Contrary to the name, this isn’t a catalog of planets. Rather, its a book to help catalog planets. The first half is concerned with exploration and the initial contact of sentient alien species, complete with methodology, ethic and helpful equipment (and a lot of very nice, clean technical art by Rob Caswell. It is a guide for both how to run and how to play this sort of encounter and it is great for any science fiction game, I think, if only for the section on defining and determining sentience, which is a heck of a deep think.

The second half of the book is a replacement for and massive expansion of the Traveller world generator. Table after table allows you define a world’s culture, their laws, their taboos, their unusual behaviors. If I had this in 1987, I would have played with and tinkered with it constantly. The compulsion to do so in 2022 as I write this is strong, too, I gotta say. And again, this is tacitly aimed at Traveller, but the tools are essentially system agnostic. You could probably use it for fantasy games too. Honestly, it’s impossible for me to not see this book as somehow anticipating or influencing the abundance of tables that make up Stars Without Number.

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When sales started to drop off, GDW attempted to reinvigorate MegaTraveller with Hard Times, which advances the calendar six years in the future. The rebellion is dying down and, in fact, is a utter failure, because no single faction has triumphed. The Imperium is dead, replaced by many splintered, warring states. Because of this, the galaxy is rapidly decaying. Interstellar trade has collapsed, pirates are everywhere and many planets have been poisoned by the war and are slowly dying. Crime, poverty and violence are now a way of life.

I think this is deeply fascinating. It is just a total unraveling of the Traveller universe. It is shocking and sad and unnervingly plausible — leave it to a bunch of wargame nerds and military history buffs to simulate one of the most compelling portrayals of a civilization in collapse you can find in RPGs.

Which is not to say I want to play in that doomed universe! While Hard Times is fascinating and well done, it also removes all the shiny optimism that defined Traveller. True, the Rebellion threw all that into doubt, but there was still hope of a return to better days. Hard Times smashes that hope into a million tiny pieces. Is that narratively brave? Certainly! And I admire it for going so enthusiastically in that direction. But no, I don’t want to play there. We’ve got Fading Suns and Warhammer and all manner of other dark futures, so I prefer to keep my Traveller bright.

Folks felt that way at the time, too. MegaTraveller dwindled on another year. In 1993, GDW launched Traveller: The New Era, which is an even bigger misstep and basically the end of GDW, but that’s a tale for another time.

Should note, I really love Dave Dorman’s cover. Some serious Star Wars vibes.

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Anyway, this book is a major course correction — 96 pages dedicated to ships, with a sizable percentage of those pages devoted to full-page illustrations by Roger Raupp. Lots of the ships seem to reference other franchises, though obliquely. There are homages to the Klingon warbird, Captain Harlock’s Arcadia and maybe even Voltron’s castle ships. You have to squint to see them, though, so maybe I am projecting.

While the pictures are lovely, the rest of the book is a mess. It feels like it is all stats, with very little explanation of the ships, their purpose, which factions are using them, you know, all the fun stuff. What the heck is a missile tanker? There’s only one fighter in the whole book? But this is sort of the story of MegaTraveller: cool stuff hamstrung by bad decisions, poor organization and typos.

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The sourcebook is dense with information, primarily detailing the thirteen factions of rebellion that have risen up in the wake of the assassination of the emperor. Some of these are legitimate claimants (like the various royal houses), others are opportunistic (like the alien nations that are taking advantage of the withdrawal of the Imperial fleet to the core worlds to conduct raids and territory grabs). Long histories and complex motivations fuel all the factions and the book is at its best when it is laying these sorts of details out. There is so much potential energy here, so many story threads, you can take this rebellion just about anywhere. It all feels interesting and, especially compared to other galactic science fiction of the time, very different (compare to, say, the political minimalism of the Star Wars rebellion). Politically complex. Though, I have to say, it is weird that everyone seems pretty committed to feudalism in this particular future — none of the factions have an obvious interest in democracy or socialism, both of which have fueled most of our real world rebellions.

A large-ish portion of the book is dedicated to the positioning of the Imperial fleet and their subsequent movements at the onset of the rebellion. Those bits read like groundwork for a wargame (though I don’t honestly know if they made one — the precedent is there, though, considering The Fifth Frontier War game).

I like the cover by AC Farley a lot. It sort of incongruously reminds me of Red Dawn.

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This is the Referee’s Companion (1988) and, I dunno if it is my own prejudices showing, but any rulebook that leads with mass combat rules is just not off to a good start. There are also tedious new rules for sub-light starship movement and a surprising amount of space given over to calendars. The section on megacorporations is two, all-to-brief pages. There are also sections on research, robots, tech, maps. It is a weird hodgepodge, and most of it feels under developed. The main thing of interest is the sections on the main alien cultures, but even this feels thin for some reason.

Fun fact: this (and a couple other MegaTraveller books) have some very early Tim Bradstreet art, from a period before he established his signature style. It is wild to think that in three short years he’d got from this to cranking out iconic Vampire: The Masquerade art.

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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.

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