How to play Traveller solo?

[jimboh]

Hello,
I have wanted to play Traveller again for a long time after delving into the game briefly in the late 80's. However, I'd have to go it alone these days.

What would I need to play Traveller solo please? What I'd like to avoid is having to learn a complex game like this just to be able to play a couple of solo scenarios. I want the full experience if possible, and if that makes sense.

I'm happy to buy whatever core books are required and source any other supplements that would enable solo play. However, I have no clue where to start and typically, searching the WWW has led me in circles because the game is so massive. Lots of opinions and yet no definitive answers.

Any help would be appreciated

 

[Reisender]

Solo Play Traveller 2e
Solo Traveller Thoughts

 

[Ewan]

Zozer Games had an excellent little supplement called Playing Solo Classic Traveller, in addition you might want to look at this also from Zozer Games

DriveThruRPG

preview.drivethrurpg.com

 

[jimboh]

Thank you both for the replies, they helped!

The Ed May videos are in my subscription list to watch. The D100 system is ok, but it didn't click with me when I tried it. The article posted by Wiganer34 was a great read and clarified a few things for me that weren't clear before.

SOLO by Zozer Games is in my basket at DriveThru as the reviews are stellar and it seems to be exactly what I'm looking for. Star Trader also looks interesting, so I am going to buy that too.
Amazingly, I found that BundleofHolding are having a sale on Mongoose Traveller books, so I bought both the Starter Set and Mercs bundles. The timing for these is excellent. I'm a big fan of printed books though, so will also look at buying some from Mongoose.

It's been such a long time since I played the original Traveller with the little black books and yet I still remember the excitement of exploring the systems with the game.

I've had a busy (and expensive) afternoon and now have a lot of reading material to wade through. Brilliant!

Thanks again Reisender and Ewan for the help, I appreciate it.

 

[Seffix]

I am curious to hear where you end up going with this.

 

[jimboh]

I'll post something more when I have made progress with the game. I'm just debating whether to stick with the pdf core rulebook on a tablet for the moment or buy the printed version immediately. Electronic PDF files are a pain to use when there are so many pages.

 

[jimboh]

Here's today's 'progress', sort of...

I tried looking through the rulebook and it reminded me just how unwieldy a pdf document is on a tablet/PC when you have to flick back and forth to various chapters. It's possible to create bookmarks and make this chore slightly less cumbersome, I know. Still, if it's not fun I lose interest and having to move around a rulebook pdf is not my idea of fun.

So, I'm definitely going to order the printed core rulebook sooner rather than later. I watched a YT vid earlier singing the praises of the boxed Starter Set (which, again, I have in pdf format only) and went in search of that on the Mongoose site. Nope. Tried ringing Mongoose using the phone number on the site (I'm in the UK too) and nope, it's out of service. So, I have used the contact us page to ask about the printed starter set, which seems better value for money than just the core rulebook.

Constructive criticism here for Mongoose...please add something more to your site to explain what all the books are for from the perspective of a complete noob and what someone 'needs to', 'should', 'could' or 'might want to' buy as a newcomer in order to get started with the game. There's a brief intro to some of these on the sales page, but it doesn't really explain why I might buy High Guard, for example. Is this book necessary as opposed to being 'nice to have when you're experienced with the system'? I can guess, but it would be nice not to have to for the prices of these tomes. As things stand, being faced with a dozen or more books at £40+ each and no clue which to buy beyond the core rulebook is not really helping the novice to move forward. I know, I know...I could use a search engine and do some digging of my own, but isn't that really the job of the publisher first and foremost?

Anyway, in the meantime I have now, bought, printed and bound the SOLO supplement from Zozer Games and have had a flick through that. Looks great! I have also thumbed through a copy of Cepheus Deluxe Enhanced that I bought and printed a while ago and forgot about. It will serve to help me learn something about the system while I wait for the official rules to arrive. I also have the Explorer version of Mongoose Traveller and have just printed that too for now.

Having read everywhere that the supplements such as SOLO are generally compatible with most official versions of the game, I figured reading something from a third party won't hurt me learning the game later from the official rules.

Ed May's video series on solo Traveller is fantastic so far. I managed to watch the first two episodes this afternoon and enjoyed his enthusiasm and walkthrough on how to begin.

 

[Seffix]

Hmm. My mini-inquisition: What sort of story do you want to play? Are you interested int he Official Traveller Universe or do you want to craft something specific to you? How many protagonists do you want to work with, and what sorts will they be?

 

[jimboh]

Good questions!

I grew up with sci-fi movies and it's my first love for fiction...Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Alien, Close Encounters and all the amazing cartoon series like Battle of the Planets, not to mention the games like Elite and the X series by Egosoft that I spent a long time with. An amalgamation or combo of any of those would be great. Imagination is the best gap filler when a story is told and playing a game that encourages creativity and imagination to tell a story is very compelling to me. Trading, combat, exploring all appeal.

