workshop plus Paranoia Press), think there is stuff that could be useful in setting up a campaign. I'm always happy to have more world maps for example, and some of the adventures might even have a seed of usefulness (though I recall some weird aliens and such).
Frank
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tec97
Level 4 Theurgist
Posts: 157
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Post by tec97 on Oct 31, 2014 15:34:45 GMT -6
Doing some thread necromancy... How good are the Judges Guild Traveller products? What's worth checking out? What should I avoid? As with most JG products, they were hit-or-miss depending. Sometimes they really just gave you a great kernel that grew into something quite different that what was published. As I recall, Simba Safari was pretty useful, as was Darthanon Queen. You could also do some pretty interesting stuff with Marooned on Ghostring. They sectors were sectors - a good alternative if you didn't want to stay in the Spinward Marches, which was about all that was available from GDW at the time. |
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