The Day 18 entry for the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge will come from Traveller: The New Era (I wonder if that title was inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation?) I had won an online auction that had a ton of dead tree books for this game last year, so I thought that I’d use it for the challenge. I recall seeing a lot of ads and articles for this game when I picked up the Challenge Magazines (there were a lot of good Star Trek and Star Wars RPG articles within the issues). This game was originally published by Game Designers Workshop, but is currently being sold on DriveThruRPG by Far Future Enterprises.
For a game that I’ve never played, I sure do pick up a lot of Traveller products. I remember the original game being advertised back in my early D&D days. When I’ve posted Traveller characters from past challenges, I notice that the number of visitors to my website spike up. So there is a lot of popularity with this game. My past character entries have included the Classic Traveller, Traveller20, Traveller 2nd Edition and retro clones, such as Cepheus Deluxe. There was even a fantasy version called Swords of Cepheus and a fan made Star Trek adaptation called Star Trek: Alpha Quadrant.
So this game comes with a one-page character sheet and a one-page character generation worksheet. Hopefully this will help with the creation process. The book itself is 384 pages long and I can tell it had been used a lot. There were several highlights that a previous owner had made on certain rules and page numbers. They had even colored in some of the black and white artwork. I haven’t looked at any of the different supplements that came with this core rulebook to see if they have also been highlighted/colored. This is primarily a cold read as I’ve only flipped through the book a few times prior to the challenge.
Note: In the book, the character generation starts on page 15 and it looks like it is in a slightly different order than on the worksheet. For the purpose of this entry, I’m going to follow the worksheet steps.
Going down the character sheet, the first thing to do is pick a name and race. I did read up on the different races earlier today and I think I’ll stick with Human just because I’m still trying to catch up. The name will be Jarl Barkton because it popped up in my head.
Attributes are next on the worksheet. We start with Strength (STR), Agility (AGL), Constitution (CON), Intelligence (INT), Education (EDU) and Charisma. There are columns for roll, mods and final as things may change during the creation process. I’m instructed to roll 2d6-1 and assign as desired. There are two additional attributes of Psionic Strength (PSI) and Social Level (SOC). The PSI is the only entry on the worksheet that has a page number and when I read it, apparently you have to role play the encounter to get your PSI tested, so I’m going to skip it as I’m already getting a mental image of what I want Jarl to be.
Step 4 is the homeworld. The worksheet has several blank spots on it and when I look at the book on page 16 it states that the player or referee can name a starting homeworld that has already been created, or the referee can roll up a homeworld for the character. However, when I went to look at the planets in the core rulebook, the different sectors were all marked as “Referee only, do not share with players” so I guess I am rolling after all. It then took a second to track down the homeworld effects on the character which I added to the worksheet.
The careers are step 5. When I’ve made past characters using the similar systems referenced above, I never know how many four-year career terms I’m supposed to use when making the character. Looking over the careers I’m going to select Army (just because he meets the prerequisites). I stumbled my way through this process and I think I got it right. There are blank sections on the worksheet (Scndry Act is what?). The character did two terms in the Army then one as a Mercenary.
From the careers I wrote down the skills for step 6 the initiative for step 7 and the age for step 8 (17+terms x4). Step 9 was the Jarl’s Hit Capacity per body part, step 10 is the character’s weight, step 11 is the load (carrying capacity) of the character, step 12 is the throw range and step 13 is the unarmed combat damage (all determined by math formulas).
The last step on the worksheet is starting money. You multiply the character’s SOC by the tech level for each term (three in this case) so 1,500 credits.
Well the worksheet is done and I did have to refer to the book quite a few times to get clarification. I didn’t come up with any backgrounds for the three contacts. As I was looking for the equipment I stumbled across the military academy section (Jarl did become a commissioned officer and was promoted several times) but it looks like he didn’t meet the prerequisites so… never mind. And actually I’m going to skip the equipment for now because 1- I need to wrap things up and 2- I would have heavily consulted with an experienced referee to see what type of campaign this would be. I’m going to go with the assumption that Jarl is the hired gun who is protecting the exploration team that I created in my earlier Traveller 2nd Edition and Stars Without Number challenge entries. I transferred what information I did have over to the character sheet.
Afterthoughts:
I really like the character generation worksheet. It’s all on one page. The only thing I wish they had added was the page numbers in the core book so I could quickly find the additional information that I may have wanted.
Some of the skills listed in the careers didn’t have skill descriptions that I could find (Determination, Spacehand were two I wanted to know more about). This was frustrating as I needed to know more about them to select or increase. Oh, I found out while transfering the data from the worksheet to the character sheet that determination and spacehand were skill clusters that I could have selected something specific in. Too late now.
While this was an interesting dip into the pool and I did read some of the game lore that was in the book (and there was a lot), I really don’t know if I’d play this game. I wouldn’t turn down an offer, but if anyone is going to have a game going, I’m expecting it to be the latest version of the Traveller RPG series.
Additional Notes:
Narak on BlueSky had created an entry using the Teenagers from Outer Space RPG. I got into a discussion with this person since I had used this system in last year’s challenge. They said “It seems like it be a great game to bust out for a silly gamenight, maybe between story arc of a serious campaign. It was fun lightweight character to build in any case! Kind of a less random, less shameful Maid RPG.” I had never heard of Maid RPG. Should I look in on it? Or is it something that I should avoid?
Coming Up Next:
OGL Wild West
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