Traveller

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/80192/ct-ttb-the-traveller-book

The three little black books are where it all begins. Traveller was a part of my childhood, our first science fiction game, and it even went to the hospital with me during a few extended stays. This was the game that I grew up with.

You can still get the original Traveller Book in POD! It is not that expensive, and it is a great source of memories to hold and flip through.

It was not Star Wars or Star Trek, it was something different. A window into another universe. With 1950s computers, a hard science fiction mentality, math formulas to calculate travel time, and space exploration that took weeks of travel time to get where you were going. This was better than Star Wars or Star Trek, since those stores were mostly wrapping up and over with, in Traveller, the universe kept going on, the stories never ended, and there was always one more star to visit and explore.

The counter games like Snapshot, Asteroid, and Azhanti High Lightning were classics, and gave us another small window into this world. The ships were massive like World War II battleships, the counters of soldiers in power armor and marines in armored space suits with Gauss rifles, fighting the psionic Zhodani with their gravitic floating war-bots armed with plasma guns - that was thrilling stuff. The female naval officers in skirts? Those were some fun counters, reflecting a retro-future that we fell in love with.

The game hasn't changed all that much today. The looks have been updated slightly, but the heart is still there. The game hasn't sold out to the modern audience, and it remains a wonderful, rich, amazingly designed and historical universe full of places to explore, and stories to learn about.

Mongoose has been an excellent shepherd to the system, and the books can fill a library and are amazing. The community games, all based on the first-edition Mongoose OGL license, are also amazing and each one is a treasure.

Even the original game still holds up amazingly well to this day. You can have a lifetime of adventures with just one book.