5 Million Worlds Rokaner Report #28, Classic Traveller is free right now!
RR#28 April 2026, Gateway at Theru
Salutations Travellers,
It’s pretty wild, but the PDF version of Classic Traveller (Facsimile Edition) is free! This includes the first three books on Character Creation, Starship Creation, and World Creation (plus Psionics). You too, can now die in character creation, haha, I highly recommend checking it out.
So yes, I am running a Classic Traveller game, and luckily the scholastic spring break gave me more time to write and worldbuild. After generating a Classic Traveller subsector last month, I kicked off a new campaign. Two, in fact. After just a three sessions, The Royal Belt has taught me a lot about this seminal science fiction game.
Before I chat a bunch about Classic Traveller, I’ve got some publishing news, including more Ansible Uplink to share, so let’s get on with it!
Publishing news
At the top of the month, Josh Domanski and I launched Paramour, an iceball planet heist/bounty hunt for Orbital Blues Month. The project funded in under six hours, and we’ve hit four stretch goals, and another is very close as we enter the final four days!
Additionally, the Mothership Month 2025 pre-order store went up! If you missed the campaign, you can grab Flatline on the Blocks and have it included in the combined shipping that Tuesday Knight Games is organizing for all those zines. Take a peek:
In addition to Flatline on the Blocks, I’m also working as editor on All on Red, Breathe Easy, Drink from the Hippocrene, Rites of Renewal, and The Sunlit Path. Also, I’m in a game of Red Nation with the creator, Mathieu Baguet, and I gotta say, the sequel giving you a different version of The Dream is very exciting to play in. Lots of great modules to check out!
I’ve also recently handed over the dev edits to Luiz at HexploreRPG for Dreadnauts: Maiden Voyage. Dreadnauts is a Panic Engine game set in the age of sail, and Maiden Voyage is the player’s guide and quickstart to deck out a table with a ship and set upon the Seas of Madness. Give Luiz a follow to read more about Dreadnauts!
Ansible Uplink, Orbital Blues Month
Ansible Uplink, my sci-fi module review podcast, focused on Orbital Blues this month with three guests who know their stuff when it comes to the game.
The Man We Knew, with Sam Leigh
Space noir by Kayla Dice at Rat Wave Games
Rogue Anthems, with Josh Domanski
We read two adventures of the eight packed in this VHS box:
Train Heist, Hardsuit Holdup on the Hartwell Limited by Jess Levine
Derelict crawl, Voidlock Tombstone by Zachary Cox
Electric Sheep Shuffle, with Eryk Sawicki
Computer con by Grahame Turner
And for the folks that know how to use it: Ansible Uplink RSS
Welcome to the Royal Belt
Initially named the Artemis Subsector (I was generating this sector during the lunar mission launch), this slice of space holds the start of the Royal Belt. Colloquially, it’s called the Buckle. At least, that’s what I’ve name the first cluster:
Each system has a world with its own Universal World Profile, or UWP, which is a series of letters and numbers. It was just impossible for me to look at the list of letters/numbers and get a picture of the greater relationships in this subsector. With this graphic rendering built up, I felt better equipped to start running the game.
Why Classic Traveller now?
Hosting Ansible Uplink, and writing 5 Million Worlds RPG are the two major influences behind this campaign. In fact, I feel embarrassed I haven’t played any Traveller up to this point, even if I played Stars Without Number for a few years before becoming a Mothership fanboy.
Like SWN and Mothership, the original three Little Black Books of Classic Traveller (CT) do not have an established setting. This was an exciting prospect for me, even if the type of sci-fi it’s emulating isn’t exactly my preferred era (New Wave). CT provides a set of rules for running “Golden Age”science fiction stories (1940s through early 1960s), and I make this precision for a few reasons.
First, Book 3 includes rules for Psionics, which was the pet psuedo-science preference of the major (and bigoted) sf editor of the era, John W. Campbell. The second and third reasons go hand-in-hand. The books place strong emphasis on military and state service for character life paths, and upon the capitalism-as-win-state in its stated goal of “the acquistion of wealth and power” (Book 3, pg. 48). For me, these two components suggest a play space with Imperial American values, as did much of “Golden Age” science fiction.
