Traveller RPG Review

Author’s Note: I use the word “generic” in various forms throughout this review. When I say “generic” I am referring to so-called Generic Roleplaying games. These are setting neutral games designed to be used for a variety of settings and play experiences. Examples include games like BRP, GURPs, Cypher, and Fate.

One of the things you need learn if you intend succeed at an Academic™, is that to write a good or interesting paper it is always best to limit your scope. Your chosen topic of expertise is always going to be infinitely complex and granular. Arguments and theories can unravel at the slightest of misunderstandings and ambiguities. So, there is always this temptation to just keep writing more: Go further, and further down the rabbit hole until you’ve reached China or Wonderland, so that way no one can disagree with you or poke holes in your argument.

The more you write, however, the more you realize this is a terrible idea.

Writing a review about Traveller presents the same temptations and risks as any academic research might. It has a history almost as long as The Seattle Game, it has countless expansions and versions, and hundreds of fan zines and adventures ready to use. It has mechanics that range from using a sensor array, to teleporting halfway across a galaxy with immense psionic power.

Mongoose Publishing’s Traveller 2E (the version discussed in this review) has more than 250 pages of rules and stat blocks for running and playing adventures in Charted Space (the game’s default setting). The core book is one of four books that people tend to recommend for people really interested in diving into the game. The other commonly recommended books for those new to Traveller are: High Guard, Central Supply Catalogue, and Traveller’s Companion.

Over 1,000 pages of material, items, and rules. And this is just the core recommended books. You could talk about Mongoose’s entire Traveller line of products, including several dozen adventures, box sets, optional expansions, and its semi-regular volumes Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society. Thousands and thousands of pages.

This is the core of the problem with talking about Traveller 2E: There is so much material written for the game, and the game’s scope is so ambitious that it flirts with genericism. You could never hope to capture the essence of the whole game and all of the different play experiences in a review, unless you wanted to play and test the game for years to come. And by that point anything you write will be out-of-date, and therefore not be an useful review. So, instead, here is what I will be addressing in this review:

• What is Traveller and what is it about?
• Is the Traveller Core Rulebook any good? How are the rules?
• How good are the supplements? Do I recommend any of them?
• Do I recommend Traveller? Who do I recommend it to?

In this review I won’t be addressing any of the following:

• A review of the complete Mongoose Publishing Traveller line. There are simply too review, and I don’t have that kind of cash.
• The nitty-gritty of combat rules (vehicles or people vs people). I don't have space for this, and these aren't the game's selling points anyways.

With this all said, it’s time to fire up the Jump drive and get to the review.

What is Traveller and What is it About?

Imagine Firefly or Cowboy Bebop. A bunch of losers traverse the galaxy in a spaceship as they take up odd jobs in order off last month’s chicken nugget debt and a ship’s mortgage.

If you’ve ever been mildly interested in trying out Traveller, you will probably have encountered this pitch at some point. It’s not wrong, per se, but in my opinion doesn’t really get to the core of what Traveller really is. Yes, Losers in a Spaceship is a campaign you could run in the game, but Traveller isn’t a game designed around being losers in a spaceship.

Jumping back to 1977, when the first of many Traveller versions was put out, the game was an intergalactic sandbox intended for players to make money while playing as (mostly) ex-military free traders travelling around an intergalactic sandbox governed by the rules of physics. You still had a mortgage to pay, and the game was very much in the style of the early 1970’s simulationist RPG’s that descended from wargames, such as D&D. 1977’s Traveller is probably the version of the game I’d most associate “hard” sci-fi of the bunch, considering it literally requires you to use equations for travel time.

This is not a joke, here’s a page with square roots.

Mongoose Publishing’s Traveller 2E is in the same vein, in many respects. It is a simulationist intergalactic sandbox. It has a rule and a stat block for everything. Many aspects of gameplay are coded and categorized in order to get immensely granular with system interactions and player budgeting.

Still there’s many tools for adventure and exploring. In fact, it’s pretty hard to get rich without adventuring, exploring, and making connections. Traveller is a game about living in a lived-in world, and the randomness it throws about you. Traveller is a game that wants to tell every story in its universe, from a crew of idiots in a Free Trader, to high in the Imperial ranks aboard a heavy battlecruiser, and it wants every role and every decision to matter.