There's so much available in the Traveller Universe that it would be remiss of me to ignore it. So, once I figure out the mechanics of the game, I'll start looking into this side of it too.

In terms of protagonists, I don't know. Somewhere between one and a small crew to begin with probably.

I guess everyone who plays Traveller has their own take on all your questions and that is another reason I'd love to learn to play. Having spent probably hundreds of hours with AD&D as a teen, I'd like to go with something sci-fi themed now and Traveller is so massive in scope that I would imagine it could fill years of play time.

What's your experience with the game?

 

[Reisender]

Constructive criticism here for Mongoose...please add something more to your site to explain what all the books are for from the perspective of a complete noob and what someone 'needs to', 'should', 'could' or 'might want to' buy as a newcomer in order to get started with the game. There's a brief intro to some of these on the sales page, but it doesn't really explain why I might buy High Guard, for example. Is this book necessary as opposed to being 'nice to have when you're experienced with the system'? I can guess, but it would be nice not to have to for the prices of these tomes. As things stand, being faced with a dozen or more books at £40+ each and no clue which to buy beyond the core rulebook is not really helping the novice to move forward. I know, I know...I could use a search engine and do some digging of my own, but isn't that really the job of the publisher first and foremost?

This could be a start:
Traveller Spine Codes
New to Traveller, where to start.
Essential books?

Most books should be pretty self-explanatory, like Core Rulebook, Vehicle Handbook, World Builder Handbook or Robot Handbook. High Guard may not be that obvious but is basically the Ship Building Handbook.
Then there are books about the Traveller Universe, such as The Third Imperium or Imperial Navy.
And last but not least there are Adventures and Campaigns, that are labeled as such. They even started to sort the adventures by region, e.g. Rift, Core, Reach, etc.

What is considered to be essential depends on what you want to play. The Core Rulebook is practically the only essential book that you need in order to play. Need more equipment then the Central Supply Catalogue is always an option. If you are into creating stuff then the various Handbooks could be considered essentials as well. Want to know more about the Traveller Universe then books like The Third Imperium are your cup of tea.

 

[jimboh]

Thanks Reisender. I hadn't heard of spine codes before and have just spotted a couple of posts online about them. This game is a deep rabbit hole and it's only been dawning on me over the last few days just how much has been developed for it over 47yrs.

One thing that brought that home to me earlier today was a post (and subsequent discussion) on Reddit about how a character lost an eye during creation and what could be done about it. The game had an answer and options for this exact situation. Just wow!

What is considered to be essential depends on what you want to play.

This is an excellent question and ties in with what Seffix asked. At first glance and to the uninitiated, Traveller is just another RPG and yet there seems to be an infinite number of ways to approach the game, not all of which are obvious, or clear. I thought I knew what I wanted from it, but I'm no longer sure because of all the choices available.

I guess my comment to Mongoose was to try and offer some perspective from the position of someone who loves sci-fi, knows Traveller is mature, popular and a space based RPG, but doesn't really know whether one of the many (expensive) 200 page books for sale will be useful or not and can't glean this properly from a small paragraph as a description.

 

[MongooseMatt]

I guess my comment to Mongoose was to try and offer some perspective from the position of someone who loves sci-fi, knows Traveller is mature, popular and a space based RPG, but doesn't really know whether one of the many (expensive) 200 page books for sale will be useful or not and can't glean this properly from a small paragraph as a description.

Taken on board, we will be looking at that this year!

 

[jimboh]

Taken on board, we will be looking at that this year!

Very much appreciated.

 

[Seffix]

I grew up with sci-fi movies and it's my first love for fiction...Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Alien, Close Encounters and all the amazing cartoon series like Battle of the Planets, not to mention the games like Elite and the X series by Egosoft that I spent a long time with. An amalgamation or combo of any of those would be great. Imagination is the best gap filler when a story is told and playing a game that encourages creativity and imagination to tell a story is very compelling to me. Trading, combat, exploring all appeal.

There's so much available in the Traveller Universe that it would be remiss of me to ignore it. So, once I figure out the mechanics of the game, I'll start looking into this side of it too.

In terms of protagonists, I don't know. Somewhere between one and a small crew to begin with probably.

I guess everyone who plays Traveller has their own take on all your questions and that is another reason I'd love to learn to play. Having spent probably hundreds of hours with AD&D as a teen, I'd like to go with something sci-fi themed now and Traveller is so massive in scope that I would imagine it could fill years of play time.

What's your experience with the game?

I grew up with SF in books, TV, and eventually movies. I got into DnD when it was the only game in town, and got Traveller as soon as it was available, played it in high school, bought various versions over the years, but was playing other RPGs. I haven't gotten to play Traveller again until 2023. Sigh... I'm old...

My current game centers on a cook/food journalist whose scientist Vargr bff was just given an old lab ship for unknown and suspicious reasons. I would describe it as Gilmore Girls meets Food Network in (Charted) Spaaaace. It's not the game I ever expected to GM, but ya play with the players ya have. (There's another branch of the game featuring a couple of Scouts doing Scout stuff, but it has been repeatedly delayed by scheduling difficulties.)

