Classic Traveller and the Zero Prep Campaign Setting

Everybody knows you can run D&D with zero prep. Do you have a prepared town and dungeon location a la Keep on the Borderlands? You are solid. You don’t need a session zero. You don’t need to know much about the “campaign world”. You don’t even need to know the finer points of the game. Everything can take shape over time as you roll on random tables during the heat of play. If you are unsure about inflicting this on real life players, a game like AD&D is so thoroughly proceduralized you can even play it completely solitaire until you get the hang of everything.

Classic Traveller has many of these same qualities, but not all. However, it has some remarkable qualities of its own. It’s a different sort of game. The scope is so much larger. While elements of the game such as space travel and trade are proceduralized, at some point the referee will be forced to concoct an adventure scenario that derives from whatever has happened and wherever it is that the players have gone.

This is daunting. Many people look at this as a problem to be solved. They write up the perfect starting planet. They load it with adventure hooks. They put all the work into making everything look pretty, professional, tight. This is absolutely the WRONG way to address this. You might have handed novice referees something they can just pick up and run. But look, if that campaign is going to get off the ground, that novice referee is going to have to become confident enough to handle quickly setting up an adventure no matter where the players go or what they elect to do.

I’m here to tell you that it is not as hard as you think. And facing this challenge head on is in fact the entire premise of the game. It’s right there in the title. With that in mind, let’s take a look at just how much the random tables of the original Classic Traveller rules booklets really give you.

First up is the character generation rules. My favorite thing about this is that rolling up a character is not preparing to play Traveller. It is playing Traveller. Traveller character generation is a game. And it does irritate me. Why don’t people supporting the Traveller game create MORE games like this? There was room for entire standalone games in the vein of Gregory M. Smith’s The Hunters all this time, but no! Everyone supporting the game wanted to just churn out the same sort of rpg crapola that has ruined every other rpg on the market!

But imagine you have one player brand new to this game and they sit down with you and you walk through this procedure with them. You immediately get a story emerging spontaneously out of nothing, it’s great! Consider:

• Ex-army Lt. Colonel, 3868B8, Age 34, 4 terms, 50,000 cr, Rifle-2, SMG-1, Forward Observer-1, Gambling-1, Winged Craft-1 (includes helicopters)

I would never spontaneously pick a rank like this if I was creating a GURPS character from scratch. Heck, I would never think to pick out a template with the army background as being an particularly intriguing character type to play. But this guy is different. His low strength meant he got promoted into a desk job. He rose in the ranks consistently until he wanted to make general, but then got put out to pasture just as that first round of aging checks all went against him. And throughout the process, the education stat repeatedly comes up as being significant. This player started out with an education of 4, relentlessly took roles on the personal development table, rejoiced when they actually got it to the point where they would get that bonus for those promotion checks, despaired when they failed their reenlistment roll, and then picked up even more education when rolling on the benefits table.

This means something. This guy is compensating for something. And he is about to find out just how well his book learning stacks up in the face of a cold, hard universe.

Ah, but what if we are zero prepping a campaign? What if we haven’t even prepared a subsector map? It’s okay, we have a world generator. Even better, we have one that doesn’t take several hours to wade through. Let’s see what we get this time:

• Moonshine — Starport C, Scout Base, 8,000-mile Diameter, Standard/Tainted atmosphere, Hydrographics 90%, Population in the thousands, NO GOVERNMENT, Law Level 1, Tech Level 6. Non-industrial.

Now, this is not much to go on. But I’ll tell you, some place is better than anyplace. And the place we got is a lonely outpost in the backwaters of space. The only thing of interstellar relevance here is the scout base. Initially we think of rural Kentucky and so name the place Moonshine. Images of the Dukes of Hazzard running liquor across state lines come into our minds unbidden. But then a minor convergence occurs here as we consider what to do with the Lt. Colonel’s Vehicle skill result. The fact that this is an Island World collides with this minor decision that we still needed to pin down. Yet again an image comes into our minds unbidden– this time it is T.C. from the show Magnum P.I. We decide that this is the Lt. Colonel’s home world and that he has returned from his career in the army. We have a vision of him flying around in a helicopter, going from island to island.

It should be noted here that all of this is playing out so far by design. Indeed, we are right now facing almost the exact same situation that Marc Miller did when he picked up Adventure 4: Leviathan many years ago. The spartan and concise game elements of the core Traveller rules are supposed to bring these sorts of images to mind. Heck, it’s all spelled out right there in Book 3:

• The purpose of the world generation sequence can best be seen as a prod to the imagination. Even the most imaginative individual soon loses brilliance in the face of creating hundreds of individual worlds. The procedure substitutes die rolls for random imagination and then allows the referee to use that information to determine specific world data.

If I was bereft of random tables, everything would be ten times as much work. Classic Traveller’s tables are just the right size, too. They are concise enough that I can get something playable within minutes. They are sophisticated enough to give me something to work with. I don’t look at a blank canvas and get all worked up trying to come up with the coolest possible campaign concept which I can be assured will fail to impress anyone playing the game. I get just enough detail that not only my own imagination gets a nudge, but that of the players is as well. Even at this stage we are in precisely the same place as when a random wilderness encounter occurs in a D&D session. The referee is peering into the entrails of these game elements trying to divine some kind of adventure scenario out of them. The players meanwhile will reflexively collaborate in developing an explanation of what it all means. There is just enough energy here that a continuing campaign can leave the theoretical stage and actually get moving. And I must say, the most irritating and debilitating thing about GURPS products is that it will do anything except facilitate something like this ever occurring.