To put it shorter: Mongoose’s Traveller 2E is a 1970’s simulationist game about traversing a simulated inter-connected cosmos that has been re-imagined and released for the design priorities of the mid 2010’s. It is much more gamified (gone are the orbital mechanics) while still capturing the procedural and granular ambitions of its 1970’s forebearer. And much like many sandbox games, you don’t have to use every rule (or so the community claims.) This statement is mostly correct, but I’ll be returning to it a little bit later.

Core Rules and Rulebook

Rolling Dice and Solving Problems

Traveller 2E is a skill-based game that mostly requires rolls of 2D6 Attribute Modifier Skill Modifier Other Modifier(s). This should be familiar to most people who play roleplaying games. However, the core rulebook is also fairly prescriptive of when a certain Attribute modifier should apply to a skill check, and sometimes it isn’t that straightforward. For example, a Broker check in order to buy and sell freight goods on a planet actually doesn’t involve an attribute as a bonus, but rather a different series of specific bonuses based off the planet’s attributes.

Effect and Tasks Chains

A roll might also have an Effect modifier applied to it. What is Effect? Basically, if you exceed or fail the difficulty of a check you generate Effect (up to 3 or down to -3) equal to the difference between success or failure. This mostly comes up in Task Chains, which are linked skill checks. Here’s an example of how a task chain ended up in my game:

The crew of the E. Honda Odyssesy, Calliope, Lyra, Nyx, and Odysseus have strange cargo aboard that seems to be messing with their ship in jump space. They theorize that, by playing certain frequencies of sound, they can induce whatever is in their cargo to pull them out of jump space and back into normal space.

This starts with a Science- Physics (EDU) roll from Persephone (target difficulty 8). She rolls a 9, generating an Effect of 1.

Odysseus, who has plugged in his bass and amp into the ship’s sensors, rolls an Art – Instrument (Bass) (EDU) check, rolling a 5 (target difficulty 8). He adds the 1 Effect modifier that Persephone generated, bringing his total up to 6. This is still not enough to hit the difficulty, so his roll generates an Effect modifier of -2.

Calliope’s Art – Instrument (Keyboards) (EDU) roll is much more fortunate, as she rolls a 15 before the -2 Effect modifier comes into play, taking her total up to 12. She generates an Effect modifier of 3.

Finally at the end of the Task Chain, Nyx rolls a J-Drive (Int) check, rolling a 7 (target difficulty 12). With her natural 2 to J-Drive, and the Effect modifier of 3, Nyx barely succeeds, and the crew causes an intentional “Misjump” to thrust themselves out of Jump space.

Effect is also useful outside of task chains, since it can be used to represent degree of success. In my game I oftentimes used Effect as a Hold (from PBTA games) on research checks, and the active player could use to ask me questions that I had to answer as truthfully as possible (with the caveat that I would not answer anything beyond the scope of the check).

Overall Effect and Task Chains combined with Traveller’s mostly-2d6 resolution system present a fun and engaging core system that is fun while not being over-complicated. Although sometimes I felt like the game got bogged down by some of the required Task Chains for things like trading goods (which was also a weird hybrid of 2d6 and 3d6) and preparing a ship to Jump. However, the granularity of these checks definitely have a purpose and a place in the game that I will be addressing later.

Thoughts on Character Creation

If Traveller has one killer feature, it’s character creation. You may have heard the rumor that you can die in Traveller’s character creation. Although to my knowledge this is not true of the version I played (unless you incorporate an expansion), but it was true of the original 1977 Traveller. However, PC death is not the reason to try character creation out. No, you will want to try it out because it is absolutely some of the most fun you will ever have.

This is most fun as a group of friends in Session 0. Have everyone listen and talk to each other while each person takes up the spotlight to roll their own special little buddy up.

The Process of Creation

Character creation in Traveller involves a heavily randomized lifepath system, which launches your PC like a chicken from a cannon through a series of career terms (that you can end at almost any time). While you and your PC may have hopes and dreams for their future, you will quickly find them crushed under the weight of Imperialism and Capitalism.

Take, for example, one poor PC from my game: Ms. Calliope C’thanifix, a Vargr who dreamed of delivering mail for the Scouts and the Imperial mail service. Unfortunately, she rolled up with an Education (EDU) of 2, which made qualifying for (and maintaining) any career incredibly difficult. Yet, somehow, she qualified for the Scout lifepath. However, when things went well, she suddenly found herself thrown out because her stats were too low to maintain her career. She ended up as a Drifter, until eventually she fell into a career as a Merchant Marine. With her random assortment of skills, and some dumb luck, she found herself coming out really well. By the time she mustered out at the age of 36, she had a nice career, a healthy paycheck, useful skills, and even a share of a Free Trader (the game’s “mascot” spaceship).