So your game can go in whatever direction you want.

Adding to what @Reisender said, the Core book is all you need. If you want to play in an official setting, one cheat you can do is get the Library Data Little Black eBook: https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/products/library-data-ebook It doesn't have current level art, and the information is outdated. I tell my players it's the Imperial Wikipedia. And there's this: https://wiki.travellerrpg.com/Main_Page

Another thing you can do it look at the blurbs on the Alien books, decide which ones you most want in your crew, shooting at you crew, or both, then pick a part of space where those aliens hang out and look for source information in that bit of space.

If there are themes or scenes or moods you want to shove your characters through, toys you want them to have or try to get, or other ideas, I can try to make more cogent suggestions.

 

[metlk]

I've just started down the solo rabbit hole as well. So far, I've used a combination of Mythic GME 2, the core rulebook random missions, and stuff from the 1st edition Traveller Supplement Book 9, Campaign Guide. For location generation, I took inspiration from D&D 5th Edition Game Mastery Guide for random dungeons and created a d6 and d66 set of tables with more sci-fi elements in the them. I then pulled the ticket system from Mercenary 1E and converted it to a mission and payout generator.

The only thing I've pulled from Solo is the ship encounter tables and I have yet to even use them (but that's more to do with the current campaign that I ended up going down.) I've used a little from the Universal NPC Emulator, but I believe the same could be accomplished using Mythic and a little interpretation. So far, I've not had a whole lot of NPC interaction beyond patrons.

The hardest part for me to work around was what I know, vs. what my character knows, and decided the best way to play it is when a situation ends up being different than what was originally described, that's okay. It just means I was either lied to, or the NPC didn't know the full truth of the situation. I use Mythic's Action and Subject tables a lot when coming up with the mission details. For instance if using my ticket tables I roll a mission to investigate a person, I might roll 3 times on the Action and Subject tables to get the words "Refuse Inside, Guide Ambush, and Communicate Fears. Using that, I would say my patron wants us to get inside a locked location and gather intel he could use for an ambush, and if at all possible, find a weakness into the facility. I would then use the location tables to set up what the facility is, and then as we enter and explore I would roll each room as we go in. If we somehow got inside information, in which case we might have the map layout beforehand, I have a table set up to test the accuracy and how the map might change, such as re-rolling a room type, or being so wrong the whole dungeon gets re-rolled as we go. I've not had the chance to test this in actual play, so I'm sure it needs adjusting.

To give you an idea on how a typical session goes, here was what happened to my son and I on a mission last night:
We were hired for 200,000 to take five new recruits and train them to fly small fighters (we're in a military thread right now.) Using the progress tracker, we hit a "flashpoint" where something that advances the plot in a substantial way happens. I rolled a space encounter from the Campaign Guide, and got Astronauts floating in space, looking for a ride to their asteroid, but they were infected with alien parasites that fed off of neural activity. (Our characters would be unaware of that fact at first.) We agreed to help, and the "astronauts" attached themselves using tethers to our small fighters so we could take them to a nearby asteroid. To make it fit our current scenario, we decided what that meant was an unknown alien race had supplied the enemy with Scionic soldiers, and they used "suggestion" to attempt to cause everyone to eject themselves so they could steal our more advanced fighters. Four ejected, three of us survived the roll, and and we managed successful piloting checks to shake off our hitchhikers before they could try again. We then found ourselves outnumbered 4-3. Our surviving npc and my son managed to take out 1 using dogfight rules before he and our ally npc were disabled. I took one out in the same round. On round 2, it was 2v1. Incredible lucky rolls let me destroy 1, then I won the dogfight in round 3 and managed to take out the last one. Had we lost, we would have most likely been captured and our adventure would have taken a new direction.

I did all of that using a bit of Mythic, Mercenary, the Campaign guide, and a little bit of imagination.

 

[alex_greene]

I'm recommending keeping journals - one for characters, one for NPCs, one for worlds visited, one for adventures.
Lightspress Media has journaling sourcebooks which you can learn from. Fat Goblin Games, likewise, has the Gamesmaster's Worldbuilding Journal, and Gamemaster's Allies and Adversaries Journal, and the Master Player's Adventurers Journal, all themed around fantasy, but they could still be useful guides.

 

[ProfGrizzlyJon]

Chiming in here. I love playing solo Traveller, it has been the only way that I have been able to stay involved over the last forty-years.

I also found it to be very helpful in creating campaigns- the NPCs and Patrons are formed from the exploits. I found it gives them backgrounds and fleshes out the rationale behind their behavior. It also helps me to learn new settings and new rules.

The journal recommendations are spot on. I started on paper, then moved digital.

I also found that iBooks have a useful search function and allow you to navigate very well. I keep all of mine on either my iPhone or my iPad.