I am sure this will be a week of uncontentious opinions. Let’s take a look at MegaTraveller! This is the core box set from 1987 and it is the true second incarnation of Traveller (the little black box era and the big color box era of the early 80s often feel like two different games to me, but it is the same system). After dominating the scifi portion of the RPG market for years, Traveller was starting to wobble, so Mega was an attempt to reinvent the Imperium (and the rules). Interestingly, GDW farmed it out to Digest Group and derived the rules from that publications third party Traveller hacks.

This…was not a good thing. Where the original Traveller is elegant despite its complexity, MegaTraveller feels complicated and clunky. The skill system is interesting but inescapable, the combat system impenetrable (I count at least two types of hit points) and the rules are horribly organized and typo-ridden. I have heard people refer to the game as MegaErrata.

In an attempt to spice up the setting, the emperor has been assassinated and the succession struggle has erupted among a rather shocking number of factions. Lots of folks hate this, understandably, preferring the original, stable Imperium. I get that, but I actually really enjoy the universe building here — while I also enjoy seeing how the original Imperium grew organically over time, it also nice to see a bunch of lore laid out in one place (the Imperial Encyclopedia, in this box, is pretty great). There is tons of attention to details and the confusing tangle of politics and bloodshed seems plausible and interesting. I like where it goes, too, but we’ll get to that later in the week.

But that system, man. It doubles down on complex simulation in a way that sets Traveller up to get pummeled by West End’s simpler, cinematic Star Wars RPG.