Traveller: The New Era

One of the biggest disadvantages to being sick is that when I get something new to add to my library, I feel too cruddy to really enjoy it. 

My experience with Traveller dates all the way back to the early-mid 80's, when the Little Black Books was pretty much all there was. I had played Twilight 2000 in college, and when a friend introduced me to Traveller: The New Era in the early 90's, I was interested enough to give it a shot...especially since it used the same "GDW house rules" as Twilight 2000 2e.

As much as I liked Traveller, I never really got into New Era -- in large part because I really wasn't much of a fan of the setting as presented. Sure, I could have tweaked it a bit for my own use, but I had other irons in the fire and never got around to doing anything with it.

The game stayed on the back-burner in my mind, however, because it WAS Traveller, after all, and because the GDW house rules were also used for Twilight 2000, Merc 2000, Dark Conspiracy, and Cadillacs & Dinosaurs. Over the years I picked up the other games (most of them, anyway...my copy of Merc 2000 is long gone), and this week I scored Traveller: The New Era.

So what am I going to do with it? I haven't really decided yet, but my thoughts are currently running towards a "Rendezvous with Rama"-type setting, except the inhabitants of the ship have devolved into a sort of "sword-and-psionics" medieval-ism, with giant reptilian beasties roaming outside of the settled zones and a group of insectoid aliens running around in the background.

But then again, maybe not...