Retrospective: MegaTraveller

Traveller is, without qualification, my favorite roleplaying game and has been since I first encountered it through The Traveller Book in 1982. Over the course of the next four years, I played the heck out of it with both my neighborhood friends and one of my high school classmates. Then, I stopped – or, more precisely, I grew bored with Traveller. Looking back on it now, I suppose it was simply a case of over-saturation. Even more than D&D had been my go-to game for fantasy, Traveller had been my go-to game for science fiction, the end result of which briefly abandoning it for GDW's other SF RPG, Traveller: 2300, which came out in 1986. (I would eventually come to feel similarly about Dungeons & Dragons, but not until the mid-90s.)

My love affair with Traveller: 2300 was comparatively brief, lasting only a couple of years. In only two years of playing it, my passion for the game burnt itself out. Not long thereafter, I discovered that, during my time away from it, GDW had released a new edition of Traveller, bearing the rather unusual (and cumbersome) title of MegaTraveller. This new edition boasted not just revised and expanded rules, but also a change in its official Third Imperium setting – the so-called Rebellion.

A quick aside for context: starting with The Spinward Marches in 1979, GDW slowly built up and developed Traveller's official setting. This setting was originally intended as a loose backdrop for published adventures. Over time, the Third Imperium setting, named for the large, human-dominated interstellar empire at its center, accumulated a wealth of details. This was a big part of its appeal to me and other fans. However, a common complaint about the Third Imperium was that it was too static, a holdover, I suspect, from its origins as a universal framework for a wide variety of campaigns. MegaTraveller's Rebellion – really a war of succession – was an attempt to end that stasis by throwing the Third Imperium into a civil war.

The Rebellion was a major reason why I decided to return to Traveller after my hiatus. I thought the political and military shakeup of the Third Imperium was exactly what was needed to add some dynamism and danger to a setting that felt very staid to me. Consequently, I snapped up MegaTraveller and dove back into the rules and setting I'd loved for many years beforehand. My hope in buying the new edition was that it was similar enough to the earlier edition rules-wise that I wouldn't have to relearn how to play, while also being changed just enough to make it more compelling.

On the first point, I was largely correct. Mechanically, most of MegaTraveller's rules were very close to the 1977/1981 versions I'd played before. Character generation was much as I'd remembered it, though there were a lot more skills and options for advanced generation methods like that found in Mercenary. The combat system borrowed elements from Azhanti High Lightning in an effort to streamline it. More significantly, there was now a codified, universal task system for the handling of both skill use and combat – a major innovation over the ad hoc approach to skills in the previous edition.

At the same time, there were major changes to starships, both their construction and combat systems. Classic Traveller had a simple, elegant system for starship construction. Its combat system was a bit more complex, making use of a realistic vector movement that I always found frustrating. By contrast, MegaTraveller introduced an extensive but unwieldy (and much corrected) construction system that required more or less demanded a spreadsheet to use properly. Its combat system seems to have been modeled on the personal combat system, which is either a positive or a negative depending on how you felt about the original combat system. 

Also included in the MegaTraveller boxed set was the Imperial Encyclopedia, which consolidated the two volumes of Library Data under one cover. There was also a map of the Spinward Marches sector. Released around the same time – but sold separately – was the Rebellion Sourcebook. This setting book laid out the various factions of the Imperial civil war for use in the game. Unfortunately, all of the information was very high level and there were no practical details, in this or in the boxed set, on what it was like to referee a campaign during this time of interstellar tumult. Its main utility for me came in the form of its credits, which thanks an organization called The History of the Imperium Working Group (HIWG), whose members were apparently dedicated to working out the details of the Third Imperium setting.

I found HIWG's address in a copy of Challenge magazine and sought them out. They were a collection of Traveller fans dispersed throughout the world who'd been consulted by GDW about the Rebellion and its development. At the time, they were quite active in producing documents about various in-universe topics, which they shared amongst themselves and with Traveller writers. Some of HIWG's members even wrote articles that were published in Challenge and elsewhere. I enthusiastically joined HIWG and used it as a platform to jumpstart my professional writing career. I also made a number of lifelong friends who also shared my passion for Traveller.

MegaTraveller was never a success. Many longtime fans, who'd wanted to see the Third Imperium setting reinvigorated, grew disenchanted with the Rebellion, which seemed both needlessly destructive and aimless. Newcomers were even more confused by what the game was about than they might have been during the latter days of classic Traveller's run. Matters weren't helped by the fact that GDW produced very few support products for the game, leaving most of that work to licensees like Digest Group Publications. The end result was a huge mess – not unlike the Rebellion itself.

Yet, for all of that, I have fond feelings toward MegaTraveller, largely because it served as both my entry into professional writing and because it introduced me to several people who've been very important to me over the years. It probably helps that, for all my protestations to the contrary, I adore setting details and MegaTraveller was an era when such details were at the forefront. From most perspectives, MegaTraveller might not be a great edition of Traveller, but it's one I nevertheless associate with many positive things. That's why it'll always have a special place in my heart.