Retrospective: The Argon Gambit

Today, I make good on a promise I made two weeks ago to write a retrospective on the other adventure included in GDW’s Double Adventure 3 for Traveller, The Argon Gambit. Compared to its companion, Death Station, it rarely receives much attention, even among dedicated Traveller fans. That’s understandable to a degree, since it is more closely tied to the Third Imperium setting and therefore less easily adapted to other contexts. Even so, The Argon Gambit is a solid scenario that plays to Traveller’s strengths as a more “serious” science fiction RPG. Rereading it, I was struck by how influential it must have been on me when I was younger, as its overall structure closely resembles many of the scenarios I’ve written or refereed over the years.

The Argon Gambit is very explicitly set in the Solomani Rim, far removed from the familiar Spinward Marches. This sector is defined primarily by human conflicts, especially the ideological tensions between the Solomani and the Third Imperium. Solomani belief in the superiority of Terran humans casts a long shadow here, shaping the sector's politics in ways that The Argon Gambit exploits for their adventure potential. 

In terms of structure, the adventure begins simply, in a way that familiar, almost clichéd, for longtime players of Traveller. The characters, in need of money, are hired to steal a set of genealogical documents from a villa in the titular city of Argon on the planet Janosz. Like all such jobs, it appears straightforward at first, but, as it turns out, the documents in question are being used for blackmail and their contents carry explosive political implications, since the Solomani Party places great emphasis on the genetic "purity" of its members. 

After the initial job, The Argon Gambit becomes a political mystery involving a three-way struggle within the local Solomani Party. A hardline supremacist, a moderate rival, and an ostensibly neutral power broker all maneuver for advantage. Behind them lurks a deeper game. The patron who hires the characters is himself an Imperial agent, seeking to manipulate events so that both major factions are discredited, leaving his own puppet in control.

It's a terrific set-up for an adventure that could only really work within the context of GDW's Third Imperium setting. That's both a blessing and curse, depending on how wedded one is to the game's official setting. For me, it was great, but I can easily imagine people less enthused with the setting finding it too obscure or focused on setting-specific minutiae to be useful. That's why I suspect The Argon Gambit doesn't get as much love as Death Station.

At the same time, the adventure, designed by Frank Chadwick, makes excellent use of the classic Traveller adventure components, like rumors, which it categorizes by source and ties to the characters’ backgrounds (e.g. Navy, TAS, noble title, etc.). These rumors are essential to understanding the situation on Janosz, though their presentation is frustrating. The referee must piece together the scenario much as the players do, only really understanding the full scope of what's happening after reading explanatory notes at its very end. That's not a problem as such, but it means the referee probably needs to read the adventure several times before attempting to run it (yes, yes, I know, that's only common sense ...).

More interesting, I think, is the moral ambiguity of the scenario. Everyone involved is compromised in some way and acting according to their own best interests. There's no obvious "right" way to proceed. The characters begin as pawns in someone else’s scheme, but, as they uncover more of what's actually happening, they, in turn, have the opportunity to bring about a conclusion that they think is best and the adventure passes no judgments on that. Consequently, it's a very open-ended and heavily reliant not just player choice but referee implementation. This is the kind of adventure that could kick off an entire campaign – or complicate an existing one.

It's a shame that The Argon Gambit isn't better known and appreciated. As I said at the beginning of this post, I hadn't realized the extent of its influence over my own personal style and preferences as a referee until I re-read it in preparation for writing this. I tend to include lots of moral ambiguity and compromised figures in my games. While I don't favor "edgy" or "dark" content, I likewise shy away from clear "good guys" and "bad guys," preferring NPCs whose motivations and actions are more muddled and, dare I say, human. I'm not sure I picked these tendencies up solely from The Argon Gambit, but there's no question the adventure played a role in my doing so, hence my continued affection for it after more than four decades.

Retrospective: Death Station

GDW's Traveller is justifably lauded for the wealth of tools it provided the referee in generating his own adventures, such as procedures for generating worlds, handling trade, and creating encounters, among many others. However, the company also published a large number of ready-made adventures, too, starting with The Kinunir in 1979 and I think they deserve to be better appreciated for how much they contributed to the success of the game. Though not all every Traveller adventure is a winner, many are classics.

One such classic is Death Station, one of two adventures published in 1981 as Double Adventure 3 (the other being Argon Gambit, about which I'll talk next week). Designed by Marc Miller, Death Station exemplifies many of the sensibilities of early roleplaying adventures by being compact and largely concerned with providing a referee with a location, a problem, and a handful of dangers with which to challenge the player characters rather than much in the way of background detail. 

The scenario's premise is simple. The characters are hired by Lysani Laboratories to investigate a lab ship orbiting the world of Gadden after communication with it has been lost. Upon arrival, they discover that most of its crew is dead, while the station itself shows signs of damage. Further investigation reveals scattered clues pointing to psychochemical experiments intended to produce a new type of combat drug that heightened personal strength, dexterity, and endurance. The experiments were successful to a degree, but sabotage by a rival company resulted in the entire crew being exposed to an early version of the combat drugs that enhanced their physical abilities at the cost of their sanity. Now deranged, they pose a threat to anyone who boards the lab ship.

In a sense, Death Station offers what might be called a science fictional "dungeon,” complete with "monsters" in the form of the deranged crew. The lab ship is mapped and divided into keyed areas through which the player characters must move cautiously, examining laboratories, storage areas, and crew quarters. As in a fantasy dungeon, each location aboard ship offers the possibility of discovery, danger, or both. Logs, notes, and physical evidence gradually reveal what happened, while the deranged survivors and similarly deranged lab animals ensure that exploration is never safe.

The influence of movies like 1979's Alien is clear, I think, but, rather than resorting to an unknown extraterrestrial threat, Death Station opts instead for reckless science running afoul of corporate espionage, which fits well within Traveller's more sober approach to SF. Even so, the adventure has great atmosphere, which is a big part of why I count it among my Top 10 Classic Traveller adventures. The scenario relies less on direct exposition than on the gradual accumulation of clues. Some of that is a direct consequence of its sparseness of its descriptions and room keys, which is as much intentional as it is driven by the shortness of the page count.  

Even so, Miller includes four pages of referee's notes that help provide not only a brief overview of what happened aboard the lab ship and why but also guidelines for how to run encounters with the deranged crew and experimental animals. This is useful, since part of the fun of Death Station is navigating its cramped rooms and corridors while its inhabitants also move about and stalk the characters. Also included in the notes is a discussion of the effects of the experimental combat drug, which is also helpful in handling encounters involving the crew who are affected by it. 

My own experience with Death Station is that it’s both straightforward to run and surprisingly tense in play. The confined environment of the lab ship, combined with the unpredictable behavior of the drug-crazed crew, creates a constant sense of unease. The situation is made more tense due to the fact that, once the characters understand what's going on, they likely won't want to kill the surviving crew but instead seek a way to subdue and possibly cure them – at least, that's what has happened when I've made use of the scenario in the past.

