Retrospective: Kinunir

Over the course of its original version, GDW produced thirteen adventure booklets for Traveller, the first of which was published in 1979. Adventure 1: The Kinunir consisted of 44-pages and is another example of old school adventure design, being a location-based adventure. Of course, in this case, the location in question is a starship of the Kinunir class, a 1200-ton battle cruiser with a full crew of 45 (plus marines).

Adventure 1 thus includes maps for all five decks of the starship, along with descriptions of every room and area on aboard. Also included are full stats for every crew member, from the captain all the way down to a cargo clerk (and the full complement of 35 marines). The booklet provides information on the Kinunir class: its general specifications, the current dispositions of these vessels, and other stats. Taken together, Adventure 1 gives you everything you need in order to use this starship in your Traveller campaign -- everything, that is, except a fully-fleshed out adventure.

What's interesting about this booklet is that it provides four short outlines (plus rumors and library data) for adventures but each of these outlines takes up no more than a single 8½" x 5½" page of text. Most of the details are left to the referee to determine and each of them has quite different assumptions from the others, which enables the Kinunir-class vessel to be reused multiple times -- once as a prison ship, once as a derelict, etc. Like a lot of early Traveller products, Adventure 1 is an efficient little product, packing a great deal of utility between its few pages.

But make no mistake: this is not a "ready-to-go" product. Though it labels itself an "adventure," it is, as I say, more of an adventuring locale with some suggestions and resources for using it as part of an adventure. That's probably why I got so much use out of the booklet back in the day and, judging from its sales figures -- close to 40,000 copies over 13 print runs -- it was one of the most popular Traveller products ever produced. For me, Adventure 1 functioned much like a supplement, providing me with ideas I worked into my ongoing campaign. It's from these details that I formed a lasting impression of the Third Imperium as a decadent, corrupt government. One of the adventure outlines involves the characters being hired to rescue a dissident noble and senator from a Kinunir-class starship turned into an orbital prison for political prisoners; that was one of the first scenarios I ever ran in Traveller and it colored my presentation of the Imperium for years afterwards.

I often wonder whether an adventure like The Kinunir would meet with much success today. On the whole, Traveller adventures were a lot less structured in their contents in presentation than were many other adventures at the time. GDW mostly ignored the Hickman Revolution and, once it ceased to do so, the results were disastrous for the once-solid game line. Part of the appeal of even the official Third Imperium setting was the very broad way in which it was drawn, allowing for a wide variety of individual interpretation and approaches. That's why I could continue to maintain my vision of the Imperium as a corrupt regime even while continuing to use many of GDW's own products. Those products were amazingly "agnostic" on a lot of big questions until fairly late in the game's lifetime and I think that made for better and more useful products. It's a model I continue to admire, especially nowadays, when selling a world and a prefab story seem far more important than giving gamers the tools and raw materials from which to construct their own.