Retrospective: Citizens of the Imperium

During the decade between 1977 and 1987, Game Designers' Workshop released thirteen supplements for use with what is now known as "classic" Traveller. As you might expect, these supplements are a mixed bag, ranging from the essential to the merely useful to the forgettable. I own them all, of course, because I've been a huge fan of the game since I first encountered it a little more than forty years ago. Even so, there are only a handful of these supplements I always use when playing and high on that list is Citizens of the Imperium.

First published in 1979, Citizens of the Imperium is 44-page digest-sized book completely devoid of any artwork, either on its cover or in its interiors. That's par for the course for most classic Traveller supplements – and quite a few adventures, too, come to think of it – unless you consider maps, deckplans, or mathematical formulae illustrations. It's frankly impossible to imagine a RPG supplement being released nowadays without even a single illustration, but, at the time, I can't recall anyone commenting on it, let alone being put out by it. Yet more evidence that the past really is a foreign country.

The book consists of two large sections, as well as two smaller ones. The first large section is the most important, introducing as it does twelve new starting careers for player characters, most of which are civilian in nature. This is significant, because the original Traveller rules only provided for three military careers (Army, Navy, Marines) and one paramilitary career (Scouts), with only the Merchants and nebulously-defined-but-probably-criminal "Other" career as non-military alternatives. Citizens of the Imperium widens the field considerably, offering barbarians, belters, bureaucrats, diplomats, doctors, flyers, hunters, nobles, pirates, rogues, sailors, and scientists as possibilities, though some are more clearly attractive than others (I have never, in all my years of playing Traveller, seen anyone roll up a bureaucrat, but I'm nevertheless glad the option exists).

The second large section is more or less an adjunct to the previously published 1001 Characters, in that it presents 40 pre-generated examples of each career type, to be used either as player or non-player characters. Difficult as it is to imagine from the vantage point of a world with ubiquitous personal computers and similar devices, this section would have been a genuine godsend to the harried referee. I know I regularly made use of it in creating NPCs for my campaigns and I suspect I was not alone in doing so. Much more so than Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller regularly included "time saver" material like this in its books, supplements, and adventures, which made sense, since what we now call "sandbox" play with the default campaign playstyle.

The two smaller sections of Citizens of the Imperium are, in different ways, worthy of note. The first provides rules for low-tech missile weapons – bows and crossbows – for use by characters in the game. I suspect the presence of both barbarians ("rugged individuals from primitive planets") and hunters ("individuals who track and hunt animals") suggested their inclusion (though Traveller was already notable among SF RPGs for including a wide range of low-tech melee weapons). The second small section presents eight heroes and villains "drawn from the pages of science-fiction" in Traveller terms. This section is important for anyone interested in assembling an "Appendix T" for the game, which is to say, a list of its literary antecedents. We get the game's interpretation of Harry Harrison's Slippery Jim di Griz, Keith Laumer's Retief, and James White's Senior Physician Conway, alongside Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader, and several others. It's one of my favorite sections of the book, if only because it's a reminder of what inspired Marc Miller and the crew at GDW when making the game.

My complaints about Citizens of the Imperium are few and curmudgeonly. The introduction of new careers paved the way for the introduction of new skills, a baleful trend inaugurated by Mercenary and continued by many more books, supplements, and adventures. I say "baleful," because one of the glories of classic Traveller in my opinion is its relative simplicity, including a relatively spare skill list. The introduction of more – and more specific – skills undermined that simplicity to the game's detriment. Still, it's easy enough to ignore most of the new skills and focus instead on the careers, most of which increased the range of options available to players without adding any mechanical complexity to the game.