From chatting with other Traveller fans, I've come to realize I'm not alone in regarding Death Station so highly. Its premise is immediately understandable, its structure is easy for a referee to grasp at a glance, and its atmosphere remains effective. Like many of GDW’s adventures, it provides just enough detail to establish the situation while leaving ample room for the referee to elaborate as needed. That balance between guidance and openness is a plus in my opinion and it’s certainly why Death Station has a lot of replay value, even after more than four decades since its publication.

Retrospective: Kafer Sourcebook

For reasons I'll explain in an upcoming series of posts, I've been thinking a lot about GDW's other science fiction roleplaying game, 2300AD (né Traveller: 2300). As I've no doubt explained on several occasions, I was, for a time, a huge fan of the game and – especially – its setting. Truth be told, I still am a fan, even though I've not played the game in almost forty years. One of the things I've always admired about the game was its commitment to a plausible and "realistic" approach to the building blocks of its setting, whether scientific, technological, or political. Unfortunately, that same commitment has also probably contributed to my inability to ever sustain a 2300AD campaign.

Emblematic of the problems I've always had with the game is, ironically, one of its best supplements, the Kafer Sourcebook. Published in 1988 and written primarily by William H. Keith, Jr, it's a deep dive into the society, culture, history, and, above all, biology of the alien Kafers, humanity's only serious interstellar rival. It is a 96-page softcover, though it feels longer, due to the sheer amount of terrific science fictional speculation packed into its chapters. Even within a product line celebrated for its world-building rigor, this book stands out for its imagination and ambition.

Remember that, when 2300AD debuted in 1986, it was pitched as the “hard science” alternative to the looser, Golden Age-inspired SF of Traveller. 2300AD's other supplements focused on Earthly politics, interstellar cartography, and the starships, among other more "grounded" topics. For all its detail, however, the line lacked a unifying extraterrestrial element, something distinctive that would shape humanity’s place in the larger galaxy. The Kafer Sourcebook was the first supplement to supply that missing anchor. It thus introduced not merely an opponent but an entire framework for understanding alien intelligence within the setting.

At a glance, the superficially insectoid Kafers fill the recognizable role of an expansionist, technologically capable adversary, the kind of civilization that might form the backbone of a future interstellar war. But the Sourcebook's treatment of the species elevates them above cliché. Their defining trait is an evolutionary system in which intelligence surges only under stress, which feels both biologically plausible and conceptually daring. In their calm state, Kafers possess little more than animal cunning. Faced with fear, danger, or uncertainty, their mental capacities accelerate rapidly, granting them the clarity and ingenuity needed to confront threats. The result is a species whose history, culture, and institutions have arisen to support continual conflict, since it's only under such stress that the Kafers' intelligence continues to increase.

This evolutionary need for conflict becomes the core organizing principle for the book. Keith uses it to explain Kafer rituals of testing and challenge, their competitive clan structure, their tendency toward authoritarian politics, and the peculiar way they approach science and technology. The chapters on physiology and psychology are particularly strong, dense with speculative xenobiology that is nevertheless readable, even compelling. The cultural chapters, meanwhile, succeed in painting the Kafers not as a hive of faceless antagonists but as a coherent civilization with internal debates, eccentricities, and historical traumas. One comes away with the sense of a genuinely alien species whose motives can be understood but never comfortably predicted.

For all its strengths, however, the Kafer Sourcebook also highlights the central challenge of the species it so creatively presents. The Kafers are genuinely difficult to use in a typical 2300AD campaign. Their hostility isn’t ideological, political, or territorial in any human sense; it is biological. Once threatened, they are almost compelled to escalate conflict, their intelligence and aggression rising in tandem. This leaves little room for negotiation, espionage, manipulation, or the many shades of diplomacy that fuel most science fiction RPG adventures. A referee who wishes to portray the Kafers accurately must accept that they are not suited to casual interaction. They are best deployed as a looming existential threat or as the fulcrum of a military campaign, rather than as participants in the varied social and exploratory scenarios that populate the rest of the setting.

That is what makes the Kafer Sourcebook and, by extension, 2300AD’s use of the Kafers so frustrating. The supplement is filled with wonderfully imaginative speculation that makes these aliens excellent antagonists, yet it offers little sense of how they might function in any capacity other than that of an implacable foe. Keith’s efforts to avoid making the Kafers one-dimensional “bad guys” by rooting their behavior in evolutionary psychology paradoxically reinforces that very one-dimensionality. A species that becomes intelligent only when threatened cannot be negotiated with, reasoned with, or engaged meaningfully outside the context of conflict. In a game line otherwise rich in politics, exploration, and cultural interplay, the Kafers remain locked into a very narrow role. The result is an alien species that is brilliantly conceived on the page but difficult to integrate into the broader possibilities the 2300AD setting seems to contain.

Mind you, this is my eternal complaint about 2300AD. It’s an extraordinarily imaginative and beautifully presented setting, one that feels right in all the ways hard science fiction should, yet it somehow ends up feeling strangely dull. Unlike Traveller, I could never quite get a handle on what GDW expected players to do with the game. Its “realism,” whether technological, cultural, or political, always seemed to work against the very things that make adventure possible. Instead of opening doors, its grounded assumptions often closed them, leaving referees to do the heavy lifting of carving out reasons for danger, mystery, or wonder.

I think hat’s the tragedy of 2300AD: a setting bursting with potential, yet one that never quite shows you how to tap into it. It’s a toolbox full of fascinating parts, but without a clear sense of what you’re meant to build.

Retrospective: Alien Module 7: Hivers

By the time Alien Module 7: Hivers was published in 1986, the Traveller role-playing game was approaching its tenth anniversary. Game Designers’ Workshop (GDW) already had a great deal of experience in producing sourcebooks to the major alien races of the Third Imperium, producing some of the line’s most inventive and distinctive supplements. The Hivers, among the most enigmatic of Traveller’s aliens were a natural fit for this deep-dive treatment. Their inscrutable nature and radical departure from humanoid norms demanded a module that could capture their alien essence while expanding the possibilities of the game itself.

Unlike the Vargr, with their wolf-pack dynamics dressed in science-fictional trappings, or the Aslan, who embodied the archetype of the "proud warrior race," the Hivers defied easy categorization. They were, in a word, strange – non-humanoid, non-violent, intellectually aloof, and relentlessly meddlesome. Their radial, starfish-like physiology and their communication through color changes and body posture evoked a biology more akin to deep-sea creatures than traditional sci-fi aliens. Their penchant for subtle, centuries-long manipulation of other species felt like something drawn from the cosmic visions of Olaf Stapledon or the surreal imaginings of Cordwainer Smith (even though the book openly admits the debt owed to Larry Niven’s Pierson’s Puppeteers and Outsiders). Despite this, the Hivers were a wholly unique creation, their oddity amplified by a psychology that prioritized intricate social engineering over direct action.