Ah, but though we have a character and a stage for him to operate on… we do not have an adventure. As good as the material is that we have so far, I have to say I haven’t the faintest idea of what to do with it. Many people before me have gotten to this exact point and then faltered. Or maybe they went nuts preparing stacks of campaign material that would never see play. Or maybe they would buy one rpg rule set after another, failing to get each one into play in succession. Or maybe they started a project of looting each of a half dozen Traveller rulesets with an eye towards developing the ultimate homebrew rules.

Not me!

I think the real answer here was always in the old game books all along. All I need to do is trust the random tables. I don’t have a copy of 76 Patrons. I don’t have a set of encounters prepared for this world. I don’t have an adventure scenario at all. So, let’s just see what the tables would give us if we were playing the core rules by the seat of our pants:

• Patron: Scout
• Random Person Encounter: Vigilantes

And now, I think something beautiful really happens. The world, the character, the situation… it all converges into something better than anything that can be planned. I immediately know what is going on and what I am doing– a feeling I never get when using a GURPS product.

The Lt. Colonel has retired from service and been dropped off on his home world. You can’t go home again. The player is free to offer ideas of what all is going on with his family and friends while he was away. But all is not well. People complain about player characters being completely irrelevant in sprawling space campaigns all the time, but that is not at all what we have in our little zero prep session here. Someone with the cash and abilities of a recently retired Lt. Colonel would be incredibly significant on a backwater world with a population of thousands. And someone on this Island World immediately recognizes this. And that person is… a patron.

The rules spell this out explicitly:

• The key to adventure in Traveller is the patron. When a band of adventurers meets an appropriate patron, they have a person who can give them direction in their activities, and who can reward them for success. The patron is the single most important NPC there can be.

The inciting incident is obvious.

Someone fairly high up in the Scout Service has gone missing. The player’s contact there is elated that the player character has happened back on the scene right as this is occurring. He pulls some strings and suddenly our Lt. Colonel is in some kind of investigation scenario.

I still don’t have an idea of what is going on at this stage. I don’t have a world map. I don’t have a cast of NPC’s for the player to interact with. But then we roll just one random encounter to prime the pump and it comes up as Vigilantes. Suddenly everything makes sense!

There is some sort of piracy operation going on in this world. The scout base is corrupt. Some of the locals are opposed to this. TC from Magnum P.I. is flying from island to island looking for clues in a weird Space translation of Hazzard, Kentucky. He immediately finds himself inside the plot of the classic movie Outland. Is first encounter is with this world’s counterpart to the Bookhouse Boys from Twin Peaks. This is really good stuff.

We can play for a while even in a zero prep session just with this. As referee, I might declare that things just go wrong with an initial investigative encounter and guns are immediately drawn. This is entirely consistent with both Raymond Chandler novels and Dumarest of Terra. Might as well lean into it! We do not need an elaborate scenario to begin play at all. We need relatively simple situations to serve as tutorials for the main rule systems of the classic Little Black Books. We not only have a campaign setting that took no effort to play, but we also have a game that is already running. It’s more important for our first steps within this space to get the players up to speed on how the rules work than it is for it to actually feel like a real game.

Thanks to Supplement 1: 1001 Characters, I have a random thug armed with an autopistol. There is no surprise in this initial encounter and encounter distance comes out to Long Range. The idea of this guy pulling a pistol at long range seems ridiculous, so I arbitrarily reset the distance to short just to produce something that is worth playing out. The player character was talking to this NPC and something got taken the wrong way and violence ensured. Let’s go with that!

It takes just a little bit of time to determine that the player character will hit with his rifle on a 3+ and the thug will hit on a 7+. We do not have the system mastery to know what kind of armor people are likely to be wearing. Surprisingly, the PC’s low strength score is not an issue– armor does not count against encumbrance limits in Classic Traveller! Just for grins, we look how this fight would go if each character involved were wearing cloth. The PC would need 8+ to hit and the thug would need 11+. Given the notorious Classic Traveller “first blood” rule, the outcome of the player dropping this NPC with his rifle with a single round of combat is perfectly in line with the rules. With ten minutes of session play, everyone is now on notice. Classic Traveller is simply not a grid game in the way that either WOTC-era D&D or even classic GURPS is.

At this point I no longer feel comfortable winging it. This is a reasonable stopping point for an initial session even though only an hour or two has passed. And I feel like the general session deserves a bit more fleshing out. As an experienced referee, my gut instinct here is to time box prep to about three hours– i.e., you can expect to spend about as much time preparing as you would in playing the game. Over time I can see a new world being rolled up and embellished with just enough detail to provide adventure situations for whichever players are involved with the game. Once several worlds are established in this manner and a few key events have become “canon” to the campaign, my expectation is that there will be enough characters, factions, and entities in play that the campaign itself will start spontaneously generating adventure content without the referee needing to dedicate terribly much prep time at all.

This is a tremendous win for classic Traveller. Regardless of what characters your players roll up or what world they begin the game on, it is very reasonable to assume that a continuing campaign that fills up an entire Judges Guild Astrogators Chartbook is completely on the table.

All we need to make it happen is for people to just agree to keep showing up!