This sounds all nice and interesting, but simply relaying this story does not convey how much of an emotional rollercoaster this was. There was one point where things went so poorly for the character that I laughed so hard I cried.

I’m a GM. I never have fun in character creation!

And then, when Calliope started to have real success as a Merchant Marine, we were all on the edge of out seats. We even egged her on to do one more term so that she might finally make that promotion. Also, for some context, keep in mind that every single term Calliope spent as a Merchant Marine came with significant risk of getting kicked out due to her poor stats.

And in that final term, when Calliope finally rolled her promotion, we cheered, and everyone clapped. Moments like this don’t happen anywhere else in roleplaying that I’m aware of.

The rules of character creation are great. If I could roll up every character like this, I would.

A Label for Everything

One thing that Mongoose (and all versions of Traveller) did inherit from the 1977 version is the UWP Code. This annoying 8-digit little code is assigned to every single planet in Traveller. Each digit reflects a fact about the world that it is assigned to. For example, one of the world’s in my game, Luanina, is run by a dictator named Jane Hernandez. Jane syndicates a nightly soap opera that also serves as a vehicle to inform the public about new laws and policies. Luanina’s UWP code is: D6537BB-6. This means a lot of things, but what is most important to understand is that this provides a general description of the planet. However, just like in real life, players might find that labels are just that: labels. Never judge a book by its cover.

UWP codes are sort of the bane of my existence but are necessary for Traveller’s crunchy trade system. I personally find them difficult to read, and I actually wrote an entire blog post on how I would redesign them for my own purposes.

UWP codes reflect Traveller’s tendency to provide rules, rulings, and labels such that the entire experience is codified. And, at least with the Mongoose edition I ran, I am fairly certain that this is intentional design. As I said earlier, the game is ambitious to the point that it flirts with generecism. But, intentionally designed to do what, exactly?

Rules and Complexity

Don’t let my descriptions of the game’s rules and my experience mislead you, Traveller is a complicated game. While many games with the label “complicated” or “crunchy” might focus their crunchiness on the abilities and powers of the PC’s, Traveller’s complexity is an emergent property of its interconnected game systems. Similar to D&D, this game is about resource management, and much of its drama comes from conflicted generated by the demands placed on the PC’s resources. However, Traveller differs from a dungeon crawler in that the core resource that is consistently tested and pushed is the player’s finances.

There’s a reason that the most common trope in the game is about a rag-tag crew trying to pay off their ship’s mortgage: Traveller is a game holistically designed to generate dramatic tension through incremental taxation on the players economic resources.

This is why every single time players want to go into Jump (Method FTL travel) the players are required to do a linked task. This is why combat is fairly deadly without expensive equipment. This is why Brokering and trading for goods while Jumping between worlds is a multi-step process. This is why 2 points of damage to a ship’s Hull costs 200,000 Credits to fix. This is why any Jump takes a week. This is why UWP code’s exist.

The game is a slow-burn resource management game that encourages the players to take on extra work in order to defeat the math that is going to, inevitably, weigh them down with the Invisible Hand of the Free Market.

And while this core experience might not sound fun if you look at it through a purely analytical POV, it does really start to shape into something interesting and compelling, if you are the type of group that values the drama that granular randomness provides.

This approach, however, is not without its demerits.

Why I Loath this Gorram Rulebook

For some additional context, there are two versions of the Mongoose Traveller 2E rulebook. There is the 2016 original 2E core book which has this cover, and there is the 2022 updated Core Rulebook. I ran the game out of the 2022 updated Core Rulebook. There were apparently some changes between the two versions (but not enough to call it an edition change). The most notable change was the move from isometric starship maps to top-down maps.

While there are good reasons to change from isometric maps to top-down (GM’s will want to run personal combat on their starship at some point and top-down maps are good for that), I actually prefer the isometric maps as a means to help me and the players grok the starship’s layout. Whelp, you win some, you lose some. Anyways, back to the topic on hand.

The more complex and granular your rules, and the closer your game swings towards simulationist generecism; the more difficult it becomes to write a rulebook that accounts for all settings, all scenarios, and all styles of play. If you consider that all of this content needs to fit in a certain page count for physical production, this problem becomes even more complicated.

