Retrospective: Traveller: 2300

Despite the amount of time I've spent over the last forty years playing, refereeing, and writing about fantasy roleplaying games, I've always been more of a science fiction fan. There are many reasons for this, but, if I had to single one out, it's probably the fact that the first "grown up" television show I watched with any devotion was Star Trek, broadcast every Saturday afternoon on a local independent TV station. Watching Star Trek with my aunt – who'd been a teenager when the program originally aired – made a powerful impression on me (as did the days of manned space exploration) and I fully imagined that, sometime in my own lifetime, there'd be a permanent base on the moon's surface, as well as regular expeditions to Mars, the asteroid belt, and the outer planets. 

Though it's quite probable that I'll not live long enough to see my youthful dreams come to pass, I remain a science fiction aficionado. I have long said that Traveller is my favorite roleplaying game, bar none. I played the game regularly and with great enthusiasm in my younger days and my first professional writing gigs were Traveller articles and adventures that appeared in the pages of GDW's Challenge magazine. Despite this, there was a time, in the late 1980s when I'd grown tired of Traveller and was casting about for a replacement sci-fi RPG. Almost as if on cue, I began to see advertisements in Dragon proclaiming the imminent publication of a new SF game from GDW, entitled Traveller: 2300 and I was immediately intrigued.

At first, I assumed, based on the title, that it was a "prequel" of some sort to Traveller. Later advertisements explained the game's setting better, connecting it not to Traveller but to Twilight: 2000, another favorite game of mine (I was and am an unrepentant GDW fanboy). Traveller: 2300 took place three centuries after the Third World War, as "mankind discovers the stars," according to the game's tagline. The setting's post-Twilight: 2000 history was generated through the play of "The Great Game," a massive freeform (and, therefore, refereed) wargame played out by GDW's staff. Consequently, that history contained all sorts of odd and unexpected elements that gave it the weird plausibility that actual history does. For example, the USA never fully recovered from World War III and took a back seat to an African-oriented Third French Empire and the northern Chinese successor state of Manchuria. I adored this, since it provided not only a terrific backdrop against which to set adventures but also plenty of scope for national rivalries, intrigue, and wars – things missing from the utopian, antiseptic future of my beloved Star Trek.

Traveller: 2300 also excelled in its alien races, all of which were genuinely alien, sometimes to the point of being almost inexplicable to humans. Again, this appealed greatly to me. I'd long been seeking aliens better than the "guys in suits" approach adopted by so much space opera and this game provided them. Attempting to understand these alien species and their cultures was, in fact, a major part of the game, with several early adventures focusing on this. Even the main "enemy" species, the Kafers, received similar treatment, with both a sourcebook and series of adventures that delved into their unique biology and psychology, explaining just why it is that they had decided to launch a devastating war against humanity. 

The game was equally devoted to fleshing out the world of the future. We learned interesting little tidbits about Earth in the future, such as the fact that the eating of rat meat was now commonplace – a holdover from the famine years following the Third World War. The game's equipment list was not generic; instead, it was heavily corporatized, with everything from weapons to armor to computers bearing the name of its manufacturer. The result was a familiar yet somehow different Earth that felt "real," which is precisely what I'd been looking for at the time.

My main complaint about Traveller: 2300 was that its rules were nothing special and, in fact, impeded my enjoyment of the game to a certain extent. I had expected they'd be similar to those in Twilight: 2000 and, while there were certain commonalities, there were also plenty of changes, not all of which agreed with me. I gritted my teeth and used the rules as they were presented to the best of my ability, but I also houseruled many aspects of the game too. Had the game had better rules, I might have played it more than I did. Even so, I devoured the setting and, to this day, retain a great fondness for it.

In the end, though, it wasn't the rules that killed my interest in the game; it was GDW itself. The game's second edition, retitled 2300 AD, bore a new tagline "man's battle for the stars." The Kafer War became a much bigger focus for the game and incongruously tacked-on cyberpunk elements – then all the rage – were introduced. After a while, the game felt less like the wondrous, exploratory game that I fell in love with in 1986 and more like a generic military SF game. Every now and again, I get the hankering to return to this game and it's stymied by my memories of the game's ultimate development. I should probably just put that aside and immerse myself in it, since Traveller: 2300, flaws and all, had a lot going for it. One day, maybe I will.