My Travellercon 2017 Report

Last Saturday, I attended Travellercon 2017 at the Lancaster Host Resort in Lancaster, Pennsylvania dedicated to the science fiction role-playing game, Traveller, in all of its many variations. An old hand at conventions, this was my first visit to Travellercon and I had no idea what to expect.

Getting up early to make my 8 AM gaming session, I set my GPS for the address of the hotel to discover that it had created a wonderful route for me through every toll road and congested urban area it could find.

Knowing the convention location was right on Route 30, much to the consternation of my GPS who screamed “Recalculating!” every three minutes, it grudgingly accepted my more reasonable route after half an hour of pouting.

I arrived with 15 minutes to spare and received my con badge and t-shirt. Though I only wanted to observe the games being played, my deafness wasn’t acting up that badly, so I signed up for a game entitled, Lights in the Sky, run by referee, Harry Bryan (1) using the MegaTraveller rules. Here is his description of the adventure:

After successfully cleaning up the mess in from last year’s adventure, the player-characters receive some much-needed down time to heal both mind and body.  While relaxing, one of the team members stumbles into a reference to the AASB – Argushiigi Admegulasha Sunimush Bilanidin - The Vilani Repository for All Forbidden Knowledge. Hmm…...

I joined four other men playing characters exploring the wreckage of a 4,000 year old space ship on some backwater planet. Unfortunately, the wreckage was lying on its side on the top of a high, rocky, snow and ice-covered mountain where the atmosphere was almost non-existent…

Harry Bryan knows his stuff. Currently, he is editing the entire MegaTraveller canon and I saw the work he had already completed. I’m hoping it may be released sometime in 2018, and I assure you it will give all the other Traveller variants a serious run for their money.

Harry Bryan leads us through the adventure. The gentleman seated with the gray hair and glasses is Jeff Zeitlin, editor and manager of the online magazine, Freelance Traveller.

During the game, I was delighted to see an old friend, Fred Jones, and though I make friends easily, Fred was the only person there I actually knew and his presence only made the con that much more enjoyable. A fellow aficionado of role-playing games, over the years, Fred and I have explored the variants of Dungeons and Dragons and Call of Cthulhu with a few excursions in The Morrow Project and It Came From The Late, Late, Late Show.

We may look like two middle-aged men, but Fred Jones (left) and I together have fought dragons, explored old, evil houses, survived alien invasions, and ingloriously died in many a tavern battle. Such is the fate of old, experienced role players.

After lunch, I attended a lecture by Marc Miller, the creator of Traveller and his discussion was in no way boring. Speaking of Traveller’s history and answering a lot of questions, I discovered Marc is very intelligent and one of the most friendly and generous men I have ever met. 

Marc Miller

During the discussion, I asked the question if Joss Whedon’s Firefly TV series was inspired by Traveller (low tech free traders on the rim of unexplored space). It appears that Joss did say the idea behind Firefly was inspired by a science fiction role-playing game he played while in college. As the only SF RPG actually available when Joss attended college was mostly Traveller, the coincidence is too overwhelming not to be seriously considered. If you’re interested in doing your own research, google Firefly and Traveller together and you’ll get enough information suitable to convince you that Firefly truly is based on the Traveller universe.

I spoke at length with a couple of veteran players during the course of the day and learned a lot about the nuances of the game. The benefit of a convention is that the attendees are there for one purpose. Putting aside politics, religion, and all social constructs, people come together over one mutual interest. The group created, hands down, one of the friendliest conventions I have ever attended.

Finally, I spent some time with Marc Miller himself who led a session entitled, Can You Survive Character Generation, and it was a true delight. Marc gave each us of a generic pamphlet that would work with any variant of Traveller and had us generate characters to play using a simplified version. The unique aspect of playing Traveller is that character generation is a mini-game in itself and it is possible for much to happen to your character before you even begin the actual role-play episode. Your character might actually die during his formative years and you have to create a brand new character all over again. However, the system gives you a fully fleshed out character with a rich backstory that makes role playing him or her all the more exciting.

And what's a convention without lots of free bling?

Will I go back? Certainly and if next year I can obtain hearing aids, I already plan on running a game myself. With years of role-playing experience as well as my experience as a public speaker, radio personality, and stage actor, I think I can give the more seasoned game masters a run for their money.

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(1) Harry Bryan has written two articles for Freelance Traveller: The Imperial Secret Service and Underworld Characters.