Last year, I read some “Golden Age” sci-fi that wasn’t as gung-ho on these themes, a sentiment which is also echoed in CT. For example, Book 1 contains a “Note on Gender and Race” that insists any character can be whatever they want. In my recent re-reading, too, I noticed some snark I’d missed previously. Despite its restrictive life paths, I understood that the game places its characters to oppose the forces of order in their own pursuit of adventure.
“My vision for Traveller was more GURPS-ish: a universal science-fiction role-playing system that anyone could play against any existing SF texts. It could be Asimov’s Foundation, or Anderson’s Terra. [But] not everyone had read all these great classics: they knew Star Trek and Star Wars […] they didn’t know the vast range of details in the various SF universes. They wanted me to supply details.
[…] I tried to make this future society understandable and relatable. I avoided a universe where interstellar navigation was a monopoly for drug-assisted mutants, or where interstellar governments were ruled by crazed religious zealots. I wanted the players to feel comfortable in the environment, making decisions that mattered to them rather than always fighting against strangeness that was never explained.”
- Marc Miller, interview with Stargazer World, 15 May 2017
But what is Traveller for others?
I’m not one to give much preferential treatment to empires and nobles outside of being baddies (the Distant Authority, as Luke Gearing puts it), so I didn’t think much of the Imperium or the services until my session zero revealed that most players were interested in exploring imperial and nobility schemes.
For them, Traveller was about the Imperium. And I didn’t know anything about the Imperium.
“Traveller was trying to give us the details of daily life in some star travelling future […] stories of classic science fiction don’t really tell us how spaceships work or how much it costs to go from here to there […] Traveller told us how day-to-day life worked in addition to how combat works and conflict works and all that but it told us that it cost you this much to eat and a spaceship cost this much and passage cost this much and those details didn’t really mesh very well with all of those novels. […] But the truth is more people wanted some guidance on how to do adventures than knew how to make their own.”
- Marc Miller, interview with Luke Gearing, 27 June 2022
Well, shit.
The Diadem Empire
When I got the Imperial Curveball, I had to scramble a bit. I was saved by two things: old work and other books.
From the get-go, I told folks this would be a homebrew 5MW x Traveller setting. I’d planned adventures around the theme of synthetic personhood, thinking about 5MW’s Emulants. And two years ago with M. Allen Hall, we collaborated on an adventure set in the ruins of the vast Diadem Empire, its capital worlds named after gemstones. So I built out a rough Diadem Empire map:
To choose the location of this subsector in the Empire, I made a quick 2d6 table placing highly populous Corewards regions at lower probabilities, and rolled the Painite Arch. So then, I knew this region was in one of the farthest reaches of the Diadem Empire. We’re working with time lag, so Imperial oversight is probably quite lacking. But that wasn’t enough.
My second saving grace was a big stack of sci-fi books. I got out Stars Without Number and rolled on the society tables. For the origins of the Royal Belt, before the Empire showed up, a got a double “religious” bit, so I then had to get out Worlds Without Number for its tables on creating religions/gods. Finally, for the starting world of Theru, I pulled from Megastructures, and used District-building tools in Cities Without Number and Augmented Reality to create districts and infighting nobles.
Now I could take the Royal Belt somewhere more complex, ready for the nobility and their political shenanigans. For folks who have time and ample imagination from sci-fi lit reading, you could sit down and ask the questions to make sense of seemingly impossible worlds (it’s a ton of fun), but I am glad to have had these resources on hand to develop something quickly. As the game goes on the setting will come to life with its own quirks and peculiarities, as it always does.
Clusters over Subsectors
One piece from all this has reinforced my design decision for 5MW to stick with smaller Clusters of hexes (though a 25x25 hexfield is way too damn big). Building a small group of systems around a theme, and then engineering how they interact with new neighboring Clusters as you play, that sounds exciting.
And of course, there’s always room for populating individual hexes with other sci-fi adventures, yeah?
Signing off,
Chris Airiau
Thank you for being part of the motley crew that's bringing Dreadnauts to light. 🤘