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Re: Traveller Madness

Alex bought a humble bundle of Traveller goodness.

I love Traveller. Absolutely love it. In theory 😄️

I've run one Traveller campaign and played as a player in another. Very much liked them both, but I just can't get through the rules. Character creation and combat were situations where I just handed everything off to the rest of the group and said "just make me a character that can fire a gun" and "this happens, roll... something... you know better than I do" respectively.

A couple of years ago I felt a strong urge to play space opera again, and I picked up Traveller and decided to give it a proper read through. I got to the page where character creation is explained in a complex and seemingly never-ending flowchart. Then I thought "screw that... I'll get back to it after reading some fun ship specs."

Except ship specs are really not fun in Traveller. They're dry as sand and really complicated.

In pure frustration I decided to give myself 15 hours to make something more to my liking.

Enter: Shipmates

What's fun in space opera?

Simple Life Path character creation.
Ship building!
Losing body parts and replacing them with prosthetics.
Space wizards! But they can't be allowed to dominate the game.
Spaceship fights! No, actually they're usually not fun, but they should be.

I think I managed pretty well.

(Beware the cover image is enormous, because I misread the lulu instructions and thought it had to be 600ppi.)

To be fair I still haven't had time to play-test this, even though it's almost been two years. It's a tongue-in-cheek labour of love for a beer-and-pretzels type of game. I'm sure it's fine 😄️

Adding to this self-plug:

It's available in print.

Alex: shipping within the EU is pretty cheap and I have an extra hard copy at home. If you want it it's yours.

-- CC0 ew0k, 2021-01-19