Retrospective: Leviathan

When I first shifted the focus of my Retrospective posts toward classic Traveller, I hadn't consciously decided to look at those adventures included in my Top 10 Classic Traveller Adventures about which I'd not previously written separate posts, but, after last week's post on Duneraiders, I realized that's exactly what I'd been doing. Rather than fight it, I've decided to lean into it, which is why I'm turning my gaze to Adventure 4: Leviathan, which I placed at the lofty rank of number 2 out of 10.

Leviathan is a very unusual adventure for a number of reasons. First published in 1980, it was written by Bob McWilliams a name many of you might recognize from the pages of White Dwarf, where McWilliams had a regular column called "Starbase" devoted to Traveller. "Starbase" was a favorite – or should I say favourite? – feature of mine and one of the primary reasons I read White Dwarf in my youth. Unlike Dragon, where Traveller (and science fiction more generally) was mostly an afterthought until the advent of the Ares Section in April 1984, White Dwarf gave pride of place to Traveller, making it very appealing to a young sci-fi nerd like myself. 

In many ways, Leviathan is as much a product of Games Workshop as it is of Game Designers' Workshop (GDW). In addition to McWilliams, the adventure credits Albie Fiore (another WD stalwart), Ian Livingstone (nuff said), and Andy Slack (ditto) as having edited it. Furthermore, the book includes illustrations by Fiore and the incomparable Russ Nicholson. Strengthening the overall Britishness of Leviathan is its use of UK spellings throughout the text, which is perhaps unintentionally appropriate, given the game's use of the double-l orthography for Traveller (whose origin, Marc Miller told me at Gamehole Con, lies with E.C. Tubb's Dumarest of Terra series). 

Traveller's default playstyle could probably be described as a "hexcrawl in space," quite literally, given what the game's interstellar star charts look like. Leviathan takes this a step further, with the characters hired by the large multi-system trading cartel, Baraccai Technum, to participate in the exploration of a region of space known as the Outrim Void. The Void lies to rimward of the Spinward Marches sector and gets its name not from its emptiness but from its relative lack of civilization, at least compared to the Imperium. The terms of the characters' contract require them to sign on as crew for the exploratory merchant ship Leviathan on a voyage of about six months.

This is a very interesting and unusual set-up for a Traveller adventure, one that's been relatively rarely used in the game's history. One would think, given the history of popular science fiction, that interstellar exploration of an unknown area of space would be a fairly common subject for scenarios. That's generally not been the case with Traveller, at least not within the official Third Imperium setting. A big reason for that, as that setting evolved over the years, it's been extensively – even exhaustively – mapped, with literally thousands of worlds placed, named, provided with stats, and often more. That's been a blessing and a curse for referees over the decades and remains so today. 

But, at the time Leviathan was written, that wasn't the case. The Third Imperium was then a very loose framework individual referees could shape to their own preferences and needs and the presentation of the Outrim Void demonstrates this. The worlds of the region are only briefly described and precisely what the characters will find as they explore them is largely left to the referee to fill in. Much like the Imperium itself, the Void is a loose framework for adventure, making it usable for all manner of encounters and scenarios. That's a big part of its appeal: it's a great tool for referees who want to do their own thing without having to invent an entire universe from whole cloth. 

Interestingly, Leviathan spends almost half of its 44 pages to information on the titular 1800-ton Leviathan-class merchant cruiser. We get not only keyed deckplans, but also game stats for the ship and its entire 56-man crew (not counting the player characters). Equally useful are 26 rumo(u)rs about the Outrim Void to entice the characters, as they explore. The five pages of library data serve a similar purpose. This is not an "adventure module" in the sense players of Dungeons & Dragons or other RPGs would recognize. Instead, it's a collection of aids to the referee to aid him in building a wide variety of situations that might arise as the characters travel from world to world throughout the Outtim Void. 

Leviathan is thus a reminder of an earlier period of the hobby, before gamers expected companies, in the words of OD&D's afterward, to do the imagining for them. Like The World of Greyhawk, Adventure 4 provides referees with an outline to which they are expected to add whatever details they needed or desired. And those details could vary widely from referee to referee and campaign to campaign rather than being bound up in a rigid canon, a concept that was, if not completely unknown, at least highly unusual in those days. By today's standards, then, Leviathan is something of a throwback and why I rate it so highly.