Writing a rulebook ain’t easy. But still, few rulebooks* (*for games published by mainstream RPG publishers) have ever made me as frustrated as Traveller when adjudicating and learning the rules. The location of common rules was often unintuitive (and not listed in the Index) and took up significant time during play. Reading through the book just felt like I was reading someone’s sticky notes left on their computer monitor: One moment, you’re reading about the rules for low gravity, and then fatigue, and then you’re reading about the rules for Medical Treatment and Surgery. Then, BAM, another sticky note reminding you that Humans and Animals have completely different rules for health and how random encounters work.  

As an aside: I think that rule (animal vs human health) is stupid. They should all just use health. The only reason human health is calculated in the same way as players is to reinforce a sense of realism. I dislike doing it this way because it doesn’t really tie into the core Money-as-resource gameplay loop, and instead just adds pointless admin from the GM to track.

Rules were often spread throughout the rulebook unintuitively, but none were egregious as the placement of the introductions to Tech Level and Starport Quality. This will require a brief explanation of the information that exists in UWP codes:

UWP Codes provide the following information, in order, with each digit of the code representing information about the planet that can be found on a corresponding chart:

[Starport Quality] [Planet Size] [Planet Atmosphere] [Planet Hydrographic Index] [Population Level] [Government Type] [Law Level]-[Tech Level]

So, naturally, Tech Level I (the last item in the UWP code) is only introduced and explained on page 6, and Starport Quality is introduced on explained on page 257 after the explanations of Planet Size, Hydrographic Index, Population level, Government Type, and Law Level.

While this might seem nitpicky, UWP codes are one of the most important features of the Money-as-resource gameplay loop Traveller’s granular rules are designed around. Every planet has a UWP code. Players plan complicated trading routes based on the information UWP codes provide. DM’s make informed setting decisions based on UWP codes.

Why aren’t UWP codes explained earlier, instead of in a sidebar on page 248 when they are so vital to the intended gameplay loop? Why is the information that each digit in a UWP code presented in such an unintuitive order, rather than following the order of the code?

Traveller veterans probably won’t see the problem here, but for my group that was learning the game as we played, the work and rulebook-flipping required to understand UWP codes was frustrating and took up valuable time. Even after we learned the basics, the granularity of the charts in each section required us all to flip through the book to find the information we needed, since we could not reasonably expect to memorize every chart.

It felt like every process and every rule necessitated constant flipping, and the poor organization really slowed us down considerably, and our game was lesser for it.

This wasn’t a group of an RPG-newbie problem or a table either. I have run 12 different games of varying complexity. One of my players is a professional boardgame and TTRPG designer. The rest of my group are veterans who have played dozens of games between each other. My group has played several games together at this point, and we know how to work efficiently to figure out rules and rules interactions.

The rulebook’s organizational decisions just served to slow us down, much in the way I complained about regarding Star Trek Adventures first edition.

Do I know how to fix this problem? Slightly. Is it fixable? Definitely. Was it expected due to the game’s complexity? Yes. It’s still very frustrating.

Spaceballs, the RPG Supplements

Mongoose Publishing has, I think, published more than a hundred different supplements and products related to Traveller 2E.  Most of these are sourcebooks or adventures. And because I’m not a Youtuebe reviewer I don’t get a massive influx of products for free, so reviewing everything Mongoose releases is out of the question. I paid for everything Traveller-related I have with cold, hard, cash.

I own the following Traveller products. If there’s a smiley-face next to it, it means I recommend it to people who are interested in checking out Traveller, and that it is worth your money. A frowny-face means I did not like the product, and don’t recommend it.

• Core Rulebook 2022

• Highguard Update 2022

• Central Supply Catalogue Update 2023

• Referee’s Screen (I don’t have the updated version) 😊

• Aliens of Charted Space: Volume 3 😊😊

• Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society, Vol. 1 😊

• The Great Rift Box Set ☹

• Islands in the Rift ☹

• Mission to Mithril

• Mysteries on Arcturus Station 😊

• Death Station 😊

• The Calixcuel Incident

• The Last Train Out of Rakken-Goll ☹, YIKES

Generally speaking, I don’t like a lot of the Traveller products I’ve encountered so far. Many of them, especially those from earlier in Traveller 2E’s life, suffer from misguided organization (I could write an entire novel about this, I won’t), and frankly are not the most useful or interesting. I found the art in most of those uninspiring, and the focus on Traveller’s granular rules a little bit frustrating.  All of the wrong details, in all of the wrong places in half-baked products.

