GURPS Traveller

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GURPS Traveller
Cover-sm.jpg
Publisher Steve Jackson Games
Version GURPS Traveller
Author Loren Wiseman
Format Bound Book
Canonical yes
Edition GURPS 3rd Revised
Year Published 1998
Pages 176
Hang in there Beowulf...

Help is on the way!

</translate> GURPS Traveller is a set of table-top role-playing game books by Steve Jackson Games. It's designed to allow game play in Traveller's Third Imperium science-fiction setting using the Wikipedia:GURPS rule system. Traveller was originally published in 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop and was inducted into the Origins Adventure Gaming Hall of Fame in 1997. Recently many people have noted the remarkable resemblance between the Traveller universe and the one shown in the TV series Firefly. Mentioning that similarity is probably the quickest way to explain to any new player what the Traveller universe is like.

History

GURPS Traveller (1998- ) was "Created on a handshake with Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson Games." This quote from Marc Miller, the original author of Traveller, and the owner of the company which still publishes the Classic Traveller game system, Far Future Enterprises. The game uses the GURPS (Third Edition) system and takes place in an alternate timeline in which no Rebellion occurred and the Virus was never released. Steve Jackson Games has produced over 30 high-quality supplements for the line, including details for all of the major races, many of the minor races, interstellar trade, expanded world generation, the military forces of the Third Imperium, and starships. The game is often referred to as "GT". Loren Wiseman who worked with Game Designers' Workshop in the design and development of Traveller is still the GURPS Traveller line manager and editor of the online magazine Journal of the Travellers Aid Society.

How GURPS makes Traveller different

Loren Wiseman and Jon Zeigler have been very successful in keeping the information, equipment, characters, style, and atmosphere of GT as close as possible to the original Classic Traveller universe. However there are several advantages to playing GT as opposed to the original Classic Traveller.

  • GURPS point based system ensures that all characters in a group will be roughly equal in terms of abilities and skills, and that a player won't spend several hours of character creation only to end up with a useless or dead character. Yes, in the original game it was in fact possible for your character to die during creation, through risks taken during his previous career. Although in practice most referee's would just have your character suffer a grievous injury and be discharged from the service. While the dice can sometimes be kind, granting your character a long list of usefull skills, at other times a few bad rolls could grant you a partially crippled character barely qualified to work the night shift at a mini-mart. Hardly the stuff of valiant adventures.
  • Because Traveller was conceived in the 70's it strongly resembles science-fiction from the late 60's. People who want to play Traveller and still keep their game universe more in line with what we currently picture the future to be like can quite simply add equipment to their game world from other GURPS sourcebooks.
  • The GURPS game system is more detailed than the original Traveller game system. In GURPS you can have a character with above average hearing, or motion sickness. Your character can be color-blind, or be more tolerant of variable gravity than the average person. The original Traveller game system just didn't go into that level of detail.
  • Until 1998 the original Traveller books had been out of print for over a decade. Also the small size and amount of the books meant there wasn't as much information on the universe as many people would have liked. Steve Jackson Games has already printed more Traveller material than Game Designers' Workshop ever did. More pictures, starship deckplans, and details of the game universe means less work for the referee who otherwise has to make up every single detail himself. Many people who play other versions of Traveller often buy the GURPS Traveller books just for the extra information.
  • And finally, your character can improve in GURPS Traveller. The original system had no mechanism for "experience points" or "gaining levels." So without house rules you were stuck with the character you made without the possibility for improvement.

Newest Edition

While GURPS was updated to a streamlined version with the August 2004 release of its Fourth Edition, GURPS Traveller players have had to remain content with GURPS Third Edition.

This is about to change as Steve Jackson Games has released (February 2006) GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars. This newest book not only allows GT players to upgrade to the latest Fourth Edition GURPS ruleset, but it also changes the default setting.

Currently GT is set in the Third Imperium around the year 1120 (since the founding of the Imperium). GT: Interstellar Wars will be set almost 2500 years prior to the founding of the Third Imperium, around the year 2170 A.D. The men from Earth finally invent a Faster-than-light drive for their space ships. They soon make first contact with extra-terrestrial aliens (The Vilani), and those aliens are human. The Interstellar Wars presents a more fluid and dynamic campaign setting than the static background of the Third Imperium.

See also

External links

Smallwikipedialogo.png This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at GURPS_Traveller. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of Wikipedia is available under the Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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