Traveller: Explorer's Edition

A one-dollar PDF gets your foot in the door.

I love the Explorer's Edition, while I have the full game, I am still a huge fan of starter sets, and this one is a very nice one. it is focused on exploration adventures, and we get character creation for two careers: scouts and scholars, a ship, ship combat rules, and a complete subset of the rules in the game needed to play small-scale planetary exploration scenarios.

I like that the PDFs are not free, and they cost a dollar. This puts a "cost" on the purchase, and ensures that new players have that important "obligation to play" the game instead of collect it. 

There is also the same book, but focused on merchant campaigns, called the Merchant's Edition. The ship is different, this only has a merchant career, you get cargo and trading rules, it has new art, and it is still only a dollar for the rule book in PDF. This is also a great idea, and it focuses on a different aspect of the game and campaign type, while still being a very inexpensive introduction to the hobby.

You don't need either of these books if you have the full game, but I would choose them over the full game for new players. It is nice seeing a "focused taste" of what is to come, without too many options to confuse new players and lose them in infinite options. 

I love that these are focused around popular careers, and I could see one of these created for mercenary, pirate, diplomatic, or naval campaigns. Traveller is better when you focus your game on one narrow activity and area of interest, something the players are excited about adventuring in and cooperating to have adventures with each other.

When we started playing with the little black books, this was the game's biggest weakness for us. We liked the classic Star Frontiers a lot, since that was more focused on a classic series of adventures, but Star Frontiers' problem is that the game runs out of steam after that first massive adventure series on Volturnus. Traveller had the expansiveness and content to keep going on forever, and that is also what we discovered.

Star Frontiers was a good 1d100 system, but it broke down when skills got over 100% and the system was not designed with "long legs." Traveller can go on for years, and even the experience system in the Traveller Companion does not break the game since it is a slower progression path that can have limits applied. Star Frontiers also tried to "do what Traveller did" with trading campaigns, exploration, navy campaigns, but it did not have system generation or infinite universe generation.

It is also insanely easy to play the original Volturnus adventures with the Traveller rules, and you would likely have a better experience with complete rules coverage for survival, research, first contact, land travel, diplomacy, hazards, encounters, and exploration. All the monster and alien stats can be created using Traveller, and the gear lists would also be Traveller.

This may sound like heresy, but 2d6 systems are toolboxes that can do anything easily.

Also, Traveller is a game that is still being supported today, and can go "beyond" these classic adventures easily. With the legacy Star Frontiers it is a good game, but ultimately a dead-ended system that is no longer supported unless you move to a close system like the excellent Frontier Space, but even that game is far smaller in scope compared to Traveller.

This approach to the Volturnus modules would be an excellent way to start a Traveller campaign. Just put this system somewhere out in a remote system, four to six parsecs away from anything, and when those adventures are complete, you have the full Traveller game and Imperium universe to fall back on. This solves the problem the original Star Frontiers game had with "what happens next?" This also gives you nearly infinite adventures, ships, expansion content, careers, planets to visit, aliens, and a vast expanse of expansion content.

So having two editions, focused on specific campaign types and "creating fans" of those styles of play, is a genius idea for introducing a game where anything can happen, and new players can get lost in the stars with no hope of figuring out what to do with the system in the core rule book. This also happened to us decades ago, and it is nice to see this being addressed.

I love these starter sets, and they are worth playing "as is" to have that focused introduction to the game. Even if you are a long-time player, experiencing the game as a new player would is inspiring and gets your mind working on campaigns and adventures.