The success of Alien Module 7: Hivers in giving shape and substance to such an unconventional species is a testament to the talents of its principal authors: William H. Keith, J. Andrew Keith, Loren Wiseman, and Traveller creator Marc Miller. Structured like its predecessors, the module is divided into sections covering history, physiology, psychology, society, technology, along with rules for generating Hiver characters. Yet what immediately sets it apart is how bizarre its subject matter is. The Hivers are not “rubber suit” aliens defined by a single cultural quirk. Their biology is profoundly non-human: they reproduce almost accidentally without pair bonding or even emotional investment, communicate via mechanisms no human could intuitively grasp, and perceive the universe through a lens shaped by their intense curiosity. Their society, too, defies familiar models. Rather than being organized around governments or hierarchies, Hiver civilization is a loose tapestry of individuals pursuing esoteric, often opaque "topics" – long-term investigations that might span centuries and often involve subtly steering entire civilizations toward particular ends. One cannot help but draw comparisons to the Bene Gesserit of Dune, with their millennia-spanning schemes or even Lovecraft’s Elder Things, with whom the Hivers share a faint physical resemblance, though without the malice or cosmic horror.

What further distinguishes Hivers from earlier Alien Modules is its refusal to reduce its subject to easily digestible tropes. The Hivers are not warriors, traders, or pirates; they are manipulators, schemers, and architects of destiny. Their commitment to nonviolence is not a weakness but a cornerstone of their civilization, shaping their every interaction. They are not pacifists in the conventional sense but they are deeply opposed to overt conflict, preferring to neutralize threats through careful, almost surgical social redesign. The module provides a vivid example of this approach in their centuries-long maneuvering against the K’kree, their militant, herbivorous neighbors, a species almost as alien to human eyes as themselves. 

As presented, a campaign involving the Hivers is unlikely to revolve around the familiar beats of firefights, starship chases, or planetary exploration. Instead, it gestures toward something slower and subtler: espionage, cultural subversion, and interstellar diplomacy of a particularly insidious kind. However, this is also where the module falters. While it does provide broad advice on running Hiver-centric adventures, it rarely offers the kinds of concrete examples that would help a referee bring these high-concept scenarios to life at the table. The included adventure, “Something Stinks!,” is brief and unmemorable, more a sketch than a scenario and one that never quite demonstrates how to make the Hivers’ unique qualities matter in play. This is a common flaw in the Alien Module series: strong ideas paired with underdeveloped tools for implementation.

That said, one of the book's more subtle successes lies in how it situates its subject within the wider Traveller setting without dulling their strangeness. The Hivers’ influence on the Imperium is indirect but pervasive, shaping events from the shadows through trade agreements, cultural shifts, and strategic nudges – at least, that’s what they’d like you to believe. This ambiguity is where the module’s potential becomes most intriguing. The Hivers are not just another species; they are potentially a vehicle for a different kind of science fiction roleplaying, one that rewards speculation, inference, and even conspiracy-minded thinking. The fact that they remain difficult to grasp even after 48 pages of focused attention feels less like a failure and more like a feature, though one that may frustrate as often as it inspires.

In the end, Alien Module 7: Hivers is an ambitious but uneven entry in the Traveller canon. It introduces a compellingly alien species with a richly imagined culture and worldview, yet it struggles to translate that material into content easily usable in play. The ideas are strong and the writing imaginative, but too often the referee is left to do the heavy lifting. Still, for those intrigued by the prospect of a campaign built around manipulation, subtlety, and long-term consequences, the module offers a tantalizing foundation. Like the Hivers themselves, it prefers to hint and suggest rather than declare outright. Whether that is a strength or a weakness will depend on the kind of game you wish to run.

Retrospective: Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook

As a big fan of Twilight: 2000, one of the most intriguing aspects of its sequel game, 2300AD (né Traveller: 2300), was discovering what had become of Earth's many nations by the dawn of the 24th century. While the game's boxed sets and numerous supplements offered occasional hints, much remained unknown. GDW hadn't yet published a map of the world, leaving me to wonder not only how borders had shifted after the Twilight War but also which new nations had risen in its aftermath. In hindsight, this omission made a certain amount of sense: 2300AD focused primarily on Earth's interstellar colonies, relegating the homeworld to a supporting role. Still, I was eager to learn more, but it wasn't until the release of the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook in 1989 that I finally got the map I’d long wanted, along with a wealth of additional detail about the planet.

By the time this supplement (penned by Lester Smith) appeared, science fiction and, by extension, science fiction gaming, was undergoing a thematic and aesthetic shift. The broad, idealistic strokes of earlier speculative futurism were giving way to bleaker visions of tomorrow, marked by corporate dystopias, body augmentation, and a cynical erosion of privacy and individuality. R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk, released the year before, had embraced this new direction wholeheartedly, quickly establishing itself as the definitive expression of the genre within the hobby. In contrast, the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook struck me as more ambivalent about the second part of its title. Its treatment of cybernetics felt less like a serious commitment to the cyberpunk mode and more like a cursory nod to a rising trend – an instance of bandwagon-jumping rather than wholehearted adoption.

I was much more interested in its depiction of 24th century Earth than in its presentation of cybertechnology anyway. I hoped that, by turning its attention away from the stars and toward the cradle of mankind, this supplement might help to expand the scope of the game and enrich the backdrop against which its action unfolded. In some respects, it’s reasonably successful. The book spends most of its 96 pages offering a portrait of the planet three hundred years after World War III, presenting a patchwork of familiar and unfamiliar nations and evolving political dynamics. Looking back on it now, what’s most notable about the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook is how thoroughly it reflects the broader ambitions – and limitations – of 2300AD as a whole.

To explain what I mean, please allow me to briefly discuss 2300AD and its premise within the larger context of GDW’s roleplaying game lines in the late '80s. 2300AD was an attempt to create a hard science fiction RPG distinct from its more space opera-tinged predecessor, Traveller. The game imagined a world rebuilt from the ashes of the Twilight War under the leadership of the French Empire and its European allies, with interstellar colonization achieved through faster-than-light “stutterwarp” drives. The game’s tone was thus one of plausible extrapolation: technology had indeed advanced, but not in ways that made the world unrecognizable. It was a future you could almost believe in – grounded, methodical, and informed by history, geopolitics, and military realism.

The Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook tries to remain true to that tone, but it haphazardly incorporates the trappings of cyberpunk in a way that, unfortunately, undermines the attempt. Cybernetic implants, shadowy megacorporations, and “deck jockeys” are all present, but they’re awkwardly grafted onto a setting that was never designed to accommodate them. Rather than enriching the game’s vision of the future, these elements often feel like genre paint hastily slathered over a very different kind of foundation. The result is a setting that feels inconsistent, even incoherent at times, a supplement trying to gesture toward contemporary trends in science fiction without fully integrating them into 2300AD’s established ethos.

This tension between competing visions of the future is, I think, emblematic of the struggles GDW often faced when expanding its game lines. The company’s writers were admirably ambitious and often ahead of the curve in terms of scope and complexity, but they sometimes failed to reconcile newer creative impulses with the foundations they had already laid. We see this in the tonal shifts and mechanical overhauls of MegaTraveller and especially in the jarring transition to Traveller: The New Era. However, it occurred even earlier in the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook. Here, though, the misstep feels especially unfortunate, because the supplement had the potential to deepen and expand the game’s portrayal of Earth and bring a neglected part of its setting into sharper focus. Instead, it mostly muddies the waters by attempting to be something 2300AD was never intended to be.

