Good Intro to OTU?

[KingMonkey]

I'm starting up a play by email game for some people who know nothing of Traveller or the OTU. My game will probably be placed in the Spinward Marches since I have a copy of that excellent work, but bringing the remote players up to speed on all things in the OTU as background might be a bit tough.

Does anyone have a suggestion for online material that I could point the players toward as a good, and hopefully short, intro to the Original Traveller Universe?

 

[EDG]

I don't have the SM book, but I thought someone else said that there's an intro to the 3I setting in the first chapter?

To be honest, if that's there then I'd suggest just sticking with that - you could just end up drowning your players in (contradictory) info otherwise. If you're going to expand beyond the local area then just introduce them to it bit by bit (the Traveller wikia is an OK source of info for small tidbits of info, though it's patchy and not very clear on what is canonical and what isn't)

 

[KingMonkey]

I don't have the SM book, but I thought someone else said that there's an intro to the 3I setting in the first chapter?

I think the intro in SM is quite good, especially considering that it is basically my Traveller background. Since my players are remote I cannot just hand them the book and say "read this". So unless I find something already out there, I'll probably end up doing a drastic paraphrase of what is in SM and emailing it to them.

Thanks for reminding me that SM gave me most of what I know about Traveller.

 

[Garuda]

There's a basic history of the 3I (and the Traveller game itself) on Wikipedia.

 

[KingMonkey]

There's a basic history of the 3I (and the Traveller game itself) on Wikipedia.

I can't believe I overlooked that one, right there on the first page of google results for "Traveller RPG". I guess I dove into traveller.wikia.com and forgot about the wikipedia.

Thanks for the input everyone, this has definitely given me what I needed.

 

[Xoph]

I reformated and printed this:http://www.freelancetraveller.com/features/advents/ttaintro/travintro.html for my players to read while they waited for everyone to get there and during the long character creation process. Add a couple of copies of book 0 and your ready to go.