Travellers Needed - The Future of Traveller

[Condottiere]

The incentive with Warhammer is that unless playing with friends at a private venue, you tend to need to turn up with official figurines, preferably correctly equipped and painted.

I think with Traveller, it's likely to be cardboard cutouts, though with printers, you can avoid the painting aspect, and reequip as per taste.

 

[Arkathan]

It is a shame that Micro Machines stopped making their Star Wars line. When they went on sale, you could get lots of squads of painted 15mm figures cheap.

Worked great for West End Games Star Wars and Star Warriors.

 

[NOLATrav]

For those who are fine with paper/cardboard minis, El Cheapo over on DTRPG has a ton of sets available, including TAS-branded Traveller minis for Vargr, Hivers, Zhodani, Imperial Marines, etc. Each set has a few different colors and builds including a three-sided version for accurate facing on the map.

DriveThruRPG.com - The Largest RPG Download Store!

Your one-stop online shop for new and vintage RPG products from the top publishers, delivered fresh to your desktop in electronic format.

www.drivethrurpg.com

There's also a handful of publishers doing paper-printed terrain, buildings and props suitable for a Traveller game.

 

[Condottiere]

At some point virtuality will be an option, so you play at the table, with either your cellphone, tablet or wearing Google Glass, watching the action unfold and your characters interact.

 

[capital_q]

We could have had all that with Vanguard, but not enough people backed the kickstarter.

Vanguard was an expensive, large-scale combat game (which I was a backer). We need PC and adversary miniatures.

 

[enpeze2]

The incentive with Warhammer is that unless playing with friends at a private venue, you tend to need to turn up with official figurines, preferably correctly equipped and painted.

I think with Traveller, it's likely to be cardboard cutouts, though with printers, you can avoid the painting aspect, and reequip as per taste.

of course official traveller cardboard miniatures would be phantastic. But I guess bringing out a KS with 3D files is more gain for Mongoose...hm...maybe not, I dont know. I also own alot of cardboard minis. Most of them are from the excellent artist Okumart from drivethrough. Maybe this great master of 2D miniature drawing should be tasked by Mongoose with bringing out a line of official traveller cardboard minis? that would be a dream. You can see his work in the link down below. (his "extrastellar" series for example comprises PCs, aliens and alot very usable folks for our traveller rpg)

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[gilthy]

2nd Dynasty (at 2nddynasty.com) have a license for Traveller-based STL files. They've Kickstarted the Type-S, and that also came with 25mm miniatures. And I think you can get printed versions of those through various sources (there's a commercial license for printing those minis available, not 100% sure on the details). There's one set of 59 minis (mostly human, some vargr, hiver and aslan) and a separate set of Star Marines (5 in battledress, the 6th suiting up).

 

[southernap]

IMO the thing is that expensive minis are not that attractive anymore, and Vanguard had these which explains more or less why the project failed. Too few people are playing traveller to justify real miniatures. Traveller has by far not the massive following of CMON or Bones.

On top of that it isn't that hard to repurpose more generic Sci-Fi themed minis (see this example from Reaper Mins) for Traveller. Heck playing around with HeroForge and you can get some workable Humans and Vagar and even Droynes if you wanted to buy in resin or even Colorized Standee style that is on plastic if you didn't want to paint.

STL Files are the simple way to go today. I know many people with home-printers who would luckily print out traveller minis for 10cent the piece and so do most of the hobby crowd. And best of the story is that 3D gets from year to year more popular, cheaper and better to handle. All mongoose has to do is looking for a good patreon artist and hiring him for 30 or so STL files directly from the traveller lore (ships, aliens etc.) and then starting the KS. If successful (and it will be) repeat this once per year. Its that easy.

I am not sure that having official minis anymore is a viable option for small market TTRPGs (and lets not kid ourselves Traveller isn't a power house anymore on the market) and as Enpeze2 mentions above it would be easier if Mongoose went this way for them to sell STLs or license STL rights to a few design houses. Heck selling STLs might be useful for the future, but there are so many other options right now on the marketplace to get sci-fi STLs and pre-printed minis; that they would be a loss for Mongoose (IMHO).
In my mind I like the El Cheapo products and Okumart work well for my table and think that if anything Mongoose should either feature them more often or should do cardboard/standee styles themselves say with the character sheet packs.

 

[Faelderg]

Droyne are easy

 

[alex_greene]

In the past, we have had an unofficial polling of Traveller players to see what they are wanting/expecting to see in future Traveller books. In the past, you have asked us for more playable aliens (which led to the Aliens of Charted Space series and the minor race articles in JTAS), exploration campaigns (Deepnight Revelation), and a focus on the Solomani (Solomani Front and a new line of Solomani adventures).

So, we come to you again - what would you like to see for Traveller in 2022 and beyond?

No answer is too silly (well, maybe...), and we are happy to look at all areas of the game, be it rules-based or areas of Charted Space.

Over to all of you!

There was a LBB supplement, Forms & Charts, which was one of the driest, most ... unforgivingly draining supplements ever created.
Imagine creating a journal, a player's journey, with an official Traveller folder or just a Traveller sticker, and allow players to create their own record of adventures through the documents they "accumulate" along the way.

A real, refillable journal would be good. Make it a ring binder sort of thing, with the ability to use polypockets so your player can put together their own adventure, possibly in real time, charting every jump, every landing, every customs cleared, in a series of little "souvenirs" of their journeys.

