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.