2019-10-01 Fantasy Traveller

In the vein of How about 2d6? I was recently reminded of the Traveller variants that are not based on a Science Fiction setting.

How about 2d6?

All I knew was games such as *Mercator*. It’s a free game by Paul Elliott:

free game

MERCATOR is a Roman Empire setting for Classic Traveller. Marc Miller has read it and given it his seal of approval!

I also knew that the Cepheus Engine existed as a free Traveller variant, but @lskh discovered that Zozer Games has some low tech supplements:

Cepheus Engine

@lskh

Zozer Games

low tech supplements

*Low Tech Weapons* provides you with a huge number of new melee weapons that can be added without fuss directly into your Cepheus Engine or 2D6-based SF RPG.
*Fast Magic* offers a complete, improvisational magic system.

As it turns out, Zozer games is Paul Elliott, so Mercator comes from the same source. The Cepheus Engine is by Jason “Flynn” Kemp via Samardan Press.

Samardan Press

The only other such product I know is Worlds Apart, which exists both as a free game and as a fancy game on DriveThru RPG, by Expeditious Retreat Press.

Worlds Apart

Expeditious Retreat Press

Another find by @lskh are the many dozens of products offered by Micheal Brown on DriveThru RPG, including Magic and Martial Art.

@lskh

Micheal Brown on DriveThru RPG

Fenris

​#RPG ​#Traveller

Comments

(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)

There’s another one in the works as well: Sword of Cepheus.

Sword of Cepheus

(By the way, how exactly does your subscription system works? I don’t think I’ve been receiving e-mail notifications of comments to posts I subscribed to.)

– Ynas Midgard 2019-10-02 06:00 UTC

Ynas Midgard

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Hm. Perhaps there’s a bug somewhere. Check your subscriptions [link no longer works since subscriptions are no longer supported]. It should list “Comments on 2019-10-01 Fantasy Traveller”, for example. Once a day a cron job is supposed to compare these subscriptions to the list of recent changes and send mails as appropriate. Looking at my outgoing emails, it seems to be working.

– Alex Schroeder 2019-10-02 06:20 UTC

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Aldreth was done for Megatraveller.

Aldreth

And I misremembered Wanderer as an actual game and not simply the brilliantly done mock-up with some relevant threads...

Wanderer

– Simon 2019-10-02 22:55 UTC

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A half-step away there is also the excellent science fiction game Stars Without Number by Kevin Crawford. It is an OSR/TSR-era D&D class-and-level game with Traveller’s 2d6 skill system attached. It works very, very well. (And the GM tools/setting creation chapters are also great.)

– Blunder 2019-10-02 23:17 UTC

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That blog post sounds sweet, Ynas!

Yeah, Simon, that fake fantasy Traveller *The Wanderer* drove me nuts back then. 🙂

And the link to *Paladin in a Citadel* led me to this Orcus picture that I like so much! My favorite.

Orcus picture

I had forgotten that *Stars without Number* used 2d6 for skills, Blunder. Kevin is not afraid to mix and match!

– Alex Schroeder 2019-10-03 05:43 UTC

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FYI I’m not getting any emails for my comment subscriptions either.

– Björn Buckwalter 2019-10-04 14:05 UTC

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Hm. I just checked my mails and cron seems to print no errors:

Date: Fri, 04 Oct 2019 07:08:36 +0200 Sending Comments on 2019-08-15 Deep Carbon Observatory Day 1 to bjorn... using kensanata@smtp.gmail.com

Perhaps Gmail changed something about all that?

– Alex Schroeder 2019-10-04 14:38 UTC

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Hm, when I setup a test and remove all the safeguards, I do in fact get an error:

invalid SSL_version specified at ... IO/Socket/SSL.pm line 698.

Gah!

– Alex Schroeder 2019-10-04 14:49 UTC

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Wohoo! Back in business. Thank you for the heads up.

– Alex Schroeder 2019-10-04 16:31 UTC