That’s not to say the supplement is without value. For those interested in 2300AD’s geopolitical vision, it remains a useful (if flawed) resource. The world map, national summaries, and discussions of post-Twilight War culture and politics help fill in gaps left by the core game and earlier publications. There are even moments of genuine insight and creativity, especially when the book focuses on the quieter, more grounded elements of life on Earth. But these moments are often overshadowed by the half-hearted dive into cyberpunk tropes, which feel tacked on rather than organically developed.

In the end, the Earth/Cybertech Sourcebook tries to have its cake and eat it too, marrying GDW’s traditionally serious approach to history, politics, and military matters to the more outlandish claims of the then-nascent cyberpunk genre. The final result is neither fish nor fowl. It gestures toward the grit and style of Cyberpunk without committing to its worldview, while simultaneously diluting the strengths of 2300AD’s grounded speculative realism. It is, I think, a rare and notable misstep in a game line that is otherwise quite measured and “realistic.” Even today, I remain disappointed by the book, not because it lacked potential, but because it failed to realize the one thing it could have done best: shine a clear and coherent light on Earth’s future without losing sight of what made 2300AD compelling in the first place.

Playable Realism

Apologies in advance for the poor quality of this image, but it was the best I could find. It's the second page of a two-page advertisement (the first page is almost identical to the one I posted yesterday) for GDW's then-upcoming science fiction RPG, Traveller: 2300, which appeared in issue #115 (November 1986) of Dragon. 

The advertisement is significant for a couple reasons. First, the section under the heading "history" suggests a connection to Twilight: 2000, though it's not explicit. That was the first indication my younger self had to the fact that this wasn't, despite its title, a prequel game to Traveller. My younger self was also confused by the reference to the "Second French Empire," since, being very keen on history, I remembered the period between 1852 and 1870, when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte reigned as Napoleon III. It was a rare misstep by GDW, a company that usually gets its history right, and was soon corrected in subsequent ads and in the text of Traveller: 2300 itself, but I still remember the error to this day.

The second notable thing about the advertisement is its emphasis on "playable realism," both in its game mechanics and in its scientific speculations. Rules-wise, Traveller: 2300 isn't anything special, even for its time. In fact, there were enough problems with its original rules that I suspect it's the reason why GDW went ahead with a revision of the entire game less than two years later (under the title, 2300AD, by which its usually known). 

However, on the science end of things, Traveller: 2300 was definitely a step up from Traveller's broader, slightly more space opera take on these matters – or so it appeared in 1986. Science, especially astronomy and astrophysics, is a constantly evolving body of knowledge, so I can't blame the designers at GDW were not being up on the latest data and theories. Remember, this was before the Internet made it much easier to keep up to date. Given what they had to work with, I think GDW did a creditable job of creating a plausible, grounded vision of human interstellar civilization three centuries hence.

I certainly liked it – so much so that I largely abandoned my true love, Traveller proper, for a number of years in favor of its little brother. And, despite its many flaws, I still love the idea of Traveller: 2300, hence my desire to one day follow up Barrett's Raiders with a science fiction campaign depicting Earth and its interstellar colonies several centuries after the wreck of the Twilight War.

State-of-the-Art Science-Fiction Role-Playing

That's a lot of hyphens! This advertisement, which appeared in issue #114 of Dragon (October 1986) was the first time I'd heard that GDW was preparing to release another science fiction roleplaying game. Based on its title, I assumed – falsely, as it turned out – that it was some kind of prequel to Traveller. Of course, being the Traveller fan I was, the date included in the title struck me as even more intriguing. Why 2300? In the history of the Third Imperium setting, 2300 AD is just a handful of years before the Terran defeat of the Vilani (First) Imperium and the establishment of the Rule of Man (aka the Second Imperium). That really excited me, as I often thought the Rule of Man would be a great alternate setting for Traveller. My assumption proved mistaken, however, and Traveller: 2300 proved to be a very different game than I was initially expecting.

Retrospective: Colonial Atlas

As you know, I've been refereeing a Twilight: 2000 campaign, Barrett's Raiders, since December 2021. Earlier this year, its focus shifted from war-torn Poland to post-nuclear America. As much as I'd enjoyed the earlier portion of the campaign, I was, in fact, very much looking forward to this new chapter. A big reason why is that I was very keen to see the characters take part in the rebuilding of the USA in the aftermath of the Twilight War. I thought that was a great frame for a thoughtful, serious military RPG campaign.

Of course, another reason why I was so keen on this is that I had dreams – likely never to be realized – of one day following up Barrett's Raiders with a 2300AD (né Traveller: 2300) campaign that linked back in some way to the events of the former. That's always been a big part of the appeal of 2300AD: its connection to the future history of Twilight: 2000 and how it extrapolates forward from that starting point. I thought doing something similar had the makings of an "ultimate campaign," hence my continued hope that I just might be able to pull it off. 

I was reminded of all of this just the other night, when I was refereeing Barrett's Raiders. That, in turn, reminded me of some of the better products GDW published for 2300AD, like the Colonial Atlas. Published in 1988, the Colonial Atlas is, like the game it was written to support, steeped in a particular strain of late Cold War futurism, one that eschews the gleaming utopias and mythic space opera of other SF RPGs in favor of grit, realism, and geopolitical nuance. It is, in many ways, one of the most emblematic products of 2300AD’s worldview: a sober, unromantic look at the challenges of extrasolar colonization in a future that looks suspiciously like 1980s Earth but with (slightly) better technology.

The Colonial Atlas presents over two dozen settled worlds in human space, each with varying levels of development, threat, and potential for adventure. The core of the book is planetary gazetteer material, and if that sounds dry, it can be – but it's also fascinating. Each entry provides topographical, ecological, and political data about a given colony, along with historical notes and adventure hooks. The book thus functions as an indispensable setting guide for any 2300AD referee, but it’s more than just a travelog. It’s also a window into a setting that takes its own premises seriously (which is exactly what you'd expect from a GDW RPG).

The detail is frequently impressive, if occasionally overwhelming. The worlds presented aren't just backdrops for adventure. There’s an almost obsessive focus on hard science plausibility, something that feels like a logical extension of what we got in Traveller, but here it’s applied to planetary settlement in a way that’s more NASA than, say, Star Trek. What’s more interesting, though, is how the Colonial Atlas uses that detail to underscore the difficulty, even futility, of colonization. Many worlds are hostile, economically marginal, or politically unstable. These are not shining beacons of a post-scarcity future. Instead, they are struggling frontier outposts, often abandoned by their Earthside sponsors and left to fend for themselves.