Even in electronic format - a Traveller's "passport" with the official cover, Great Seal, and "rubber stamps" of planets visited.

 

[Sigtrygg]

And yet it was incredibly useful back in the day for photocopying (it would be the mid 90s before I had access to my own printer)

 

[Shardan13]

An update of the Vehicle Handbook. Especially the military vehicles as modern weaponry stops targeting the front and starts hitting on the top. More energy weapons that can fit in the small mount would also be nice.

 

[alex_greene]

Make it less about the toys tacked onto the chassis of vehicles, and more about the tactics and action scenes involving them, in 2D on the ground, and in 3D in the air and water, or similar fluid medium.
@MongooseMatt The revised VHB could do with a look at aquatic and aerial vehicle scenes - weather, enemy actions, races and chases, stuff like that. Then something similar for ground vehicles, such as the effects of snow, rain etc. on Speed and Handling, visibility considerations and so on.
Less about the toys; more about the experience of driving and handling vehicles. After all, the Travellers probably spend as much time inside those wheeled tin cans as they do on board their ships.

 

[IanBruntlett]

@MongooseMatt The revised VHB could do with a look at aquatic and aerial vehicle scenes - weather, enemy actions, races and chases, stuff like that. Then something similar for ground vehicles, such as the effects of snow, rain etc. on Speed and Handling, visibility considerations and so on.
Less about the toys; more about the experience of driving and handling vehicles. After all, the Travellers probably spend as much time inside those wheeled tin cans as they do on board their ships.

How would you handle (literally) rolling a 4x4 vehicle when driving over rocky terrain and/or steep inclines? I am not a petrol head but it was a common problem, a number of decades ago...

 

[alex_greene]

Roll your Drive skill to avoid rolling; if your wheels do go into a roll, your Drive skill can be used to check for the vehicle to land upright, and Mechanic skill to make sure it's still able to run. Hopefully, your ride won't land on its roof, or - worse yet - tumble off a precipice or fall upside down into the drink.

How would you handle (literally) rolling a 4x4 vehicle when driving over rocky terrain and/or steep inclines? I am not a petrol head but it was a common problem, a number of decades ago...

 

[Condottiere]

Could be the time to convert Dungeons And Dragons classes and bestiaries into Traveller statistics and mechanics.


Dirtsides & Dreadnoughts

 

[nats]

Something I have always thought would be interesting in Traveller would be info on what it is like to be living as a future citizen - travelling on passenger ships, using planetary public transport grav buses/trams etc, being a tourist going on holiday trips around a star system, or going on long sight seeing holidays around a sector, stewards, food/drink, hotels, hotel lobbies, taxis, pubs and clubs, carousing and dating, gambling games and casinos, types of future sports events, housing, going to work, offices, shops and malls, the industrial sector, civilian robots, banks and money, gangs and criminals, police and law breaking, etc.

This sort of info could be useful in setting up the beginnings of an adventure set in the future and adding a lot of flesh onto the typical role playing setting.

A lot of great films start off with the mediocre/boring lives of the soon to be heroes .... Nobody being a perfect example, Star Wars being another ! The Judge Dredd comics often contrasted Dredds exploits fighting criminals with his home life and his robot servant Walter lol. Bladerunner 2049 is another good example of depicting the contrasting life of the main character.

 

[Vormaerin]

Something I have always thought would be interesting in Traveller would be info on what it is like to be living as a future citizen - travelling on passenger ships, using planetary public transport grav buses/trams etc, being a tourist going on holiday trips around a star system, or going on long sight seeing holidays around a sector, stewards, food/drink, hotels, hotel lobbies, taxis, pubs and clubs, carousing and dating, gambling games and casinos, types of future sports events, housing, going to work, offices, shops and malls, the industrial sector, civilian robots, banks and money, gangs and criminals, police and law breaking, etc.

This sort of info could be useful in setting up the beginnings of an adventure set in the future and adding a lot of flesh onto the typical role playing setting.

A lot of great films start off with the mediocre/boring lives of the soon to be heroes .... Nobody being a perfect example, Star Wars being another ! The Judge Dredd comics often contrasted Dredds exploits fighting criminals with his home life and his robot servant Walter lol. Bladerunner 2049 is another good example of depicting the contrasting life of the main character.

What species of future citizen? From what culture? At what tech level and planetary environment? Transhumanist Solomani citizens on Neumann live very differently from the tech 5 folks on stormwracked Susanawo that's in the same subsector. I'm a super big fan of cool cultural details, but I wonder how that could be usefully communicated outside of a world specific book. I wouldn't want a bunch of generic cultural cues.

 

[Shardan13]

It may sound strange but I felt that the various types of humans were too monolithic. The Vilani, the Zhodani and the Darrians each seem to pretend in contemporary times that were always Vilani, Zhodani and Darrian. Their histories of their home worlds claimed to have individual countries in the past. It might be nice to explore these "lost" countries and see their influence in their descendants.

 

[Iracundus]

Since there's effectively a Solomani supplement, why not a Vilani one? After all the Vilani are ancient and their culture still influences and is blended into the Third Imperium. Could cover more Vilani purists near Vland and the like, and could include an exploration of that most dangerous topic of Vilani cuisine.