Thursday, February 20, 2025

Retrospective: Traveller: The New Era

The original purpose of MegaTraveller's Rebellion was to shatter the Third Imperium into a welter of mutually antagonistic successor states – the idea being that this would make GDW's official setting more dynamic, thereby encouraging a wider range of play. Reception of this approach was mixed. Many longtime players of Traveller felt it had irrevocably "ruined" the setting, while newer players were simply confused. The Rebellion made sense (barely) if you were already deeply invested in the deep background. If you didn't have such arcane knowledge, it was downright confusing.

The situation only became worse as development of the unfolding Rebellion storyline relied more and more on such knowledge. That's when GDW decided to bring the Rebellion to a conclusion and usher in a new era for Traveller and its Third Imperium setting – or should I say post-Imperium setting, as the once-great interstellar empire was forever destroyed and would never be stitched back together, no matter how much some fans held out the hope that it might.

Enter 1993's Traveller: The New Era (TNE), a wholesale revision not just of Traveller's rules but also of its setting and, I would argue, tone. Whereas MegaTraveller's version of the Imperium was merely in the midst of long-term political turmoil, it was still largely recognizable as the same setting published by GDW since 1979's The Spinward Marches. TNE, by contrast, largely wiped the map clean. The shattered Imperium of MegaTraveller was mostly gone, its worlds thrown into chaos, with many reverting to barbarism as a result not just of the battles of the Rebellion but the release of an artificially intelligent weapon known as Virus that soon infected advanced computers and other technology throughout Charted Space. In doing so, Virus triggered a near-total collapse of all interstellar civilization outside of a few isolated pockets.

To say TNE's setting was very different from that of either classic Traveller or MegaTraveller is something of an understatement. With the exception of the Regency (an area of space that included the aforementioned Spinward Marches sector) and the alien Hive Federation, all the other pillars of the Traveller setting were now absent. The intention behind this was to provide referees with a blank slate on which to build their version of the Traveller universe. No longer would it be necessary to go delving into multiple supplements to learn the details of a sector or world. The Rebellion began and Virus ended the Imperium and its neighbors, leaving behind a vast expanse of unknown worlds to explore.

It's a great idea in principle, but, in practice, TNE required only slightly less understanding of the pre-Virus Traveller setting than did its predecessors. The larger story of TNE – the recovery from Virus and the rebuilding of interstellar civilization – depended on what had come before. Indeed, it was often a commentary on it, with lots of (in my opinion) intrusive criticisms of the Third Imperium and, by extension, most other interstellar states as cruel, uncaring, and often oppressive regimes that cared little for the worlds and peoples they governed. The violence and death of the Rebellion is presented as an indictment of the Imperium and its political structure, despite the fact that the nature of jump drive and a lack of interstellar communications makes more responsive, collaborative forms of governance impossible. 

Of course, TNE did itself no favors in the rules department either. MegaTraveller, for all its faults (and errata), was still broadly the same game as classic Traveller. By contrast, TNE uses rules that are quite similar to those in the second edition of Twilight: 2000 and Dark Conspiracy – GDW's so-called "House System." The House System is mostly fine, but it's not Traveller. For example, characters have a different set of ability scores (Agility instead of Dexterity, Constitution instead of Endurance, etc.) and that rubbed me the wrong way. Similarly, skills and character generation differed in ways big and small from those of previous editions. Combined with larger changes to combat, technology, and other areas, it made TNE feel off to me – like an uncanny valley version of the game I knew and loved.

I have no idea how the game was received by newcomers to Traveller. I know of at least one person who loved TNE and considers the time he spent playing it among the best experiences he ever had playing Traveller or indeed any RPG. That's great and I'm genuinely glad that someone enjoyed it. I say that as someone who contributed to the TNE rulebook. One of the two sample adventures presented there is written by me, my earliest credit in a roleplaying game book (as opposed to magazine). I still like the scenario well enough, but it's the kind of thing that really only works in the context of a game like Traveller: The New Era. 

Ultimately, that's close to my real feelings about TNE: it has its virtues but it doesn't feel like Traveller to me. Nearly everything about the game – the setting, the rules, the general tone – is like a funhouse mirror version of Traveller, which is to say, recognizable but twisted in ways I didn't find especially congenial. It's not a bad game as such; it's simply not a game that I had much fun with. To a great extent, that's a reflection of my own love of the Third Imperium setting and how I hated seeing it trashed by Virus. In fact, my experiences with Traveller: The New Era served as a major impetus for the creation of Thousand Suns years later. Others not as wedded to the Imperium or the game's original rules may well feel differently. In any event, all subsequent versions of Traveller have quite pointedly been set before either the Rebellion or the New Era, which says it all, I think.

