A
science fiction roleplaying game, perhaps the best of its
genre ever created. Traveller kept the rules fairly light, kept the science fairly realistic, and didn't require a whole bunch of
funny dice to play. The various books and supplements detailed a stupendously large empire called the
Third Imperium, which gave just about every
roleplayer something they liked, from
court intrigue to
grunt fighting on the
frontiers.
It was eventually replaced by
MegaTraveller, the game's second
incarnation. While MegaTraveller cleaned up a lot of the mechanical problems Traveller had, it started to take the Traveller universe in directions some of the players didn't want to go - specifically, the emperor was assassinated and the grand, sprawling empire broke up into the
space opera equivalent of
city-states.
Then in 1993 third game's third incarnation, called
Traveller: The New Era, was published. This
book wasn't a great
success, partly because the mechanics were completely changed and also because the Third Imperium was completely destroyed by a sentient
computer virus called (of all things) Virus.
Then the original designer of the game,
Marc Miller, tried to recreate what was so special about the original Traveller in a new book called
Marc Miller's Traveller (usually abbreviated T4). But this book also had problems - there were an unusually large number of
typos and pasteup errors, some of which actually prevented the book from being used as written. The mechanics were simplified from Traveller: The New Era, but still did not even begin to approach the
simplicity of the original Traveller game. Several supplements were published for the line, but it sank pretty quickly.
Then
Steve Jackson Games got into the act, licensing the Traveller universe and producing a version of Traveller based of their
GURPS roleplaying system.
GURPS: Traveller (as the final book was called) was considered a step in the right direction by longtime Traveller fans - it was mostly written and edited by
Loren Wiseman, an experienced Traveller writer/editor, the GURPS system was much cleaner than the systems of Traveller: The New Era or Marc Miller's Traveller, and the book set up an
alternate timeline where the events of MegaTraveller and Traveller: The New Era never took place.
Since then, many supplemental books have been released, ranging from
mediocre to
staggeringly good (the Scout and Merchant books, in particular, have been widely praised).
As I write this, plans are being made to reprint the original Traveller books (now called
Classic Traveller) and Marc Miller is saying he wants to do a T5...
As you can see, despite its
checkered past, Traveller is a game that a lot of people know and love and don't want to see die.