The geopolitical tension that underpins 2300AD is deeply felt here. Each of the great Earth powers – France, Manchuria, America, and others – has carved out slices of the galaxy and the resulting colonial patchwork is rife with competition, suspicion, and occasional violence. This is the Age of Empire redux, and the Colonial Atlas wears that cynicism openly. Even the book’s graphic design, with its utilitarian charts, maps, and wireframe esthetics, contributes to the sense of a future built by bureaucrats and engineers, not by dreamers. To be clear, that's not a criticism. The universe described in the Colonial Atlas is very much in line with movies like Outland or the Alien films (both of them) and that's something I've always enjoyed.

As a game supplement, the Colonial Atlas does its job well. It provides structure and inspiration for countless adventures, whether in the form of local unrest, corporate espionage, environmental disasters, or alien mysteries. As an artifact from the late 1980s, it also captures the mindset of that particular moment in history, when SF speculation looked to the future and saw not transcendence, but the same old human problems projected across the stars. Its vision of the future is one where the then-modern world hadn’t so much evolved as metastasized.

Colonial Atlas was always among my favorite 2300AD products, though it's not perfect by any means. I suspect that writers Timothy B. Brown, Rob Caswell, and Deb Zeigler often knew little or nothing about the foreign countries and languages about which they wrote. There are numerous egregious errors in the book's use of French, for instance – Provence Nouveau instead of Nouvelle Provence as the name of the French Alpha Centauri colony being just one example – so I imagine similar cruelties have been inflected on other tongues as well. Likewise, some of the colonies presented are downright dull, offering little in the way of reasons for ever visiting them in a campaign. Maybe that's the point, but, even so, I would have liked a little more imagination or at least a hint of mystery. Even in a setting grounded in realism, adventure needs somewhere to take root.

It's still too early to say whether the Barrett's Raiders campaign will one day give birth to 2300AD campaign. If it does happen, though, I have no doubt I'll making good use of the Colonial Atlas. It's a solid little supplement with lots to recommend it, even more than three decades later.

Traveller Distinctives: Character Generation

I've often mentioned a classic Traveller computer program that I first encountered years ago and that I use as a time waster. The program faithfully recreates the game's character generation system and I've always found it a fun way to spend a few minutes. Of course, one of the reasons I find it so enjoyable is that, like Traveller's character generation system, it's an exercise in risk management, luck, and ambition.

Where most roleplaying games treat character generation as a more-or-less straightforward process of choosing (or rolling) ability scores, picking a class/profession, and selecting skills or equipment, Traveller invites the player to step into the shoes of his character long before the campaign even begins. The character isn't just a blank slate with a sword or a spellbook. He is a veteran of one of several possible interstellar institutions: a former Marine, a merchant officer, an "Other," whatever that is, with a past. And that past is determined through a series of career terms, each one a gamble.

Do you reenlist for another four-year hitch in the Navy? Making Captain comes with a +1 SOC and those additional rolls on the skill tables are tempting. Plus, your mustering out benefits could use a boost. But there's always the chance that this time, the dice won't be so kind. You might fail your promotion roll. You might fail to get any useful skills, leaving you four years older with little to show for it. You might even die.

There it is. The most infamous and distinctive element of the design of classic Traveller: your character can die during character generation. Even people who’ve never rolled up a Traveller character have heard the jokes. It’s a legendary bit of RPG lore, often recounted with equal parts amusement and awe – and for good reason. This single, brutal mechanic has played a big part in defining the game’s reputation for nearly half a century.

Of course, not everyone finds it funny. For many gamers, the idea of losing a character before the adventure even begins feels not just strange, but cruel. Why spend time building a character only to have him die on the metaphorical launchpad? But that very unpredictability, that razor’s edge between possible glory and oblivion, is what gives Traveller its edge. Character generation isn’t just prep; it’s your character's first adventure. It’s a gamble, a dare, a high-stakes game of chicken with the dice. And that’s exactly why I love it.

You can muster out early with a safe, if unremarkable, character. Or you can go for one more term, hoping for that coveted rank, that ship benefit, that skill. But with each term comes a greater risk of injury, aging and, of course, death. And when you roll that fateful snake-eyes on the survival roll, even with the +2 DM for a high Endurance score, that's it. You're dead. Roll again.

Later versions of Traveller, beginning with MegaTraveller and continuing into Traveller: The New Era and the Mongoose editions, have sought to blunt the edges of this system. MegaTraveller, for example, included "brownie points" the player could use to influence dice rolls in his favor. Mongoose, following an option present even in the original rules, replaces death with injury or a mishap on a failed survival roll. These modifications are understandable from a certain perspective, but I think they miss the point entirely. The original system's ruthlessness is not a flaw; it's a feature.

In Traveller, your character doesn't just have a backstory – he earns one. Every skill, every benefit, every rank is the product of risk. The characters who survive are often quirky, sometimes underpowered, occasionally broken, but they're also often memorable and utterly unlike the kinds of characters I'd have chosen to make. The character generation system breeds an emergent narrative, where the highs and lows of the dice suggest a life of triumphs and setbacks, filled with enough hooks to seed a dozen adventures.

I also think this system encourages risk-taking even in players. They become gamblers, daredevils, and strategists, all before the campaign even starts. Each reenlistment roll, each attempt at promotion or benefit, becomes a choice weighed against the threat of death. Do you settle for a safe, mediocre career or roll the dice one more time for a shot at greatness? It trains players to think in terms of trade-offs and consequences, to live with the results of their choices, and to embrace uncertainty. In doing so, it sets the tone for the entire game. Traveller is not about balanced builds or power fantasies; it's about living by your wits in a vast, indifferent universe.

This, to me, is one of the glories of classic Traveller. It's a game that understands that sometimes, the most compelling stories are forged not in a carefully "balanced" system, but in the chaotic, glorious churn of a couple of six-sided dice.

That's why I keep playing that little program and continue to find it so addictive. It's also why, when I've refereed Traveller in the past, I've never considered eliminating the possibility of death from character generation. It's not that I enjoy punishing players, but mostly because I think it's fun. It's a rite of passage, a crucible that produces not just numbers on a sheet, but living, breathing science fiction adventurers in the far future. To strip away that danger, that gamble, would be to rob Traveller of one of the things that makes it truly distinctive. Why would anyone ever want to do that?

Serious Fun: An Ode to GDW's RPGs

As I've said innumerable times since I started this blog, I was never a wargamer.

I didn’t have shelves stocked with hex maps or spend my weekends calculating armor penetration on the Eastern Front. I wasn’t part of that sacred brotherhood that spoke in acronyms and argued over the effective range of a Panther’s 75mm gun. Yet somehow, whether by accident or by fate, I fell in love with a company born from that world: Game Designers’ Workshop, better known as GDW.

GDW got its start in 1973 as a publisher of serious, detail-oriented, historical wargames. While I didn’t know almost any of this when I first encountered their roleplaying games, I nevertheless felt it. Even as a teenager, I could tell there was something different about the games GDW made. Where TSR gave us magic missiles and gelatinous cubes, GDW gave us vector movement, speculative trade tables, and the quiet horror of running out of fuel in central Poland.