20 comments:

  1. There was an adage I heard awhile back about RPGs and me editions:

    "You can change the setting or you can change the system, but you can't do both."

    I think TNE was a clear example of this problem in the hobby.

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  2. Any details on the sample adventure you penned for TNE, James?

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  3. Arguably, The New Era's big flaw was a failure to trust fully its own premise.

    On the small scale, it gives a really solid and easy to understand campaign set-up -- free agent privateers tasked with recontacting lost worlds to help rebuild their societies, topple unacceptable authoritarians, and loot a little useful technology along the way. It comes ready with dozens of possible adventure seeds and a solid conceptual structure on which a campaign could grow around the players.

    But they wasted much effort that should have gone into reinforcing that premise rather on excusing it in terms of the game's previous iterations. Like a band whose new album sales tank because they're afraid to stop performing their old hits. I suppose though they were still gun-shy from their previous attempt to update the game from the ground up with Traveller:2300.

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  4. TNE was my first Traveller; when I first got into gaming, my group wanted to try Traveller -- because even then it had fame as the sci-fi rpg -- and TNE was the current edition.

    It was a disaster. The rules were too complex and fiddly, and we lacked the proper grounding in sci-fi to really grasp what to do with the game; I ran something with heavy Babylon 5 and Iain Banks influences, but it didn't really work.

    All that said, in hindsight, I'm much more, not fond, but friendly towards TNE and I can now appreciate what it was trying to do.

    (At least in terms of setting; the rules are still a mess.)

    Making it wild, and mostly post-apocalyptic restores a sense of discovery and unpredictability to the setting, and the introduction of Virus is a surprisingly neat way of sidestepping Traveller's "computer problem"; now there's a reason why these high-tech spaceships are all carting around huge anachronistic computers.

    I can see why long term fans didn't like the Virus setting changes, but I've come to quite like them.

    The rules though, those can get in the sea.

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  5. If I remember, production quality was down too, awful ink, awful paper, & awful artwork

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    1. Yep. The graphic design in general was just ugly and confused, especially when compared to elegant minimalism of the LBB days. And good gods, look at that cover. Pick a damn font already.

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    2. You're not wrong; it's a truly atrocious cover. The mix-and-match fonts are pretty bad, but, even without them, it would be poor. The composition is all over the place -- incredibly busy, but with no real focus. The images draw the eye toward the blank space in the middle, which, while perhaps interesting in a "concept" fashion, doesn't work well as cover art.

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  6. “Intrusive criticisms of the Third Imperium” really rings a bell. I’m not sure if it was Survival Margin or Regency Sourcebook that really felt like an argument against previous work in the series—not just the GDW but (as i discovered later) the fine DGP work as well. It was a weird tone to take that really felt like they had hired some new people to take over the project that were more interested in trashing previous work than expanding on it. Which distances the reader and makes one feel well, if GDW doesn’t feel like GDW, why am i still patronizing them? It is a feeling familiar to comic book readers.

    As it was i felt like i was mentally having to argue for political systems i had never really ‘believed in’ in the first place. Thanks?

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  7. I never was much of a sci-fi guy, but I picked up TNE on a whim. I'd played some original traveler, but never read any of the setting info.

    I liked the TNE setting. Post apocalyptic space with a points of light setting. I'd much rather play in that than what I know about standard Traveler.

    But I get why people would be upset by the changes.

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  8. Other than potentially opening the Ardala & Deering Detective Agency - yes, snickers about Private(s) Investigation - I just can't grip Sci-Fi, but I love it that the space is getting more ink here, and more exchange.

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  9. The irony is that in an attempt to make Traveller more friendly to Game Masters, I found that it ended up being even more intimidating than the original rules. The Third Imperium had a set of assumptions that could aid in setting up a campaign, despite the vastness of Imperial space and lore. While trying to wipe all that knowledge away to allow for a "clean slate," the vastness actually seemed bigger (because I was now responsible for filling it all in) and the knowledge of the lore seemed even more important because what were my PCs supposed to explore and recover, if not all that cool Third Imperium stuff? That, a whole new ruleset, and the absence of the character creation mini-game was just too much for both me and the guys who willingly dreamed of playing Traveller some day.