Author’s Hot Take: If an adventure opens with a UWP, then that adventure is prioritizing the wrong things.

As far as the adventures go, Mongoose’s Traveller adventures are really hit-or-miss. I really, really hated The Last Train out of Rakken-Goll, but the product itself is reflective of my larger issues with the standalone adventures: they often provide the wrong types of information and guidance to a GM that wants to run the game. For example, I felt Mission to Mithril lacked a compelling structure that aided the DM (it’s a bizarrely under-monstered and railroady hexcrawl), nor the level of art I’d want in order to justify its $20 price tag. However, Mysteries on Arcturus Station was absolutely superb, and was everything I had ever wanted in an adventure (bonus points for extreme replay-ability).

I disliked Islands in the Rift because, similar to Rakken-Goll and Mithril I felt like it didn’t provide enough content or guidance to really justify its price tag. Seth Skorkowsky loved Islands in the Rift, but I’d imagine that’s influenced by his experience running an absolutely epic campaign based off of it. However, for me, it just didn’t have everything I would want from an at the price it’s sold at. I’d rather pick of Winter’s Daughter, Lurkers, or Shadowdark Zines simply because I know that there is going to be a minimum level of quality and usefulness that I know these products will meet.

As for the catalogue-style books (Highguard, Central Supply, etc.) I would really only recommend those to the types of DM’s who love running Generic RPGs such as GURPS. They are page after page of items, and item stats. These never really came in handy for my game, and I personally regret my purchase of them. I don’t particularly enjoy flipping with item sourcebooks, so I didn’t really get any personal enjoyment out of these either. I am a little surprised that these are recommended so often for newbies over Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (JTAS). These books are a serious financial investment for a product that really only serves a certain style of play.

Catalogues and adventures addressed: where Traveller products really do seem to excel are what I call mixed-content books like Aliens of Charted Space and the various Volumes of the Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (JTAS). The sheer volume of content in these basically assures you will find something interesting and usable in your game. Traveller content is at its best when it is providing something novel for your game that helps to convey the game’s Charted Space setting. Aliens of Charted Space was a joy to read (especially to learn about my guys, the Bwap). The volumes of JTAS and Aliens of Charted Space both provided me with some very cool ships, a useful decent-quality adventure (or two), and some fun setting details. As far as I am concerned JTAS volumes are probably the best bang for buck.

Although I cannot afford to read all of them, t is very likely that all of the Volumes in these two series are worth your money. If they look interesting enough to, and I actually recommend to newbie GM’s that they pick up the two volumes of these that I have in my collection, instead of High Guard and the other catalogue books that are usually recommended. These books will serve as a sampler for you to use as you develop a better sense of the types of resources that are useful for you and your playgroup, rather than shelling out $120 on the typical recommended sourcebooks.

Lastly, the Referee’s Screen is excellent, and I can only imagine that the newest version is just as good.

Despite liking Aliens of Charted Space and JTAS (and the consistent improvements to adventures and sourcebooks over the lifecycle of Traveller 2E), I still find myself to be a very hesitant buyer of Traveller supplements. I’ve been burned by one-too-many The Last Train out of Rakken-Golls to really endorse the game’s product line, despite the occasional temptation. For example, Last call at Eneri’s Cantina looks compelling, and the preview art and layout looks like an improvement. But is it actually a good adventure? I don’t know. And I don’t have the confidence to buy the adventure to find out. And because there’s not really a robust review community for Traveller products in the same way there is for D&D, it’s pretty easy to get burnt on a bad product purchase. In short: I really don’t like the Russian roulette I have to play when it comes to Mongoose’s products.

Mongoose, if you are reading, I would actually really love to write an in-depth review of Bounty Hunter. It looks exactly like the type of product I would value for my Traveller game, and the preview pages look promising. As it stands, I just can’t make a purchase with any confidence.

In short: be careful about purchasing supplements for Traveller as a newbie. The various volumes of JTAS and Aliens of Charted Space are probably your safest purchases if you are looking to get your feet wet with more material without breaking the bank or running into disappointment.

Do I Like Traveller? Do I Recommend It?

My players and I have enjoyed our time with Traveller, despite some of our mutual frustrations with the game. Although, I doubt my current group will be returning to it any time soon. This is partially because we are pretty donezo with the core rulebook, and because ultimately it doesn’t actually fit the constraints and style of playgroup. My Traveller group meets for 3-4 hours, once every two weeks, online, on a weekday, which was to our detriment when it comes to this game. We’re very roleplay heavy, so this means we have a lot of time between rolls and interacting with the core mechancis.