Like a lot of roleplayers, Traveller was the game that first introduced me to GDW. I came across it several years after playing Dungeons & Dragons, and the contrast was immediate. Traveller didn’t just offer you a character; it offered you a life. Character generation gave you a person with a backstory in the form of a career and an odd collection of skills and equipment. Of course, if your rolls were unlucky, all you got was an early grave before the campaign even began. This was the kind of game where you might end up as a grizzled ex-Merchant with a gambling habit and no pension instead of a mighty-thewed barbarian.

Traveller’s vision of the far future wasn’t shiny or triumphant. It was bureaucratic, complicated, and often rather gray. There was something fascinating about how it treated space travel not as an exciting novelty but as a job, equal parts dangerous, expensive, and frequently boring. It was, I later realized, a very wargamer approach to science fiction: not about wish fulfillment, but about systems, trade-offs, and consequences. Even though I’d never played Drang Nach Osten! or Pearl Harbor, I could still intuit that GDW’s RPGs were built by people who thought about conflict, logistics, and uncertainty in a fundamentally different way.

That sensibility was especially evident in Twilight: 2000. T2K was a game that asked, “What if the Cold War ended in fire and now you’re out of gas in a broken-down Humvee, trying to negotiate with a Polish farmer for potatoes?” It was bleak, but it was real. Every decision mattered. Ammo wasn’t just an abstraction; it was the difference between life and death. Characters had to eat, find shelter, manage morale. There were no magical solutions, just the grim satisfaction of surviving one more day.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think Twilight: 2000 taught me something about roleplaying that's stuck with me to this day: adventure doesn’t have to come from epic quests. Sometimes, it comes from the struggle to get by in the face of all sorts of obstacles, both big and small. Fixing a broken axle under sniper fire, bartering for antibiotics with a suspicious local, or just figuring out where the next meal is coming from. That was the adventure.

Later, I picked up Traveller: 2300 (later rebranded 2300 AD), which built on the ashes of Twilight: 2000's world to envision a future shaped not by utopian ideals, but by historical inertia. Nations rebuilt and space was colonized by corporations and governments with agendas rather than by high-minded dreamers. It wasn’t heroic, but it was plausible. It had an internal consistency that made it feel like a real place, even if that place was cold, indifferent, and occasionally French.

Then there was Space: 1889, GDW’s pioneering foray into what we'd now call "steampunk," complete with ether flyers, Martians, and an entire solar system shaped by European colonialism. Space: 1889 had a slightly lighter tone than its siblings, but it nevertheless bore the hallmark GDW seriousness. There was surprisingly detailed setting material, a respect for history, and a commitment to internal consistency that made its outlandish premise feel oddly plausible. Even in a world where Queen Victoria reigns over Venusian swamps, GDW still asked you to think like a colonial officer, an inventor, or an explorer navigating the realpolitik of empire.

Finally, there was Dark Conspiracy, a game that asked what would happen if you took the economic anxiety of the late '80s, mixed in extra-dimensional horror, and then handed the whole mess to a security contractor. As I mentioned in my recent Retrospective, Dark Conspiracy failed to live up to its full potential, but even so, it was strangely compelling. Beneath the neon-soaked dystopia and monstrous invaders, you could still feel GDW’s trademark seriousness at work: the emphasis on gear, tactics, and systems that made survival feel earned rather than assumed.

What bound all these games together wasn’t genre; it was approach. GDW brought a wargamer’s eye to RPGs. They cared about detail, about systems that worked even when they weren’t elegant (though I continue to maintain that Traveller is one of the most mechanically elegant roleplaying games ever designed). GDW wasn't afraid to make things difficult or even bleak, because they believed that challenge and immersion went hand in hand. As a player and a referee, I must confess that I didn’t always understand every rule. I sometimes made do with what I thought they meant, but I nevertheless respected the intent. GDW’s RPGs weren’t about wish fulfillment. They assumed you were already smart enough to navigate their worlds and tough enough to handle the consequences. 

As someone who entered the hobby on the more fantastical side represented by D&D and Gamma World, that was both refreshing and bracing. GDW showed me that roleplaying could be serious, by which I don't mean dour, but serious in the best possible way. Roleplaying games could provoke you to think, to plan, and to inhabit a world that didn’t care about your character sheet unless you used it wisely.

So, as I said at the beginning of this post, I was never a wargamer, but I was – and remain – a GDW fanboy. Their RPGs showed me a different way to play, a way shaped by history, consequence, and thought. Almost thirty years after the demise of the company, that kind of grounded imagination still feels like something worth celebrating, hence today's ode to the amazing roleplaying games of Game Designers' Workshop. What an incredible company, what an incredible library of games.

Retrospective: Merc: 2000

The last six months of 1989 marked the beginning of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe and, with it, the Cold War. Between June, when Solidarity won Poland's first semi-free elections in decades and the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu in late December – not to mention the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 – the world that had existed since 1945 unraveled in real time. These momentous events ushered in what U.S. president George H.W. Bush optimistically dubbed the “new world order.” For a time, many breathed a sigh of relief.

At Game Designers’ Workshop in Bloomington, Illinois, though, the end of the Cold War created a creative dilemma. Their military RPG Twilight: 2000 was built on a dark, alternate history premise: détente had failed, nuclear war had erupted, and civilization lay in ruins. Now that reality had taken a different path, that premise was suddenly obsolete. Line developer Loren Wiseman didn’t throw in the towel but instead adapted.

Merc: 2000, released in 1990, was his answer.

Rather than pivot away from military adventure, Merc: 2000 reimagined a world where the Cold War ends more or less peacefully, as it had in reality, but the peace is shallow. The Soviet Union lingers in a diminished state, the Third World seethes with brushfire wars, and the major powers, unwilling to commit their own troops, outsource dirty work to deniable assets. Enter the player characters as mercenaries for hire, plying their trade in a world where “peace” is just another illusion and every war is someone's business opportunity.

In hindsight, Merc: 2000 reads as much as a nervous exhalation from a culture suddenly unsure of who the enemy is as a RPG supplement. To varying degrees, it captures the jittery uncertainty of the early ’90s, when ideology faded but the machinery of conflict kept humming. If Twilight: 2000 was a fever dream of what might have been, Merc: 2000 was a grim-eyed projection of what was coming.

And it wasn’t wrong.

The setting anticipates the rise of private military contractors, the shadow wars of the post-9/11 era, and the morally murky interventions of the ’90s, such as Somalia, the Balkans, and the Persian Gulf, among too many others. It imagines a world of porous borders, covert missions, and soldiers who work for paychecks, not flags. Its tone of weary professionalism, competence without cause, sets it apart from the more operatic tone of Twilight: 2000. In some ways, I'd go so far as to say it's aged better.

That said, Merc: 2000 isn't a standalone game. It builds directly on Twilight: 2000's second edition, also released in 1990, and inherits both its strengths and its spiky complexity: crunchy mechanics, detailed equipment lists, and an emphasis on logistics, firearms, and realism. If you liked T2K’s obsessive attention to detail, you’ll find plenty to enjoy here. If not, Merc probably won’t change your mind.

