Vintage RPG

If there is anything like a Pharaoh’s Curse in this world of ours, it is putting “Volume 1” on the cover of an RPG book. Seems like if you do, you’re inviting fate to intervene to prevent Volume 2 from appearing. Such is the case with Lee’s Guide to Interstellar Adventure (1983).

I expected this to be a field guide for players — equipment, methods for exploration, advice on interacting with alien species, that sort of thing. Nope. What this is, though, is a collection of…they are too short to really be called short adventures, but too fleshed out to be adventure seeds. Let’s call them adventure saplings. There’s lots of advice on how to structure or develop stories. Basically, each chapter focuses on a different world, sketching out its features and climate and inhabitants, then in a succession of paragraphs, suggests potential scenarios and their complications (which generally spring directly from the environment or the pre-existing inhabitants than anything like a bespoke narrative).

Thus, for the planet with the erratic star and the weirdly undifferentiated animal life, the first suggestion is an ecological survey, the second setting up a mining operation, the third a suggestion to use the planet as the backdrop for a manhunt or similar search, or to accompany a colonization project, or as the site of a shipwreck. None of these are particularly wild ideas, but they are all complicated in interesting ways by the mimicry-loving alien lifeforms and the effect the erratic sun has on electronics, the environment and so-on.
It’s a neat book with an interesting, chatty approach to presenting adventures. It isn’t all the different from the stuff coming out of GDW around the same time — Tarsus and Beltstrike in particular — but it actually feels a good deal meatier. Some nice illustrations by Wallace Miller, too.

FASA stopped making products for Traveller in 1983, so the Keith brothers moved their freelancing ways over to my favorite early 80s RPG small press, Gamelords. I picked A Pilot’s Guide to the Drexilthar Subsector (1984) pretty much at random from a sizable pile of books that are all pretty good. The Keiths would continue to write Traveller material for Gamelords until they closed sometime in 1984.

The chapbook details a sector used in at least two Gamelords adventures — The Drenslaar Quest and Duneraiders. In fact, it is part of the Reavers’ Deep Sector, a chunk of the galaxy licensed by GDW to the Keith brothers for them to develop (through their own small press Marischal Adventures), which they then in turn licensed to Gamelords to get paid for writing about, which seems pretty clever honestly.

Contents wise, we’re in pretty familiar territory, a planet-by-planet guide to the sector, offering a variety of environments and potential hooks. The method for this had been established for a couple years now, and was evolving over at GDW into box sets, but this is still pretty sturdy, well-developed material. J. Andrew did the writing, William did the art. Good stuff.

FASA, which would later go on to do stuff like the Star Trek RPG and Shadowrun, got its start producing third party material for Traveller. Ordeal by Eshaar (1981) is an adventure set during the Fifth Frontier War, in which the players travel to an extremely hostile planet (hot and toxic) where Imperial and Zhodani interests are competing for mineral rights important to the war efforts on both sides. Both have embassies on a Scout Service dome on the planet (as do the Vargr). Players get to participate in the wrangling of the diplomats, then safeguard an imperial survey mission, which the Zhodani sabotage. That leaves the Imperials in poor standing with the natives, who demand the survey team participate in an Ordeal (essentially, a long, purifying survival run through the planet’s hostile environment) to atone. It’s pretty good and it feels pretty much like a GDW Traveller product!

And it should be, because it is written by the Keith brothers (J. Andrew and William), who had previously written material on contract for GDW. J. Andrew wrote so much for the Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society that he used two pseudonyms so it didn’t look so obvious he was writing everything. The brothers were prolific freelancers, so when FASA started producing Traveller material, they were right there, writing most of it.

This fancy production is FASA’s Merchant Class Ships (1982). I’ve seen it as a box set, but mine comes in a plastic bag. No idea if it was ever issued in a bag, but the bag is definitely old, so if someone lost the box, they did it a long time before I got a hold of it.

Anyway, this is a pretty elaborate product for a third party producer. It comes with two booklets, lots of chits and poster sized deck plan for six different merchant ships. Everything is high quality, including the art.

There isn’t a lot more to say about it, honestly. FASA produced a number of other deckplan sets of similar quality. I included this one mostly to illustrate that it wasn’t all zines (ahem: chapbooks) among the third party Traveller products.

Everything old is new again. One of the things I love about the contemporary RPG scene is the way third party community products emerge in support of popular games. Mothership, Mork Borg, Cairn and OSE are all interesting examples of this, but while digital distribution and cheap printing options have made this sort of thing easier and more prevalent, the phenomenon has been around pretty much since the beginning of the hobby. I particularly enjoy how Game Designers’ Workshop courted and encouraged third party designers to expand on the Traveller experience.

Scouts & Assassins (1981), from Paranoia Press, is a good example of this. By today’s definition, this is a zine (ahem: chapbook), 12 pages long, with pretty high production standards for the time (though it identifies itself as a Traveller Variant). You get new character generation rules for Scouts (an alternate from the regular Traveller Scout rules) and Assassins, as well as plans for a scout ship. The most interesting to me is that Unfit for Service rules. Traveller characters, famously, can die during character creation if they fail a survival roll during their tour of duty. This one page rule hack replaces death with a number of potential reasons a character could be drummed out of the serive — insubordination, mutiny, drunkenness and so on. Death is still a possibility, but it is now just one of many. I’ve always figured that this was the prime rule to get homebrewed for Traveller, and here we have it in print!

This is about as official a Traveller product as you could get without being printed by GDW. Marc Miller even has a little thing in the front saying the book is approved for use with the game and the back cover has a GDW product listing.