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  10. A thing that doesn't get discussed often enough, I feel, is the decisive break with pulp SF that the game represents. In both classic and Mega versions of Traveller, the implied setting includes space marines who are taught to use bladed weapons and the rules in both cases reinforce this by making it a viable choice even fighting against opponents wearing powered Battle Dress. Marines versus pirates, both wielding cutlass or blade and revolver or auto pistol, is the implied matchup of civilized forces against the barbaric minions of chaos (and further note that when the Zhodani first show up in the Library Data of Adventure 1: The Kinunir, they are called "the barbarians" rather than given their later proper name.) Starting with The New Era, the game settles into a more "realistic" mode where powered armor suits are overwhelming to lesser-armed foes but face off against similarly overwhelming offensive weapons like plasma and fusion cannons. Sword and sidearm is gone, dismissed into a past that includes other deprecated tropes like Martian canals and Venusian swamps, but also piratical adventurers of the sort you can still see represented in the original Star Trek series (notable instances include, most obviously, a fantasy segment in "The Cage" and repeated in its follow-up "The Menagerie", or the Harry Mudd and tribbles episodes; you might even detect the vestiges implied in episodes like "Friday's Child", "Conscience of the King", "Shore Leave", or "A Private Little War", along with a few others).

    Anyway, at the time I hardly noticed the passing of automatic Cutlass skill for Marines, nor would I have mourned it at the time if I had. Noticing it missing in Mongoose's edition, I went back and found it gone in TNE and T4 as well, then took notice of the changes in the rules that had made it mostly pointless anyway where it once was potentially valuable.

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    1. Rather like Rifts, then, with its "megadamage" concept; attacks capable of dealing "megadamage" are immediately fatal to any target without "megadamage capacity (MDC)," and any target with even one point of MDC is entirely immune to any attack that does *not* deal megadamage.

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    2. @Darien: Except kind of the opposite of that. In classic Traveller and in Megatraveller, a cutlass is capable of injuring a person wearing any armor, especially when wielded by a skilled user, although it is much less likely (and in MT the injury is almost certain to be minor) than with more energetic weaponry.

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    3. @Darien: Ah, I see. You're commenting on how I characterized the change that started with TNE. I still wouldn't say so. It's just that the later games take a more "realistic" view that muscle-powered blade weapons are not capable of damaging someone wearing a powered armor suit.

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  11. I pretty much missed out on the whole TNE era, and don't think that at any point since encountering it I've had really strong feelings of any kind about it. I accept that I'm not a _real Traveller fan_.

    E.T. Smith's comment really rings true and loud to me, and 'thekelvingreen's' too. Anonymous's comment I get too, though I didn't have his own reaction to it; I guess overall I'm good with some self-reflection and self-criticism of what we're doing and enjoying.

    FrDave also makes a good point, that 'trashing everything and starting over in the rubble' isn't a solution because it elides the problem of what the rubble actually is. There's no such thing as a blank slate.

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  12. There was an abortive attempt to give GMs a playground free of the Third Imperrium setting in the Foreven sector. It was supposed to be wide open and since it was convenient next to the Marches, for some value of convenient, it allowed for a non-TI region right next door to the game's original setting sector. Unfortunately one of the authors felt it necessary to drag in background from previous third party supplements, invalidating the concept. I'm not saying that was why it didn't catch on but I don't think it helped.

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  13. It didn't help that Foreven is completely surrounded by sectors that _are_ worked up and into the 'Third Imperium setting. To make it (or keep it) 'canon-free' kind of calls for a sort of magic influence barrier all around it.

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  14. I also have to wonder: if the idea was the need to start fresh, why not start fresh, and introduce a new setting, instead of making the previous IP unusable? It didn’t look like they saved themselves much work and the results mostly antagonized an existing fan base.

    It could have been their chance to produce a Dragonlance or an Eberron instead of torching Greyhawk.

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    1. I agree completely. I don’t know why Traveller is thought to be inextricably tied to the Third Imperium setting.
      If the setting had become too unwieldy or whatever(?), scrap it in total. These “world changing” events never work for a campaign setting, but designers keep using them to “freshen-up” a stagnant world (or universe). You end-up pissing-off the diehards (your base) and rarely draw new players (customers) to your product.

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