What distinguishes it is scope. Where Twilight: 2000 offered survival in a wrecked Europe (and, later, America), Merc: 2000 gives you the world. Campaigns can explore corporate espionage, peacekeeping gone wrong, proxy wars, failed states, and morally ambiguous black ops. It opens the door to adventures that blend military action with politics, ideology, and personal cost, offering a sandbox of plausible deniability and ethical compromise.

From today’s perspective, what stands out most is how little Merc: 2000 glamorizes its subject. There are no grand causes, just contracts. No crusades, only jobs. In that, it feels oddly prophetic. It foresaw a world where war became a business and soldiers became freelancers in the global gig economy of violence.

Unlike Twilight: 2000, which I played quite a bit, I never had the chance to run Merc: 2000 back in the day. By the time it came out, I’d already drifted away from T2K, thinking the real world had outpaced it. Ironically, as my Barrett’s Raiders campaign heads back to the USA, I realize how much of Merc: 2000 has seeped into my imagination after all, particularly in the types of missions, the tone, and the sense of purpose frayed by compromise that now animate that campaign. 

Thirty-five years on, I think more highly of Merc: 2000 than I probably did upon its publication, not because, like Twilight: 2000, it depicted a world that never was, but rather because it depicted one we hadn’t yet admitted we were already living in.

Mongoose Acquires Dark Conspiracy

Serendipity is a real thing. When I decided last week to write a Retrospective post about GDW's 1991 horror RPG, Dark Conspiracy, I had no advanced knowledge of today's announcement that Mongoose Publishing has acquired all the rights to it. This isn't exactly surprising. Once it was announced last summer that the company now owned the rights to Traveller (along with Twilight: 2000), I thought it inevitable that they'd also grab the rights to other former GDW properties. Still, it's nevertheless an odd little coincidence that I started thinking again about DarkCon after all these years.

According to the limited information available, Mongoose's re-release of the game won't be until next year. There's no official word on its rules, but I'd be amazed if it didn't use some version of the Mongoose Traveller rules, which are rapidly becoming the house system of the company. I'm fine with that, honestly. For all my complaints about the most recent iteration of the Mongoose rules, it's still a solid system and much better than Dark Conspiracy's original rules, which I never much liked. 

When I hear more, I'll be sure to share that information here. 

Yellow Journalism

Here's another strangely prescient sidebar from that Dark Conspiracy preview insert that appeared in issue #47 of Challenge (December 1990). This is obviously dated from a socio-technological standpoint. In 1991, when the game was released, the consumer Internet barely existed, but the writing was already on the wall by that point, even if most people hadn't realized it yet. 

"I've Got a Really Swell Life."

Here's one of the more evocative sidebars from the Dark Conspiracy preview appearing in issue #47 of Challenge magazine (December 1990).

Retrospective: Dark Conspiracy

My history with roleplaying games is littered with games I desperately wanted to like but that, for one reason or another – sometimes many reasons – I simply couldn't. A prime example of what I'm talking about is Dark Conspiracy, a near-future horror RPG released by Game Designers' Workshop in 1991. Even now, more than three decades later, my feelings about Dark Conspiracy (or DarkCon, as it was often abbreviated back in the day) are complicated, so complicated, in fact, that I'm not entirely sure how well I'll be able to articulate them in this post. Please forgive me if what follows is more rambling than usual.

Let's start with some context. At the turn of the 1990s, the RPG world was in a state of transition. Arguably, that's been the default state of the hobby since its inception, but I think it's fair to say that, by the last decade of the 20th century, the times, they were a-changin'. Signs of the decline in the dominance of both Dungeons & Dragons and TSR were, by this time, becoming obvious and this created an opening for new games, new companies, and new approaches to roleplaying. 

Of course, TSR wasn't the only venerable RPG company to show signs of decline as the '90s dawned. Game Designers' Workshop was another one. Founded in 1973 as a wargames publisher, GDW nevertheless entered the roleplaying market quite early, when it released Traveller in 1977, only three years after the appearance of OD&D. However, by 1991, the fortunes of Traveller – and GDW along with it – were in doubt. Traveller was stuck in the doldrums of the Rebellion Era established by MegaTraveller and it was clear that something had to be done to reinvigorate the moribund game line. Likewise, history had caught up with Twilight: 2000. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 put into serious question the game's speculative history of World War III, resulting in a second edition in 1990 that not only altered its timeline to bring it closer to reality but also changed its entire rules system.

Larger cultural shifts were also at play. The winding down of the Cold War, the rapid advance of computer technology, and the impending arrival of the new millennium fueled widespread anxieties. Some of these found expression in the cyberpunk genre, with its visions of corporate tyranny and technological alienation. Others surfaced in conspiracy theories about the New World Order, UFOs, and even apocalyptic religious prophecies. Like many turn-of-the-century moments, it was a chaotic, uncertain time, equal parts thrilling and unsettling. I was just entering adulthood then, and I remember the early '90s with strange affection. On bad days, I find myself longing for those times.

Enter Dark Conspiracy. Written by Lester W. Smith, Dark Conspiracy attempted to fuse cyberpunk’s dystopian corporate control with supernatural horror and alien invasion. At first glance, it seemed to be the perfect game for the era: a paranoid, near-future setting in which America had collapsed into vast urban metroplexes and lawless wastelands, while eldritch entities known as the Dark Ones manipulated humanity from behind the scenes. Thematically, it was an ambitious blend of Cyberpunk and Call of Cthulhu, a world where high technology coexisted with conspiracies, cults, and Lovecraftian nightmares.

In its published form, however, Dark Conspiracy was a game of contradictions. Its setting concept was rich and evocative, but its execution was often unwieldy. GDW, perhaps trying to draw on its existing fanbase, built the game’s mechanics on the same ruleset as the second edition of Twilight: 2000. While that system (which came to be known as the "House System") worked well enough for military survival scenarios, it was clunky and a poor match for horror gaming in my opinion. Character creation was detailed but slow, leaning heavily on a career-based progression system that felt more suited to military campaigns than to the investigative horror that Dark Conspiracy promised. Likewise, combat was intricate – perhaps overly so – while supernatural and investigative mechanics felt like an afterthought by comparison.

Despite these flaws, Dark Conspiracy had undeniable strengths. Its setting, which painted a grimly fascinating picture of a broken America where the supernatural lurked at the fringes of perception, held a lot of possibilities, even if they were never fully realized. The game encouraged a mix of adventure styles, from corporate espionage to alien-hunting and post-apocalyptic survival. In some ways, it was ahead of its time, prefiguring the pop culture explosion of conspiracy fiction that would define the late '90s and early 2000s. Remember that the genre-defining television series, The X-Files, wouldn't air until 1993, two years after the publication of this game. People often use the phrase "ahead of its time" too casually, but, in this respect at least, Dark Conspiracy earns it.

The game never quite found its footing. GDW supported it with a range of supplements, including adventures and setting expansions that deepened its world, but they were uneven both in terms of quality and their portrayal of the game world. Some, for example, suggested that its early 21st century setting was not too dissimilar to the real 1990s but with slightly more advanced technology, while others implied much greater social and technological changes. Early promotional materials for the game in the pages of Challenge painted a very dark, even bleak, picture of the setting, where vast swaths of the world had been largely abandoned and given over to the Dark Ones and their human co-conspirators and minions. Unfortunately, the published game was inconsistent on this point, which hampered my enjoyment of it. 

