New setting for Traveller needed

Re-writing the starships chapter and providing new personal equipment is not the same as tossing out the entire rule set.
 
enderra said:
With all due respect, but I don't believe this can be true. Yes, there are certain assumptions built into the Traveller rules, and in some areas they are more pervasive than in others; but it should be trivial to easy to adapt the rules to any setting you wish. What's giving you trouble?
The technology level of a Perry Rhodan setting would be beyond
even the technology level of the Ancients of the Third Imperium
setting, so one would have to design the entire technology part
of the rules, for example new rules for starship drives and wea-
pons, instant interstellar communication and matter transmission,
or various types of force fields and screens. A typical small craft
in the Perry Rhodan universe is a spherical craft with a diameter
of 60 meters, the size of a Third Imperium warship, and a huge
battleship of the Perry Rhodan universe has a diameter of 2,500
meters, which Traveller's starship design rules could hardly handle.
And so on and on, these are just two examples of many.
 
Hopeless said:
Assuming that Traveller and the Imperium are unavoidably linked and can't establish a separate setting that is Mongoose's alone as far as Traveller is concerned?
Sorry, I don't buy this at all. The Mongoose product line pretty concretely demonstrates that the 3rd Imperium is only "one possibility". Besides which many GMs and players don't use the 3I anyway.
 
It is possible to modify the current rules to accomodate this level of technology, but it requires a large amount of work to do so. In any case, the Traveller rules are deliberately vague about what is possible beyond the current limits of Imperial technology. This is one area where there is plenty of scope for further development within the limits of the system. I think it's fair to say that some of the technologies envisioned since the original LBBs were written could be placed here without anyone being the wiser - dry molecular nanotechnology, wormhole engineering, non-destructive uploading of human minds, advanced genetic engineering, etc. With a more radical approach, you could even place some technologies unavailable in the classic 3I setting here - such as limited FTL communications based upon causal channels that use quantum entanglement or relay stations that generate microscopic wormholes for communication between star systems. These change the nature of the setting in various ways though. An option might be to allow some of these technologies to flourish in the Fourth Imperium centuries in the future.

One option might be to add a page or two to the core rulebook that offers some guidelines for alternative technology paths, such as the "Common Biotech" future.
 
Lord High Munchkin said:
Hopeless said:
Assuming that Traveller and the Imperium are unavoidably linked and can't establish a separate setting that is Mongoose's alone as far as Traveller is concerned?
Sorry, I don't buy this at all. The Mongoose product line pretty concretely demonstrates that the 3rd Imperium is only "one possibility". Besides which many GMs and players don't use the 3I anyway.

To be blunt, I think that some fans of the Third Imperium setting do begrudge anything published for other SF universes because it draws resources away from their preferred campaign setting. Mongoose can only publish so many Traveller books per year and each release for 2300AD or Judge Dredd or Babylon 5 or whatever potentially means one less release slot for new Third Imperium material. I can understand this position - and even sympathise with it - although I disagree with it. There are a lot of people out there waiting patiently for some of the promised Third Imperium releases and I'm sure that some of them get frustrated when they see Mongoose wasting time and energy releasing something liker the Judge's Handbook II instead....
 
Diminishing returns, if you over emphasize one line.

For Judge Dredd, there were times I thought Warhammer 40K might be more appropriate.
 
rust said:
The technology level of a Perry Rhodan setting would be beyond
even the technology level of the Ancients of the Third Imperium
setting, so one would have to design the entire technology part
of the rules, for example new rules for starship drives and weapons,
instant interstellar communication and matter transmission,
or various types of force fields and screens. A typical small craft
in the Perry Rhodan universe is a spherical craft with a diameter
of 60 meters, the size of a Third Imperium warship, and a huge
battleship of the Perry Rhodan universe has a diameter of 2,500
meters, which Traveller's starship design rules could hardly handle.
And so on and on, these are just two examples of many.

No trouble at all.

You can re-use the star ship rules as-is, but if ships are really so big, you probably won't need to have stats for every single lasergun on board anyway. Just make something up that fits the literary source and assign Traveller stats that roughly match. Just scale the system up - an abstract hull point is a hull point, no need to worry about compatibility to 3I because, well, you won't mix the two anyway in any meaningful way. A pulse laser represents not a single weapon but an abstract "battery" of pulse lasers, and so on.

Don't know how PR force fields work, but the two basic types I can envision either provide a to-hit penalty to the attacker, or grant temporary, replenishable hull points to the craft. Easy peasy.

Instantaneous FTL radio and matter transmission require no (game) rules, they're plot devices.
 
Prime_Evil said:
But the Third Imperium has already been done a number of times without the Traveller rule system - there's the GURPS version, the d20 version, the Hero System version, etc..

Gurps Traveller is a traveller system and it uses the 3i, all of them are, proving my point about the 3i being integral to trav; there is not a "the" system though. I'm not trying to pull a thomas and be insanely negative, but if Mongoose lost it's license and lost the 3i/2300 stuff, so would their rpg suffer heavily. Matt stated a year or two ago that their best selling rpg was Traveller, with 3i products leading; which supports something said by Miller/Wiseman/Neilsen of there being both collectors and players. Which is fine, as the completists do help the bottom line for players by helping to keep sales up and thus material flowing.
 
Mongoose has already technically SRD'd the Major Races in slightly different forms. Take a close look at their write-ups in the CRB.

Build a setting around those changes. The old map is out the window pretty quickly.
 
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