Traveller is the type of game where you want the players to engage with all of the mechanics and processes in order to ramp up the tension between time and monetary resources. Unfortunately, the processes (especially trading) take time. You can automate these things with a spreadsheet (like we did), but at the end of the day the admin work we were doing was really running into the story and the characters in an unpleasant way. This led us to have an unbalanced experience: sometimes a session might be dominated by trade rolls and admin, and the other times it might be dominated by another process or procedure.

However, I don’t think this is going to be an issue for groups who meet in-person and for longer sessions. Crosstalk, which really only happens in-person, seems like it would address the group-boredom that seemed to occur when my ship’s Broker was dealing with trade rolls. And the longer session times should lead to a more balanced experience with the game.

If my sessions were 5-6 hours long, I probably would not have been frustrated by the uneven and inconsistent gaming experience my sessions seemed to produce. I probably would have been able to explore all of the mechanics with the depth they deserve. However, my constraints are my constraints, and I learned a lot from this experience.

Do I like Traveller? Yes. I will probably run it again.

Do I recommend Traveller? This is a harder question to answer, I definitely cannot recommend it to everyone. Instead, I want to provide advice on those whose interest is already piqued (or has been piqued by this review):

If you are interested in Traveller, buy the core rulebook and JTAS Vol.1. Run some adventures that take place in the same system as the planet Hazel (from the adventure Ship in the Lake in JTAS Vo.1).  Make sure you give yourself at least 4 hours per session, although 5 will be better. Try to run it in-person. Make sure everyone at your table is willing to learn the rules to help you run the game.

Run 8-10 sessions.

You’ll know.

But what if I don’t want to run eight sessions?

The people I can recommend Traveller for, then, are those people who really enjoy the granularity and modularity of something like Gurps, Cyberpunk: Red, or various crunchy Generic or borderline-Generic games. I can also recommend it to people who love accumulating things. Traveller has tons of stuff. In many ways the game is about stuff. If you like games with lots of catalogues of weapons and items, then Traveller might be worth a shot.

However, if you’re looking to tell a space opera, or something like Cowboy Bebop, and you run shorter sessions, then I think there are games out there that will better suit your needs.

Want to run D&D but in space? Look at Starfinder first. Hint: you might want to wait till Starfinder 2 releases.

Want to run something episodic problem-of-the-week? Look, here’s Star Trek Adventures.

Want to run Cowboy Bebop or Star Wars? Look at Scum and Villainy or Edge of the Empire first.

However, if you want to run a sci-fi game with a storied history, and the ambition to match the sheer depth of its setting and granularity, and don’t mind a few paint marks? Try Traveller.

Want to tell the story of a small group of space idiots just trying to make it in a world that is too big to care about them? That sounds like Traveller to me.

In my opinion, the game is best when it is about stories so small that you could sink into its infinite setting forever and be happy. Traveller is a game and a setting that rewards lifetime players. I’ve seen where this game can go, and the beautiful moments it can produce.

Ultimately, between the frustrating, it's insane scope, the time-consuming process-driven core gameplay loop, hit-or-miss publisher support, and its hyper-expansive setting, it’s just too much for me. But there are definitely people out there it is for.

Some Resources I Found Useful

Thanks for reading, I figured I’d drop some useful resources below, for those of you interested in running the game.

A complete and interactive map of Charted Space - Make a personal map of any sector with this tool. It kicks butt.

UWP Translator, by Ben Wilson – Helped me understand UWP’s when I was first starting out.

On the Four Table Legs of Traveller, by Sir Poley – A nice blog post by someone who understands Traveller far better than I ever will.

Seth Skorkowsky’s Traveller Overview – A really good overview and thorough review of Traveller’s rules. Slightly out-of-date with the 2022 revisions to the core book, but basically 1-to-1. I probably am single-handedly accountable for half the views in this series.

Seth Skorkowsky’s review of Murder on Arcturus Station – Seth is like a jedi of the investigative RPG genre. A master tells you how to run a masterpiece.

Income, Costs, Passengers, and Trade Calculator Spreadsheet – This Excel sheet made running trade a lot faster and let us track everything in a convenient place. This was made by one of my players. I probably would have burned out without this.

Cepheus Journal – Sector Generator – I made my own sector with this for my game, and it was a blast. A bit of a learning curve, but messing with it will really help you understand the information in UWP’s as you modify the planets for your own needs.