Traveller (role-playing game)

Traveller is a science fiction role-playing game first published in 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW). Designed by Marc Miller with help from Frank Chadwick, John Harshman, and Loren Wiseman, it is one of the earliest and most influential science fiction tabletop RPGs. The game emphasizes exploration, trade, and combat across star systems, set in a human-dominated but cosmopolitan universe centered on the feudalistic Third Imperium. From its origin and in all currently published systems, the game relies exclusively on six-sided dice for random elements.

Characters

The game’s design is influenced by literary works such as Dorsai, the Dumarest of Terra series, Space Viking, and The Cosmic Computer, among others. Key features include commerce as the driving force of civilization, a human-centric but cosmopolitan focus with support for alien species, limited communication without faster-than-light methods, and a socially stratified society where Social Status (SOC) is a core attribute. Characters are generated using a lifepath-style system, where players make career choices that determine the character’s life before adventuring begins; death during character generation is possible in some editions, a mechanic that became infamous. Characters have six primary characteristics generated by rolling two six-sided dice, and may possess psionic abilities such as telepathy and telekinesis.

Starships

Equipment lists emphasize wilderness exploration, hazardous environments, and combat, including both low-technology primitive weapons and high-technology cybernetics, robots, and ancient artifacts. Starships range from small scouts to giant planetoid colony ships, with design rules balancing power, life support, and defenses. World generation rules produce a random mix of worlds, from barren moons to heavily populated planets.

Editions

The default setting emerged from in-house play tests, and the game has been published in numerous editions, including Classic Traveller, MegaTraveller, Traveller: The New Era, GURPS Traveller, and Mongoose Traveller. The current rulesets are Traveller5 and Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition. Traveller has won multiple Origins Awards and was inducted into the Origins Hall of Fame in 1996. It has also been featured in novels and at least two video games, including MegaTraveller 1: The Zhodani Conspiracy and MegaTraveller 2: Quest for the Ancients.