This is a great shame. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I really wanted to like Dark Conspiracy. In principle, it's a perfect mash-up of lots of ideas and genres that are right up my alley – science fiction, horror, dystopianism, conspiracy theories, and more. The potential of the game is immense and, especially at the time of its original publication, it managed to tap into an emerging zeitgeist. If only it had been better – better rules, better presentation, better adventures – it's possible that it could have made a bigger splash and helped lift GDW out of its doldrums. Alas, that was not meant to be and I'm left only with my conflicted feelings. 

My Top 10 Favorite Traveller Images (Part II)

Part I can be found here.

5. JTAS #13 Cover

The Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society was GDW's in-house periodical for supporting Traveller (until it was replaced by Challenge in 1986). With a few exceptions, the covers of JTAS weren't notable, but issue #13 is one that really captured my imagination. Drawn by William H. Keith, it depicts a member of the Hiver species, one of the most interesting – and weird – nonhuman aliens of the official Third Imperium setting. Few of the subsequent depictions of the Hivers ever looked as good as this one in my opinion, not even those in the Alien Module devoted to them. Consequently, this particular piece has stuck with me for years as a high point in Traveller art, particularly of alien species.

4. The Traveller Book Cover

William H. Keith returns (for the last time) with his cover art for The Traveller Book. Its placement so high on this list is at least partially due to nostalgia, because I've used it as my go-to Traveller rulebook for decades. I readily acknowledge that, from a technical perspective, the cover is slightly amateurish. However, I care more about its grounded vibe. It's just a merchant crew warily disembarking their 200-ton Far Trader, armed and ready for anything. It's a terrific encapsulation of Traveller as a game and I love it, for all its weaknesses as a work of art.

3. Alexander Lascelles Jamison

OD&D had Xylarthen the Magic-User and Traveller had Alexander Lascelles Jamison. This 38 year-old merchant captain has been the game's sample character since 1977, but his portrait got a significant upgrade in The Traveller Book over its original version. Drawn by David Dietrick, who provided a lot of great artwork for Traveller during the mid to late 1980s (and in Thousand Suns, too, come to think of it). Dietrick's reimagining of Jamison isn't just how I imagine this particular character; he's my mental image of the default Traveller character. You can't get much more iconic than that.

2. Charted Space Map

I've raved about my love of this map before, so I won't say much more here. I will add that this image is very near and dear to my heart, both because of what it depicts and how it depicts it. The map is peak classic Traveller – elegant and evocative with just enough information to inspire. I had this map pinned to my wall for years, so it will always be very special to me.

1. Regina Subsector Map

If D&D is defined in part by graph paper, Traveller is defined by hex paper, or rather by its 8×10 hex-based subsector maps, the foundations upon which the game's conception of the galaxy are built. Regina subsector is subsector C of the Spinward Marches and the example subector presented in in many GDW products. Regina is thus like the Grand Duchy of Karameikos, the Dalelands, or Lakefront City – an example that grows beyond its original purpose to have a life of its own. Every time I look at this map, I quickly find myself imagining situations and adventures on its worlds, especially those located outside the main travel routes. Looking at this map makes me want to play Traveller, which is exactly what a good RPG image should do.

My Top 10 Favorite Traveller Images (Part I)

Before I start, a couple of caveats and explanations. First, you'll note that I say "images," not "illustrations." That's because Traveller is rather (in)famous for its dearth of artwork, especially prior to the publication of The Traveller Book in 1982. However, the game never lacked for images, by which I mean maps, deck plans, and the like and many of these helped define the game and its approach to science fiction every bit as powerfully as did more "traditional" RPG illustrations. Second, I've purposefully limited my selection of images to Traveller products published by GDW between 1977 and 1986. There's a lot of third-party Traveller material published during that time, many with superb imagery, but, in the interests of focus, I've limited myself to only the main Traveller line. If there's sufficient interest, I might do a second series of posts that expands the scope a bit.

10. Diagram 1 from Shadows

Shadows is one of my favorite Traveller adventures, one I've refereed numerous times over the decades. One of my favorite things about the adventure are its maps and diagrams. All of them serve to describe the alien ruins found on the backwater planet of Yorbund that forms the location in which Shadows takes place. While several of them could easily have been chosen as an entry in this post, I think Diagram 1, pictured to the left, is by far the best and most interesting. As you can see, the diagram depicts the central shaft of the ruins, descending from a hidden entrance at the top of a surface pyramid tens of meters below the surface of Yorbund. It's a very practical image, enabling the referee to get a handle on how the various parts of the ruins relate to each other. It's also very atmospheric, establishing Shadows as a literal descent into the underworld. 

9. Snapshot Deck Plans

Another entry in this list and still no illustrations! Instead, gaze upon these deck plans from Snapshot. They depict two iconic starships from Traveller – the 100-ton Type S Scout/Courier and the 200-ton Beowulf-class Free Trader. These are probably the two most common "adventuring" starships in the game, in large part due to the fact that Scout and Merchant characters stand the chance of mustering out with one of them. They're also the perfect size for a band of characters. Though there are many other versions of these deck plans, it's these from Snapshot that are seared into my brain, thanks to having used them repeatedly in my youth.

8. Entering Jumpspace

Our first "proper" illustration and by William H. Keith, no less (a name that will appear several more times in this post and the next). In case the flash of red isn't enough to give it away, this piece appeared in The Traveller Book. That's the aforementioned Type S Scout/Courier as it prepares to enter jumpspace. Though very simple, it's a favorite of mine and has colored (no pun intended) my conception of what it Traveller interstellar travel looks like. Though I can't prove it, I suspect it was inspired, at least in part, by how the Millennium Falcon entered hyperspace in Star Wars.

7. Zhodani Battle Dress

The psionic Zhodani are the main rivals of the Third Imperium and were described in detail in the fourth Alien Module produced for Traveller. One of many great things about that supplement is the way it firmly established the esthetics of the Zhodani Consulate and their citizens and military forces. I particularly like this illustration (by Bryan Gibson) of Zhodani battle dress, complete with notations pointing out its various features, such as its distinctive clamshell helmet. This piece occupies a halfway point between being a traditional illustration and being a diagram, I think, but it's all the more effective for it.

6. The Patron

Another William H. Keith piece from The Traveller Book (note the red highlights), it depicts a distinctive element of Traveller – and one about which I'll be posting soon – the patron encounter. Many a Traveller adventure begins with meeting Space Sydney Greenstreet over drinks in the darkened corner of a startown bar, his bodyguard looming over the proceedings. Ironically, it's not a scene about which I can recall many illustrations in GDW products, which is probably why this one has stuck with me over the years. In many ways, this is the defining image of Traveller, or at least the way it was played back in my youth. If I didn't have other even more representative images, I'd probably rate this one even higher.